a friend of mine was talking about how things are going to collapse as if there will be some flash point where everything just burns down. And i told them no that's not going to be the case. Things will just continue to get worse. They told me that's a bleak perspective.

This reminds me of a former coworker. Our workplace had optional earthquake preparedness kit inspection, where you get a gift card or something for showing earthquake prep supplies (it was discontinued before I worked there) . The first year, this coworker had a serious set of supplies, canned food, water, etc. But the following years he started presenting fake supplies as a joke, the first year it was several bottles of vodka and wine, saying that "after society collapsed, we would be back to bartering and alcohol should be a shelf-stable, portable form of value". And this eventually worked up to the last year of the program where he just had a handful of rubber bands, paper clips, and a picture of MacGyver.

potatoes. have a billion potatoes. its how my family got through ww2 in the middle of nowhere. infinite potatoes. become obsessed with potatoes. dream of potatoes. have 50 buckets of potatoes growing at any given time. collect rainwater and become so obsessed/PTSD-d with it that you need every container you have filled with water in every room for the rest of your life. showering? baths? toilets? cleanliness? nah forget it, thats some place you could be storing water.

oh and IEDs. have a lot of those. put them near a nazi base and fuck off to your gremlin hideout in the mountains

Frankling

Beans and bullets! It's always beans and bullets!

the stonk ticker beneath that headline is just

Benjamin Frankling

I would let my trade deals wait until fire has stopped raining from the sky. No matter how valuable my hoarded sticks of butter will be people in that picture will be too busy dealing with a vengeful God.

I am going with bottle caps, it's statistically likely that some wretched basement dwelling g*mers will survive the bottleneck and it'd be very funny to watch them soyface as they trade away their beans for 10 years worth of High-life caps.

Alright here's my list:

Cigarettes x90

unironically feel like that was written by a bot. i checked because it seemed like an april fool's premise but it isn't funny, plus the list is intensely generic & foolish

Canned Fish!

The 90 items to buy to get us to climate collapse the quickest.

Doesn't take specialized knowledge to figure out valuable things. But it does unfortunately seem take some actual intelligence to understand that you want things you can distribute to your neighbors and community to help it become self sustaining.

Tomato seeds, potatoes, 🅱️eans, other seeds, salt, yeast. A spool of narrow gauge copper pipe...