It says a lot about mindset between various classes when Silicon Valley billionaires are building huge self-sufficient retreats in New Zealand to hide out in when civilization collapses[0] and working class folks are willing to stay at the factory for a month in order to get essential goods out the door in order to prevent said collapse.
The “worst” of that set includes names like Zuckerberg, Thiel and even Sam Altman, among many others.[0]
I’d be willing to bet that a pretty significant percentage of the tech elite have taken serious steps like this, this clearly isn’t a small set of obscure players.
I don't understand why hedging against long-tail events is 'bad'. They bought large quantities of supplies, and hired a bunch of people to build them facilities which could be of benefit in the event of a catastrophe. The tradesmen doing the building were probably happy to do the work, and I am sure the supplies provided a number of manufacturing and administrative jobs. I don't see a problem; unless you think this pandemic was caused by bunker construction.
This is a form of critical thinking error. "They" wanted to build a safe destination in case of a multitude of possible conditions come to occur. You are looking with a historical lens on what has happened and then labeling them "dumb" based on the knowledge we have now. If you look at it that way, almost any disaster planning is "dumb".
No, you misunderstand. I am saying owning a bunker may be a valuable thing in some emergency’s. However, just because this is an emergency does not mean going to a bunker now is a good idea.
There’s something incredibly disingenuous about creating companies around the idea of “making the world a better place” and beading oneself as a world visionary while simultaneously taking extreme measures assuming the worst is about to happen. If the collective sentiment around the ruling class was that the world is becoming a better, safer place, why build the shelter?
> Is buying a lot of insurance also evil?
Generally, I don’t think so. Insurance exists to protect one’s finances, and it’s one of the oldest financial instruments out there. But you can’t eat an insurance policy, it can’t sustain life.
The issue here is moral hazard. Yes, buying insurance is bad if it disincentivizes you to work your hardest to prevent the outcome that you're insured against.
Not saying that everyone with a bunker falls into this category. But it's certainly true that when the best resourced and connected among us have the means to withdraw comfortably, their aggregate effort to remedy whatever is causing the disruption will diminish.
> "Yes, buying insurance is bad if it disincentivizes you to work your hardest to prevent the outcome that you're insured against."
Most people here have home fire insurance coverage but don't have extinguishers (or haven't checked them in years), sprinklers, or a fire safe. So is fire insurance coverage bad?
To be clear, I’m not accusing Zuckerberg or anyone else of avoiding philanthropy altogether. No doubt Zuckerberg has donated a lot of money to charity.
He has a major foundation whose stated goal is to improve wellbeing around the world and a massive social media company that constantly markets itself as making the world a better place.
If his foundation and company are truly fulfilling their missions, why is he buying up land in Hawaii and elsewhere to go hide out if everything goes bust?
Whether we like it not, people like Zuckerberg are some of the biggest leaders on the planet. We worship the kind of money and power people like him have.
To see people like that so unsure of the world in which they have an immense amount of influence over deeply undercuts their image of being these brilliant and visionary leaders.
Because people sometimes buy insurance for things even when they think they’re not likely to happen, and even as they’re working to try to make them not happen?
> To see people like that so unsure of the world in which they have an immense amount of influence over deeply undercuts their image of being these brilliant and visionary leaders.
This is a beautiful sentence. It is often touted, "If you don't like the culture you live in, change it". The response of most people is that they don't have the influence to change it, and it's better to just bare it until they can move on. The examples of Zuck, Thiel, and others who do have this influence, but choose to invest in fallback plans rather than throwing everything into making the needed changes says a lot about the mentality that breeds success in the US.
The rich have much more fragile and much more litigious lives than the poor. Those self-sufficient retreaters will also have disputes among themselves.
Let's all stop finger-pointing and do more what Effective Altruism encourages: using resources more effectively:
- donate money where it does more good per dollar spent - if you're able to
- spend working time on important issues - if you're able to
Just because some millionaires aren't doing anything to make the world a better place, doesn't mean those with fewer means can't. We in the tech field with our salaries especially.
Is charity even the right solution? From what I’ve heard, pensions are a thing because c. 1900 millionaires didn’t — and possibly couldn’t — give enough to charity.
That line of reasoning leads to the need for political change, and not necessarily revolution.
Effective Altruists are working on a variety of approaches. Pandemic prevention has been on their radar for as long as the movement has been around. Structural change is very important and it's best approached in places where there is high tractability and high neglectedness.
As for donations -- that's the low-hanging fruit. Any individual, without having to change anything about their life (other than spending a bit less on themselves) can give to cost effective charities to do a tremendous amount of good.
There isn’t a charity in existence that could’ve provided even close to the amount of support needed to support major parts of the world (2.7bln in quarantine) population to date, to say nothing of what they will need in the future. Governments are the only proven way of handling truly large scale issues like defense and national health.
Americans in particular depend on charities for services because domestic spending has been recklessly and cruelly slashed for at least the last 40 years. Depending on unaccountable and nebulous organizations and random billionaires for critical services is the opposite of personal freedom.
If they're not, I will. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22961062 but tldr: if altruistic people donate to (welfare-oriented) charity rather than lobbying for tax-supported welfare, they effectively subside non-altruistic people by exempting them from paying their share of welfare support.
What about a charity like Give Directly? It provides one-time large cash non-restricted grants to individuals in some of the world's poorest communities.
It's hard for the people just barely getting by to also fight for better governance. Giving a small 'leg up' can help communities get better faster.
> It's hard for the people just barely getting by to also fight for better governance.
Yes, obviously. I'm claiming that the people donating to (among others) Give Directly would be more effective at achieving their stated goals via political corruption than personal charity.
To be clear, I'm violently opposed to the sort of blind act-utilitarianesque consequentialism that would claim it's morally wrong to do anything other than the most utility-maximizing action (and people who donate to Give Directly et al probably are helping, just less effectively than they could be), but as far as recommendations go, see above.
I see that you're in favor of people working to end political corruption. You're claiming that it would be more effective at making the world a better place.
But it also seems like you're claiming that people should not donate to charities, because that is actively bad.
But then, what about donating to charities that work on ending the political corruption?
Given that it's very hard for an individual to change their career mid-life to focus on fixing corruption; or to even use their free time to do that; what is the problem with sharing a message that encourages people to do research (focusing on cost-effectiveness of charities) before giving money to charity?
> But it also seems like you're claiming that people should not donate to charities, because that is actively bad.
I am specifically not claiming that; I'm claiming that, in the case of public goods and services[0], donating money to fund those them directly is less effective (that is, strategicly wrong, a mistake presumably made in good faith) than spending that money to push government-funded public goods through the corrupt faux-democratic process.
> see that you're in favor of people working to end political corruption
> what about donating to charities that work on ending the political corruption?
I don't think I've made any claims about whether people should work and/or donate to end political corruption.
> Given that it's very hard for an individual to change their career mid-life
Yes, obviously if they make enough money to pay for >1.00 person-years per year of whatever they're trying to accomplish, it's more effective to spend money rather than labor, and that 1.00 drops quickly if a full-time specialist would be more productive. I'm not making a distiction between donating money versus donating labor.
0: including no-strings-attached grants like Give Directly appears to do; I think basic income would be a better way to structure that, but that's not what I'm objecting to.
> Are you recommending people stop giving money to charity?
I'm recommending people not support (with money or otherwise) charities that provide public goods and services, because those (being public) should be paid for by the entire tax base, especially corporations, in favor of supporting efforts (whether recognized as charities or not) to force the government to do its job of providing public goods and services to its subjects.
Eg, if the government were to stop maintaining the roads, I would not recommend that people donate to a road repair charity; I would recommend that they put whatever pressure necessary on the government to do its damn job.
Yes, I should have been a bit more explicit that I was only talking about charities that provide public goods and services, rather than "any kind of charity, in general".
And I wasn't expressing any moral position, just: given the goals that such charities seem to be pursuing (eg healthcare), their actions don't seem effective at actually accomplishing those goals. Basically, agreeing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22960723 saying:
> There isn’t a charity in existence that could’ve provided even close to the amount of support needed
Also, utilitarianism never claims something is "wrong" or "right" -- that's a spandrel from deontology. Utilitarianism is a claim about the ranking of actions: some actions are better than others.
We're not fighting to make the claim "doing X" is the ultimate and nothing is better -- with the world of nearly-infinite complexity and unbridgeable uncertainty, the best we can do is point out what seems, based on good evidence, as things to do that seem better than others.
Charity isn't an efficient use of funds. If we want our resources used more effectively, that money needs to go to the government and we need to elect leaders who use it for the things we actually need.
They evaluate charities; their top-recommended charity Against Malaria Foundation can, for $5, provide an insecticide-treated mosquito net that can protect individuals from malaria for 3-4 years. It's been proven to effectively decrease incidence of malaria in regions where such nets were distributed. This is very cost-effective.
Charity can be very efficient in helping people. You just have to find cost-effective charities and give your money there.
To Levchin, prepping for survival is a moral miscalculation; he prefers to “shut down party conversations” on the topic. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.” In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. “At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?”
When the French revolution came along, it swept away the aristocrats regardless of whether they were abusive or kind and paternalistic to commoners. Mobs don't frequently make moral calculations the same way that individuals might.
I think the logic is less “Give money so the pitchfork folks won’t come after you personally” and more “Give money so there’s no need for a revolution”
I don't think he's talking about paying favors to avoid the pitchforks. The idea is collaborating with the community so they improve their lives and the revolution isn't necessary. Some will do it out of selfishness, others from real believe in the community.
This is about preventing the revolution from starting in the first place, but once it starts, the mob is very proper to ask themselves why we need aristocrats in the first place. What purpose do they serve? Why do they suck up all the air in the room and actively harm us?
This is a prisoners' dilemma/tragedy of the commons dynamic[0]: any improvement per megadollar donated is of limited benefit to donater specifically, because it's spread out over the entire aristocracy[1]. So it's actually affermatively wrong to willingly donate any money to welfare projects, versus spending that money to bribe (sorry, 'lobby') politicians to impose welfare-directed taxes on the entire aristocracy (and thus deprive the more sociopathic 90% thereof of the ability to opt out of donating to the local homeless shelter, and gain a stragic advantage thereby).
This is the same reason why it's prefectly resonable for a corporation to engage in Google/Facebook style adware and spyware deployment (or any other unilateral only-not-crimes-because-the-law-hasn't-caught-up) provided that they also lobby to criminalize the very tactics they're currently using. (This is not hypocricy, this is appropriate response to a molochian incentive structure.)
0: internal to the aristocracy[1], not aristocracy vs lower classes
1: substitute a different term for "uppermost upper class" if you prefer
> provided they also lobby to criminalize the very tactics they're currently using.
For it to be ethical it must be highly targeted and explicit. When it's not, in the real world it more often turns out to be a case of "lip service" or hedging. (Both of which are pretty close to hypocrisy ethically speaking.)
Just for an example-- Richard Stallman targeted his use of a proprietary compiler specifically to compile a free software compiler.
Another one was Lawrence Lessig starting a Super Pac to run for president with the singular goal of replacing dark money with publicly funded campaigns.
> in the real world it more often turns out to be a case of "lip service" or hedging. (Both of which are pretty close to hypocrisy ethically speaking.)
Yes, fair. I'm not talking about the signalling/optics side of it at all. If they're not trying to criminalize it then they're not trying to criminalize it, regardless of whether they succeed in convincing people otherwise.
> Richard Stallman targeted his use of a proprietary compiler specifically to compile a free software compiler.
A relevant example would be someone who is lobbying for mandatory disclosure of source code, but not providing source of their own software until legally required to.
> Another one was Lawrence Lessig starting a Super Pac to run for president with the singular goal of replacing dark money with publicly funded campaigns.
Yes, and my point is that it's not hypocritical to use dark money for that, since to abstain would weaken his position even if he's actually sincere. On the hand, from a PR/signalling perspective, abstaining from dark money is not a effective signal, because there's nothing actually stopping a campaign that intends to reneg on it's promises from sending the same signal, if it sees that that would benefit it. So insisting on ideological purity just disadvanges Lawrence-Lessig-like campaigns relative to openly malicious ones, without actually filtering out secretly malicious ones.
> So it's actually affermatively wrong to willingly donate any money to welfare projects
Too late to edit, but I wanted to clairify that I'm talking about strategicly wrong (less effective than something else they could be doing) rather than morally wrong (of negative effectiveness).
I take it as an interesting "follow what they do, not what they say" commentary that these UHNWI's, despite the overwhelmingly asymmetrical power they wield in the economy and politics, are voting no confidence in the capitalist model they themselves sit upon the apex of. So capitalism as currently practiced for them is a convenient fig leaf for a non-cooperating internal model they run and operate off of in their own minds, until it blows up from its internal contradictions and they need to sit it out until it blows over?
Even the most self-sufficient retreats I've read about I estimate can only last about a generation on their own before their tech base rapidly dissolves, and the residents face a harsh decline. As our civilizational complexity and population density increases, the challenges facing our species keep creeping up the effects' time horizon. It's already a Red Queen's race for all but the biggest retreats to outlast these types of large-scale disruptions.
If you really want to prep, then you build for redundancy, you build for the long-term (decades, centuries, millennia, not days, weeks, years), you build for positive sum, win-win outcomes, you build for continuous striving towards post-scarcity, inclusively across as many people as there are resources for. That level of preparedness is nearly impossible to kill, is self-regenerating across generations, with no retreat-building necessary because the "retreats" are all over the place.
Its even more absurd when you consider the entire foundation and basis of their wealth and power is the society they'd rather run away from than protect.
> Early last summer, just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by. (Other prominent boosters include Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur best known for advocating Silicon Valley’s complete secession from the US to form its own corporate city-state.)
> ...
> The book’s 400-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions:
> 1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.
> 2) The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy.
> 3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity.
> 4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.
> The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. Davidson and Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. “The new Sovereign Individual,” they write, “will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.” It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn.
> Davidson and Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals, as a “domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age”.
They should get downvoted. Their example is certainly the extreme case, but the principle that employees shouldn't complain about seemingly small things is completely and utterly wrong.
This is a perfect time for companies to take advantage of the situation by cutting pay, perks, promotions, etc. Employees should absolutely push back.
Super interesting but I want to know where they sit in the supply chain. When they're done, where does the material go? Where did the finish product end up? And not in general, but specifically.
From my estimate, they produce plastic resin in pellet form. Imagine a material that is like coarse plastic sand.
If you are making a respirator mask, another factory will take these pellets, heat it to melting, and basically spray the hot plastic to form a sheet with very fine plastic fibers. Because the fibers need very specific properties, they probably use a custom plastic resin, not a regular commodity resin.
If you are making protective clothing, a different factory will take the pellets, heat it to melting, and slowly extrude it through a nozzle. Once you get a sheet, you cut it to size, and maybe glue some different pieces together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6V0w-ajtN8
From watching a video about this yesterday, I think they manufacture polypropylene pellet stock suitable for both injection molding and the various melt-blown processes that make nonwoven cloth. This pellet stock is in short supply worldwide and much of it is made in China.
No, we owe them good working environments, high wages, good benefits, time off, relief from their mortgages and rents, health care, voting rights, access to education, etc.
I'm sure a few cases of beer would be nice as well, but let's remember that it's the workers who made all those masks and by taking care of those workers we've helped our society as a whole.
Not OP, but he's emphasizing that the increased compensation should be of a different kind rather than of a different degree (of the same kind, one may assume).
“ To accommodate the dedicated workers, the company gave them an increase in wages and provided beds, kitchens, groceries, internet access and iPads, WPVI reported.” Bravo! I wish all our essential workers called to do extra work were treated like this.
One thing the article doesn't mention: What's next for the facility? Is this a shift change, with the next group cycling in for another 28-day shift? Or do they intend to go back to normal shift work, with people heading home at the end of each day? Or have they created enough raw material for now to go into a shutdown? It's an interesting decision point, so I'm curious which direction they took it.
Why is this a nice contrast... having to require workers to live in a single location for 28 days to meet demand is not ideal, having stockpiles would be an actual solution.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 160 ms ] thread0: https://www.npr.org/2020/04/22/840906009/author-tours-the-en...
We're far too likely to see things as character flaws when looking outward and as circumstance when looking inward.
I’d be willing to bet that a pretty significant percentage of the tech elite have taken serious steps like this, this clearly isn’t a small set of obscure players.
0: https://www.inquisitr.com/3950643/billionaires-are-building-...
Is buying a lot of insurance also evil?
Some basic risk analysis shows the trip increases risks and is therefore a dumb move even if the idea of a bunker could be useful in other situations.
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/e2-80-98we-needed-to-go...
> Is buying a lot of insurance also evil?
Generally, I don’t think so. Insurance exists to protect one’s finances, and it’s one of the oldest financial instruments out there. But you can’t eat an insurance policy, it can’t sustain life.
Not saying that everyone with a bunker falls into this category. But it's certainly true that when the best resourced and connected among us have the means to withdraw comfortably, their aggregate effort to remedy whatever is causing the disruption will diminish.
Most people here have home fire insurance coverage but don't have extinguishers (or haven't checked them in years), sprinklers, or a fire safe. So is fire insurance coverage bad?
Fire risks the loss of things that insurance cannot replace, such as your face, dog, or offspring.
I think the fear is of billionaires using money to save the bits they want by running away rather than the bits you want by fixing the society.
Once this is all over, they'll want to stroll back in like nothing happened. Ideally, we won't let them back in.
He has a major foundation whose stated goal is to improve wellbeing around the world and a massive social media company that constantly markets itself as making the world a better place.
If his foundation and company are truly fulfilling their missions, why is he buying up land in Hawaii and elsewhere to go hide out if everything goes bust?
Whether we like it not, people like Zuckerberg are some of the biggest leaders on the planet. We worship the kind of money and power people like him have.
To see people like that so unsure of the world in which they have an immense amount of influence over deeply undercuts their image of being these brilliant and visionary leaders.
This is a beautiful sentence. It is often touted, "If you don't like the culture you live in, change it". The response of most people is that they don't have the influence to change it, and it's better to just bare it until they can move on. The examples of Zuck, Thiel, and others who do have this influence, but choose to invest in fallback plans rather than throwing everything into making the needed changes says a lot about the mentality that breeds success in the US.
https://www.fastcompany.com/90494347/american-billionaires-h...
People at the top are profiting while people at the bottom are either sacrificing or outright dying.
It's informative to look at the examples of how that isn't true.
- donate money where it does more good per dollar spent - if you're able to
- spend working time on important issues - if you're able to
Just because some millionaires aren't doing anything to make the world a better place, doesn't mean those with fewer means can't. We in the tech field with our salaries especially.
That line of reasoning leads to the need for political change, and not necessarily revolution.
As for donations -- that's the low-hanging fruit. Any individual, without having to change anything about their life (other than spending a bit less on themselves) can give to cost effective charities to do a tremendous amount of good.
Americans in particular depend on charities for services because domestic spending has been recklessly and cruelly slashed for at least the last 40 years. Depending on unaccountable and nebulous organizations and random billionaires for critical services is the opposite of personal freedom.
It's hard for the people just barely getting by to also fight for better governance. Giving a small 'leg up' can help communities get better faster.
Yes, obviously. I'm claiming that the people donating to (among others) Give Directly would be more effective at achieving their stated goals via political corruption than personal charity.
To be clear, I'm violently opposed to the sort of blind act-utilitarianesque consequentialism that would claim it's morally wrong to do anything other than the most utility-maximizing action (and people who donate to Give Directly et al probably are helping, just less effectively than they could be), but as far as recommendations go, see above.
But it also seems like you're claiming that people should not donate to charities, because that is actively bad.
But then, what about donating to charities that work on ending the political corruption?
Given that it's very hard for an individual to change their career mid-life to focus on fixing corruption; or to even use their free time to do that; what is the problem with sharing a message that encourages people to do research (focusing on cost-effectiveness of charities) before giving money to charity?
I am specifically not claiming that; I'm claiming that, in the case of public goods and services[0], donating money to fund those them directly is less effective (that is, strategicly wrong, a mistake presumably made in good faith) than spending that money to push government-funded public goods through the corrupt faux-democratic process.
> see that you're in favor of people working to end political corruption
> what about donating to charities that work on ending the political corruption?
I don't think I've made any claims about whether people should work and/or donate to end political corruption.
> Given that it's very hard for an individual to change their career mid-life
Yes, obviously if they make enough money to pay for >1.00 person-years per year of whatever they're trying to accomplish, it's more effective to spend money rather than labor, and that 1.00 drops quickly if a full-time specialist would be more productive. I'm not making a distiction between donating money versus donating labor.
0: including no-strings-attached grants like Give Directly appears to do; I think basic income would be a better way to structure that, but that's not what I'm objecting to.
EDIT: actually, way back at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22960983
> Are you recommending people stop giving money to charity?
I'm recommending people not support (with money or otherwise) charities that provide public goods and services, because those (being public) should be paid for by the entire tax base, especially corporations, in favor of supporting efforts (whether recognized as charities or not) to force the government to do its job of providing public goods and services to its subjects.
Eg, if the government were to stop maintaining the roads, I would not recommend that people donate to a road repair charity; I would recommend that they put whatever pressure necessary on the government to do its damn job.
I think the disagreement started with the your response to my question to someone else:
> Are you recommending people stop giving money to charity?
And your response
> If they're not, I will.
It looks like your position is a lot more nuanced than "stop giving money to charity" :)
And I wasn't expressing any moral position, just: given the goals that such charities seem to be pursuing (eg healthcare), their actions don't seem effective at actually accomplishing those goals. Basically, agreeing with https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22960723 saying:
> There isn’t a charity in existence that could’ve provided even close to the amount of support needed
We're not fighting to make the claim "doing X" is the ultimate and nothing is better -- with the world of nearly-infinite complexity and unbridgeable uncertainty, the best we can do is point out what seems, based on good evidence, as things to do that seem better than others.
They evaluate charities; their top-recommended charity Against Malaria Foundation can, for $5, provide an insecticide-treated mosquito net that can protect individuals from malaria for 3-4 years. It's been proven to effectively decrease incidence of malaria in regions where such nets were distributed. This is very cost-effective.
Charity can be very efficient in helping people. You just have to find cost-effective charities and give your money there.
To Levchin, prepping for survival is a moral miscalculation; he prefers to “shut down party conversations” on the topic. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.” In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. “At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?”
This is the same reason why it's prefectly resonable for a corporation to engage in Google/Facebook style adware and spyware deployment (or any other unilateral only-not-crimes-because-the-law-hasn't-caught-up) provided that they also lobby to criminalize the very tactics they're currently using. (This is not hypocricy, this is appropriate response to a molochian incentive structure.)
0: internal to the aristocracy[1], not aristocracy vs lower classes
1: substitute a different term for "uppermost upper class" if you prefer
For it to be ethical it must be highly targeted and explicit. When it's not, in the real world it more often turns out to be a case of "lip service" or hedging. (Both of which are pretty close to hypocrisy ethically speaking.)
Just for an example-- Richard Stallman targeted his use of a proprietary compiler specifically to compile a free software compiler.
Another one was Lawrence Lessig starting a Super Pac to run for president with the singular goal of replacing dark money with publicly funded campaigns.
Yes, fair. I'm not talking about the signalling/optics side of it at all. If they're not trying to criminalize it then they're not trying to criminalize it, regardless of whether they succeed in convincing people otherwise.
> Richard Stallman targeted his use of a proprietary compiler specifically to compile a free software compiler.
A relevant example would be someone who is lobbying for mandatory disclosure of source code, but not providing source of their own software until legally required to.
> Another one was Lawrence Lessig starting a Super Pac to run for president with the singular goal of replacing dark money with publicly funded campaigns.
Yes, and my point is that it's not hypocritical to use dark money for that, since to abstain would weaken his position even if he's actually sincere. On the hand, from a PR/signalling perspective, abstaining from dark money is not a effective signal, because there's nothing actually stopping a campaign that intends to reneg on it's promises from sending the same signal, if it sees that that would benefit it. So insisting on ideological purity just disadvanges Lawrence-Lessig-like campaigns relative to openly malicious ones, without actually filtering out secretly malicious ones.
Too late to edit, but I wanted to clairify that I'm talking about strategicly wrong (less effective than something else they could be doing) rather than morally wrong (of negative effectiveness).
Even the most self-sufficient retreats I've read about I estimate can only last about a generation on their own before their tech base rapidly dissolves, and the residents face a harsh decline. As our civilizational complexity and population density increases, the challenges facing our species keep creeping up the effects' time horizon. It's already a Red Queen's race for all but the biggest retreats to outlast these types of large-scale disruptions.
If you really want to prep, then you build for redundancy, you build for the long-term (decades, centuries, millennia, not days, weeks, years), you build for positive sum, win-win outcomes, you build for continuous striving towards post-scarcity, inclusively across as many people as there are resources for. That level of preparedness is nearly impossible to kill, is self-regenerating across generations, with no retreat-building necessary because the "retreats" are all over the place.
There are no billionaires in mad max world.
This article by the same author goes deeper into some of the billionaires' mindset:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val...
> Early last summer, just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by. (Other prominent boosters include Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur best known for advocating Silicon Valley’s complete secession from the US to form its own corporate city-state.)
> ...
> The book’s 400-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions:
> 1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools.
> 2) The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy.
> 3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity.
> 4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends.
> The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. Davidson and Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. “The new Sovereign Individual,” they write, “will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.” It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn.
> Davidson and Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals, as a “domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age”.
You're getting downvoted, but that sadly does reflect the mindset of some clueless entitled participation-trophy-winning employees I know.
This is a perfect time for companies to take advantage of the situation by cutting pay, perks, promotions, etc. Employees should absolutely push back.
Why is this the perfect time? Is something going on that is affecting the entire world economically?
If you are making a respirator mask, another factory will take these pellets, heat it to melting, and basically spray the hot plastic to form a sheet with very fine plastic fibers. Because the fibers need very specific properties, they probably use a custom plastic resin, not a regular commodity resin.
If you are making protective clothing, a different factory will take the pellets, heat it to melting, and slowly extrude it through a nozzle. Once you get a sheet, you cut it to size, and maybe glue some different pieces together. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6V0w-ajtN8
I'm sure a few cases of beer would be nice as well, but let's remember that it's the workers who made all those masks and by taking care of those workers we've helped our society as a whole.
Georgia, “Hold my beer”.... “let’s open er back up”...
[0] https://6abc.com/braskem-america-marcus-hook-pa-pennsylvania...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22938990