7 ms·

As the article's first comment states, and what was my first criticism after seeing Madd Max years ago: Who's refining the gas? Let's just call it what it is:

by johnea 1y ago

As the article's first comment states, and what was my first criticism after seeing Madd Max years ago: Who's refining the gas? Let's just call it what it is: The whole premise is stupid, and was the biggest detractor from "suspension of disbelief" while watching the movie. This is the same stupidity that's causing rural residents to shoot themselves in the foot by refusing to adopt electrification. There is NO other technology that allows the level of technical autonomy, post-apocalyptic or otherwise, that is afforded by electricity. People with rural acres could be supporting ALL of their own residential and agricultural energy consumption with onsite electrical generation. Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries.

rightbyte 1y ago
Water world at least had some tanker to explain where all the gasoline were coming from. Mad Max was a dystopian movie in a dysfunctional state. I don't know how the exaggerated view of it became the franchise.
- decimalenough 1y ago
  Because it looks cool. There's a scene in Fury Road where a muscle car type vehicle blows up in such a way that it's propelled high up into the air, and then blows up again in mid-air. The physics to make this possible exist only in Hollywood, but hey, this way you get two pretty explosions.
  - anyonecancode 1y ago
    I go to the movies for physics-defying aesthetically overwhelming explosions. For all-too-physics bound and far scarier crashes, I drive the Garden State Parkway.
  - snypher 1y ago
    As always truth is stranger than fiction; https://youtu.be/H3NB5_EqYQw https://youtu.be/H3NB5_EqYQw
    - andrewflnr 1y ago
      I guess an anti-tank mine would have to be pretty punchy, but holy crap, are we sure that's real footage?
    - defrost 1y ago
      Somewhat atypical truth in that the vehicle launched by anti tank mine was loaded with explosives pre rigged to detonate .. SVBIED (Suicide Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device)
- BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
  Shits so fun is why
lurk2 1y ago
> Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries. The majority of the content I see in this space is overwhelmingly supportive of rolling your own grid. The point isn’t to reject electrification as a technology, but to reduce or eliminate reliance upon the electrical grid. A lot of homesteaders operate wood boilers for heat simply because it’s cheaper, but the truck-driving redneck you’re envisioning lost faith in industrial society a long time ago.
- nine_k 1y ago
  It's a funny position to have lost faith in the industrial society and drive a truck that depends on it heavily for spare parts and daily fuel. I bet they also watch TV a lot. A horse-drawn buggy would be a consistent (and sustainable) choice, instead of a truck. Preppers and rednecks are quite distinct though.
  - roenxi 1y ago
    There don't seem to be any contradictions there. If someone expects industrial society to collapse then as far as the truck is concerned it just means they need to prepare a contingency plan for if/when it stops working. They can still use the truck while spare parts and petrol is available.
awnird 1y ago
The gas was being refined from crude oil in Gas Town. This was explained explicitly in both modern Mad Max movies, but in fairness I haven’t seen the old ones.
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  The old ones are great, Mel Gibson is a treasure. Watch Apocalypto as well, one of the best action movies ever made
  - no_wizard 1y ago
    Mel Gibsons acting had treasured moments perhaps. Mel Gibson the man, not so much
    - monero-xmr 1y ago
      I simply don’t care about the personal lives of artists. Put a spotlight on any of us and the reality is painful
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - IncreasePosts 1y ago
      Just a heads up that almost certainly in every major Hollywood production of note, there has been a rapist or a racist, or a scumbag heavily involved in the project, either acting, directing, producing, etc
ivape 1y ago
You can't believe they just had a large amount of oil left over from the apocalypse that could sustain a few hundred thousand people? It's just a matter of cartelling it and controlling the supply. If an apocalypse happened, believe it or not, the few remnants of Earth would have all the world's knowledge via an LLM. How could that be? Wasn't everything destroyed? Nope.
- Filligree 1y ago
  Oil? Sure, but you can't burn raw oil for anything more interesting than pure heating. Refined gasoline, diesel or even propane? That stuff degrades. After a few years it's useless.
  - shoxidizer 1y ago
    Refining gasoline isn't special. The Syrian civil war caused the construction of thousands of makeshift oil refineries. It's basically just distillation. You won't have an easier time making batteries and semiconductors from scrap metal. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/24/dying-to-keep-warm-oil-trade-and-makeshift-refining-in-north-west-syria/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/24/dying-to-keep-war...
- monero-xmr 1y ago
  I find it highly likely that some insane natural event - extreme volcano, solar flare, nuclear accident, plague, large meteorite hitting major city, etc. - will befall man within the next 1000 years. Very very extreme event that has fallout for 20+ years. Would be very interesting to see how humans adapt with all of our tech
giraffe_lady 1y ago
The Miocene Arrow is an interesting post apocalyptic novel that takes this problem seriously. In it a neofeudal society is oriented around producing surplus grain and processing it into alcohol for small diesel-powered airplanes, maintained in small numbers at vast expense by an aristocratic class as both symbol and means of enforcing their dominance. Entire hereditary craft guilds for all the support and subskills necessary to keep them running etc. Sort of analogous to warhorses in premodern europe I guess. Solid book, the first one in the series is interesting too but based in a different setting.
AngryData 1y ago
Sure making high quality gasoline is difficult, but making shitty gasoline or fuels that can take the place of gasoline with a bit less power is not some crazy technology. Gasoline engines, if tuned to do so, will run off naptha and ethanol mixtures. And if you are creating it fresh, like from the existence of a place called gas town, it will allow you to use more volatile but higher octane fuels mixed to make decent octane gasoline, it just won't last sitting around for very long. And methanol is fairly easy to produce from heating up nearly any organic matter up in a dry still. Diesel engines will run off nearly any oil that will burn. I mean sure, fuel refining knowledge isn't super common, but plenty of people still know enough about it and chemistry to less efficiently produce fuels as long as they have a source material, be it an actual oil well or enough organic materials, with some basic tooling. Tooling which we would already know exists by the fact that people are maintaining a fleet of vehicles. And you also have to remember that Max himself was alive and working in world pre-collapse, it isn't a world 10+ generations into an apocalypse, only like 2 maybe bordering on 3 generations of apocalypse with some people still remembering the old world, albeit in a decaying state. There are hippies that process wood into usable liquid fuels you can find on youtube. If we wanted to be more realistic, they would be driving less, and have a far higher percentage of diesel vehicles because diesel is so much easier to make and the engines are easier to run on even garbage fuels. But Mad Max isn't like 200 years post-apocalypse.
duped 1y ago
In every movie except the first one (where society was starting to collapse, it hadn't fallen yet) the question of "where's the gas" is a major plot device I'm not going to sit here and argue Beyond Thunderdome is high art or anything, but kind of the whole point of the Mad Max films is not just to comment on resource scarcity and control but to make them the call to action for everything in the story. You're asking "who's making all the gas" because that's exactly what George Miller wants you to be thinking about.
- Cordiali 1y ago
  Beyond Thunderdome was good in my book, because it expanded on the Mad Max world. Methane from pigs, of course! I really didn't like Fury Road. It just felt like an over-the-top rehash of the end of Mad Max 2, without meaningfully expanding the world. Everything was far too polished, excessive, and wasteful, for no particular purpose.
01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Once again everyone has underestimated the cunning Toyota Prius, especially the new plug-in model, the Prius Prime. Your gas went bad a year after the hammer fell? The Prius Prime can drive highway speed on its battery, and you can charge that with solar and an inverter. Need to break camp and make yourself scarce in 5 minutes? Toss some fuel tanks in the back and floor it. The Prius Prime has a 600-mile EPA range on gasoline.
_dain_ 1y ago
>Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries. it's a little more complicated than that. check out the map of which states use gas stoves vs electric. https://www.statista.com/chart/29082/most-common-type-of-stove-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/chart/29082/most-common-type-of-sto...

by johnea 1y ago

rightbyte 1y ago

Water world at least had some tanker to explain where all the gasoline were coming from. Mad Max was a dystopian movie in a dysfunctional state. I don't know how the exaggerated view of it became the franchise.

decimalenough 1y ago
Because it looks cool. There's a scene in Fury Road where a muscle car type vehicle blows up in such a way that it's propelled high up into the air, and then blows up again in mid-air. The physics to make this possible exist only in Hollywood, but hey, this way you get two pretty explosions.
- anyonecancode 1y ago
  I go to the movies for physics-defying aesthetically overwhelming explosions. For all-too-physics bound and far scarier crashes, I drive the Garden State Parkway.
- snypher 1y ago
  As always truth is stranger than fiction; https://youtu.be/H3NB5_EqYQw https://youtu.be/H3NB5_EqYQw
  - andrewflnr 1y ago
    I guess an anti-tank mine would have to be pretty punchy, but holy crap, are we sure that's real footage?
  - defrost 1y ago
    Somewhat atypical truth in that the vehicle launched by anti tank mine was loaded with explosives pre rigged to detonate .. SVBIED (Suicide Vehicle Borne Improvised Explosive Device)
BriggyDwiggs42 1y ago
Shits so fun is why

lurk2 1y ago

> Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries. The majority of the content I see in this space is overwhelmingly supportive of rolling your own grid. The point isn’t to reject electrification as a technology, but to reduce or eliminate reliance upon the electrical grid. A lot of homesteaders operate wood boilers for heat simply because it’s cheaper, but the truck-driving redneck you’re envisioning lost faith in industrial society a long time ago.

nine_k 1y ago
It's a funny position to have lost faith in the industrial society and drive a truck that depends on it heavily for spare parts and daily fuel. I bet they also watch TV a lot. A horse-drawn buggy would be a consistent (and sustainable) choice, instead of a truck. Preppers and rednecks are quite distinct though.
- roenxi 1y ago
  There don't seem to be any contradictions there. If someone expects industrial society to collapse then as far as the truck is concerned it just means they need to prepare a contingency plan for if/when it stops working. They can still use the truck while spare parts and petrol is available.

awnird 1y ago

The gas was being refined from crude oil in Gas Town. This was explained explicitly in both modern Mad Max movies, but in fairness I haven’t seen the old ones.

monero-xmr 1y ago
The old ones are great, Mel Gibson is a treasure. Watch Apocalypto as well, one of the best action movies ever made
- no_wizard 1y ago
  Mel Gibsons acting had treasured moments perhaps. Mel Gibson the man, not so much
  - monero-xmr 1y ago
    I simply don’t care about the personal lives of artists. Put a spotlight on any of us and the reality is painful
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - IncreasePosts 1y ago
    Just a heads up that almost certainly in every major Hollywood production of note, there has been a rapist or a racist, or a scumbag heavily involved in the project, either acting, directing, producing, etc

ivape 1y ago

You can't believe they just had a large amount of oil left over from the apocalypse that could sustain a few hundred thousand people? It's just a matter of cartelling it and controlling the supply. If an apocalypse happened, believe it or not, the few remnants of Earth would have all the world's knowledge via an LLM. How could that be? Wasn't everything destroyed? Nope.

Filligree 1y ago
Oil? Sure, but you can't burn raw oil for anything more interesting than pure heating. Refined gasoline, diesel or even propane? That stuff degrades. After a few years it's useless.
- shoxidizer 1y ago
  Refining gasoline isn't special. The Syrian civil war caused the construction of thousands of makeshift oil refineries. It's basically just distillation. You won't have an easier time making batteries and semiconductors from scrap metal. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/24/dying-to-keep-warm-oil-trade-and-makeshift-refining-in-north-west-syria/ https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2020/04/24/dying-to-keep-war...
monero-xmr 1y ago
I find it highly likely that some insane natural event - extreme volcano, solar flare, nuclear accident, plague, large meteorite hitting major city, etc. - will befall man within the next 1000 years. Very very extreme event that has fallout for 20+ years. Would be very interesting to see how humans adapt with all of our tech

giraffe_lady 1y ago

The Miocene Arrow is an interesting post apocalyptic novel that takes this problem seriously. In it a neofeudal society is oriented around producing surplus grain and processing it into alcohol for small diesel-powered airplanes, maintained in small numbers at vast expense by an aristocratic class as both symbol and means of enforcing their dominance. Entire hereditary craft guilds for all the support and subskills necessary to keep them running etc. Sort of analogous to warhorses in premodern europe I guess. Solid book, the first one in the series is interesting too but based in a different setting.

AngryData 1y ago

Sure making high quality gasoline is difficult, but making shitty gasoline or fuels that can take the place of gasoline with a bit less power is not some crazy technology. Gasoline engines, if tuned to do so, will run off naptha and ethanol mixtures. And if you are creating it fresh, like from the existence of a place called gas town, it will allow you to use more volatile but higher octane fuels mixed to make decent octane gasoline, it just won't last sitting around for very long. And methanol is fairly easy to produce from heating up nearly any organic matter up in a dry still. Diesel engines will run off nearly any oil that will burn. I mean sure, fuel refining knowledge isn't super common, but plenty of people still know enough about it and chemistry to less efficiently produce fuels as long as they have a source material, be it an actual oil well or enough organic materials, with some basic tooling. Tooling which we would already know exists by the fact that people are maintaining a fleet of vehicles. And you also have to remember that Max himself was alive and working in world pre-collapse, it isn't a world 10+ generations into an apocalypse, only like 2 maybe bordering on 3 generations of apocalypse with some people still remembering the old world, albeit in a decaying state. There are hippies that process wood into usable liquid fuels you can find on youtube. If we wanted to be more realistic, they would be driving less, and have a far higher percentage of diesel vehicles because diesel is so much easier to make and the engines are easier to run on even garbage fuels. But Mad Max isn't like 200 years post-apocalypse.

duped 1y ago

In every movie except the first one (where society was starting to collapse, it hadn't fallen yet) the question of "where's the gas" is a major plot device I'm not going to sit here and argue Beyond Thunderdome is high art or anything, but kind of the whole point of the Mad Max films is not just to comment on resource scarcity and control but to make them the call to action for everything in the story. You're asking "who's making all the gas" because that's exactly what George Miller wants you to be thinking about.

Cordiali 1y ago
Beyond Thunderdome was good in my book, because it expanded on the Mad Max world. Methane from pigs, of course! I really didn't like Fury Road. It just felt like an over-the-top rehash of the end of Mad Max 2, without meaningfully expanding the world. Everything was far too polished, excessive, and wasteful, for no particular purpose.

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago

Once again everyone has underestimated the cunning Toyota Prius, especially the new plug-in model, the Prius Prime. Your gas went bad a year after the hammer fell? The Prius Prime can drive highway speed on its battery, and you can charge that with solar and an inverter. Need to break camp and make yourself scarce in 5 minutes? Toss some fuel tanks in the back and floor it. The Prius Prime has a 600-mile EPA range on gasoline.

_dain_ 1y ago

>Instead, due to culture war side taking, they hobble themselves to be ever dependent on the petro-extraction and refinement industries. it's a little more complicated than that. check out the map of which states use gas stoves vs electric. https://www.statista.com/chart/29082/most-common-type-of-stove-in-the-us/ https://www.statista.com/chart/29082/most-common-type-of-sto...