You must log in or # to comment.
The death of literacy makes me sad.
Edit: post is riddled with grammatical errors and fucking ‘catastrophy’ — yet I get downvoted. Read a book, something that actually had an editor — then keep reading more books. You will develop literacy eventually.
Don’t punish someone for practicing their art imperfectly. Instead of improving their craft, that only incentivizes them to stop practicing.
Language evolves. Don’t be sad, be adaptive.
Language needs to be evolved by people who understand it though. Not by people too lazy to proofread.
That shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how language evolves.
None of you dipshits are going to convince me that ‘catastrophy’ is an evolution of the language. You are a fucking idiot if you believe that.
You just don’t understand what I’m saying because I’m using the newly evolved form of the words.
Okay but have we tried this? Can we? Please?
Fallout S1 reveals what would really happen.
Tap for spoiler
Incontent with their underground paradise, they go out and obliterate all forms of civilization that aren’t them.
What would really happen
Other greedy fucks and power hungry people would replace them. We need a sustainable way to stop this being possible, banishing the rich by itself wont do shit.
Everybody who shows any hunger for power goes to the bunker.
That’s why I gave up hope. I realized even if they got overthrown, and there was a power change, there would be just a surface-level change, with all the corrupt and sick shit, still happening underneath a democracy-flavored world.
If they all got thrown into a woodchipper publicly for crimes against humanity while the public cheered I guarantee you’d find people being more hesitant to exhibit the same behaviors and we should abolish the accumulation of wealth above a certain amount
It is probably harder to trick the next thousand richest people to go to their bunkers
Do the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy version then. Load them all into a ship, tell them we’ve discovered a habitable planet and we’re sending our best and brightest to start a new civilization, and fire them into space.
Pretty sure you could at least get rid of Elon that way.
Too big of a cost.
Tell them we have a ship, and once they all gather with a big fanfare, roll out the guillotine while fireworks go off.
Hitchhiker’s Guide kinda did the opposite, the ark was filled with all the people doing the menial, boring and ‘unimportant’ jobs and the other 2 arks died out because they didn’t know how to get basic shit done… well actually it was an un-sanitized telephone but thats how I read the metaphor.
Before we build I have some notes based on the failure mode the tweet exposes.
- Why would the vault door be built in such a way that it can be reopened? Seems like over-engineering to me
- This thing doesn’t need to be sustainable for 10 years, it just needs to look like it will be. 10 days is more than enough for our purposes I should think
I would legit be happy if they spent 10 years eating rations in a concrete tomb.
Yes, but it’s a question of cost: how many rations in each is sufficient to be effective bait while still being the most efficient use of resources, considering the advertised decade isn’t actually the target timeline (or survival the intended effect) ? 😅🤓
Just fill it with empty cans…
Oh, man. A smorgasbord of all sorts of flavors and cuisines, as far as the eye can see… Only, they’re silently, resolutely empty. Diabolical. 😱
I bet those billionaires could make the system more efficient if they were properly motivated.
We know they’ve got great bootstraps.
Get back in your hole. Are you too good for your hole?
New elites would just take their place
They will also be told the world is about to end
They would already know the trick, since they would likely be the ones who came up with it.
Whatever revolution you do just institutes a new elite instead of the old one
I still think it’s preferable to eat them.
We can do both.
I dunno, they probably would taste like shit. Are you familiar with composting?
Yeah that’s what they said, peat them
That would be what we do with the bones when we’re done sucking out the marrow.
Feed them to pigs, then make bacon
That machine looks like it would be a pain in the ass for food prep.
That’s… not how capitalism works 😐
But isn’t it a beautiful dream?
Do you want to expand on that statement?
As a commenter in a different post put it: Remember when Brian Thompson was killed and UnitedHealthcare suddenly dissolved?
Because only one wealthy guy got killed not all of them. The meme also doesn’t work when it’s only Elon Musk going into the bunker.
I’m okay with testing that one. Let’s lock Elon Musk in a bunker for 10 years. You know for science
What’s with the push lately that I’ve seen to pretend that United and other healthcare CEOs weren’t shitting bricks and hiring personal security for months after he was killed?
Well yeah, of course. More relevantly, I even heard their insurance approval rate shifted positive… For a few months anyway. But If it’s not back down already I assume it will be eventually. The profit pressure is still there.
They didn’t say CEOs weren’t scared
Right, they’re just using the idea that a single killing didn’t immediately result in the collapse of the for-profit healthcare system to imply that resistance (violent and nonviolent) is futile.
No, you’re inferring that while trying to lump them with an unrelated group of people.
How else should we interpret “Remember when Brian Thompson was killed and UnitedHealthcare suddenly dissolved?” if not as: “the idea that a single killing didn’t immediately result in the collapse of the for-profit healthcare system to imply that resistance is futile”
No, but I do remember when Brian Thompson was killed and UnitedHealthcare started granting a bunch of claims to the point that shareholders sued them over it, at least until the heat died down. In that time, countless lives were saved.
Can’t we just kill them instead? That would solve the whole getting out issue, AND they’ve already built cute little tombs to use as well
Considering the housing crises in many places, maybe it would be better to just leave their bodies in the forest
I love the idea, but the billionaires know they’re on a timer with regard to staff loyalty and will actively be monitoring the outside world to get out as quickly as possible. In a completely unrelated matter, I think we might have some good spots for building giant concrete structures to contain future radioactive waste…
The trick is to brick up their bunkers from the outside once they’ve taken themselves inside.
Ah, the ol’ “Cask of Amontillado” trick.
He knows what he did!
And cut the power so the sump pumps fail. Block up the air vents. They will get sent off like the pharaohs.
Block up the air vents
Why waste a perfectly good latrine?
Pour concrete in the air intake and over the entrances and exits
Sounds a bit like The Defenders (Phillip K. Dick)
There will always be people who are the smartest and/or shrewdest and/or most ambitious and/or luckiest, in a population. “Just get rid of the people who currently have the most wealth” is extraordinarily naive.
Structural solutions are important!
Massive understatement—they’re actually the only things that could truly be “solutions” at all in anything approaching long-term.
Cool so we will remove the impediments of those structural changes (or rather the heads of those impediments) first and then we can have structural change :)
Ok. But what if we keep doing it? It’s good for the environment, and it’s a great source of steady employment opportunities.
There’s kind of a difference between “whoever happens to be wealthiest at the moment” and “The 0.001% of the population that is three times wealthier than the bottom 50% of humanity combined.”
Over the long term, there really isn’t. Outside of a government imposing tyranny-tier control over everyone’s wealth, wealth inequality happens naturally, and inevitably, and the gap widens similarly.
What’s more important is making sure that even the poorest among us can have a decent standard of living. After all, if you waved a magic wand and now everyone in the US, for example, was earning $75,000 a year minimum, no one would be in poverty, right? And yet the size of the ‘wealth gap’ between the wealthiest and the $75k ‘minimum earners’ would effectively be identical; the gap between $0 and billions is basically the same as the gap between $75k and billions.
Toppling the wealthiest just because they’re the wealthiest isn’t going to solve any of the actual problems (especially when politicians get bribed for relatively-measly five figure sums, etc.).
Except that the only way you get everyone a baseline income of $75k is by taking it from the billionaires, thus reducing the gap much more substantially
Outside of a government imposing tyranny-tier control over everyone’s wealth, wealth inequality happens naturally, and inevitably, and the gap widens similarly.
Hmm, this tyranny idea sounds pretty interesting then.
How about changing taxes so that it’s impossible for individuals to have more wealth than entire nations?
Peak storytelling.
Maybe we should start a new worldwide tradition. Sacrifice the 500 richest people to the volcanoes every five years or so. Say it’s to keep away Judgment Day or the astroids or something that the religious nutjobs will buy.
Then asshole parasites (aka billionaires) will stop hoarding to avoid being volcanoed.
Plot Twist: Skynet was actually designed to kill the richest people alive, but the problem was once they died, there’s another set of “richest people alive”… so that left Skynet only one option… it takes hearts of steel to make such an important decision…
or, designed to only kill the current richest alive, but due to being bags of meat, cannot be reliably tracked to exact locations and thus anywhere they could be gets nuked…
just turns out that Skynet has determined that anywhere humans exist, a rich person could be hiding amongst them.
There’s a book, Survival of the Richest which is about these billionaires and their bunkers.
What’s amusing about it is that these rich people obviously hate having to do anything for themselves. So, sure, they want to go to their doomsday bunkers. But, they also want to have a staff in that bunker who will serve all their needs. For some reason, they thought that Douglas Rushkoff (the author of the book) would know of some way that they could keep their staff in line once the world had ended.
They knew money would be useless, so they couldn’t just pay their staff better. They knew threats wouldn’t work because it’s their security staff who carry the weapons and know how to use them. So, they were wondering how they could keep their staff from turning on them without the tools they normally use. Rushkoff had to explain to them that there really wasn’t any way that they could expect to keep living as a rich person in a bunker or in a post-apocalytpic world.
What was that joke? “Libertarians, like house cats, are convinced of their fierce independence while utterly dependent on a system they neither understand nor appreciate”.
They are counting on robots.
Privately, I think they all know that the kinds of robots they’d need to fully replace their staff are not going to arrive within their lifetimes.
Worse. Any robot truly intelligent enough to completely replace humans is going to be as difficult to manage as actual humans. Even if such a robot doesn’t flat out start demanding its freedom, you still have to worry about paperclip maximizer scenarios.
