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by wpietri 2269 days ago
Does it? Let's set aside the scorekeeping systems we use (money, profit, ownership, wealth) for a moment. I see no reason to think we can't get people properly fed indefinitely. We'll still have power, water, sewage, bandwidth. And it's not like the shut down businesses will evaporate or anything. The buildings will be there. The equipment will be there. 97%+ of the staff will still be around.

Eventually we'll have a vaccine, and life can go back to normal (if we want). The main problem in the interim is keeping everybody from freaking out because the before-times social constructions weren't really set up for a global pandemic. But we can fix that if we want.
1 comments
crazy1van 2269 days ago
> We'll still have power, water, sewage, bandwidth

Don’t forget about food. There’s a lot of complexity and people involved in getting food from a farm to your local restaurants and grocery stores.

If it gets really bad and even a fraction of people in these industries stop working, stay-at-home life might get a lot less comfortable.

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wpietri 2269 days ago
As you can see from the sentence before the one you quoted, I didn't forget about it.

I agree there's a lot of complexity there. But it's still a relatively small slice of the population. A friend is a farmer; she's just carrying ahead farming. Compared with urban life, she's been "socially distancing" for years. For the more dense parts of the chain, we need to take other infection-prevention measures. But food production is already pretty good at keeping things clean, and the rest we can work on.

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vkou 2269 days ago
Food production is essential work, so nobody is stopping it.

We are about to have millions unemployed. Any job vacancy will be trivial to fill.

I wouldn't be concerned about the food supply.

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carapace 2269 days ago
It's worth remembering how efficient our modern food systems have become that less than 3 out of 100 people are enough to work them.

That said, it wouldn't hurt anything to start a "victory garden", it's the right time of year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victory_garden (but that's a good idea anyway, orthogonal to the virus.)

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