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Comment by blueflow | Hacker News Reader

The comments section is an trash fire. Some people seem to be more than ready for the apocalypse to actually happen. What a sad state of affairs.

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People never picture themselves as being among those great numbers who suffer and die in these scenarios.

Be realistic, you are more likely to die from cardiovascular issues or car crashes.

And suffer from rising water levels, don't ask me how I know.

A simultaneous failure of multiple breadbasket regions (something made much more likely by climate change) would case mass global death. To be fair, first-worlders wouldn't be as affected, though.

It's not good to assume all hope is lost, but it is also dangerous to bury your head in the sand.

Global food production per capita now is massively higher than 50 years ago (and still climbing). And also probably higher than any time in the past.

Even if food production falls globally by 25% or so, any famines will be due to distribution, not lack of global food production.

If we really screw up, we may have famines similar to what was relatively common up to about 1980.

And why did we stop having them?

Many countries in the world can't feed themselves. They import food from others. If there are crop failures, food producing countries impose export bans. For example, India has a ban on wheat export this year [1] because of crop failure.

Once export bans become tit-for-tat (not dissimilar to the tit-for-tat export/import control bans between US-China right now), then some countries will be fine, and others will experience mass starvation. Global food production per capita only works if there is free trade of food.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-61590756

I live in a country that imports 50% of the food. As long as the population produces something that others will trade for, that tends to work out ok.

However, should global food trade suddenly stop, I may be one of those starving.

Edit: just to be clear: Global refusal to trade food is extremely rare. What happens a lot more often, is that some country is unable to purchase food abroad due to either some blockade or lack of purchasing capacity.

doing my best to cover those too. I try to stay physically fit and eat a diet that is anti-inflammatory

It's kinda like learned helplessness and depression have infiltrated the human condition. But why wouldn't it? We're not that dumb, we see what's happening around us. It's mad.

It is sad but I think it points to how meaningless people find their lives. That's a big issue, why have we created a society where everyone is so miserable they want to watch the world burn.

a trash fire *

Some people just want to watch the world burn

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