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Oscar Winners, Sports Stars and Bill Gates Are Building Lavish Bunkers (hollywoodreporter.com)
turkeydance quotes a report from Hollywood Reporter: Given the increased frequency of terrorist bombings and mass shootings and an under-lying sense of havoc fed by divisive election politics, it's no surprise that home security is going over the top and hitting luxurious new heights. Or, rather, new lows, as the average depth of a new breed of safe haven that occupies thousands of square feet is 10 feet under or more. Those who can afford to pull out all the stops for so-called self-preservation are doing so -- in a fashion that goes way beyond the submerged corrugated metal units adopted by reality show "preppers" -- to prepare for anything from nuclear bombings to drastic climate-change events. Gary Lynch, GM at Rising S Bunkers, a Texas-based company that specializes in underground bunkers and services scores of Los Angeles residences, says that sales at the most upscale end of the market -- mainly to actors, pro athletes and politicians (who require signed NDAs) -- have increased 700 percent this year compared with 2015, and overall sales have risen 150 percent. Any time there is a turbulent political landscape, we see a spike in our sales. Given this election is as turbulent as it is, "we are gearing up for an even bigger spike," says marketing director Brad Roberson of sales of bunkers that start at $39,000 and can run $8.35 million or more (FYI, a 12-stall horse shelter is $98,500). Adds Mike Peters, owner of Utah-based Ultimate Bunker, which builds high-end versions in California, Texas and Minnesota: "People are going for luxury [to] live underground because they see the future is going to be rough. Everyone I've talked to thinks we are doomed, no matter who is elected." Robert Vicino, founder of Del Mar, Calif.-based Vivos, which constructs upscale community bunkers in Indiana (he believes coastal flooding scenarios preclude bunkers being safely built west of the Rockies), says, "Bill Gates has huge shelters under every one of his homes, in Rancho Santa Fe and Washington. His head of security visited with us a couple years ago, and for these multibillionaires, a few million is nothing. It's really just the newest form of insurance."
I bet the bunkers built for the Hollywood anti-gun elite are packed with weapons.
Just like gun sales have never been better. A lack of calming from leaders has led to a self survival mentality. If ISIS doesn't get to you, North Korea, Iran, China, Russia, or aliens will. The one thing President Obama has done to feed the hysteria is a lack of ability to be calming in a crisis. He seems to say all the wrong things, and do all the wrong things to instill confidence for people. The next President will at least have to be better at fixing the problem at home if not abroad. You at least have to instill a false sense of confidence if nothing else. Otherwise the fear in people comes out, and it's usually not good.
I think what the rich fear is the poor, coming to their homes to reclaim what was lost.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
No. It's the blog where you realize that the people you respected all your life aren't as high and mighty as you naively thought, and also suffer from many imperfections and lunacy that all of us suffer from.
But the fact that even those top people admit and recognize that it's a dead race between Trump and Hillary on who is worse as an individual, each being utterly horrible in their own characteristic way, should be a telling tale.
Of course, we will bury this revelation under a few tons of smoke-screen by utilizing people's fascination with bunkers and apocalypse-survival that entertainment has thankfully banked on and deeply spread far and wide.
So essentially a company in Utah that builds basement shelters is claiming it has lots of superstars who buy their bunkers... but it can't tell you who because NDAs. But all the superstars rush to Utah because their sales are up 700% they say.
And Bill Gates may also have a bunker because someone in an Indiana shelter company says that he spoke to an unnamed head of Gate's security team who told him Gates has them.
But hey, its from marketing director Brad Roberson, so in no way is this marketing!
Whether Obama has been merely thoughtful and cautious or actually indecisive and passive is something that can be debated, but whatever it is it has created something of an impression that he lacks an appearance of decisiveness and strong leadership.
I kind of wish he had made some bold moves, even if they weren't necessarily the most ideal moves, simply to demonstrate he was moving forward and not settling for a status quo ante.
Well the rich/poor divide is a problem.
It is mostly due to both sides not understanding the other.
While many wealthy people worked hard or smart for their wealth. And many poor are there due to slacking off and bad life decisions. It isn't always so cut and dry as the old moral argument for being wealthy. There are degrees of luck especially for the super rich...
IBM may had wanted to have full license over DOS.
HP may had denied woz the rights to the Apple 1
That one lucky incident that got your name out just didn't happen.
Your parents didn't have a few million dollars for you to start out with.
Also for the poor.
You may had to deal with undiagnosed ADD
You could have low level autism without any additional help
The teachers and society said you wouldn't amount to anything
Your parents had no money to give you any advantages
That one chance for a break was lost.
As the rich see it the poor are just being lazy so giving them money will not encourage them to try harder.
While the poor see the rich of just holding onto their money without giving them a break so they can try again.
When you are rich you can take risks as failure is an option and try again. For the poor failure means death.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I would think a superior solution to a fixed bunker would be some kind of specialized boat designed for long endurance. Wind turbines, fold out solar panels for electric power. Water could be supplied by marine water makers. Food supplies could be supplemented by fishing.
Simply being out on the water gets you away from the most common threats. Maybe there are mobile pirates you have to worry about, but there will always be fewer of them than roving mobs of people with cutting torches.
If you were super rich, why not look into retrofitting an oil drilling platform into a sea bunker?
The one thing i've observed from the rich is that many of them had an impressive amount of failures before the big success. They are sturdy as hell people.
Ford had 5 business fail before the well-known company finally emerged.
The most impressive of all is Colonel Sanders.
He failed over 900 times trying to have someone take up his chicken recipe. Over 900 fucking times. We are talking failing a job interview over 900 times and still going forward. He finally managed to create KFC out of that.
Compare a man who failed over 900 times and still stood strong, to this hipster hugspace/safespace trend today where people get emotionally triggered by the stupidest of shit such as a video game character showing titties. It's depressing.
Of course luck had a say with many of the rich people, but the one thing without which they would never have become rich was utter maniacal persistence.
You could say that without persistence, that luck would never have materialized.
Without persistence, you have no right to luck, and even if it strikes you have no right to long-term benefits from it without persistence.
It's the basis of all this shit.
The article talks about battery power and long-life food but not climate control, water or sewage.
That's because an entire industry has grown up around scamming survivalists. Whether it's Jim Bakker selling $160 buckets of potato soup (and you can poop in the bucket later!), Glenn Beck's hugely overpriced gold or these guys selling luxury underground bunkers, the goal and method are the same as any other con; gain the mark's confidence using lies and half-truths, then take them for every penny they can get.
Building a bunker that could actually be lived in is secondary to increasing the profit margin, so they skimp on the basic construction and spend a little on cheap frills to hide the deficiencies. That's why the kitchen picture Ultimate Bunker website looks like every piece of shit house that's had superficial improvements done by someone trying to flip it for a profit.
No matter if you're persistent or not, no one has a "right to luck".
Everyone has an equal chance of being lucky, doesn't matter who you are or what you do.
What you can say is that some people opened more opportunities for luck to manifest itself, but that is not guarantee, no matter how hard you influence the odds. It may as well be the ordinary Workaday Joe who ends up getting lucky.
Eat the rich.
"While many wealthy people worked hard or smart for their wealth. And many poor are there due to slacking off and bad life decisions."
You are referring to decent people who made a fortune legitimately - which is wonderful.
Unfortunately most of the wealthy elite did not get there by working hard - they got there by profiting from the misery and misfortune of others and engaging in criminal activities.
Most poor people aren't poor due to bad decisions. They are poor because they are exploited by the wealthy and live in a system where the average person - absent some stroke of luck - can at best have a moderate income if he/she works hard their entire life.
How many millionaires do you know that made their fortune by working 40+ hours a week and saving every penny? Probably none.
Certainly not the Bush's, Clinton's, Desmaris', Bronfman's, Johnson's, Buffets, Rockefellers, Rothschilds, etc.
Poor people are meant to stay poor; rich are meant to stay rich.
That is the will of our overlords - not the average joe.
No successful people ever credit luck, that's for fucking sure. lol.
How many millionaires do you know that made their fortune by working 40+ hours a week and saving every penny? Probably none.
Read "The Millionaire Next Door". You just described most millionaires. And you know them; you just don't know that they are millionaires.
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Ron Paul a fascist. Give me a break. I'll assume you are a little to the left of Mao.
And then BOWLING ALLEYS and GARAGES ?? These people want to survive an apocalypse. . . .and they want to garage their Lamborghini ??
Not an apocalypse, just torches, pitchforks, and guillotines. History shows us that the real criminals (the men who apply the money to make horrible things happen- for profit) lie low while figureheads are deprived of their heads and then scuttle out when the danger has passed, and also that people have short memories and will let them live when they do.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They're not anti-gun. They're anti-the American people having guns. There's a big difference.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Even gold depends on the shared belief that there will be somebody else willing to accept it in exchange for goods of actual use within a survivable period of time after whatever crisis you are expecting passes. Certainly more durable than a few electronic IOUs or fiat currency issued by a nation state that is now on fire/crawling with zombies/etc; but the intrinsic utility is pretty limited. If the apocalypse needs corrosion-resistant connectors, gold has you covered; you could substitute it for lead in ballistic applications; but that's pretty much the list.
With the exception of people expecting to deal with explosions(where bunkers are a natural fit; and fairly commonly used in varying degrees of sophistication); a lot of this disaster-prep stuff falls into an unhelpful category of being both overprepared and underprepared: If you are concerned, it's pretty easy to justify enough supplies to weather a breakdown in our efficient-but-tightly-stretched supply chains; but you don't usually need a bunker to do that. If you have a crisis more serious than not being able to buy groceries for a few months in mind, however, the problem stops being "Do I have enough MREs?" and turns into "Am I set for subsistence farming and/or tribal warfare; and do I really want to bother with that shit anyway?" unpleasantly quickly.
It all seems aimed at a (not impossible; but not necessarily plausible) medium-size disaster; which will somehow be big enough that the 'stash of supplies in the basement' crowd is doomed; but small enough that your bunker isn't going to be plundered by local militias and there will be a society worth living in waiting for you when it's time to open the door again.
No he means boat. And stop calling me Shirley.
This, you would be surprised how many millionaires live in small houses and ride 8 year old honda civics.
But in reality these bunker mentalities don't understand they can't survive for more than a few weeks anyway.
That's where you're wrong. It's a comforting story to tell yourself, but read the articles. I wasn't sure if this one wound up linked somewhere or not. These are facilities with vegetable gardens and extensive water and air recycling systems. Many also have above-ground solar and wind power in addition to large reserves of diesel fuel for the on-site generators. Besides that, they have supplies to last for a lot longer than a few weeks. Try months or up to a year.
That's why we sealed them off with cement after N-day and are just now thinking about opening a few back up 15 years later.
Granted, they're nowhere near as good as Vault 81 from Fallout 4, but that's video games for you. I remember when I was a kid, I used to go over to a friend's place to play that. My parents couldn't afford a system to play that on and wouldn't have bought it for me anyway.
Of course, nobody thought it could actually happen--except the 1%ers.
Yeah, I am pretty sure I will be one of the first wave of people killed in the apocalypse.... It actually doesn't bother me much, though. I will make way for others to survive.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
The problem with a conventional yacht is they're fuel pigs. I'd wager Allen's yacht runs a high powered generator continuously to maintain the internal electrical systems, ventilation, and so forth even when docked unless docked at a location where you could get an industrial grade shore power feed.
What I'm thinking of is more along the lines of a more purpose-built boat that would require much less continuous electrical power and what it needed could be taken from wind, solar or even wave generation from deployed buoys. Tesla-type Li battery storage for nights or periods of poor weather, although in a marine environment with wind turbines some kind of power could always be generated.
I could see a solar panel system that would fold out from the sides when at anchor, as well as wind turbines that could be folded down along with fixed panels for supplemental power when the boat was in motion. The folding stuff would be folded in poor weather or in transit and deployed as weather conditions allowed. With enough solar panels, you might even be able to provide air conditioning for smaller interior spaces during sunlight hours.
The idea would be the ability to have long-duration self-sustaining electric power at anchor. Firing the engines would be done only when you needed to move and the engines sized for minimal fuel consumption -- there's a lot of recreation trawlers with top speeds of 9-10 knots off single engines capable of a few thousand mile ranges on full fuel tanks.
Or bottlecaps. I mean, come on.
The reason that a lot of these survivalists and preppers think that gold is the thing to have is because they've bought into the hype that gold is the thing to have. "The guy on the TV says I should have this if the world goes to shit. He's got his own TV show, so clearly he's onto something here."
That being said, I've known a few preppers, and it's hardly uniform that they're stockpiling gold. Actually, most of the ones I know focus on having a stockpile of food, water, bullets, etc. like you said. But the ones that make the news are the ones who have stockpiled a shitload of crazy.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
Until there's a war, in which case it's the war.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
Yeah, I've got the obession with gold as a sound post-apocalypse move. It might do well when the financial markets are in turmoil, but that's only because investors tend to flee to the commodities market when that happens, yet the chance of an apocalypse that cripples the financial markets yet leaves the commodities intact is... well, zero. It seems far more likely that post apocalypse the things you are going to need to survive and eventually (not to mention hopefully) trade with are going to be far more fundamental; food, water, fuel, livestock, manual and basic mechanical tools (in all their forms) and other basic supplies. The slightly longer term view might be things like seed stocks, construction materials and other other things necessary for some form of civilization to try and get back on its feet, but gold... not for quite some time, I'd imagine.
Another way to look at it; when Europeans were heading west across and establishing settlements across what would later become the US and Canada, how long did it take before currency (or company scrip) really took over from bartering as the defacto means of trade? And that's in an environment where there was (mostly) a lot of co-operation going into pushing on towards the Pacific and building a viable colony in the wake of the wagon trains that would be needed to help support them once they settled. Assuming that is the kind of environment that you are going to find when you crawling out of your bunker dragging your pile of gold seems like it's ruling out a lot of more likely, more violent, and far more long-term scenarios than all the survivors giving each other a pat on the back and getting straight on with rebuilding civilization.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
Many people are building "panic rooms" into their homes. They are multi-purpose, and the guys who know how to build the good ones hide them in plain sight.
"Well, good luck finding a judge that doesn't run a bestiality site."
right? Aside from a few folks who personally lost relatives to gun violence nobody favors gun control more stringent then "No Bazookas". Seriously, nobody's coming for your AR-15. It's been 8 years and 'Bama doesn't have your guns yet. Gun control is an issue kept alive by the right and the NRA to a) sell guns (Obama was great for their bottom line) and b) get you to ignore economic issues and let them go on draining you for all it's worth.
The left started to drop the issue in the 90's when Mr Clinton pointed out nobody wanted it. The issue had gained some traction in the 70s and 80s mostly because the anti-violence advocates formed an alliance with the racists (who were none to pleased that cheap manufacturing made guns affordable to the Black Panthers). The those racists got over their fears of Black guys with Guns, the alliance collapsed and the issue was lost.
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In Bowling for Columbine there's an animated video describing how scared Americans are (of just about anything). The number of bunkers screams fear to me - I'm sure there are a handful of such bunkers in the UK (or Europe, generally), they're mostly for politicians who must survive nuclear war, because only cockroaches will survive (apparently). I seriously doubt there's more than a couple for private citizens (and most of those are just swimming pools in the basement).
What's the point? I mean, if there's a nuclear war, you're better off just letting the galactic dice decide your fate. For low-level issues, such as no food for a few months, you're going to need to live in a tiny bunker for the entire duration. The rest of us will all just be mucking-in together to work out ways to collectively survive it. Sure, someone will come and steal the potatoes I'm growing in my back garden, but they can't steal all the potatoes in the neighbourhood. Besides, why steal them when you can just ask and we'll give you some?
Given the increased frequency of terrorist bombings and mass shootings
Is that a given, though?
Just checking you've done your homework...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
He had flown off carriers during the Vietnam war and had gone through nuclear training. His training had basically taught him that in at least a limited nuclear exchange, most of the stuff simply wouldn't go off. Nucs, at least then, were delicate things that were expected to often be shaken enough in the boost phase that many simply wouldn't work. It was a really fun exercise, to be honest. Studying how much concrete boils off from a particular size explosion, etc. This thing had decontamination showers, weapon lockers, a buried well head, steel shuttered loop holes for firing at mutants, a secret passage leading to a door hidden behind a bookcase, the works. Since he could pay for it from petty cash, it was no problem financially, just like the elite today.
Admit it, everyone here would do the same if they could. If for no other reason than the systems design exercise. Better keep it secret!
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
I have had this discussion with many people and most of the dangers we face are not the kinds of things you can "wait out in a bunker" like in some bad hollywood film. Almost all the disasters we face are going to have long term consequences which may last into geologic time tables. You will not have enough supplies to live for hundreds or thousands of years so you are slowly going to run out of resources and eventually die anyway. Although the idea of a rich guy eating those horses is kind of funny in a black humor sorta way.
Scenario: You discover to your surprise that you can have your fill of every pleasure money can buy, and then you notice you've still got a mountain of that stuff lying around.
What to do?
(1) Pursue power. This never gets old, because there's other guys with mountains of money doing the same thing. No amount of power.is ever enough, because it's relative power that brings satisfaction.
(2) Serve humanity. The ability to amass money on this scale is a function of the scale of society, and that means that society's problems scale proportionately. The material resources you command could have solved all humanity's problems -- five thousand years ago. Today they're just a drop in a bucket, and that's a challenge.
(3) Build yourself a lavish Armageddon bunker.
(4) Any combination of the above.
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to construct private bunkers as a precaution against events they are elected to prevent. This is only fair, similar to placing the children of elected officials who vote for war on the front lines of those very wars.
Read "The Millionaire Next Door". You just described most millionaires. And you know them; you just don't know that they are millionaires.
Our society's lexicon needs a word for someone who has at least $10 million, because that is who people are really thinking of when they talk about millionaires. Either that or people who only have a few million but are still in their 20's/30's. No one is thinking of a regular middle class person who amassed $1.5 million in their retirement account by the age of 65.
It really is an important distinction, because having $1-2 million by retirement does not give the lifestyle anyone in the developed world attributes to "millionaires". $2 million provides about $60k-$80k in yearly income (inflation adjusted) throughout retirement. Hardly what anyone is thinking of when they refer to millionaires. I can virtually guarantee this isn't what the AC was thinking of when he mentioned them.
Having $10 million on the other hand will provide over half a million dollars of income for life. This is the lifestyle people mean when they refer to millionaires.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke
Yes, I've noticed how anti-gun Hollywood is; you can see it in the movies that come out of there.
I think the problem is that real guns are so disappointing. If you could make one that sprays endless bullets with no recoil, well that'd be a hoot.
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$1,000,000 puts you in the top 0.5%.
That link refers to annual income, not net worth (which is what the discussion was about). Like the parent said, every million will get you about $30k-$40k in income, hardly in the 1% for income. To be in the top 1% for net worth, you need about $7 million.
Enigma
well all those "liberal" elitist "Oscar Winners, Sports Stars and Bill Gates " etc, who are building bunkers seems to believe what alex jones says and follow his advice in doing that, while denouncing his influence on hoi polloi.
oh the irony!