Genuine question, in the full on nuclear war scenario presumably most people wouldn’t have food supplies and just starve. Do you expect to be able to protect your food supplies from organized plundering armed gangs? Eg former criminal gangs, or former police/military?
Do you expect to be able to protect your food supplies from organized plundering armed gangs?
Yes. Compared to most other places, looting my area is unappealingly dangerous and expensive.
In order for a stranger to successfully loot my home, they would have to:
Expend the fuel to travel a long way out into the middle of nowhere
Either loot all the visible homes along the way without getting shot, or coordinate with past looters to know to skip the more dangerous places. If a “skip this house” code starts showing up, you’d better bet we’ll all be marking our own driveways with it.
If they’re not the first looters, they’ll probably have to either repair the main road or risk getting lost and/or stuck in the mud in a maze of logging roads to go around. Or I guess they could walk a few miles. But my community has all the equipment necessary to block the main road in several places, and we’d almost certainly do that if people from town started trying to come out and loot us.
Determine that my driveway is worth investigating, unlike the many similar-looking driveways around here which lead to nothing of value except possibly getting your vehicle stuck in the mud
Clear whatever stuff I’ve dropped into the driveway, or disembark their vehicles and walk an unknown distance
Figure out where my food is stored
Avoid/disarm any traps, or perhaps perfectly harmless configurations of stuff that look like traps, while searching my property and retrieving my food
Load the food into their vehicles, perhaps by carrying it a fair distance if they didn’t want to spend the time or fuel clearing stuff out of my driveway
Safely return to their base of operations without running out of fuel, experiencing a fatal interaction with a neighbor, getting lost or stuck in the woods, etc.
But if there are actually plundering gangs of any sort, having my food stolen would be the least of my worries. I would expect that the kind of lawlessness where groups of “former” criminals are attempting to steal strangers’ food would correlate strongly to the kind of lawlessness where people like me get some combination of raped, enslaved, and murdered.
I personally don’t leave traps set, because realistically the person most likely to get hurt by them is myself, but plenty of people like me don’t subscribe to that line of reasoning.
Anyways, the point I was trying to make was in the next level of abstraction up from the question of whether any particular house is trapped at any particular time—it’s the uncertainty of not knowing whether a given house is really safe to enter.
Genuine question, in the full on nuclear war scenario presumably most people wouldn’t have food supplies and just starve. Do you expect to be able to protect your food supplies from organized plundering armed gangs? Eg former criminal gangs, or former police/military?
Yes. Compared to most other places, looting my area is unappealingly dangerous and expensive.
In order for a stranger to successfully loot my home, they would have to:
Expend the fuel to travel a long way out into the middle of nowhere
Either loot all the visible homes along the way without getting shot, or coordinate with past looters to know to skip the more dangerous places. If a “skip this house” code starts showing up, you’d better bet we’ll all be marking our own driveways with it.
If they’re not the first looters, they’ll probably have to either repair the main road or risk getting lost and/or stuck in the mud in a maze of logging roads to go around. Or I guess they could walk a few miles. But my community has all the equipment necessary to block the main road in several places, and we’d almost certainly do that if people from town started trying to come out and loot us.
Determine that my driveway is worth investigating, unlike the many similar-looking driveways around here which lead to nothing of value except possibly getting your vehicle stuck in the mud
Clear whatever stuff I’ve dropped into the driveway, or disembark their vehicles and walk an unknown distance
Figure out where my food is stored
Avoid/disarm any traps, or perhaps perfectly harmless configurations of stuff that look like traps, while searching my property and retrieving my food
Load the food into their vehicles, perhaps by carrying it a fair distance if they didn’t want to spend the time or fuel clearing stuff out of my driveway
Safely return to their base of operations without running out of fuel, experiencing a fatal interaction with a neighbor, getting lost or stuck in the woods, etc.
But if there are actually plundering gangs of any sort, having my food stolen would be the least of my worries. I would expect that the kind of lawlessness where groups of “former” criminals are attempting to steal strangers’ food would correlate strongly to the kind of lawlessness where people like me get some combination of raped, enslaved, and murdered.
You booby trap your house? What if some kids stumble in or something 50 years from now?
Did I say that?
I personally don’t leave traps set, because realistically the person most likely to get hurt by them is myself, but plenty of people like me don’t subscribe to that line of reasoning.
Anyways, the point I was trying to make was in the next level of abstraction up from the question of whether any particular house is trapped at any particular time—it’s the uncertainty of not knowing whether a given house is really safe to enter.