Lucifer’s Hammer has a scene where the rich guy makes it to his mountain home, and is shocked when his caretaker won’t let him in. The caretaker didn’t shoot him, so the rich guy had that going for him at any rate.
Umm . . .
I guess you’re arguing that if you chop off some one’s head after a revolution its a state action and therefor not murder? I’ll just disagree with that.
It gets hard to tell since you bounce around in your posting like a schizophrenic monkey but lately it seems you want to line up next to Der and Asahi. I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that we score on the same side of the dem party.
Helpful hint: the numbers to the right of the decimal point don’t count.
Regards,
Shodan
The wealthy *can *still be wealthy in an apocalyptic dystopia, it’s just a different kind of wealth. In that world, you’re right that things like dollars and euros are useless, but what ***would ***be valuable is things like canned food, crop seeds, solar panels, firearms + ammo, medical supplies, all sorts of useful gear, and the wealthy can stockpile that stuff in abundance ahead of time, and in larger quantity than anyone else. A millionaire who amassed a huge basement full of that stuff would be richer than Bill Gates in such a dystopia.
Hence the seminal problem of those wealthy fuckmooks in the article : “how do I keep my violent goons loyal ? Bomb collars, maybe ?”
This is all true (I’d add a variety of camping gear, communications gear, liquid fuels, etc to the list). Money will be useless and likely so will precious metals (at least at first).
But the argument made in the article is that the leaders don’t know how to keep control of the paramilitary forces they depend on for security. Right now the state has a monopoly on violence. Having a monopoly on violence is much harder when you have a bunch of people with security services each consisting of 10-20 people, and each one of them knows all they have to do is kill the billionaire and his family to collect all the goods for themselves.
Generally speaking the smaller the state is, the easier it to overthrow. In a post apocalypse scenario states will just be tiny tribes and the bodyguards will just kill the leaders and take their stuff.
I personally doubt society collapses though. Society is pretty damn resilient. From 1900 until about 1953 Russian society withstood a civil war, WW1, a second civil war, the spanish flu, the stalinist purges, mass famines, WW2 and then a new set of purges. Society survived fine.
During the black plague when half of Europe died, society survived. To truly kill a society (like what happened in a lot of native American societies) you have to kill about 90% of the citizens. Anything short of that, and society seems to survive.
The idea that society will collapse because coastal cities will be flooded doesn’t sound reasonable to me.
Right.
There are plenty of End Times preppers who are not wealthy. It doesn’t surprise me that some rich people are similarly deluded that they’ll be able to survive the coming Apocalypse and live decently afterwards.
I’m reminded of the top government and military officials in the War Room in “Dr. Strangelove”, brainstorming ways to avoid the consequences of worldwide nuclear war in underground bunkers.
:rolleyes: Helpfuller hint: the IQ scoring system is by definition integer-valued, so there aren’t any “numbers to the right of the decimal point” in an IQ score.
Just as a matter of interest, what are guillotines used for in your neck of the woods?
Slicing sausages.
I did not read the OP as advocating murder or encouraging people to engage in it, rather, the OP recognizes that if the wealthy are nasty enough there will be a rebellion. Such as in the French Revolution where there literally were heads mounted on pikes for a bit. Those that protect the rich assholes are going to meet the same fate in such circumstances.
But I can see where someone on the side of the wealthy bastards could read it as a call to murder and get all butt-hurt about it.
Honestly, if the billionaires really want guards they can trust with their lives, they should found a religion. Nobody will be willing to die for money, but plenty of people would be happy to die for their god.
The article made less and less sense as it went on. But I’ll just point out an inaccuracy that hints to me that the author operates more on a principle of “stories that reinforce my beliefs” than actual fact:
There were not two Biosphere trials. “Biosphere 2”, as it was called, was the first and only “Biosphere”. The “2” comes from Earth being the actual first biosphere.
It did not cost billions. It cost around $200 million.
Finally, it was not a serious attempt at an enclosed system capable of sustaining human life. Although it did yield useful scientific insights, one would take a very different approach to a Martian habitat.
And you can take tours of it.
Did you hear? “Fortune of 25 richest billionaires in the world grew by $ 255 billion in two months” The World’s 25 Richest Billionaires Have Gained Nearly $255 Billion In Just Two Months
Incredibly, with this level of unemployment in the US… 
They lied. They were simply bigots and sadists looking for an excuse. They hate nearly everyone on Earth, not simply the “coastal elites”.
They’d murder us all given the chance.
When fools dump stock because of a panic of course people with sense are going to buy them at a discount.
Would you have rather there not have been Walmart and Amazon, during the pandemic? Would you and the rest of society have rathered to go outside and make your own toilet paper and hunt, kill and dress your own food?
Or were those companies supposed to provide those services at a loss for our benefit?
:dubious: Are those the only possible choices? What I would rather have had during this crisis would be a much broader sharing of the profits from it, rather than CEOs getting massive increases in their already super-massive wealth while many of their hardworking employees struggle for bare survival.
I doubt that’s what’s fueling their wealth.
Even in a depression, there’s investment and there’s economic activity. The difference is that it’s not spread across the economy evenly.
What’s happening is that all of the economic activity that used to be taking place in restaurants, small shops, shopping malls, and hotels is now being funneled into online markets like Amazon and a few other tech-heavy services. Wealth is getting sucked out of the hands of the masses and into the hands of the plutocrats - very predictable.