1 is good. Phone and internet scams in general seem like a pretty solid plan.
How do you all plan to get permission to work in Canada? It's been getting harder to get a work permit- even for people married to Canadian citizens.
I'm about the end of my rope here so I'm up for whatever. Let's do crimes.
We're all agreed then. Maybe Moby can also do some plumbing on the side.
8: You do! Plumbing is the perfect front.
We're all just a bunch of housecats.
3: You don't need a work permit to do crimes.
I'm in Berlin, so I think that "invade Poland" is the traditional answer.
8. Read derauqsd's book on the typology of financial crimes and go from there. Plumbing is the perfect starting point.
There's apparently a ton of money to be made grifting the Trump 2020 rubes.
It takes a village to write Hallmark cards.
4: At which point the Canadian version of Trump announces he needs to build a wall on Canada's southern border to keep out the notorious Unfogged crime gang members who are streaming into Canada...
We should definitely start our own greeting card company. I predict the "Who wants to sex Mutombo" card will be our best seller.
16. So depressing. Both Honduras and Guatemala have criminal administrations, US supported.
13: And as he remarks, fraud works well in Canada, since they're such a high-trust society. And everyone gets one free long firm.
When that drys up, I recommend we become highwaymen. The prairies seem like a good place for Mad Max-esque shenanigans. Or perhaps the forests of Northwestern Ontario.
That being said, the main thing Canada has going against it is that it's too close to the United States.
16: Some of them, I assume, are good people.
19.2 -- I don't remember if you were here the day I posted about the Fat Burglar of Winnipeg.
I'm for Gimli, Manitoba myself. I hear their hospital is really something else.
I'm in if get to play Margaret Lockwood's Barbara in The Wicked Lady. What a part! God I love that movie.
we have lawyers, journalists, programmers, academics and the academics-adjacent
Basically, a world-class collection of those bullshit artists who are too scrupulous to turn bullshit to profit. Scrupulous is not a plan!
I have cut-rate disaster response training as of this year. Occasionally, as I lie down to sleep, it occurs to me to imagine how truly, utterly miserable I will be if the earthquake hits and I have to get out of bed and run around town for the rest of the night trying to save everyone. In the event, though, adrenaline probably does its job.
25: Convert and you only need to save the people who painted their door frames with lamb blood.
In the event, though,adrenaline probably does its job I'll probably just die
The list of things I am unwilling to do in the aftermath of an apocalyptic event is pretty long, and includes, inter alia, cannibalism, combat, walking long distances, and expenditure of effort.
That's pretty much the whole of The Road.
I thought when our jobs crumbled during the apocalypse, we got to sit around and read novels by the waning light. I was promised housecatness. Eventually the ice weasels/roving mauraders get you.
But to be fair, by that point they've really earned you.
Just don't be the guy who manages to be the last person on Earth and then breaks his glasses.
And forgets that he could find a magnifying glass pretty easily.
Anyway, key point: Twinkies don't actually last particularly long times in storage. You need something canned or freeze dried or something.
Eventually the ice weasels/roving mauraders/rogue killers get you.
We did a simulated rescue in which another team of volunteer responders pretended to be the victims, trapped in a potentially dangerous structure. I knew it was absolutely not real, and I was fucked up for at least an hour afterwards. Effective emergency response seems to call for certain personality traits I do possess, but not as the default, 100% uptime personality layer. There's a lot of "Wait, what am I forgetting? Who might die if I do this? Think!" on top of the decisive action stratum.
I remember I did keep the wood supply flowing to the people building box cribbing, though. Should be easy to find broken 4x4s in a disaster landscape, right?
34: [response gif of a man opening a can and joyfully removing a Twinkie]
If you're looking for a serious answer, the thing for an eclectic group of people to do in Canada is run a summer camp for rich Jewish kids. I imagine when the Nazis invade it could make a good premise for a movie too.
Also summer camps definitely need good plumbers.
My summer camp only had pit toilets.
It probably had no Jewish kids, so maybe that was the key.
And forgets that he could find a magnifying glass pretty easily.
How?! I mean, he just broke his glasses!
Running a summer camp sounds like a lot of manual labor. Wouldn't we write great YA novels though, if we needed to? Or regular novels, for that matter, the kind with arcane but interesting side-trips where we just yoink from 15 years of archives to flesh those out.
I don't think I'm far enough from my cancer diagnosis to get a visa. (This was actually a problem for a good friend who moved to Canada).
we have lawyers, journalists, programmers, academics and the academics-adjacent
We should probably get some Ford foundation money or something and start a think tank. Where's Soros when we need him?
Has anybody done a maple syrup-backed crypto coin?
We should do import/export between Canada and the USA. Brokerage fees. Storage fees. Probably we could have some boats, and who doesn't like boats. Somebody's gotta get the Canadian bacon to America's breakfast plates.
46 Ekranoplans or we're unworthy of the blog.
A man, an ekranoplan, a Canada plan! - Ponarke Nanama!
Founding a cult could be a viable income-producing strategy, but I would need someone a lot more charismatic than myself to act as the leader.
44 was more or less my first thought, but it went in more of a "let's start an awesome think tank where we solve the problem of American democracy and political participation in theory (after ten years of fighting among ourselves), then emerge from the Canadian wilderness to find 800,000 other bands of starving think-tankers with their ragged printouts, at which point, well, I guess either Rousseau or Hobbes is somehow vindicated but the details blur" direction. Alternately, we are all devoured by Jordan Peterson furioso, right after he informs us that he's putting the man back in manitou.
I thought this blog already had a signature confidence trick.
Put the blog on the blockchain, that'll do it.
We could have the chattiest weed dispensary in the frozen north.
46. Real Americans don't eat Canadian bacon. Still, the ekranoplan idea is excellent.
The blog could also become a nebulous internet or smart phone startup, get funded by hypnotized VCs or GoFundMes, and go out in a Producers-like blaze of glory. It's been done, but never by such a distinguished cast of characters.
We could print self-deprecating t-shirts! Hooray!
22: I may have been subconsciously thinking about the fat burglar.
Wide, shallow Lake Winnipeg has ekranoplan potential. It works well with Natilo's Gimli suggestion.
I paused on that post because it's not time-sensitive, and Elizabeth Warren and Georgia voting seemed more pressing.
I just had a great idea! What if you could do blood tests with just a drop of blood from your finger? I'm going to call up Henry Kissinger and George Shultz to ask them to endorse this!
My plan has been* to learn enough of historical, paper-only accounting methods to make myself indispensable to any warlord or republic as long as society remains functional enough to have money and taxation. I don't know about the rest of you theoreticians, maybe you could run my abaci.
*have not actually done this yet
"let's start an awesome think tank where we solve the problem of American democracy and political participation in theory (after ten years of fighting among ourselves), then emerge from the Canadian wilderness to find 800,000 other bands of starving think-tankers with their ragged printouts, at which point, well, I guess either Rousseau or Hobbes is somehow vindicated but the details blur" direction.
I laughed.
Wide, shallow Lake Winnipeg has ekranoplan potential.
Much of Canada has ekranoplan potential. You don't need to be flying over water, or even over a perfectly flat surface; you just need to know that there aren't going to be any unexpected things sticking up (pylons, antenna masts, churches with spires, churches with towers, minarets, statues of Christ the Redeemer, peel towers, rollercoasters).
And that you aren't going to be flying overhead of any people who might complain.
in the aftertimes i plan to sit by the light of the fire* and tell strange tales of the office politics of the uk music weeklies between 1960 and the late 1980s, the thing it turns out that -- right at the moment of crisis -- i am more expert in than nearly anyone else, thank goodness
*yes the atmosphere will be on fire, handy for reading at night i guess
We should totally heist Quebec's strategic maple syrup reserve, but without getting caught, of course.
We could print self-deprecating t-shirts!
Also an option!