Doomsday Prep for the Super-rich
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
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.
I can't see weapon tech falling much below the 1850s.
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.
a brisk trade in AK-47's would develop
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Instead of investing in strengthening the institutions that made their way of life possible these idiots are trying to sequester themselves. It is sad that we have allowed morons to such high ranks of power. The only sensible voices in the entire article are Levchin and Johnson.
On a related note, I was appalled by the howls and outcries against Obama's (entirely sensible, if maybe easily misunderstood) "you didn't build that".
(Related discussion in the "Don't tell your friends they're lucky" article/thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13437332 )
I like Max Levchins idea behind this statement. The underlying anxiety shown by a lot of the characters interviewed in this article display a real human dis-connect. There is nothing in the US (and other countries for that matter) that cannot be fixed with hard work, a bit of luck and investment in the right things. Maybe that is the real eye-opener. One of the things I have observed, in crisis the way individuals act, reflects their mental state.
"The growing foreign appetite for New Zealand property has generated a backlash. The Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa—the Maori name for New Zealand—opposes sales to foreigners."
NZ, a colonised country with a treaty, has all the same problems the US has in terms of inequity. Way more tribal and dangerous than the tourist brochures suggest.
"The original silo of Hall’s complex was built by the Army Corps of Engineers to withstand a nuclear strike."
The traces of hydrazine (H4N2), you get for nothing. ~ https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2016-09/documents...
Bode well to get on with the local tribe with goodwill instead of using the blunt violence of the (questionable) law.
3 day reversal ~ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/jan/26/mark-zuck...
The homicide rate in NZ is less than 1 per 100,000 inhabitants. And almost all of those homicides are solved, because the police force is large compared to the number of homicides.
I disagree strongly that NZ has the same problems as the US. If I lose my leg doing wheelies while drunk on a motorcycle cos I'm idiot, I will be taken care of at hospital, free of charge. If I get cancer, I will get surgery/radiotherapy/chemo till its beaten, free of charge. If I have trouble getting pregnant, the government will fund up to 3 IVF attempts. When I am prescribed drugs, they will basically only ever cost ~$5 a month.
All this is possible because the government does a cost/benefit analysis to decide whether various health treatments are actually worth doing. And if it decides something is worth doing, it buys/trains in bulk. As a result, NZ spends ~$3200 USD per capita on healthcare, compared to the >$7500 USD the US spends.
And if you're rich, then buy private health insurance. It's waaaaay cheaper, because the government program will happily use private hospitals if they pass the cost/benefit analysis. So private hospitals have a real incentive to provide health care cheaply.
But back to the poor. Because of these safety nets, you can be super happy and relaxed in NZ even if you're in the bottom quartile.
I would know. I'm in it.
I'm not kiwi-bashing, simply pointing out that rich foreign individuals, using NZ as a bolt-hole are faced with similar situation, just in a more dispersed population.
"Of all New Zealand children, 22% live in
families where the major caregiver receives
income from a social security benefit.[0]
That is around 230,000, or one fifth, of
New Zealand children"
I still remember the effects of Roger Douglas [3] on NZ in the 80's/90's while studying with my Kiwi mates.
It is worse in Aus, the country is geographically bigger, without a treaty and to compare the two places, Australian Aboriginal males have a life expectancy of 69.1 [4] but from anecdotally it's more like 50. In NZ it is 72.8 ('13).
"I would know. I'm in it."
Kia ora @Tomminn
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_poverty_in_New_Zealand#c...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intention...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Māori_people#Socioeconomic_cha...
Maori also get special seats in parliament, the Te Reo language and Maori culture is a big part of NZ (Aotearoa) culture and our way of life, and there is a lot of state funded help to try and bring the racial inequalities in line.
A lot of the problems are what we see all around the world, and are hard to sort out. The towns that Māori live in are often small towns where there is not a lot of employment, if they live in the cities they are often disenfranchised and have a lack of cultural support.
"The towns that Māori live in are often small towns where there is not a lot of employment, if they live in the cities they are often disenfranchised and have a lack of cultural support."
I hear the same in Australia. Much bigger country, same lack of support.
Also if you pass a certain threshold of medication usage (it's not much, I get prescription allergy medication and I passed it) then you don't even need to pay the $5, that's not to mention the fact that if you are poor or unemployed you also don't need to pay for medication.
The problem with private healthcare in NZ is that if there are complications they call an ambulance and send you to a public hospital for an emergency, which are better equipped.
A 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
Now, I disagree with this whole "preppers" mindset, but I think some of the practical problems could be overcome.
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.
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...
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.
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.
Yes, even in the 21st century, (although this is in the Philippines, this shows what humans are capable of given certain conditions), you can kill someone if they are suspected of using drugs and Duerte will give you a medal. The astute among you can see that you can kill any person, sprinkle some crack on them, and not only will there be absolutely no investigation, you will be regarded as a patriot and a hero. It seems that if you kill a poor person, absolutely no one cares.
This is one of the first major purchases I would make and I do have a rather large emergency kit should disaster strike. Like me, they're in California along a known fault line way overdue for a major earthquake. Unlike these "smart" execs, I'd hone my survival skills. I'm not overly concerned about a 21st century peasant revolt, but we live in an area where it's not a matter of if, but when a major disaster will strike. If people are without electricity and running water for an extended period of time and/or there is a breakdown in security (police, national guard, etc.), it gets ugly quick. For example, in Los Angeles, there was a mentally ill person who threatened to jump off of an overpass on the 405 (possibly the world's busiest freeway). His antics caused such a slowdown in traffic, the freeway became a literal parking lot for a few hours. Because a man inconvenienced their time, people began to goad him into killing himself saying things like "What are you waiting for you fucking pussy, get it over with!!!" This wasn't one person, a significant part of the traffic jam was saying this or wishing it.
When you are malnourished and/or dehydrated, you lose compassion and reason, gain paranoia, and become more focused on your own survival. For people with such resources this is like paying a few pennies for apocalypse insurance.
At least there's one reasonable person in this circus.
'It's cute to see the whole "I'm going to buy a home in New Zealand! Full of canned goods! And a helicopter pad!" Realistically, though, for the money they could do a lot better. Go buy an entire block in Detroit, rehab all the houses, rent them at below-market rates to folks who need help. There's your "militia."'
Anyway, these people are insane. Its hilarious to see some wealthy, liberal hedge fund manager consider with complete seriousness the prospect that donald trump will turn out to be a ruthless dictator. It is something that many liberal people are doing now -- comedically grave comparisons to hitler and concentration camps abound on the left. Werent these people around in 2008 when the right went through the exact same hysteria? Cant they look at the videos of right wingers furiously assering that obama was a muslim terrorist and see themselves?
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.