https://www.theguardian.com/news/2022/sep/04/super-rich-prep...
> They started out innocuously and predictably enough. Bitcoin or ethereum? Virtual reality or augmented reality? Who will get quantum computing first, China or Google? Eventually, they edged into their real topic of concern: New Zealand or Alaska? Which region would be less affected by the coming climate crisis? It only got worse from there. Which was the greater threat: global warming or biological warfare? How long should one plan to be able to survive with no outside help? Should a shelter have its own air supply? What was the likelihood of groundwater contamination? Finally, the CEO of a brokerage house explained that he had nearly completed building his own underground bunker system, and asked: “How do I maintain authority over my security force after the event?” The event. That was their euphemism for the environmental collapse, social unrest, nuclear explosion, solar storm, unstoppable virus, or malicious computer hack that takes everything down.
Mostly tongue in cheek... but the whole thing hangs together.
Personally if you want to propagate life by shooting containers of RNA at different extraterrestrial plants.
Well, it's certainly one of the concerns there. After the lack of an atmosphere, biosphere, usable water...
For every prepper in the $100+ million class, I know a hundred who are not. They’re enjoying their lives or working to make more money.
The perception that rich people are preppers comes from the string of stories about a few rich people prepping in New Zealand a few years ago. You can tell who gets their worldview from headlines when rich people are described as “they” who all act in unison and do this one thing that was in news headlines recently.
This.
I live in Wyoming and frequent the Bay Area, New York and some places in Europe and India. The rich preppers are rare. (And mostly techies or oil men.) It’s mostly a middle-class pursuit, the singler and older and maler the person, the more likely they own clothing in camo. If they’ve spent any time in a military or intelligence service, their “prepping” is basic emergency preparedness, not bunker lunacy. (Though one retired special ops guy who started military contracting kept a map of the bunkers. I think as a joke. The saying being a well-stocked bunker owned by an asshole is a good target for a group of guys with guns.)
At the end of the day, the rich preppers build bunkers because it gives them something interesting to talk about. That group is mostly chasing that high.
> karma: 178634
> about: Ski. Fly. Growth equity VC.
And, if I’m not misremembering, of Silo as well.
As for Mark Zuckerberg escaping to his "virtual metaverse," well that's certainly in keeping with the overall seriousness of the Guardian.
Do you have evidence that the ultra wealthy are actually taking this into account? Over a human timeframe every ultra wealthy person has access to plenty of “climate change safe“ locations, no particular advance planning is needed.
Define "unemployment". There are six (U-1 to -6) ways of classification in the US:
* https://www.bls.gov/lau/stalt.htm
* https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/080415/true-...
* https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unemployment.asp
And the fact that they're different between the US and other countries, and between other countries and other-other countries is well recognized; "International unemployment rates: how comparable are they?":
* https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2000/06/art1full.pdf
And this isn't something new; from 1957, "International Comparison of Unemployment Rates":
* https://www.nber.org/books-and-chapters/measurement-and-beha...
Just because they're different does not mean that they are "misleading" or 'manipulated'.
> The wealthiest people in the USA are now in the mode of grabbing what they can while the 'grabbing is still good.'
How is this new? Is greed something discovered recently and especially in the US?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedman_doctrine
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilded_Age
Even stacking government with loyalist appointees is, to a certain extent, returning to 'the old ways' before reforms were enacted to clamp down on the practice:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_service_reform_in_the_Un...
For those not realizing that unemployment has several definitions - isn't it wonderful that all were published AND all are well-documented?
It's these points of reliability and trustworthiness that, complexity aside, we are losing from chaotic administration.
Source? For unemployment, isn't the U-3 definition used for "headline unemployment" consistent to most other countries?
That said, measurement is not as easy today with so many gig workers. Government data is often driven by proxies because its too hard to measure directly and the number of people getting an llc for their uber/doordash/lyft/etc job is throwing off our math. Government currently uses number of new businesses as a proxy since generally people starting businesses are hiring people.
Even with tons of talented and well-intentioned people and everyone fully aligned to re-build everything broken, it'd take decades to rebuild that trust that was lost in a matter of weeks.
America's been in that mode for a long time.
The republic may be collapsing. The empire comes after. The rich benefit if we transition to an autocratic empire based on American military might.
There is some truth to this. Other examples of crossing the line and breaking long-term trust would be:
To Canada: Statements about Canada last year.
To Europe: The idiocy around Greenland earlier this year
To the Middle East: Current events.
Things have definitely accelerated in the second term, but it's not like there weren't signs that political leaders definitely noticed were disruptive, even if the wider public weren't as aware at the time.
Ie real actual legal liability. Line up anyone who did insider trading, the doge guys, the big mouths in the big house, and put them through a zero tolerance military tribunal.
No bullshit kangaroo court where they're let off with a slap on the wrist because they're rich.
I mean strip every last one of these motherfuckers of everything they're worth. 180 the kangaroo court. Make a public mockery of them. Posters everywhere.
Think of it as a peace offering for the rest of the world. We could even include the war on terror guys in there, all the liars who claimed WMDs could go to the same federal prison. No cushions.
It wasn't. You are conflating "production" with "manufacturing." They're not the same. The US, for better or worse, produces a lot of value.
> moral project of "America" was effectively discontinued
I'm not sure America was ever a "moral project," considering the many many dark parts of its history. Nevertheless, at the moment moment, it seems to be on a quest find the bottom of the pit of depravity.
The USD cannot exist as a reserve currency and support domestic manufacturing. That is to say, the US political engine and its benefactors sold out domestic manufacturing for international leverage.
Did it have to be this way? No, we could have implemented the Bancor, but the appeal of dominating international politics was irresistible. We cannot reindustrialize without giving up international financial power and with that in mind, who would still decide to switch?
Though I’m not particularly looking forward to living through the decline of the empire, I cling to the hope that a post-imperial America can emerge and attempt to live up to the dream of FDR, MLK, and that Jesus guy everyone seems to like so much but ignores all the inconvenient tolerance and sharing stuff he was so obsessed with.
This is a myth. But a self-fulfilling one, given we’re cutting budgets to those agencies because so many Americans believe it.
Manufacturing consent is horseshit because it gets the direction of causation wrong. Nobody is master planning any of this. Storytellers sell stories. And then politicians sense the vacuum of attention.
Fox News and Shadowstats don’t whip their flock up so DOGE could cut budgets. They did it to sell ads. DOGE then cut, mostly randomly. And there was no fury about these cuts so they stuck.
This is a big claim. What other countries? What are their methods and how do they differ?
That’s a bold claim, do you have sources to back it up? If true, we’d all (I’d, at least) learn an important lesson.
It also specifically says unemployment figures isn't solely from state unemployment insurance figures.
That's quite a claim. A "whopper" one might say.
(1)This is normal human behavior usually described as "capitalism". It has been well-studied & the literature awaits you, e.g., The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776 by Scottish economist Adam Smith. Go ahead: if you read the entire tome you may be the first man to do so. Perhaps you could write a usefully shortened version or versions of it.
mark_l_watson says"Without this immoral looting, our government could do a better job of protecting US citizens as our empire collapses."
(2)the behavior isn't immoral, as you will find by merely educating yourself [see (1)].
(3)There was/is no [US]"empire". And certainly none in the sense of the Persian, Mongol, Roman, incan, Spanish, British, French, or even, God forbid, Belgian empire, all of which were true empires.
With a valid measure I would expect a roughly even distribution over time between underestimates and overestimates. For a valid measure worth considering I'd also expect the stat to be released later when revisions are less likely because more actual data has been collected
This is a valid hypothesis. It’s wrong, and I’ll explain why. (It’s a bad and invalid thing to conclude.)
If measurement errors were iid, you’d be correct. But they’re not. They’re well documented for not being so. Earlier survey results are biased by directional response bias inasmuch as the employers with the lease changes respond first. So the earliest releases tend to match whatever was going on before. Then the employers who had to do paperwork respond. And then, finally, someone gets around to calling the folks who never got back. Some of them aren’t around anymore.
So yeah, the directional tendency in revisions is well documented. And for a long time, the early releases were appreciated. But maybe American statistical and media literacy is such that only final releases should be released, which would mean we’d always be working with data 6 months to a year out of date.
At some point a lack of decision to take compensating action becomes faking the numbers.
There have been revisions since the forever, and this is because they depend in part of surveys, and if companies (and the people with-in them) don't bother responding in a timely or accurate manner then that's going to throw the sampling off.
> CES estimates are considered preliminary when first published each month because not all respondents report their payroll data by the initial release of employment, hours, and earnings. BLS continues to collect payroll data and revises estimates twice before the annual benchmark update (see benchmark revisions section below).
* https://www.bls.gov/opub/hom/ces/presentation.htm#revisions
Post-COVID surveying seems to have become more difficult (and BLS budget stagnation/cuts haven't helped). This has been a known issue for a while; see Odd Lots episode "Some of America's Most Important Economic Data Is Decaying":
> Gathering official economic data is a huge process in the best of times. But a bunch of different things have now combined to make that process even harder. People aren't responding to surveys like they used to. Survey responses have also become a lot more divided along political lines. And at the same time, the Trump administration wants to cut back on government spending, and the worry is that fewer official resources will make tracking the US economy even harder for statistical departments that were already stretched. Bill Beach was commissioner of labor statistics and head of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics during Trump's first presidency and also during President Biden's. On this episode, we talk to him about the importance of official data and why the rails for economic data are deteriorating so quickly.
Honestly, your comment made me mildly angry. That said, can you say why you believe parent's comment is misleading?
Admittedly, if I could find a single instance of someone willing to vouch or share insight on having filled out a BLS survey, that'd cure a healthy chunk of skepticism. There's still be the other distortions in the data to account for, but I'd at least have an instance proving that yeah, there is somebody filling out these surveys and it isn't just something they say they do to make their magic unemployment number sound legit.
Note, I'm in a massive sceptical shit phase at the moment. Last decade has burned my optimism hard. So when it comes to my ability to assume benevolent intent right now, there's a heavy bias against doing it, and a heavier bias in the direction of "what would be the easiest way to keep the System limping along?" The answer to that is "say you do one thing, in reality do another, and as long as no one comes lookin', it's gold." The finance industry runs on Trust moreso than anything else, and there ain't much to be said for Trusting anything you can't verify these days. Not from other humans.
I’ve never met a single chicken farmer. Does that mean I should be sceptical about them existing? Like, what sort of metric is this for truth finding?
> to assume benevolent intent
No need. Markets move on these data. The rich and powerful bet their money on what they say.
Unless you have introduced yourself with this question to thousands of people, this is a totally meaningless statement. It says more about your social circle, your grasp of descriptive statistics, and the weird online stew you are soaking your brain in than it says about the CPS.
So my main argument ( and frankly the only argument that should matter ) is that is a bad fit for the goal of estimating values ( even though we do know its failure modes ). Is that not enough?
<< do other countries
No, it doesn't mean I am wrong.
<< That's what people are asking you to do.
No. What I am being asked to do is: "Show me a better way, but I only accept a better way that is already utilized by someone else". Not a recipe for a thoughtful exchange of ideas.
Context has power. Removing it is thining the herd of power.
Instead of "This economy sucks!" "Yeah, but look at the data, it's getting better..."
Now we just have "This economy sucks!" "Yeah"
The point is, the argument isn't "this data is right leaning" vs "this data is left leaning" or whatever your skew-scope is.
The argument at present: "We don't need to know to know X" versus "Of course we need to know X".
And ther'es clearly a fascist convincing people it's all useless while they ply their grift of choice.
Israel? Bribes? We pay them ...
If one was to really think about national level bribes then presumably Saudi Arabia would be worthy of mention, given their involvement with the Trump (extended) family.
Epstein.
I don't have a particular position on the actual "controlled by Russia" claim.
But that's probably just my lying' eyes.
But if you just stop collecting data? No, these are not your father's red versus blue stats.
Please give specifics. Otherwise this is just grouchiness.