I paid accident claims for five years. The vast majority of claims were either people working the system and finding ways to get their regular chiropractic treatments covered as accidents or "an accident waiting to happen."

In some cases, the "accidents waiting to happen" were egregious enough that the policy didn't pay anything. Accident policies always have a list of provisos that boil down to "Were you doing something egregiously stupidly dangerous for funsies when you got injured? We aren't cutting you a check!"

It was only a really tiny percentage of claims that were clearly and obviously "Damn. Wrong place, wrong time. It sucks to be you, dude." In five years, there were only about three claims that made it hard for me to sleep nights, even though I routinely read police reports and ER reports describing quite serious injuries (plus lots of really minor injuries -- see above about getting regular visits covered as "accidents").

I tend to not like articles of this sort. I don't like reading, for example, about millionaires and billionaires who have bunkers in New Zealand and a jet waiting "just in case" things go to hell over night.

All that does is it tells me the rich people running the world aren't doing enough to run the world well. They foolishly imagine that after they run the world into the ground they can handily escape the consequences of their actions and only the little people will really suffer because of it.

The Time Machine by H. G. Wells was published in 1895. The crux of the plot is that "in the dystopian future, the descendants of hard working servants will be eating the sheeple descendants of the helpless rich." (a message that tends to get lost in movie versions of the story).

That's a much more likely scenario if things truly go to hell. The rich people whose wealth and comforts depend upon stocks and bonds and working financial markets and the like will not likely come out on top.

It will be soldiers and hunters and people with real survival skills pertinent to the dystopian scenario who will suddenly be the people with power and social backing. Rich people skills only work to keep you on top if you keep your civilized world humming along nicely and don't let it go to hell in a hand basket.

Kind of like the scene in The Titanic where the rich guy tries to bribe his way onto a lifeboat and gets told "Your money isn't worth anything to me at the bottom of the sea." The guy he was trying to bribe was going to go down with the ship. He had no further use for money. He would be dead within a few short hours, tops, and he knew it.

I know why these articles appeal to people, but I wish they had less appeal. I wish actually resolving our problems was a more popular topic, but any time I try to talk about real solutions I'm given a ration of crap.

No one wants to hear that we should be doing x, y and z practical, unexciting thing today. It isn't any fun to talk about that. Most people just want to imagine some fantasy in which things get really and truly crazy bad -- as if they aren't bad enough currently -- but bad in a way where heroics somehow save the day rather than, say, washing your hands and not rudely blowing your nose next to people under your mask while standing in a crowded Walmart.

Articles like this are mostly escapist fantasy where people imagine themselves the hero in some future that plays out like an exciting movie. It helps them forget the dull reality of our current serious problems for a bit while not requiring them to actually fix anything in earnest.