Personally I’m 100% WAAF now. I think the empire is falling and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that there will not be any form of soft landing, particularly not for anyone with a net worth under 1MM in 2018 money.
I think the time has come for us to start seriously planning for how we are going to protect ourselves.
How do we think the fall will play out? What do we think the threats will look like? How do we survive or even thrive in the new environment?
Personally I think the US is one of the worse places to be (outside the poorest parts of the world that are also unfortunate enough to be near the equator obviously, those people are about to take part in one of the more brutal forced migrations in human history) over the next 50 years. I’ve got my own ideas about why, but I’m curious about what everyone else is expecting.
The demo of this board is likely 30-50 year white men between middle and upper middle class. Why do you think the near future USA is going to be a bad place for them?
I think a bunch of you are wildly underestimating your personal risk levels. I had a Russian college professor (in his mid 50’s at the time) whose job in the USSR had been to trade oil and gas for hard currency as a member of the KGB, which apparently had an econ team. I asked him once why he didn’t stay since he was pretty well positioned to get extremely wealthy in the aftermath of the fall.
He told me that of the ~15 people he worked with when it all collapsed two were now billionaires and eight had died violently. Some of us are going to die in drone bombings.
In my industry I’ve been seeing white collar crime increase pretty much continuously since I entered. As the government weakens and the monopoly on violence softens I expect to see a lot more blatant attempts to victimize me. Right now I’m expecting to need to start factoring in security costs in everything I do in <5 years.
I agree that most of the people on this forum are going to do quite well, but I think a lot of you are depending on stuff that won’t do well in a very chaotic environment.
This is just one area where I think we have risk. Then there is the disasters from climate change which it’s probably a good idea to start thinking about now.
A lot of people suffer from “it can’t happen here” syndrome. Even when we plainly see the checklist being ticked off towards a very dark place there is a natural desire to say “It won’t be that bad for me and mine”. I guarantee people were saying that in every state that failed up till it was too late and the real horrors started.
Yeah everyone here has a reasonable shot of ending up on a train to a death camp as well. The stuff that holds our current reality together is breaking down extremely quickly.
I don’t think it (USA turning in Russia) can’t happen here but I don’t see the incredibly wealthy people in America “letting” the country and therefore the economy/global power and value of the USD collapse and them taking a 30%+ haircut on their wealth. I think its time to panic when you see the big players in tech start to talk about moving HQ out of the US, or if you start to hear talk from other countries about moving off of the USD as a global reserve currency. That hasn’t even remotely happened AFAIK.
China is cutting off our supply of cheap material goods already. I fully expect to see us lose reserve currency status in the next 5 years. Our rich people are currently lobbying to make every single problem this country has worse. They aren’t going to be able to turn before the whole vehicle goes off the cliff. They literally broke every single mechanism the country had for self correction.
The very wealthy have already diversified globally and are strip mining the US economy as quickly as possible. When it fails some of them will be caught flat footed, but most of them will own enough of the next big thing that they won’t be personally impacted.
This government has lost the ability to defend itself against internal threats or collect taxes. Its military is primarily a vehicle for writing checks to private firms. It can’t build anything and it can’t make anyone do anything.There is no longer a rational reason to fear it. It is already irrelevant and all that remains is waiting for everyone to realize that it is irrelevant.
The only reason we aren’t going to get invaded and lose is our incredibly privileged geographical location and our nuclear arsenal. None of that will stop outside powers from treating our country like a playground.
Basically I think the United States is on its death bed and we’re going to spend the rest of our lives watching it decompose.
I think rather than digging in too much on this idea (which you’re obviously correct on btw), it’s better to stick more to the topic of what can any of us peasants actually do?
4 years? We’ve always done it intermittently, but the current iteration of detention camps started a little over 40 years ago when Reagan opened the Fort Allen Detention Center (which Carter started). CCA, the world’s first private prison company started imprisoning immigrants in 1983. The whole thing carried on, with growth spurts, from then until now and Trump (4 years ago) wasn’t some special thing where we just started camps for brown people.
And it’s not like this was a secret. I was posting about it on 2p2 back in like 2013, but it was Obama doing it so no one cared and it got memory holed.
Improvised explosives + a off the shelf retail drone is just the modern version of a car bomb. Impunity leads to a breakdown in the monopoly on violence, which leads to people using fear as a business tool. The trains are less likely, but the GOP could theoretically go full Nazi and start exterminating people. I’ll admit the second one is a lot less likely than the first.
the unmovable empire was simply a propaganda image. it’s not that unmovable things can collapse. it’s that collapsible things can appear unmovable.
while i agree that us economy isn’t as strong as some believe, and i don’t consider it unmovable, it is hardly a case where the reserve currency is in question. it’s not even clear how countries who hold USD reserves would put their money in another currency. even less clear how trillion dollar funds could do the same, presumably without others noticing.
We already have constant mass shootings, it just doesn’t even make national news anymore unless it gets to a double digit death toll.
All hell is going to break loose if/when Trump runs again in 2024. The previous two cycles were already insane and now these dipshits are going to be high on four years of agitprop that Biden stole the last election and then proceeded to ruin the country.
Really only way to deescalate is for Rs to somehow convince/bribe Trump not to run again. They are heavy favorites to win straight up if they somehow get anyone but Trump as their candidate and then things will suck but not in a chaotic way.