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More like blast from the past than current burning culture war battle, but one interesting fact dropped from court documents concerning FTX effective altruist saga.
Sam Bankman-Fried wanted to buy the nation of Nauru to wait out the world's end
Dead bird thread
This article is more clickbaity and sensational than factual, actual quote from the court documents docket 1886 - "Adversary case 23-50448. Complaint by FTX Trading Ltd., Alameda Research LLC" is:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8NgFWTk2puBG5eSJA/ftx-foundation-wanted-to-buy-the-nation-of-nauru-to-save-eas
Hard to imagine worse place to be stuck in the case of TEOTWAWKI that deserted and devastated island that lacks even drinkable water.
It was never a serious plan, nothing more than one of many ideas brainstormed among elite human capital of FTX Foundation, but it is symptomatic as for elite thought and for their beliefs that everything and everyone is for sale. As people on EA forum pointed up, it could achieve nothing than give EA a bad name (if it already hadn't one).
We are not any more in the Holy Roman Empire, selling and buying sovereign principalities is, legally, not a thing anymore and trading land between sovereign states is also thing of the past.
Last case was in 1791, when Christian Friedrich Carl Alexander, last margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach sold his country to Prussia so he could enjoy comfy retirement in England (stereotypical boomer behavior, but probably the smartest move at the time).
FTX saga update: Campaign finance charges on Sam Bankman-Fried were just dropped. Nothing happened,no big deal. Another win for effective altruism.
Campaign Finance Charge Against Sam Bankman-Fried Is Dropped
crucified bird thread with list of SBF contributions
There are many more charges left, but stay hopeful. Even if SBF's body gets to rot in prison, effective altruism will be marching on.
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I'm affronted. Nauru is rightful Australian clay, we've effectively already bought the island. It's used for offshore refugee processing (Europe could learn a lot from the 'no refugee who arrives by boat will be resettled in Australia' doctrine). They don't even have an army, they're effectively an Australian protectorate.
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Dorks like this will rightfully be the first ones killed in any real apocalypse. How did anyone take these guys seriously?
Or more fitting:
No, you don't understand, my billionaire bunker will be different! All my hired muscle will surely stay loyal after fiat currency collapses
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-William Jennings Bryant
They lost $8 billion dollars, not all of it was trading losses, they were very generous to an enormous number of causes which means at least all the people with an interest in those donations continuing would take them seriously enough to keep the money flowing.
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Link to the complaint was wrong. Try [this one]?
Doesn’t really matter; you quoted the whole section of substance. The rest of that section, “political and charitable donations using commingled funds,” is rather pedestrian.
I wonder how much this guy thought Nauru would cost.
Not sure how much it would cost - this article seems to suggest that land isn't typically commoditised in Nauru and instead is just passed down from generation to generation. But wages are low (around $75-$150 per week according to that same link) and the place is tiny - about the size of JFK airport. So it should be at least theoretically possible for a sufficiently rich billionaire to buy off all 10k people who live there. If you gave them a million each, that's 10 billion.
But of course the main asset of Nauru is not its land, it's the status it has as technically-a-country. It gets its income from "foreign aid" for voting the right way in international fora, selling the rights to fish in its waters, getting paid to take asylum seekers off Australia's hands, etc. So any attempt to take control of it will inevitably become a geopolitical incident.
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If the world is ending, why would you even need to be on 'sovereign territory'? By definition this scenario involves the collapse of government which means that you want a lightly defended, low population country in a place that probably won't be tier-1 priority for nukes, where you can survive year round and where things will grow naturally.
Honestly there aren't many options. The only two I can think of are rural parts of New Zealand's South Island (where Thiel and the other billionaire preppers have already bought compounds around Lake Wanaka) and Patagonia.
The problem with the pacific islands is that their carrying capacity is very limited - a truly remote pacific island that was never mined or deforested for cash crops could probably support a very small population indefinitely, but there aren't many of them left. Nauru has 11,000 people and relies very heavily on imports for most food. There are some uninhabited islands in French Polynesia one could purchase. You'd still be in France, though. There are some good islands off Fiji, but the problem is they're too close to the very densely inhabited main island which will have 700,000 hungry people on it.
You don't need a sovereign territory as the world collapses, you need it before the world collapses to enable you to set up the conditions that keep you sovereign after the world collapses.
The neoreactionary concept of preparing to be handed power while still under the rule of a (decrepit, flailing) government doesn't seem to work super well.
What you need to set up the conditions to make you sovereign after the world collapses is a reputation as the kind of person who can keep your underlings alive and prosperous when the shit hits the fan. Once it does, there's no external authority and no one is personally powerful enough to rule alone, so these relationships are all you have to maintain your rule. If those under you generally trust that if they do what they'll say, they'll be alive and rich (whatever that means after the SHTF), the challengers to your power will generally be kept in check. Internal challengers too -- and you can't exclude all those with the ambition to be such, because your underlings are going to need underlings of their own, and the same qualities which make you a good leader make them good leaders too.
You don't need a sovereign territory beforehand, though it may help. You probably have to be a certain type of military leader; what I'm describing is basically a warlord.
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I would think the reverse would be a problem as well, especially if the enclave had things the bigger government wanted or needed for stability. Governments in their death throes tend not to care much about legal niceties like sovereignty, rights, or law. If TSHTF, and governments know it, they’ll simply invade and take the resources they need.
Tiny Pacific Islands don't really have anything that people want. They're neither rich in resources or people - other than refuges for the wealthy, there's actually not much you can make of them, which is why they're ideal.
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Parts of rural Australia fit the bill, I’d think- not a lot of people around, unlikely to get nuked and if they do it’ll just be like Sidney and Brisbane, will have lots of farmers after the end.
So would large parts of the interior of the US, especially if you have a huge budget to invest in facilities up front.
Too dry, IMO. You'll want easy farming after the end, with no pumps or water storage needed.
Depends on your capital budget, I’d think. If you’re a billionaire you can easily afford windmill pump wells or solar pumps or whatever. It’s a lot less work than growing your own crops unmechanized in even the nicest climate.
The windmill pump wells are already there. Any outback property you buy is going to have half a dozen of these.
Also, while growing a few vegetables in a backyard garden is easy enough (we had one when I was growing up there), there's an even easier food source. You will never, ever, ever run out of kangaroos.
Herding sheep over the outback is even easier.
As far as windmill pump wells, if it’s anything like Texas they require significant investment to be usable.
Outback windmills are typically in active use - that's how livestock get drinking water in many places.
Sheep tend to be raised in the more fertile and forgiving areas, like the Darling Downs. Places like the Desert Uplands are mostly cattle country. But roos are everywhere.
And decent meat too. Roos are very lean creatures so they make for shitty steaks, but in a spaghetti or chili you can't tell it's different from beef.
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"Immortan Sam controls the water in this territory!"
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I think the risk is that regions of the US that are ideal are often actually quite near the location of US nuclear missile silos. A lot of rural land especially in depopulated parts of the West is also national parks or otherwise protected. This is also the problem with parts of Southwestern Canada, for example.
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You have to be on sovereign territory to do some of the moonshot shit they were fantasizing about. Like rewriting medical ethics.
Orrrrrr it could just be a poorly conceived brainstorm, and not something to model as a rational, cost-benefit decision. But that’s not fun, huh?
You don't need to be on sovereign territory for that, just bribe a Gulf government (ie. one of the poorer emirates, maybe Oman) by saying you'll put their country at the 'forefront of medical research' and promise to keep everything quiet so the clerics don't get angry.
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I was wondering if anything new was on the horizon given this case was very quiet recently.
Sooooo - they don't at all mind sounding like 70s Bond villains? (Also his family seem to be heavily involved in it all). 'Let's set up our own desert island volcano lair where we can ignore pesky regulations about creating MONSTROSITIES REPUGNANT TO GOD AND MAN', huh?
"sensible regulation around human genetic enhancement" Well that doesn't sound at all like the High Evolutionary!
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Trump wanted to revive the tradition by purchasing Greenland, but small-minded people derailed the plan. Sad!
I still think buying Greenland is an actually cool idea and wish we would have done it.
I would be happy if it actually happened, though realistically I don't think it could - the times are different and spectacular events like that aren't happening anymore. Now proposing something like that just marks you as a crazy. While understanding everything about "good old times", I still genuinely feel sad about it.
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I mean, you can't, really, it's not for sale.
The USA could've used its might to pressure Denmark into selling it, if it really wanted to and was willing to take off its diplomatic mask entirely over Greenland of all places. But given that, it could've just as well used its might to pressure Denmark into simply giving it up, or done a Crimea on it.
Or it could've done what it usually does, and put its money and weight behind an "independence" movement (that it could astroturf out of whole cloth if need be), and then simply occasionally remind the new Supreme Leader of Greenland who put him there, who keeps him there, and why.
But it doesn't even need to do that, since the Danish government is already de facto the USA's pet poodle, so there is nothing to be gained.
It wasn't for sale at the start, so what. My house is not for sale either, but offer me 20x the price, and I'll be willing to talk. Why not, I could then buy much better house and all the moving expenses will be covered. There are things that aren't ever for sale, and there are things that aren't for sale but given the right price, may become for sale. There may be a price point where both Greenland residents and Danish government would consider doing it. I'm not sure if that price point would also make it worth it for the US to buy, but at least exploring that question doesn't sound crazy to me, and shouldn't just stop at "not for sale" at the beginning. And there's nothing inherently Danish there also, I mean we're not talking about Copenhagen here, so I don't think it's completely out of the question no matter the price.
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Denmark said they were willing to do whatever the residents wanted, so theoretically we could have just bought all their votes and had them tell Denmark they wanted to be the 51st state now. There's not that many people there, I'm thinking low six figures per resident plus US citizenship could be covered by the Pentagon's lost couch cushion money.
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This is especially galling coming from the guy who will flip a 50.1% coin forever at double or nothing on civilization's behalf. We might all be lucky he blew up "early".
Is it very mean of me to take a look at the kind of people around SBF, then imagine them as the template for the future generations of humanity post-apocalypse, and shudder?
Like, two generations down the line they all die off from lack of stimulants for the ADHD etc. etc. etc.? Because post-freakin' apocalypse and collapse of entirety of human civilisation?
People here hate to admit it but the future will be filled with tall, good-looking chads who are good at socializing.
If society doesn’t collapse we’ll just continue on the same trajectory of mate selection. If it does collapse then physically fit, personable guys will be the ones who actually have useful abilities.
A few moments more of thought leads to the conclusion that the present is already filled with such people.
The virgin looking forward vs. the chad looking backward
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The future will be full of the descendants of random African peasants, and religious nuts. Chads are good at having short term relationships, but that doesn’t translate into reproduction anymore.
Have you seen what Mormon people look like?
Yes, I have. And no doubt there will be many tall, handsome Chad like types among the descendants of religious nutters, but there will also be many short, glasses wearing jewfro Havers. Mormons are not the entirety of religious groups with significantly above replacement fertility, and unlike, say, the Haredi, or Dutch calvinists, their fertility rate is falling.
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