And disasters / apocalypse are distributed by a power law or exponential. The lead subject in the linked article is almost certain to live long enough to experience the inevitable next San Francisco earthquake, at which time he will absolutely die if his glasses are broken and he can't get around, so his prepping by fixing his eyes makes sense.
Most prepping means your survival on the "oops" scale goes up. The media making fun of anything other than business as usual focuses solely on preppers and total thermonuclear war or zombies or utter economic collapse. People sick of journalists, troll them right back, yah bro I'm prepping for the zombie and alien invasion.
In reality, personally I'm very well prepared for legendary blizzards, which makes sense because where I live we get legendary grade "international news story" blizzards perhaps every couple years. Because its very cheap, very easy, and I love my family. But sure, I'd tell a journalist my snow shoes and camping gear are for surviving the thermonuclear winter. Mostly because I hate journalists (just being honest about myself)
That's only true for countries with small economies. If the US, China, Japan or the Eurozone collapsed, that would plunge the whole world into a depression.
The number in the ledger will obviously survive, will the value?
I mean, say I have some food that I want to trade (not just me, me and my big squad of well armed killers). Are you going to trade instead with the guy who says he has lots of bitcoin?
Bitcoin behaves rather badly under global scale network partitions, or if your global network has a latency of over an hour. But on the other hand it is completely immune to collapse of governments
Or internet access. It seems like you could commit fraud by traveling to regions without a means to communicate with one-another online and selling them BTCs that were already spent on another network.
I bet two people pull that off before those communities ban BTC.
On the other hand, as long as those communication islands don't reconnect, all those double-spent BTC will be just as good/bad as homemade dollar bills.
Bitcoin might be postapocalyptically valuable if the apocalypse in question has hyperinflation at its core, but in a scenario without that it will be inferior even to vintage paper money. The true availability of BTC within a given community is just too much of an uncertainty. What could be a sizable fraction of the amount in active circulation one day could be completely devalued due some early adopter backup going live a day later.
"collapse of government" doesn't have to mean total collapse of infrastructure. Providing infrastructure is harder without government, but if you charge for the infrastructure anyway, you can just increase prices.
It's of course a problem for low income workers, but here we are talking about the super rich.
I think he means "any given government" not "all governments". Like, if the government collapses in Venezuela, Bitcoin holders there will still have their purchasing power preserved.
To be fair, Bitcoin technically doesn't need a true internet, just an ad-hoc mesh network. (Not that those will be easy to come by, either, but they would be somewhat more feasible to establish.)
What would be the mechanism by which which two previously separate but each fully legitimate (in their own network) ledgers interact?
Not trying to poke holes; Just curious.
E: To clarify, imagine that the North American Free Peoples Conglomerate and the New China Society finally re-establish contact between the two continents for the first time in hundreds of years. They have each been running fully functional bitcoin networks for generations on their (until now) 100% separated continent-wide networks.
Is there any current consideration for combining two block chains? or would this need a new custom solution to handle treating each as a completely separate currency (exchange rates)?
... but the individual transactions on the losing chain could would still be valid and could be incorporated into the winning blockchain. It wouldn't be quite a simple as "the shortest chain loses"
Oh, and the country with the lowest amount of energy spent mining would win. Both countries hashing after unification would work on the chain with the lowest difficulty, which would be the one with the least hashing power. :)
The difficulty is arbitrary and set socially (mechanistically it is currently set by a formula in the software; it could be set differently if people decided to use different software...).
So having a lower difficulty at time t is a terrible reason for a given miner to move to a given chain, they have to also believe that it will be the consensus chain that maximizes their value/opportunity in the future.
Also, if you don't care about distributed consensus (discarding chains outside the network to make it keep working), POW mining is an expensive and inconvenient way to keep a ledger.
Apparently you're the one who needs to read up. Any valid transaction from the shorter chain could (profitably) be incorporated into the long chain. Only double spends would be invalid, which are difficult to do in a network partition.
After a hundred years each blockchain's software would already have different hard coded checkpoints. They would effectively be 2 different coins and treated that way.
Ethereum has already forked on purpose and ETH and ETC are treated as two separate coins
Well.. Darpa designed arpanet (the precursor) to the internet to persist in the event of a nuclear holocaust. All of those bunkers probably have ham radios (thanks Jon Conner) and redundant internet connections.
I've got a titanium spork and some dental floss in my backpack and in the trunk of my car I've got a hi-vis vest, white hard hat, and a two-way radio. Am I missing anything?
Are some of these prepper people are missing out on the key concept that to live by your wits you need wits? Or maybe they're aware of that and that's why they stockpile the shotgun shells and dehydrated water capsules...?
Wits don't help when the water is all dirty, the food is in cans and the batteries wear out. Especially when other sharp-witted people are in the same situation.
No - but there do exist "survival water packets" - you can find them on amazon and elsewhere (basically small pouches of clean water - think ketchup packets, with clean water instead).
Floss is useful for things other than cleaning teeth; it's fairly strong, lightweight, and you can get a lot for little money. You can use it to tie up things, as a wick for a candle or oil lamp, sewing (in a pinch), etc. Basically, get a small roll for your bug-out bag, make sure it is unflavored and waxed.
> To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
This whole article reads like some surreal parody of what eccentric SV mil/billionaires would do.
Although I suppose there is probably some truth that in a post apocalyptic / post rule of law world... the person in the big house with the expensive stuff to loot probably has a huge target on them.
Post apoc. things like bows and crossbows would be more valuable, but I can't see weapon tech falling much below the 1850s. Its much easier to make a lead ball than an arrow and making blackpower is less about infrastructure than knowledge.
I have a replica Remington Model 1858 black power revolver. It shoots lead balls which are easy to make, same with its percussion caps. The kicker is, once loaded, its tactically the same as any modern single action 6 shooter.
If things really got bad, I have a heard time imaging my .55 cal muzzle loading flint lock would be out of commission either. I'd save the cross bow for stealth actions and maybe hunting smaller game, for which it would rock.
There is also the fact it would take years to burn up all the ammo floating around out there, so this would be gradual.
I can't see weapon tech falling much below the 1850s.
I can imagine short-term or more localised effects.
The USA could be viewed as an outlier, given the amount of gun-ownership: 22% of the population (and as some people own many guns, the total number of guns is more than 1 gun per person). By comparison, less than 1% of the UK population own a gun.
So in some countries, there may be guns around for the taking, but in other countries, those guns will be in the hands of very few people.
I'd imagine a period of a year or so where more primitive weaponry took precedence, during which we would have to relearn how to make tools, weapons and ammo without the benefit of technically advanced manufacturing.
Sure, popular gun, available in large numbers (outside most western countries).
How long would it take for them to become commonplace in western countries/Europe?
Hypothetically imagining a trade in AK-47s between Turkey and the UK (around 3,000 km), how quickly could those guns (and ammo) be moved, in enough numbers to be significant? Would the traders be threatened along the way?
Would that trade be on foot (maybe 20-25 km per day), or would they still have the advantage of car/truck/air transport? Would the trade give enough value to account for the traders' risk?
I think that an immediate, catastrophic societal breakdown would give a year or two of extreme regression, during which archery might be useful.
Given a couple of years for the reappearance of traditional techniques (such as hand-crafted blacksmith work) or the redistribution of AKs, things to change.
All that said, it's all guesswork…for all I know, one week without electricity and we could all be Mad-Maxing.
On the one hand, our guesses are based on little except media dystopia fiction like Mad Max and Waterworld, on the other hand, our exposure to those genres could influence our actions to bring about those very outcomes.
So, er, I'm just going to fill up some waterbottles and go stock up on cans of corned beef and archery kit. Although they're definitely not stored at my home, no sirree.
Given the collapse of civilization, I'm confident that I could be producing basic automatic weapons (submachineguns) in less than a month. Six months on the outside before I could be turning out high-quality automatic rifles. The hardest part would be the barrel rifling, but even that is doable. This is without electricity, of course.
They are an a lot quieter. But don't be fooled. Even with shitty long guns (not even riffles since they weren't riffled), the American Indians swapped bows for guns. They still used bows, but took to guns due to their power.
Interestingly, in the American Southwest guns didn't really challenge bows until the introduction of the Colt revolver.
Even Kentucky long rifles which were very effective against infantry were pretty much worthless against mounted natives who could fire dozens of arrows a minute.
"It is common to deride early modern firearms as slow to load, inaccurate and undependable in wet weather. Indians had a more favourable opinion of these weapons, particularly of the flintlock muskets that became available at the beginning of the 1630s. ...
Flintlocks were still cumbersome. They required about 25 seconds to load, and were accurate only to about 100 yards. Yet Indians did not intend to use the weapon in open-field, pitched battles. Rather, they wanted flintlocks to fire on human or animal targets from ambush at close range. After firing, they would rush in with hand weapons. The manner in which Native peoples used guns is critical to understanding their demand for them."
>They still used bows, but took to guns due to their power.
Not necessarily. Early guns were inefficient; one shot every minute is nothing compared to what a good bowman can do and you couldn't place an accurate shot outside of a few yards.
The reason an army switches to guns is because they require very little strength (and consequentially, training time) to use. In fact, for a musket, the limiting factor would be the user's height (they're 5 feet tall; being much shorter than that would make reloading much more difficult).
For American Indians, it would make sense to switch as their stocks of trained bowmen were depleted. Not before then.
You still need a significant amount of strength and time to ready a crossbow. Anyone can fire it, but not everyone can load it. Also the bolt is relatively slow (the shot travels in an arc that's more pronounced the slower the projectile), requiring you to be close to what you want to hit.
And if you're hunting game, even firing a crossbow will likely spook your target.
Or you could buy some 100-year-old military rifle and become proficient with it. Nearly all of them fire rounds that can be (and frequently are) successfully used for taking all North American game.
And a bolt-action surplus rifle (or any other repeater) is still faster than any bow, and you can carry more rounds than you can arrows in a quiver for the same weight, and bullets don't snap in half or depend on delicate pieces on the shaft to fly straight.
The reality is that there are enough firearm cartridges in the world, and particularly in the US, to last a very, very long time without manufacturing any more. Americans currently buy more than 10 billion cartridges per year and cartridges have an extremely long shelf life, upwards of a century if stored properly.
Given that there are probably a thousand cartridges for every man, woman, and child in the US today, it would take at least a decade to burn through the available supply, particularly if people were not profligate with their expenditure (which I imagine would be the case in a post-apocalyptic world).
Plus the gun companies and NRA types stir up paranoia, so people frantically hoard this stuff. One of my dad's neighbors out in the sticks has a stockpile of like 50k rounds of ammo, waiting for god knows what.
Are you sure it's a "stockpile", and not just a "stash"?
If you include .22, I probably have 25,000 rounds in my closet in my apartment. That's only about a year's worth of ammo for practice at most.
People who shoot regularly go through seemingly ridiculous quantities of ammunition. It takes hundreds of thousands of rounds to become a skilled marksman.
It doesn't take hundreds of thousands of rounds to become a skilled marksman. But it does take at least a few thousand, so your point is still valid even if the estimate is way off.
SV mil/billionaires descended into self-parody a long time ago. The plans for floating libertarian utopias, the eschatological X-risk stuff, the "simulation hypothesis" (and, apparently, someone actually trying to "hack our program")... the list goes on. I really hope more developers wake up soon to the fact that we're being led by a cadre of lunatics.
The discussion was about "eccentric SV mil/billionaires". All of those dudes have renovations on their fancy houses on a regular basis, and no renovation would be approved without the earthquake work.
reddit may be valued at 600 million (orl?) but steve huffman's net worth is in the millions/tens of millions at most. you wouldn't call him super rich when he can barely afford a nice house in Palo Alto :)
I grew up in a 3rd world small farm, raising pigs, chicken, setting traps and planting a bunch of stuff, not to mention a light version of WROL (without rule of law). Reading this article I feel that I'm more prepared for the apocalypse than all the "super-rich"...
You and all of us that lived in rural areas learning to survive on the land, cooperate with neighbors, and fight off trouble-makers. Such people will probably do better than most.
Because you absolutely are. I've always thought that anybody who seriously thinks society is going to collapse should just move to a developing country, buy a farm, and get-on getting-on. Because there's really no way to prepare other than to get started on your post-collapse life.
I grew up on a farm in very rural USA and we often face mini-"disasters". The roads would be impassable due to snow, power would go out for weeks sometimes. My life has shown me that you don't prepare for disasters, you just do without.
You're cold, hungry, and miserable. Guns and ammo doesn't help because there's nothing really to hunt, same goes for fishing (most people don't live within walking distance of a non-polluted waterway). Better not get too attached to electricity or driving because it's going to be impossible to store any significant amount of fuel.
A collapsed society resembles rural Afghanistan or India more than it does whatever wild west these people are imagining.
I agree with this, too. Most of the super rich have wealth and resources that matter in a stable global capitalistic economy/society, but these will have no value with the breakdown of that system. The truly important skills, post-disaster, will be those needed to survive without civilization. The ones that survive will be those that already have those skills or are quick to adapt, AND are physically located in areas with enough resources to survive.
"I agree with this, too. Most of the super rich have wealth and resources that matter in a stable global capitalistic economy/society, but these will have no value with the breakdown of that system."
Thinking about this doing some PT this morning. Super optimised for our technological civilisation but not not much else. The important skills in my view is working out how tribes work and be part of one. If your competitive advantage is money, how do you operate when money has no value or the biggest group in the block comes along and takes it?
The thing about NZ is that in a post apocalyptic world people will just get on with things, society won't break down to any great extent.
You won't need to be able to set traps or do the economy will collapse but New Zealand is pretty self sufficient when it comes to food and energy. Domesticly sourced oil will be very expensive and obviously high end technology relies on supply chains from China so if the world turns as crap as that then it's the end of iPhones, etc. But life will go on.
Not exactly, almost everything you rely upon has a global supply chain. The tractors used for agriculture are probably not made in NZ, as their components, transformers, electrical materials, basic chemical supplies, etc.
Look around you and think where all the aluminium, iron, potash, copper, rubber, basic oils, etc. comes from. All those supply chains will be disrupted, if not eliminated completely. There is barely any self-sufficiency left in the world.
There's the capacity to make whatever mechanical equipment is required domestically as well as more aluminium than the country would require, I think most if not all of the above will be able to be manufactured.
The comment wasn't about being self sufficient and maintaining our current lifestyle, it was about being a piece of civilisation that survived an all out world war.
> I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.
Revealing the location of your supplies cache is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, in such a scenario. Desperate people now know where to go to find such things.
I was afraid this article was going to upset me, but in fact it doesn't shy away from the more difficult questions, namely
A/ the reason we're "skating on really thin cultural ice right now" is in no small part due to the emergence and dominance of social media, so it's quite rich that the people responsible for chaos are trying to protect themselves from it
B/ it's quite morally repugnant to want to survive alone if society collapses
C/ it's completely impractical because you can't survive alone for very long ("are you taking your pilot's family with you? What about the maintenance guys?")
Everyone is part of society. If society "collapses" (which can take many forms), the responsible, respectable reaction is to stay with it and try to restore it, not cut it loose -- retract to a shelter somewhere with "lots of guns and ammo" to wait it out.
When disaster strikes it may be very natural and expected to save oneself, if possible. That's survival instinct. But prepare for it is not admirable, to say the least. It's being selfish with intent.
Max Levchin says this in the article "It’s one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the sense that we are superior giants who move the needle and, even if it’s our own failure, must be spared."
But at the end of the day, you're not restoring anything if you're dead due to lack of food, water, or shelter, or violent action by someone else. That's what's confusing me about your view, here.
There's a reason these basics are at the very base of Maslow's hierarchy[1], and that's because without them, such niceties as polite society aren't possible. It would be foolish to not concentrate on having the basics available.
Your post presumes conflict with all the other survivors, which says a lot more about you than it does about them. In reality, people tend to help each other out in the wake of disasters, rather than engaging in a zero-sum struggle for exclusive control of resources.
And you presume that you know the friendliness status of every other survivor. Such assumptions only hold within your limited circle of acquaintances. What happens when you encounter someone who you and your circle of friends and neighbors don't know? The social order is gone.
There's a "disaster", and then there's the total collapse of society.
What do you do in your bunker? Sit around, eat canned food and watch DVDs? What happens when the beer runs out?
It's one thing to seek shelter. It's another to go live in a hole. The other issue is that billionaire or not, once everything goes poof, your billions go with it.
I think the idea is that they're looking for a safe place to ride out the collapse itself - the transitionary period between our current civilization and whatever follows, where a large percentage of the population dies from violence and resource shortages.
I really don't see a scenario working where you pay money to someone to protect you in a doomsday scenario working. The guard is the guy with the guns (and the training to use them). Why would the guard not just kill you/kick you out of the secure place once shit hits the fan?
From the article: One of the guests was skeptical, Dugger said. “He leaned forward and asked, ‘Are you taking your pilot’s family, too? And what about the maintenance guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors, how many of the people in your life will you have to take with you?’ The questioning continued. In the end, most agreed they couldn’t run.”
It's like one of the sayings in A Song of Ice and Fire: A swordsman receives conflicting orders from a king, merchant, and priest. Actual power lies with the swordsman, everything else is just an illusion brought about by societal convention.
Are you focussing on the word 'focussed'? That is a correct spelling of the word and if memory serves, the New Yorker have written about how their style guide requires it.
So. You're not one of the 0.1%. Society "collapsed", whatever than means. You did go through hardship, hunger, lack of Instagram, pain, loss of loved ones, loss of property but also amazing feats of solidarity and human compassion. It still doesn't really look OK and you're daily mourning the life you and society lost.
Then there lands a Gulfstream, out climbs a well fed billionaire straight out his fancy bunker. There's a street lamp nearby and a little bit of rope could be found..
In a sense. The size of the group matters - inside the group you have trusted allies. Two foragers are safer than one; three are safer than two. And so one.
I'm not saying that immorality alone will stop many people, but your rationale proves too much, and would stop you from intervening in any immoral act.
How would the gulfstream land without a crew properly maintaining the landing strip, clearing it of debris, providing air control, etc?
Not to mention that fuel spoils fast. Gasoline lasts only a few months in normal conditions, up to a year in optimal conditions. A small detail that almost all apocalypse movies seem to ignore...
If you have that level of financial resources, then a natural gas-powered or propane-powered (liquefied, of course) plane is not infeasible. Survivalists favor those fuels because long-term storage is about managing the containers; the fuel itself will keep indefinitely.
In general however, most of these HNWIs' plans assume a resumption of status quo ante, or at the very least that they will find a spot on the planet where that happens. A Roman Empire-type civilization-wide collapse where knowledge outright disappears is extremely challenging to prepare against; at our tech level, you are essentially figuring out how to build much of a space habitat or generation ship. The population infrastructure to maintain the operational knowledge to sustain and produce at that tech level (not to speak of advancing it) is vast: tens of millions at a minimum.
If you prepare for that kind of end-of-civilization catastrophe with private resources, even billionaire resources, then you necessarily are building at a far lower tech level (a mix of 1800s and later periods' tech that can be recreated with more primitive tech, like transistor production), creating small villages and towns, and I have yet to hear of someone even doing that. Sid Meier's Civ series only barely nods at a hint of the vastness of the challenge to completely decouple indefinitely from civilization and keep going at a specific tech level: the skill tree to my knowledge hasn't been mapped out even for 1800s-level tech, such that a group of people with basic literacy can recreate the skill bases required.
So this is actually something I've thought a lot about, in terms of whether it's actually rational to be a prepper or if it's just a fun hobby.
In nominal terms, your risk of dying in a society-wide collapse is actually larger than your risk of dying in a car accident.[1] So if you wouldn't think twice about taking basic steps to lower your chances of vehicle death (e.g. wearing a seatbelt) then it's absolutely rational to be at least concerned about your risk of dying in the apocalypse.
However, in absolute terms your risk of dying in the apocalypse is still considerably smaller than the most common causes of death. Given that only 1.2% of Americans meet all 7 guidelines for good cardiovascular health[2], being a prepper probably has negative returns unless you already have enough money to access safe food and healthcare, you're meeting all the guidelines for good cardiovascular health, you don't have any neglected mental health issues, etc.
That's the tl;dr version. For each of those bullet points there is obviously some nuance, e.g. knowing how much exercise counts as being physically active.
I did some math on my end too - I decided that at my weight, I was more likely to die or experience a great reduction in quality of life due to complications incidental to obesity than anything else. As a result, I'm focused on dropping weight and getting healthier before anything else :)
Survivalism, prepping, militias, whatever you call it now, is pretty much just Military Cosplay. It's just another hobby for people with disposable income. Instead of golf clubs they're spending it on AR-15s, bunkers, and canned food.
Having grown up in poverty in a third world country that is extremely chaotic, the doomsday obsession in America is laughable and a little disturbing at the same time. Society doesn't break down like that. Can someone explain why is there such paranoia in the US about societal collapse ? It it video games, movies, media frenzy, hyper partisan politics ? All of it ? I know people who have created bunkers and stock pilled food to prepare for apocalypse. Seriously !!
We have an even-increasing supply of dangerous nuclear weapons on this planet, and no short supply of individuals who may want to use them. I can envision a lot of scenarios from that which could lead to societal breakdown.
> Most of it is due to Fundamental Christian beliefs along with extreme right wing political beliefs.
I haven't read the methodology, but supposedly over 40% of Americans believe the rapture is coming by 2050. And the rapture and the apocalypse should be mutually exclusive, in the sense that if you really think Jesus is going to save you then there isn't much reason to be stockpiling cans of spaghettios.
No, but there are great business models based on the "rapture". Some guy somewhere sells insurance for pets: he says he's not Christian and therefore, in the event of rapture, he will be left on earth, where he will take care of your pets -- for a monthly fee that you have to pay right now.
The topic is example number 258726 of the most photogenic controversial clickbait not really having much to do with the reality of anything.
"Society doesn't break down like that."
Unfortunately it does, in the USA. See the aftermath of hurricane Katrina for an example of how well we get along when things are temporarily bad.
Also the geography of the USA frankly sucks. We're rich and its not because our weather is unusually calm. I live on the border of tornado alley (if you stretch the definition a thousand miles) and if you don't have something heavy to sit under in the basement you're a fool. I've had coworkers houses destroyed by tornado. Closest hit to my house is about two miles in the last decade. Another thing that sucks is we get paralyzing blizzards and occasional ice storms knock out power for days, every couple years. You can prepare for it and frankly relax and enjoy a couple days off work, or you can prepare to suffer greatly. So everyone here has a "bunker" and stockpiled food. Its called "living" not prepping.
Katrina only affected a relatively small area: a small portion of the Gulf coast. So of course help poured in. It's not like the entire US was hit by a Category 5 hurricane!
An economic disaster is different: it hits the whole country at once, and then other parts of the world because of trade disruption and other economic ties. There aren't going to be any places left to "pour in" help; they're all going to be suffering.
As someone who actually lives in New Orleans and knows people who were here during Katrina - I feel compelled to interject at this point that the institutions in New Orleans (the police, the Orleans Parish Levee Board) had been rotting long before Katrina. Using the chaos in the aftermath of Katrina is misguided because Katrina was just simply a very heavy straw on a camel with a mostly broken back.
we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.
Nope. Not even close. We survived the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests. For all our online angst and whining, we're not even 1/10th as far toward the tipping point as we were back then.
Those were all human-created events. What happens when we have a super-volcano eruption and the world has another mini-ice age, and there are famines across the globe? Or the coastal flooding that is predicted to happen by 2050 if we continue current warming trends. We can't just force nature to give up through a superior show of force (unlike winning a war).
By taking such a sweeping view, you're glossing over a lot of individual suffering. Even if we're better off now than prior to WW2, the >50MM casualties of that war would probably disagree.
Let's be real- this article is more a lifestyle piece on the excessively prepared, i.e. type A, silicon valley super achievers. Apparently, this is an article about these folks who have their shit together so far ahead the rest of us, that this otherwise genius for productivity goes into form of deranged overdrive.
Let's also look at this article's source, the New Yorker, as a vicarious observer and critic of anything that veers off their path of caring/obsessing about depresssing novelists/filmmaker s and actors, fashion, and all things analogue as the solution to the salvation of the light of humanity and culture, of which they perceive themselves as the clear torchbearers.
> The fears vary, but many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth. (Southwestern Connecticut is first.) “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
This is already happening and I would expect it to get worse. We have a chance now to develop policies that will help mitigate the negative effects, if we choose to.
And what's up with the beefed up security guy with a kalishnakov who looks like he's some steroid version of Neal Stephenson? At least they got their marketing for this article right.
Glamor-prepping, glepping: the ultimate fuck-you-I-got-mine to any young people still struggling to come up in the society that these wealthy people wield an undue influence over.
What happens when everybody at the top has their private island sanctuary but still holds power in the society we all have to live in?
How many paid people does it take to maintain these huge compounds?? These people don't seem to understand that all of their wealth and possessions only belong to them because there is a big organized power system that says so, with lawyers and cops with guns and people that are required to obtain cash money every month. 5 seconds after things go south, that helicopter belongs to the pilot, not to you. That land you're buying belongs to the person standing on it. If you're really afraid of the apocalypse, then stock up on the only things that will matter afterwards: friends and family, real relationships not based on money. That and some hand tools and guns.
I think this is what a lot of libertarian types don't get (a lot of overlap with prepper types). Taxes aren't the government stealing money that you willed into existence out of thin air, you're paying to live in a society built to protect your wealth.
> Taxes aren't the government stealing money that you willed into existence out of thin air, you're paying to live in a society built to protect your wealth.
Well, the Mafia do protect businesses which pay them protection money, too. Sure, you have a (single) vote for a few legislators and an executive at the state and federal levels to influence the IRS, but the influence of your vote is probably less than your shared humanity is an influence on a don's enforcers.
There's a question of the extent to which the government's (or the Mafia's) taxation is commensurate with the services it renders, but they're equally involuntary.
(and yes, government is necessary, and preferable to lawlessness; that doesn't mean that everything it does is right, nor does it mean that it's voluntary, any more than the execution of a convict who doesn't physically fight every step to the gallows is voluntary)
Some taxes are useful (roads, justice system, police, some defense, etc). Many taxes however are simply theft.
The only way taxes are fair is when it impacts everyone. When a tax takes money from one group for the benefit of the other, it's theft.
A universal consumption tax is about the only thing that is fair as it's proportional to gains and gains are generally (albeitly imperfectly) proportional to shared infrastructure built, maintained and defended using taxes. Unless the additional revenue benefits everyone, it's hard to increase.
Our entire society is constructed to remove wealth from many people and funnel it to a few. If taxation is theft, then what is rent? What about the fact that any business pays its employees less than the value of the work they do? Once you start to redefine "theft" in such a wide way, most of the economic and social activity we engage in on a daily basis becomes "theft".
Quite. If the shit actually hits the fan and the ultra-rich head off to their boltholes, I give it about 72 hours before the servants realize that there won't be any consequences for simply doing away with their erstwhile employer and opt to turn the compound into a collective farm instead.
Super-rich don't seem to understand that if the society collapses, only individualism that exists is rugged individualism. Hiding int he bunker might work for some time, but it would be life of fear.
Individuals don't survive alone. It's the tribe, village and family that ensures survival. Best way to survive would be to connect into some tight knit community, where people who know and trust other take care of each other. If you have plenty and someone is starving, you share and bond or you fight.
Here is better survival strategy for Silicon Valley billionaire:
Build hidden storage bunker in the middle of Amish country. Fill it with all the community needs in doomsday, medicine, spare parts, tools and simple food. When doomsday happens, invite all your neighbors to share while you study bible and become important member in your community.
> “If I had a billion dollars, I wouldn’t buy a bunker,” Elli Kaplan, the C.E.O. of the digital health startup Neurotrack, told me. “I would reinvest in civil society and civil innovation. My view is you figure out even smarter ways to make sure that something terrible doesn’t happen.”
At least there's one reasonable person in this circus.
177 comments
[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 301 ms ] threadA post apocalypse in which internet survives seems far fetched.
The apocalypse is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.
Most prepping means your survival on the "oops" scale goes up. The media making fun of anything other than business as usual focuses solely on preppers and total thermonuclear war or zombies or utter economic collapse. People sick of journalists, troll them right back, yah bro I'm prepping for the zombie and alien invasion.
In reality, personally I'm very well prepared for legendary blizzards, which makes sense because where I live we get legendary grade "international news story" blizzards perhaps every couple years. Because its very cheap, very easy, and I love my family. But sure, I'd tell a journalist my snow shoes and camping gear are for surviving the thermonuclear winter. Mostly because I hate journalists (just being honest about myself)
(Not saying that this is a smart way to park your money...)
I mean, say I have some food that I want to trade (not just me, me and my big squad of well armed killers). Are you going to trade instead with the guy who says he has lots of bitcoin?
I bet two people pull that off before those communities ban BTC.
Bitcoin might be postapocalyptically valuable if the apocalypse in question has hyperinflation at its core, but in a scenario without that it will be inferior even to vintage paper money. The true availability of BTC within a given community is just too much of an uncertainty. What could be a sizable fraction of the amount in active circulation one day could be completely devalued due some early adopter backup going live a day later.
It's of course a problem for low income workers, but here we are talking about the super rich.
This reads like a parody of Bitcoin fanatics. You can't be serious.
Not trying to poke holes; Just curious.
E: To clarify, imagine that the North American Free Peoples Conglomerate and the New China Society finally re-establish contact between the two continents for the first time in hundreds of years. They have each been running fully functional bitcoin networks for generations on their (until now) 100% separated continent-wide networks.
Is there any current consideration for combining two block chains? or would this need a new custom solution to handle treating each as a completely separate currency (exchange rates)?
Oh, and the country with the lowest amount of energy spent mining would win. Both countries hashing after unification would work on the chain with the lowest difficulty, which would be the one with the least hashing power. :)
So having a lower difficulty at time t is a terrible reason for a given miner to move to a given chain, they have to also believe that it will be the consensus chain that maximizes their value/opportunity in the future.
Also, if you don't care about distributed consensus (discarding chains outside the network to make it keep working), POW mining is an expensive and inconvenient way to keep a ledger.
Ethereum has already forked on purpose and ETH and ETC are treated as two separate coins
Are some of these prepper people are missing out on the key concept that to live by your wits you need wits? Or maybe they're aware of that and that's why they stockpile the shotgun shells and dehydrated water capsules...?
Is that a real thing? that sounds like nothing at all.
Once out of floss, I can either pull my teeth out (Well, OK, every _other_ tooth) or kill myself. Life w/o floss is unimaginable.
This whole article reads like some surreal parody of what eccentric SV mil/billionaires would do.
Although I suppose there is probably some truth that in a post apocalyptic / post rule of law world... the person in the big house with the expensive stuff to loot probably has a huge target on them.
I have a replica Remington Model 1858 black power revolver. It shoots lead balls which are easy to make, same with its percussion caps. The kicker is, once loaded, its tactically the same as any modern single action 6 shooter.
If things really got bad, I have a heard time imaging my .55 cal muzzle loading flint lock would be out of commission either. I'd save the cross bow for stealth actions and maybe hunting smaller game, for which it would rock.
There is also the fact it would take years to burn up all the ammo floating around out there, so this would be gradual.
Really, they should never had allowed college students to run around a refurb'ed castle without a supervisor.
The USA could be viewed as an outlier, given the amount of gun-ownership: 22% of the population (and as some people own many guns, the total number of guns is more than 1 gun per person). By comparison, less than 1% of the UK population own a gun.
So in some countries, there may be guns around for the taking, but in other countries, those guns will be in the hands of very few people.
I'd imagine a period of a year or so where more primitive weaponry took precedence, during which we would have to relearn how to make tools, weapons and ammo without the benefit of technically advanced manufacturing.
How long would it take for them to become commonplace in western countries/Europe?
Hypothetically imagining a trade in AK-47s between Turkey and the UK (around 3,000 km), how quickly could those guns (and ammo) be moved, in enough numbers to be significant? Would the traders be threatened along the way?
Would that trade be on foot (maybe 20-25 km per day), or would they still have the advantage of car/truck/air transport? Would the trade give enough value to account for the traders' risk?
I think that an immediate, catastrophic societal breakdown would give a year or two of extreme regression, during which archery might be useful.
Given a couple of years for the reappearance of traditional techniques (such as hand-crafted blacksmith work) or the redistribution of AKs, things to change.
All that said, it's all guesswork…for all I know, one week without electricity and we could all be Mad-Maxing.
On the one hand, our guesses are based on little except media dystopia fiction like Mad Max and Waterworld, on the other hand, our exposure to those genres could influence our actions to bring about those very outcomes.
So, er, I'm just going to fill up some waterbottles and go stock up on cans of corned beef and archery kit. Although they're definitely not stored at my home, no sirree.
Even Kentucky long rifles which were very effective against infantry were pretty much worthless against mounted natives who could fire dozens of arrows a minute.
This was the case up until about the 1850s.
"It is common to deride early modern firearms as slow to load, inaccurate and undependable in wet weather. Indians had a more favourable opinion of these weapons, particularly of the flintlock muskets that became available at the beginning of the 1630s. ...
Flintlocks were still cumbersome. They required about 25 seconds to load, and were accurate only to about 100 yards. Yet Indians did not intend to use the weapon in open-field, pitched battles. Rather, they wanted flintlocks to fire on human or animal targets from ambush at close range. After firing, they would rush in with hand weapons. The manner in which Native peoples used guns is critical to understanding their demand for them."
Not necessarily. Early guns were inefficient; one shot every minute is nothing compared to what a good bowman can do and you couldn't place an accurate shot outside of a few yards.
The reason an army switches to guns is because they require very little strength (and consequentially, training time) to use. In fact, for a musket, the limiting factor would be the user's height (they're 5 feet tall; being much shorter than that would make reloading much more difficult).
For American Indians, it would make sense to switch as their stocks of trained bowmen were depleted. Not before then.
You still need a significant amount of strength and time to ready a crossbow. Anyone can fire it, but not everyone can load it. Also the bolt is relatively slow (the shot travels in an arc that's more pronounced the slower the projectile), requiring you to be close to what you want to hit.
And if you're hunting game, even firing a crossbow will likely spook your target.
Or you could buy some 100-year-old military rifle and become proficient with it. Nearly all of them fire rounds that can be (and frequently are) successfully used for taking all North American game.
And a bolt-action surplus rifle (or any other repeater) is still faster than any bow, and you can carry more rounds than you can arrows in a quiver for the same weight, and bullets don't snap in half or depend on delicate pieces on the shaft to fly straight.
Given that there are probably a thousand cartridges for every man, woman, and child in the US today, it would take at least a decade to burn through the available supply, particularly if people were not profligate with their expenditure (which I imagine would be the case in a post-apocalyptic world).
If you include .22, I probably have 25,000 rounds in my closet in my apartment. That's only about a year's worth of ammo for practice at most.
People who shoot regularly go through seemingly ridiculous quantities of ammunition. It takes hundreds of thousands of rounds to become a skilled marksman.
Edit - oh, that joke's been made below already...
Sort of missing the point of emergency preparedness, methinks.
I grew up on a farm in very rural USA and we often face mini-"disasters". The roads would be impassable due to snow, power would go out for weeks sometimes. My life has shown me that you don't prepare for disasters, you just do without.
You're cold, hungry, and miserable. Guns and ammo doesn't help because there's nothing really to hunt, same goes for fishing (most people don't live within walking distance of a non-polluted waterway). Better not get too attached to electricity or driving because it's going to be impossible to store any significant amount of fuel.
A collapsed society resembles rural Afghanistan or India more than it does whatever wild west these people are imagining.
True! I remember one time when our transformer blew up, and we lived for several weeks without electricity until we got a replacement.
Nothing like listening to the world cup on a battery-powered radio. Fun times!
Thinking about this doing some PT this morning. Super optimised for our technological civilisation but not not much else. The important skills in my view is working out how tribes work and be part of one. If your competitive advantage is money, how do you operate when money has no value or the biggest group in the block comes along and takes it?
You won't need to be able to set traps or do the economy will collapse but New Zealand is pretty self sufficient when it comes to food and energy. Domesticly sourced oil will be very expensive and obviously high end technology relies on supply chains from China so if the world turns as crap as that then it's the end of iPhones, etc. But life will go on.
Look around you and think where all the aluminium, iron, potash, copper, rubber, basic oils, etc. comes from. All those supply chains will be disrupted, if not eliminated completely. There is barely any self-sufficiency left in the world.
The comment wasn't about being self sufficient and maintaining our current lifestyle, it was about being a piece of civilisation that survived an all out world war.
Revealing the location of your supplies cache is one of the biggest mistakes you can make, in such a scenario. Desperate people now know where to go to find such things.
A/ the reason we're "skating on really thin cultural ice right now" is in no small part due to the emergence and dominance of social media, so it's quite rich that the people responsible for chaos are trying to protect themselves from it
B/ it's quite morally repugnant to want to survive alone if society collapses
C/ it's completely impractical because you can't survive alone for very long ("are you taking your pilot's family with you? What about the maintenance guys?")
When disaster strikes it may be very natural and expected to save oneself, if possible. That's survival instinct. But prepare for it is not admirable, to say the least. It's being selfish with intent.
Max Levchin says this in the article "It’s one of the few things about Silicon Valley that I actively dislike—the sense that we are superior giants who move the needle and, even if it’s our own failure, must be spared."
There's a reason these basics are at the very base of Maslow's hierarchy[1], and that's because without them, such niceties as polite society aren't possible. It would be foolish to not concentrate on having the basics available.
1: http://www.simplypsychology.org/maslow-pyramid.jpg
There's a "disaster", and then there's the total collapse of society.
It's one thing to seek shelter. It's another to go live in a hole. The other issue is that billionaire or not, once everything goes poof, your billions go with it.
Now, I disagree with this whole "preppers" mindset, but I think some of the practical problems could be overcome.
Call me a nit, but why are there typos in an article from the new yorker?
Edit: apparently doubling the consonant is something they just do - http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-double-l
Then there lands a Gulfstream, out climbs a well fed billionaire straight out his fancy bunker. There's a street lamp nearby and a little bit of rope could be found..
Most modern philosophers have taken the view that envy itself is immoral.
In a post apocalyptic society it's kill or be killed.
"Oh please, what you're doing is morally wrong. Shame on you!"
Not to mention that fuel spoils fast. Gasoline lasts only a few months in normal conditions, up to a year in optimal conditions. A small detail that almost all apocalypse movies seem to ignore...
In general however, most of these HNWIs' plans assume a resumption of status quo ante, or at the very least that they will find a spot on the planet where that happens. A Roman Empire-type civilization-wide collapse where knowledge outright disappears is extremely challenging to prepare against; at our tech level, you are essentially figuring out how to build much of a space habitat or generation ship. The population infrastructure to maintain the operational knowledge to sustain and produce at that tech level (not to speak of advancing it) is vast: tens of millions at a minimum.
If you prepare for that kind of end-of-civilization catastrophe with private resources, even billionaire resources, then you necessarily are building at a far lower tech level (a mix of 1800s and later periods' tech that can be recreated with more primitive tech, like transistor production), creating small villages and towns, and I have yet to hear of someone even doing that. Sid Meier's Civ series only barely nods at a hint of the vastness of the challenge to completely decouple indefinitely from civilization and keep going at a specific tech level: the skill tree to my knowledge hasn't been mapped out even for 1800s-level tech, such that a group of people with basic literacy can recreate the skill bases required.
In nominal terms, your risk of dying in a society-wide collapse is actually larger than your risk of dying in a car accident.[1] So if you wouldn't think twice about taking basic steps to lower your chances of vehicle death (e.g. wearing a seatbelt) then it's absolutely rational to be at least concerned about your risk of dying in the apocalypse.
However, in absolute terms your risk of dying in the apocalypse is still considerably smaller than the most common causes of death. Given that only 1.2% of Americans meet all 7 guidelines for good cardiovascular health[2], being a prepper probably has negative returns unless you already have enough money to access safe food and healthcare, you're meeting all the guidelines for good cardiovascular health, you don't have any neglected mental health issues, etc.
[1] http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/04/a-huma...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22427615
That's the tl;dr version. For each of those bullet points there is obviously some nuance, e.g. knowing how much exercise counts as being physically active.
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_and_USSR_nuclear_...
(that other countries now have warheads doesn't make up much of the difference: http://www.icanw.org/the-facts/nuclear-arsenals/ )
Things will have to get much worse before that outcome is likely, though.
I haven't read the methodology, but supposedly over 40% of Americans believe the rapture is coming by 2050. And the rapture and the apocalypse should be mutually exclusive, in the sense that if you really think Jesus is going to save you then there isn't much reason to be stockpiling cans of spaghettios.
That's so perfect.
"Society doesn't break down like that."
Unfortunately it does, in the USA. See the aftermath of hurricane Katrina for an example of how well we get along when things are temporarily bad.
Also the geography of the USA frankly sucks. We're rich and its not because our weather is unusually calm. I live on the border of tornado alley (if you stretch the definition a thousand miles) and if you don't have something heavy to sit under in the basement you're a fool. I've had coworkers houses destroyed by tornado. Closest hit to my house is about two miles in the last decade. Another thing that sucks is we get paralyzing blizzards and occasional ice storms knock out power for days, every couple years. You can prepare for it and frankly relax and enjoy a couple days off work, or you can prepare to suffer greatly. So everyone here has a "bunker" and stockpiled food. Its called "living" not prepping.
You are claiming that they are clear evidence of how terrible we are, so I think it is fair to ask you to show the work.
Because another aftermath of Katrina is all the help and aid that poured in over the following days, months and years.
An economic disaster is different: it hits the whole country at once, and then other parts of the world because of trade disruption and other economic ties. There aren't going to be any places left to "pour in" help; they're all going to be suffering.
Nope. Not even close. We survived the Civil Rights movement and Vietnam War protests. For all our online angst and whining, we're not even 1/10th as far toward the tipping point as we were back then.
Food shortages caused by climate change, on the other hand...
Let's also look at this article's source, the New Yorker, as a vicarious observer and critic of anything that veers off their path of caring/obsessing about depresssing novelists/filmmaker s and actors, fashion, and all things analogue as the solution to the salvation of the light of humanity and culture, of which they perceive themselves as the clear torchbearers.
This is already happening and I would expect it to get worse. We have a chance now to develop policies that will help mitigate the negative effects, if we choose to.
I suppose that's the backup plan when his libertarian utopia doesn't work out?
I guess no government is good, until you want a place to stay when society breaks down.
What happens when everybody at the top has their private island sanctuary but still holds power in the society we all have to live in?
Resources invested in creating these bubbles are resources not invested in the wider economy.
What if that $mil you spent building a bunker to hide from the future could have been the $mil that funded the battery tech that saved that future?
Well, the Mafia do protect businesses which pay them protection money, too. Sure, you have a (single) vote for a few legislators and an executive at the state and federal levels to influence the IRS, but the influence of your vote is probably less than your shared humanity is an influence on a don's enforcers.
There's a question of the extent to which the government's (or the Mafia's) taxation is commensurate with the services it renders, but they're equally involuntary.
(and yes, government is necessary, and preferable to lawlessness; that doesn't mean that everything it does is right, nor does it mean that it's voluntary, any more than the execution of a convict who doesn't physically fight every step to the gallows is voluntary)
The only way taxes are fair is when it impacts everyone. When a tax takes money from one group for the benefit of the other, it's theft.
A universal consumption tax is about the only thing that is fair as it's proportional to gains and gains are generally (albeitly imperfectly) proportional to shared infrastructure built, maintained and defended using taxes. Unless the additional revenue benefits everyone, it's hard to increase.
Individuals don't survive alone. It's the tribe, village and family that ensures survival. Best way to survive would be to connect into some tight knit community, where people who know and trust other take care of each other. If you have plenty and someone is starving, you share and bond or you fight.
Here is better survival strategy for Silicon Valley billionaire:
Build hidden storage bunker in the middle of Amish country. Fill it with all the community needs in doomsday, medicine, spare parts, tools and simple food. When doomsday happens, invite all your neighbors to share while you study bible and become important member in your community.
At least there's one reasonable person in this circus.
Also: https://youtu.be/XanyPq5BcoA?t=52m18s