Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
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.
This, you would be surprised how many millionaires live in small houses and ride 8 year old honda civics.
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.
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.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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