When The Rich Become Preppers, It's Time To Worry

For over 10 years now, we've been openly advocating that folks take action to become more prepared should crisis arrive. And for a long time, this advice relegated us to being labeled "tin-foil hat doomsday preppers" (and other less-polite monikers). The media just couldn't figure out any other box to put us in.

But now, the concept of taking at least some responsibility for your own future well-being by increasing your self-reliance is finally moving towards the mainstream.

Of course, government agencies have long ascribed to "situational planning" in case sudden unrest were to happen. Nations around the world have long invested in redundant supply chains, as well as well-stocked disaster 'continuity caves', fortresses and hardened facilities of all sorts.

It's strikes us as puzzling that most private citizens fully expect their government to be prepared for disaster like this, yet don't see similar wisdom in practicing a similar approach to preparation in their own life. In fact, many go so far as to denigrate and even mock their friends and neighbors who do.

Perhaps that gap between what's considered acceptable in a public institution but not in a private home is best explained as abdication of personal responsibility. It happens a lot in our society. Live your life and let the government worry about the scary stuff. They'll take care of us if something bad happens.

We think it's a huge error in judgment (remember Katrina, anyone?), but we understand why it's a convenient and comforting narrative to hold. Plus, it frees up a lot more time to shop at the big box stores and keep up on the Kardashians. Life's more fun and stress-free…right up until some unexpected disruption occurs.

Well, we here at Peak Prosperity deeply believe in shouldering our own personal responsibility. And not just to protect our own private well-being, but also that of the communities we live in and depend on.

After all, Peak Prosperity's mission is To create a world worth inheriting. You don't do that simply waiting to see if the calvary is ever going to show up. You assume responsibility for your own destiny, and inspire others to do the same by offering your support and serving as a living model for others to emulate.

Those expecting/demanding the State to have high emergency preparedness while not practicing the same in their own lives lack integrity. Nobody respects a low-integrity person for very long. (Pro tip: Don’t fly your personal jet to give a lecture on the importance of addressing climate change.)

A resilient nation is built from the bottom up, starting with resilient households. Enough of those households creates resilient neighborhoods, and those in turn lead to resilient towns and cities. And then counties, and states – you get the point.

So taking steps to be partially self-sufficient in the basics of life – food, warmth, shelter and water – and have useful experience or skills (medicine, fixing things, building, distilling, to name just a few) just makes sense. You don't have to strive to be completely self-reliant – it's not realistic or necessary. Just position yourself to reduce your lifestyle requirements during times of strife, and to contribute valued support to those whom in turn you ask for help.

Other urls found in this thread:

archive.is/FaZYB
zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-28/when-rich-become-preppers-its-time-worry
twitter.com/NSFWRedditGif

Preparing Is Rapidly Going Mainstream

For years now, I’ve written that the highly wealthy people whom I encounter through conferences, family offices and private consultations all got the “bug out” vibe after the 2008 crash, if not before. Today, many of them are more thoroughly prepped than us regular folks can imagine.

Disaster prepping is now acceptable enough that this week's article in The New Yorker had no trouble finding high-profile executives to talk to on record. I couldn't help noticing that the reporter avoided inferring that these folks were crazy, or implying as much. I guess once a critical mass of super wealthy tech entrepreneurs jumps on the bandwagon it’s suddenly hip to be a prepper?

At any rate, if you haven't already seen the article, it's a real eye-opener:

Doomsday Prep For The Super-Rich

Jan 30, 2017

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 focused 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.’

The message here is clear enough: The wealthy have caught onto the idea that the probability of a major social disruption is high enough to merit serious action.

Prepping is now becoming “a thing.”

And that makes it increasingly OK to talk about in the open. That's a great development; we at Peak Prosperity have been waiting for this milestone for a decade now. But it comes with a cost: the more people who awaken to the risks we face, the faster the peaceful complacency society has slumbered in will dissipate.

From here it’s only a hop, skip and a jump for the newly-awake to start losing faith in our debt-based fiat money system and the massive unsustainability of the economy built on top of it. As our readers know very well, once you understand how these systems are structured, it's hard not be shocked by their fragility (not to mention their deep unfairness).

For example, our food distribution system relies on a lot of moving, integrated parts. If any one of these breaks down, the shipment of food (and pharmaceuticals, and many other components of daily life) simply stops. Cities only have about 3 days' worth of inventory at any given time. Should a shock occur to the system, even a minor one like a winter blizzard, supply can dwindle out in a matter of hours as people scramble to get what they can.

Here’s an image of shelves at a Wal-Mart in Charlotte NC taken as a relatively minor snow storm was approaching the area on January 6th 2017.

The line between “well stocked” and “stripped bare” is merely a matter of public awareness. Once people become worried about the possibility of scarcity, their mad scramble to hoard what they can actually creates the very scarcity they dear. That's because our system is deliberately run on a just-in-time basis, in order to maximize profit. Excess inventory incurs storage fees; so we "optimize" our supply chains to avoid it. But it begs the question: perhaps the human suffering costs of quickly running out of essentials during an emergency is higher than the dollars saved by keeping inventory levels minimal?

Our fractional reserve banking is structured the same way: it only works if everyone doesn’t show up at the same time demanding to withdraw their money. If that ever happens, there isn't nearly enough supply for everyone. Once the illusion is exposed, then people get panicky and start grouping into angy mobs

Think it can't happen here? Just talk to folks in India. Two months ago they would have agreed with you. Today, the most they are allowed to withdraw for their bank is a few hundred dollars worth of banknotes per week. Here's a video of a run on a bank there where the swaming masses quickly stampede over the security guards, trampling elderly patrons in the process:

And it's even worse in Venezuela. There, the limit is US$5 per day. If you had US10,000 of savings in the bank, at that rate, it would take you 5 and half years to withdraw it all.

Playing the Odds

Of course, most truly catastrophic events are quite rare. Rather than worry about them, it usually makes sense to simply ignore these tail risks and carry on with your life.

I do this rather than stress out about a large asteroid impact or a Yellowstone supervolcano eruption. While either of these *could* happen in my lifetime, the odds are incredibly low and there’s virtually nothing I can do to prepare for or predict such an event. So I don’t even try.

Other potential threats to our well-being, however, have much higher probabilities. And yet, most people are quite content to ignore the need to prepare, no matter how high the risks. Few people maintain a deep pantry, which is why the store shelves invariably get stripped as a big storm rolls into town. And only a small minority of people living along California's active fault lines have put together a well-stock earthquake kit.

But more cadres of thinkers are embracing the wisdom of investing in an ounce of prevention today. In the New Yorker article, the techies from Silicon Valley seem more inclined to ‘do the math’ and follow logic:

As we've advised for years, even if something has a low probability, if it's result would be catastrophic, then buy insurance if you can. Prepping for a major "grid-down" power outage is simply a no-brainer for those who have decent math skills. The calculation is eminently rational, as there a number of potential causal factors (weather, sabotage, squirrel) and the downside could be quite large.

So, with all the potential looming risks out there – economic shock, social disorder, supply chain failure, to name just a few – what are practical, affordable, achievable steps a prudent person should take?

archive.is/FaZYB

zerohedge.com/news/2017-01-28/when-rich-become-preppers-its-time-worry

Hmmmm, if only the rich were in some sort of a position of power they could improve society so the apocalypse won't happen.

kek'd

Sage since I really did add anything to this thread.

Bump since I'm sure other do

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We're talking about some Dawn of the Planet of the Apes scale chimpout than an astronomical event that would sterilize all life though.

And they will take every internet libertarian/capitalist that defended them against "evil commies", with them. Start packing.

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Ha.
Haha.
HAHAHA
HAHAHAHA.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!.

repent the end is near

This is the third thread about this in the last 48 hours.

There are none. You will be subsumed in the coming dark. Nothing will survive. Anything that does survive will be too broken to be worth a damn.

There is No Future but Nuclear Fire.

Jewsus is never coming back. Fuck your god. Creation is a crime against the created.

Exactly. Scaring anons into Happening mode is the new CTR strategy.

Well, good thing there will be plenty of nice shit to loot after they're dead on the first day.

You assume too much. That's too good to happen, not how it will work.

Remember the universal constant: The Universe Must Suck. Always.

I am ready fam

I just don't see today's richfag leftists being able to go two days without a hot shower without sperging out. If you just took away their Chai Lattes, they'd fucking become total mongoloids and forget how to breathe.
Sure, they might be able to eat, sleep and shit during a habbening, but not much else.
To survive such an event worth prepping for, I believe you'd at least have to know how a firearm works and have basic mechanical aptitude at a minimum.
Richfags would be immediately targeted for their supplies when SHTF. First to die. They'd have their $300 titanium prepper stoves and their fancy gear and they'd get robbed and killed.

The world doesn't share the fate of your military outpost user.

You mean when the (((rich))) become preppers, because they know there's going to be a real holocaust coming for them this time.

Be the country boy poorfag that has his case of beer, his beat up truck, his dog and his atv and his Ar15.

All those rich fags - don't know how to do shit. They exists off of modern living mindset and city industry rules.

When Said rules and ways of life fold back into the original way of life. Country boy becomes lord of the Realm again as he always was prior to industrial revolution.

Industrial revolution was the down fall for the western world. Making shit in mass does nothing more but swell birth rates and for what end? More fucking people to feed thats what.

Be country boy.

You're still expecting too much. That's not how it works and oyu know it. Richfags will be in their bunkers with everything they need and they'll forget the rest of us ever existed by the time the media is even telling us that there might be a happening.

You lose. Always. Loss is Infinite.

No. Never. Never Ever. You don't get that. You get nuclear fire and death. Nothing more. NO return to old life ways. NO return to anything.

Only Ashes and Echoes

You mean doublecross the jews who let them get rich? I'm sure that would end up well for them.

Did any of you read the whole fucking text?

The rich fags are moving to New Zealand or in underground bunkers

asses and (((echoes)))

Bill Gates reportedly has multi-MILLION $$$$ survival bunkers under every single home and property of his. That shit is pennies to him.

And these aren't some shitty buried CONEX box (definitely not a good idea) in the middle of a Nebraska corn field. These are state of the art systems with food, water, radios, electricity, weapons, and everything and anything that kind of budget can imagine.

Rich and the "elite" have bug out plans and fueled up jets on standby waiting to take them to New Zealand at the drop of a hat. There, they have just as equally fancy and exorbitantly luxurious "survival" homesteads just WAITING for them. Enough food and water and coffee for decades.

These people drop more money on this shit than we can imagine or even hope to replicate. While these assholes will be sipping lattes, and killing off trespassers with remote-controlled FLIR scoped Barrets on servos from their living room with an XboX controller — we will be stuck having to defend whatver shit we've managed to save up from the goddamn hungry Golden Hordes mass-exodusing the cities and suburbs.

Hundreds of thousands of mouths ready to kill you for a fucking can of pork and beans. And that's just the average hungry schoolteacher with a snotty 4 year old in tow and a .38 special they found on a dead cop.

WE HAVE ALREADY BEEN IN HAPPENING MODE SINCE BEFORE CHAN SINCE 1.0 NET.

YOU MUST BE P.YOUNG.

I would too if I could afford it.

We need to meme Israel into nuking New Zealand as part of their Samson plan.

lol reported

The fact is that prepping without guns is ridiculous, so these "leftie preppies" will either acquire guns and start training or get bored of their hobby after a few weeks and forget about it. If they acquire guns their bluepill mind is already poisoned, they will be on the one hand confronted with the government redtape surrounding gun ownership, on the other hand they will get a taste for self sufficiency after getting into the mindset of taking responsibility for their own safety. This will get them started on a slippery slope to the right.

Sometimes commies may decide to become preppers. But there are no commie preppers.

ZH has been shilling this muh leftard preppers meme pretty hard for a while now. Probably because a lot of their audience is retard-tier blackpill goldbug grandpas who don't know shit. I guess the logic is that all these richfags are rich because they're really smart and know everything, so if they're prepping they must know something. As many, many events like Bernie Madoff will demonstrate, these people aren't some superhuman geniuses. They just figured out how to do the one thing right and rolled with the right crew to amass shekels. Stop fucking fetishizing wealth, these people are wasting their money on bunkers that their spoiled rich kids will allow to decay and eventually sell for a fraction of the cost.

I didn't realize it was already summer.

Hey, we can use this!
We need to promote prepping "against Donald Trump." This needs to be a thing because you're right. It will short circuit their pinko faggot brains.

Mom! We need to be a little more constructive here. Okay?

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Even funnier, over the last decade the government has taken a dim view of prepping, and considers it "domestic terrorism". These faggots are gonna start with their gun/ammo stockpiling shit, but they're also muslims or muslim sympathizers and they'll be loud and proud about it, not to mention constant sperging about attacking Trump. They'll look mighty suspect. Due to inexperience some will fuck up and violate gun regulations, and being anti-cop, when the authorities show up they will sperg out more. The administration we have now doesn't play, I'm betting they'd come down extra hard on such shenanigans compared to past ones. Libtard prepping just sounds like a Waco-tier disaster just waiting to happen. And then happen again, and again, and again…


I hate to ride a politician but we've just had the one candidate out of 30 or so who was the most pro-law&order, the most pro-stability, the least progressive (read: least willing to disrupt societal order), the least warmongering (anyone remember fiorina chomping at the bit to start a war with russia?) and the most able to peacefully negotiate with important world powers is elected for 4 years, probably will be reelected as well.

Historically, does societal collapse correlate with strong leaders, or weak? These people buying shelters got scammed, just like the Obama-era tinfoils with pallets of bic lighters and toilet paper. As always, the best preparation for SHTF is to invest in yourself, namely learning skills. If a richfag wanted to insure himself, the obvious solution is to network with his community, start a local charitable organization, and use his financial resources to assume leadership roles in nearby communities and make friends, which will translate into being able to assume de facto post-SHTF leadership. Of course this is hard and takes work, while throwing money down a scammer's hole is easy, so that's what they do, same as tinfoils who hoard gimmicky first aid kits instead of actually going to a first aid class.

There goes my dream of cheap ammo for the range. Now I know why /k/ has a deep disdain for Holla Forums. I swear to kek if steel plates and armor go up as a result of this, I'm blaming Holla Forums.

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When did Holla Forumsacks start posting the same shit that zerohedge does, without reference links? I've seen this multiple times now.

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Did you read it at least?

I'm armed and I live on a farm.
I'm pretty okay, I'm basically self-sufficient. If the government ever collapsed I'd live the same way I currently do, only without electricity.

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I have an interesting story. One millionaire teaches a personal finance class at my high school. He buys 300 ounces of silver a month in anticipation of the upcoming crash, he has done this for the past 20 years. Silver holds value, and its value will be astronomically high during and after the collapse. He also has a survival bunker in the middle of the desert. If anyone's interested, I can tell more.

What about all the ga-
oh.

Don't you fucking dare, we are still whiter than you m8.

What's the obsession with New Zealand? It will be just as fucked as everywhere else. It already has a desperate impoverished population, lots of third world immigrants with multiculti BS, it has a lot of violence and a population becoming more accustomed to violence. New Zealanders also have a strong almost irrational dislike for Americans and wealthy foreigners. If I was a wealthy foreigner I would see escaping to New Zealand as walking into a trap, after a collapse how would one attempt to escape from New Zealand?
Its 1200 miles to Australia from there.

Most New Zealanders are very aware that the reason they have been so poor for so long is greedy foreigners (landlords, bankers multinationals…) Sure the elites could spend a decade in a bunker but after they emerge and speak with a foreign accent they would be ethnically cleansed. It would be nothing more than delaying the inevitable. Remember the people outside the bunkers will have had a decade to become very hardened and very bitter. Try trading with people who see you as the enemy who have escaped to your land after pillaging it from afar for generations.

New Zealand is a playground for elites now but will turn from fantasy to nightmare in a STHF scenario.

nigger

Is it a toilet paper farm? Gotcha. You're life would be very different without the government infrastructure making double-ply possible. And who wants to live in that world anyhow.

like live never existed before toilet paper.
there will be a lot of things we take for granted that will be gone, but life goes on. Wash your ass with water.

It's Y2K goys buy my water filters.

There's a cottage industry for this shit, they've been cashing in on the apocalypse since the 70s. New Zealand is considered clean/safe/remote/hospitable/white by the average idiot who buys into this, they were also using Costa Rica, Cayman Islands and the Bahamas in the past.

The actual situation on the ground eludes them, but with the internet we can easily find out about that country: earthquakes, landslides, poor roads, massive property and land bubble dispossessing the largely poor underemployed blue collar population, high drug use and criminality.

Alarm bells should ring any time you hear this network of people involved in anything:

Gerald Celente, Peter Schiff, Max Keiser, Ron Paul, Paul Craig Roberts, Webster Tarpley, Joel Skousen, Christopher Martenson.

These guys are in the Fear Porn business and make a living from selling you on the idea the world is collapsing and you should buy gold/silver, survival gear etc.

They have transitioned smoothly into social media after being early internet adopters under the Alex Jones umbrella network. American people are paranoid by nature, and Christianity is an apocalyptic death cult, so it's natural to see various slimy snakeoil salesmen characters appear from time to time to cash in on these cultural quirks.

Presumably OP is an intern or some low level web monkey at one of these websites selling this crap. Don't take my word for it, disable your adblock on zerohedges home page and take a look at some of the shit they throw at you.