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Doomsday prepping is not a usual Soylent subject, but apocalypses are a staple of geek culture. Do Peter Thiel's preparations make sense?
You know things are getting risky when billionaires start making plans to flee to New Zealand on the off chance civilization might collapse. This week's New Yorker details the doomsday survival plans of Peter Thiel, and other notable Silicon Valley tech moguls.
The thing is, despite their virtually unlimited budgets, none of these guys is doing it right.
[...] In more realistic circumstances, there are 21.8 million veterans in the U.S., with various levels of professional expertise in solving problems like bunker busting. Hell, there's more guns than people in this country. Fixed locations are inherently vulnerable by their very nature, subject to siege, and allowing attackers to patiently plan ways to penetrate them. Any billionaire's hoard of survival supplies will be a natural target following the breakdown of society. Keeping them secret will be a challenge too, when contractors have been paid to construct them, delivery men have carried the supplies in, and even the armed guards may decide their friends and families could use all those tins of spam a little more desperately than their paranoid employer.
(Score: 1) by moondoctor on Friday February 03 2017, @11:10AM
People acting like the breakdown of civilization would mean that the 7-11 closes are pretty comical.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Friday February 03 2017, @04:45PM
It doesn't take much disruption to the status quo to cause panic. After Hurricane Sandy knocked out power in large sections of the Tri-state area people were desperate to charge their cellphones. They camped out in malls that were running off generators so they could charge at the outlets used for floor waxers. Checking your updates on Facebook is not anything like a critical need, really, but they sure thought it was.
Maybe it's a function of making people ever more dependent on government and corporations. Nobody fixes their own stuff anymore and few have any idea how any of the things that enable their lifestyles work. It's all just "tech." I see it on a deeper level than that, too. I grew up in the rural Rockies and even after 20 years of living in NYC I am struck by how helpless and pitiful urbanites are. We would regularly pick berries in the mountains or fish and hunt or garden and think nothing of that being a regular part of our diet, but here people could be standing next to an apple on a tree and would not dare touch it until somebody picked it and offered to sell it to them for $10/lb. And I'm sure I seem the same way to a Kalahari bushman.
I figure in the wake of a global collapse people like the Vietnamese would take over, because those people waste nothing and stop at nothing.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 4, Informative) by WillR on Friday February 03 2017, @05:49PM
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday February 03 2017, @10:56PM
You have it the wrong way round. The breakdown of civilisation doesn't close the 7-11, the closure of the 7-11 is what breaks down civilisation. All you need is a major interruption to the food supply chain, coupled with a major distraction to hamper the government's efforts to provide relief. Say, a big war and/or a series of very well organised attacks on major fuel depots.
Shops and supermarkets carry enough food to last the communities they support just a few days, maybe a week at most. Most homes carry enough to keep their occupants going for a couple of weeks, give or take. Less if the power goes and the freezer starts to thaw. You're looking at about a month before people start eating cat food, a month and four days before they eat the cats. None of that even takes into account the inevitable panic-buying and hoarding, which would of course hugely exacerbate the problem and move the doomsday timetable forwards significantly.
Obviously it's not not so much of a problem in rural areas, where food can be readily found in nearby farms and wild places, but in cities (you know, where the majority of the population actually are) then an interruption of even a fortnight to the supply chain could really cause problems. Even more so for places like America, where people can't even get to a shop without petrol in their tanks. (The interruption to the supply chain is almost certainly going to involve fuel shortages, heightened by folks simultaneously panic buying fuel and driving for miles in search of food.)
If for whatever reason the trucks ever did stop arriving, you'd be looking at panic buying and stockpiling in urban areas within a fortnight. Looting within three weeks, and food riots within four. Your 7/11 would be closed due to empty shelves by Tuesday of the second week, broken into by Friday and in flames on Sunday. Somewhere around week two or three you'd see an exodus (slow at first, building up quickly) from the cities to the countryside. I give it a fortnight of that before the country people start turning the refugees away at gunpoint, and then you are then looking at looting, raiding and violence at the source of the food production while the cities crumble. Need I go on?
TL;DR - don't take your local 7-11 for granted, it's the only thing between you and catburgers.