Five things you would stock for an emergency

General Chat
21

Tea.

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22

Didnā€™t expect a @teapoweredrobot to overlook that

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23

Bottle of gin in a weird flavour
Book on an obscure language
The ginger cat that is suspicious of me
iPod Shuffle
The rest of the bag is filled with jaffa cakes

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24

Well if it was from the coronavirus then I would have all of the stuff at my house so I would just have to stalk up on food and cleaning supplies and hygiene items. Also water. The rest of the stuff - entertainment I would already have at my house.

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25

Youā€™re so right!

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26

Youā€™ve been watching too much danielml

27

Oh, I havenā€™t watched him for years. When I was watching he was like 7k :wink:

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28

Isnā€™t he still 7k :wink:

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29

wind-up stuff is cool, i had a wind-up radio that could also be used to charge a phone

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30

At one point I was doing a course in electrical installation, which I failed because Iā€™m clumsy and bad at drawing stuff. Well, in the workship was a big sign that said:

THE REPAIR MANIFESTO

If you canā€™t fix it ā€“
you donā€™t own it.

And Iā€™ve considered that a piece of wisdom from that day.

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31

But my laptopā€¦

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32

What else besides your laptop?

33

Oh noā€¦ and most of my musical instrumentsā€¦ I wouldnā€™t dare repair my analog synthesizer.

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34

This is why you canā€™t own a cat :stuck_out_tongue:

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35

I think power is my main concern

You could add a solar panel recharger in the list then :wink:

As far as I am concerned, Iā€™d guess Iā€™d stock the things I bought in this case.

  • Some food that doesnā€™t expire soon (canned food, rice, pasta, beans etc)
  • Some water

And in case of a ā€œlook at the meteoriteā€ disaster level and assuming power/internet failure I would add :

  • heating and light provisions (lighters, flashlights, batteries, some fuel)
  • Writting material for entertainment (empty pages, pens and pencils)
  • Lots and lots of candybars. The true currency of a post-apocalyptic future :stuck_out_tongue:
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36

no caffeine?

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37

Coming at this question for a third time, I think that Iā€™d stock or take:

  • a medium-sized serrated knife
  • some water
  • an Ordnance Survey atlas of England
  • a bottle of good gin
  • coffee and a Moka pot

If the remaining space Iā€™d add a blow-up pillow, a small pack of salt, cash in notes, a cigarette lighter, a few biro pens and a pocket notebook.

Those should all take up quite little room, especially if I go for a smaller bottle of gin.

If thereā€™s pocket space then Iā€™d put some boiled sweets (hard candy) there.

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38

This got me thinking: if fiat currency ($ / ā‚¬ / Ā£ etc.) were to fail, then what ā€œreal currenciesā€ or ā€œcurrency goodsā€ would take their place?

One could envisage a system based on goods like

  • containers
  • pens, pencils and paper
  • tinned food
  • cigarettes
  • various drugs
  • knives and other tools
  • guns and ammunition
  • salt and spices
  • batteries
  • gasoline!

The interesting about any of these goods in a post-collapse society is that as theyā€™re used up theyā€™ll become rarer if not still under production, making their value rise and necessitating the need for lower and lower values of currency.

So whereas initially the lowest-value currency good might be the battery, it might be then replaced by the cigarette as a unit of everyday transaction, in turn replaced by the pen, and then by even less valuable goods like the hard candy, the paper quarter-sheet, the buttonā€¦

This leads into an interesting concept in which mining landfill sites from the pre-collapse past would become a profitable exercise. That was an idea used by Iain M. Banks in his novel Against a Dark Background.

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39

I think it also depends on the kind of catastrophe, for example if water is still drinkable, even if difficult to obtain, crops and fruit safe to consume etc.

After some time passes, durable clothes and shoes could be an issue.

And accessibility equipment that we now take for granted, but really isnā€™t; I definitely need contact lenses/ glasses to survive, and they are fragile and difficult to obtain.

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40

That reminds me of this song, Eyes of Eagles from Leslie Fishā€™s 1989 album Firestorm: Songs of the Third World War, part of several songs written with the expressed intention of preserving skills in oral memory in the event of nuclear war and post-apocalyptic collapse.

It details how to create microscopic lenses.

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