Jon Stokes

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Oct. 22, 2020

A giant waxed cheese wheel is the apocalypse prep you didn’t know you needed

Fats and proteins are a bigger challenge when putting together your food preps than other categories like grains and veggies. These critical nutrient families tend to have a terrible shelf life, so if you want either of them in a form that’ll last…

Oct. 16, 2020

The Prepared

How to shop for preps without going over-budget or buying fantasy gear

Doomshopping — a vicious cycle of doomscrolling, fear-fueled impulse buying (of preps and supplies), guilt at overspending, and then back around to doomscrolling to justify the purchases and silence the guilt. So may Americans are doing it right now…

Oct. 14, 2020

The Prepared

Doomshopping: How to stop overspending because you’re freaked out about the election

Oct. 7, 2020

The Prepared

NOAA: 2020 already has a record number of $1 billion disasters, and it’s not over

As if you needed another reason to always have a go-bag constantly at the ready, a new NOAA report brings word that 2020 has already hit the previous annual record of 16 disasters that cost $1 billion or more — and there’s still a whole quarter left…

Sep. 2, 2020

The Prepared

Seeing the big picture: how to think about the pandemic and predict what’s next

Those readers who’ve been with us since our January coverage of the SARS-CoV-2 outbreak in Wuhan, China, know that The Prepared has consistently predicted the twists and turns of this pandemic. Our blog has been early on many stories, and our…

Aug. 18, 2020

WIRED

The YOLOers vs. Distancers Feud Is Tearing Us Apart

Covid-19 has given rise to a new blood feud—and the two camps are increasingly blaming each other for everything the pandemic has wrought. In the past few weeks, many Covid-19 hot spots around the country have seen their case counts surge and then…

Jul. 29, 2020

The Prepared

Key developments for Tuesday, July 28, 2020

Welcome to the newly revamped Key Developments, now twice weekly and with non-COVID news. Right now, it’s actually still mainly COVID news, but we’ll be slowly morphing it into something broader as we go. World events Many are worried about the…

Jul. 17, 2020

The Prepared

Dress like a prepper: the wonders of wool/nylon blends

Back in November and December of 2019, before the viral apocalypse ravaged global supply chains and sent us all indoors, I redid my entire wardrobe. I threw out some 90 percent of the clothes I’d been wearing, and I started over from scratch with a…

Jul. 14, 2020

The Prepared

Fire season is here, so here’s how to prepare for blackouts on a budget

Fire season is upon us, and with wildfires comes rolling blackouts. Last year, California and other states saw widespread, rolling blackouts due to the wildfires. Now is the time to ensure you’re prepared to meet the challenges of fire season,…

Jul. 9, 2020

The Prepared

It’s not just you: what’s going on with product shortages & what could be next

If there’s one or two products you’ve been trying to get your hands on, but they’re either always out-of-stock or going for sky-high markups, know this: it’s not just you. It’s also not just some random thing you’re trying to get your hands on. The…

Jul. 2, 2020

The Prepared

How we know the future of COVID-19 is a roller coaster of lockdowns and spikes

When it comes to knowing what’s next with the pandemic, I’ve found the following two methods have yet to let me down: I keep close tabs on what infectious disease experts are saying, and I regularly mask up and go outside to look around. For the…

Jun. 25, 2020

The Prepared

Unpacking the logic behind “slow the testing down, please”

A lot has been made of the President’s claim that we should “slow the testing down,” a claim that he doubled down on in subsequent remarks to reporters. Most commentators state that he’s under the mistaken impression that if we just don’t look at the…

Jun. 25, 2020

The Prepared

How to understand ICU occupancy numbers and tell when your area is in the danger zone

ICUs in some areas of the United States are about to go into overflow mode, as you’ve probably seen. You may have even shared a story about this on a social media site. And if you shared one of those “ICU occupancy is surging” stories, odds are good…

Jun. 24, 2020

The Prepared

Video review: the Work Sharp Benchstone Knife Sharpener

I’m not a big fan of gadgets and “sharpening systems” that lock you into a specific way of putting an edge on a blade. I advocate learning to free-hand an edge on a strop or a diamond stone, because once you learn that skill, it’s easily…

Jun. 22, 2020

The Prepared

Review: the GORUCK face mask

Here in Texas, we’re still having a hard time getting reusable cloth masks of decent quality. My wife ordered some fancy-looking masks from Canada over a month ago, and they’ve yet to ship. I recently waited three weeks for some overpriced masks that…

Jun. 16, 2020

The Prepared

Think twice before buying a face mask from a random online ad

No matter who you are and what you tend to shop for, you just about can’t click a link these days without seeing an ad for cloth face masks. Quite often, the masks look like the one in the picture above — cloth material, a plastic exhale port, and…

Jun. 10, 2020

The Prepared

Review: Somewear Global Hotspot

Identify how [you] can communicate with your loved ones. This should include a location to meet if cell service is interrupted. — Community safety, the City of Minneapolis Welcome to the new normal, where the government of a large Midwestern city is…

Jun. 9, 2020

The Prepared

COVID-19: The WHO absolutely did not say those without symptoms can’t spread coronavirus

Have you heard the big WHO announcement? People who aren’t showing symptoms don’t spread the virus! — Happy people everywhere right now The WHO’s announcement that infected people who aren’t showing symptoms of COVID-19 aren’t spreading the virus has…

Jun. 8, 2020

The Prepared

Testability, repeatability, fairness: testing preps is all about asking the right questions

We do a lot of product testing here at The Prepared, so we know how difficult it is to design a test that’s repeatable, fair, and actually answers the burning questions we have about a product. In fact, in many cases we spend far more time designing…

Jun. 4, 2020

The Prepared

The “split-screen effect”: what it is and how to turn it to your advantage

It’s a common feature of epidemics and pandemics: one city or village will be decimated and the next one over is unscathed. The same thing also tends to happen with civil strife. Some regions of a city or country will be literally aflame, while…