[ExI] Zuckerberg just bought 26 days of world peace?

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Dec 6, 2558 BE, at 5:25 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote: 
> OK Rafal, I know you are making preparations to do without, so you and plenty of people will be OK.  But plenty of people will not.  Then what?
>  
> Perhaps someone here can enlighten me, but I have long wondered about those silly zombie apocalypse exercises we keep hearing the US military does.  We know they do exercises to train for every scenario, so what’s up with the zombie apocalypse?

Recall the last power outage where the unwashed masses ran amok and killed off millions of people? Me neither.

> Perhaps they are training for what happens if there is a nationwide power outage or some kind of civil unrest, and soon you have hordes of starving people, just wandering around looking for some means of staying alive? 

Depends on what your goal is here. If you're only concerned about your safety and well being, then things are quite simple. But if you do care about those starving folks, it's an almost trivial matter to feed and clothe them and give them shelter. It's mainly the governments that get in the way here, preventing mutual aid (which is NOT charity) and the like. Simply allow these cooperative interactions and most people help themselves and others.

> Could that be something the military would train to handle?  I don’t see why not; it has already happened.  Mikhail Gorbachev writes in his memoirs about the communists taking over and forming the Soviet Union.  In those days, the government handed the farmers a quota.  If the fields produced insufficient amounts of crops, the government would come in and take whatever they estimated was their fraction.  If the family had nothing left, oh well, so sorry.  They starved.

The Soviet Union was in far worse shape then than the US is now. Not only does the US have a better over economy, it actually over-produces food.
 
> 
> Gorby writes of seeing starving people.  He saw a man collapse and freeze to death near his home.  No one even retrieved his frozen corpse for three days.
>  
> There may be Europeans here whose families have seen Real Trouble, who can elaborate.
>  
> OK, I digress.  What happens when Social Security becomes insolvent, and can’t pay those who do not have any alternative means?
>  
> Do we get the zombie apocalypse?

Do you see these folks, mainly victims of generations of bad social policy, as zombies? I don't. I also think it'd be far easier to resolve this problem non-violently than to keep the current system going, but I don't see collapse as all that likely anyhow. Yes, it makes for fun fantasy scenarios -- like gray goo or SkyNet does for toys we want to play with -- but the real world system is likely to just muddle through, IMO.

Regards,

Dan
  Sample my Kindle books via:
http://author.to/DanUst
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