The bunker builders preparing for doomsday
bbc.com
bbc.com
(I'm not seriously suggesting this)
I wonder whether these bunker-builders would get more bang for their buck if they were to build inside a city instead of outside. Investments in infrastructure around them could improve security at a structural level. (A distant relative thread notes that bunkers could not possibly have full hospital service.) A castle does not have just a keep, but an entire town inside its walls, or else it could not support its keep.
Coops are now one of the most crazy over-specified engineering things you'll ever see. They test and maximize cost efficiency of things like: how often to wipe dust off the light bulbs, given 50 different variables, and then contractually write it out.
For every tiny thing, and that was 10+ years ago.
In a post apocalyptic world, there is no medical school. Once your health staff is dead or too old to continue, you're on your own.
In a post apocalyptic world, there are no high tech factories to manufacture medical equipment. From complex machines to basic surgical masks and gloves, bandaids, morphin, syringes, vaccines, gloves, none of those are manufactured anymore in a post apocalyptic world. The factories have been destroyed. The skilled workers who knew how to operate the machines are dead or who knows where.
Okay, so let's say that your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital also includes a factory to manufacture medical equipment.
Gloves and masks are made of plastic. Petroleum products. So let's say your bunker for rich couples with a mini hospital and full staff complement and a medical factory now also has an oil extraction operation and a refinery on site. You need petroleum engineers. These engineers have families and will expect to be well taken care of. Replacing the engineers with robots? You're gonna need a robot factory, built by humans. And so on.
See where I'm going? If you take this reasoning to its logic end you arrive at a full society.
No one can survive well in the long term without a modern society and all of its amenities, including government, public services, and taxes. Exactly all that would cease to exist in a doomsday scenario. Unless you are prepared to accept a standard of living worthy of the Middle Ages.
Every man for himself is a libertarian fantasy.
No one can survive in the long term, full stop. Modern civilization makes it significantly safer, more comfortable and longer, but rest assured, there are plenty of humans on planet Earth who survive just fine without governments, public services and taxes.
I disagree. Let me look up a checklist of failed states.
Yemen. Libya. Somalia. Syria. DR Congo.
Hmmmm. Exactly the worst countries to live in.
Now let me look up checklists of countries with the highest levels of human development index, life expectancy at birth, and income per capita.
Norway. Sweden. Denmark. Canada. The United States. South Korea. Singapore.
All countries with well established governments and public services infrastructure, and a social safety net (this is somewhat less true for the US).
Most humans living in places without governments and well organized societies live either in the middle of literal warzones, desert wastelands, or are indigenous tribes living far from civilization.
Bunker survival can be nice and pretty for a few years at most, but the idea that modern technology has abolished man's dependence on his community is a fantasy.
Yes, and they survived this way for thousands of years.
Yes, in a post-apocalyptic society you probably won't be able to get your medical gloves. But you will be better off that the middle ages, because you'll know about sterilizing your instruments and so on, you'll have medical textbooks and trained doctors who will know that leeches are not in fact useful for treating headaches, ear infections or hemorrhoids.
You won't be able to fab computer chips, but if you have a good stockpile of cheap arduino stuff you'll be able to make machines and automate aspects of your life.
You won't be able to create petrol to power your vehicle but you (or some handy McGyver type) probably can modify existing cars to run on firewood (like almost every motorised vehicle in continental Europe was during WWII).
Our existing knowledge alone would make the survivor's post-apocalyptic lives far, far better than the middle ages.
The future is solar punk. Electricity is easier.
...although yes, for my notional post-apocalyptic Tesla kit, there's a wood-burning generator.
I used to consider myself merely mildly curious about prepping, but 2020 has convinced me we are much closer than we think to every man for himself, to the point where I am almost seriously looking for private, defendable land tucked away in the mountains with fresh water, juuuust in case. Not for a permanent The Road scenario, but to weather a temporary storm.
The counter for this would be to relocate there earlier in the unfolding of a crisis, before most people have caught on, but then you'd have to go more often (lower relocation trigger threshold), and also stay there until it's over, which would mean you'd have spent ~all of 2020 in one.
A friend sold his camp near Lake Champlain to some dude from NYC, sight unseen, for about $100k over asking in April. It was unwinterized, and the buyer dropped a fortune into making it a 4 season home.
I wonder how many are re-evaluating their location choice.
We don't know what will go wrong. Being over-prepared and easily weathering difficulties is a much better plan than being underprepared.
Strongholds and regionalization are pretty much the worst responses to any crisis, seeing as how the entirety of this era of modern civilization traces it's origins to the rise of global trade that began in the renaissance.
That'll work. Until Vic and Blood come along with a sack full of rags, plastic sacks, a tarp to plug up the air intakes ... then wait to hear the Screamers.
They're really bad at considering the actual logistical and tactical issues i.e. have they adequately cleared trees and cover from the bunker entrances, are the air intakes able to be shielded from gun fire which might pierce the filter assemblies, do they have adequate overlapping covering positions for them, how do you replace an air intake filter clogged with soot from someone burning a bonfire upwind for a few days, do you have adequate surveillance to cover nightfall?
I mean a fairly obvious problem is that starting a big fire near the bunker is more or less going to both clog the air filters and completely blind and destroy most surface surveillance gear...which let's you get in close and then duct-tape the air intakes up.
Have you ever had one of these people talk your ear off?
Hidden, remote ventilation intakes, surveillance, hidden escape hatches to flank their opponents, and overlapping cover are the sort of thing they spend their waking hours planning, dreaming, building, and earning money to afford.
Saying they're bad at considering logistics and tactics is like saying Lord of The Rings nerds are bad at considering the lore. Come on.
If they haven't...
How the job ends: Contractor shows up to collect final payment, ends up in a shallow grave on the far side of the retaining wall behind the cistern
You don't get to be a billionaire by leaving loose ends lying around...
The fact is, in a shit hits the fan scenario, money has no value, and thus the world's billionaires become just random dweebs.
There will be plenty of softer targets meal team six will be going after first, with plenty of fighting to keep them distracted.
I'm picturing Bill running the old embrace, extend, and extinguish model until they all just kill each other or die of hunger/radiation/lead poisoning.