futz factor

FUTZ FACTOR


Everyone seems to be falling over each other in their haste to proclaim financial doom and gloom, all because the government took everyone by surprise and announced they needed to borrow a crap load more money to keep paying Sally Senior for her Hover-Round and Sgt. Slaughter to keep sharpening pencils for twenty years to get his retirement. Oh, wait. The military gets screwed on their pensions. Okay, let me put up the usual disclaimers so every jag bag jizzing into the flag doesn’t get all butt hurt and proclaim me unpatriotic and give me a one way ticket to Syria for renditioning. Yes, yes, every one of our boys in cammo deserves his retirement. He worked hard defending our Empire, I mean country from imminent box cutter attack, and should be getting his full pay as a pension. Indeed you are all he salt of the earth and deserve what was promised you. But! The fly in the ointment is that deserve still has to obey the laws of physics. You can’t have what ain’t there. I’m sorry if you abused your body for decades keeping the city from burning down. If the politicians who were your boss pissed away your pension money playing the horses at the derivatives track, you won’t get a pension. Well, sorry, at least you ain’t as screwed as the military, whom they just arbitrarily change the rules on ( like extending your term of service to keep you in one of the OilStans ), because you still get some kind of pension. It won’t buy too much, but you get the full dollar amount. Maybe. If the fedgov can afford to take over the city pension plan. I’m really honestly confused that not everyone realizes the promises to them will not be kept.

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So, yes, the news is full of financial Armageddon. Right now, you should be very aware that things are going to hell in a hand basket on a rocket ship post haste. Declining oil reserves meet increasing dollar supplies with a dash of weather related crop failures for spice. How much time did you think you had to prepare? None of this bothers me because I’m at the Futz Factor in my preps. The Futz Factor is when you are comfortable in your preparations and can lean back, relax, and just futz about with any additional items. Casual purchase, almost done without alarm, because it is all just extra. Frosting on the cake. This payday, you buy another bag of beans. Or not. Perhaps you bought the newest post-apocalypse novel instead. No worries, you’ll get it next week. If it all ends tomorrow, you’ll be fine. I’m certainly not saying that you can ever have enough of certain items such as food or ammo. There are always duplicates of something you should get ( I have one scope mount for the Enfield- I need two more. I have two scopes, I should get five or so more ). But soon after you’ve satisfied a basic level of paranoia, you should proclaim yourself satisfied and move from Full Scale Immediate Panic Prepping to a more benign Futz Factor. Never stop prepping, but start to relax.

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How much is enough depends on the person. It is never a hard and fast rule. Even those of us advocating full and complete collapse have a cut off point where any more won’t do you much good. For instance, a years supply of food isn’t enough, since you can have year after year crop failures. But more than three or five years of storage food is pretty much feeding a neurosis. If you need more than that, if, say, for instance, an asteroid fell and the debris in the atmosphere made plant growth impossible for a decade ( look up nuclear winter to get a vibe on something like that ), I would think that the constant lack of sunshine would drive you to suicide way before you could eat your twenty years of storage food. The same with ammunition. Most of us don’t have enough, but some of us getting a hundred thousand rounds are playing against the odds thinking they will survive so many firefights. I reached a decent level of preparedness before Y2K. Oh, sure, I was in an overly populated area and I needed years more food. But all I needed was to tweak the fundamentals ( one of which was to get a LOT more paranoid about the economy and get junk land ). I haven’t really panicked too god-awful much since then ( when I do, it quicky passes ). Not as much as you would think reading this drivel.

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I’m not worried about a pension, either corporate or Social Security. I’m simply going to work until there are no jobs or I die, whichever comes first. I never bought into the promise. I’ll never have enough supplies to make it through a total economic crash without a collapse, but that scenario seems to be pretty far fetched to me. Since 99% of us are at least partially dependent on the global trade system for basic supplies, the economic crash IS the social collapse. Even if we all had the seeds, knowledge, compost and time to organic intensive farm, we are too concentrated in urban areas ( where the governments and banks forced people globally ) to have enough land to do so. We CAN’T go back to living off the land, most of us. Not until after the die-off. Which gets us back to the amount of storage food you need. Enough for a few crop failures, and the die-off ( which should be quicker than Militia Porn, multi-year UN troop oppression with oodles and gobs of ammunition and fuel have us believe ). The military will quickly run out of food, fuel and ammo. They will quickly be walking, without heavy weapons, and fighting for the same prime land the “got a gun and no food” crowd, which is about half the population. I put the military threat down low on the worry list, come collapse ( pre-collapse being another matter of course ). Any more food than that ( waiting for the idiots to kill each other ) is sort of silly, other than for stored wealth for trade.

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I’m not saying not to panic if you aren’t prepared. I am saying, there is no need to panic after that. Don’t lose your sense of humor because it is already starting to collapse and you are sitting in Las Craphole with a case of chicken noodle soup and a 9mm. Pull a few hundred bucks out of your butt, get prepared, then start enjoying the panic on everyone else’s face as they have one pack of top ramen per family unit and a golf club as a weapon. It is going down. Learn to enjoy it. Stop taking this stuff too seriously. You needn’t be gloomy to enjoy the doom and gloom.

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