If it wasn't for your (previous) website I would have never thought about these things. It would have taken first-hand experience to make me even consider it, and then I would have been stumbling in the dark.
Seriously great work. Communicates the necessity of preparing for (inevitable) disasters better than any number of warnings and indicators of societal descent for most people.
This is very good info. I bet you could find a way to do some sort of consulting for shelters. I don't think most paupers would be able to design something workable, unless they were the very rare breed with high intelligence and excellent survival sense. Anyone else looking at creating a long-term livable shelter is likely spending over $10K--probably well over that. Would think you could get at least a few grand per project helping efficiently design something like that. Most people, myself included, would have no idea where to start.
That's why I plan to build my next shelter the cheapest, easiest way possible, hopefully all on my own except for the concrete (and may mix that again myself) to prove it is possible for less than $2 grand. I have seen lots of things done with old timbers and plastic sheeting to waterproof it that look pretty stable to me. I am hoping once I get Vault-Co podcast running I can get a slope of about an acre and build a dozen caches/small shelters in it using different methods, all of them to show you can do it on a very tight budget. I saw some pretty impressive Indian Lodge techniques in Australia using nothing but surrounding trees. Get your 12v air pump, a half dozen mask filters for intake filtration. This stuff can be done very cheap if you have the land. The money you do have, you spend wisely to make sure it is expended on the stuff that really counts. I could see building the shelter from nothing but reclaimed materials but spending $5000 on the air intake from American Safe Room, would likely be well spent for those needs. Increasingly nowadays, the computers to run VAULT-SYS could be scavenged junk left over from anything in the last 30 years. There are so many good quality embedded devices thrown out in the garbage behind businesses nowadays you would not believe it. I am lucky I didn't drag another 5 tons of equipment from Australia. Once in Sydney with some office closing down they had an entire 2 ton bin filled with retro circa 1980s technology, I could only afford to take some of the choicest pieces. I got a cardboard box filled with thin client devices, got them home plugged in a USB and had Windows and DOS running on all of them.
You'll never believe this but when CDS creates the database for the first time, it creates a table solely to store the fields, formulas and calculations used on that page! Formerly it was over at the LDS then I copied the new one when it seemed to be updated for newer categories. I forget what the table name is but those figures are used to generate a web page like that one and also for calculations in a dashboard graph to show you how long your remaining supplies will last. (All this has been in continuous revision since around 2005 and will likely continue to evolve to get the figures more accurate.)
There are view sets generated by the CRON module running in the background that are kicked off whenever food inventory or water supplies are altered. They are left in a special table of cache data to then pop up on the dashboard so they are only computed when it changes.
Won't lie, these things work but in a very primitive proof-of-concept way. The dream is to have it fully integrated into state logic so weaknesses become apparent right away, like running out of protein or vitamin C ... etc.
That's cool. If I get some free time one of these weekends I might put together a simple site that does the following:
- Same tables as on webpage above
- Scrapes popular sites for prices on said goods (Costco, Amazon, etc.)
- Alerts when deals on food appear
Would make it easier to keep track of how much one needs to save to store up enough for their goal. Lots of interesting things can be added like adjusting macros and having the food amounts adjust accordingly, showing calories instead of raw weights, adjusting for dietary preferences, etc.
No, I've been assembling it from a variety of sources for about a year, almost around the time I started this Substack. Been adding to it the whole time trying to include anything I may have missed. The reason it took so long to publish is I always thought it needed more without going overboard into too much detail. So I'd see something that would remind me of underground heating sources, etc. and add that in. Finally I reached the limit of an article on Substack so I decided to publish. Glad to finish it, was kind of mandatory for this site.
Thank you for this post! I just skimmed through it for now, but will definitely crank up the printer for a copy of it to keep handy. BTW, if it wasn't addressed here, the joke about the can opener is very funny(!) and I'd found a solution to that dilemma a few years ago. Canned foods are sealed at the top ridge, so you can scrape that ridge back and forth on cement or a rock and the seal comes undone. I tried it: it works. Thanks again for putting together this comprehensive guide.
This is the best information on the topic anywhere.
Agree. Great work.
Amazing article.
If it wasn't for your (previous) website I would have never thought about these things. It would have taken first-hand experience to make me even consider it, and then I would have been stumbling in the dark.
Seriously great work. Communicates the necessity of preparing for (inevitable) disasters better than any number of warnings and indicators of societal descent for most people.
This is excellent, a lot of work, thank you, Tex!
Shared far and wide!!!
This is very good info. I bet you could find a way to do some sort of consulting for shelters. I don't think most paupers would be able to design something workable, unless they were the very rare breed with high intelligence and excellent survival sense. Anyone else looking at creating a long-term livable shelter is likely spending over $10K--probably well over that. Would think you could get at least a few grand per project helping efficiently design something like that. Most people, myself included, would have no idea where to start.
That's why I plan to build my next shelter the cheapest, easiest way possible, hopefully all on my own except for the concrete (and may mix that again myself) to prove it is possible for less than $2 grand. I have seen lots of things done with old timbers and plastic sheeting to waterproof it that look pretty stable to me. I am hoping once I get Vault-Co podcast running I can get a slope of about an acre and build a dozen caches/small shelters in it using different methods, all of them to show you can do it on a very tight budget. I saw some pretty impressive Indian Lodge techniques in Australia using nothing but surrounding trees. Get your 12v air pump, a half dozen mask filters for intake filtration. This stuff can be done very cheap if you have the land. The money you do have, you spend wisely to make sure it is expended on the stuff that really counts. I could see building the shelter from nothing but reclaimed materials but spending $5000 on the air intake from American Safe Room, would likely be well spent for those needs. Increasingly nowadays, the computers to run VAULT-SYS could be scavenged junk left over from anything in the last 30 years. There are so many good quality embedded devices thrown out in the garbage behind businesses nowadays you would not believe it. I am lucky I didn't drag another 5 tons of equipment from Australia. Once in Sydney with some office closing down they had an entire 2 ton bin filled with retro circa 1980s technology, I could only afford to take some of the choicest pieces. I got a cardboard box filled with thin client devices, got them home plugged in a USB and had Windows and DOS running on all of them.
Great post. Here's a calculator I found that's useful: https://wallabygoods.com/pages/food-calculator
You'll never believe this but when CDS creates the database for the first time, it creates a table solely to store the fields, formulas and calculations used on that page! Formerly it was over at the LDS then I copied the new one when it seemed to be updated for newer categories. I forget what the table name is but those figures are used to generate a web page like that one and also for calculations in a dashboard graph to show you how long your remaining supplies will last. (All this has been in continuous revision since around 2005 and will likely continue to evolve to get the figures more accurate.)
There are view sets generated by the CRON module running in the background that are kicked off whenever food inventory or water supplies are altered. They are left in a special table of cache data to then pop up on the dashboard so they are only computed when it changes.
Won't lie, these things work but in a very primitive proof-of-concept way. The dream is to have it fully integrated into state logic so weaknesses become apparent right away, like running out of protein or vitamin C ... etc.
That's cool. If I get some free time one of these weekends I might put together a simple site that does the following:
- Same tables as on webpage above
- Scrapes popular sites for prices on said goods (Costco, Amazon, etc.)
- Alerts when deals on food appear
Would make it easier to keep track of how much one needs to save to store up enough for their goal. Lots of interesting things can be added like adjusting macros and having the food amounts adjust accordingly, showing calories instead of raw weights, adjusting for dietary preferences, etc.
Was this assembled with AI?
No, I've been assembling it from a variety of sources for about a year, almost around the time I started this Substack. Been adding to it the whole time trying to include anything I may have missed. The reason it took so long to publish is I always thought it needed more without going overboard into too much detail. So I'd see something that would remind me of underground heating sources, etc. and add that in. Finally I reached the limit of an article on Substack so I decided to publish. Glad to finish it, was kind of mandatory for this site.
Thank you for this post! I just skimmed through it for now, but will definitely crank up the printer for a copy of it to keep handy. BTW, if it wasn't addressed here, the joke about the can opener is very funny(!) and I'd found a solution to that dilemma a few years ago. Canned foods are sealed at the top ridge, so you can scrape that ridge back and forth on cement or a rock and the seal comes undone. I tried it: it works. Thanks again for putting together this comprehensive guide.
That's actually so useful (we did that in the Army with C Ration cans!) I am adding it to the document.