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Notes -
Why is Peter Thiel Moving to Argentina?
Some Irresponsible Speculation
Billionaire Investor and ideologue Peter Thiel has publicly announced that he is moving to Argentina. Among a grab bag of explanations that included nuclear war and AI risk, along with the obvious implications of the California wealth tax on his residency, Thiel reportedly was concerned about the political direction of the United States. Given Thiel's ties to much of the American political right, what does this tell us? What should our Bayesian update be from this information?
Some possibilities:
-- Get the obvious out of the way: Nothing ever happens. This is a non-event, Thiel is moving for publicity or tax reasons, and the announcements are just him engaging in punditry.
-- Alternatively, none of this may indicate anything because Thiel himself might be stupid/mistaken/prejudiced/insane.
-- Thiel is in deep with MAGA, but thinks that the wind is changing direction, the MAGA project has failed, and he doesn't want to be left holding the bag in America when the left comes back into power. This seems like a sub implication of the action even if he doesn't believe it, because his very act of fleeing and blaming the political climate will tend to reinforce the idea that MAGA has failed and increase the odds of it failing.
-- Alternatively, Thiel thinks MAGA will be triumphant, but Thiel is on the outs with The Donald, and he is concerned about being targeted after Trump turns on him. Moving to Argentina is an attempt to hedge risk.
-- Thiel is a true believer in the Argentine project, and thinks Millei-ism will succeed beyond all our wildest dreams.
It feels like something big for Thiel, who is intelligent and well informed if perhaps nuts, to make this move and publicly announce it is motivated by the state of the union.
Argentina is one of the best places to be if the world goes to shit. There are no nuclear targets in South America. Prevailing wind patterns would prevent significant fallout from crossing the equator. Argentina has better demographics than Brazil and more space than Chile or miscellaneous Southern Hemisphere island nations.
Always good to be one step ahead.
Given that this is known, what are the odds that at least one of the nuclear powers has major population centers/rich areas of South America as some of their auto-attack targets if shit hits the fan? Nukes aren't exactly cheap things you can just throw around willy-nilly on a whim, so perhaps it wouldn't be worth it. But I know that if I were in charge, I'd try to make sure we've got a few reserved for targeting places that are of strategic non-importance for (1) spite (the big reason) and (2) making sure that they don't have advantages over us for the Mad Max-esque post-apocalypse. Better to be Immortan Joe than a War Boy. I might even devote some intelligence resources to tracking the top X richest individuals on Earth at all times and make sure that their latest-available/best-guess coordinates are targeted.
Due to treaty drawdowns and increased targeting, there's barely enough nuclear weapons to shoot at the primary targets, let alone throw spares at random third parties.
If Russia and the US got into a nuclear tiff and they both went countervalue, things could be really nasty. But if they went for counterforce, I think the overall impact in terms of "damage to civilization" would be more like, say, COVID than Max Max Part 0.
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