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Comment by cryptica | Hacker News Reader

This shows the fragility of big cities. People who live in a big city are highly dependent on the government and the economy. Cities don't produce much food themselves so it has to be brought in from other parts of the country every day. Shanghai has 24 million people; it's difficult to conceptualize how much food is required to sustain so many people.

I find big cities terrifying. What if there is a food shortage or some other panic and everyone decides to leave within a short period of time. Will it even be physically possible to leave with millions of people and cars clogging all the streets and booking out all surrounding hotels and accommodation?

If you live in a remote town without too many people, this is not a problem; everyone in those towns easily find ways to sustain themselves from their surroundings; fish, birds, deer, wild fruits, vegetables...

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If anything it shows the fragility of having someone point a gun into your head forbidding you to go get food

If for whatever other reason you'd live in a remote area and the government used force to stop you from getting food in whatever way, the exact same thing would happen, as it already did in Ukraine (holodomor hunger) where you have one of the most fertile grounds on the planet

If there was going to be a food shortage in a big city which could not be stopped... Would the government tell people that there is going to be a food shortage? IMO, they wouldn't because this would cause panic buying by some which would make it happen even faster. I think they would just use some other excuse and find ways to reduce average consumption to make people last as long as possible on the limited supply and hope that the situation improves.

> the exact same thing would happen

People in Shanghai are completely unable to produce their own food, with many not stocking even a bag of rice.

Meanwhile, there's plenty of rural areas that can produce family-sized amounts of eggs, milk, fruits, and veggies to survive on indefinitely should the government decide to blockade you.

You are missing the point.

During the holodomor hunger the government forbid getting food food even if your produced it yourself.

If you went into the fields after harvesting and tried getting anything that felt on the ground because you and your family were starving you were put to death.

Producing the food yourself makes no difference if the government takes it from you

Some may call this “the industrial revolution and it’s consequences”… These people are entirely dependent on technology and social structures that they have no control over. Unfortunately, that’s true for everyone in the countryside too unless they want to live with Stone Age farming tools. Could you sustain yourself if your town had to recreate the metal supply chain? Energy? Probably not. I don’t think you’re much better off in the long run. You can’t sustain your own lifestyle either.

The difference would be how much of a shock to the system would result in catastrophic effects to you/your family. A hypothetical major 2-week disruption to supply lines and public infrastructure looks pretty different if you are in the country, with well/septic, on a plot of land with a well-stocked fridge/cellar vs. a small downtown apartment with maybe a day or two's worth of supplies and the strong possibility of nearby violence from those that might not be even that prepared.

In a few areas of the US, we have Old-order Amish who make a point of trying to do without dependencies on most modern infrastructure. They always live rural, on farms, certainly not by accident.

Agreed, it's about the magnitude of the impact. A massive economic crash would affect people in the countryside too but the difference is that there is a much higher chance to survive by downgrading your lifestyle. As a basic example, you can't go fishing in the city to catch your own food, especially if there are millions of people competing to fish in the same river. There are also no wild fruit trees or farms there. Only way to survive would be cannibalism - That's what happened to Leningrad/St Petersburg during WW2 as a result of a military siege.

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