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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: 3, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday February 03 2017, @12:19PM
Step 1: Find some town where your face isn't well known, and using an array of different intermediaries to do the following:
Step 2: Set up a heavily armed and well fortified compound at the edge of town. Stock it with loads of food, water, guns and ammunition, plenty of fuel and a couple of armoured vehicles. Employ a group of overly paranoid ex-military types and wild-eyed nutball survivalists to drop everything and come live in the compound the moment the alarm sounds. They are expecting some millionaire boss they've never met to show up on doomsday and identify himself with a password.[1]
Step 3: Set up another compound, very much like the one above, on the other side of the same town. They are expecting a different boss with a different photo.
Step 4: Set up a third, just to be sure, on another edge of the town.
Step 5. Buy half an acre of land on a dead-end road a mile or two outside out of town, on the fourth corner of the map. Build a modest but sturdy house on it, surrounded by a modest but sturdy fence / wall. Stock the house with food, water, medicine, books, practical clothing, farming gear, solar panels, rechargeable batteries, high-quality booze, one or two guns and some ammo.[2]
When the shit hits the fan, go live in the house and leave the compounds the fuck alone.
The various gangs will be so busy watching / fighting each other and eliminating every other potential threat within an eighty mile radius they won't even think to come and bother you. If they do come to visit, cultivate the image of a harmless, scruffy eccentric who is friendly and occasionally useful[3], and certainly not worth shooting.
[1] The boss they are expecting is actually just a photo of some random person off the internet.
[2] Obviously the vast majority of your stockpile should be stashed in a cellar under the house, exclusively accessible via a secret door that only you know about.
[3] For added sneakiness, be sure to leave a few essentials items or skillsets out of the supplies/ staff of each compound - Medical books/ knowledge, for example. Then you can "just happen" to have such essentials readily available in your own house, which you can gift to them at opportune moments in order to gain their favour.
Actually, I think this would make a great TV series...
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday February 03 2017, @12:35PM
Although it increases your personal risk, what's living in a fortress without your own cult of adoring worshipers? Boring, that's what!
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(Score: 2) by bob_super on Friday February 03 2017, @07:22PM
The main problems with taking your harem with you are the maintenance of said harem, the distraction required to keep them off each other's throats if there is no media, and how having a harem will attract every crazy ass in a 200-km radius...
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @09:26PM
The obvious solution is to use electro-shock aversion therapy to gradually reprogram yourself to find only cabbages sexy. Then you can keep a huge harem of cabbages instead. Much lower maintenance.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Friday February 03 2017, @11:07PM
There's nothing in that plan that actually requires a zombie apocolypse. Why not start now?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 03 2017, @11:27PM
This is the type of intelligent and quality advice I want to get out of a tech site like this. Thank you, I'll start tomorrow.