Prepping Worthwhile?

The California power outages prompted me to look at a whole house generator. There's basically two categories of generators: expensive reliable ones, and cheap chinese stuff that is meant to be used once in a while. It's basically $5000+ or under $2000. Then you've got a choice to make about the fuel to use: gasoline, propane, or natural gas.

That range of choices inevitably leads to a question of what you're trying to prepare for: an occasional power outage, or some disruptive natural or man made disaster that knocks power out for weeks, or months.

The weird thing about a generator is you're basically buying something you'll hardly ever use. You might never use it at all. Over my lifetime, the power has only been out a handful of days altogether. The frequency of power outages is really, really low.

On the other hand, if we are moving into a new era in the United States where the system's infrastructure starts falling apart like in California, then maybe it's not valid to assume that historical condition will continue.

For most of my lifetime it seemed like there was enough money really resources for the Federal and State and Local governments to do every and anything. California shows there really aren't enough resources to do everything. California is unable to prioritize in any sane way. It's unlikely my state is either, and the Feds definitely aren't.

If we're going toward a third world scenario in the United States, where resources are limited and the government is really an overt inept and corrupt enemy of the people, then individual communities and even individual homes are going to be islands of prosperity or the current level of resource use we "enjoy" today. The high cost of the infrastructure to maintain that prosperity probably reflects that it's unsustainable on a large scale. It's also pretty unlikely that all the systems that those prosperity islands require would remain intact and functional in that scenario.