Oscar Winners, Sports Stars and Bill Gates Are Building Lavish Bunkers (hollywoodreporter.com) 332
turkeydance quotes a report from Hollywood Reporter: Given the increased frequency of terrorist bombings and mass shootings and an under-lying sense of havoc fed by divisive election politics, it's no surprise that home security is going over the top and hitting luxurious new heights. Or, rather, new lows, as the average depth of a new breed of safe haven that occupies thousands of square feet is 10 feet under or more. Those who can afford to pull out all the stops for so-called self-preservation are doing so -- in a fashion that goes way beyond the submerged corrugated metal units adopted by reality show "preppers" -- to prepare for anything from nuclear bombings to drastic climate-change events. Gary Lynch, GM at Rising S Bunkers, a Texas-based company that specializes in underground bunkers and services scores of Los Angeles residences, says that sales at the most upscale end of the market -- mainly to actors, pro athletes and politicians (who require signed NDAs) -- have increased 700 percent this year compared with 2015, and overall sales have risen 150 percent. Any time there is a turbulent political landscape, we see a spike in our sales. Given this election is as turbulent as it is, "we are gearing up for an even bigger spike," says marketing director Brad Roberson of sales of bunkers that start at $39,000 and can run $8.35 million or more (FYI, a 12-stall horse shelter is $98,500). Adds Mike Peters, owner of Utah-based Ultimate Bunker, which builds high-end versions in California, Texas and Minnesota: "People are going for luxury [to] live underground because they see the future is going to be rough. Everyone I've talked to thinks we are doomed, no matter who is elected." Robert Vicino, founder of Del Mar, Calif.-based Vivos, which constructs upscale community bunkers in Indiana (he believes coastal flooding scenarios preclude bunkers being safely built west of the Rockies), says, "Bill Gates has huge shelters under every one of his homes, in Rancho Santa Fe and Washington. His head of security visited with us a couple years ago, and for these multibillionaires, a few million is nothing. It's really just the newest form of insurance."
NDAs & Holllywood reporter (Score:2, Interesting)
So essentially a company in Utah that builds basement shelters is claiming it has lots of superstars who buy their bunkers... but it can't tell you who because NDAs. But all the superstars rush to Utah because their sales are up 700% they say.
And Bill Gates may also have a bunker because someone in an Indiana shelter company says that he spoke to an unnamed head of Gate's security team who told him Gates has them.
But hey, its from marketing director Brad Roberson, so in no way is this marketing!
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One of the points of having a survival bunker. . . (Score:2)
. . . . is people not KNOWING you have one. Because if people KNOW you have one, then everyone who does know (and everyone THEY have told) will want in.
The old Twilight Zone episode "The Shelter" is instructive, on this point. [wikipedia.org]
And then BOWLING ALLEYS and GARAGES ?? These people want to survive an apocalypse. . . .and they want to garage their Lamborghini ?? Additionally, looking at the floor-plan in the "Hollywood Reporter", and comparing it to offered bunkers by the providers mentioned in the article, th
Re:One of the points of having a survival bunker. (Score:5, Insightful)
And then BOWLING ALLEYS and GARAGES ?? These people want to survive an apocalypse. . . .and they want to garage their Lamborghini ??
Not an apocalypse, just torches, pitchforks, and guillotines. History shows us that the real criminals (the men who apply the money to make horrible things happen- for profit) lie low while figureheads are deprived of their heads and then scuttle out when the danger has passed, and also that people have short memories and will let them live when they do.
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Simple solution: Anti-personnel turrets...
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Many people are building "panic rooms" into their homes. They are multi-purpose, and the guys who know how to build the good ones hide them in plain sight.
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I hear that stadiums make great mass shelters....
Keep your bunkers. (Score:2)
I live right by a freight hub station and a wal-mart warehouse in BFE. While everyone else lives like a rat in a hole, I'm going to build my own flourishing metropolis and rule with an iron but fair fist. Hehe...
West coast flooding? (Score:2)
I live at 5000 feet ASL. If my house floods because of sea level rise, I think we're all pretty much doomed. Indiana will be under water long before Colorado.
Fear Factory (Score:3)
In Bowling for Columbine there's an animated video describing how scared Americans are (of just about anything). The number of bunkers screams fear to me - I'm sure there are a handful of such bunkers in the UK (or Europe, generally), they're mostly for politicians who must survive nuclear war, because only cockroaches will survive (apparently). I seriously doubt there's more than a couple for private citizens (and most of those are just swimming pools in the basement).
What's the point? I mean, if there's a nuclear war, you're better off just letting the galactic dice decide your fate. For low-level issues, such as no food for a few months, you're going to need to live in a tiny bunker for the entire duration. The rest of us will all just be mucking-in together to work out ways to collectively survive it. Sure, someone will come and steal the potatoes I'm growing in my back garden, but they can't steal all the potatoes in the neighbourhood. Besides, why steal them when you can just ask and we'll give you some?
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What's the point?
I imagine that most of this is just preparation they don't expect to ever actually use but accept that there is non-zero chance of a disaster. Natural disasters are pretty much a threat anywhere. For the US, the West coast has earthquakes and volcanos. East coast and gulf have hurricanes. In between, there are tornados. No matter how good your neighborhood is, there is certainly a chance that something could happen to cause it to lose electricity and other utilties for a couple of weeks. Since such a situat
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In other words, the 1% can afford to spend on 1% odds of disaster.
Given? (Score:3)
Given the increased frequency of terrorist bombings and mass shootings
Is that a given, though?
Just checking you've done your homework...
The well-stocked bunkers would be early targets (Score:2)
If there ever is a disaster or break-down of the type that requires people to resort to bunker living you can bet mobs of people will be quick to take their frustrations out on the nearest wealthy estate. These bunkers might stand for a long time without a concerted effort to destroy them, but they will be useless to protect their occupants for any length of time if they are attacked. That is unless those occupants also have a made the bunkers defensible and are harboring a force that can man those defens
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But even then - assume they have a private security force. Those people would need food as well - what's not to say that those folks bug out to take care of their own families. In reality one would need to make the bunker large enough to support your security staff and their families.
The whole "bunker mentality" just seems wrong to me - in reality there are very few scenarios where such a thing could actually help you. I suppose a hurricane might be one, but there you have advance notice and just leaving
Good deal the rich can die slowly... (Score:3)
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Frankly, if you have all the resources in the world, you're going to die long before "hundreds or thousands of years" anyways.
Hell, even if you believe in Biblical lifespans, you're talking a handful of people who've ever made "hundreds of years", much less "thousands of years"....
It's the marginal hedonic value of money, folks. (Score:5, Informative)
Scenario: You discover to your surprise that you can have your fill of every pleasure money can buy, and then you notice you've still got a mountain of that stuff lying around.
What to do?
(1) Pursue power. This never gets old, because there's other guys with mountains of money doing the same thing. No amount of power.is ever enough, because it's relative power that brings satisfaction.
(2) Serve humanity. The ability to amass money on this scale is a function of the scale of society, and that means that society's problems scale proportionately. The material resources you command could have solved all humanity's problems -- five thousand years ago. Today they're just a drop in a bucket, and that's a challenge.
(3) Build yourself a lavish Armageddon bunker.
(4) Any combination of the above.
It should be illegal for elected officials (Score:4, Insightful)
to construct private bunkers as a precaution against events they are elected to prevent. This is only fair, similar to placing the children of elected officials who vote for war on the front lines of those very wars.
soil dwellers' substrata equity (Score:2)
The Americas Are Now Officially 'Measles-Free' [slashdot.org]
In other news, the pox just adopted mark-to-market [wikipedia.org] accounting practices.
I figure this is how it works with The Donald, too. He wakes up in the morning with a novel idea for how to litigate one of his business partners—also known as contractual co-signatories—and mentally adds $300 million tax free to his personal net worth as he flosses his astonishingly sharp teeth.
Pity this won't show up on his tax returns for years and years. This, however, is a
Color me Saddened... (Score:2)
There may be more to this article but if true I thought Mr. Gates had a better bead on things.
If you build an inter-connected world you can't find safety by removing yourself from it. We are beyond the point of no return. It's peace prosperity or bust.
He could make it himself much safer by giving his money away... which in a way he has I suppose.
Still bums me out. I have faith in humanity, I wouldn't be here without them... ;-)
Reality TV show?? (Score:2)
No, you just *tell* them there has been a great catastrophe, and then you have a reality TV show with them down in their bunker. Then wait and see how long it takes before they figure out that they got punked.
Liberals protecting against risk of Trump winning (Score:2)
I note that all of the groups mentioned:
- Oscar Winners
- Sports stars
- Bill Gates
... are more likely than not to be liberals/democrats.
They aren't afraid of terrists. They are afraid that Trump might win.
And Bill Gates is of an age (same as me) to have acquired a life-long fear of the realistic possibility of global thermonuclear war. (BEFORE "War Games", during the Cuban Missile Crisis.)
If Trump wins, now you have TWO international leaders of nuclear-armed countries who are off-the-rails. Let the fun begin
Re: sure! (Score:5, Insightful)
I bet the bunkers built for the Hollywood anti-gun elite are packed with weapons.
Re: sure! (Score:5, Interesting)
You do know almost everyone has dropped the issue (Score:5, Insightful)
The left started to drop the issue in the 90's when Mr Clinton pointed out nobody wanted it. The issue had gained some traction in the 70s and 80s mostly because the anti-violence advocates formed an alliance with the racists (who were none to pleased that cheap manufacturing made guns affordable to the Black Panthers). The those racists got over their fears of Black guys with Guns, the alliance collapsed and the issue was lost.
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Yes, I've noticed how anti-gun Hollywood is; you can see it in the movies that come out of there.
I think the problem is that real guns are so disappointing. If you could make one that sprays endless bullets with no recoil, well that'd be a hoot.
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Re: sure! (Score:5, Insightful)
With the exception of people expecting to deal with explosions(where bunkers are a natural fit; and fairly commonly used in varying degrees of sophistication); a lot of this disaster-prep stuff falls into an unhelpful category of being both overprepared and underprepared: If you are concerned, it's pretty easy to justify enough supplies to weather a breakdown in our efficient-but-tightly-stretched supply chains; but you don't usually need a bunker to do that. If you have a crisis more serious than not being able to buy groceries for a few months in mind, however, the problem stops being "Do I have enough MREs?" and turns into "Am I set for subsistence farming and/or tribal warfare; and do I really want to bother with that shit anyway?" unpleasantly quickly.
It all seems aimed at a (not impossible; but not necessarily plausible) medium-size disaster; which will somehow be big enough that the 'stash of supplies in the basement' crowd is doomed; but small enough that your bunker isn't going to be plundered by local militias and there will be a society worth living in waiting for you when it's time to open the door again.
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Yeah, I am pretty sure I will be one of the first wave of people killed in the apocalypse.... It actually doesn't bother me much, though. I will make way for others to survive.
they're not wrong (Score:2)
If the seabeds' rockin' don't come a'knocking on my bunker door.
You are thinking am make joke...
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Ouch....that's kinda pessimistic, isn't it?
I don't have a ton of supplies, or bunker, but I am stocking up on arms and ammo. And I have friends that will all try to hook up if shit does bad. I don't expect it, but you never know.
And if nothing else, if hillary gets in....guns and ammo prices will skyrocket and stock will plummet.
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Ouch....that's kinda pessimistic, isn't it?
That's my MO. I am pretty pessimistic.
There is nothing after death and nothing we do matters beyond a few miles above our heads or a few millimeters outside our own skulls.
If we were to all disappear in a flash of green light, the galactic community would not even know we were gone. As a matter of fact, our own world would be better off.
I do enjoy breathing and feeling the wonder of existence, but I don't really fear death (as long as it isn't super painful).
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some of my friends know me as "the chemist" :)
Those friends have guns (and are good with them).
There is a group of about 20 of us that, while we may not be best mates we recognize each other's value in certain situations. Guns with requisite skill, gardening, wood carving, food preservation, etc. Everyone would have value to the whole.
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I'd say the main reason to go with precious metals--specifically gold--is its durability (in the 'does not noticeably suffer from oxidation' sense) and the fact that it's been used by many cultures for many years...because of that and its rarity. It's likely coins sometimes were considered for exchange purposes as worth what we'd call their scrap value, simply because the issuer was too far away for the locals to know who these Roman jokers are which would make fiat currency a bit hard to trade. (If the c
Re: sure! (Score:4, Interesting)
He had flown off carriers during the Vietnam war and had gone through nuclear training. His training had basically taught him that in at least a limited nuclear exchange, most of the stuff simply wouldn't go off. Nucs, at least then, were delicate things that were expected to often be shaken enough in the boost phase that many simply wouldn't work. It was a really fun exercise, to be honest. Studying how much concrete boils off from a particular size explosion, etc. This thing had decontamination showers, weapon lockers, a buried well head, steel shuttered loop holes for firing at mutants, a secret passage leading to a door hidden behind a bookcase, the works. Since he could pay for it from petty cash, it was no problem financially, just like the elite today.
Admit it, everyone here would do the same if they could. If for no other reason than the systems design exercise. Better keep it secret! [wikipedia.org]
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But in reality these bunker mentalities don't understand they can't survive for more than a few weeks anyway.
That's where you're wrong. It's a comforting story to tell yourself, but read the articles. I wasn't sure if this one [survivalcondo.com] wound up linked somewhere or not. These are facilities with vegetable gardens and extensive water and air recycling systems. Many also have above-ground solar and wind power in addition to large reserves of diesel fuel for the on-site generators. Besides that, they have supplies to last for a lot longer than a few weeks. Try months or up to a year.
That's why we sealed them off with cem
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Let me restate that for you, guns, water, food, medicine, energy of some form(for heat/light) and then gold and alcohol. Water would be the biggest issue, food heck, costco sells one year food bucket thingies for cheap. If Musk can make it to mars, how hard could it be to bunker down for a year?
Re:Fear is a good thing for business (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like gun sales have never been better. A lack of calming from leaders has led to a self survival mentality. If ISIS doesn't get to you, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, or aliens will. The one thing President Obama has done to feed the hysteria is a lack of ability to be calming in a crisis. He seems to say all the wrong things, and do all the wrong things to instill confidence for people. The next President will at least have to be better at fixing the problem at home if not abroad. You at least have to instill a false sense of confidence if nothing else. Otherwise the fear in people comes out, and it's usually not good.
I think what the rich fear is the poor, coming to their homes to reclaim what was lost.
Re:Fear is a good thing for business (Score:5, Insightful)
Well the rich/poor divide is a problem.
It is mostly due to both sides not understanding the other.
While many wealthy people worked hard or smart for their wealth. And many poor are there due to slacking off and bad life decisions. It isn't always so cut and dry as the old moral argument for being wealthy. There are degrees of luck especially for the super rich...
IBM may had wanted to have full license over DOS.
HP may had denied woz the rights to the Apple 1
That one lucky incident that got your name out just didn't happen.
Your parents didn't have a few million dollars for you to start out with.
Also for the poor.
You may had to deal with undiagnosed ADD
You could have low level autism without any additional help
The teachers and society said you wouldn't amount to anything
Your parents had no money to give you any advantages
That one chance for a break was lost.
As the rich see it the poor are just being lazy so giving them money will not encourage them to try harder.
While the poor see the rich of just holding onto their money without giving them a break so they can try again.
When you are rich you can take risks as failure is an option and try again. For the poor failure means death.
Re:Fear is a good thing for business (Score:5, Insightful)
The one thing i've observed from the rich is that many of them had an impressive amount of failures before the big success. They are sturdy as hell people.
Ford had 5 business fail before the well-known company finally emerged.
The most impressive of all is Colonel Sanders.
He failed over 900 times trying to have someone take up his chicken recipe. Over 900 fucking times. We are talking failing a job interview over 900 times and still going forward. He finally managed to create KFC out of that.
Compare a man who failed over 900 times and still stood strong, to this hipster hugspace/safespace trend today where people get emotionally triggered by the stupidest of shit such as a video game character showing titties. It's depressing.
Of course luck had a say with many of the rich people, but the one thing without which they would never have become rich was utter maniacal persistence.
You could say that without persistence, that luck would never have materialized.
Without persistence, you have no right to luck, and even if it strikes you have no right to long-term benefits from it without persistence.
It's the basis of all this shit.
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No matter if you're persistent or not, no one has a "right to luck".
Everyone has an equal chance of being lucky, doesn't matter who you are or what you do.
What you can say is that some people opened more opportunities for luck to manifest itself, but that is not guarantee, no matter how hard you influence the odds. It may as well be the ordinary Workaday Joe who ends up getting lucky.
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(.)(.)
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"While many wealthy people worked hard or smart for their wealth. And many poor are there due to slacking off and bad life decisions."
You are referring to decent people who made a fortune legitimately - which is wonderful.
Unfortunately most of the wealthy elite did not get there by working hard - they got there by profiting from the misery and misfortune of others and engaging in criminal activities.
Most poor people aren't poor due to bad decisions. They are poor because they are exploited by the wealthy
Re:Fear is a good thing for business (Score:5, Insightful)
How many millionaires do you know that made their fortune by working 40+ hours a week and saving every penny? Probably none.
Read "The Millionaire Next Door". You just described most millionaires. And you know them; you just don't know that they are millionaires.
Re:Fear is a good thing for business (Score:5, Insightful)
This, you would be surprised how many millionaires live in small houses and ride 8 year old honda civics.
Re:Fear is a good thing for business (Score:5, Informative)
Read "The Millionaire Next Door". You just described most millionaires. And you know them; you just don't know that they are millionaires.
Our society's lexicon needs a word for someone who has at least $10 million, because that is who people are really thinking of when they talk about millionaires. Either that or people who only have a few million but are still in their 20's/30's. No one is thinking of a regular middle class person who amassed $1.5 million in their retirement account by the age of 65.
It really is an important distinction, because having $1-2 million by retirement does not give the lifestyle anyone in the developed world attributes to "millionaires". $2 million provides about $60k-$80k in yearly income (inflation adjusted) throughout retirement. Hardly what anyone is thinking of when they refer to millionaires. I can virtually guarantee this isn't what the AC was thinking of when he mentioned them.
Having $10 million on the other hand will provide over half a million dollars of income for life. This is the lifestyle people mean when they refer to millionaires.
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$1,000,000 puts you in the top 0.5%. [wsj.com]
That link refers to annual income, not net worth (which is what the discussion was about). Like the parent said, every million will get you about $30k-$40k in income, hardly in the 1% for income. To be in the top 1% for net worth, you need about $7 million [wsj.com].
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"While many wealthy people worked hard or smart for their wealth. And many poor are there due to slacking off and bad life decisions."
You are referring to decent people who made a fortune legitimately - which is wonderful.
Unfortunately most of the wealthy elite did not get there by working hard - they got there by profiting from the misery and misfortune of others and engaging in criminal activities.
Most poor people aren't poor due to bad decisions. They are poor because they are exploited by the wealthy and live in a system where the average person - absent some stroke of luck - can at best have a moderate income if he/she works hard their entire life.
How many millionaires do you know that made their fortune by working 40+ hours a week and saving every penny? Probably none.
Certainly not the Bush's, Clinton's, Desmaris', Bronfman's, Johnson's, Buffets, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, etc.
Poor people are meant to stay poor; rich are meant to stay rich.
That is the will of our overlords - not the average joe.
How is it that someone working in a sweatshop is exploiting them? Sure, the factory owner could pay them western wages, but why? The minute they do someone else will build a factory and undercut their prices by lowering wages. If the wage or working conditions are too bad, people won't work there. The reason they work there isn't because someone is forcing them, it's because they chose to work in the sweatshop because it was better than not working in the sweatshop.
Same is true of child labor. The choice is
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Let's ask the dictionary, shall we?
Exploitation: the action or fact of treating someone unfairly in order to benefit from their work.
"the exploitation of migrant workers"
synonyms: taking advantage, abuse, misuse, ill-treatment, unfair treatment, oppression
"the exploitation of the poor"
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If you think the system is rigged and there is nothing you can do to change it then you are powerless to do anything.
But my experience has been that careful spending, planning and hard work IS all you need to be a millionaire.
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You confuse cause and effect. The rich don't want to give up the power economic oppression gives them, so they see whatever helps excuse it. Just like every ruling class ever.
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The wealthy own the mechanisms of the market, and they use this advantage to bleed everyone else dry. They own the politicians, too, so forget about being accountable to regulations or even having meaningful sets of regulations. And market accountability...? Too Big To Fail!
The disparity in wealth upsets the wealthy, too. So they inflame other kinds of conflict (among the working classes) to draw unwanted attention away from themselves.
Then they better get green house too (Score:2)
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And oxygen/water production in a complete autonomic bunker. Because once it comes down to laying siege to a bunker, the one outside can wait for a looooong time. The one inside may not.
Who's gonna wait? They're going to cover the air intakes and walk away, then come back later. Even people who have SCBA are about guaranteed to only have days of it, tops.
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It's been tried before, on an impressive scale [wikimedia.org]. Humans haven't figured out absolutely how to keep rats, cockroaches and bedbugs out of their domiciles, much less most persistent and clever pest of all: other humans.
It'd probably be worthwhile for the rich to consider what being rich actually means. It's not having a lot of gold. Gold through the ages has only been useful as specie because (a) it's pretty and (b) it didn't have much practical use other than being pretty.
What being rich means is having the
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I'm pretty sure about half of the population is in a state of mid-life crisis.
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If all your options are bad, your only option is to make a bad choice.
cf the dumpster fire falling off a cliff and sliding into the sea that is the 2016 election.
Re:Fear is a good thing for business (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether Obama has been merely thoughtful and cautious or actually indecisive and passive is something that can be debated, but whatever it is it has created something of an impression that he lacks an appearance of decisiveness and strong leadership.
I kind of wish he had made some bold moves, even if they weren't necessarily the most ideal moves, simply to demonstrate he was moving forward and not settling for a status quo ante.
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When immediate action is necessary, or an appearance of decisiveness & strong leadership is essential, the difference between 'thoughtful and cautious' and 'indecisive and passive' when it can be debated which it is...comes down to things like "Is this person my boss's relative?"
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I'll bite, aside from being a Russian matroyshka doll, what is it you expect Obama could do to calm ISIS, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, or aliens crises. Invade the Mid-East again? Arm the opposition in Syria with shoulder fired anti-plane weapons? Shoot Syrian and (preferably, in my opinion, Russian) planes out of the sky? I cannot imagine any of those calming Syria, or the rest of the world's skies when the shoulder fired weapons get sold to Daesh for some virgins. He could push back against the Russi
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*Most* likely violent death is an automobile accident.
Re:Fear is a good thing for business (Score:4, Insightful)
Until there's a war, in which case it's the war.
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Never forget the 7 million Jews who died in car accidents 1941 - 1945.
Re:Is this slashdot? (Score:4, Interesting)
No. It's the blog where you realize that the people you respected all your life aren't as high and mighty as you naively thought, and also suffer from many imperfections and lunacy that all of us suffer from.
But the fact that even those top people admit and recognize that it's a dead race between Trump and Hillary on who is worse as an individual, each being utterly horrible in their own characteristic way, should be a telling tale.
Of course, we will bury this revelation under a few tons of smoke-screen by utilizing people's fascination with bunkers and apocalypse-survival that entertainment has thankfully banked on and deeply spread far and wide.
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Bunkers are for sissies, real men move to Mars.
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Hopefully the blast buries the entrance/exit to these "bunkers"
Hopefully plugs up the toilet too.
Re:Is this slashdot? (Score:4, Insightful)
well all those "liberal" elitist "Oscar Winners, Sports Stars and Bill Gates " etc, who are building bunkers seems to believe what alex jones says and follow his advice in doing that, while denouncing his influence on hoi polloi.
oh the irony!
Re:Most rich people's houses aren't in very... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would think a superior solution to a fixed bunker would be some kind of specialized boat designed for long endurance. Wind turbines, fold out solar panels for electric power. Water could be supplied by marine water makers. Food supplies could be supplemented by fishing.
Simply being out on the water gets you away from the most common threats. Maybe there are mobile pirates you have to worry about, but there will always be fewer of them than roving mobs of people with cutting torches.
If you were super rich, why not look into retrofitting an oil drilling platform into a sea bunker?
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Re:Most rich people's houses aren't in very... (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with a conventional yacht is they're fuel pigs. I'd wager Allen's yacht runs a high powered generator continuously to maintain the internal electrical systems, ventilation, and so forth even when docked unless docked at a location where you could get an industrial grade shore power feed.
What I'm thinking of is more along the lines of a more purpose-built boat that would require much less continuous electrical power and what it needed could be taken from wind, solar or even wave generation from deployed buoys. Tesla-type Li battery storage for nights or periods of poor weather, although in a marine environment with wind turbines some kind of power could always be generated.
I could see a solar panel system that would fold out from the sides when at anchor, as well as wind turbines that could be folded down along with fixed panels for supplemental power when the boat was in motion. The folding stuff would be folded in poor weather or in transit and deployed as weather conditions allowed. With enough solar panels, you might even be able to provide air conditioning for smaller interior spaces during sunlight hours.
The idea would be the ability to have long-duration self-sustaining electric power at anchor. Firing the engines would be done only when you needed to move and the engines sized for minimal fuel consumption -- there's a lot of recreation trawlers with top speeds of 9-10 knots off single engines capable of a few thousand mile ranges on full fuel tanks.
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The problem with a conventional yacht is they're fuel pigs.
You really just need the yacht to get to your private island where the real survival compound is located.
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Yeah, there is a lower density of predators at sea, but there is also no cover whatsoever; nowhere to hide. And boats require drydocking for maintenance, or they eventually sink. Your idea of a fixed platform is even worse. It doesn't even have the defense of mobility/running away.
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I would think a superior solution to a fixed bunker would be some kind of specialized boat designed for long endurance.
Obviously what you want is a nuclear submarine. But what would probably be adequate is just any small submarine to use as a taxi, and a sub-aquatic "bunker". Nobody will be able to get to you there.
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Well, what you really want is a the starship Enterprise...
Obviously a nuclear powered submarine would be impossible even for Paul Allen money.
But even if Elon Musk designed a submarine, a submarine is simply too complex of a marine system to realistically manage (outside of the short-duration tethered submersibles used for finding wrecks).
A sub-surface habitat is an interesting idea, but I think the systems involved with air production and circulation would be too complex and the entire thing would be too d
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Boats need constant repairs. You obviously never knew anyone who has owned a boat. I can't think of a worse platform to bet your long term survival on than a boat in fact! Well i guess a plane would be a worse idea, or a train.
You just need a remote, self sufficient, and most importantly completely obscured location. If you read the book "the road" when they discover the secret bunker that some survivalist has built and never occupied, they don't want to stay too long lest they get complacent and sloppy. So
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No he means boat. And stop calling me Shirley.
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cannibalism
Well at least we'll have plenty of food.
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Depends on the feeding strategy doesn't it ... https://what-if.xkcd.com/105/ [xkcd.com]
Without storage, less than three years. Should be enough to get you through a nuclear winter though.
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Sure, blame us instead of the rich.
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The environmental calamity will be your least concern considering that
a) You have a bunker
b) everyone else doesn't
c) but they know what you got in there
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They better have terminator guards then, too. If you have to have armed people to defend you, then you've got to feed them, so now you need an even bigger bunker to hold more guards and more supplies.
It's almost like you'd be better off just having neighbors that don't want to kill you.
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And if supplies get scarce, give me one good reason why I, your guard, should not simply eliminate a, from my point of view, useless eater.
Re:Long term (Score:4, Interesting)
The article talks about battery power and long-life food but not climate control, water or sewage.
That's because an entire industry has grown up around scamming survivalists. Whether it's Jim Bakker selling $160 buckets of potato soup [rawstory.com] (and you can poop in the bucket later!), Glenn Beck's hugely overpriced gold [motherjones.com] or these guys selling luxury underground bunkers, the goal and method are the same as any other con; gain the mark's confidence using lies and half-truths, then take them for every penny they can get.
Building a bunker that could actually be lived in is secondary to increasing the profit margin, so they skimp on the basic construction and spend a little on cheap frills to hide the deficiencies. That's why the kitchen picture Ultimate Bunker website looks like every piece of shit house that's had superficial improvements done by someone trying to flip it for a profit.
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Or bottlecaps. I mean, come on.
The reason that a lot of these survivalists and preppers think that gold is the thing to have is because they've bought into the hype that gold is the thing to have. "The guy on the TV says I should have this if the world goes to shit. He's got his own TV show, so clearly he's onto something here."
That being said, I've known a few preppers, and it's hardly uniform that they're stockpiling gold. Actually, most of the ones I know focus on having a stockpile of food, water, bulle
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So, you actually WANT to survive, long term ?? (Score:2)
Let's posit, for a moment, that you had millions of dollars, and notice that a major, but not world-ending apocalypse was coming.
Me ? I'd buy a farm in a remote area, with decent climate and a good water supply. Hunting and fishing areas would be a bonus, but if we actually had some sort of apocalypse, the woods would be hunted bare, and the lakes and rivers drained of catchable fish.
A sufficient variety of breeding stock for food animals (various poultry, cows, perhaps sheep, goats, and rabbits) and work
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Who says they don't hoard ammo and seed/rations?
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we really want *surviving* a catastrophic event.
They're collectively the "B Ark".
Hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.
Strat
Re:Fascism Can't Last Forever, Baby (Score:5, Interesting)