I made something like this in like 2007 called Apocalypse Feed. It took in a few factors and aggregated them into a 0-to-100 number that updated and published over RSS. First it pinged debian mirrors around the world and made a map based on mirror city's lat/long: green for online, red for offline. If there was a cluster of red, that part of the world was considered gone. Then it checked space weather data and nearest asteroid, increasing the value if it was looking bad. It scraped news headlines looking for key words like zombie, pandemic, virus, war, bomb, etc. These fed into a pie graph showing what "type" of apocalypse was most likely at any given time.
It was all fun and games until my VPS host banned me for pinging too many people every few mins.
> we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers.
I would bet on the exact opposite. Unless you're within a few hundred meters of ground zero you're better off seeking shelter than trying to run, and if you are running you only want to go those few hundred meters and then take shelter. The local airport where your plane presumably is would be far more likely to be targeted than your current location. Traveling to the airport, especially in the chaos of people scrambling for shelter, is probably going to take much longer than you have time for and you are much more exposed than if you went into a basement/subway/concrete stairwell. Even if you could physically get to the airport in time, that doesn't do you much good if the plane isn't ready to go. If the plane is on hot-standby you might be able to take off within 10 minutes of getting to the airport, but if we're assuming this is a sudden development you gotta get the crew to the plane, you need to fuel the plane, etc; you're not getting off the ground in less than half an hour. If by some miracle you could get up in the air before the nuke hit, the air is the worst possible place to be. There is nothing between your plane and the pressure wave of the nuke. Your plane's electronics are going to get fried by EMPs. There's a decent chance your pilot will go blind depending on where the nuke actually hits. Even if you manage to stay in the air - now what? You need to land eventually. Most airports have been destroyed, and air traffic control is probably down or at best too busy to deal with you so you don't know if you're actually going to be able to land at any particular destination. Absolute best case scenario you land in a random location where everyone of the ground is several hours ahead of you into a SHTF situation.
I'm not saying nobody will try it, but I would think most people with access to private jets probably have access to or could acquire access to basements in well built buildings that are a decent bit away from likely targets of nuclear strikes.
> Your plane's electronics are going to get fried by EMPs.
Oldschool piston engine aircraft with magnetos will probably be fine.
If you wanted to be really sure, look into the diesel engine conversions based on good old Peugeot XUDs - and your Citroën BX will be unaffected too ;-)
By definition it's a bit of a lagging indicator, unless we assume that all these folks have better access to inside information than the rest of us. Given that I was well aware of, for example, the likelihood of a Covid pandemic well before a bunch of rich people flew to New Zealand, it seems likely that CNN is gonna be a better gauge.
I think the point is exactly that some people do have better information for wars.
In COVID's case nobody knew how governments all over the world would react and how bad the situation would get (and rich people weren't particularly affected anyway) but for wars we do have regular insider trading happening because it's easy to know more or less exactly "there is going to be an attack".
Yeah came here to say the same thing. While last year might have been a bit chaotic, this as well, I highly doubt we were as close as it is possible to come to nuclear apocalypse without getting one. This seems like a completely useless metric.
Would ADS-B Exchange heatmap files would be accessible at even DEFCON 2? Which raises the question of what it would show when the data sources are not available.
As someone already mentioned, these are often tracked on Twitter. Just wanted to add: many of these Air Force and government planes use ADS-B so they're easy to follow. Seems to be more tankers and cargo that do. We were able to watch some of the movements to Venezuela and Iran in advance of hostilities. Other interesting things have popped up like US or British intel flights over the Black Sea.
This would be a great thing to add to the apocalypse tracker. Though I guess it might be a bit tricky. Would need to know the baseline of normal operations. And what would be more or less typical while conflicts, like the current one, are ongoing. Then figure out what would be a sufficient deviance from that for alarm thresholds.
There are accounts on Twitter that attempt to do this, down to recording encrypted messages and using the existence and pattern of the messages - rather than the text - as a potential clue.
The various doomsday planes regularly take part in nuclear exercises - which are treated as signals for both friends and foes - so there's quite a bit of data to keep.
Conclusion: unless a full first strike is scheduled beforehand and you're high up enough to be in the loop, you're very unlikely to get much notice.
I have little faith that a compound in NZ or HI would be much use unless you move there well ahead of any Event.
And possibly not much after, because with supply chains gone you're going to start running out of essential spare parts and consumables (including medical supplies) within a decade at most.
You wouldn't need FAA ownership data and details on who/what owns what tail number to track "flying" or "not flying" status of the world's fleet of bombardier global 6000/7000/8000, dassault falcon 7x and similar, given open data from ads-b exchange.
Pinging weather stations should be a good indicator. If you notice a bunch of contiguous ones no longer responding, or sending back huge temperature readings, there's a good chance a nuclear apocalypse is imminent. (Just ignore the few statistical outliers: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/europe/france-weather-sensor-...)
> In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers.
1. I think the logic behind this particular concept flawed. What's the flight time for an ICBM? 20 minutes if from Russia, and less than that from a submarine? I don't think a billionaire could get to his jet in time, unless he lives on an airstrip like John Travolta. Some might get some early notice if their country planned a first strike (but I doubt it, as loose-lips like that would probably give the enemy notice, too).
2. I think if nuclear war is actually immanent, your best bet of an early warning is an EAS National/Presidential alert (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System), because I'd hope people with access to actual early-warning sensors would cause one to be sent (while they're getting ready for a second-strike attack). But, given the shambolic nature of post-Cold War government, that could be a foolish hope.
The more effective thing is probably something scanning a news feeds for world events that indicate a major crisis progressing up the escalation ladder. Stuff like conflicts involving nuclear powers, threats of nuclear weapon use, reports of unusual activity of emergency command and control aircraft (like going on alert), use of tactical nuclear weapons, etc.
I mean - just take a look at all this speculative trading action around the Iran war. Trump is all about "his friends" presumably that means that many of them could get a heads up.
If you're talking about nuclear war, I don't think you could expect Polymarket to pay out in the aftermath. So anyone betting on one would be pretty dumb.
One factor: There's a limit on shorting, due to discounting. Suppose you're 100% convinced that Jesus does not return by 2027, so you want to buy the "No" trading at 96 cents. But you only get your 1$ back in 2028, when the bet resolves. You're not going to pay more than 96 cents for that if you can instead put them in risk free treasuries for the same paltry return.
Thus, the 4% yes are not necessarily people actively pushing back against "No", but rather an artefact of discounting. To alleviate that (and make bets near the extremes track implied probabilities more closely), the cost of making a bet should not be the currently traded probability (plus a spread), but the currently traded probability times the discount factor to resolution time. (This gets tricky if resolution time is probabilistic, of course.)
Yep, not much profit over long time horizons in correcting a relatively small number of people who are either delusional enough to believe in second comings or think it's a fun bet
To add to that, even if there's zero probability of an actual Second Coming, there's nonzero risk whatever oracle a betting market uses gets hijacked by Second Coming believers who resolve some new Jesus.AI or declaration by a cult leader as representing the authentic return of the Biblical Jesus, plus risks of exchanges defaulting on all bets or your winnings being locked up for gambling-restriction related reasons. For related reasons, you could earn money betting on Trump winning the most votes in 2020 after they'd been counted.
I think that GP is saying that recent betting market developments provide evidence that Trump or someone high up in the administration is tipping off others. Therefore, one might think that the 'in' crowd would be tipped off about an apocalyptic event, which would trigger this software. I don't think that GP was saying anything about betting on an apocalyptic event.
I'll ask the obvious: wouldn't the aircraft just take to the skies directly, without bothering with the formality of setting their transponder, if they were knowingly escaping an apocalypse scenario?
There’s no formality. For planes with ADS-B out, it’s on when the plane is on (barring it being explicitly disabled by yanking the fuse).
Plus transponders are really convenient when you’re trying not to crash into other air traffic. Particularly in a scenario where you might be expecting ATC to be unavailable or abandoning their posts.
AFAIK the transponder kind of turns itself on when powering on the plane, you'd have to explicitly disable it but then you'd have weird discussions with the airport tower guiding you to a free timeslot on the runway which would just delay your takeoff, since ignoring the airport tower is a good way to not get off the ground at all because you'll accidentally be hit by some other plane.
They wouldn't have to set anything. The transponder on almost any modern plane defaults to automatically on, either immediately or at takeoff. With Mode C (reporting altitude) or S (& reporting more) and squawking 1200 (VFR).
Colliding with other planes is going to impede your escape plan, so it would still be a good idea to turn the thing on. No further action needs to be taken for the ADS-B output to be correct, it works once it's powered on.
In a theoretical scenario of the billionaire class of the world having some kind of "advance warning" of the apocalypse, they'd be taking to the air in the hours or several days prior to a total disaster happening. Meaning this would be done while the local governments were ostensibly still functioning, in which case you can't just have your private jet depart without active ADS-B and in-the-clear voice traffic for ground, and air traffic control coordination.
If governments and airspace control have already collapsed, post tense, then of course anything goes.
This has the same issue as many other types of event warning systems based on noisy, incomplete data.
The latency of constructing a semi-reliable warning signal from the data sources described significantly exceeds the latency of event onset. You can modify the algorithms to reduce latency but then the false positive rate skyrockets. Not what you want for an "apocalypse" early warning system.
To mitigate this you need more data from more diverse sources and lower latency feeds.
There was a Sci-Fi book I read where this was a service provided to rich people. Basically you signed up for it, and you'd get a text when everything was about to go down. Time to drop everything and fly to your bunker.
This seems like an area rife for a scam, like hurricane insurance or earthquake insurance. You pocket the money, and when disaster strikes, who is going to sue you when you do nothing? If there was a real bunker-worthy event then all your insurees have been devoured by zombies or dissolved by radioactive strings or whatever.
Historically, savings accounts do much worse than the stock market. People are spoiled from the last decade and don't remember what corrections or bear periods look like. Over time you get 4% over inflation. That's it.
No, but they have spent tens of millions of dollars on a go bag —> helicopter to private jet -> bunker in New Zealand preplanned route and you haven’t.
Good luck to the billionaires in a real collapse scenario, when their security and support staff can decide that the billionaires are counterproductive, and vote them out of the survival bunkers.
You didn't include the locals, we're not huge fans of being considered a liferaft by people who have actively worked to make the world worse. And we have a can do spirit (and earthmoving equipment...)
A few months of some narrow strait of water in the other side of the world being closed off and New Zealand is about to collapse. And these billionaires think they can just sit back and relax in their bunkers here in an apocalypse scenario?
A few moments' thought will convince just about anyone that their best chances of survival will come from allying themselves with a strong, resource-rich leader, namely the one they already work for.
Immediately turning on such a leader would be a bad move, because you'd then have to fight all the other traitors for your share of the loot.
If I was a guard. Would I pick up my boss I see every week or some random dude I might have seen year or more ago once? Probably would go with the boss that I am hopefully reasonably friendly with. There really is quite a chain of command even in security.
I don't care. And I guarantee you most wealthy people don't care either. A few eccentric wealthy people do and you think r/preppers is filled with the elite - it's not.
>>we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers
Why would that be true? There would never be enough warning to get to the airport and take off anywhere, even if everything else was still working perfectly.
This assumes any inside information is distributed across the set of jet owners relatively uniformly. In reality most of the private get guys run dealership chains or well services companies. Nobody is going to bother tipping them all off.
The reality is, much like American wealth, the distribution is super-exponential. If you actually wanted this to be kind of useful, you'd only look at the tail numbers known to belong to people who are associates of US senators, high ranking congressmen, and senior defense officials (Raytheon/LM/NG/Boeing execs).
That said, the *actual* reality is you'll just fucking know because it'll be obvious things are escalating out of control. The government is not mystically competent, they're morons like us just figuring it out as they go along. If things were to somehow pop off unexpectedly you only have somewhere between 3 and 30 minutes which is not enough time to get an aircraft in the air with no notice.
There are questions about who would be launching all-out nuclear war on the US when there are such obvious and effective indirect means of destruction.
If you want to destabilise an economy, destroy science and R&D, nuke healthcare, ruin decades of trust with allies, disassemble democratic checks and balances, co-opt the media, and give most of the population a nervous breakdown that has them believing batshit divisive nonsense, you certainly don't need nuclear weapons to do it.
I made something like this in like 2007 called Apocalypse Feed. It took in a few factors and aggregated them into a 0-to-100 number that updated and published over RSS. First it pinged debian mirrors around the world and made a map based on mirror city's lat/long: green for online, red for offline. If there was a cluster of red, that part of the world was considered gone. Then it checked space weather data and nearest asteroid, increasing the value if it was looking bad. It scraped news headlines looking for key words like zombie, pandemic, virus, war, bomb, etc. These fed into a pie graph showing what "type" of apocalypse was most likely at any given time.
It was all fun and games until my VPS host banned me for pinging too many people every few mins.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110516084503/http://www.apocal...
This is so good! You have to bring this back!
Oh this is really cool
> we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers.
I would bet on the exact opposite. Unless you're within a few hundred meters of ground zero you're better off seeking shelter than trying to run, and if you are running you only want to go those few hundred meters and then take shelter. The local airport where your plane presumably is would be far more likely to be targeted than your current location. Traveling to the airport, especially in the chaos of people scrambling for shelter, is probably going to take much longer than you have time for and you are much more exposed than if you went into a basement/subway/concrete stairwell. Even if you could physically get to the airport in time, that doesn't do you much good if the plane isn't ready to go. If the plane is on hot-standby you might be able to take off within 10 minutes of getting to the airport, but if we're assuming this is a sudden development you gotta get the crew to the plane, you need to fuel the plane, etc; you're not getting off the ground in less than half an hour. If by some miracle you could get up in the air before the nuke hit, the air is the worst possible place to be. There is nothing between your plane and the pressure wave of the nuke. Your plane's electronics are going to get fried by EMPs. There's a decent chance your pilot will go blind depending on where the nuke actually hits. Even if you manage to stay in the air - now what? You need to land eventually. Most airports have been destroyed, and air traffic control is probably down or at best too busy to deal with you so you don't know if you're actually going to be able to land at any particular destination. Absolute best case scenario you land in a random location where everyone of the ground is several hours ahead of you into a SHTF situation.
I'm not saying nobody will try it, but I would think most people with access to private jets probably have access to or could acquire access to basements in well built buildings that are a decent bit away from likely targets of nuclear strikes.
I think this is meant to detect insider knowledge of imminent risk of a nuclear attack. It's not meant to detect if nukes are already inbound.
That, or any other potentially apocalyptic event
There’s also a non-zero chance that the pilot left without you.
Insiders.
Most rich people work in cities.
They will want to get to their hideaways quickly.
> Your plane's electronics are going to get fried by EMPs.
Oldschool piston engine aircraft with magnetos will probably be fine.
If you wanted to be really sure, look into the diesel engine conversions based on good old Peugeot XUDs - and your Citroën BX will be unaffected too ;-)
By definition it's a bit of a lagging indicator, unless we assume that all these folks have better access to inside information than the rest of us. Given that I was well aware of, for example, the likelihood of a Covid pandemic well before a bunch of rich people flew to New Zealand, it seems likely that CNN is gonna be a better gauge.
I think the point is exactly that some people do have better information for wars.
In COVID's case nobody knew how governments all over the world would react and how bad the situation would get (and rich people weren't particularly affected anyway) but for wars we do have regular insider trading happening because it's easy to know more or less exactly "there is going to be an attack".
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/u-s-special-forces-won-409k-bet...
Another indicator we could track.
Fun idea of a metric, but if I'm reading this correctly, we get roughly one apocalypse warning per year?
> Level 5 is calibrated so only the highest daily peak in the trailing year should exceed it.
My bet is it's the day of the Super Bowl or the Las Vegas Grand Prix.
So, if you see a 5, you are probably fine. If it gets up to 6 or 7, maybe start worrying.
You don‘t get to worry much then because 5 is the max level
Yeah came here to say the same thing. While last year might have been a bit chaotic, this as well, I highly doubt we were as close as it is possible to come to nuclear apocalypse without getting one. This seems like a completely useless metric.
Would ADS-B Exchange heatmap files would be accessible at even DEFCON 2? Which raises the question of what it would show when the data sources are not available.
Can you keep an eye on government planes that would be airborned if the SHTF?
E-4Bs, E-6s, VC-25As, C-32A, etc plus mass helo flights exiting DC.
Topic reminds me of the movie Miracle Mile.
As someone already mentioned, these are often tracked on Twitter. Just wanted to add: many of these Air Force and government planes use ADS-B so they're easy to follow. Seems to be more tankers and cargo that do. We were able to watch some of the movements to Venezuela and Iran in advance of hostilities. Other interesting things have popped up like US or British intel flights over the Black Sea.
This would be a great thing to add to the apocalypse tracker. Though I guess it might be a bit tricky. Would need to know the baseline of normal operations. And what would be more or less typical while conflicts, like the current one, are ongoing. Then figure out what would be a sufficient deviance from that for alarm thresholds.
There are accounts on Twitter that attempt to do this, down to recording encrypted messages and using the existence and pattern of the messages - rather than the text - as a potential clue.
The various doomsday planes regularly take part in nuclear exercises - which are treated as signals for both friends and foes - so there's quite a bit of data to keep.
Conclusion: unless a full first strike is scheduled beforehand and you're high up enough to be in the loop, you're very unlikely to get much notice.
I have little faith that a compound in NZ or HI would be much use unless you move there well ahead of any Event.
And possibly not much after, because with supply chains gone you're going to start running out of essential spare parts and consumables (including medical supplies) within a decade at most.
Why are almost all planes in the US? Is this a data problem or are only the US rich enough to fly private jets?
> The tracked set is built from FAA registry data
So I imagine planes in other countries exist, but the US FAA doesn't have data on them.
You wouldn't need FAA ownership data and details on who/what owns what tail number to track "flying" or "not flying" status of the world's fleet of bombardier global 6000/7000/8000, dassault falcon 7x and similar, given open data from ads-b exchange.
Pinging weather stations should be a good indicator. If you notice a bunch of contiguous ones no longer responding, or sending back huge temperature readings, there's a good chance a nuclear apocalypse is imminent. (Just ignore the few statistical outliers: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/23/europe/france-weather-sensor-...)
> there's a good chance a nuclear apocalypse is imminent.
Or that an excavator took out some fiber.
For network engineers is there really any difference between an excavator taking out your network and an actual apocalypse?
I run to my fallout shelter every time Google fails to load.
the FCC doesn't seem to think so
> In the event of an imminent nuclear apocalypse, we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers.
1. I think the logic behind this particular concept flawed. What's the flight time for an ICBM? 20 minutes if from Russia, and less than that from a submarine? I don't think a billionaire could get to his jet in time, unless he lives on an airstrip like John Travolta. Some might get some early notice if their country planned a first strike (but I doubt it, as loose-lips like that would probably give the enemy notice, too).
2. I think if nuclear war is actually immanent, your best bet of an early warning is an EAS National/Presidential alert (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_Alert_System), because I'd hope people with access to actual early-warning sensors would cause one to be sent (while they're getting ready for a second-strike attack). But, given the shambolic nature of post-Cold War government, that could be a foolish hope.
The more effective thing is probably something scanning a news feeds for world events that indicate a major crisis progressing up the escalation ladder. Stuff like conflicts involving nuclear powers, threats of nuclear weapon use, reports of unusual activity of emergency command and control aircraft (like going on alert), use of tactical nuclear weapons, etc.
Nuclear war is immanent to our civilisation and human nature, but perhaps not imminent.
I mean - just take a look at all this speculative trading action around the Iran war. Trump is all about "his friends" presumably that means that many of them could get a heads up.
If you're talking about nuclear war, I don't think you could expect Polymarket to pay out in the aftermath. So anyone betting on one would be pretty dumb.
You can currently bet on Jesus returning before 2027, which means they would also have a hard time paying you, and 4% are betting on yes.
i have a hard time fathoming why anyone would bet yes. if they’re right isn’t their money irrelevant anyway?
One factor: There's a limit on shorting, due to discounting. Suppose you're 100% convinced that Jesus does not return by 2027, so you want to buy the "No" trading at 96 cents. But you only get your 1$ back in 2028, when the bet resolves. You're not going to pay more than 96 cents for that if you can instead put them in risk free treasuries for the same paltry return.
Thus, the 4% yes are not necessarily people actively pushing back against "No", but rather an artefact of discounting. To alleviate that (and make bets near the extremes track implied probabilities more closely), the cost of making a bet should not be the currently traded probability (plus a spread), but the currently traded probability times the discount factor to resolution time. (This gets tricky if resolution time is probabilistic, of course.)
Yep, not much profit over long time horizons in correcting a relatively small number of people who are either delusional enough to believe in second comings or think it's a fun bet
To add to that, even if there's zero probability of an actual Second Coming, there's nonzero risk whatever oracle a betting market uses gets hijacked by Second Coming believers who resolve some new Jesus.AI or declaration by a cult leader as representing the authentic return of the Biblical Jesus, plus risks of exchanges defaulting on all bets or your winnings being locked up for gambling-restriction related reasons. For related reasons, you could earn money betting on Trump winning the most votes in 2020 after they'd been counted.
But betting against one could pay off?
Betting against dumb people is often a good strategy.
I think that GP is saying that recent betting market developments provide evidence that Trump or someone high up in the administration is tipping off others. Therefore, one might think that the 'in' crowd would be tipped off about an apocalyptic event, which would trigger this software. I don't think that GP was saying anything about betting on an apocalyptic event.
I'll ask the obvious: wouldn't the aircraft just take to the skies directly, without bothering with the formality of setting their transponder, if they were knowingly escaping an apocalypse scenario?
There’s no formality. For planes with ADS-B out, it’s on when the plane is on (barring it being explicitly disabled by yanking the fuse).
Plus transponders are really convenient when you’re trying not to crash into other air traffic. Particularly in a scenario where you might be expecting ATC to be unavailable or abandoning their posts.
AFAIK the transponder kind of turns itself on when powering on the plane, you'd have to explicitly disable it but then you'd have weird discussions with the airport tower guiding you to a free timeslot on the runway which would just delay your takeoff, since ignoring the airport tower is a good way to not get off the ground at all because you'll accidentally be hit by some other plane.
99.99% of airports do not have "timeslots on the runway." Most airports in the US have no tower whatsoever.
But I bet if you filter for airports that business jets park at, the percentage of airports without towers is much lower than the overall average.
They wouldn't have to set anything. The transponder on almost any modern plane defaults to automatically on, either immediately or at takeoff. With Mode C (reporting altitude) or S (& reporting more) and squawking 1200 (VFR).
Don't want to get shot down?
You won’t get shot down for merely taking off without a transponder.
Worst case scenario a fighter jet will be scrambled to investigate.
But in apocalypse scenario, chances are the fighter jets will be busy with tasks other than enforcing FAA rules.
> But in apocalypse scenario, chances are the fighter jets will be busy with tasks other than enforcing FAA rules.
Depending on the type of event, they very well could be scrambling to shoot down unidentified aircraft.
Fog of war sucks, and friendly fire still happens often.
Colliding with other planes is going to impede your escape plan, so it would still be a good idea to turn the thing on. No further action needs to be taken for the ADS-B output to be correct, it works once it's powered on.
In a theoretical scenario of the billionaire class of the world having some kind of "advance warning" of the apocalypse, they'd be taking to the air in the hours or several days prior to a total disaster happening. Meaning this would be done while the local governments were ostensibly still functioning, in which case you can't just have your private jet depart without active ADS-B and in-the-clear voice traffic for ground, and air traffic control coordination.
If governments and airspace control have already collapsed, post tense, then of course anything goes.
If they have 5 minutes, sure. If they have 5 hours, they'll follow procedure.
This has the same issue as many other types of event warning systems based on noisy, incomplete data.
The latency of constructing a semi-reliable warning signal from the data sources described significantly exceeds the latency of event onset. You can modify the algorithms to reduce latency but then the false positive rate skyrockets. Not what you want for an "apocalypse" early warning system.
To mitigate this you need more data from more diverse sources and lower latency feeds.
Is it the end of the world or just Davos?
I'd like to see this site the week of the Superbowl.
Wouldnt absence of the jets be a strong indicator? Like none of the royal family in Saudi Arabia?
There was a Sci-Fi book I read where this was a service provided to rich people. Basically you signed up for it, and you'd get a text when everything was about to go down. Time to drop everything and fly to your bunker.
This seems like an area rife for a scam, like hurricane insurance or earthquake insurance. You pocket the money, and when disaster strikes, who is going to sue you when you do nothing? If there was a real bunker-worthy event then all your insurees have been devoured by zombies or dissolved by radioactive strings or whatever.
On Polymarket, $60m has been wagered on "Will Jesus return before 2027"
https://polymarket.com/event/will-jesus-christ-return-before...
Yeah, but Jesus is gonna place a big bet on himself just before he returns.
I'll definitely put money on that one around December for a quick return. Thanks for the tip
Why wait till December? Aren't there higher returns the earlier you put money?
Is it profitable? Current price for No is $.96. Making 4% in 8 months is better than most sure bets but less than the stock market on average.
Stock market's historical average is actually just about 4%/year after inflation. So it does beat it (absent fees), but just barely.
Barely above a high yield savings account I guess.
Historically, savings accounts do much worse than the stock market. People are spoiled from the last decade and don't remember what corrections or bear periods look like. Over time you get 4% over inflation. That's it.
Is that how it works? I don't gamble sorry. But this one I will gamble on, heavily
Any chances you'll recall the title? It sounds interesting
This is essentially the premise to Fallout, or at least the leadup to it.
Also Paradise on Hulu, or at least the setup there as well.
Polymarkets? Bets in units of gold or canned goods, not currency.
This is more useful than every other "monitoring the situation" dashboard I've seen.
I dunno, this guy's setup looks pretty decent: https://youtu.be/2IsR06zf8nQ
Do you think that rich people are on some sort of private 'end of the world' mailing list?
No, but they have spent tens of millions of dollars on a go bag —> helicopter to private jet -> bunker in New Zealand preplanned route and you haven’t.
Good luck to them. Having Luxon or Peter crawl up their arse on arrival will have them wishing for a fiery death.
Good luck to the billionaires in a real collapse scenario, when their security and support staff can decide that the billionaires are counterproductive, and vote them out of the survival bunkers.
You didn't include the locals, we're not huge fans of being considered a liferaft by people who have actively worked to make the world worse. And we have a can do spirit (and earthmoving equipment...)
I suggest calling one of these bunkers Khazad Dum.
It would certainly align with Thiel's naming predilections...
A few months of some narrow strait of water in the other side of the world being closed off and New Zealand is about to collapse. And these billionaires think they can just sit back and relax in their bunkers here in an apocalypse scenario?
You clearly haven't read articles where they said they were pondering all their employees in those bunkers to have explosives in their neck...
A few moments' thought will convince just about anyone that their best chances of survival will come from allying themselves with a strong, resource-rich leader, namely the one they already work for.
Immediately turning on such a leader would be a bad move, because you'd then have to fight all the other traitors for your share of the loot.
If I was a guard. Would I pick up my boss I see every week or some random dude I might have seen year or more ago once? Probably would go with the boss that I am hopefully reasonably friendly with. There really is quite a chain of command even in security.
I don't care. And I guarantee you most wealthy people don't care either. A few eccentric wealthy people do and you think r/preppers is filled with the elite - it's not.
Reminds me this this post from Reddit the other day from someone who believes AI is a conspiracy perpetuated by the rich people: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1syeppa/am_i_ov...
> Do you think that rich people are on some sort of private 'end of the world' mailing list?
The Palantir guys? Absolutely. Trump's inner circle? Absolutely.
People one degree of separation from them? Maybe. Two degrees? Probably not.
I think news of such an impeding scenario would probably percolate through their circles first, before the wider media.
How private the Bilderberg Meeting and group are is up to your interpretation.
Bloomberg Terminal chat?
I have something somewhat similar at <https://blog.sentinel-team.org/>, tracking events that could kill over a million people.
in case of Apocalypse you think they're all filing flight plans?
If it's early enough, they would have to. And in case it's a false positive, they would be liable.
All this to say, I actually find the thing hillarious, though. If there's an actual apocalypse a plane will not save you.
Rich people will start using this to decide when to flee.
Google will use the popularity of this site as a leading indicator in its own index.
But what if they shut down the entire tracking system just before?
>>we suspect that many people who have access to private jets will immediately take to the skies and escape city centers
Why would that be true? There would never be enough warning to get to the airport and take off anywhere, even if everything else was still working perfectly.
This assumes any inside information is distributed across the set of jet owners relatively uniformly. In reality most of the private get guys run dealership chains or well services companies. Nobody is going to bother tipping them all off.
The reality is, much like American wealth, the distribution is super-exponential. If you actually wanted this to be kind of useful, you'd only look at the tail numbers known to belong to people who are associates of US senators, high ranking congressmen, and senior defense officials (Raytheon/LM/NG/Boeing execs).
That said, the *actual* reality is you'll just fucking know because it'll be obvious things are escalating out of control. The government is not mystically competent, they're morons like us just figuring it out as they go along. If things were to somehow pop off unexpectedly you only have somewhere between 3 and 30 minutes which is not enough time to get an aircraft in the air with no notice.
TLDR this doesn't do anything. It's cool though
There are questions about who would be launching all-out nuclear war on the US when there are such obvious and effective indirect means of destruction.
If you want to destabilise an economy, destroy science and R&D, nuke healthcare, ruin decades of trust with allies, disassemble democratic checks and balances, co-opt the media, and give most of the population a nervous breakdown that has them believing batshit divisive nonsense, you certainly don't need nuclear weapons to do it.
The fact that this had none of the visual tells of being a Claude-derived artifact is a relief.