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Comment by throwGuardian | Hacker News Reader

Very sad situation - deeply empathize with the working class that's battling economic pain on top of a health crisis. No real blame can be placed on the manufacturing reliant employer base either - they work at razor thin margins and are optimized for just-in-time everything, including cash flow. No production == no cash on hand for salaries.

Reminder that our great civilization is fragile. If this situation lasts longer, it'll quickly devolve into civil unrest

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“There are only nine meals between mankind and anarchy.”

Alfred Henry Lewis, 1906

This event is just another wake up call that we should be prepared for such an event. Having a simple supply of food, water, and other basics is essential. Extreme prepping isn’t the answer, but most people are undoubtedly unprepared for even the smallest crack in the fabric society - whether that be a virus or an weather disaster.

But "extreme prepping" is the answer. If most households just had 20 lbs of rice and 10 lbs of beans, 2 gallons of fuel for a portable stove at home as backup, a logistics meltdown would be so much less dangerous for society. Those supplies are very cheap for like 95% of the population in developed countries and would give valuable time untill any mess is sorted out, hopefully.

As it is now there are like no margin for country wide disasters at all with these JIT food deliveries. The government can't handle this very good as any central warehouses they would put food in would be involved in the logistic meltdown. Maybe on a county level.

That's reasonable prepping.

"Extreme prepping" is the "bunker full of guns, ammo, 5 years of food, etc" version.

What happens when you run out of ammo?

I think that's totally reasonable prepping. Extreme prepping is what gets the focus of TV and media.

In 1840 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon defined anarchy in "What Is Property" as "the absence of a master, of a sovereign".

Anarchy means no authority, it does not mean no rules. I would suggest that anarchy needs a full belly instead and it's probably closer to mankind that capitalism.

Anarchy sounds like that shoe company that experimented with Holacracy. But with guns, samurai swords, and chains.

And lots of black leather. But how do you make leather in a post-civilization society? That always baffled me.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_leather

> No real blame can be placed on the...employer base either

..uh, why?

> they work at razor thin margins and are optimized for just-in-time everything, including cash flow.

This is a risk they take, and when shit hits the fan, they find out why it's a bad one - their employees, all of them (hopefully, not just the little guys) are going to suffer.

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