Privatized offshore cities: the new climate apartheid

[chgoliz]

That was true in the U.S. as well.

[enso]

[Progstu]

Building private cities in Honduras too. http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/09/01/under-new-management/

[NeueHeimat]

Not sure if this makes economic sense. Does Nigeria have enough rich people to create a viable market for schemes like this?

[shaddack]

@NickyG

Thankfully I feel a lifetime of William Gibson and other genre novels has prepared me fairly well for this moment.

Spice it with army manuals (the FM and TM series do a good job), and some military and intelligence/espionage history for tactics and for what is possible. Due to the technological developments, focus somewhat towards electronic warfare.

[kupfernigk]

@pixleshifter

Palestinians have been making their own for generations.

Very unsuccessfully, in fact they seem to do less damage to Israel than one criminal with a handgun can achieve in the US. They just waste scarce resources.
Obviously the Palestinians never read the history of WW2 - the German V-weapon attacks on the UK did less damage than one air raid on Dresden by conventional aircraft, and consumed the resources that might have enabled Germany to hold back the Russians long enough for a peace deal with the West.

[shaddack]

Quite successfully, if you compare the cost of the el-cheapo rockets and the cost of the Iron Dome.

[jsroberts]

@doctorow

In places like Eko Atlantic the escape, a moral and social secession of the rich from those in their country, will be complete. This essentially utopian drive – to consume rapaciously and endlessly and to reject any semblance of collective impulse and concern – is simply incompatible with human survival. But at the moment when we must confront an economy and ideology pushing the planet’s life-support systems to breaking point, this is what the neoliberal imagination offers us: a grotesque monument to the ultra-rich flight from responsibility.

Not that there aren’t many exceptions or differences in degree, but I’m not sure the ultra-rich are that different in kind from a lot of the developed world in this regard. Many don’t have enough, but that isn’t the same as having a clear sense of what ‘enough’ would mean.

[stephen_hill]

So it goes…
http://www.angryflower.com/348.html

[milliefink]

@dobby

Apartheid is a pretty loaded term, setting oneself and one’s community apart specifically on racial lines. This is still more of mankind’s long running abuse of others because of power imbalance.

Um, setting oneself and one’s community apart specifically on racial lines isn’t another example of power imbalance?

[milliefink]

@dacree

Hording wealth is more obscene than pornography, violence, foul language, and hording.

The message that conspicuous consumption is offensive and horded wealth is obscene needs to enter the public discourse. We need to shun and mock people like this instead of praising them.

Yes! I’ve been saying that wherever I can for awhile now.

When are they going to get rich money-hoarders on that TV show? What if they did a scene like this one in a rich person’s home, where the show’s host pokes around saying basically the same things about the ludicrously expensive decor and objets de art? I’d LOVE to see a show like that…

Hoarders Buried Alive-Worst I've Ever Seen01

[milliefink]

@retchdog

by contrast we have actually had quite a bit of feudalism, wide-spread poverty, and “class war”.

Yup. It’s only (called) “class war” when the poor fight back.

[zikzak]

@kupfernigk

they will offer a hard but endurable life to their servant/slaves, enough preferable to the anarchy outside to keep ready supplies coming.It’s how the US already works its farms with people from Mexico, no change needed.

Another informative example is Dubai, where servants/workers are imported from impoverished regions abroad, housed in a controlled environment while they are worked, and then returned to their poverty when they’re no longer needed. This prevents the formation of slums, or any other independent clustering of poor people where they might develop a common culture, economy, or worst of all political organization.

A slum exists because it’s the most efficient way to provide for the basic survival of the large number of poor people required to operate factories and businesses in an area. But the super-rich don’t have to be as concerned about efficiency, so the cost of transporting and housing foreign workers is a very modest premium in exchange for the improved security and control that they can have over a mass-displaced workforce.

[chgoliz]

@NeueHeimat

Does Nigeria have enough rich people to create a viable market for schemes like this?

I’d love to know your spam filter.

[kupfernigk]

@billstewart

With late-19th-Century Britain, it wasn’t just the upper classes that had live-in servants, it was middle classes as well, and even the less poor had servants (not sure if they were live-in as well.)

This is true, but you have to remember that the percentage of what we now call “middle class” people was much lower then. They were the 1%.

[kupfernigk]

@shaddack

Quite successfully, if you compare the cost of the el-cheapo rockets and the cost of the Iron Dome

Fair point, but I suspect that the cost of the rockets are far more onerous to the Palestinians than Iron Dome is to the Israelis. And Israel is itself quite a poor country.

[milliefink]

@kupfernigk

Fair point, but I suspect that the cost of the rockets are far more onerous to the Palestinians than Iron Dome is to the Israelis.

Right. I do wonder how much of my U.S. tax dollars went to pay for it.

But – Israel is a poor country?? No. It is an unequal country, an especially onerous fact if one is a member of any among several abused/despised minorities.

The recently published Wealth-X report classes Israel as the fourth richest country in the Middle East, with 360 of its richest citizens having a total wealth of $70 billion. For comparison the Israeli state’s GDP is around $270 billion. Twenty Israeli families dominate the economy and between them control around half the stock market and a quarter of the top companies.

One in five Israelis lives in poverty

[tboy]

@kupfernigk

No; they will offer a hard but endurable life to their servant/slaves, enough preferable to the anarchy outside to keep ready supplies coming.

And if the slaves helots servants don’t like it, you can exterminate them without worrying too much about their humanity.

Used to be in circumstances like this you needed to transform the upper classes into a permanently-militarized society and have a strong warrior culture to ensure that they’d be able to slaughter enough helots to discourage the rest from killing the peers bring back public order, but these days you’ve got drones, you’ve got enough force multipliers, you’ve got enough non less-lethal weaponry to reduce a grown adult to a quivering mess of pain and obedience.

And hey, if you can automate enough of the drudgery, then you can reduce manpower requirements to the point when it becomes practical to have “acceptable” but down-on-their luck people who can spend time being au pairs and governesses to the children of the ultra-rich before going off to do their own thing… as equals, of course. Professionals. They leave and have a great reference and another line in their CV, you gain the advantage of skilled labour teaching and nurturing your children, no one Except the rest of the filth, but who cares about them loses. Then you can exterminate and forget humanely deal with and transition away from the subhuman vermin low-quality labour.

[tboy]

@zikzak

But the super-rich don’t have to be as concerned about efficiency

Oh, but they are. That’s what industrial automation and all of that process improvement is for — to reduce the manpower requirements so that you can run the whole shebang and reduce operational costs so that more sweet profit goes to you.

You’re spot on with everything else, though. Ship them back to their country and let them rot, and don’t need to worry about them until you realize that they’re sitting on primo real estate, and then take it away from them. Heck, they’re not efficiently using it, might as well, at least one is more worthy of using that resource than they. Heck, they’re such wastes of CHON one might as well develop disassemblers and toss them in, it’s not as if they’re using all of those atoms efficiently.

Who needs Skynet when you have the hyper-ultra-rich?

[popobawa4u]

I haven’t been drinking the “money” kool-aid myself, so see it as not so much of a “rich” vs “poor” thing. (Oooh, what a sophisticated ape, it collects symbols…)

The apparent advantage that most people ascribe to those they call wealthy is that of organization. Some people are simply more organized than others. If you and 500 of your friends decided to make a private offshore colony this year, you could certainly do it. But, odds are that most of you simply won’t, due to a complete lack of coordinated effort.