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.
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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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There are workarounds. I didn’t say an exact miniature civilization isomorphic to the one we have. I said narrow/deep. A sustainable high-functioning deep tech capability that can survive a collapse. I’d expect a deep hoarding component for example, for certain things.
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I think you don't appreciate quite how many things it would take even to sustain 1900 level technology. Where are your specialists in metrology in all of this (you need gauge blocks). Where are your specialists in high volume specialty chemicals and their infrastructure?
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I think you’re wildly misunderstanding what I’m proposing
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Anyway, having not seen such an explanation yet: I direct everyone to a video version of Reed's famous essay "I, Pencil": youtube.com/watch?v=IYO3tO
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Yes and there’s the toaster thing too, and google “fabricatory depth” while you’re at it, if you want a formal framework for your point. I understand what you’re talking about. It’s just not what I’m talking about and it’s not worth the trouble to elaborate more on Twitter, sorry
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Well, okay, but understand that I don't *think* I'm an entirely unreasonable observer, and you've apparently said something that's confusing to *me*, because it seemed like you were talking about what budget would be needed to create an autarkic system...
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...and one with a reasonable facsimile of the range of products of current industry. I think on a $3B budget and with a small city, you would be hard pressed to create an autarkic system that could maintain a c.a. 1800 standard of living even given current knowledge.
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