55 years: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0720250/

I hear you, but especially in scavenger mode, even pounded flat copper sheets aren’t going to have the capacity to store the wiring diagram for an EV you find that you want to fix up and rig for solar charging. Particularly when you don’t know which year or model of thing it is you’re going to be wanting to scavenge.

the one option we can’t even get to work when everything is working.

While I agree that laser printers are finicky, once I get one working if I have enough paper I can generally print until I run out of toner. And printed paper isn’t forever, but I do have laser printouts from 40 years ago that are as legible as they ever were.

Where I disconnect with you is: why even bother with Terabytes of knowledge when you’re just going to collect the “most important” 100kB or so on your copper sheets at a rate of one sheet per hour, or less? There’s a reason Moses only had ten commandments instead of the full Talmud.

We can start growing our own food within weeks, not reliant on ancestors

Having watched a neighbor “farming commune” with 12-15 adults on 80 acres who had nothing better to do than play Gilligan’s Island building their huts and trying to grow their own food, for two years with full internet access, enough money for tools and fertilizers, electric pumps for irrigation, they seemed to shy away from using the tractor in the field to work the crops but they had a working tractor… after two years they were only growing about half of their calories.

In other words, In my opinion a “real prepper” already has a “Victory Garden” going and producing enough food that they can easily scale it up to meet 200% of their calorie needs, some to store for hard times, some to barter. If you haven’t actually done that, you’re probably in for a surprise when the raccoons eat your crops in the middle of the night.

All that time can be used to make hard copies of essential information.

If you have a working printer, toner, paper… and don’t forget: a laser printer uses more than10x as much power as an efficient computer. A couple of years would be required just to figure out what you think might be essential information, and after the printer dies you’ll find new essential things based on changes in your situation.

Having said all that, yeah, I’ve got the big offline copy of Wikipedia setup with a reader on a laptop…

You can learn how to salvage wire and build new energy sources. An average 2100²ft empty house has almost 200 pounds of copper wire in the walls. 3000 cycles to learn.

This will the the real resource people use for probably 50+ years after TSHTF - scavenging from what’s left over. As you say: 90%+ dead by next Spring, that leaves a LOT of empty houses to scavenge. Food won’t be there, but wire in the walls, lumber to burn for heat, glass, water pipes, there will be used mattresses available for decades.

thanks for telling me who I am and what skills I already have.

Speaking in general about the 10% who do survive the first three months, the skills required to make it through that chaos are very different from the sustained scavenger/farmer phase.

You don’t prevent trolls and shills, you block them - whitelist style. Communicate with people who have established a good reputation with you, or one or two or three degrees removed from you. Spend time with anonymous when you feel like it, maybe turn some of those identities into trusted friends, but always communicate with some kind of secure ID- even if that ID only lasts for a 10 minute back and forth exchange.

A major not completely solved problem with cryptographically secure anything is: key management. Ultimately you might carry some kind of switchable RFID key with you, switched off until you’re ready to authenticate for some reason.

one person can open multiple accounts in multiple networks.

No problem with that, unless you’re expecting to count heads accurately. If one person is creating the content of ten using ten accounts, is that a problem?

Facebook forces people to have phone numbers and there’s still so many bots and shills there.

I don’t remember giving FB my phone number… with burner phones that seems to be an intentionally lame approach.

I think there’s so many ways for bots to happen that it’s like playing wack a mole.

I don’t think you ever stop them, you just ignore them like junk mail in your physical mail box, except with secure IDs you can automatically filter them without even a glance.

The average hunter gatherer had food forests planted by their ancestors, wild herds of meat for the taking and a lifetime of knowledge transfer and physical training in living that lifestyle.

You may be adaptable and intelligent and have wikipedia by your side to tell you what to do, but Wikipedia is written by people living in today’s society, not that reality. 90% of today’s people will suffer horribly getting in the physical and mental condition required to do a hunter-gatherer daily routine in 6 hours or less.

But not you, you’re awesome and you get it done in 3, so that leaves you time to go mine copper ore, smelt it into wire and other such things - in reality, no, for the duration of your remaining life scavenging the wreckage will be more productive than DIY from the earth, but scavenging requires a lot of travel and even e-cars won’t be getting around very well.

you as an individual shouldn’t waste your time making an asteroid detection and diversion system

This is where modern society is falling apart. A bunch of individuals with the “feeling” that an asteroid diversion system is “a waste of THEIR money” and that the detection system is a bigger waste still… Then we have preppers like Musk thinking about personally setting up a Mars colony, so he needs massive tax advantages and other government grift to fulfill his THC fueled visions.

About the black hole prep thing… it’s not necessarily all that expensive, you just need Musk’s Mars colony, or maybe more realistically one of Niven’s iron asteroids melted by solar power, inflated and spun to be a big hollow shell with atmosphere and gravity inside. Setup a process to make one of those every 500 years or so and string 'em out in nicely varied orbits to spread the risk. Send a few out on fusion powered slow trips to other stars…

more than enough time to find or make a replacement even if society doesn’t rebuild.

If you’re living somewhere with enough easy food, water and shelter that you’re not spending all your time just handling that. Making groceries takes a lot of time and effort.

That would then rely on any effective “Right to be forgotten” laws to erase unnecessary data.

Laws != effective, in my experience.

If you are attempting to deal anonymously, you need to go “burner phone” on a regular basis - throw the identity away and get a new one, or three. How often you do that depends on how valuable your anonymity is to you.

I think the main thing we need to teach the youth of today is: how to maintain a long term undeniable identity that they can live with their whole lives. Meaning: silly pictures with school friends -> anonymous. Master’s Thesis -> certified identity. In-between? That’s where the judgement calls come in.

People doing serious stuff are going to need to start depending on certified identity sources, and openly disclosing when they don’t really know the credibility or even identity of their sources.

As for “credible fake names” - like shell corporations? I think those are a bad idea altogether.

We had some land on a river. Somebody bought the neighboring piece of land through a shell corporation, county public records didn’t give any real names in connection with the sale and transfer of the deed. In 5 minutes on the internet I looked up the owner of that corporation in Nevada and found that it was beneficially owned by a has-been rock star. 5 more minutes and I found a newspaper article from the nearby town with has-been rock star quoted as saying “we bought 11 acres out on the river…” It’s really that easy, and for the people who “do it better” there are forensic accountants who “untangle it better” and the whole game is mostly a waste of time for everybody except the lawyers and accountants charging billable hours, unless you’re covering up something that most people probably don’t want hidden anyway - like money laundering or worse.

they’d be trusted that they’re not inventing people from thin air.

And that trust would be verified how?

a lawyer, or journalist’s office - somewhere they’d have established notaries, and show them a driver’s license or other notable documentation … would grant a cryptographic signature sourced from their office to express that their office has seen them.

So, Russian Troll goes on vacation in Amerika, visit 1000 notaries and obtain 1000 different cryptographic signatures sourced from their offices expressing that they have seen Russian Troll who borrowed U.S. identity card and swapped photo. Very nice.

A “cryptographic identity” is only as valuable as the material signed by it, and then only as long as the secret portion of the identity (you know, those bitcoin keys that guy is buying a landfill to try to find…) is known only to the person(s) controlling the identity.

They can work very well in blockchain form which makes it impossible to alter past records, again only so long as long as the true owner of the identity has control of the secret that signed the last block in the chain. “Right to be Forgotten” is actually somewhat compatible with blockchain, you don’t have to show all the photographs that were placed in the chain throughout history in order to validate the chain, only the cryptographic hashes of those photos. But… if anyone ever finds the bit for bit exact photograph that was in the chain, it becomes irrefutable that the photograph was signed by the chain owner as part of the chain…

This kind of logic should be being made interesting to fourth graders, implemented in practice by 8th graders, and practiced as easily as phone numbers and e-mail addresses by 12th graders. Maybe after kids educated with that kind of knowledge and awareness grow up, they can get a handle on this mess where: “people just trust me, dumb fucks.”

inform people about what’s going on around them

I have lived all my life around retirees, people 50+ years old. I can tell you from that experience, you can inform them all you want, they’re not likely to change their opinions about anything.

Neuroplasticity goes to hell after 40, faster when you drink and/or smoke.

the cost for preparing for some incredibly low odds events is higher than the likelihood it’ll ever be useful.

There’s the flipside of that: cost of prepping vs what’s at stake if it happens.

This is one where development of a reasonably capable asteroid diversion system probably makes sense, or at least makes more sense than bombing each other’s cities and kidnapping each other’s children… Sure, it’s fabulously expensive to make big rockets capable of moving big rocks in space, but the cost of one of those big rocks hitting the ocean is higher. It’s low odds that a big rock is hitting any ocean tomorrow, but over the course of the next 1000 years? Even if that chance is 1/100, doing the prep work now to be able to deflect it if it comes could be a big payoff overall.

But, that still doesn’t address the unknown unknowns which - we don’t know, so calculating odds is just a matter of trying to look back in time to see when really bad things happened and assuming (incorrectly) that the odds of really bad things happening in the future are about the same.

I never wanted to be told what to do, much less when to put my life in danger, so the military wasn’t a great fit for me. However, I’d be 100% astounded if gay and cross dressing soldiers, seamen etc. weren’t a somewhat common thing throughout the ages, about as or more common than trans-gender in society today, which Google currently rates as about 1/200 people.

Point being, after 3000 cycles, it’s toast and there’s no fresh bread available.

Yes, you could construct something, but I think you’d be pretty amazed at how maintenance intensive a 1kWh gravity battery is.

If there were good ways of verifying basic conditions of people you interact with online, without exposing personal details

The problem there is: seen and verified by who? What’s your “chain of trust” behind that blue checkmark or whatever signifies a “verified person”?

Even an “anonymous identity” if it runs long enough eventually gives away the person doing the writing under the pseudonym. They may refer to experiences indirectly, unconsciously even, and those narrow down the subset of who they could be, until eventually there can be only one person on the whole planet who fits all the available clues.

To an extent, the world needs to grow up and realize that anyone determined enough can hunt you down through your online footprint unless you’re being super careful with your identity creation, what you say, and how long you use that identity. They also need to realize that among the 8 billion+ of us, they just aren’t very interesting unless they seem gullible enough to authorize a transfer of funds…

How many WWII films depict trans shows put on for the troops by the troops? Especially in the Navy. Is that all fiction?

Actually, if the economy crashes (like under the pandemic) that will slow climate change quicker than our proposed mitigation plans.

Cue malicious compliance in 3…2…1…

Give them a lollipop so they shut up?

The first step in trustable networks is securely validated identity.

On the internet nobody knows if you’re a dog, a Russian Troll, or a corporate shill.

Simpler still: disenfranchise senile boomers. Of course you don’t target boomers specifically, any old person with very little time left to live and severe disconnect from reality shouldn’t be allowed to vote on what affects the rest of the world long after they are dead.

https://old.reddit.com/r/DownWithIncumbency/

How do you find that? Through some kind of rigorous analysis, or just an intuitive feeling?

When data is absent, rigorous analysis is impossible. When data is severely lacking, attempts at rigorous analysis are more intuition than anything else.

you need to collect data and work the numbers, not just imagine them.

And when the data can’t be collected? Contingency planning and resource allocation for the unknown is folly, right up until it is the smartest thing to do.

all the causes that we know don’t apply to any nearby stars that might threaten us.

That we know of.

We should focus on expanding our knowledge and plan based on the best data we have, but like the first lunar astronauts spending 21 days in quarantine, a bit of planning and care for the unknown isn’t a bad idea either.