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Comment by jamestomasino | Hacker News Reader

We keep an emergency "go bag" in the front hall closet with tools necessary for basic survival. Included in that are 6 weeks worth of MREs for the family, water filtration system, water storage (fill it in a tub), rope, shovel, saw, first-aid kits, blankets, and so on.

Whatever the situation may be, whether natural, political, or zombie-related, we can grab that and hit the road knowing we have the basics.

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How big/heavy is that bag? As someone that doesn't know much about this topic, that seems like an enormous amount of food!

My bag weighs 35 lbs. It's two weeks of food for two people, 3 litres of water and a bunch of stuff like a radio, flashlight, water purification kit etc.

It's about 30-35lbs. It's kind of shaped like a bowling bag. It's not designed to strap on my back and go hiking, but to toss in the car. The MREs are pretty tiny and last about 5 years. We refresh them every now and again. Peace of mind doesn't cost all that much.

Here's a write-up I did on the extended set, including camping gear, dutch oven, etc. It's not all part of the go bag. https://blog.tomasino.org/zombie-survival-kit.html

Interesting. Before Y2K (Year 2000) I stocked up on a good amount of packaged food with some shelf life, and some minimal tools etc. Turned out that nothing major happened, either to computer systems or the world. Surprisingly low effect compared to what was imagined or predicted.

There was a lot of of money spent on remediating and testing computer systems during the 90's.

Governments had plans within plans and conducted drills. Shareholders asked CEO's what their Y2K plans were during AGM's.

Not surprising that the effect was low.

To this day, I wonder if our over-preparedness for Y2K is why we are so complacent about climate change.

>There was a lot of money spent on remediating and testing computer systems during the 90's.

Yes I know. I was part of one such remediation project for a large client for a while, though not directly involved.

> Not surprising that the effect was low.

It was known that the fixes done would work. The concern was about steps possibly not taken in some random systems like hardware or infrastructure ones.

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