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It says a lot about mindset between various classes when Silicon Valley billionaires are building huge self-sufficient retreats in New Zealand to hide out in wh

• natalyarostova 6y ago
  It's not particularly interesting or productive to compare the best of one set to the worst of another.
  • jhamilton 6y ago
    It is when the worst of one set has the means to do much more good than the best of the other set, and yet squanders it in their greed.
    • founditincache 6y ago
      The vast majority would behave the same in that position. Are you sure you wouldn't? We're far too likely to see things as character flaws when looking outward and as circumstance when looking inward.
  • happytoexplain 6y ago
    I couldn't disagree more strongly when the things being compared are the wellbeing of humans.
  • save_ferris 6y ago
    The “worst” of that set includes names like Zuckerberg, Thiel and even Sam Altman, among many others.[0] I’d be willing to bet that a pretty significant percentage of the tech elite have taken serious steps like this, this clearly isn’t a small set of obscure players. 0: https://www.inquisitr.com/3950643/billionaires-are-building-bunkers-in-new-zealand-prepping-for-the-apocalypse/ https://www.inquisitr.com/3950643/billionaires-are-building-...
    • nickff 6y ago
      I don't understand why hedging against long-tail events is 'bad'. They bought large quantities of supplies, and hired a bunch of people to build them facilities which could be of benefit in the event of a catastrophe. The tradesmen doing the building were probably happy to do the work, and I am sure the supplies provided a number of manufacturing and administrative jobs. I don't see a problem; unless you think this pandemic was caused by bunker construction. Is buying a lot of insurance also evil?
      • Retric 6y ago
        Traveling to those bunkers could spread the virus. Just stay home is a completely viable option. Some basic risk analysis shows the trip increases risks and is therefore a dumb move even if the idea of a bunker could be useful in other situations.
        • jeromegv 6y ago
          Did any of them actually travelled to their bunker? Or are you blaming them for something that didn't happen?
          • techsupporter 6y ago
            According to published reports, yes: https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/e2-80-98we-needed-to-go-e2-80-99-rich-americans-activate-pandemic-escape-plans/ar-BB12V3En https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/world/e2-80-98we-needed-to-go...
        • bdamm 6y ago
          This is a form of critical thinking error. "They" wanted to build a safe destination in case of a multitude of possible conditions come to occur. You are looking with a historical lens on what has happened and then labeling them "dumb" based on the knowledge we have now. If you look at it that way, almost any disaster planning is "dumb".
          • 6y ago
  • mayneack 6y ago
    Who are the "best" of the Silicon Valley billionaires that they should be compared to?
  • throwlaplace 6y ago
    Sorry who should we compare them to? https://www.fastcompany.com/90494347/american-billionaires-have-gotten-280-billion-richer-since-the-start-of-the-covid-19-pandemic https://www.fastcompany.com/90494347/american-billionaires-h... People at the top are profiting while people at the bottom are either sacrificing or outright dying.
  • GoodJokes 6y ago
    Lol, the best of billionaires. Billionaires shouldn't exist.
  • majormajor 6y ago
    There are many out there who will claim that one set is itself "the best" as proven by economic success. It's informative to look at the examples of how that isn't true.
• anticensor 6y ago
  The rich have much more fragile and much more litigious lives than the poor. Those self-sufficient retreaters will also have disputes among themselves.
• yboris 6y ago
  Let's all stop finger-pointing and do more what Effective Altruism encourages: using resources more effectively: - donate money where it does more good per dollar spent - if you're able to - spend working time on important issues - if you're able to Just because some millionaires aren't doing anything to make the world a better place, doesn't mean those with fewer means can't. We in the tech field with our salaries especially.
  • ben_w 6y ago
    Is charity even the right solution? From what I’ve heard, pensions are a thing because c. 1900 millionaires didn’t — and possibly couldn’t — give enough to charity. That line of reasoning leads to the need for political change, and not necessarily revolution.
    • yboris 6y ago
      Effective Altruists are working on a variety of approaches. Pandemic prevention has been on their radar for as long as the movement has been around. Structural change is very important and it's best approached in places where there is high tractability and high neglectedness. As for donations -- that's the low-hanging fruit. Any individual, without having to change anything about their life (other than spending a bit less on themselves) can give to cost effective charities to do a tremendous amount of good.
      • xnyan 6y ago
        There isn’t a charity in existence that could’ve provided even close to the amount of support needed to support major parts of the world (2.7bln in quarantine) population to date, to say nothing of what they will need in the future. Governments are the only proven way of handling truly large scale issues like defense and national health. Americans in particular depend on charities for services because domestic spending has been recklessly and cruelly slashed for at least the last 40 years. Depending on unaccountable and nebulous organizations and random billionaires for critical services is the opposite of personal freedom.
• yingw787 6y ago
  My example to follow in this domain is Max Levchin: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-for-the-super-rich https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/30/doomsday-prep-... To Levchin, prepping for survival is a moral miscalculation; he prefers to “shut down party conversations” on the topic. “I typically ask people, ‘So you’re worried about the pitchforks. How much money have you donated to your local homeless shelter?’ This connects the most, in my mind, to the realities of the income gap. All the other forms of fear that people bring up are artificial.” In his view, this is the time to invest in solutions, not escape. “At the moment, we’re actually at a relatively benign point of the economy. When the economy heads south, you will have a bunch of people that are in really bad shape. What do we expect then?”
  • oh_sigh 6y ago
    When the French revolution came along, it swept away the aristocrats regardless of whether they were abusive or kind and paternalistic to commoners. Mobs don't frequently make moral calculations the same way that individuals might.
    • glaugh 6y ago
      I think the logic is less “Give money so the pitchfork folks won’t come after you personally” and more “Give money so there’s no need for a revolution”
    • slg 6y ago
      I think the argument is not to curry favor with the mob, it is to take preventive measures to ensure the mob never forms by investing in society.
    • tecleandor 6y ago
      I don't think he's talking about paying favors to avoid the pitchforks. The idea is collaborating with the community so they improve their lives and the revolution isn't necessary. Some will do it out of selfishness, others from real believe in the community.
    • tehjoker 6y ago
• yourapostasy 6y ago
  I take it as an interesting "follow what they do, not what they say" commentary that these UHNWI's, despite the overwhelmingly asymmetrical power they wield in the economy and politics, are voting no confidence in the capitalist model they themselves sit upon the apex of. So capitalism as currently practiced for them is a convenient fig leaf for a non-cooperating internal model they run and operate off of in their own minds, until it blows up from its internal contradictions and they need to sit it out until it blows over? Even the most self-sufficient retreats I've read about I estimate can only last about a generation on their own before their tech base rapidly dissolves, and the residents face a harsh decline. As our civilizational complexity and population density increases, the challenges facing our species keep creeping up the effects' time horizon. It's already a Red Queen's race for all but the biggest retreats to outlast these types of large-scale disruptions. If you really want to prep, then you build for redundancy, you build for the long-term (decades, centuries, millennia, not days, weeks, years), you build for positive sum, win-win outcomes, you build for continuous striving towards post-scarcity, inclusively across as many people as there are resources for. That level of preparedness is nearly impossible to kill, is self-regenerating across generations, with no retreat-building necessary because the "retreats" are all over the place.
• throwaway2048 6y ago
  Its even more absurd when you consider the entire foundation and basis of their wealth and power is the society they'd rather run away from than protect. There are no billionaires in mad max world.
• ardy42 6y ago
  > Silicon Valley billionaires are building huge self-sufficient retreats in New Zealand to hide out in when civilization collapses[0] This article by the same author goes deeper into some of the billionaires' mindset: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-valley-billionaires-are-prepping-for-the-apocalypse-in-new-zealand https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/feb/15/why-silicon-val... > Early last summer, just as my interests in the topics of civilisational collapse and Peter Thiel were beginning to converge into a single obsession, I received out of the blue an email from a New Zealand art critic named Anthony Byrt. If I wanted to understand the extreme ideology that underpinned Thiel’s attraction to New Zealand, he insisted, I needed to understand an obscure libertarian manifesto called The Sovereign Individual: How to Survive and Thrive During the Collapse of the Welfare State. It was published in 1997, and in recent years something of a minor cult has grown up around it in the tech world, largely as a result of Thiel’s citing it as the book he is most influenced by. (Other prominent boosters include Netscape founder and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, and Balaji Srinivasan, the entrepreneur best known for advocating Silicon Valley’s complete secession from the US to form its own corporate city-state.) > ... > The book’s 400-odd pages of near-hysterical orotundity can roughly be broken down into the following sequence of propositions: > 1) The democratic nation-state basically operates like a criminal cartel, forcing honest citizens to surrender large portions of their wealth to pay for stuff like roads and hospitals and schools. > 2) The rise of the internet, and the advent of cryptocurrencies, will make it impossible for governments to intervene in private transactions and to tax incomes, thereby liberating individuals from the political protection racket of democracy. > 3) The state will consequently become obsolete as a political entity. > 4) Out of this wreckage will emerge a new global dispensation, in which a “cognitive elite” will rise to power and influence, as a class of sovereign individuals “commanding vastly greater resources” who will no longer be subject to the power of nation-states and will redesign governments to suit their ends. > The Sovereign Individual is, in the most literal of senses, an apocalyptic text. Davidson and Rees-Mogg present an explicitly millenarian vision of the near future: the collapse of old orders, the rising of a new world. Liberal democracies will die out, and be replaced by loose confederations of corporate city-states. Western civilisation in its current form, they insist, will end with the millennium. “The new Sovereign Individual,” they write, “will operate like the gods of myth in the same physical environment as the ordinary, subject citizen, but in a separate realm politically.” It’s impossible to overstate the darkness and extremity of the book’s predictions of capitalism’s future; to read it is to be continually reminded that the dystopia of your darkest insomniac imaginings is almost always someone else’s dream of a new utopian dawn. > Davidson and Rees-Mogg identified New Zealand as an ideal location for this new class of sovereign individuals, as a “domicile of choice for wealth creation in the Information Age”.