Southeastern Preppers Network
Other Topics => News (Non-Political) => Topic started by: Carrot on January 23, 2017, 09:28:02 PM
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http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich
Here is an excerpt. I would copy and paste the entire story but this is a long-form article that would take a while to finish. *After getting further into the article, I have changed the title of my post to wealthy elites rather than liberal elites. It better describes the subject matter.
Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn’t usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. “If the world ends—and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble—getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass,” he told me recently. “Without them, I’m fucked.”
Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate’s Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat—a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb—than he is on the aftermath, “the temporary collapse of our government and structures,” as he puts it. “I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time.”
Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.
Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”
In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”
Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”
When Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm, considered his preparations, he decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”
For some, it’s just “brogrammer” entertainment, a kind of real-world sci-fi, with gear; for others, like Huffman, it’s been a concern for years. “Ever since I saw the movie ‘Deep Impact,’ ” he said. The film, released in 1998, depicts a comet striking the Atlantic, and a race to escape the tsunami. “Everybody’s trying to get out, and they’re stuck in traffic. That scene happened to be filmed near my high school. Every time I drove through that stretch of road, I would think, I need to own a motorcycle because everybody else is screwed.”
Huffman has been a frequent attendee at Burning Man, the annual, clothing-optional festival in the Nevada desert, where artists mingle with moguls. He fell in love with one of its core principles, “radical self-reliance,” which he takes to mean “happy to help others, but not wanting to require others.” (Among survivalists, or “preppers,” as some call themselves, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, stands for “Foolishly Expecting Meaningful Aid.”) Huffman has calculated that, in the event of a disaster, he would seek out some form of community: “Being around other people is a good thing. I also have this somewhat egotistical view that I’m a pretty good leader. I will probably be in charge, or at least not a slave, when push comes to shove.”
Over the years, Huffman has become increasingly concerned about basic American political stability and the risk of large-scale unrest. He said, “Some sort of institutional collapse, then you just lose shipping—that sort of stuff.” (Prepper blogs call such a scenario W.R.O.L., “without rule of law.”) Huffman has come to believe that contemporary life rests on a fragile consensus. “I think, to some degree, we all collectively take it on faith that our country works, that our currency is valuable, the peaceful transfer of power—that all of these things that we hold dear work because we believe they work. While I do believe they’re quite resilient, and we’ve been through a lot, certainly we’re going to go through a lot more.”
In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks. Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”
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Tell me about it!
How elite is a stained, prefab garden tub in your bugout doublewide?
(http://i.imgur.com/jfyi1TW.jpg)
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While I do applaud them for putting in some thought and effort toward prepping, I find the article leaves more questions for me than answers. The tone of the piece seems to be "these people spent a lot of money". I couldn't help but pick up on some things that to me seem to be missing.
- There were several mentions of guns and weapons, but only one where one of the people admitted to any kind of training or practice...and that was in archery. I'm not saying archery doesn't have it place in prepping, but one guy with a bow is not a very good defensive tactic unless he's starring in a samurai movie. Just like any other piece of gear, having guns is useless if you don't know how to employ them properly. I could go out and buy a NASCAR rig, but without training and practice, I'd turn myself into a bloody smear on the track. Guns are no different.
- The missile silos are a great idea in theory, and the guy building and selling them seems to have done a lot of homework on not having people go stir crazy. However, of all the articles that I've read about that project, I've never seen any mentions of practice runs or of any periods where everyone who will be living there have interacted. I think that's a recipe for disaster (and one of the reasons that this board exists); without being reasonably sure that all of the inhabitants are comfortable with each other and able to work together a SHTF situation would be untenable. It would be like buying a vacation condo to retire to sight unseen and then finding out, after you've sold your old house and moved in, that you can't stand your neighbors. Which brings me to the next point...
- The silo guy mentions rotating chores to prevent cliques from forming. I hate to say it, but at least 70% of people with $3 million to toss down are probably not in the habit of doing "chores", they expect someone else to do that for them. Even if there was some sort of written agreement or a provision in the purchase stipulating that chores were a part of the deal, I'm sure that a number of them will balk when the time comes, which is going to create friction.
- Skills, or lack thereof. This goes back to my point about guns. I read a lot in there about being stocked up, but very little about acquiring and practicing skills. For instance, one guy noted that he kept an airplane fueled up. OK, if you're worried about nukes, you have to factor EMP into the equation. And if it's an EMP, that airplane likely isn't going anywhere. So prudence would insist that he have an alternate plan of egress, along with the ability to execute that plan. Can he hike the distance to his BOL? Can he utilize a map and compass? The questions are almost limitless. Granted, some of them mention motorcycles, but the same principles apply. Can you reach where you're going on one tank? Do you have fuel reserves stored or cached, because if there's an EMP, the gas stations aren't going to be functioning? Do you have multiple routes mapped out and are you familiar with them, potential problems along the routes, and the time each takes to complete the journey? Is the motorcycle a low-tech model that is EMP-survivable?
I know that's all probably more than one article can cover and a lot of what I talked about is "deep dive", but the impression that the writer subtly exudes as the sentiment of the people he's covering seems to be "just throw money at it". At least they're moving in the right direction, and maybe they have thought about and addressed things like what I've pointed out. I just hate that a lot of people (not ones here, but the non-prepping public) might get the idea that shelling out scads of money without actually learning or being able to do anything is the way to prep or that you can only prep if you have a few million dollars just laying around.
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Tell me about it!
How elite is a stained, prefab garden tub in your bugout doublewide?
(http://i.imgur.com/jfyi1TW.jpg)
we hauled ours outside to use the space in the house and now it waters the wildlife lol
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Lol, we did the same with our home in FL! Got lots more room in the master bathroom taking that monstronsity out.
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An interesting part of the article cited above. Indicates to me that they might invest in a silo but won't be there long, by choice or eviction.
Nemo
At the same time, though, they invest in the mechanics of escape. He recalled a dinner in New York City after 9/11 and the bursting of the dot-com bubble: “A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.” One of the guests was skeptical, Dugger said. “He leaned forward and asked, ‘Are you taking your pilot’s family, too? And what about the maintenance guys? If revolutionaries are kicking in doors, how many of the people in your life will you have to take with you?’ The questioning continued. In the end, most agreed they couldn’t run.”
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From the same article, but something we pay attention to and should take note of on Thursday.
Nemo
Every year since 1947, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a magazine founded by members of the Manhattan Project, has gathered a group of Nobel laureates and other luminaries to update the Doomsday Clock, a symbolic gauge of our risk of wrecking civilization. In 1991, as the Cold War was ending, the scientists set the clock to its safest point ever—seventeen minutes to “midnight.”
Since then, the direction has been inauspicious. In January, 2016, after increasing military tensions between Russia and NATO, and the Earth’s warmest year on record, the Bulletin set the clock at three minutes to midnight, the same level it held at the height of the Cold War. In November, after Trump’s election, the panel convened once more to conduct its annual confidential discussion. If it chooses to move the clock forward by one minute, that will signal a level of alarm not witnessed since 1953, after America’s first test of the hydrogen bomb. (The result will be released January 26th.)
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Did you remodel the bathroom, or just leave a big ugly hole?
I've joked about making it into a catfish pond.
But in all seriousness I could put some wire shelving in there and grow lights and make it a seed starting area.
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And its closer to midnight.
Nemo
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2017/01/26/doomsday-clock-end-world-nuclear-weapons-climate-change-donald-trump/97077736/
Doomsday Clock ticks closer to apocalypse and 1 person is to blame
USA Today Network Mary Bowerman , USA TODAY Network Published 10:21 a.m. ET Jan. 26, 2017
Scientists moved the hands of the Doomsday Clock closer to midnight on Thursday amid increasing worries over nuclear weapons and climate change.
Each year, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a nonprofit that sets the clock, decides whether the events of the previous year pushed humanity closer or further from destruction. The symbolic clock is now two-and-a-half minutes from midnight, the closest it's been to midnight since 1953, when the hydrogen bomb was first tested. Scientists blamed a cocktail of threats ranging from dangerous political rhetoric to the potential of nuclear threat as the catalyst for moving the clock closer towards doomsday.
“This year’s Clock deliberations felt more urgent than usual…as trusted sources of information came under attack, fake news was on the rise, and words were used by a President-elect of the United States in cavalier and often reckless ways to address the twin threats of nuclear weapons and climate change,” Rachel Bronson, the executive director and publisher of Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, said in a statement.
While many threats played into the decision to move the clock 30 seconds forward from where it was in 2016, one person in particular prompted the scientists to act.
"Never before has the Bulletin decided to advance the clock largely because of the statements of a single person. But when that person is the new president of the United States, his words matter," David Titley and Lawrence M. Krauss of the Bulletin wrote in an New York Times op-ed.
The Bulletin pointed to President Donald Trump's careless rhetoric on nuclear weapons and other issues as well as his troubling stance on climate change.
“Current political situation in the U.S. is of particular concern,” Titley of the Bulletin Science and Security Board said. “The Trump administration needs to state clearly, unequivocally it accepts climate change caused by human activity…There are no alternative facts here.”
Last year, the clock remained at three minutes from midnight. It was moved to three minutes in 2015 where it was previously at five minutes to midnight.
Manhattan Project scientists, concerned about the first atomic weapons, founded the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in 1945. They created the clock two years later, and update its minute hand each year.
This CEO got laser eye surgery to prep for an apocalypse
According to the group, the clock “conveys how close we are to destroying our civilization with dangerous technologies of our own making.”
The threat of nuclear warfare plays heavily into the time on the clock, as do the dangers of climate change the threat from cyber technology, according to the group’s website.
The decision is made by the board of the nonprofit Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' along with input from a board of sponsors which includes 15 Nobel Laureates, according to the group.
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These were the same people calling us crazy 8 years ago.
http://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/technology/article129232199.html
Bomb-shelter builder stays busy as customers prep for ‘Trumpocalypse’
By Gordon Dickson
gdickson@star-telegram.com
MURCHISON
Inside his football field-size warehouse an hour’s drive southeast of Dallas, Gary Lynch is busy trying to keep up with orders for his solid-steel bomb shelters.
He offers visitors a tour of a 600-square-foot model under construction for a Saudi customer.
Right now, it’s just a steel shell, he said, but when the work is done it will be a luxurious underground bunker with a master bedroom, four bunk beds, a composting toilet, a living room with satellite television capability, filtered air and water, and a storage closet with room for months of food.
Lynch explains that orders for his most expensive shelters, which can cost as much as several million dollars, have increased since the November election.
“It definitely has picked up a little as Donald Trump emerged as president,” said Lynch, general manager of Rising S Co. on the outskirts of the rural city of Murchison. Lynch said some customers even half-jokingly say they’re trying to protect themselves from a “Trumpocalypse” or “Trumpnado.”
“There’s some people who maybe even voted for Donald Trump and may be worried some of the riots are going to get out of hand and there’s going to be social or civil unrest,” he said.
“Then you’ve got people who didn’t vote for him and are thinking that now that he’s president maybe he’s going to start a war. There’s definitely been some renewed interest from people since the election.”
Doomsday prepping — the act of stockpiling food and other essentials in a reinforced, often-underground shelter — used to be mostly associated with Libertarian-leaning Americans who feared their own government would turn on them.
But now that Trump has taken office, some centrists and left-leaning folks also are building bomb shelters under their homes and businesses, apparently fearing either civil strife or war with an external enemy.
Sales of Rising S’s most luxurious shelters have jumped 700 percent in recent months, he said. Lynch didn’t provide specific data on how many units he typically sells, but he said Rising S Co. recorded about $14 million in sales during the past year.
Although Lynch credits Trump’s surprising rise to power for the latest sales spike, he said a similar jump in sales occurred eight years ago when President Obama took office.
He has been building shelters for 13 years.
“When a Republican is president, the left wants to buy a bunker,” he said. “It’s the opposite when a Democrat is president.”
Popular phrases
The phrase “#Trumpocalypse” has taken on a life of its own on social media such as Twitter.
And a quick search online shows many other examples of people taking advantage of Trump’s knack for controversy to sell their fare.
$8.3 million Most expensive bunker on Rising S Co.’s website. It includes a game room, green house, gun range and bowling alley.
For example, in Pearsall, south of San Antonio, a Craigslist seller named Dan was offering used buses for $3,000 to $5,000, and explaining on his advertisement that “They make good Trump Bunkers and Bomb Shelters.”
“You Know Who’s Finger will be on the Button,” the ad continues. “Make America Great Again. Buy a Bus. All are welcome. Pro Donald. Pro Hilary. (sic) Can we all be friends again?”
Cold War roots
America has a long history of building bomb shelters, going back to the days of the Cold War with the Soviet Union shortly after World War II.
In the 1950s and 1960s, thousands of home owners built underground escape rooms — something that was encouraged by President John F. Kennedy, a Democrat who presided over the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis that nearly brought the U.S. and Russia to nuclear blows.
America’s bunker mentality is the stuff of movies and historical lore. The desire for blast-proof walls, filtrated air and water, and composting toilets is deeply embedded in the national psyche.
And, although it’s an issue that typically only comes up during a leadership change, domestic strife or a global crisis, the desire to be safe from harm — to have a place where loved ones can hunker down indefinitely — seems to always burn in the nation’s collective belly.
Tornadoes, too
It’s a different story with storm shelters, similar structures that can be built either underground or as a “safe room” within a home. Storm shelters tend to grow in popularity after a major disaster such as the tornado in 1997 that killed 27 people in the Central Texas city of Jarrell, or the one two years later that killed 36 people in the Oklahoma City area.
According to the Lubbock-based National Storm Shelter Association, which applies its official seal to shelters that meet high construction and design standards, “sales are half what they were three years ago,” executive director Ernst Kiesling said.
After a major incident such as a tornado or hurricane, Federal Emergency Management Agency money can sometimes be made available to offset some of the cost of shelter construction, depending upon how states and cities use the federal funds.
But the demand for shelters usually only lasts about as long as the cleanup, Kiesling said.
People are worried Trump is going to take us to war.
“After an incident, there will be an upsurge among the public, but it it will subside rather quickly,” he said.
Storm shelters can be underground, or they can be built at ground level in a home. They can be made of steel, fiberglass or other materials.
Although they typically don’t have the long-term accommodations for people to live in indefinitely, like a bomb shelter, storm shelters can also provide residents with a “safe room” to escape dangers such as gunfire or a home intruder.
Doomsday clock moves forward
The Doomsday Clock was moved 30 seconds closer to midnight on Thursday, as the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said reckless language over nuclear weapons and a growing disregard of scientific expertise on climate change put humanity in its greatest peril for more than 50 years
The Associated Press
New ‘atomic age’
But usually it’s concerns about enemies of the state — whether foreign or domestic — that motivates someone to install a bunker in their home or business.
Peter Westwick teaches a class on the atomic age at the University of Southern California, and he sometimes shows his students a photo that he took just a few years ago of a commercial building in Los Angeles called Atlas Survival Shelters. The otherwise-nondescript metal building featured an outside display of a bright yellow bomb shelter the size of fuel truck.
The photo illustrates how little has changed about Americans’ concerns for the long-term security of their republic since the 1950s, he said.
“I sometimes use a picture I took of a shelter manufacturer here in L.A., just off the 5 freeway, to show these fears haven’t gone away,” Westwick said in an email. “But they have changed, to a broader doomsday/survivalism instead of just nuclear fear.”
Of the current interest in shelters, Westwick said, “I think you could indeed say that the losing side in election often takes a catastrophic view of the outcome. You might consider the migration to the Idaho, Montana, Wyoming region by conservative or Libertarian adherents following Obama’s election.
“There’s an issue here with whether the survivalists fear an external enemy (e.g. the Soviet Union, albeit aided by Communists in American society) or an internal one (e.g. the Idaho survivalists apparently fearing their own government and fellow citizens).
“The current fears seem to be more of Trump provoking an external enemy, whether another state or stateless terrorists,” he said.
Customers big and small
Often, customers who buy bomb shelters are wealthy.
Steve Huffman, founder of the Reddit social news aggregate site, acknowledged in a recent New Yorker story that he is obsessed with surviving a catastrophe.
In that same article, many other wealthy elite from New York, San Francisco and other tony places say they’re stocking up on gas masks, motorcycles (more nimble and fuel-efficient than cars during a crisis) and other essentials to escape from the expected confusion and panic that likely would envelope and overtake those who had failed to prepare.
But bomb shelters don’t have to break the bank.
Some manufacturers offer closet-size underground bunkers for as little as $5,000.
At Rising S Co., Lynch said he and his roughly 40 employees can’t sell anything that cheap. They use the finest, Alabama-made steel and an air purification system with a patent pending on its design — and materials like that come at a cost.
Rising S Co.’s shelters also feature a water purification system that can be designed to pull water from an underground well, a municipal water system or a storage tank.
But Lynch said he can set up customers with an entry-level shelter approximately 4 feet by 6 feet for roughly $10,000.
In fact, he has one of those basic models under construction right now in his warehouse off Texas 31 in Murchison, right alongside the underground virtual palace his crew is building for that wealthy Saudi customer.
Gordon Dickson: 817-390-7796, @gdickson
Read more here: http://www.star-telegram.com/news/business/technology/article129232199.html#storylink=cpy
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Zuckerberg Dismisses Reports He Is Building a Huge ‘Doomsday Bunker’ Under His Hawaiian Compound, Insists It’s ‘Just a Little Shelter’
In an interview with Bloomberg about a week ago, he addressed rumors that he is building an underground facility beneath his sprawling 1,400-acre estate on the island of Kauai.
“’No, I think that’s just like a little shelter. It’s like a basement’, Zuckerberg, the third wealthiest person in the world behind Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, told Bloomberg’s Emily Chang.