h a l f b a k e r yIdea vs. Ego
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Will it be oil or water that we'll first do without? You can help decide, while making a meaningful hedge against the disaster of your choosing by betting the farm pledging to buy the commodities you think we'll miss most. How to: Withdraw large sums and spend them on futures to deliver your commodity
of choice to your destination of choice at the future date which you think will have the strongest demand. Then wait. Then sell your goods to the desparate throngs, thereby doing good while doing well.
Harry Browne: How You Can Profit from the Coming Devaluation
http://www.bookdepo...rowne/9784871873215
Here's similar ideas from back in 1970. [zen_tom, Jun 11 2012]
John Pugsley: The Alpha Strategy
http://zombieprepdo...1/book2-preface.pdf
The Alpha Strategy from 1980. [zen_tom, Jun 11 2012]
[link]
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Are you kidding? Water doesn't run out. If anything, we're
going to have more of it than we want in centuries to
come. The only places that will 'run out' of water are the
places that already have. |
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Oil, on the other hand, is a safe bet. Buy it up by the
barrel in hide it out in the Texas desert. But, personally,
I'm putting all of my savings in custard. |
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First, we'll run out of ammo. Won't stop the fighting, though. |
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You're right about that. There's no point in even laying
money on it. As Einstein noted, WWIV will be fought with
sticks and rocks. A lack of modern, efficient weaponry does
nothing to curb the human (mostly male) combative urge. |
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Anyway, as long as we still have wood, sulfur, lead, and
horse piss, those of us with large stockpiles of spent brass
won't run out of ammo. |
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Useable energy. If you have enough of it, there's no
scarcity of anything else (possibly excepting certain
rare earths, since we haven't figured out convenient
transmutation yet). So by definition any scarcity is a
result of lacking energy. |
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//Anyway, as long as we still have wood, sulfur, lead,
and horse piss, those of us with large stockpiles of
spent brass won't run out of ammo.// |
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You intend to make your own primers? |
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Why not. It can't be that hard. I may not be able to make
snazzy modern primers, but I already have some
rudimentary skills in that area, so I bet that with a couple
of chemistry books and a great deal of care, I could figure
out how to make something that goes bang when you
smack it hard enough. |
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“It seemed like such a good idea back when I still had
all my fingers…” |
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Mercury fulminate. Mercury occurs as the native metal, and can be easily extracted from Cinnabar. |
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Silver nitride -bubble ammonia through saturated silver nitrate solution; copper acetylide; lead azide. |
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The world is the friction-sensitive bivalve mollusc of your choice. |
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"Well, it's rather brutal here. Right now we are advising all our clients to put everything they've got into canned food and shotguns... |
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Or, as Mark Twain cogently pronounced, "Buy land - they've stopped making it". |
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There's a book that covers a scenario such as this, called "The Alpha Strategy" by John Pugsley - in addition to being a ravenous rant against the system, it's pretty cogent - I think it was written sometime in the early '80s. |
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The trouble with stockpiling commodities in too great a number, is other people. So when the world is going to tits, and that nice big truck turns up outside your house and starts offloading your 5-year supply of gold, ammunition, food and abundant energy supplies, you need to prepare for a series of challenges:
i) your truck being hyjacked at the depot by an angry mob demanding their "fair share",
ii) your truck being hyjacked en-route by an angry mob demanding their "fair share",
iii) your goods being liberated by an angry mob as the truck delivers them to your door,
iv) your house being assaulted by an angry mob once the goods are safely ensconsed in your house,
v) your house being besieged by an angry mob demanding their "fair share" and accusing you of being a collaborator, capitalist, thief, banker, Jew, Profit/Blackmarketeer or whatever demographic is least likely to mount a successful complaint during the time of transition. |
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So whatever you choose, it needs to be loot-proof - and by extension, so do you. Alternately do *everything* in secret and dig a big pit beneath your house, that you can line with concrete and steel, and enjoy your material wealth in private, as far from envious attention as is humanly possible. |
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Or, as others have pointed out, get a bunch o'guns, and ideally enough followers that you can form an effective angry mob of your own and liberate other's wealth at your leisure. |
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(This last part isn't from The Alpha Strategy, it's more a plan B) |
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// ideally enough followers that you can form an effective
angry mob of your own // |
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I've always fancied that I'd make a great post-apocalyptic
warlord. |
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