Spreading the risk: too much digital and in cash

MattMattMattUK

Middle_of_the_Road said:

I don't think the OP was envisioning a global armageddon, rather a situation where all records of one's deposits are lost due to a catastrophic computer failure. 

All systems of that kind of multiple redundancies and backups that are usually archived going back several years so that they can be rebuilt if needed, however a large scale technological failure of the kind the OP talks of "digital armageddon", also known as "the great reset", is really only likely with something like an NEMP, which would also take down the power grid and then subsequently water supplies, food supplies, payment systems etc. Society as we know it is somewhere between three and seven days away from total collapse without electricity (the point after which people start fighting and killing for food, law and order breaks down completely and the ability to rebuild even within decades becomes highly unlikely. An NEMP event would take out power supplies across most of Europe so our closest allies would not be able to assist, a direct impact solar flare would take out power supplies globally and lead to a technological regression back to the iron age. 

If you plan for anything more than a small, temporary outage with one bank or payment system, a temporary grid outage you are really wasting your time. The localised or temporary outage does not need any particular planning beyond basic resilience, the "digital armegaddon" requires huge preparation and an ability to survive that most people do just not possess. Keep a couple of weeks of dried food at home and a small camping stove (with fuel), enough bottled water to last a week, any required medication for a couple of weeks, anything beyond that and society will have collapsed, no hidden stockpile of gold is going to help.

MattMattMattUK

Eyeful said:

Harry227:      You state that

" I'm interested in savings rather than investments, per se.22"
However both gold & land are investments, not savings.

Gold and land are assets, not investments. However assets are only useful if one can a) enforce property rights and b) get anyone else to exchange them for useful goods, an angry mob looking for food are not going to care about gold, or land ownership, so the two become worthless. 

Eyeful

Middle_of_the_Road said:

I don't think the OP was envisioning a global armageddon, rather a situation where all records of one's deposits are lost due to a catastrophic computer failure. 
Those who understand such systems could hopefully put our minds at rest.

Humans have existed for a long time before computers.
They have faced war, plague, faming, climate change and living with wild animals ready to eat them.
 A catastrophic computer failure will I think be a small thing, compared with that list.

Eyeful

MattMattMattUK said:

Eyeful said:

Harry227:      You state that

" I'm interested in savings rather than investments, per se.22"
However both gold & land are investments, not savings.

Gold and land are assets, not investments. However assets are only useful if one can a) enforce property rights and b) get anyone else to exchange them for useful goods, an angry mob looking for food are not going to care about gold, or land ownership, so the two become worthless. 

Gold and property are both widely recognized as investment options.

Harry227

Middle_of_the_Road said:

I don't think the OP was envisioning a global armageddon, rather a situation where all records of one's deposits are lost due to a catastrophic computer failure. 
Those who understand such systems could hopefully put our minds at rest.

Exactly.  Thank you, but I also enjoyed (and found interesting) the other comments above.

Albermarle

Eyeful said:

MattMattMattUK said:

Eyeful said:

Harry227:      You state that

" I'm interested in savings rather than investments, per se.22"
However both gold & land are investments, not savings.

Gold and land are assets, not investments. However assets are only useful if one can a) enforce property rights and b) get anyone else to exchange them for useful goods, an angry mob looking for food are not going to care about gold, or land ownership, so the two become worthless. 

Gold and property are both widely recognized as investment options.

Also investments ( in shares etc) are often referred to as assets, as in the phrase 'asset allocation' for example, which is regularly used when discussing the split between share equity, bonds, cash etc 

p00hsticks

Eyeful said:

Middle_of_the_Road said:

I don't think the OP was envisioning a global armageddon, rather a situation where all records of one's deposits are lost due to a catastrophic computer failure. 
Those who understand such systems could hopefully put our minds at rest.

Humans have existed for a long time before computers.
They have faced war, plague, faming, climate change and living with wild animals ready to eat them.
 A catastrophic computer failure will I think be a small thing, compared with that list.

I'm not convinced of that - we've already almost seen riots when KFC ran out of chicken. Deprive people nowadays of the internet and social media for more than a few hours and I dread to think of the consequences. 

MattMattMattUK

Eyeful said:

Middle_of_the_Road said:

I don't think the OP was envisioning a global armageddon, rather a situation where all records of one's deposits are lost due to a catastrophic computer failure. 
Those who understand such systems could hopefully put our minds at rest.

Humans have existed for a long time before computers.

We did, around 100,000 years, give or take and depending on how exactly you define human.

Eyeful said:

They have faced war, plague, faming, climate change and living with wild animals ready to eat them.

Wars deplete populations, but apart from a nuclear war have no capacity to wipe out the species, they have however caused societal collapse. Plagues of various types have wiped out up to a third of the population at any one time, various plagues wiped out whole villages and for example killed between forty and sixty percent of the population of different European countries at various points, leading to societal collapse. Famine at various times caused starvation and death of up to half of the population at various points in history at a time when the ability to forage and hunt sustained many of those who survived, this also lead to societal collapse. The far higher density of fauna generally provided a food source rather than a source of predation for humans throughout almost all of the last hundred thousand years. 

Eyeful said:

 A catastrophic computer failure will I think be a small thing, compared with that list.

Modern civilisation is built on computers. Our water supplies, our retail, our food supplies, all require an interconnected world. If we had a "digital armageddon" and we lost the internet and a significant portion of the computing systems available then societal collapse is all but inevitable because we would not be able to feed the population, provide them with potable water, medicine, most jobs would cease to exist and there is not enough wildlife to eat or land to farm without the modern technology required, or the ability to import food on a large scale. It is not just going to be the end of Netflix, Amazon and TikTok, but the collapse of nearly everything that underpins society, such is the extent of digitisation. 

Eyeful

I have more faith in humans to overcome hardships than you seem have.
The cry is always the same, " but this time its different!". It never is.

There were no computers less than 100 years ago but the the world still functioned.

I think that all the major governments have thought and made plans for what should be done in the circumstances you describe.  

Until AI takes over, or robs humans of the power of thinking for themselves, computers will just be tools.

The only thing that might bring an end to us is either ourselves or nature.
Examples:  (a) Nuclear wars   (b) Climate change (c) Too many Volcanos erupting at once. . 

Eco_Miser

For the past several millennia, civilised society has kept records of property and debt in easily readable form - on paper, parchment, vellum, birch bark, notched sticks, clay tablets. We had communication systems that consisted of messengers moving from place to place carrying written or verbal messages. In the current millennium we have largely abandoned that, and keep all our records and communications as representations of 0s and 1s in various media, and need electronic machines to read those representations, and then to interpret the 0s and 1s into something meaningful to us. This is why a collapse of the Internet, or just widespread electronic failures, will  likely cause societal collapse, we have abandoned and dismantled the previous systems we had built over the 100,000 years of human existence. Yes the human race will survive, but many of its members will not.

TL;DR: The world functioned fine without computers, but it won't function fine if the computers are suddenly turned off.