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Spice300
Premium Member
join:2006-01-10

Spice300 to PX Eliezer704

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to PX Eliezer704

Re: Revolution (NBC, Sept 17)

said by PX Eliezer704:

As has been said, why has America been locked in at such a primitive level?

15 years of war among sociopaths and militias has left the U.S. destitute. Militias do not produce food because they steal it from others. They conscript young men, kidnap young women and murder anyone who resists or threatens to acquire power over them. They take the most productive workers and turn them into soldiers. Anyone who invents a machine that makes a community more powerful than a militia is kidnapped or killed and the machine taken or destroyed to further the power of the warlords. If the people are kept weak, struggling to produce enough food to survive, then they are easy to control. 310 million people have probably been reduced to a few tens of million by starvation and murder. Oppression requires revolution to cure.

The writers are very poor at expressing what has happened leaving the audience rather confused. Showing the collapse over the last 15 years using flashbacks is a poor choice because the audience does not believe society could collapse to the level of the medieval or dark ages. In my opinion this level of collapse is plausible, if, one day, all electrical equipment suddenly stopped working. The problems have to do with the characters not being as rugged as one would expect for what they have experienced. Miles is too feeble looking to be a super-warrior which is a failure of casting.

Here is a scenario. There is a farmer with tens of thousands of acres of corn 2 weeks before harvest. Suddenly all electrical equipment stops working which means no tractors, no lights at night and no refrigeration (all the meat in his freezer spoils). He has corn to eat but not much else. There is no way he can harvest all of his corn manually. However, this farmer is fourth generation, has a garden, a chicken coop and a few cows. He and his family are not in immediate danger of running out of food. His grandpa's old diesel tractor is parked in the barn and being a rugged farmer knows how to repair his equipment. He removes the electric starter and rigs up a manual crank starter. It already has a mechanical fuel pump, so no problem. He gets it going, hooks up a harvester and harvests 100 acres of corn. He has enough corn to feed his family for years and enough left over to sell or trade for other crops. He hooks up a trailer to his tractor and slowly drives a load of corn to the farmer's market in town.

Three weeks after all electrical equipment stopped working he drives into a town occupied by starving people. A person walks by snatching a basket from his trailer. Then another and another. The farmer tries to stop them but is overwhelmed and trampled to death by a mob. There is not enough for everyone so a riot breaks out. Three brothers with guns leap onto the tractor and shoot into the crowd to secure the booty. Their tactic fails because the starving people are savage. They push the tractor and trailer over crushing one of the brothers and kill the other two.

Result: Corpses lying in the street. The farmer's non-electric tractor is a heap lying on the shoulder of the road and his knowledge lost upon his death. Next year there will be no harvest at his farm that could feed 100 people for a year. Maybe his wife and children can plant a garden and sustain the chickens and cows, but only if someone does not come along and steal or kill anyone. Maybe they have the foresight and knowledge to convert some of that unharvested corn and corn stocks into compost for their garden because they certainly will not be getting any more industrial fertilizer. They are reduced to subsistence farming.

Starving people are not rational. They are brutal and only consider the present. Desperate people usually eat their seed crop. Thus goes anarchy.
Spice300

Spice300

Premium Member

Clarification: the farming being isolated out on the farm did not know that electrical equipment failed for everyone else and thus did not realize the desperate situation in town. He spent his time modifying the tractor and harvesting. He had no time for anything else.
PX Eliezer704
Premium Member
join:2008-08-09
Hutt River

PX Eliezer704 to Spice300

Premium Member

to Spice300
said by Spice300:

Here is a scenario. There is a farmer with tens of thousands of acres of corn 2 weeks before harvest. Suddenly all electrical equipment stops working....

Damn!

You should be writing for the show! Seriously!

Grimm
join:2011-05-23

Grimm to Spice300

Member

to Spice300
said by Spice300:

said by PX Eliezer704:

As has been said, why has America been locked in at such a primitive level?

15 years of war among sociopaths and militias has left the U.S. destitute. Militias do not produce food because they steal it from others. They conscript young men, kidnap young women and murder anyone who resists or threatens to acquire power over them. They take the most productive workers and turn them into soldiers. Anyone who invents a machine that makes a community more powerful than a militia is kidnapped or killed and the machine taken or destroyed to further the power of the warlords. If the people are kept weak, struggling to produce enough food to survive, then they are easy to control. 310 million people have probably been reduced to a few tens of million by starvation and murder. Oppression requires revolution to cure.

The writers are very poor at expressing what has happened leaving the audience rather confused. Showing the collapse over the last 15 years using flashbacks is a poor choice because the audience does not believe society could collapse to the level of the medieval or dark ages. In my opinion this level of collapse is plausible, if, one day, all electrical equipment suddenly stopped working. The problems have to do with the characters not being as rugged as one would expect for what they have experienced. Miles is too feeble looking to be a super-warrior which is a failure of casting.

Here is a scenario. There is a farmer with tens of thousands of acres of corn 2 weeks before harvest. Suddenly all electrical equipment stops working which means no tractors, no lights at night and no refrigeration (all the meat in his freezer spoils). He has corn to eat but not much else. There is no way he can harvest all of his corn manually. However, this farmer is fourth generation, has a garden, a chicken coop and a few cows. He and his family are not in immediate danger of running out of food. His grandpa's old diesel tractor is parked in the barn and being a rugged farmer knows how to repair his equipment. He removes the electric starter and rigs up a manual crank starter. It already has a mechanical fuel pump, so no problem. He gets it going, hooks up a harvester and harvests 100 acres of corn. He has enough corn to feed his family for years and enough left over to sell or trade for other crops. He hooks up a trailer to his tractor and slowly drives a load of corn to the farmer's market in town.

Three weeks after all electrical equipment stopped working he drives into a town occupied by starving people. A person walks by snatching a basket from his trailer. Then another and another. The farmer tries to stop them but is overwhelmed and trampled to death by a mob. There is not enough for everyone so a riot breaks out. Three brothers with guns leap onto the tractor and shoot into the crowd to secure the booty. Their tactic fails because the starving people are savage. They push the tractor and trailer over crushing one of the brothers and kill the other two.

Result: Corpses lying in the street. The farmer's non-electric tractor is a heap lying on the shoulder of the road and his knowledge lost upon his death. Next year there will be no harvest at his farm that could feed 100 people for a year. Maybe his wife and children can plant a garden and sustain the chickens and cows, but only if someone does not come along and steal or kill anyone. Maybe they have the foresight and knowledge to convert some of that unharvested corn and corn stocks into compost for their garden because they certainly will not be getting any more industrial fertilizer. They are reduced to subsistence farming.

Starving people are not rational. They are brutal and only consider the present. Desperate people usually eat their seed crop. Thus goes anarchy.

If only others could have an imagination like this, they could easily get sucked into any show/movie and not be so critical of everything.

Bravo, Spice300. Bravo.

Snakeoil
Ignore Button. The coward's feature.
Premium Member
join:2000-08-05
united state

Snakeoil to Spice300

Premium Member

to Spice300
This series is reminding me of two books I read last year.
First was Directive 51, second was Daybreak zero. Both written by John Barnes.

The short of it is:
Tree huggers spread a nano virus. The virus eats anything that contains oil. So, rubber, oil, fuel, crumbles apart.

The second part is that a Chinese defense system [It was a secret weapon base] on the moon. The base fires missiles at anything that transmits a radio signal.
So radio communications are basically stopped.

So now you have the USA basically thrown back to the days of horse and buggy.
Though electric power can still be generated, and fuel can be used [as long as the nano virus can be kept away from it].

Granted they are over simplifying things for television.

*edit* Nice job spice.