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There are two kind of issue there: - have no "buffer", meaning living in houses where you can't store food in quantity sufficient for a certain, not little, pe

• robonerd 5y ago
  > no power can stop an angry population The longer you wait, the hungrier you get. The hungrier you get, the weaker you are. Best for the people of Shanghai if they start rioting now than a week from now, when it may be too late.
  • kkfx 5y ago
    of course, but the hungrier you get the less you have to loose so you act with far more fierce effort accepting more and more extreme consequences. Honestly food issues will be spread all around the world in the near future: we are too much for the food quantity we can produce, it's just a matter of time. Probably the key most élites count on are a divided population between a mass of young kept a bit nourished and well indoctrinated just to live for work, a small extent of "new feudal class" to keep the system app and other poor to starve. When (not if, IMO) we will be there it will be too late to change the course but I do not know how much late is already...
    • robonerd 5y ago
      > of course, but the hungrier you get the less you have to loose so you act with far more fierce effort accepting more and more extreme consequences. Definitely true. I just hope people aren't so tolerant of hardship that they miss their window of opportunity. With respect to food shortages in the rest of the world, I'm not too concerned. Many items are missing from grocery stores in my corner of the world, but basic sustenance doesn't seem threatened. Maybe I can't find chicken one week, or cheese the next, but there is still plenty of beans and bread around to keep stomachs full and I don't anticipate that changing. In Shanghai, the food shortages seem to be to be the direct consequence of the government locking down the city and disrupting supply chains. It's not a food production problem, it's a lockdown/logistics problem. If the rest of the world doesn't follow suite with this sort of zero-covid insanity, then I think we'll be fine.
      • kkfx 5y ago
        I'm not that sure because yes, we have enough for us "the westerners" BUT if you read the neoliberal agenda they want a poor and hungry population: they want to push entomophagy to ensure almost all eat just ultra-transformed industrial food to crush any possible less-industrialized production, similarly they want a poor population living on their services, witch means they need to make almost all poor and to do so prices need to skyrocket at a similar peace new "smart cities" emerge, where people inside are just guest allowed to stay only if they comply. To push such big change in such short period of time just pushing fossils prices does not suffice. To steer whole populations you need a hyper big sense of catastrophe, no matter much if real or invented/enlarged. Try just reading Klaus Schwab's "The Great Narrative" and Mark Carney's Value(s): Building a Better World for All. Of course they do not directly say they want a poor population but it's clearly implied. Lockdowns themselves can be read as a way to forcibly reduce consumption while keeping people under fear so obedient to a certain extent. Especially since they sanitary effect is evidently proved to be essentially null... If resources are scarce States need to isolate themselves from peers to preserve their scarce reserves and grab others states resources, so wars are needed but against enemies that can't defend themselves to reduce natural resources usage keeping number of deaths high. Remember that after the French revolution we are effectively in an era where economy dominate on politics, so decisions are made on purely economic considerations.
• zdragnar 5y ago
  > no government, no power can stop an angry population There are plenty of examples of the government doing just that in China. Boxer, taiping, 8 trigrams rebellions, etc, and those are just a few recent historical examples. In a country as large as China, you need substantial support from sympathetic government insiders if the angry population is even remotely regionally located. Uniting a billion people is an extremely high bar if that is your goal.
  • kkfx 5y ago
    That's a matter of scale: all revolts you've cited was made by few and often repressed even with exterior help. A hunger revolt is at nearly-country scale, no one can stop it. And China have already an extreme food issue because to develop industries they have to sacrifice food production and there are not much fertile lands around so they need to mass import foods from distant places, so general hunger unrest are very likely in the near future, not only in China of course, in the west we are not much in better shape for most countries, but certainly China will suffer much. About sympathies consider that all armies in the world so fare are made of Citizens not drone, so they are humans against humans, a dictatorship can't count much about army loyalty under certain conditions, and that's one of the reason all governments that can push so much toward drones and isolated cohort of people, to avoid having a "social society".
    • zdragnar 5y ago
      The ones I mentioned most certainly were not small scale. The taiping rebellion alone eventually had hundreds of thousands of troops by time time it essentially turned into a civil war. As for hunger, the last mass famine in China was during the Great Leap Forward. Let's also not forget the effects of the Cultural Revolution. I think you vastly overestimate the extent to which governments and populace form an "us versus them" mentality- it is rarely so simple as government on one side, populace on the other. At the end of the day, no matter who wins, someone still has to be in charge, and no large group of people will readily agree on exactly who or how.
      • kkfx 5y ago