The amount of infrastructure it takes for us to live is insane. amirite?

Imagine taking away just one of these conveniences and see how quickly your life breaks down. Broken fridge, broken toilet, no hot water, no running water at all, no trash pickup service, no electricity... Horrible

by Anonymous 1 year ago

sounds like another tuesday in bangalore

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Lmao

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And in Ghana

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Or any third world country

by Anonymous 1 year ago

part of it is before water heaters, flushable toilets, fridges, and running water there was alternative methods of doing what those do that are not nearly as accessible today.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

This is what it's like to be homelesss, except everyone hates your for it and blames you for it.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yea, i don't hate the the homeless and i realize all it takes is something bad happening for the downfall. I wish there were more systems to get the homeless back on their feet.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

There's tons of systems. Chronic homeless (which you're probably referring to) is rarely just "bad thing happened once" and more mental illness + inability to forcefully detain someone.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Hating homeless people with mental illnesses is no better.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Dude is arguing the problem is we aren't allowed to forcefully detain people without a home. Safe to say they are likely a stupid take machine

by Anonymous 1 year ago

No internet

by Anonymous 1 year ago

This actually sounds nice

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I could live well without A/C but not heat. I could live well without my phone.. I definitely could not give up my fridge, water, electricity, or toilet. Those are spoils that I will cling to with all my dignity at risk.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Not in Texas you couldn't lol.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

bring it down to a more basic level what if there wasnt steel.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I've lived in military housing before.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And many people still don't want to pay taxes :)))

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I recently moved and had no fridge. Life was ok, i guess, but we always had to buy fresh (meat, for example) and cook small amounts of food (rice, beans, pasta..), so it wouldn't go bad because there was no refrigeration. I got a fridge now, as a donation, but it's broken (probably out of gas), and it was half working and was getting warmer and warmer everyday until i turned it off today and will wait for the guy to come fix it before i use it again. I can't imagine life in the early days, with no butcher shops to buy fresh meat everyday, and no grocery stores to buy tomato sauce, olive oil and onions LMAO

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It's doable. Not that bad. Try it.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

wait, hot water? Why's that a requirement?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The 3 things that make our lives so convenient and easy. Electricity, running potable water and sewage, heating (direct pipes natural gas for most people). Electric could be used for heating so it could really be just 2 things . Lose one of those and things get difficult to function, sure you could go a few day but long term, not feasible as a society, especially in a large city. Electricity is basically magic.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Eletricity, if it were in any fantasy setting, would be considered magic. It already does tons of magical features associated with magical worlds. Instantaneous communication? Sure why not. 2d real moving images? Sure. Controlling climate? Sure. Shoot lightnings? Light up places? Power automatons? Make mechanical horses? It's the Force. The Weave. The Power. Whatever you wanna call it. Except its wielders don't get to be in super secret fantasy cults and wear dope ass robes and get to mingle in continental geopolitics... They're just your next door Joe electrician guy.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'm demanding the next IBEW meeting dress code be dope ass robes.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Petition to start referring to electricians as power rangers

by Anonymous 1 year ago

This makes me want to write about a fantasy setting where the average wizards are like your average electrician. You can still have the cults and global geopolitics, those are the equivalent of our scientific institutions and corporate research labs.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Well and septic FTW?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

No way you can do that in an urban area, cities and towns only exist because we sorted out clean water and sewage treatment.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah I know. It's a joke because I'd rather have water and sewer

by Anonymous 1 year ago

>Electricity is basically magic. Completely agree. I refuse to believe that moving electric currents generates magnetic fields then variable magnetic fields generate electric current and that the universe is just okay with that.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

There's a book called "The World Without Us" that describes what would happen if humans suddenly vanished and our infrastructure was no longer being maintained, and how quickly everything would break down. It's a super interesting read.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I think about this all the time! I think when people bemoan how much more expensive it is to exist in daily life now relative to <vague time in the past> they're overlooking just how insanely complicated even the simplest things are behind the scenes now.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And they haven't even considered things like improvements in medical care, food preparation and nutrition, global trade of all sorts of things, hygiene habits and products, and materials science.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Exactly. My parents used to get fresh fruit in their Christmas stocking, because it was so expensive to get in winter. It was considered a luxury to eat fruit anytime other than when it was in season locally. Now you can even get heavy items like watermelon all year round.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The few bits of fruit they did have were probably nice at least - now we have an abundance of everything in grocery stores, but it mostly tastes meh. Looks perfect and has a long shelf life, but the taste now takes a backseat to the optimisation of the supply chain and appearance on the shelf.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And CEOs' yachts

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The costs are different though. People aren't paying 50% of income for internet, they're paying rent. Rent and housing as a concept hasn't changed since the 50s. We aren't paying twice as much because it's equipped with internet or a cellphone

by Anonymous 1 year ago

But they are right. It IS more expensive. 50 years ago there weren't mobile phone or internet bills for example. Now having a smartphone and the internet is worth the cost, but it's just a fact that some parts of life were in fact simpler.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

"It is more expensive" Hmm, I'd argue that it isn't. "More expensive" is a comparison between two things. There is no comparison between having a 2023 cellphone in your pocket vs the 1970 non-equivalent that doesn't exist. The richest person in the world in 1970 didn't have anything in their pocket that comes remotely close to a 2023 cellphone.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yes, that's why I said It's worth the cost, but it's a cost that didn't exist previously. Therefore there are more daily expenses now, making month to month costs more expensive. If you did a simple comparison of just monthly finances adjusting for inflation, life is in fact more expensive now.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

You obviously never paid a pre-cell era phone bill. Especially one with loved ones outside your area code.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

my father got a car phone in 1987, bought by his company, he was a salesman, it cost $4000, there was a big box in the trunk

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Time.... Time to send a message or receive it... Time is the great equalizer. Rich folks didn't have a cell phone but would of had horses or be able to hire the fastest messenger, afford to send a telegraph, or have a house phone... It's all about time imo

by Anonymous 1 year ago

"Would have"

by Anonymous 1 year ago

We basically just understand the cost by comparison. There is no way we could process it otherwise. The worst thing for me though, is the internet. I understand conceptually how it works, but the mechanism to send the pulses with enough information to have real time video game play is mind blowing

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The mechanism to send pulses with enough information to have real time video game play, real time chat or video calls, and even stream the game I'm playing to thousands of people all over the world in real time, at the same time, sometimes even wirelessly.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I think that society needs AI solutions to keep advancing. Everything is so complicated no individuals can manage it all and human communication and cooperation is spotty at best. I can only imagine making things even more complex would require a singular entity capable of managing it all with clear processing and communication between all the disparate parts of the whole.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah it's hard not to take it all for granted, just the unknowable scope of engineering and the myriad ways everything is interconnected and still functional. Imagine laying Redstone under your house so all the doors open automatically but x100000000 lol

by Anonymous 1 year ago

This is why I find it kind of odd when people just complain about taxes in general. Like yeah I would like to lose less of my paycheck and I would like to control where that money is allocated. But when people act like the concept of tax at all is bad and needs to be erased. I just wonder how they think our convenient society functions

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'd prefer my taxes not be spent bombing brown children and giving bailouts to billionaires. It's how the taxes are used. Our infrastructure is depressingly outdated and failures will cascade. We've paid our taxes. Our elected officials haven't upheld their end

by Anonymous 1 year ago

…I literally included being upset at how it's allocated as a valid reason.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The US passed the largest infrastructure bill in history in 2021. At least Democrats are trying.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Very pleasantly surprised with Biden

by Anonymous 1 year ago

There's a phrase going around worth mentioning: I don't mind paying taxes when the poor can't. I do mind paying taxes when the rich won't.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

They don't care. And even if they understood it (and I have to imagine they do to some degree), they don't care. It's all about what _they_ deserve.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

My mother had to draw water from a well. Imagine not having to spend years of your lives doing that

by Anonymous 1 year ago

My friend's mom in a rural area did that until they installed a pipe and a pump to draw it

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Along the same lines, I like to think of everything involved in making a milkshake or ice cream cone.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And yet no one gives a damn it appreciates it until it breaks

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yep and this apply to each thing we take for granted, for example Internet and network in general is an insanely complicated thing at world scale that just works instantaneously on demand.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Next time you fly, get a window seat and look down at how our road stretch across the land like concrete vines that have ensnared the earth. Then just think of the length or wire and cable that we wrapped around the earth too. It's pretty crazy but I'm pretty sure that with the undersea internet cables we have a continuous path that circle the entire planet. Then consider all our satellites which constantly blast every square inch of land and sea with their signals...

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It all came from the earth and will decay into the earth.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It all came from the sun and will decay into the sun.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Life sucks. It takes a whole lot to make it passable.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I also feel like everything is just barely held together. Like it's an amazing feat of labor and math and engineering for the most practical and exquisite house of cards.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I live off grid. I'm fully aware we're living in a society that is unsustainable. No one cares. No one does anything about it and never will. We'll just pollute and glutton ourselves into the ground.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

The earth forgives. 50,000 years after we are gone there won't be much left of us. This is still not much time to mother earth. She won't remember us. On the other hand if we continue down this path of technological advancement and prosperity we will be an intrastellar species in 100 years and and interstellar species in 1000 years! Wonderful, huh!?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Hooray! More planets to pollute! Maybe by then we'll have our heads on straight.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Hard to believe some people want to destroy all that with talk of "civil' war

by Anonymous 1 year ago

As I increasingly grow off grid and self reliant, I think about this often. If you wanna be energy independent, you have to learna lot about elecricity and plumbi g and thats just operation and maintenance, if you go solar or generator or something you need to buh them, its not as though you have knowledge to build panels or engines, most people anyway. Ironically the easiest thing is learning how to get rid of or remove waste.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

What have the Romans ever done for us?

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I would never survive the middle ages.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

What regularly blows my mind is just how much humanity makes — everything from bikes to computers are made up of smaller things that themselves had to be made somewhere. Every gear, every screw, every resistor, every little thing that makes up what we call society was made somewhere. It's factories all the way down.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yup, hard to believe the older generations take this for granted, calling the people who upkeep the infrastructure "lazy do-nothings."

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And yet the people that design and build all that absolutely necessary infrastructure get only a tiny fraction of its value to do so. Electricians and plumbers, civil engineers, research scientists etc are the ones that should be driving lambos instead of landlords, finance bros and CEOs

by Anonymous 1 year ago

yeah it is ass backwards in that regard garbage men too

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I highly recommend a book called One Second After by William R Forstchen. It is about a terroristic EMP attack. It shows how quickly and completely we would fall without electricity.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yeah, no sane person would ever choose a system this complicated.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I really wish we could Ouija this question to anyone born before the 20th century.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I think about this a lot. It almost seems impossible when you think about even just the total length of all the paved roads we have and how much work and materials it takes to create them all. Not to mention everything everything else we've built and maintain.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Covid taught us that no toilet paper results in war.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Conservatives: "I don't need anybody else. The government is useless. We'd be better off without it."

by Anonymous 1 year ago

That's why it's so hilarious when MAGAs scream about all the poors sucking of the government teet and how they don't want to live in a socialist country, when everything from their Medicaid to the safety of their truck to the upkeep of the roads is financed by a social democracy.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Yet people complain about taxes…

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I think about this a lot. I think about our food. Consider a pizza. How many things had to happen for you to be able to eat that pizza? So many ingredients all coming from different places, the labor to obtain them and bring them together. Mind boggling.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

When I meet someone who calls themselves an anarchist I just roll my eyes. Libertarians to a lesser extent.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

They do say, "Civilization is 3 meals away from collapse."

by Anonymous 1 year ago

In particular the electricity network, that at a continental scale keeps delivering electricity to every consumer and producing it at power plants, in perfect balance at all times. The scary thing is that, if there was a complete blackout of the entire network, we don't know if we would be able to bring it up again. Seriously, we probably would not be able. Source: electrical engineer doing research on power grids.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I once read the headline "We are better prepared for a zombie outbreak than for a electric blackout" and that is horribly true.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It's also super important to remember the hundreds of millions of people living in abject poverty that allow us to have the infrastructure keeping us alive.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

please elaborate

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I always use the 50 cent can of tomato soup as an example of this Think of all the people involved in all the different industries involved in making that simple can if soup. Miners, steel workers, lumber jacks, paper factories, ink factories, heavy industry equipment manufacturing, rubber and tire companies, farmers, truck drivers factory workers, store employees... And they all made money some how on a 50 can of soup

by Anonymous 1 year ago

And the civil engineers that tie it all together.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

It actually takes no infrastructure to actually live. Tons of people did it in the colonial and pioneer days.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'm am presently sitting on an island We had a big storm. No electricity and no running water. We are remarkably fine with neither. If It runs more than a day or two I might start getting anxious.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

> No electricity and no running water. We are remarkably fine with neither. If It runs more than a day or two I might start getting anxious. So it hasn't even been a day yet… it's like saying you skipped breakfast so you don't need food or water and you're fine.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

Do you really want your mind blown? 20% of the population of the US is Boomers, and 20% is GenX, Boomers and GenX are aging out of the workforce with all the years of experience they have, leaving Millennials least trade skilled workforce in 4 generations, most of which can't change a tire on a car to maintain and rebuild the most complex interwoven regulated infrastructure system in history. imagine a complex system being taken over by a kid with 10 years of experience after being vacated by the guy who was there for 40 years while it was built. This doesn't even take into account the people in the medical field who will retire and go from providing care to needing it, the people who repaired and maintained houses, buildings, cars, roads, bridges, farms, and food plants, who will still need those services but will no longer be able to do their own work much less someone else's. Then there is the problem of all the countries that rely on exports from the US and other countries that also have aging populations. It is truly apocalyptic in scope. Any skilled labor will be in high demand, and people who can learn truly complex systems will be in incredibly short supply.

by Anonymous 1 year ago

I'm sorry, but you can learn to change a tire in 5 minutes on YouTube. Also I know a LOT of very skilled millennials, some of whom work in infrastructure. Why do you think younger generations are less capable? At one point the aging population had only 10 years of experience.

by Anonymous 1 year ago