If your way of making money makes you really fear people will be mad at you, you should be asking yourself what’s wrong with your way of making money. That is, if you care. But if you don’t care don’t whine.
I know which compound I’m targeting first.
I think they know the system is unfair. They are just greedy fucks who’d prefer to squeeze it completely dry to benefit themselves.
Capitalism being about companies competing to provide value to society is a myth we tell. Otherwise no one would have a problem.
I read a book called Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven many years ago about a comet hitting the Earth. There was a scene in the book, after the impact, where a rich guy manages to finally reach a place up in the mountains where he has supplies stashed, only to find that his employees have claimed it for themselves and won’t let him in because he’s basically useless in the new world of survival.
If you were working for Huffman or Musk or any of the rest of them, and a there was a huge society ending disaster, would you let them in when they showed up or would you just shoot them down with their own guns? I know what I would do. I can’t imagine anyone letting them in.
It doesn’t even have to be so combative.
Imagine being thrown together with 99 other survivors of the apocalypse and 1 of them was musk.
There’s going to be medical people and trades people and farmers and naturalists and even people with governance experience from community groups et cetera.
Imagine how utterly useless a billionaire would be in that context. Their entitlement would make them worse than useless. Like I’d rather be stuck with nanna who is just a drain on resources rather than someone who’s only skill is self interest.
Nanna is the keeper of the stories and the only person who has the entire new testament memorised.
That is such a great book.
And yeah, fuck them. I would absolutely never let them in.
Now ask yourself why these guys are suddenly so obsessed with AI, chatbots, and getting rid of roles previously staffed by humans.
I hope the virtual doorman hallucinates that they’re a radioactive dog or some shit
lol
A delivery guy I know couldn’t make his (scheduled, daily) pickup at an Amazon warehouse because the robot security didn’t recognize him that day (despite being the usual guy, with a badge).
So yeah, that probably will be the most likely scenario.
Which is just a thousand times fucking funnier to me given that i’m someone with actual technical knowledge who works in the industry as opposed to a kholed nepo baby with parental funds.
Cory Doctorow’s Masque of the Red Death novella (named after Poe’s story of the same name) explores this theme a lot, especially how short sighted the rich can be and how well the poor band together to rebuild.
Here’s the free audio book:
Ooh, free Edgar Allen Poe book? Are you trying to be my new best friend?
well it’s not EAP, its CD - but using an EAP title. Sure we can be BFFs, but ill need a credit card number and PIN code
Ah, I shouldn’t have skimmed your post. Thanks again, I’ll give it a listen.
Didn’t read the book but I get the scenario after a hypothetical world changing disaster, it’s going to be a ratrace for high ground. It’s a false sense of security to believe hoarding cash or guns or vehicle would be your ticket out of it, it’s called pride and hubris.
A motor/car can’t swim. Weapons are a sign of hostility. Cash could be useless. Even having access to an escape satellite doesn’t guarantee you’ll be hit by space trash or cosmic plasma streams. The Road is a example how depressing the aftermath really is.
The Road is a good example; this thread also has me thinking about the Amos and Clarissa arc after the meteors hit in The Expanse.
I had gone quite a long time without thinking about The Road.
Day ruined.
Being hired as security at a billionaire’s Hawaiian apocalypse bunker has got to be the best job imaginable. You get paid to live in a tropical paradise in case The Worst should happen. If The Worst actually does happen, you just go inside the bunker and lock the doors, and if the billionaire shows up, you don’t let him in. Easy peasy.
I don’t remember who said it, but I think about this comment a lot:
All these billionaires would rather spend their wealth building bunkers for when their actions cause social collapse, instead of trying to prevent social collapse in the first place.
The thing is, none of these bunkers are built by billionaires. Would be real unfortunate if they had some design flaws in them lol
Many Bothans have died to bring us this intel.
Doesn’t need to be any design flaws, a few minutes with a welder and/or a truck load of concrete at the door once they’re in there would render the whole billionaire problem “solved”, Hotel California style.
Given we’re talking about the total collapse of society, the goal in such an event would be less “keep the billionaire in” and more “get all the food and ammunition he’s hoarding out. And any women.”
These assholes always fantasize that their wealth and accumulation of luxury items will grant them the leg up to become rulers during the social collapse. They don’t realize that in case of a social collapse the world won’t immediately look like Mad Max, and they certainly aren’t Immortan Joe. It will look more like Children of Man. Very slow and very gradual and with a lot mass governmental violence, not small arms violence.
Further, they don’t have what it takes to survive off the land, nor the intimidation to warlord after.
Other than a pensioners its difficult to imagine someone more dependant on the systems.
Because becoming a billionaire itself contributes to society’s collapse. They are opposite goals.
I don’t think they necessarily “prefer” it. It’s more just that they have what is an unimaginable amount of money in comparison to us, why not invest to preserve your long term survival?
They have already dealt with the normal shit the rest of us have to. They have a house, car, enough money for them and their families to never work again, to do whatever hobbies they like with no restriction.
If you are someone with a worth of a billion, this bunker development will cost something like 10m. That’s 1% of your wealth. It would be the same as the median American spending $1920 in pure relative terms, but probably would have an effect more like $500 on their real finances (again, every other need has been financially met long, long ago)
Well, because I’m not a sociopath I think preserving the world’s ecosystems is more important than a few years at the tail end of my life. Doomsday bunker with a Mad Max stockpile wouldn’t occur to me as a thing to actually do.
To be fair, what could a single billionaire do? They are far more powerful than most, but they would have to cooperate with other billionaires to make that change.
There are 3000 billionaires. Who is going to stick their head out if the necessary changes will be opposed by many billionaires as well as huge parts of the regular population?
It would be better for society to improve itself instead of waiting for a solution by the billionaires. Difficult while being trained to be a consumer, but possible.
Douglas Rushkoff
Author, media theorist, and cool guy
Does the Team Human podcast
Dude could have been cast as a white walker and HBO would have saved a ton in VFX and makeup costs.
Fuck that guy.
Bunker Boy! Pale as can be for rotten is he.
Where are you getting the gas, Steve? Gas is only good for a few months in storage without treatment and a couple of years with it. Have you never read a fucking book?
“Gas goes bad.”
-Phillip “Tandy” Miller
Petroleum distillation is incredibly simple. Give me a couple weeks in a junkyard with a welder and I can have your crude refined to any weight distillate you want. People were distilling petroleum fuels a century before penicillin was invented.
Fuck piss baby spez. But of you should see the crude “refineries” around the world run with just a tank, heated by the same crude inside, with just a long pipe as a condernsor that people manually water cool.
Key words in that sentence: give you those things. I doubt the lord tech bro could do any of that if the apocalypse happened tomorrow.
Even the janky version requires skill and knowledge, and if he doesn’t have the crude then both are useless anyway. Building a hole in the ground with motorcycles doesn’t help you when you depend on a highly connected world to fuel and maintain it.
The really funny thing about Spez is that he’s far from a power player in the tech scene, nowhere near the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg. But he so desperately wants to be that he actually just looks sad and pathetic in the process.
Wtf is he going to do with his stockpile of motorbikes during the apocalypse? Start a Mad Max biker crew? What a fkn loser lol.
He’s just going to the next tier of cuck that provides bikes for the raiders that get in his bunker. They should keep him alive as a manservant when his little apocalypse plan falls apart.
I can just imagine this as a scene in a fallout game. Lonely old rich fuck hidden away for years. You ring the intercom and he’s so excited to hear another voice that he invites you in. Starts spewing shit opinions. You eventually realize he could’ve helped stop the apocalypse but built the bunker and profited instead. Look at all the loot. Inform him he can either become a smear on the wall or caretaker of your new place.
Little french maid costume?
Danny mcbride’s gonna slot right in there
I just want to know the evidence for the motorcycles. Is it really a “stockpile” of them, or is he a rich bitch and likes motorcycles like jay leno likes cars?
I agree. Many people are imagining, “instead of using his vast wealth to fix the world, he dedicates all his money and mental energy to an elaborate bunker that will ensure his survival in a specific apocalyptic scenario he believes is likely to happen.”
It might be more like, "amongst all the random wealthy-person shit he’s bought, there are guns and motorcycles (because he thinks they are cool) as well as a pantry full of canned food (because everyone should have an emergency kit and you never know).
But I could be wrong.
The first thing people will do when society collapses is head to where the billionaires live to raid their stockpiles.
If any are successfully defended, I propose we simply push a bunch of rocks on top of it.
Shit next to the intake vents. Make that spot the communal toilet. Lets see how long the filters last
Multiple motorcycles? What’s he gonna do, ride them all at once?
If you have a bunch of motorcycles going in a line and you ride another motorcycle on top of that line like a conveyor belt then you will be going twice as fast as the highest speed the single motorcycle could go.
More wheels is more faster, just like legs. That’s why horses are faster than people. This Huffman guy might be onto something
If you stack them enough you can approach light speed as well!
Obviously him (and all the other oligarchs behaving like this) are counting on their entourage of sycophants following them. I don’t think they have completely considered the fact that all of their untangible wealth will be worthless in an apocalypse situation, and instead they will just turn into golden geese sitting on a pile of stuff that everyone else, including their former sycophants, would like to sit on instead.
There was some guy that got to interview a bunch of billionaires for some reason and their views on an apocalypse situation are eye opening.
making guards wear disciplinary collars of some kind in return for their survival. Or maybe building robots to serve as guards and workers – if that technology could be developed “in time”.
Motorcycle centipede
I always find it funny that people imagibe that in an apocalypse a modern fossil fuel vehicle would be any good. Unless you know how to modify the engine to use realistically self-producable fuel you will be able to run it for only a few months before all the fuel in the world degrades and starts destroying/not running the engine. Better off getting electric vehicles as electricity is actually easy to produce.
A bicycle isn’t a bad thing to have in an apocalypse. Not difficult to maintain, considerably faster and more efficient than walking, basically no infrastructure required.
For sure, but there would be use cases for bigger vehicles, especially if you don’t want to be on the run but rather rebuild
Sure, but if I’m stocking a ragnarok bunker I’m going to stick a Trek in there.
Unrelated? How would that apply to cars?
Cars can be converted to run on wood gas.
As I said, You would need to know how to modify your car for that.
This video walks you through on how to convert a vehicle to run on wood gas. I should have posted this instead of the link I posted.
I am sure there are instructions written down in case of no electricity.
Better to get a horse and a mule.
Insane strategy, Silicon Valley execs. Sell the thing that you believe is gonna cause the apocalypse so you can afford to have apocalypse insurance. That definitely needed to happen…
This is it… how about these dudes stopped preparing for the apocalypse that they themselves are causing, and instead changed the reality they’ve created, thus preventing said apocalypse from taking place in the first place…
That would require empowering the poors and they can’t be having that
But then number go down
Nawww is the little piggy boy scared we’re gonna come for him?
Good.
Rushkoff wrote a book about consulting for these billionaire peppers.
https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of-the-tech-billionaires/
That’s really interesting thanks
My library had copies available in ebooks and audiobooks, too
Just collecting shit for badder men really. Dumb.
Gee, it was really considerate for these folk to collect all the shit our bandit rover band needed all in one place. Shame we had to eat all of them though.
All these billionaires stockpiling in their secure bunkers have clearly never heard of the word ‘siege’.
Self fulfilling prophecy
