The biggest challenge would be to get out of the city and make the trip to my family’s farm safely. It would take about a week on foot/bikes using less known roads with all the supplies/weapons that would be crucial.
If I could get to the farm, rest would be fairly easy. I can farm, fish and and hunt. Heating works with wood. Fresh water is not a problem, nor is refrigeration with an ice cellar. My family has an old mill that we could restore to get flour and I think I could retrofit it to produce hydroelectricity in a year or so.
I’d trade access to electricity to get horses and other farm animals.
Almost every neighbour is related to me, so forming a defensive alliance should be possible.
I have the gear and the knowhow to make things work, it’s the not-getting-killed part at the start that’s hard.
And then there’s me. I either get some of your food, or I die. The hunger is growing in me like crack withdrawal. I also have survival skills and I’ve used every tool you can imagine and I’m really good at sneaking around.
I’ve probably got a gun by now.
I’m just gonna come and take ten pound of your corn. That’s all I need, then I’ll be on my way.
I don’t know how well I would do even if I escaped to my inlaws farm. It is pretty low tech but they are depending on city water which involves pumps and a moped to even get to the farm from their house still requires a battery.
The trouble isn’t that you can’t do all that. It’s how many other people have that same idea. Rural areas will be overrun by people who think getting out of the cities is the best idea – not that they’re wrong – but it will run supplies low outside cities too, and home gardens and the local deer population can only take so much pressure. That’s not even to mention the road traffic. If cities can’t handle rush hour, 2 lanes will certainly be gridlocked as everyone looks for the next road not taken. The locals would not take kindly to such an influx either.
The best strategy in my mind would be to stockpile food and other necessities wherever you are now and prepare for a long wait, hoping power gets restored. It would be horrible and dangerous no matter where.
3 months is when my insulin runs out. I doubt I’d make it that long in the USA.
Like I said, the start would be the hardest part. Cars or any other motor vehicles would be out of the question.
f this scenario would happen during the winter, it would effectively block all the lesser known forest roads for vehicle use. Doing the trip with skis would easily halve my travel time, even with the supply sled and heavy backpacks. 30-50km per day would be easy, when one wouldn’t have to go around all the lakes and rivers. We don’t get much daylight here in the far north so travelling in the cover of darkness would be ideal. I can find my way in dark forests with ease.
In the summer, the trip would be much more problematic. My country has countless number of old, unmarked roads and forest paths that are usually suitable for mountain bikes. This would be my first option. The second would be crossing the forests by foot which would be very safe, but it would take time.
My relatives would take care of the farm until I would arrive, of that I am certain - and they are very capable of doing so. My family has stuck around those parts for hundreds of years and we aim to keep it that way in any scenario ;)
I feel like you are more encouraged to interact here. Like you’re helping the fediverse grow. The other thing for me is that people seem to be much more civil then in other places. So yeah I feel the same.
Exactly this. I never bothered to do much interacting on Reddit. Either comments were trolled or downvoted “just for shits and giggles” or they were buried in no time under all the snarky oh-so hilarious comments that instantly killed all real discussion.
From what I see, Lemmy is just at the edge of “not enough content”. So many communities have one or two committed posters. So I comment as much as I can and post when I see something interesting.
For me it’s the gonewild subs… Once you start getting regular content there and they expand out to gonewildcurvy or bdsmgw or 30sgonewild etc you’ll really see lemmy take off.
They’ve had some issues with that though. lemmynsfw was heavily defederated from others over concerns about CSAM being federated, and after that lemmynsfw had much more mild porn.
Personally, I think that as long as porn is still freely available via old reddit without logging in, then it won’t take off much. Also, we’re in the post-Only Fans age, so it’s unlikely lemmy will ever get that “pure” gonewild feel that reddit had, as almost every user that posts their own porn is now doing it for money.
That’s the thing I find so surprising. There are so few NSFW posters. Porn pushed a lot of technical and economic innovation online. If Lemmy can’t get traction on adult content, we’re in bad shape.
Most online software actually has two separate pieces of software.
One (front end) runs locally on your device, i.e. an app or a webpage on a browser after it has loaded. This is responsible for interfacing directly with the user, converting human input into ones and zeros and vice versa.
The other (back end) runs on the webserver/host/company that your device (and many others) is talking to. It is responsible for storing and giving data/content, managing user accounting information, policing the interactions between users and security.
It is typical to have a single backend which coordinates data sharing among and between users, and to have multiple front ends, each of which takes a different approach to interacting with the user.
For example, lemmy instances are primarily responsible for running a single backend and also send you a copy of the default front end when you open the site in a browser. But you could use another front in software instead. And have it talk to the backend without first downloading a copy of the front end software.
Lemmy Is also a bit special in that it shares data between instances (other, similar backend software) and even entirely different server software (via a common data protocol called activitypub
I think the immediate deaths would all be from people who need electricity to run medical devices.
Followed shortly by people who require refrigerated medication.
Followed by elderly who die from exposure to extreme, unconditioned temperatures.
and that would be in the first, oh, say… week or two.
Then, with fridges full of rotted food, your first major death wave will occur as masses of people lose their absolute goddamn minds in panic and fear and start food riots/try to rob from others/raid big industrial farms/neighborhood gardens/etc, which leads to mass deaths from starvation, exposure, exertion, desperation, and gunshot.
Which will even out after about a week or two.
Then you settle in for the slow burn. 3 months out you’ll have another, comparatively small wave of deaths from people who run out of non-refridgeration requiring medications.
Then another slow burn until manufactured canned goods run out in stores and scavanged homes until a wave of starvation.
All in all, I’d say you’d probably be over the bulk of the mass deaths after 6 months, and with a significantly reduced population… Which will be to the benefit of the survivors, since less people per mile will make farming/hunting easier, and life safer… because while raiders/thieves will always be a overarching concern and safety issue, at this point, most of the desperation should have passed along with most of the desperate.
There will also be, for at least a generation, possibly two, the lingering unspoken understanding that more people than anyone would ever care to count only survived the famines and fall by eating the long pig.
Yep. I’d have about a month and a half of insulin to use, since it lasts that long out of refrigeration. It would take a while to actually kill me probably, but yeah that would be what gets me I think.
You got it right. If you’re already in a hospital you’re screwed. Anyone on a ventilator etc. is dead in hours.Then there’s people who need special meds that require refrigeration. They’re dead in days. Depending on the season, many more are dead in weeks. Food would be an issue but there are lots of shelf stable/canned goods that could last for a bit. Scarcity would be the bigger concern.
The dead bodies themselves could also be an issue at scale.
The crazier issue in my mind are all the industrial plants, nuclear power plants, chemical processing facilities…
In any major catastrophe they are abandoned and likely the meltdown and other issues could render whole areas uninhabitable. Might be manageable in certain power loss scenarios… but anything major and sudden like if you’re country suffered a nuclear attack or a major natural catastrophe and you survived I’d stay away from nuclear plants or chemical processing facilities. Potable water will be hard enough to come by…
To be fair most people in a first world country don’t need to think about water since it’s just “there”, all the time.
But as soon as the electricity goes out the water supply goes out too.
No water supply means no water to drink, with no water the human body die within 3 days, so people will start to rely on any dirty water they can find.
About dirty water, no water also means no WC. I repeat: no WC so no evacuation of feces and urine. Within a few day a big city swill be covered with human excrement. Mixed with no clean water access it means that deadly waterborne diseases will spread extremely quickly.
I wonder about the population using non-refrigerated but still vital medication being “comparatively small.” There are countless people who would no longer be getting things they need to live, and only a very small percentage of those folks would have the ability to grow a plant or something and refine themselves a substitute of some kind. I am really curious how those numbers would line up.
Yeah, folks are super reasonable compared to other social media sites, for the most part. The occassional nutter isn’t propped up by some PR company bot net to drive engagement so they just end up downvoted into oblivion.
Not yet! A lot of my interests aren’t as easy to find on Lemmy yet, but I’m definitely on here more than Reddit. I’m not really a community leader type but I can definitely be in the hype squad.
I agree that the USA has always had a “might makes right” mentality, especially in regards to its international relations, but yes, within our domestic affairs as well.
The boon of technologies, however, is initially a benefit to those who are differently abled, or somehow otherwise incapable of accomplishing physically strenuous tasks (think of the boon the invention of the bicycle had to women, who were demonized for wearing pants shortly after its invention and visiting ”men of ill repute” just the town over. Or more recently the invention of modern contraceptives and safer abortion techniques).
Said technologies are often usually then weaponized for power or profit by militaries, police, and corporations to exploit and disenfranchise, as well as remove access of these technologies to certain classes of people (the public working and public lower classes).
One only has to look at the corporatization of the modern farming industry and its rabid attempts to circumvent right to repair laws to see its nightmarish effects on not only agriculture, but also the modern farmer’s ability to run their own business according to their whims, and not an overlord corporation.
The loss of electricity worldwide would send us back to the late 19th century for the most part. And there are many strong, dominant, men who would love nothing more than to have the reliance of brute strength become the rule of law again.
To me, that is not a time I wish to revisit, that is not a transition I wish to bear witness to, as it would likely involve witnessing the disenfranchisement and disenpowerment of the world’s differently abled people as well as witnessing the rise of violent conflicts over resources and a return of more blatant slavery than we see today. Quite simply, I’d rather die.
I do hope this would play out differently in other countries (likely smaller countries). But the cynic in me doesn’t believe it’s possible.
Same reason you’d want to live in this fucked up world full of injustice and suffering.
Most people have a very powerful inherent drive to survive, and a lot of people who think they’ve got nothing to live for experience a reprioritization and will fight like hell to survive.
Most individuals who try to kill themselves immediately regret their decision. This happens a lot with jumpers, where most survivors report immediately regretting the decision as soon as they are in free fall and their brains reprioritize survival over the petty or even significant reasons we had to jump in the first place.
Just after jumping and while mid-air, Ken said, “I realized, at that moment, this is the stupidest thing I could have done.”
“I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable — except for having just jumped.” Source
Yeah yeah. Heard that story like a billion times. Totally agree. I’d rather die from starvation after having witnessed my loved ones die from similar circumstances. And I’m not being facetious. This is preferable to suicide.
Nah. If Food runs out, food runs out. Evenly distributed rations. It’s simply more likely I’d survive longer as my general health is better than my loved ones right now, and therefore I would likely be the one to bear witness to their tragic demise.
I can see why you’d think that though, based off of the unclear wording of my previous reply.
Yeah, that definitely means that it’s not a “might makes right” case, because it hasn’t happened to you personally, ty for clearing that up it makes me feel better as I have my rights eroded.
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