Fantastic moats on the tax payer. Is this a family guy episode?
You know what’s cheaper than building fucking castles and living in fucking fear all the fucking time?
Paying your taxes to fund a proper welfare state. Simple as.
But they earned that money. /s
Impenetrable
Lol. Keep thinking that.
We played this game back in the 70s, during White Flight. I lived through it.
White professionals got very paranoid about living in THE CITY. Built giant gated communities just at the edge of town. Stuffed their neighborhoods with cops and private guards and security cameras and retractable road spikes and giant fuck-off electric gates and stone walls. Then nothing happened for a few years, and people inside realized this shit was boring af and obnoxiously expensive.
So they brought in a bunch of developers to add parks and malls and theaters and clubs. And then these places needed labor, so they built a bunch of low-rent housing just outside the spots just outside THE CITY. And these places filed up with the same working class folks who lived in THE CITY. But now the white professionals weren’t living in the exurbs anymore, they were living in THE CITY again. So they all panicked and sold out and fled to the new edge of town.
And we’ve been repeating this pattern for 50 years, such that now it’s a two fucking hour drive to get from Katy or Clear Lake or The Woodlands into downtown Houston where all the fucking professional jobs are. But, of course, this is Texas so nobody is allowed to build commuter rail. Instead we have several hundred miles of twelve lane highways gobbling up a bunch of historically prime real estate. And we spend $1.1B/year on cops who mostly do dick-all jerking themselves off in their squad cars earning 2.5x overtime pay on six figure salaries.
Everyone under 30 wants to GTFO of these horrible boring overpriced suburbs. While everyone over 60 is still too terrified to walk out their front doors when they live 30 miles outside of town, because the news said someone in a suburb on the opposite side of the city was center stage on the nightly news for getting their purse snatched.
But hey, don’t worry, because Palantir Presents THE PANOPTICON is coming soon. And they’ll definitely finally permanently for real this time solve the problem of crime forever. Just give them access to your retirement account so you can pay for it.
This plays out on a less extreme level too, when an area attracts wealth the more wealthy residents will silo themselves behind security gates and kill any sense of community that the area previously had.
This is nothing new to the Mega Rich and absolutely an ad read from WSJ to the Middle Rich.
They can only store so much food in there.
Fine. Trap them in their palaces. Turn them into tombs.
What’s sad is, they already essentially do this with us.
The Epstein class literally do
Just to elaborate for the folks I’ve run into who doubt and downplay the worst of it - even if you remove the more lurid reports, the simple fact of “recruitment” for such a hideous enterprise, what accomplishing that requires - that is hunting humans for sport.
Extending globally to identify and traffick vulnerable young people, targets meeting the right criteria to make it all “work”.
No metaphors are needed, nor any reliance on anything remotely controversial in the files. Hunting humans for sport is exactly, dead on correct.
How will drones ever cross the moat?
I got a trebuchet for sale.
I imagine the ultra-wealthy can afford their own personal surface-to-air missiles & their own personal army to man them.
Both of those sound more expensive than drones.
True but I think this guy means that we commoners could cross their strongholds with drones. And I meant that the wealthy could defend themselves against our paltry drones with surface-to-air missiles & their own personal armies.
They surely could.
And we could fling stuff over the walls to make sure they don’t get a minute of quiet or more than a week with un-scorched grass.
There is a very thin line between “Safe inside your bunker” and “Trapped inside your bunker”. The people on the outside dictate how that plays out.
Walls work both ways. Sieges are back on the menu boys!
Who needs to get in? They wanted to be pharos - gods even. They want to be in there? I say let them be. Concrete is pretty easy to pour and it just doesnt seem capitalist to just leave such prime real estate under developed…
“Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man.” -General George Patton
But can they really trust their guards? What guard wouldn’t want to have the nickname the kingslayer?
That’s why they’ll fit their guards with death collars to prevent them from getting ideas.
First you have to get said guards (who are hired to protect you) to agree to wear those. Only a moron would agree to that. And sure they malfunction too. So be hard if you security is fucking disabled from your death collar to protect you. Rich people are not smart.
Reminds me of Wedlock. Little perfect movie with Rutger Hauer.
So they’re working really hard to make impossible to enter their houses. How hard would it be to modify them to make it impossible to leave?
Pretty sure that getting close enough without being murdered by hired goons would be the hardest part.
After solving that, anyone creative and/or competent enough should have no problem sealing the would be pharaohs in their pyramids of hubris 🤷
You can cause lot of fatigue in those goons by just having someone randomly shoot at them and run away once or twice a night.
So, ‘Under the dome’ but with the very rich instead of a random city, then.
The ultra rich have always done this, we just used to call them “castles”.
I wonder if someday there will be guided tours of Jeff Bezos’ mansion. A little museum too, all about his reign of terror.
