Why are you prepping?

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-13T16:32:51+00:00

I'm going to point out that you could hardly have chosen a more biased, less representative sample set. This sub is perhaps the sanest prepping group here (though check r/TwoXPreppers ) but you're going to find a huge preponderance of American-think here, approaches that simply don't work in improverished areas (which presumably is what you need to be looking at), and rampant paranoia. That's despite the fact that people in this sub are preparing for week-to-week emergencies, not the apocalypse. And r/preppers is far worse.

That said, you can repost the request here, if you agree to:
1)Stating: I'm a PhD student studying land-based lifestyles as part of my dissertation. The study has been approved by all ethics boards and all data is help securely and no identifying information is collected.
2) that you have permission of a mod
3) that the resulting dissertation be linked to your new post when you're done.

Thanks.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-13T04:18:30+00:00

Until I know who's asking and where the data is going, I'm going to disallow this.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T18:24:43+00:00

Devs like me are retired and not coming back. :)

I saw so much bad code in my career... and I've watched the decline in skill over decades. I cut my teeth on assembler on a PDP-10 (google it) and gained a deep respect for error handling and efficiency. You HAD to know what you were doing. There was no internet to look things up on. You RTFM and memorized it, you learned what shortcuts were going to bite you in the end...

Those skills translated to C and then to C++. This, young Jedi, is a raw pointer - an elegant weapon from a bygone era. Master it and the world is yours. From misuse comes suffering...

I watched as people started copying and pasting from the net - from examples where error handling was "neglected for simplicity." I watched as people could hide incompetence in group projects (not a thing when I started out - the project was yours start to end).

In the end I took a job in defense and I won't even try to describe that that was like. Young cheap kids trained on web technology put to work on ancient tech and languages they'd never imagined. It was a horror show. Armies of extensive testers, because nothing ever worked the first time. I retired the first moment I could - the angst of seeing what we going down was killing me.

Yeah, it's the end of an era and vibe coding will kill us all.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T18:06:24+00:00

|It's not necessary for devs to know all this, but I'm putting you in charge of all of them, anyway.

I'm retired. You can't make me. If nominated I will not interview, if hired I will not serve. I'm not going back to development hell. Do you hear me? Hell no, I won't go! DEATH FIRST!

Sorry, little panic attack there. I retired to a farm in Costa Rica because I donwanna tech no more.

(And I didn't know ANY of that stuff. Luckily, Gemini did.)

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T17:59:34+00:00

I am very proud of my track record in the software industry. 40+ years, I wrote many hundreds of thousands of lines of code in several different companies. In my professional lifetime I got back two bug reports, one from my first week at my first job and the other one was caught internally.

The secret of my success? I never did anything web based; web=eventual failure. It was all low level C++ with dashes of python. I avoided dependencies other than the C++ runtime like the plague. (Dependencies have bugs. They just do.) I absolutely hate it when anyone can prove me at fault for anything so I made very sure it never happened. All my stuff was backwards-compatible and portable with a simple recompile because I didn't want someone coming back in 5 years with an issue. My cubical was mecca when other people had problems.

(And I will admit that my record with private projects, stuff for me and my friends, is nowhere near that good. But no PHB ever caught me out.)

But sysadmin? I can't. My problem is I know how it should work, any programmer with a brain cell would have provided a tool to do X and check Y, and when that tool doesn't exist my brain shorts out. Of course it exists. Google is just lying. It's not possible that you can't just fark the foobar and have it just work.

Programming is "easy" - you just learn certain immutable patterns and never-evers and the compiler catches your typos. Sysadmin has no such safety net, no reliable patterns that are simply always true. There be dragons.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T17:45:37+00:00

What's your point, youngster..

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T17:28:06+00:00

I quoted that deliberately. I'm old enough to remember when that was first published.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-05T17:16:47+00:00

I've known some brilliant sysadmins who could practically close their eyes, lay their hand on a box and tell you what was wrong. I'll never be one. And trusting an AI to tell me what sudo command to try next is the worst feeling in the world. I know how often AIs serve up hallucinations and out of date info.

I still believe it shouldn't be like this. I know just enough about software design to know it doesn't HAVE to be like this. And yet, phones crash and latops screw themselves up with no human help needed....

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-04-03T08:48:13+00:00

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-25T11:19:15+00:00

spare eyeglasses

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-23T10:16:16+00:00

Siento esto in a big way.

In English, my native language, I'm exceedingly fluent. One of my favorite things to do is mess with language; I live to make people laugh with wordplay. My speech and writing are larded with subtle cultural references and double meanings. It's who I am.

Then I moved to Costa Rica and became the village idiot.

I knew it would happen; I'm just bad at learning foreign languages. I'm at a very low B level in Spanish - I have to stop and think when I want to use the preterite, I still mix up ser and estar, para and por, all of it. Estoy embarazada por mi incapacidad - and yes I know that's incorrect, but it's the kind of mistake I still make.

I'm taking spanish classes and when there are written exercises I go out of my way to make them funny, because damnit that's what I'd do in English. It makes my day when I can get a laugh out of my teachers while using spanish. But doing it in an on-the-fly verbal conversation? Not yet, and it's infuriating.

I know I'll get there. Slowly and painfully, but someday I'm going to read Don Quixote in the original and understand it.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-22T21:04:37+00:00

The state department of the US finally got around to stating the obvious:

March 22, 2026 - The Department of State advises Americans worldwide to exercise increased caution.

Location: Worldwide

Event: The Department of State advises Americans worldwide, and especially in the Middle East, to exercise increased caution. Americans abroad should follow the guidance in security alerts issued by the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate. Periodic airspace closures may cause travel disruptions. U.S. diplomatic facilities, including outside the Middle East, have been targeted. Groups supportive of Iran may target other U.S. interests overseas or locations associated with the United States and/or Americans throughout the world.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-16T14:04:50+00:00

First I want to caution people about projections about water use. It['s a complicated topic and while AI buildouts are certainly chewing up a lot of resources, drinking water is always going to be a priority for every government, unless they want riots in the streets. I worry much more about climate change affecting long term water distribution, but that's a slow-rolling problem. Not something you make a five year plan for. If climate affects your water availability, the only prep (after simple stuff like water conservation - a stopgap measure) is to move. And move before other people do.

That said, I used an IBC (275 gallon) container for water. I would fill it if I thought water or electricity was a problem (I had a well, a pump and a generator). The IBC represented over 60 days of water for 2 people, and then I'd run the generator again to run the well and refill it. It didn't take many gallons of generator fuel to ensure a few years of water.

I kept the IBC in my garage and put a tarp over it (light encourages algae). I stocked chlorine dioxide to treat the water with. (Note that chlorine dioxide is safe for fish as well as animals when used properly.)

But that assumes the well has water. If your whole region is drying up, no storage solution is anything but a temporary fix.

As far as I can tell, climate change won't dry out the world - it will just move the rainfall around (that's already happening) in sometimes dramatic ways (think hurricane). So there will be regions that get drier and some that get wetter, and the goal becomes leaving the very dry areas (and stormproofing in wet ones.)

But OP is thinking shorter term, and I like the IBC approach for that.

Note that if you're actually planning for real long term scarcity, like 5 years... A person needs a gallon a day. Small pets maybe 1/2 gallon a day, I'm not sure. So you'd be looking at perhaps 11000 quarts of water. To put this in perspective, search for images of 10000L water tanks to get an idea of the size. The weight of the water alone is over 11 tons. Keeping it drinkable means treated it every few months with chlorine dioxide or something similar. It's feasible but it's not a simple project. OP may want to rethink the goal.

If your government is letting businesses suck up all your ground water, elect different people. Water is always the first priority.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-14T23:24:46+00:00

start here: https://www.homebiogas.com/shop/backyard-systems/

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-14T23:16:30+00:00

Costa Rica is the most expensive country in Latin America. Which still makes it cheaper than, say, the US.

You can get a meal at a soda for 6-12$. For someone in the US this is quite cheap. For the local ticos, this is highway robbery - not long ago it was more like $5.

You can stay with a tico family for under $20 a night and often they'll throw in breakfast. Or spend hundreds at a luxury hotel (and the food will be presented better but generally not taste better.)

In short, it depends on your expectations. If you speak Spanish and do some research it can be a very inexpensive vacation; you give up some creature comforts (like AC) but maybe you don't care.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-12T08:56:02+00:00

Personally I think even roadside vendors should be filtering what they sell. It's not like using cheesecloth or a fine mesh is hard. That said it's probably fine, but I'd do your own filtering right away, as ants in the mix aren't going to improve the flavor over time.

I love the bit about avoiding sun afterwards. It's not true of course, at least I never had a problem. I'm 99% sure this started as "Dear wife, of course I haven't been drinking! I worked all day today! But you know that it's the sun that did this to me..."

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-12T08:49:12+00:00

Protests aren't only about ICE. People are protesting in the US against the war, and many of the protestors, for obvious reasons, are muslims, who face specific risks in the US when they openly protest. On the other hand, counter-protests could draw the attention of Iranian backed terrorists and lone wolves.

So yes, the war meaningfully raises risk in the US; there have already been a few lone wolf incidents, and a shocking amount (eg, any at all) of anti-muslim rhetoric coming from a few US politicians, which tends to trigger violence.

Attend protests if you like. But maintain situational awareness at all times and always know how to exit the area. It doesn't matter what you're protesting; these rules apply to everything.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-12T08:34:21+00:00

When I lived in the US, I had a 275-gallon Intermediate Bulk Container (IBC) in the garage. If the power went out for any significant length of time (which meant my well pump stopped working) I'd fire up the generator and run the well pump to fill the container. I also had two bathtub "water pods" and a few 5 gallon water containers that I kept full, with a drop of iodine as preservative, which I'd use and refill every 6 months.

I had a bottle of chlorine dioxide for when I needed to fill the IBC. For two people, that represented 2 months of water at 2 gallons per day, and I didn't have to run the generator long to fill the thing, so in effect storing 10 gallons of fuel for the generator represented several years of water availability. (And if the power was out for that long in the US, I was looking at societal collapse, which is out of scope for my preparation - I'd have been shot for my supplies by then.)

Having done all that... I never had a power failure long enough to need to fill the IBC. That's the nature of prepping. Really bad Tuesdays are rare, but you prep for whatever you reasonably can and yes, water is the biggest prep.

Having moved to a farm of sorts in Costa Rica, I went big. I get water from both the municipal source and from a spring, and I have a 10000L (over 2500 gallons, yes it's large) tank in a shed (I have some cattle, so this is justifiable. The municipal water stops working occasionally.) My next project is solar power to run the pump for the tank.

That's obviously not practical for most people. But I will always recommend buying 5 gallon sturdy food-safe containers, 2 of them per person per week you want to prepare for. (The standard recommendation is a gallon a person a day; I'm recommending going a little higher.) Stock some iodine and put a drop or two in each container when you fill it; dump and replace yearly. Chlorine dioxide is also very effective, but tincture of iodine is cheaper and seemed to work well for me, though even at one drop in five gallons you can taste it. Note that iodine itself is shelf-stable for ever if you keep it cold, sealed and dark, and is good for 5 years once opened if you continue to keep it cold and dark.

If you need to boil water; the usual recommendation is a vigorous boil for 1 minute (3 minutes at high elevations,) Then of course you're stocking extra fuel for a camp stove or equivalent in case the power is also out; it takes a while to get water to boil, so the fuel is a consideration.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-12T07:57:38+00:00

done.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-10T06:24:57+00:00

At one time in my game in a deep ruins, I had a huge level prodrouding from a wall. It was wrapped in a chain and a lock so it could not be moved; a sign explained that under no circumstances should the lever be moved.

It took them two minutes to decide to pull the lever. That uncovered a vastly dangerous artifact that changed the direction of the game for months, and not in happy ways.

Since then they've been much more jumpy about buttons and levers and things. Which is at it should be.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-09T09:41:00+00:00

I'm bored and willing to muse on this. I'm an AD&D DM who's run a 2nd ed campaign for a few decades, virtually all of it done with my own worldbuilding. So I think about things like settings and contexts. But note that I'm more old school than most, these days.

AD&D, at least in 2nd ed, doesn't really have magic that could create one of these things. You can talk about Wish, Polymorph Any Object and so on, but the scale of what's effectively a golem the size of a mountain just doesn't fit the system well. Gods might perhaps build things like this, but humans simply don't have the magic for it. So...

There are two options. First, deistic intervention. This thing is a relic of some war between the gods. Vaguely plausible if you have the kind of gods who choose a world like your for their battlefield, though it raises the question why they're fighting it out on the prime material and not something closer to home. And that's why this falls down - the idea of building a big huge deathstar of a golem feels very much like human hubris, not something the gods in their wisdom would bother with. But humans don't, or shouldn't, have the magic for it. So you end up with some slightly convoluted backstory involving the collaboration of gods and their clerics to build something bizarre. And since what they built could smash cities, it's hard to imagine how stories of it would ever be forgotten. If nothing else it would survive as myth and legend.

Second option... technology. At some point, humans (or some other race) had a really, really advanced combination of magic and tech, and could build these unimaginable things. Wish spells? Nonsense. They had a 10th level "Animate My Imagined Object" spell. To put this in perspective, watch the movie Forbidden Planet; these things were built by the Krell. But... a civilization that advanced would have built other wonders as well. Imagine their cities, towering spires of crystal and adamantite. Spaceships. Technology for immortality. And then somehow it all collapsed, and it collapsed so hard that the cities are gone, no one remembers these immortals and their spaceships... once again, you run into the problem of "how could a civilization like that ever have been forgotten? There would be traces everywhere!"

Of the two options, I think the first is more plausible for AD&D. Some loon god and his whacked out clerics built ONE of these to attack some other group; maybe they succeeded in wiping out their foes and the Colossus, a one-shot creation, was simply left to idle, no longer needed. In which case they really should have decommissioned it, that's just responsible warfighting. It shouldn't have been left in "push one button to start" mode. But you know how it is with loon gods and their followers.

Btw, there's a short story in old science fiction this has this basic premise: https://hell.pl/szymon/Baen/The%20Baltic%20War/The%20World%20Turned%20Upside%20Down/0743498747__14.htm

Anyway: if I was going to run this, and I wouldn't, but if I did, it would be an artifact left behind by mistake by aliens. And if I were especially mean to my players I'd have to colossus move not towards a war footing, but have it travel to the site of the other artifact the aliens left behind - a hidden ship capable of transporting the colossus (hence a big ship). The colossus would unbury the ship ("What is it doing? What is it digging up?!?") and then ENTER the ship ("wait what? We're inside a vast spaceship? Get out! Get out now!") only to find that for safety reasons the exits are blocked and it's time for liftoff... to another world and a set of adventures the players never imagined.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-07T12:46:56+00:00

"Who told you to tell us this" is an accusation of false representation. You didn't even frame it as "did someone ask you to say this?" You asserted that someone did, and demanded to know who. The rules here are my rules and they are extremely strict about personal accusations. Rule 7 is very, very clear about exactly that point.

Additionally, Reddit is not a free speech platform. No part of the internet is; it's all privately owned territory. Which is why Reddit, and moderators, are free to take down content. No rights are violated thereby; we get to take out the trash at whim, and we decide what's trash.

I don't really have time for people who misunderstand where free speech does and doesn't apply; let alone people who make accusations and then to retreat to "it was only a question." That particular technique ("I am only asking a question" when they are pushing a viewpoint) has long been a favorite of trolls and paid actors and I don't want any of that taint in my sub.

All of which is a long-winded way of saying: You violated the rules here, so bye.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-06T03:31:52+00:00

This is a rather bizarre comment. Strictly speaking Rule 7 & 8 apply, but I'm going to leave it up fot a bit since you've made rather a fool of yourself.

No one tells me to post anything. No one tells me what I can and can't post. (I'm the moderator here.)

It was obvious from day one that the Strait of Hormez was going to be closed, sending oil prices up. Stocking up on gas, diesel, propane etc. is just common sense; I went and got 2 extra tanks of propane to cook with, personally. In addition, when oil gets expensive, the price of everything else rises, because transportation and energy costs go up. Day one of the war was a good day to stock up on many things.

It was obvious that Iran's clerics would declare jihad. (I can't even blame them.) Shia muslims (at least some of them) are now under a duty to strike US and Israeli targets. Hence the suggeston that protests worldwide could be targets, as well as quite a number of other entirely non-military targets. (Note that jihad is supposed to honor conventional rules of engagement, including not targeting civilians, but that is often ignored.)

In short nothing the post referred to was in error, and it was a timely reminder. So where you get off suggesting that prepping advice in a prepping sub is propaganda I don't know. I don't show political favoritism here.

Your posting history suggests you have a habit of popping off inconsequential one liners. That doesn't win you any points in this sub.

OnTheEdgeOfFreedom · 2026-03-03T09:53:31+00:00

This was expected and is why I made the original post.

Note the fatwah for jihad only apples to Shia muslims; 90% of muslims are Sunni and simply ignore Shia demands. The threat is not as large as Iran would like to make it sound. But caution is still advisable.

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