"The story of “government cheese” started with Jimmy Carter’s campaign promise to support the price of milk (specifically, to support a $0.06/gallon price increase). Consider it a rare campaign promise that happened to be kept, though it wasn’t completely thought through.
"Enforcing a higher price for something commonly either means restricting supply or increasing demand. In this case, supporting the price increase meant that the government had to buy milk en masse. What happens when you buy lots of milk? You discover that it does not keep well. That in turn led to the milk being converted into other forms that last longer: cheese, primarily. The other benefit of cheese being its greater density — producing one pound of cheese requires roughly 10 pounds of milk.
"But then what to do with the cheese? At first, the government just stored the cheese, where it apparently filled most of the large-scale cold storage in the US. (Rough cost for one year of the milk price support program (1981): $2 billion paid to dairy farmers in price support and $120 million in storage.)"
https://unintendedconsequenc.es/food-from-thought/
> Resting in a former limestone mine, it’s one of the nation’s most secure data centers and storage facilities. Few people inside Pennsylvania and outside it know this place exists. That’s the way the owner, Iron Mountain, likes it.
> “The reason people use this place is because we don’t talk about this place,” said Chris Miller, Iron Mountain’s infrastructure manager.
The tone of that is unclear, while giving a tour to a journalist.
> security by obscurity is weak for actual security
There was a time when I believed this. But over the years, I've concluded that in many cases, that which is considered legitimate security is in fact rooted simply in ensuring that the attacker is lacking information, which is fairly synonymous with obscurity.
Secrecy is a core part of legitimate security. But mere obscurity is not secrecy. In a secure system design you know exactly which parts are secret and which are not.
Yes, ideally this distinction can be made. But a piece of information you consider secret, if known by more than exactly one person, is merely obscure information.
That could be, although I'd guess obscurity in this case might reduce the likelihood of random mentally ill people minor threats, and also reduce the likelihood of being the chosen target of some more capable terrorist threat.
(Even random mentally ill people are likely to have access to firearms, and maybe heavy vehicles.)
Before cloud got big, I used to have a personal physical server colocated at a network facility, in a nondescript commercial building that you had to know was there, and turn off the main street to get to, with no signage I could see. (Also, biometrics scanners, when those weren't consumer things, and a waiting room that seemed to securely lock in visitors, in view of guards.)
I'd previously heard of non-government buildings without signage, for security reasons, so I figured that was it. Rather than not wanting to spend the money on a sign that would make it easier for customers to physically find, increase brand awareness, or raise their prominence in the minds of local officials before whom they might occasionally have business.
And, over time, you hear of other non-government unmarked buildings that are arguably "sensitive", for one reason or another. The ones that personally come to mind, historically that type has been threatened before (by, e.g., people angry at a company that they blame for automating away jobs, people who saw a movie involving blowing up records of bank loans and think that will work in real life, animal rights activists who want to free lab animals (and didn't see that other movie), eco-terrorists, people who are are mentally ill and found something conveniently located to fixate on). Maybe also no need to invite protestors?
Once went to visit a Raytheon technical support guy in his office. He made a point that it was 'hard to find' and there 'were no signs'. And he was right. Drive to a building. Park. List of business but not Raytheon. Go through a door that looks like it should be locked. Down a hall to the end. Open a door that looks like a utility closet and there is their office.
Company Policy.
Old office in SF two floors were a banking operation. They weren't on the signage. And you'd get in the elevator with people that worked on those floors and they would stand silently despite obviously knowing each other. Double set of doors on those two floors.
I think you're right about obscurity preventing a lot of low-grade issues.
There's an interesting building right in downtown Minneapolis that takes up an entire block that I'd passed several times a week for years without even noticing it—it's the operations center for Wells Fargo (and actually it just recently has been sold).
Zero signage and very nondescript, but when I found out what it was some of the physical security around it started to become super obvious. Big bollard "planters" and protection from large vehicles, a lot of cameras, no real obvious lobby.
Dead on.
Another good example is the London Stock Exchange; they have a really nice office downtown that is something of a magnet for protests, but I used to work around the corner from their data centre , and it was in a very scruffy , anonymous building with dirty windows, just an unusual number of cameras and stuff on the roof.
There's no "sounds like" about it, Iron Mountain has been around for much longer than that TV show and is very well known by anybody who has had to deal with archiving data for regulatory or contractual purposes.
Oh yeahhhh I didn't even notice that logo. Cool! I like it when shows give a nod to the real world. Especially Mr. Robot where so much attention was spent on details. It was really refreshing to not see hollywood hacking there (a "HACKING..." progress bar on a green screen :P )
I wonder if Evilcorp was also based on something. Edit: Ah I see it was Enron. Thanks for that link to the wiki, I didn't know it.
There's a ton of facilities like this for storage of various stuff in middle America. The limestone geology (there was once a sea between the Appalachian and Rockies) lend itself well to them. These facilities store all manner of things, almost everyone reading this has probably eaten cheese from one of them.
If noting unusual ever happened then I might agree with you but unusual events like significant US food aid after disasters are going to significantly affect these numbers even if it’s just for a few meals after an earthquake or political subsidy such as in 1965-1966 where US cheese flooded India. Several other countries had similar events during the early days of the green revolution.
Mad Cow disease is a more recent example where global supply chains shifted and suddenly people were eating a lot more imported products or products from different countries.
Further, from restaurants, ingredients in packaged food, vacations, baby food, pot luck’s, to one off sampling of a MRE many people have done something once which completely changed the supply chain for their normal diet.
PS: I’d agree it’s under 50% globally when including children, but for the HN audience specifically it’s probably over that.
No you misunderstood again, US cheese exports make up ~5% of global cheese trade between countries.
Further, when you first read “global trade” and thought “all global trade” why would you suddenly from “global trade of cheese” to “global production of cheese”.
Production and trade are the same thing. That's what we mean when we say trade.
Why would you object to the idea that the amount of global trade in cheese is equal to the global production of cheese, but not to the idea that the amount of global trade is equal to the amount of global production?
You could argue that there's more trade than there is production, because of reselling, but that would once again dramatically shrink the share of cheese trade that you could attribute to US cheese exports, which don't take future reselling into account.
Does the geology related to the current shale revolution from pretty much the same area have anything to do with that past sea? I’m just curious and too lazy to search for it now on my mobile phone
Virtually all petroleum (and shale-oil) deposits were formed in shallow seas, though possibly in lakes or wetlands (though swamps are more associated with coal-bed formation). Oil is largely metamorphosed algae.
J.R. Dyni, "Geology and Resources Of Some World Oil-Shale Deposits" (2003)
Oil shales were deposited in a variety of depositional environments including fresh-water to highly saline lakes, epicontinental marine basins and subtidal shelves, and in limnic and coastal swamps, commonly in association with
deposits of coal.
Do they have any 2003 Explorer Sport Tracs down there? Because they have the only 1L2Z-3551729-AAPTM parts remaining in existence that haven't been destroyed by sun damage. It would save me a lot of time on this project: https://sporttrac.org/threads/gen-1-roof-trim-reproduction.1...
At some point in working on old cars you need definitely need to give up on oem parts and fabricate or buy reproduction things. There is an inflection point where it is less hassle. People tend to overvalue authenticity, I think, so for me the inflection point comes sooner than average. Having read your post... It seems like you have this problem tackled? What's left? Having the shape scanned opens up tons of possibilities.
Site is giving a Cloudflare error: "We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error."
“In Kansas, in the Midwest, you get rain, you get hail, you get winter, you get ice, you get everything. And I think [Ford] really wanted to store the vehicles that they were producing and assembling in the area that wouldn’t come into harm’s way,” said Tompkins. “And so what better location than under a large roof?”
First thing to note is that while the pictures are from the 1960s, the article merely says that Ford uses (and has used, for years) these caves to store cars in transit.
The Kansas City Ford plant manufactures more trucks/vans in a day than it can ship to their destinations, and Ford uses almost any surface lot it can rent (including a nearby amusement park's lot in the offseason) to hold cars until they can be transferred by rail or truck--it's very demand-driven. It's completely natural they'd use these caves as well based on their proximity to the rail and interstate transport near the river.
I don't see in the article anything that implies there's a cache of 1960s cars down there gathering limestone dust. That space would quickly be reclaimed for temporary storage of Transit vans awaiting their buyers.
There's a Ford manufacturing plant 3-5 miles from many of Kansas City's limestone caves along the Missouri river. And as the comment-linked video down below shows, these warehouses are vast and even used for commercial businesses. You can play paintball in a cave at Subtropolis.
Not too far away (3-4 hours), the salt mines in Hutchinson, KS store a lot of Hollywood memorabilia.
One big plot point of "The Day After" back in the 1980s was that people sought shelter in the underground caves around Kansas City.
Because Ford now have a large number of factories and other facilities deliberately located near the caves so that they can keep on using them as storage for new vehicles that need to be stored before they are shipped to customers.
In the 90s I worked for a company in Kansas City designing pagers. We rented space underground for RF testing. There are no radio signals in the caves, at least back then. I'm sure that's different now, especially with manufacturing happening there. (Our cave was closer to downtown and was mostly used for warehousing.)
I think they mean that there might be WiFi access points or cellular base stations now installed in some of these caves given the ways the spaces are used.
Limestone tunnels are extensive and "paid for" when mined, now they still exist and are assets that can be rented for storage.
Large blocks were cut and pulled for processing, typically there are access tunnels that are wider than a two line highway with clearance for moving van height trucks with many "bays* that are large mined voids larger than a basketball court or three.
It's cheap storage given the security (controlled access) and the shade from sunlight and protection from rain, weather (hail), etc.
In Upper Michigan there is an underground laboratory by a military shower curtain supplier in an old salt mine. Ever since the congressional hearings on missing astronauts there are rumours that they are researching more than just shower curtains.
You know it's possible to gain citizenship in other countries, right? You may have to be inconvenienced a bit to leave the USA, but it's entirely possible to do it. You aren't a prisoner here, you're free to leave it all behind.
I have no plans to leave, I quite enjoy the freedoms we have here.
Re government cheese...
"The story of “government cheese” started with Jimmy Carter’s campaign promise to support the price of milk (specifically, to support a $0.06/gallon price increase). Consider it a rare campaign promise that happened to be kept, though it wasn’t completely thought through.
"Enforcing a higher price for something commonly either means restricting supply or increasing demand. In this case, supporting the price increase meant that the government had to buy milk en masse. What happens when you buy lots of milk? You discover that it does not keep well. That in turn led to the milk being converted into other forms that last longer: cheese, primarily. The other benefit of cheese being its greater density — producing one pound of cheese requires roughly 10 pounds of milk.
"But then what to do with the cheese? At first, the government just stored the cheese, where it apparently filled most of the large-scale cold storage in the US. (Rough cost for one year of the milk price support program (1981): $2 billion paid to dairy farmers in price support and $120 million in storage.)" https://unintendedconsequenc.es/food-from-thought/
It actually dates back to World War 2: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_cheese
Thanks for making this correction. It made me wonder about the rest, but the gist seems real.
There’s a similar facility called Iron Mountain in Boyers, PA that stores, among other things, millions of government records:
https://www.pennlive.com/news/2021/01/inside-iron-mountain.h...
> Resting in a former limestone mine, it’s one of the nation’s most secure data centers and storage facilities. Few people inside Pennsylvania and outside it know this place exists. That’s the way the owner, Iron Mountain, likes it.
> “The reason people use this place is because we don’t talk about this place,” said Chris Miller, Iron Mountain’s infrastructure manager.
The tone of that is unclear, while giving a tour to a journalist.
The person giving the tour knows security by obscurity is weak for actual security, but strong for marketing.
> security by obscurity is weak for actual security
There was a time when I believed this. But over the years, I've concluded that in many cases, that which is considered legitimate security is in fact rooted simply in ensuring that the attacker is lacking information, which is fairly synonymous with obscurity.
Secrecy is a core part of legitimate security. But mere obscurity is not secrecy. In a secure system design you know exactly which parts are secret and which are not.
Yes, ideally this distinction can be made. But a piece of information you consider secret, if known by more than exactly one person, is merely obscure information.
That could be, although I'd guess obscurity in this case might reduce the likelihood of random mentally ill people minor threats, and also reduce the likelihood of being the chosen target of some more capable terrorist threat.
(Even random mentally ill people are likely to have access to firearms, and maybe heavy vehicles.)
Before cloud got big, I used to have a personal physical server colocated at a network facility, in a nondescript commercial building that you had to know was there, and turn off the main street to get to, with no signage I could see. (Also, biometrics scanners, when those weren't consumer things, and a waiting room that seemed to securely lock in visitors, in view of guards.)
I'd previously heard of non-government buildings without signage, for security reasons, so I figured that was it. Rather than not wanting to spend the money on a sign that would make it easier for customers to physically find, increase brand awareness, or raise their prominence in the minds of local officials before whom they might occasionally have business.
And, over time, you hear of other non-government unmarked buildings that are arguably "sensitive", for one reason or another. The ones that personally come to mind, historically that type has been threatened before (by, e.g., people angry at a company that they blame for automating away jobs, people who saw a movie involving blowing up records of bank loans and think that will work in real life, animal rights activists who want to free lab animals (and didn't see that other movie), eco-terrorists, people who are are mentally ill and found something conveniently located to fixate on). Maybe also no need to invite protestors?
Two things I remember.
Once went to visit a Raytheon technical support guy in his office. He made a point that it was 'hard to find' and there 'were no signs'. And he was right. Drive to a building. Park. List of business but not Raytheon. Go through a door that looks like it should be locked. Down a hall to the end. Open a door that looks like a utility closet and there is their office.
Company Policy.
Old office in SF two floors were a banking operation. They weren't on the signage. And you'd get in the elevator with people that worked on those floors and they would stand silently despite obviously knowing each other. Double set of doors on those two floors.
I think you're right about obscurity preventing a lot of low-grade issues.
There's an interesting building right in downtown Minneapolis that takes up an entire block that I'd passed several times a week for years without even noticing it—it's the operations center for Wells Fargo (and actually it just recently has been sold).
Zero signage and very nondescript, but when I found out what it was some of the physical security around it started to become super obvious. Big bollard "planters" and protection from large vehicles, a lot of cameras, no real obvious lobby.
This is the building, it's fascinating to check out the street view all the way around the block: https://maps.app.goo.gl/UYKnA2Bs9gMQsSwo9
Dead on. Another good example is the London Stock Exchange; they have a really nice office downtown that is something of a magnet for protests, but I used to work around the corner from their data centre , and it was in a very scruffy , anonymous building with dirty windows, just an unusual number of cameras and stuff on the roof.
>in a nondescript commercial building that you had to know was there.
If I had to do it I’ll make it a boring unsuspecting commercial building with signage “storage R us” for example.
Something doesn’t add up. I see Iron Mountain box trucks at least weekly, with PA tags. Also we use them for backups.
Nothing about them is a secret. What a strange quote by the owner.
They're a huge company, with 24,000 employees and over 1,500 storage locations - the vast majority of which are warehouses above ground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_Mountain_(company)
"Few know" yet they advertise it all over their trucks all over Pittsburgh?? lol blatant marketing BS
Also in PA, Wampum Underground where you can store your boat, RV, or other vehicles in their cave for the off season
https://wampumunderground.com/vehicle-storage/
Sounds like Steel Mountain from Mr Robot, cool.
In fact it sounds like the TV show facility was based on this, the 'have their own fire brigade' thing also created in the show.
There's no "sounds like" about it, Iron Mountain has been around for much longer than that TV show and is very well known by anybody who has had to deal with archiving data for regulatory or contractual purposes.
Oh yeah I know but it sounds like the place in the TV show was likely inspired by Iron Mountain.
Yes it definitely was. Once you look at the logos and the company it's an obvious nod to that fixture of business and IT in the region. https://mrrobot.fandom.com/wiki/Steel_Mountain
Oh yeahhhh I didn't even notice that logo. Cool! I like it when shows give a nod to the real world. Especially Mr. Robot where so much attention was spent on details. It was really refreshing to not see hollywood hacking there (a "HACKING..." progress bar on a green screen :P )
I wonder if Evilcorp was also based on something. Edit: Ah I see it was Enron. Thanks for that link to the wiki, I didn't know it.
The Many Lives of Iron Mountain (New York) https://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-many-lives-o...
Only 1.7m square foot though.
There's a ton of facilities like this for storage of various stuff in middle America. The limestone geology (there was once a sea between the Appalachian and Rockies) lend itself well to them. These facilities store all manner of things, almost everyone reading this has probably eaten cheese from one of them.
You might be over-estimating the US-centricness of HN readership demographics.
HN traffic is apparently 42% from the US, which while high is way lesser than I thought.
The US exports a lot of cheese. $2.2B/year or ~5% of global trade.
I'd imagine that the entire international trade of cheese carries just a tiny part of the cheese consumed over the world.
Sure, but a lifetime is also a long time.
A very small part of a tiny part tends to overwhelm that duration.
That is to say, most people probably never eat US-made cheese, and those that did mostly did so while physically on the US.
Also, most of that exported cheese tends to go to the same few places. That happens to every kind of product.
If noting unusual ever happened then I might agree with you but unusual events like significant US food aid after disasters are going to significantly affect these numbers even if it’s just for a few meals after an earthquake or political subsidy such as in 1965-1966 where US cheese flooded India. Several other countries had similar events during the early days of the green revolution.
Mad Cow disease is a more recent example where global supply chains shifted and suddenly people were eating a lot more imported products or products from different countries.
Further, from restaurants, ingredients in packaged food, vacations, baby food, pot luck’s, to one off sampling of a MRE many people have done something once which completely changed the supply chain for their normal diet.
PS: I’d agree it’s under 50% globally when including children, but for the HN audience specifically it’s probably over that.
Does this come from federal stockpiles? Earnest question; how logistics happen is intentionally obscured from the perspective of consumers.
I think there is both “government cheese” and various pizza products made with subsidized cheese and dairy.
Any idea where the history of some of this stuff might be?
I’m suddenly curious where the cheese air lifted into Berlin after WWII came from.
> $2.2B/year or ~5% of global trade.
You think global trade amounts to 44 billion dollars per year?
The United States alone has a GDP of 29,000 billion dollars. World GDP for 2023 seems to be estimated at 105,000 billion dollars.
By that estimate, $2.2B / year is 0.000021% of global trade.
They may be referring just to the global trade of cheese.
The claim would be just as stupid; US cheese exports are somewhere around 7% of US cheese production. The US is not 86% of world cheese production.
No you misunderstood again, US cheese exports make up ~5% of global cheese trade between countries.
Further, when you first read “global trade” and thought “all global trade” why would you suddenly from “global trade of cheese” to “global production of cheese”.
Production and trade are the same thing. That's what we mean when we say trade.
Why would you object to the idea that the amount of global trade in cheese is equal to the global production of cheese, but not to the idea that the amount of global trade is equal to the amount of global production?
You could argue that there's more trade than there is production, because of reselling, but that would once again dramatically shrink the share of cheese trade that you could attribute to US cheese exports, which don't take future reselling into account.
To give you an idea of what these caverns are like - here's a tractor-trailer driver making a delivery into one in Missouri.
There are speed limit signs, stop signs, directional signs, etc. because otherwise you'll get lost.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDDdgVdczUE
Does the geology related to the current shale revolution from pretty much the same area have anything to do with that past sea? I’m just curious and too lazy to search for it now on my mobile phone
Very likely.
Virtually all petroleum (and shale-oil) deposits were formed in shallow seas, though possibly in lakes or wetlands (though swamps are more associated with coal-bed formation). Oil is largely metamorphosed algae.
J.R. Dyni, "Geology and Resources Of Some World Oil-Shale Deposits" (2003)
Oil shales were deposited in a variety of depositional environments including fresh-water to highly saline lakes, epicontinental marine basins and subtidal shelves, and in limnic and coastal swamps, commonly in association with deposits of coal.
<https://kirj.ee/public/oilshale/2_dyni_2003_3.pdf> (PDF)
Ah yes, the famed government cheese. Haven't had the privilege to taste any unfortunately!
I remember my Grandmother got some and shared. If I remember correctly it seemed a lot like Velveeta.
Correct
Misleading title: Ford has kept transient stock underground since the 60s. The article isn't about vehicles kept since the 60s.
Do they have any 2003 Explorer Sport Tracs down there? Because they have the only 1L2Z-3551729-AAPTM parts remaining in existence that haven't been destroyed by sun damage. It would save me a lot of time on this project: https://sporttrac.org/threads/gen-1-roof-trim-reproduction.1...
At some point in working on old cars you need definitely need to give up on oem parts and fabricate or buy reproduction things. There is an inflection point where it is less hassle. People tend to overvalue authenticity, I think, so for me the inflection point comes sooner than average. Having read your post... It seems like you have this problem tackled? What's left? Having the shape scanned opens up tons of possibilities.
Cool project, thanks for sharing! I don't have a need for the parts but it's cool to see vehicles from that era working properly.
Site is giving a Cloudflare error: "We can't connect to the server for this app or website at this time. There might be too much traffic or a configuration error."
Try https://archive.is/DU1Tt
Fun fact, there are also a bunch of data centers and colos in the caverns
The article didn't say why Ford is still storing the cars there.
“In Kansas, in the Midwest, you get rain, you get hail, you get winter, you get ice, you get everything. And I think [Ford] really wanted to store the vehicles that they were producing and assembling in the area that wouldn’t come into harm’s way,” said Tompkins. “And so what better location than under a large roof?”
From TFA.
Yes, I read that. That's why they were put there. Why are they still there?
First thing to note is that while the pictures are from the 1960s, the article merely says that Ford uses (and has used, for years) these caves to store cars in transit.
The Kansas City Ford plant manufactures more trucks/vans in a day than it can ship to their destinations, and Ford uses almost any surface lot it can rent (including a nearby amusement park's lot in the offseason) to hold cars until they can be transferred by rail or truck--it's very demand-driven. It's completely natural they'd use these caves as well based on their proximity to the rail and interstate transport near the river.
I don't see in the article anything that implies there's a cache of 1960s cars down there gathering limestone dust. That space would quickly be reclaimed for temporary storage of Transit vans awaiting their buyers.
The article didn't say the picture was from the 60's. But that would answer my question. I thought it would be quite a treasure trove for collectors!
There's a Ford manufacturing plant 3-5 miles from many of Kansas City's limestone caves along the Missouri river. And as the comment-linked video down below shows, these warehouses are vast and even used for commercial businesses. You can play paintball in a cave at Subtropolis.
Not too far away (3-4 hours), the salt mines in Hutchinson, KS store a lot of Hollywood memorabilia.
One big plot point of "The Day After" back in the 1980s was that people sought shelter in the underground caves around Kansas City.
Because Ford now have a large number of factories and other facilities deliberately located near the caves so that they can keep on using them as storage for new vehicles that need to be stored before they are shipped to customers.
What are those old 1970s Mavericks doing there? Waiting 50 years for a customer?
I think that's an old photo. I didn't see anything in the article that suggested the 1970s Mavericks are still down there today.
There are some people discussing that in the article comments, they think it's a clickbait headline photo combo.
This is normal storage space, anyone can rent it out.
In the 90s I worked for a company in Kansas City designing pagers. We rented space underground for RF testing. There are no radio signals in the caves, at least back then. I'm sure that's different now, especially with manufacturing happening there. (Our cave was closer to downtown and was mostly used for warehousing.)
Are you saying there could be radio signals in caves these days?
I think they mean that there might be WiFi access points or cellular base stations now installed in some of these caves given the ways the spaces are used.
I've driven into some the caves a number of times. Pretty wild.
Here's a video of "Subtropolis": https://youtu.be/3DJ4VjIRM24
That's wild how long he continues to drive underground! It's massive.
In fact the article says there are a dozen companies that make custom Fords that occupy some of the space. Zero delivery time I guess.
As for normal I beg to differ, but yeah ofc anyone can rent it.
I read the article and it seems they build and store new cars and trucks there. Doesn't seem particularly cost effective.
Limestone tunnels are extensive and "paid for" when mined, now they still exist and are assets that can be rented for storage.
Large blocks were cut and pulled for processing, typically there are access tunnels that are wider than a two line highway with clearance for moving van height trucks with many "bays* that are large mined voids larger than a basketball court or three.
It's cheap storage given the security (controlled access) and the shade from sunlight and protection from rain, weather (hail), etc.
In Upper Michigan there is an underground laboratory by a military shower curtain supplier in an old salt mine. Ever since the congressional hearings on missing astronauts there are rumours that they are researching more than just shower curtains.
I remember seeing something about that a few years ago. Super strange they never were found.
Cave Johnson probably still has them doing some important science underground somewhere.
portal reference?
Yes: https://time.graphics/event/2394246
If only there were large underground caves filled with oil to gas up cars in other underground caves.
/s
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_(U...
tl;dr: There's an old limestone mine that rents out space. Ford is a major customer, they store old cars there.
Pretty cool but doesn't need the mystery. I wouldn't mind visiting, although I'm not a big fan of Ford. Seeing an old Ford GT might be cool.
No it looks like they store brand new cars there to avoid inclement weather. Kansas City gets hail. And tornadoes.
>Seeing an old Ford GT might be cool.
Be extremely careful if you spot a 1967 GT500 named Eleanor, that's how it gets stolen again.
[dead]
[flagged]
Probably easier and more comfortable to move to Canada or Europe.
OK dual citizenship lucky dude, enjoy
"Dutch American Friendship Treaty", https://www.americanbar.org/groups/international_law/resourc...
You still need an independent income for that.
You know it's possible to gain citizenship in other countries, right? You may have to be inconvenienced a bit to leave the USA, but it's entirely possible to do it. You aren't a prisoner here, you're free to leave it all behind.
I have no plans to leave, I quite enjoy the freedoms we have here.