We’ve been exploring other towns around the West as alternatives for San Diegans who want to downsize. Heck, let’s pick it up a notch!
Years of doomsday talk at Silicon Valley dinner parties has turned to action.
In recent months, two 150-ton survival bunkers journeyed by land and sea from a Texas warehouse to the shores of New Zealand, where they’re buried 11 feet underground.
Seven Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have purchased bunkers from Rising S Co. and planted them in New Zealand in the past two years, said Gary Lynch, the manufacturer’s general manager. At the first sign of an apocalypse — nuclear war, a killer germ, a French Revolution-style uprising targeting the 1 percent — the Californians plan to hop on a private jet and hunker down, he said.
“New Zealand is an enemy of no one,” Lynch said in an interview from his office in Murchison, Texas, southeast of Dallas. “It’s not a nuclear target. It’s not a target for war. It’s a place where people seek refuge.”
The remote island nation, clinging to the southern part of the globe 2,500 miles off Australia’s coast, has 4.8 million people and six times as many sheep. It has a reputation for natural beauty, easy networking, low-key politicians who bike to work, and rental prices half those of the San Francisco Bay Area. That makes it an increasingly popular destination not only for those fretting about impending dystopia, but for tech entrepreneurs seeking incubators for nurturing startups.
“It’s become one of the places for people in Silicon Valley, mostly because it’s not like Silicon Valley at all,” said Reggie Luedtke, an American biomedical engineer who’s moving to New Zealand in October for the Sir Edmund Hillary Fellowship, a program created to lure tech innovators.
Link to Full Article
Half the price of SF rents. Oh yeah. There’s a major selling point. Did they mention how much a car gas or iPhone costs there?
EnZed has a lot to recommend but billionaires in bunkers reeks of the first class passengers who had reservations on the lifeboats abroad Titanic.
“New Zealand is an enemy of no one,” Lynch said in an interview from his office in Murchison, Texas, southeast of Dallas. “It’s not a nuclear target. It’s not a target for war. It’s a place where people seek refuge.”
That is, until now, Captain Yappy.
If I were a fascist world leader aiming to re-rack the balls, a side interest to me would be the open opportunity to atomize an enclave of world billionaires.
After successfully redrawing the power map of the world, who likes heckler’s?
Too late.
New Zealand bans foreign buyers:
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-newzealand-politics-housing/new-zealand-passes-ban-on-foreign-homebuyers-into-law-idUSKBN1L00KO
Imagine if they did that here?
A friend of mine told a story over the weekend. He’s retired now, and drives an Uber in the OC just to have something to do.
A lady gets in his car, and explains she just got here and is looking for a house to buy for a million dollars. Her husband works for the government in China, and he sent her here by herself to handle.
She is also pregnant, and the baby is due next week. She asked what is a good town to have a baby in!