Well, for one thing, an inordinate amount of people will chortle evilly and go “Sucks to be them. So long, hippies!”

California is the land of beaches, mountains, and all the legal marijuana you can stomach. It’s also, inconveniently, a dangerous minefield riddled with nasty fault lines that rupture without much warning, generating massive earthquakes that can level buildings, pulverize roads, and kill lots of people in the span of seconds.

First rule of surviving a disaster: Dont Be There. But, as we’ve pointed out recentl, some folks, despite wanting to leave for greener (and safer) pastures, are stuck where they are for various reasons. Good luck.

I have a friend whose uncle was a photographer for the railroads in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. I have a suitcase here filled with ancient pictures of California in the late 1890’s right up to, and shortly after, the big San Francisco earthquake. Its eerie to look at those photos and imagine all those buildings, wharves, and people being destroyed in the following conflagration.

It’s easy to forget that a gigantic California earthquake is not the same as a giant San Francisco earthquake. We think of earthquake we think of tall buildings swaying, broken water mains, etc…but California covers a lot of ground that looks nothing like San Francisco or LA.

All the scientists keep saying that The Big One is ‘overdue’. Will it create Nevada beachfront property? Probably not. (Darn it.) But it will definitely be something pretty much unprecedented in modern American disaster responses. I would think that it would be an ‘all hands on deck’ event with pretty much every resource across the country being shipped westward. The survivor stories would be epic.

Happily, my little chunk of Montana seems relatively stable…last years earthquake notwithstanding. Sure, we have a supervolcano brewing a few hundred miles away, but the likelihood of that thing popping off within the incredibly small amount of time that is my lifespan is like hitting the PowerBall.

Will The Big One happen in my lifetime? I dunno. I figure I’ve got about 25 years left on my meter…thats a pretty small window, from a geological timeline, to have something happen. For the sake of the few decent people in California, I hope it doesn’t happen but theyd be crazy not to be geared up for it.

Apparently, according to my extraordinarily unscientific poll, when it comes to what country we think is going to be a big problem we give the nod to China. Not surprising, although what was mildly surprising was the way it was the top vote-getter.

The Chinese are famous for taking the long view of things. American politics tends to focus on short periods (like, say, four or eight years) when it comes to policy making… the Chinese, on the other hand, are in it for the long haul. I’ll give you an example:

I was reading an article about an airport in Sri Lanka that was built to handle a million passengers a year, but serves only 50,000. Who backed the construction of the airport? China. Why? Well, ostensibly its a development project for Third World countries. Mind you, its a development project that conveniently creates a large airport with runways capable of handling military transport. Interesting, that. And as you read about China’s other endeavours, you see more ‘long game’ maneuvering… long-term leases on huge swathes of African farmland spring to mind. And, again, those infrastructure improvements that look pretty noble and generous but are easily converted to military use.

You guys are all familiar with their recent activities in the South China sea, right? China is building islands in contested waters to give them a military launchpad for regional actions. Forward thinking stuff.

Economically, we hear about how China is the biggest buyer of US debt. A popular end-of-the-world scenario is China dumping that debt and doing tremendous financial damage to the US.

And there’s always that niggling little detail about how dang near everything we buy is Made in China. That includes electronic devices which sometimes mysteriously come with spyware already loaded into it that reports back to……?

Perhaps the Russians aren’t doing anything that China isn’t already doing, they just do it quieter. But, I’m of the opinion that between the two countries, I’d say China is a more viable threat than Russia because China’s focus is on economic warfare and dominance, whereas Russia seems to just go for the military. It’s the difference between being robbed by a shady accountant or by the guy in an alley with a baseball bat.

So, yeah, I’m in that percentage that voted China as the biggest problem.

For some reason, this amazingly stupid sentiment seems to be prevalent among Gyno-Americans whereas I have never encountered it among us Penile-Americans..the slogan: “live every day like its your last” or sometimes phrased as “live today like theres no tomorrow”, or some other similar phrasing.

Dude, I’m a survivalist. My whole existence as a survivalist is predicated on being prepared for tomorrow. Additionally, if people really lived their lives like there was no tomorrow we’d be living in ‘The Purge‘. With an absolute absence of long-term consequence (‘long term’ being no more than 25 hours from when you commit your act of non-tomorrowness) you know what you get? People settling old scores, killing people they dislike, shotgunning their annoying neighbors, looting everything in sight, and generally going completely off the chain. Thats what a world full of people who live like there’s no tomorrow looks like. Oh, sure..there will be some folks who will spend those last 24 hours with love ones, or conversing with their deity of choice, or simply committing suicide (kinda of like quitting before you get fired)… but by and large, you tell a couple billion humans that in 24 hours they will all be extinct you can bet there’s going to be some Olympic-level savagery taking place.

And, really, if you think about it, anyone who says they live like there’s no tomorrow is, most likely, just spouting pithy sayings. If they really believed that they’d have no qualms forking over the keys to their car, quitting their job, or doing any one of a host of things people who really aren’t going to see the sun rise would do.

Heck, think about it even more and you realize that someone who lives like theres no tomorrow is living a life devoid of the notion of consequence. Who wants to share a planet with a socipath like that? Expecially when they dress their insanity in the garb of some sort of noble enlightenment. Sure, maybe the Dali Lama says he lives like theres no tomorrow but I’ll bet you a hundred bucks he buys his toilet paper in a 12-roll pack.

What this world really needs is more people who live like there is a tomorrow. They plan, develop careers, establish long-term relationships with other people, invest, and engage in long-term goals and projects.

I have got to stop looking at the bumper stickers on the cars in front of me in traffic… its a recipe for aggravation.

No doubt you’ve heard the term ‘cashless society’, right? Basically, it means a system where the usage of physical currency has been supplanted by the use of ‘cashless’ forms of payment….debit cards, electronic wallets, etc. They’ve already started experimenting with this sort of thing in parts of Europe (naturally) and this sort of thing is being hailed by the technology fans as a tremendous advancement in society…muggings and robberies will fade as people no longer have cash. Why hold someone up in an alleyway or knock over a MiniMart when there’s no cash there?

Who else lauds this move to the cashless society? Folks who feel they have an interest in keeping tabs on what you do with your money. I’m of the opinion that whether I’m buying a Slim Jim and a copy of Hustler at 3am in 7-11, or buying a duffel bag of AR mags out of the back of a van in the Domino’s parking lot, what I do with my money is no one’s business but mine.

I was in the bank today and saw this lovely sign:

This is what I would call a ‘soft ban’. A hard ban would be the outright prohibition of the use of cash. Knowing that sort of thing might actually not go over well with a large chunk of the voting constituency, the alternative is to make the transactions more and more annoying to the point where the average Joe says “Screw it, it’s easier for me to just move the money to your account using [PayPal/ACH/Debitcard/etc]”. See, they don’t actually ban the cash, they just make it more and more difficult to the point where it may as well be a ban. (Machine guns are a good example…they’re not banned, they just require a tax..and fingerprints..and background checks…and police approval..and nine months of waiting…and…and…and…to the point where they may as well be banned.)

Governments angle, of course, is tax revenue. Oh, they cloak it in ‘war on terrorism’ nonsense…can’t let those guys have a bake sale amd then move the money to Islamabad to buy RPG’s..but a happy side-effect (for the .gov) is that it’s far easier to make sure you’re claiming all the money you make for tax purposes.

Taxes aside, no one needs to be able to look at financial records and determine who bought freezedrieds, ammo, guns, bus tickets, politically-sloganed sportswear, or anything else for that matter.

There will always be that group of people (raises hand) who prefer to do cash transactions for things. When Kroger stops taking cash and only takes EBT and debit cards, or the local Conoco only takes plastic ‘for the safety of our staff’, what choices are left to you? Barter? I suppose that might work but the guy working the island at the Costco gas pumps isn’t in any position to dispense fuel for cash (or cash equivalents). You’re only real recourse will be small businesses and entrepreneurs who will fill that market void…and, reasonably, make a profit. $2.50 a gallon for gas with your debit card at Costco, or $4 a gallon in the back of the WalMart parking lot from a bunch of five-gallon cans in the back of someones pickup.

I used to work in an adult bookstore. Virtually all the transactions were in cash for a very obvious reason – no one wanted their spouse (or whoever) getting the cancelled checks or credit card statements and seeing that someone had rented movie or bought toys. Did the store owner declare all that lovely undeclared cash? Beats me. But the takeaway here is that using cash afforded a level of privacy.

The usual crowd will address these issues by saying  ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide then you shouldn’t have a problem with it’. Thats the same crowd that has schoolkids wearing see-through backpacks and want’s a backdoor to unlock your phone. ‘Reasonable’ and ‘commonsense’ limitations on privacy, of course.

Whats the privacy-minded to do? Well, the obvious answer, to me, is also the shady answer – go create a fake identity and load it up with a debit card or other electronic banking info. But…that would be wrong, You could use some anonymous electronic payment form like a prepaid debit card like you’d find in vending machines or in the gift rack at the supermarket checkout, but those actually have some limitations on how they can be used. I suppose the lowest-impact thing to do would be to vigilantly make sure that your must-be-private transactions are done with cash. And, of course, whenever possible try to be paid in cash.

Cryptocurrency? That’s definitely something that has potential, but it’s still a bit too unstable at the moment. The idea is brilliant and wonderful and, of course, of great concern to .gov who thinks that unmonitored financial transactions are the work of terrorists and bad guys and not simply people who want their privacy.

Gold and silver are about as close a thing as we have to a universal currency. Trouble is, you still can’t really go into WalMart and buy a deli bucket of chicken wings with it. Oh you can convert it into a currency that will let you get your bucket of wings, but if that WalMart doesn’t take cash then what exactly will you convert it to?

I’m not sure what the solution is. I suppose it’s to simply be prepared to pay a premium to do things the ‘off the grid’ way. The more clever and morally flexible of us will, no doubt, come up with some workarounds but that has its own set of problems and issues.

For now, I suppose I’ll just have to keep an eye on how things develop.

So two people figured that they had maxed out their preparedness level, according to the last poll I posted. Interesting. The majority of respondents put themselves at a very middle-of-the-road five. A couple people threw in a zero. As I said, I figure I’m about a seven.

It’s a little misleading though…we don’t have a standardized benchmark for what constitutes readiness. You may think a years worth of food is your goal, and someone elses goal would be six months. But..it’s not a competition..the only person whose opinion really matters on this sort of thing is your own. I suspect the perfect level of preparedness is like achieving the speed of light – you can get to 99.999999999999% there but you’ll never get to that 100%.

Biggest bottlenecks? Again, it differs from person to person. My experience in talking with other survivalists is that there are really usually only three things that hold them back:

• Money
• Family
• Job

Money is the one that holds me back. If I could shake loose an extra couple thousand bucks a month I’d get a lot off stuff crossed of my list. But…it’s hard to make that kinda money out here in the flyover states. I already exist on a pretty tight budget, and while my income is definitely going up it’s still well below the national average.

Many, many people I talk to say that their big bottleneck is family. Why are you still living in San Francisco, I ask? “Oh, I want to move to Wyoming but my wife doesn’t want to leave because the grandkids are here”….I’ve heard that one a bunch. Or they feel they have to be near an elderly relative. Or the kids are in school for another X amount of years. So, they do the best they can where they are.

Finally, the job angle. This is the same as the family angle except the focus is the career rather than the family. It’s hard to walk away from being a gas/oil lease attorney in Houston making a zillion bucks a year and become a small-town lawyer in Thermopolis or Pahrump doing water-rights law for inbred farm communities.

On the other hand, I have met survivalists who conquered this sort of thing in the simplest and most arduous way possible – they took a deep breath and jumped into a 3-5 year plan of working their asses off in big cities like Chicago, LA, or New York, saved every dime they could, put together a nest egg that would let them live elsewhere, and then took the money and ran.

He’s dead now, so I can talk about him….I used to know a machinist down the valley here. He came out in the 70’s fell in love with Montana and knew this was his future. He went back to his aerospace job in California and worked like a dog for four years until he had enough money to bail. He came out here, bought about 60 or so acres, built his house and machine shop, and moved out here for good. He brought enough money from his California indenture to pay for the land up front, build his place, set it up, and have some money in the bank to cover him while he got his new machining gig set up. Being a gunnie at heart, he wound up selling a chunk of the property to create the local shooting range. So..you guys who go shooting in Hamilton at the Whittecar range, your local friendly neighborhood survivalist sold ’em that property.

Much more rarely I’ll meet people who simply had some sort of moment where they just packed it up and moved with a lot less planning than that. Someone has a really bad day at the cube farm, gets stuck in traffic on the way home, comes home to find neighborhoodlums on the lawn, gets woken up by sirens and urban noise, and says “Screw this, lets sell this place and move to Idaho”. Which, actually, often works better than you think since the house you sell in LA or Sacramento will fetch enough to buy you the same size house out here for about 1/2 the money….leaving you the other half to stake yourself.

As I said, my bottleneck is cash. But, Im lucky in that money is not finite. You can always get or make more. It’s time that becomes scarce. My math says I’ve only got maybe ten or fifteen productive years in front of me, so it’s balls to the wall in terms of trying to get money put away and stuff acquired.

What bout you, man? What’s keeping you from pegging the needle on the HowPreppedAmI-o-meter?

There are little hallmarks that occur in life that let you  know, for better or worse, that you’ve transitioned to a new stage in your life… having to wear a tie or body armour, for example. Todays sign that my life has gotten more complicated than it used to be: I had to buy a matching pair of monitors so I can dual-wield programs.

On the bright side, if I get back into gaming these will be fabulously useful.

I dunno about you, but sometimes I think there’s never a level at which I’m satisfied. Me, I’d say Im a 7. But…lets put it to a vote:

[yop_poll id=”3″]

But, we happy survivalists being a rather independent bunch, my definition of prepared may not be the same as your definition of prepared. But, for me, I’d say I’m an easy seven…prepared enough to outlast a majority of the population, but not so prepared that I won’t worry when the bombs go off.