Is all this bunker-building a sign the 1% know something we don’t
No.
and are preparing for end times?
Yes.
They fantasize constantly about their wealth becoming even more disproportionate to the general population - even if it, in absolute numbers, collapses. They crave more power over people, and are deluded enough to think that in a crisis scenario, their wealth will mean anything.
Yeah these bunkers would just be the homes of warlords that kill billionaires - probably the heads of their own security teams.
I’ve heard floated the idea that they will try and stop this happening by having remote detonation collars on the families of their security team.
Like anyone would ever put exploding collars before shooting in the face whoever proposed it
Who are the assholes who would take that job? "But Honey, I get weekends off and dental! Just put on the decapitation collar... Please?"
They could store the families in a separate underwater bunker built on the ruins of a death cult's sunken wizard tower too.
Is this a reference to the snail?
I hope we still have some concrete during the apocolypse in order to seal those fuckers in.
Water and a couple bags of quickrete from the local hammer barn should do it.
See anything that could possibly be air ventilation or filtration, destroy it and seal it up.
It's cute that they think the society that supports them is going to continue to support them in their bunker and they only have to worry about attacks. What are they going to do when the plumbing breaks or the canned food runs out?
Is it? Is it? Short of an utter and complete societal collapse the likes of which we have basically never seen, history tells us the billionaires will emerge from any catastrophe with even greater wealth.
During WWII the Nazis got their factories bombed to smithereens. Entire cities like Dresden got essentially wiped off the map. Can you guess what happened to the rich industrialists who benefitted from slave labor? That's right, they came out of their bunkers and proceeded to become richer than ever and are still household names to this day. Oh, and of course while everyone was on food stamps/rations the rich were having lavish banquets.
Capital is power, by definition. Instead of hoping for an apocalypse so bad all capital vanishes and even gold and land don't hold any value, maybe we should focus on wealth distribution through democratic means.
I don’t think I would personally like that if I were a billionaire. Would like to prove that either way though.
The idea of a doomsday bunker being dumb and mostly pointless aside, a flammable moat is the best defense system they can come up with? In a doomsday scenario, why would someone waste precious good fuel to set a moat on fire for a few days? Instead of using, say, booby traps?
And of course Yudkowsky, the writer of the world's most boring Harry Potter fan fiction had to chime in with an even worse take.
They clearly didn't read Leiningen vs The Ants.
Yeah there’s no way mines aren’t a better worse idea.
Explosives or hole in the ground? Not that it really matters, both could be better worse ideas
Here is a silly take:
The billionaires could use their doomsday bunker money to try and help solve the global issues we are having instead of just saying "fuck it I'm going underground."
It's too late. The billionaires are well aware it's far too late.....
The climate change and insane weather patterns that we're experiencing are a byproduct of the carbon that was emitted into the atmosphere in the 1970s. That's 50+ more years of carbon accumulation that we haven't even really been able to measure. In another 50 years, the feedback loops will be very underway and the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of the AMOC, and massive heat domes will probably kill most people on Earth.
It may be too late to avoid the damage of excess carbon in the atmosphere but these fucks have enough resources and political connections to try and make the lives of us that will be very much negatively effected by all of this slight less shitty. Instead they double down on the only thing they know to do which is 'fuck you I got mine'
Doesn't matter. They're going to burn with the rest of us. They won't be able to keep staff as it gets worse, and many of them lack any real ability to care for themselves. Pampered fucks are facing a grim future they made sure was going to happen.
The staff won't keep them. What security guard is going to agree to protect Elon Musk after the apocalypse? They'll shoot him in the back and take the keys to the kitchen.
These things have been thought through. The money may be worthless, but the highly controlled access to food, guns, ammo and medicine would be adequate leverage.
I expect, at some point, a leader would emerge with more cred than, "I started a company, " but they'd need to get permanent access and they'd have the same problem: control, rationing.
All this stuff is just people fantasizing about being smart and solving hard problems. The truest hard problem is we are not meant to live alone or like Morlocks.
There are ways to have a retreat hidden in plain site.
I mean you say this but our species has a long history of people serving authoritarian monsters. I think you're vastly overestimating humans ability to say this is messed up I should do something about it. Most people just keep their heads down.
Usually because those authoritarians have the power to kill them. Armed guards have the power to kill Elon.
And how do they have that power? Where does it come from?
By holding the purse strings (the economy will have collapsed) and by making the laws (which won't exist anymore).
Also, I think you underestimate the loyalty of a paid security staff when they stop getting paid.
Yeah, once the global economy collapses, their billions are worthless and the people with the guns are the most powerful. How long until their private security force is like "hold on, why are we following you again?"
You section off the food and booze, so that only you can access it and then have two security teams that never intermingle. Nothings guaranteed, but it would be harder to coup you.
Sounds perfect until the security team takes your wife and children hostage.
There was an article where a reporter sat in on a discussion between Tech Lords, where one actually proposed shock collars on "The Staff" to keep them loyal.
"The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or 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.""
bunkers are terrible in general because of air/exhaust problems. If you know where they are you can just tape all the vents shut. What they should be investing in is submersibles.
Either way this a grotesque squandering of society's resources.
I say we convince them society is collapsing, let them hide in their bunkers, wait for the flaming moat fuel to run out, then wall them in.
No need for a wall, just grade over it all with some bulldozers, plant some trees, and make a park where my dog can have a nice place to shit while I read a book.
I don't know... do you want to risk them finding a way to dig themselves out?
I have Great Danes, they'll never dig through that much dog shit.
Pour concrete down the ventilation shafts before making the park. They won't realize what's happened until they're too oxygen deprived to do anything except panic for a few minutes and then asphyxiate.
How? There will be no working class down there to wipe their arsses for them, never mind dig for them.
Podcaster Christina Randall, who has over 1.58 million subscribers, thinks so. Randall recently observed that Zuckerberg’s reported bunker is one of approximately 15 end-of-days projects being undertaken by billionaires worldwide and said the Biblical Book of Revelation, which predicts the end of the world, is being fulfilled. “Revelation 6:15 says that the kings of the Earth, the princes, the generals, the rich, the mighty and every slave and every free man hid in caves and among the rocks of the mountains,” Randall said.
Okay, the guardian
The best defense is a strong community that loves you. Literally living around you.
I told you guys. I've been waiting for you guys to catch up for ages, so we can go drag these fucks out of their homes, now they've gone and built moats
The good thing is that these moats need fuel to work which means they'll eventually stop burning.
Lava moat is better, stops zombies and creepers
An enterprising person could siphon off the fuel to power their own survival and leave the paranoid billionaire without as much protection.
10 Zuckerfield Lane
I feel that I became a little bit stupider after reading this article.
I love how they think we're going to try to break in and hurt them. We really are just going to entomb them in their bunkers and seal off any intake and exhaust.
If we as a species survives the climate collapse and finds a way to flourish again, archeologists will find these bunkers and think they where built by slaves to celebrate their rulling pharaohs.
Oh, and billionares getting bunkers is a new trend? Bill Gates has had one since he was CEO of Microsoft and HE was following the trend already.
This is true. We will entomb them.
Even if the world does turn to absolute shit and many of us die, it’s the not the billionaires in their bunkers who will the last ones standing.
If there’s any hope at all it will be with the remaining pockets of communities outside who learn to abolish capitalism and just live and support each other in a sustainable way. No one can survive long alone.
Any billionaire in their bunker will be entombed, and if they come out they’ll just get lynched.
I wonder if this is part of a cyclical history and this is how we ended up with kings/nobility in the first place? Like we've been in this situation before where the Earth's climate goes to shit and the only people with the resources to make it through the Dark Ages are this class of wealthy individuals who were also the cause of the Dark Ages, but were able to build bunkers/castles to make it through their obscene wealth that they had accumulated.
So at some point in a few hundred years, we'll have these kingdoms carved out, all centered on these new tech billionaires and other families that were able to carve out their own fiefdoms. I'd love to see a "fantasy" series that starts out as sort of typical Fantasy, with maybe medieval technology, but then gradually over time it's revealed that they're survivors of a post-apocalypse (though I'm sure it's been around for decades, I know Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series kind of fits in that realm, along with Dungeon Crawl Classics for an RPG). The "Great Families" will be revealed to be the Musks, Gates', Bezos', Zuckerburgs, Ballmers, Ellisons, Pages, and whoever else has been building their own bunkers in secret.
This just proves how capitalism rewards the inanely stupid - these parasites cosplaying as doomsday preppers (who already are not known for their firm grip on reality) don't realize that any event which would cause them to need such a bunker would also most likely destroy the very thing that attributes any kind of value to the power-coupons they've been hoarding - ie, the economy that only exists thanks to the working class.
Also, good luck to them when the well-armed rent-a-goons they hired to protect their little bunkers finds out the money they are being paid is all of a sudden completely worthless and that the governments that guaranteed private property rights is no longer around to protect them from the very same well-armed rent-a-goons. It would be a shame if nobody was around to film the anarcho-capitalist comedy that would ensue...
Naaaaaaaaaniiiiiiii?? You're telling me the people with guns will call the shots in an apocalyptic event because money will lose its value??? IMPOSSIBRU!!!
This is the best case scenario.
We the under classes scare them into their bunkers.
We cut off all forms of communication with them.
We seal them in so they can't change their minds.
We switch the rules to "Socialize the profits and privatize the losses."
There is only so many in the .0001% that need to be taken off the board and left to play with their toys inside their gilded cages. If they go voluntarily then how can they say that it is wrong, especially if no one is listening.
Congrats, you won capitalism. Please proceed to the winners bunker for your prize. Non-compliance will be met with dinner forks.
It's a sign that they're paranoid as fuck and never learned to share or play nicely with others.
This is not a new trend or something specific to billionaires. Home fallout shelters were popular during the Cold War.
I think the AI drone war is going to be in the next 10 years. The way drones are already being used with FPV, the next step is AI image recognition. At $600 a pop for FPV, we are nearing the point where AI can take over. The FPV drones are effective at 1 in 3 targets. That is far far cheaper than artillery or any other weapon system in all of modern military history. Millions of autonomous drones could be a hard thing to stop and a loss economically. Every time some major shift happens like this, it seems someone always pulls the trigger and tries to use it. The US arms industry is too focused on their high end stuff. What is the response to wave after wave of hundreds of thousands of drones that target indiscriminately and are released?
I dunno, but could you email your congressperson this? I imagine you're seeing previews in Ukraine.
My best guess is lines of AI controlles guns with dumb bullets firing at the sky. The first wave will be painful depending on scale, but a country in need should be able to have their best and brightest have something up and running in a few days.
This occuring to the USA would likely result in an awfully strong response with whatever they've been coming up with.
The problem is that every step I can think of to use against AI drones is also a more potent weapon when they control it too.
Like okay, it is easy to set up a high power diode laser that can target any image sensors. The laser can move fast and target objects far faster than any weapons system and do so cheaply. However reversing this, that same system can target all human eyes exactly the same way, permanently blinding thousands of people in under a minute.
EMP would probably be the way to go at that point
Maybe we can just let the drones shoot at each other and everyone else just has a picnic and watches?
Anyone who thinks the end times are near in any capacity is some flavor of moron.
You're either one of the rich fucks or one of their useful idiots if you go about doomsaying like you're Rorschach from Watchmen.
We have the means to destroy ourselves, and there are a lot of truly stupid people who have power over those means. I don't say I personally believe we will all die soon, but I can see how someone might.
Mate it's not going to be atomics. It's climate change and we're just at the beginning of it. Atomics will only be a consequence of climate change.
Yea I didn’t only mean atomic war, the same stupid people who have power over that means to an end also are important factors in if we will all die of climate change.
No.
Yes.
They fantasize constantly about their wealth becoming even more disproportionate to the general population - even if it, in absolute numbers, collapses. They crave more power over people, and are deluded enough to think that in a crisis scenario, their wealth will mean anything.
Yeah these bunkers would just be the homes of warlords that kill billionaires - probably the heads of their own security teams.
I’ve heard floated the idea that they will try and stop this happening by having remote detonation collars on the families of their security team.
Like anyone would ever put exploding collars before shooting in the face whoever proposed it
Who are the assholes who would take that job? "But Honey, I get weekends off and dental! Just put on the decapitation collar... Please?"
They could store the families in a separate underwater bunker built on the ruins of a death cult's sunken wizard tower too.
Is this a reference to the snail?
I hope we still have some concrete during the apocolypse in order to seal those fuckers in.
Water and a couple bags of quickrete from the local hammer barn should do it.
See anything that could possibly be air ventilation or filtration, destroy it and seal it up.
It's cute that they think the society that supports them is going to continue to support them in their bunker and they only have to worry about attacks. What are they going to do when the plumbing breaks or the canned food runs out?
Is it? Is it? Short of an utter and complete societal collapse the likes of which we have basically never seen, history tells us the billionaires will emerge from any catastrophe with even greater wealth.
During WWII the Nazis got their factories bombed to smithereens. Entire cities like Dresden got essentially wiped off the map. Can you guess what happened to the rich industrialists who benefitted from slave labor? That's right, they came out of their bunkers and proceeded to become richer than ever and are still household names to this day. Oh, and of course while everyone was on food stamps/rations the rich were having lavish banquets.
Capital is power, by definition. Instead of hoping for an apocalypse so bad all capital vanishes and even gold and land don't hold any value, maybe we should focus on wealth distribution through democratic means.
I don’t think I would personally like that if I were a billionaire. Would like to prove that either way though.
The idea of a doomsday bunker being dumb and mostly pointless aside, a flammable moat is the best defense system they can come up with? In a doomsday scenario, why would someone waste precious good fuel to set a moat on fire for a few days? Instead of using, say, booby traps?
And of course Yudkowsky, the writer of the world's most boring Harry Potter fan fiction had to chime in with an even worse take.
They clearly didn't read Leiningen vs The Ants.
Yeah there’s no way mines aren’t a better worse idea.
Explosives or hole in the ground? Not that it really matters, both could be better worse ideas
Here is a silly take:
The billionaires could use their doomsday bunker money to try and help solve the global issues we are having instead of just saying "fuck it I'm going underground."
It's too late. The billionaires are well aware it's far too late.....
The climate change and insane weather patterns that we're experiencing are a byproduct of the carbon that was emitted into the atmosphere in the 1970s. That's 50+ more years of carbon accumulation that we haven't even really been able to measure. In another 50 years, the feedback loops will be very underway and the acidification of the oceans, the collapse of the AMOC, and massive heat domes will probably kill most people on Earth.
It may be too late to avoid the damage of excess carbon in the atmosphere but these fucks have enough resources and political connections to try and make the lives of us that will be very much negatively effected by all of this slight less shitty. Instead they double down on the only thing they know to do which is 'fuck you I got mine'
Doesn't matter. They're going to burn with the rest of us. They won't be able to keep staff as it gets worse, and many of them lack any real ability to care for themselves. Pampered fucks are facing a grim future they made sure was going to happen.
The staff won't keep them. What security guard is going to agree to protect Elon Musk after the apocalypse? They'll shoot him in the back and take the keys to the kitchen.
These things have been thought through. The money may be worthless, but the highly controlled access to food, guns, ammo and medicine would be adequate leverage.
I expect, at some point, a leader would emerge with more cred than, "I started a company, " but they'd need to get permanent access and they'd have the same problem: control, rationing.
All this stuff is just people fantasizing about being smart and solving hard problems. The truest hard problem is we are not meant to live alone or like Morlocks.
There are ways to have a retreat hidden in plain site.
I mean you say this but our species has a long history of people serving authoritarian monsters. I think you're vastly overestimating humans ability to say this is messed up I should do something about it. Most people just keep their heads down.
Usually because those authoritarians have the power to kill them. Armed guards have the power to kill Elon.
And how do they have that power? Where does it come from?
By holding the purse strings (the economy will have collapsed) and by making the laws (which won't exist anymore).
Also, I think you underestimate the loyalty of a paid security staff when they stop getting paid.
Yeah, once the global economy collapses, their billions are worthless and the people with the guns are the most powerful. How long until their private security force is like "hold on, why are we following you again?"
You section off the food and booze, so that only you can access it and then have two security teams that never intermingle. Nothings guaranteed, but it would be harder to coup you.
Sounds perfect until the security team takes your wife and children hostage.
There was an article where a reporter sat in on a discussion between Tech Lords, where one actually proposed shock collars on "The Staff" to keep them loyal.
"The billionaires considered using special combination locks on the food supply that only they knew. Or 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.""
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prepper-bunkers-apocalypse-survival-richest-rushkoff
Time to start building guillotines, boys and girls.
bunkers are terrible in general because of air/exhaust problems. If you know where they are you can just tape all the vents shut. What they should be investing in is submersibles.
Either way this a grotesque squandering of society's resources.
If.
Urge to build guillotines intensifies.
I say we convince them society is collapsing, let them hide in their bunkers, wait for the flaming moat fuel to run out, then wall them in.
No need for a wall, just grade over it all with some bulldozers, plant some trees, and make a park where my dog can have a nice place to shit while I read a book.
I don't know... do you want to risk them finding a way to dig themselves out?
I have Great Danes, they'll never dig through that much dog shit.
Pour concrete down the ventilation shafts before making the park. They won't realize what's happened until they're too oxygen deprived to do anything except panic for a few minutes and then asphyxiate.
How? There will be no working class down there to wipe their arsses for them, never mind dig for them.
Okay, the guardian
The best defense is a strong community that loves you. Literally living around you.
I told you guys. I've been waiting for you guys to catch up for ages, so we can go drag these fucks out of their homes, now they've gone and built moats
The good thing is that these moats need fuel to work which means they'll eventually stop burning.
Lava moat is better, stops zombies and creepers
An enterprising person could siphon off the fuel to power their own survival and leave the paranoid billionaire without as much protection.
10 Zuckerfield Lane
I feel that I became a little bit stupider after reading this article.
I love how they think we're going to try to break in and hurt them. We really are just going to entomb them in their bunkers and seal off any intake and exhaust.
If we as a species survives the climate collapse and finds a way to flourish again, archeologists will find these bunkers and think they where built by slaves to celebrate their rulling pharaohs.
Oh, and billionares getting bunkers is a new trend? Bill Gates has had one since he was CEO of Microsoft and HE was following the trend already.
This is true. We will entomb them.
Even if the world does turn to absolute shit and many of us die, it’s the not the billionaires in their bunkers who will the last ones standing.
If there’s any hope at all it will be with the remaining pockets of communities outside who learn to abolish capitalism and just live and support each other in a sustainable way. No one can survive long alone.
Any billionaire in their bunker will be entombed, and if they come out they’ll just get lynched.
I wonder if this is part of a cyclical history and this is how we ended up with kings/nobility in the first place? Like we've been in this situation before where the Earth's climate goes to shit and the only people with the resources to make it through the Dark Ages are this class of wealthy individuals who were also the cause of the Dark Ages, but were able to build bunkers/castles to make it through their obscene wealth that they had accumulated.
So at some point in a few hundred years, we'll have these kingdoms carved out, all centered on these new tech billionaires and other families that were able to carve out their own fiefdoms. I'd love to see a "fantasy" series that starts out as sort of typical Fantasy, with maybe medieval technology, but then gradually over time it's revealed that they're survivors of a post-apocalypse (though I'm sure it's been around for decades, I know Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun series kind of fits in that realm, along with Dungeon Crawl Classics for an RPG). The "Great Families" will be revealed to be the Musks, Gates', Bezos', Zuckerburgs, Ballmers, Ellisons, Pages, and whoever else has been building their own bunkers in secret.
This just proves how capitalism rewards the inanely stupid - these parasites cosplaying as doomsday preppers (who already are not known for their firm grip on reality) don't realize that any event which would cause them to need such a bunker would also most likely destroy the very thing that attributes any kind of value to the power-coupons they've been hoarding - ie, the economy that only exists thanks to the working class.
Also, good luck to them when the well-armed rent-a-goons they hired to protect their little bunkers finds out the money they are being paid is all of a sudden completely worthless and that the governments that guaranteed private property rights is no longer around to protect them from the very same well-armed rent-a-goons. It would be a shame if nobody was around to film the anarcho-capitalist comedy that would ensue...
Naaaaaaaaaniiiiiiii?? You're telling me the people with guns will call the shots in an apocalyptic event because money will lose its value??? IMPOSSIBRU!!!
This is the best case scenario.
We the under classes scare them into their bunkers.
We cut off all forms of communication with them.
We seal them in so they can't change their minds.
We switch the rules to "Socialize the profits and privatize the losses."
There is only so many in the .0001% that need to be taken off the board and left to play with their toys inside their gilded cages. If they go voluntarily then how can they say that it is wrong, especially if no one is listening.
Congrats, you won capitalism. Please proceed to the winners bunker for your prize. Non-compliance will be met with dinner forks.
It's a sign that they're paranoid as fuck and never learned to share or play nicely with others.
This is not a new trend or something specific to billionaires. Home fallout shelters were popular during the Cold War.
I think the AI drone war is going to be in the next 10 years. The way drones are already being used with FPV, the next step is AI image recognition. At $600 a pop for FPV, we are nearing the point where AI can take over. The FPV drones are effective at 1 in 3 targets. That is far far cheaper than artillery or any other weapon system in all of modern military history. Millions of autonomous drones could be a hard thing to stop and a loss economically. Every time some major shift happens like this, it seems someone always pulls the trigger and tries to use it. The US arms industry is too focused on their high end stuff. What is the response to wave after wave of hundreds of thousands of drones that target indiscriminately and are released?
US Military isn't as focused on the high end stuff as you think
I dunno, but could you email your congressperson this? I imagine you're seeing previews in Ukraine.
My best guess is lines of AI controlles guns with dumb bullets firing at the sky. The first wave will be painful depending on scale, but a country in need should be able to have their best and brightest have something up and running in a few days.
This occuring to the USA would likely result in an awfully strong response with whatever they've been coming up with.
The problem is that every step I can think of to use against AI drones is also a more potent weapon when they control it too.
Like okay, it is easy to set up a high power diode laser that can target any image sensors. The laser can move fast and target objects far faster than any weapons system and do so cheaply. However reversing this, that same system can target all human eyes exactly the same way, permanently blinding thousands of people in under a minute.
EMP would probably be the way to go at that point
Maybe we can just let the drones shoot at each other and everyone else just has a picnic and watches?
There's a book about that- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_on_Earth_(novel) where the Ai war is held on the Moon.
As all wars should be held. Preferably with giant robots.
Edit: That's a Lem book I was unfamiliar with, so I'll check it out. Thanks!
Like this?
https://youtu.be/O-2tpwW0kmU?si=KVfHyn8Fb81K4scq
Anyone who thinks the end times are near in any capacity is some flavor of moron.
You're either one of the rich fucks or one of their useful idiots if you go about doomsaying like you're Rorschach from Watchmen.
We have the means to destroy ourselves, and there are a lot of truly stupid people who have power over those means. I don't say I personally believe we will all die soon, but I can see how someone might.
Mate it's not going to be atomics. It's climate change and we're just at the beginning of it. Atomics will only be a consequence of climate change.
Yea I didn’t only mean atomic war, the same stupid people who have power over that means to an end also are important factors in if we will all die of climate change.