Exactly. Living your life with zero buffer against fluctuations in the availability of life-critical materials is just as stupid as people who are prepping for zombie invasions. One guy thinks nothing will ever happen and the other thinks society is a transient entity. They are both fantasies. If you aren’t ready for earthquakes, fires, financial disasters and etc then you have a short attention span or you’re just lazy.

Besides all this, consolidation and integration of life-support is the way of the future. If you look at society as one big system, it makes a lot of sense to have lots of redundant units rather than all units depending on one central resource. Sole and batteries for example harden the whole country against equipment failure, terror attack, negligence and natural disasters. With a single power plant any instance of one of those things could bring down huge numbers of houses. Technology is making it possible to produce some of the things you need in home, so there is a funny convergence of preppers and technologists.

No idea why you've been d/ved, as you say, there's so many potential, but low risk, scenarios. Even in America and the EU we've all got a 0.5%, maybe 0.1% every year that something could go very wrong. Most likely is that it doesn't spiral, like the 2008 financial crisis, but there was a real, but small, chance that could have gone much worse.

His comment not only is ignoring real-life examples that have happened within his life time (Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Venezula, Katrina, Puerto Rico, etc.), he's also postulating that these new governmental structures would magically spring up over night, rather than taking years or even decades to emerge.

I'm no prepper, but I do feel that I am knowingly taking a risk, albeit a very small one, by not being one. If I had a family to care for, I would definitely be more prepared with 3 months food and some emergency medical supplies beyond a first aid kit. It's a small enough risk that it will probably not happen for my generation or my country, but it does happen.

I also often don't buy insurance for things I think aren't worth it, but it's still a deliberate choice rather than sleep walking into it.

It's almost on the same risk percentage as Home Insurance, so if you're insuring your home, why aren't you 'spending' a little time each year prepping? Just because it's socially unacceptable, but home insurance is regarded as socially acceptable?

Doesn't even have to be something destructive like Iraq or Puerto Rico, Argentina comes to mind: serious economic collapse, maybe not Venezula-style, but enough that it disrupted things heavily.

I agree with the parent -- it's just insurance, and is a cost-benefit trade-off that needs to be evaluated in a similar fashion as flood insurance or the like.

There are a lot of what I'd call "psychological" or perception-based factors for doing things like hoarding guns and food, and it's easy to go overboard, but they're not fundamentally poor choices.

This is a great point. I recently had a small burn which ended up infected with golden staph.

If that infection had a happened and I couldn't get antibiotics, clean water, food, shelter, etc. for a month things could have gone quite the way south.

For those cases the only thing you need to stash is money- maybe some gold if you think money might become worthless. Because just leaving the place for somewhere else is a vastly better option than any survivalist fantasy.