BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 8 months ago
Not the kind parents will teach their children in home schooling (not necessarily so, but maybe, I certainly would), but with a different emphasis.
Following the same procedure, we can see that even over an 18-year span we have a 10% chance of violent revolution, which is an interesting thought experiment to entertain before you have kids. It’s also important to note that a violent nation-state transition doesn’t just affect people who live in a floodplain. It affects everyone stuck in the middle. Especially the poor and defenseless.
The authors try to do some PRA (Probabilistic Risk Assessment) with a limited failure data set. After all, violent revolutions in North America is a limited data set. A better statement follows. “The tech preppers do not necessarily think a collapse is likely. They consider it a remote event, but one with a very severe downside, so, given how much money they have, spending a fraction of their net worth to hedge against this . . . is a logical thing to do.”
This is better because it boils it down to its essential elements. We’ve discussed this many times before in the context of concealed or open carry. The minimization of risk means understanding high risk scenarios, and risk = probability X consequences. So for example, if something is low probability and the consequence of the event is low (for example, a spoon breaking when you eat your morning cereal), you don’t invest in a new set of expensive china.
If on the other hand an event has high probability or high consequence, that can drive the risk high, meaning it’s something you need to plan for. Preppers see the event for which they are planning to be a high consequence event. They are right.
It’s just that simple.
