Mark Zuckerberg reportedly building a self-sustaining doomsday bunker in Hawaii

Short of that, he could use soap and water. I recommend… LAVA soap.

Yes. I know.

8 Likes

You already expected the joke to crater?

9 Likes

Roughly 30 years ago, I popped into the middle of a British TV show on PBS.( I think Michael Palin was in it.) Set outdoors, he and circa 1920-ish university buddies were on an outing. There was boating and later a picnic lunch, and the atmosphere was both bucolic and Bohemian. Once they got into the lunch, things took a nasty turn: They forgot to bring a can opener. Tinned fruit of some sort. (Pears?) Things escalated. Like angry animals they bashed away at the can, including stabbing it with one of the oars. It didn’t work.

5 Likes

:musical_note: Hope for the best; expect the worst. (Mel Brooks)

3 Likes

Three men in a boat-a pretty funny book about people not quite ready for the real world.

8 Likes

Was that the name of the show? If so… THANKS!

3 Likes

And ten years later, in 1969, they missed the opportunity to write “Inside the Far Out Shelter”! It would have been groovy, man! Like, real wavy gravy!

5 Likes

Either that, or it was an episode of Ripping Yarns, a series by and with Palin/Jones.

4 Likes

It appears that it’s that; I have Ripping Yarns (hilarious!), but nope there on the episode.

5 Likes

PessimisticFlashyChihuahua-size_restricted

3 Likes

Also a plot point in good ol’ IHNMAIMS.

5 Likes
3 Likes
3 Likes

As @BakerB (edit: and @anon73430903 ) has said, it’s Three Men in a Boat - Wikipedia. It’s been made into a movie and a TV series, but I haven’t seen them. The book is well worth it, and holds up very well for having been written in 1889.

"It cast a gloom over the boat, there being no mustard. We ate our beef in silence. Existence seemed hollow and uninteresting. We thought of the happy days of childhood, and sighed. We brightened up a bit, however, over the apple-tart, and, when George drew out a tin of pine- apple from the bottom of the hamper, and rolled it into the middle of the boat, we felt that life was worth living after all.

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

Then we looked for the knife to open the tin with. We turned out everything in the hamper. We turned out the bags. We pulled up the boards at the bottom of the boat. We took everything out on to the bank and shook it. There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

Then we all got mad. We took that tin out on the bank, and Harris went up into a field and got a big sharp stone, and I went back into the boat and brought out the mast, and George held the tin and Harris held the sharp end of his stone against the top of it, and I took the mast and poised it high up in the air, and gathered up all my strength and brought it down.

It was George’s straw hat that saved his life that day. He keeps that hat now (what is left of it), and, of a winter’s evening, when the pipes are lit and the boys are telling stretchers about the dangers they have passed through, George brings it down and shows it round, and the stirring tale is told anew, with fresh exaggerations every time.

Harris got off with merely a flesh wound.

After that, I took the tin off myself, and hammered at it with the mast till I was worn out and sick at heart, whereupon Harris took it in hand.

We beat it out flat; we beat it back square; we battered it into every form known to geometry — but we could not make a hole in it. Then George went at it, and knocked it into a shape, so strange, so weird, so unearthly in its wild hideousness, that he got frightened and threw away the mast. Then we all three sat round it on the grass and looked at it.

There was one great dent across the top that had the appearance of a mocking grin, and it drove us furious, so that Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it, and we got into the boat and rowed away from the spot, and never paused till we reached Maidenhead."

11 Likes

So that’s an easy way to get a bunker, but it also sounds like an unpleasant way to get a bunker. If you have to go around telling Zuckerberg how smart he is, then it’s not for free.

8 Likes

Yeah, it’s not a perfect plan :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

8 Likes

In the opening chapter of Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest (discussed above) the author relates an anecdote about a time he was paid a ridiculous sum of money to meet with a handful of billionaires at a remote retreat. It turned out that they were seeking his expertise on ways to plan their escape strategy, with an emphasis on “how can I guarantee the loyalty of my security staff after a global catastrophe renders money worthless?”

The rich people at the meeting had bandied about ideas like non-removable compliance collars or putting food supplies in safes secured with biometric locks. Rushkoff’s advice was basically “The best way to survive that kind of situation would be to build genuine relationships with the people you depend on. Befriend your security teams now. If you don’t want your bodyguard to slit your throat tomorrow, you should start by paying for his daughter’s bat mitzvah today.”

The rich folks in the meeting had a little chuckle and basically reacted as if they thought he was either joking or childishly naive.

10 Likes

I’ve heard that before. Maybe it is naive? I mean, it’s nice of Doug to think the rich people could befriend their bodyguards like that, but they’d still figure out that they’re selfish assholes nobody would miss sooner or later.

5 Likes

I think it’s less naiveté on Rushkoff’s part than hard realism: if you can’t establish respectful and/or mutually beneficial relationships with other human beings then you’re gonna be fucked in the event of a major social collapse no matter what other preparations you make.

One reason I like the Vincent D’Onofrio depiction of Kingpin in the Netflix Daredevil series is that it shows how Fisk is able to build and maintain a criminal empire through human relationships. At one point midway through the series Fisk finds himself in prison with few remaining assets and a big target on his back. So what does he do? He chats up some of his fellow inmates. He finds out what is going on in their lives. He uses up a large portion of what few assets he still controls to ensure that one inmate’s mother can keep paying the rent on her apartment or that another inmate’s kid can see a medical specialist or whatever. In short order he quickly becomes the most powerful person in the prison and has built himself a security detail whose loyalty extends beyond a short-term paycheck.

11 Likes

That’s how actual leadership looks, yeah. I was more joking about how most billionaires are too self-absorbed for it. I think on some level they probably know they don’t know how to make friends who would stand by them – I mean, a lot don’t even treat spouses that way – even if they probably assume that’s simply not a thing rather than a personal failing.

4 Likes