SAFE HARBORS FOR DEEP POCKETS

By Mikaprok 

While some people are fighting for their own freedom on the surface of the Earth, some others are going to hide under its surface.

The situation in the world today doesn’t seem calm, so we all have to come up with am option in case of global catastrophe.

Thousands of top American residents for the past 2 years have received exotic citizenship of New Zealand, Fiji and the Caribbean islands.

In November 2016, only New Zealand got 13401 requests from the freest people in the world. 17 times more than for the period 2013-2015.

Who are they?

Here we go: Peter Thiel, two VPs from the board of PayPal, the major shareholders of WellsFargo, several VPs of the smaller Silicon Valley funds, Oracle executive management level and so on.

There are no business needs to travel individually towards the beautiful sunsets, but there is a need for retreat in the unforeseen circumstances.

The simpler and more brutal businessmen, like Andy Garcia (Facebook) or Steven Hoffman (CEO of Reddit), are buying up acres of land in the forest, supplying them with autonomous electricity and weapons in case of a “zombie apocalypse.”

Aesopian language at its apogee.

“When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,”

2 bikes, several tons of gasoline, a few centners of food…

How much is this enough? The answer is 2-3 months. Zombies will surely survive you :-)

If earlier a typical “survivor” was represented by low segment of white middle-class, now the whole story: a) became fashionable, b) turned into an industry for the establishment.

Everyone who has money got involved in the race.
Over the past 2 years, the number of English-speaking groups of post-apocalypse in Facebook has reached a four-digit mark. These are mostly private chats for economically successful tribes.

In private 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 tells freely: “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system. A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, the Managing Director of the Mayfield Fund, organizes face-to-face meetings with his friends, actually a couple of hundred people in the Valley, and discusses how to get a safe second passport, to stockpile the places to escape, at a time when “everything will collapse.”

Marvin Liao, a former Yahoo executive who is now a partner at 500 Startups, a venture-capital firm,  decided that his caches of water and food were not enough. “What if someone comes and takes this?” he asked me. To protect his wife and daughter, he said, “I don’t have guns, but I have a lot of other weaponry. I took classes in archery.”

Generally, it could be attributed to the hobbies of kidults and “Fallout game universe”. If not one particular circumstance.

In fact the survival market exists long ago and super-wealthy citizens both US and EU certainly have 2-3 escape plans for any conceivable disaster.

There are relatively democratic options: for $ 200-300 thousand, you can close 90% of the risks. In Russia, for example, there are many people who can afford it.

At the same time, most of today’s fans did not pay any attention to this. Computer games are good, weapons are OK, but without the enthusiasm of traditional survivors, a shelter in the forest is a bad taste, it’s better to have “ocean view.”

It is believed that it was Trump who frightened off the middle class.

Not so simple.

The first volume sales from the North West Shelter System happened back in 2014, in 2015 this became a trend.

Larry Hall, CEO of Survival Condo Project, sells $ 500 million in shelter projects each year.

For example, he gas built a shelter for all Google management and a special bunker for the server part.

As far as I understand zombies will also use real-time maps :-)

Radius Engineering Inc. and Utah Shelter Systems began to build more than a year earlier.

It is now easier to say who does NOT enjoy survival. According to the latest market research, about 63% of CEOs, both technology companies (to a greater extent) and financial institutions (to a slightly lesser extent) are thinking about a corner where one can wait out a storm.

People are extremely pragmatic and far from the geek culture place the accents a little differently, but with about the same result.

Robert H. Dugger worked as a lobbyist for the financial industry before he became a partner at the global hedge fund Tudor Investment Corporation, in 1993. After seventeen years, he retired to focus on philanthropy and his investments.

“Anyone who’s in this community knows people who are worried that America is heading toward something like the Russian Revolution”.

“A group of centi-millionaires and a couple of billionaires were working through end-of-America scenarios and talking about what they’d do. Most said they’ll fire up their planes and take their families to Western ranches or homes in other countries.”

Robert A. Johnson sees his peers’ talk of fleeing as the symptom of a deeper crisis. At fifty-nine, Johnson has tousled silver hair and a soft-spoken, avuncular composure. He earned degrees in electrical engineering and economics at M.I.T., got a Ph.D. in economics at Princeton, and worked on Capitol Hill, before entering finance. He became a managing director at the hedge fund Soros Fund Management. In 2009, after the onset of the financial crisis, he was named head of a think tank, the Institute for New Economic Thinking.

He grew up outside Detroit, in Grosse Pointe Park, the son of a doctor, and he watched his father’s generation experience the fracturing of Detroit. “What I’m seeing now in New York City is sort of like old music coming back. These are friends of mine. I used to live in Belle Haven, in Greenwich, Connecticut. Louis Bacon, Paul Tudor Jones, and Ray Dalio”—hedge-fund managers—“were all within fifty yards of me. From my own career, I would just talk to people. More and more were saying, ‘You’ve got to have a private plane. You have to assure that the pilot’s family will be taken care of, too. They have to be on the plane.’ ”

“Twenty-five hedge-fund managers make more money than all of the kindergarten teachers in America combined. Being one of those twenty-five doesn’t feel good. I think they’ve developed a heightened sensitivity.” The gap is widening further.

Essentially, there is nothing new in this process – both A.Carnegie and D.Rockefeller  felt uncomfortable in the surrounding landscape 100+ years ago and saved their lifestyle by investing in charity.

But such a boom was, perhaps, for the first time.