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Blastfrog

Hypothetical collapse of the first world as some sort of weird apocolypse

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I was thinking about if the current situation in the world gets so unstable and unsustainable under their own weight that all of the world superpowers collapse, leading to the creation of city-states everywhere. Resources would be very scarce, and this would be a second dark age.

How would this make for a science fiction setting?

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In a resource crisis, cities would collapse. Modern cities are faaaaar too large to be supported without a working infrastructure of fast international trade and transportation.

Famine would kill a lot of people, and the rest would become neo-rurals and rediscover agriculture.

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A collapse of superpowers would cause anarchy and high rise of food prices (the only reason food costs as little as it does is because of governments and other similar bodies such as EU supporting farmers). In real welfare states it would also cause total malfunction of social services, but I don't think any of those countries would count as a super power. This world is strongly enough led by corporations and their interests that the disappearance of some states wouldn't outright stop the world as we know it from functioning. Any other effects would be indirectly caused by expensive food and anarchy.

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Unless Google send you food with ads on it. That should do the trick, Max Headroom style.

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Gez said:

In a resource crisis, cities would collapse. Modern cities are faaaaar too large to be supported without a working infrastructure of fast international trade and transportation.

Famine would kill a lot of people, and the rest would become neo-rurals and rediscover agriculture.


So basically one of the endings from Deus Ex?

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Sodaholic said:

How would this make for a science fiction setting?

A predictable "seen this many times before" kind of one.

Perhaps not the exact detail but, yes, it's standard fare.

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Jodwin said:

(the only reason food costs as little as it does is because of governments and other similar bodies such as EU supporting farmers)

Lol horseshit.

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AndrewB said:

Lol horseshit.

Lol, no. It's true. Farmers don't really get paid for their crops, they get money from the government determined by what their aerial is. The money they make from crops is negligble.

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Even if that's true, if you think that would result in a highly efficient farming industry that results in low prices and a higher standard of living for everyone in the country, well, I'm just going to say that I can't imagine what the logic flowchart in your head must look like.

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It means that the farming industry is subsidised by everything else in society through tax money. It also means that anyone who got a lower income gets their groceries for less money than they otherwise would have. Since the richer parts of the country/society help pay their food it means that it results in a higher standard of living across the board.

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AndrewB said:

Lol horseshit.

Go out to the countryside and find a farm. Ask the farmer how many breads his wheat can produce a year. Then calculate how much money those breads would make in retail. Probably not even nearly enough to sustain the farm if he got the full price himself...and those retail prices also include milling, bread baking, logistics and retail profits just to name a few extra fares that you need to pay for.

Without farming benefits the poor we have now would no longer exist - simply because they would die of starvation as the farmers increased their crop prices so that they can make a living. And since they're in the beginning of the production line, them increasing prices would have even higher effects in retail as price increases cascade along the way.

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AndrewB said:

Lol horseshit.


CAP, FCEA, etc.

You may believe that the theory behind them is horseshit as much as you want, but they exist, whether you want it or not.

Jodwin said:

Go out to the countryside and find a farm. Ask the farmer how many breads his wheat can produce a year. Then calculate how much money those breads would make in retail. Probably not even nearly enough to sustain the farm if he got the full price himself...and those retail prices also include milling, bread baking, logistics and retail profits just to name a few extra fares that you need to pay for.

Without farming benefits the poor we have now would no longer exist - simply because they would die of starvation as the farmers increased their crop prices so that they can make a living. And since they're in the beginning of the production line, them increasing prices would have even higher effects in retail as price increases cascade along the way.


Furthermore, distribution drive price down dramatically in agriculture -- companies like WalMart in the USA, Carrefour or Aldi elsewhere, have enough clout to basically decide the price at which they'll buy produce, and if the producer isn't happy, he can just instead sell to, well, nobody at all since at a local scale there's either no retailer at all, or they are too small to buy the whole of the production. Since selling at a loss is still better than not selling at all, the farmers yield. But they need heavy subsidies to compensate. These subsidies allow distributors to pressure the price at which they buy even more...

We've seen the result recently in Greece, with potato producers, exasperated by the pitiful sum they got from distributors, loading their production in vans and selling directly to the populace. They could sell them at a profit and it was still less expensive than in a local mall.

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Most crops are genetically modified with bee-killing pesticides inside them to help trigger a food collapse with a eugenics agenda. Some argue that they also weave aborted fetuses into the DNA to make everyone cannibals and serve the dark lord. Monsanto forces everyone to buy seeds that can't reproduce, so they have to buy again and again and then sue you when their GMOs 'accidentally' blow into your farm for patent infringement. All the meat is pink slime.

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the EU/US agricultural subsidies aren't the reason for low food prices, they are a reason for artificially set low prices in EU/US and extremely high prices in the 3rd world. agriculture is easily the one segment that needs more globalization - no inbound taxes for african and southamerican products in EU/US, no disgusting subsidies for EU/US farmers for not doing anything with their fields or growing fucking rape oil. cause it does rape agriculture. we need to get rid of our excesses, go do something else, farmers!

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It gets worse. Fruits are often the result of finding a good one and then just grafting or planting cuttings from the tree. If the blight kills all the bananas we're fucked. There's no diversity and they can't reproduce on their own. The ones that do are inedible crap. Apples breed, but they make randomness when they do. Specific, tasty kinds are about growing parts of the original tree.

What bothers me about GM foods is the debate about them is always misplaced. People seem to want them labelled as if they're dangerous to eat. They're never dangerous to eat; they're dangerous to grow because they stomp all over the environment - the engineered part being the environment stomping. We might as well just grow crops under domes because that's the only safe way I can think of to grow Round-Up-ready stuff (doubly true with Monsanto being bastard patent trolls).

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Technician said:

ALL crops have been genetically modified at some point; it's called domestication.

That's not genetic modification, that's empirical selection. That's like selling dung as food and saying "there are still some undigested nutrients in it".

GM is actually modifying genes directly, so as to introduce entirely new traits, instead of merely practicing selective fertilization or hybridizing in the hope of obtaining something that looks like the traits we want in less than three dozen generations. You can selectively breed mice for as long as you want, you're unlikely to make them glow in the dark this way.

The point of actual genetic modifications in crops is usually to either make the plant generate its own poison so that it will kill insects trying to eat it (as well as those trying to pollinate it, and also slowly build up toxins in the livers of human consumers but fuck them, if they eat GM food it's because they're poor) or to introduce a resistance to the poisons sold by the same company as the seed, so that the fields can be doused in twenty times the same quantity of toxins as before, again with the same end results.

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Sodaholic said:

How would this make for a science fiction setting?

Forget science fiction and start thinking survival horror, since that's the more likely scenario in the event of a global resource crisis. Whatever city states may emerge will only last as long as their food supplies or until the armory's depleted.

Technician said:

ALL crops have been genetically modified at some point; it's called domestication.

There's a slight difference between gene-splicing in a laboratory and selective cross-breeding.

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Sodaholic said:

I was thinking about if the current situation in the world gets so unstable and unsustainable under their own weight that all of the world superpowers collapse, leading to the creation of city-states everywhere. Resources would be very scarce, and this would be a second dark age.

How would this make for a science fiction setting?

I hope you're not thinking you're the first person to have thought of this.

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