Paul Singer is CEO and founder of the Elliott Management hedge fund, looking after some $25 billion of client funds. A self-made billionaire, he has a personal net worth of $1.5 billion, and his hedge fund is notable for only having had two down years in the 37 years he has been operating it. It has averaged 14% annual return, compared to 10.8% for the S&P 500 as a whole. He publicly warned about the […]
Our notions of modern war and warfare are, in largest part, hopelessly outdated and dangerously inaccurate. When you ask most people to describe how they would expect any enemy to attack the US – whether a nation/state or an amorphous terrorist group, you’ll probably get responses ranging from nuclear missiles to crashing more planes into buildings or other sensitive areas. But the most likely future attack may not involve bombs, and may not even require […]
We’ve written many times before about the vulnerability posed to much/most of our electrical and electronic gear by a major solar storm. Indeed, noting the expert opinion that suggests there’s a 12% chance of this type of disruptive solar storm destroying most of our modern life and lifestyle within the next decade, a solar storm and its effects should be considered one of the greatest risks of all to prepare for. There are two issues […]
An interesting new study predicts that a limited nuclear exchange between warring powers would result in a ‘nuclear winter’ scenario. The study says this would create global famine, cooling, drought and massive increases in UV radiation (due to damage to the ozone layer), lasting some 20 years, and with between hundreds of millions and billions of people dying (the total population on the planet is about 7 billion). The full study is available here, and […]
Unlike shotguns, once you’ve chosen a rifle or pistol, you have few choices for the type of ammunition you shoot. Okay, maybe you can choose between hollow point and solid, and a few other tweaks like that, and maybe you have a few choices of bullet weight, and (at least in theory – in practice most cartridges are loaded at close to standard maximum all the time) the amount of powder used in the cartridge, but […]
Rifles are perhaps the least glamorous of the three major categories of firearms (the other two categories being handguns and shotguns). Many people over-inflate the value of both pistols (in terms of range, accuracy and lethality) and shotguns (again in the same three categories) and many people overlook rifles, or consider them too specialized. But, in reality, if you were to have only one firearm at your retreat, it should be a rifle, which is […]
The US Geological Survey organization – a government department that few of us think about, but which employs over 10,000 people in over 400 locations – has now revised its earlier 2008 earthquake risk projections. The new projection shows heightened risk in some of the American Redoubt states, but some parts of the country have their risk downgraded, so overall, there is probably no significant change in national overall earthquake risk. The areas of changed […]
You know that when you design and build your retreat structure(s) you want to ‘overbuild’ and build it (them) way above minimum code requirements, right? Although building codes sometimes seem unnecessary and adding extra layers of cost to what should be a simple process that you are free to do as you wish, there are two parts to the reality of building codes that people seldom appreciate. The first is that most of the code […]
Here’s a rather simplistic article that talks about the potential for solar storms to disrupt many aspects of our modern-day life. What is interesting however is their pie chart analysis of some of the derivative disruptions from a solar storm (shown on the left and more easily seen full size in the linked article). Like so much that appears in public about our society’s underlying vulnerabilities, we feel their chart is more optimistic than perhaps is […]