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Comment by hellofunk | Hacker News Reader

> billionaires caused the climate change and how they are building bunkers and buying NZ passports to fly there when [shit happens]

Why NZ?

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> Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn and a prominent investor, recalls telling a friend that he was thinking of visiting New Zealand. “Oh, are you going to get apocalypse insurance?” the friend asked. “I’m, like, Huh?” Hoffman told me. New Zealand, he discovered, is a favored refuge in the event of a cataclysm. Hoffman said, “Saying you’re ‘buying a house in New Zealand’ is kind of a wink, wink, say no more. Once you’ve done the Masonic handshake, they’ll be, like, ‘Oh, you know, I have a broker who sells old ICBM silos, and they’re nuclear-hardened, and they kind of look like they would be interesting to live in.’ ”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-...

Yeah doesn't seem like a well conceived plan if there really is a consensus amongst the super rich to isolate themselves all together on one relatively small island. First of all globally there are a hell of a lot of super rich people. Secondly I'm not sure you'd want your neighbors to all be other aggresssively well resourced people in a world of survivorship. Third, if the masses blamed the super rich for the catastrophes of the world we'd know where to find them.

The masses never blame the super-rich. Instead, they hate their immediate bosses (who hate theirs). Politically, we mostly resent the party of the middle managers.

We are a "managed population", following Edward Bernays's program from one century ago.

Billionaires don't cause the climate change. If you kill all the billionaires, there will be zero difference. If you kill all non-billionaires, you have an immediate solution to all the problems in the article.

It is an inconvenient destination for mass migration and military invasion, not downwind of likely thermonuclear war targets, is large enough to support amenities, and is at sufficiently high latitude.

> at sufficiently high latitude

I assume you mean altitude?

Latitude. Tropics become uninhabitable (anyway, unfarmable) by humans fairly early on. When the super-rich do finally decamp to New Zealand, CO2 output will probably be declining precipitously. A resulting new ice age would make refuge at high latitude ironic.

1. You can basically buy a passport there

2. Peter Thiel bought there and sold NZ to all of his rich friends which started a snowball effect

3. “New Zealand is an enemy of no one,” Lynch said in an interview from his office in Murchison, Texas, southeast of Dallas. “It’s not a nuclear target. It’s not a target for war. It’s a place where people seek refuge.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-rich-new-zealand-doo...

1. Because it's reasonably "far away" from the main centres of possible climate refugee migration

2. Because you can. https://www.businessinsider.de/international/countries-where...

To add to the many good comments, it's also very low population density -- at 18 people per km^2. Being well down in the southern hemisphere, it's well out of the way when the fighting and desperate mass migration kicks off. It's probably no coincidence it was one of the last land areas to gain humans.

Probably least likely place in the first world for conflicts/nuclear strikes.

* First-world, developed country

* Stable currency

* Stable political system

* Speaks English

* Few geopolitical entanglements

* Natural resources

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