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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: 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