If your way of making money makes you really fear people will be mad at you, you should be asking yourself what's wrong with your way of making money. That is, if you care. But if you don't care don't whine.
I know which compound I’m targeting first.
I think they know the system is unfair. They are just greedy fucks who’d prefer to squeeze it completely dry to benefit themselves.
I don't remember who said it, but I think about this comment a lot:
All these billionaires would rather spend their wealth building bunkers for when their actions cause social collapse, instead of trying to prevent social collapse in the first place.
The thing is, none of these bunkers are built by billionaires. Would be real unfortunate if they had some design flaws in them lol
Many Bothans have died to bring us this intel.
These assholes always fantasize that their wealth and accumulation of luxury items will grant them the leg up to become rulers during the social collapse. They don't realize that in case of a social collapse the world won't immediately look like Mad Max, and they certainly aren't Immortan Joe. It will look more like Children of Man. Very slow and very gradual and with a lot mass governmental violence, not small arms violence.
Further, they don't have what it takes to survive off the land, nor the intimidation to warlord after.
Other than a pensioners its difficult to imagine someone more dependant on the systems.
Because becoming a billionaire itself contributes to society’s collapse. They are opposite goals.
I read a book called Lucifer's Hammer by Larry Niven many years ago about a comet hitting the Earth. There was a scene in the book, after the impact, where a rich guy manages to finally reach a place up in the mountains where he has supplies stashed, only to find that his employees have claimed it for themselves and won't let him in because he's basically useless in the new world of survival.
If you were working for Huffman or Musk or any of the rest of them, and a there was a huge society ending disaster, would you let them in when they showed up or would you just shoot them down with their own guns? I know what I would do. I can't imagine anyone letting them in.
It doesn't even have to be so combative.
Imagine being thrown together with 99 other survivors of the apocalypse and 1 of them was musk.
There's going to be medical people and trades people and farmers and naturalists and even people with governance experience from community groups et cetera.
Imagine how utterly useless a billionaire would be in that context. Their entitlement would make them worse than useless. Like I'd rather be stuck with nanna who is just a drain on resources rather than someone who's only skill is self interest.
That is such a great book.
And yeah, fuck them. I would absolutely never let them in.
Now ask yourself why these guys are suddenly so obsessed with AI, chatbots, and getting rid of roles previously staffed by humans.
Cory Doctorow's Masque of the Red Death novella (named after Poe's story of the same name) explores this theme a lot, especially how short sighted the rich can be and how well the poor band together to rebuild.
Here's the free audio book:
Dude could have been cast as a white walker and HBO would have saved a ton in VFX and makeup costs.
The really funny thing about Spez is that he's far from a power player in the tech scene, nowhere near the likes of Musk and Zuckerberg. But he so desperately wants to be that he actually just looks sad and pathetic in the process.
Wtf is he going to do with his stockpile of motorbikes during the apocalypse? Start a Mad Max biker crew? What a fkn loser lol.
He's just going to the next tier of cuck that provides bikes for the raiders that get in his bunker. They should keep him alive as a manservant when his little apocalypse plan falls apart.
Where are you getting the gas, Steve? Gas is only good for a few months in storage without treatment and a couple of years with it. Have you never read a fucking book?
The first thing people will do when society collapses is head to where the billionaires live to raid their stockpiles.
I always find it funny that people imagibe that in an apocalypse a modern fossil fuel vehicle would be any good. Unless you know how to modify the engine to use realistically self-producable fuel you will be able to run it for only a few months before all the fuel in the world degrades and starts destroying/not running the engine. Better off getting electric vehicles as electricity is actually easy to produce.
A bicycle isn't a bad thing to have in an apocalypse. Not difficult to maintain, considerably faster and more efficient than walking, basically no infrastructure required.
Multiple motorcycles? What's he gonna do, ride them all at once?
If you have a bunch of motorcycles going in a line and you ride another motorcycle on top of that line like a conveyor belt then you will be going twice as fast as the highest speed the single motorcycle could go.
Obviously him (and all the other oligarchs behaving like this) are counting on their entourage of sycophants following them. I don't think they have completely considered the fact that all of their untangible wealth will be worthless in an apocalypse situation, and instead they will just turn into golden geese sitting on a pile of stuff that everyone else, including their former sycophants, would like to sit on instead.
I say that when the billionaires retreat into their bunkers we should all cover the entrances and vents with a couple hundred layers of concrete.
Nawww is the little piggy boy scared we're gonna come for him?
Good.
Insane strategy, Silicon Valley execs. Sell the thing that you believe is gonna cause the apocalypse so you can afford to have apocalypse insurance. That definitely needed to happen...
Just collecting shit for badder men really. Dumb.
Rushkoff wrote a book about consulting for these billionaire peppers.
https://rushkoff.com/books/survival-of-the-richest-escape-fantasies-of-the-tech-billionaires/
All these billionaires stockpiling in their secure bunkers have clearly never heard of the word 'siege'.
seige only works if the besieged don't have enough supplies and food production.
Well, if you can find the bunker and have nothing but time on your hands, you can get through concrete.
That may have been true before explosives technology was developed
There is a reason the trebuchet was invented.
Self fulfilling prophecy
The rich would rather live in an apocalypse than let workers have some more of the wealth that the workers themselves have created.
I would like for them to find out the hard way that the characteristics to be a leader in a Neo-liberal capitalistic society are not the same in an apocalyptic wasteland.
And by hard way, I mean that they would be made the fucksock of charismatic warlord.
Hilarious and sad considering those techbros are creating the conditions for a possible economic collapse, such as playing with creepto.
Oh yes, kinda reminds me of reading a chapter in World War Z (the book with its dark comedy is still more entertaining than the humorless movie), like how one character found himself on an island full of rich people... Guess what happened next?
If I remember correctly their bodyguards turn on them and kill them in their bunkers.
Electric motorcycles? Do preppers have an understanding of how gasoline absorbs water from the air and is substantially worse within a matter of months? Even with stabilizer, you get a few years out of it, tops. What are you going to use for the rest of your life?
To be fair, the writers of post-apocalyptic Hollywood movies don't understand it, either.
At least i know where to find the motorcycles, guns and food when the apocalypse comes
Would rich people want to live in a world where there is no one else to enslave?
It's almost like we should strike now before they have a chance to run and hide.
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