It's funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be relatively flat socioeconomically. At most they think there will be small-scale warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist communes.
No. There will be deathstar billionaires with private armies and narrow-deep tech stacks.
Conversation
The industrial age has made us (falsely) believe that an "industrial base" has to necessarily be a nation-state scale at minimum. No. A complete industrial tech stack can be built as a fairly narrow single-billionaire pillar.
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A traditional "industrial base" has steel, sulphuric acid, power plants etc. at the bottom, and space programs and aircraft carriers at the top. This kind of stack can now be replicated with a *very* narrow footprint. I think you could do it for $3-4 billion in a small city.
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I don't see this as credible. Your entire budget won't buy a single 7nm semiconductor plant, and you'll have nothing left over to make the raw materials that plant requires. That leaves out everything else, too, from steel to ink.
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Get a copy of a McMaster Carr catalog, look in it, and think to yourself, "what would it cost to build systems to make everything in this catalog, because without those things, I can't even start to make the systems themselves."
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Far from the industrial base being "miniaturized", it seems to me that it's far more complicated than ever before. Even the logistics systems we require to keep a modern economy going are insanely complicated.
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In short, it takes billions of people to keep our industrial civilization going, and you're not going to replace all their specialities and all their capital equipment with pocket change.
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It takes billions of people to keep it going for billions of people. Once you decide you only care about small group you can specialize/refactor stack design significantly. Just like camping gear isn’t the same as apartment furnishings, or cruise ships aren’t exactly like hotels

