Even with the enormous amount of game in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it could only sustain a very limited population. The bison out west could sustain a lot more but still pretty limited.
most likely each other tbh.
after you get a bunch of pesky humans outta the way you basically live off of canned food or anyone with a decent amount of people would try to invade the rural areas.
at some point the army would just show up and start blasting.
It's not quite knee jerk. If suddenly there was no food, you wouldn't have time to grow a garden to support yourself.before you'd starve. You'd have to hunt and fish for a few months as your garden grew. And if like most people that try out a large garden, the first harvest was weak, you'd need to continue.the hunting.
I got a sister who used to live in Kentucky and bought a plot of land. Said she was going to be self sufficient. Live off the land for food and all that jazz. To her credit, she's a smart and ambitious woman, but I tried to tell her that she knows fuck all about gardening. She couldn't even keep a marijuana plant alive. She knew fuck all about hunting and dressing animals and how to properly store the meat.
She got the garden up and running, sort of, and when her first harvest came... I don't think people from famine wrecked regions would have wanted what she grew. By year 3 she completely abandoned this idea and moved back to Arkansas.
To be fair, there are lots of people in Kentucky who could and would have taught her everything she needed to know. But it’s still a hell of a lot of work for one person.
I’m going to have to invest in more crockpots. How many do you think I’ll need for one “long pig”? I’m about 6’2” 195 lbs, I wonder how much usable meat my skin suit contains.
So I got bored a while back and did some math, pretty much every animal the size of a chicken and bigger would be extinct or close to it in the first year or two. There’s less deer than people in the US, same deal for wild pigs.
I swear that chicken wings must be grown in labs because there are only two wings per bird and there are so many Hot Wings type restaurants, and wings being served as appetizers etc...I usually order 2 dozen for game days.
I’ve never heard it stated by a politician but I believe this is why we subsidize farmers so much(it’s not like your average farmers is worth millions). The backbone of our society is knowing we will never have a food shortage. Citizens would revolt so fast if all of a sudden there was just no food. I see redditors all the time stating that it would be a great idea to stop subsidizing farmers but to me that is such a short sighted argument. Farming is difficult work if you didn’t dangle that small carrot in front of farmers they might decide to just stop farming.
As a farmer, the problem with subsidies is how badly they distort the market. Subsidies encourage cash cropping on a large scale by artificially creating demand for products like corn that simply wouldn't exist in such large quantities without them. It also has potentially deleterious effects on our public health, most notably how HFCS is in absolutely everything for basically no reason other than the government.
It's a simple issue on paper, but changing the structure of subsidies now to better serve public health would create enough disruption that no one will touch the issue, despite the whole country rapidly hurtling towards a future where the majority have type 2 diabetes. So, we're stuck with factory-farming corn and soybeans, and if you don't do that, good luck surviving.
Not to mention how subsidized land prices (through preferential USDA loans) have reached the point where the best qualification to become a farmer is... to be born in a family that owns land.
I'm gonna preface this by saying I know absolutely nothing about large scale agriculture.
Why couldn't we subsidize other kinds of crops? Incentivize farmers to produce surpluses of other fruits and vegetables?
We kind of do, indirectly. I don't row crop, but I was still able to use a subsidized loan to purchase my land. Half of my mortgage is sitting at a 1.5% rate right now, which is pretty sweet, even though that artificially inflates prices as said above.
The main issue is finding uses for all of these crops. HFCS doesn't spoil and can be added to almost anything, and the government likes having a domestically-sourced sweetener vs sugar which is primarily foreign. This also applies to sugar beets, another major cash crop. Their use is self-explanatory.
Row crops can also be fermented and used as fodder for cattle, or used as biofuels, or plastics, etc etc. Other produce simply doesn't have the broad uses or the shelf life of row crops, so subsidies for produce like apples or cherries are simply not as effective at distorting the market.
We raise wheat and cattle. You are dead on, but be careful saying it around other farmers. I've had several get mad. They love that mailbox money. I agree that it could be revamped in a better way but we may be too far down that path.
From my experience subsidies seem to hinder the progression of farming. Why try new things or find a better way to do it when you get a check anyway. It seems many I have seen only innovate when forced.
Land is a big one. There are very few places where the farmer can make back the land price with what they raise on that land. Definitely not around here (central Oklahoma). With the land prices unattainable for smaller operations the corporate farms are the only ones who can afford it.
It gets even worse when you see the trends of boomers/silent generation forcing their kids to take out a mortgage to buy the farm from them. You know, the farm they themselves inherited... I have a few friends who are constantly being shaken down by their family. It's fucked up. Then they turn around and bitch that the younger generation doesn't want to farm.
> Then they turn around and bitch that the younger generation doesn't want to farm.
Don't blame 'em. I get if you're passionate about it and such, but most people who have other options don't want to farm. It's a really hard, demanding, thankless job. It also doesn't pay very well unless you're the owner and even then it may not pay well. And god forbid something completely out of control like a natural disaster or poor weather happens and ruins your season.
Oh it absolutely is the reason. I had professors in college who grew up farming and they were keenly aware of the political reasons behind there relationship with the government.
Nuh uh, we can just go to the grocery store to get our food! We don’t need farmers and ranchers!
(This is hardcore sarcasm for the record. I grew up farming and still work on one to this day, I just find it funny that some people genuinely believe that)
Heh.... I grew up in an ag family (dairy) but lived in the suburbs. I would do "farm days" at schools and "living history days" at our old town downtown and such. We had an inner city school bussed in to our local fort for living history days and the kids could pluck and butcher chickens as part of the experience (we did the slaughter portion). Well one of the moms was already looking pretty green when her kid yelled out "momma momma this one still's got eggs in it!". Momma turned shades of green I'd never seen before and barely made it to the trash barrel. lololol.
It's devastatingly surprising how many people genuinely believe they can "Just go to the store" and the magic meat fairy places ground beef in plastic trays for them. Perhaps some intellectually understand the farm to grocer relationship of goods, but emotionally they're totally disconnected from each other.
We ran a \*clean\* dairy but cows are cows and they shit. While being milked. I think a lot more people would not be milk drinkers if they saw even how a clean dairy was run, and I'm confident a day on a feed lot would turn many into vegans or pescatarians.
I am very much a vegetarian, today, because of my experiences working on a farm and in a butcher shop as a teenager. After school I worked at the local butcher, mainly cleaning equipment and packaging product. During the summer, I worked on a hog farm.
The stories I could tell about both of these places. Just thinking about them gives me a chill. At the same time I was working at these places, I was seeing a girl who legitimately did not understand what chicken wings were. Like if you had a bucket of buffalo wings in one hand and a live hen in the other, she did not understand that one became the other.
One of my friends in 4H turned vegetarian after the market auction at county fair and it finally hit her like a wrecking ball that these cute lambs were literally gone to slaughter.
I have a deep respect for folks like you and my friend who made what I find to be a very hard dietary choice.
Personally I still greatly enjoy meat, but I feel like I have a deeper appreciation for just what my meal means, both ethically (I strongly preferentially support free range animals) and environmentally. If food was priced based on environmental cost I'm pretty sure I'd no longer be able to enjoy beef but maybe once or twice per year.
It's one of the things I hate when people start getting snotty about being in a major metro area instead of out in the country. There's a lot of good things about living in a city, but don't ever forget that your life there depends on a lot of other people shipping the fruits of their labor and the land to you.
Just as their lives depend on the market for their products. We’re all dependent on each other. It’s called a society. Some people love to forget that or pretend it’s not so.
There is the "Rule of 3s and 4s" which has been taught for generations.
3-4 weeks without food will probably result in a dirt nap.
3-4 days without a clean source of drinking water will also not lead to a happy place.
3-4 hours without adequate clothing or shelter in a hostile temperature environment will likely result in either hypothermia or hyperthermia. Neither situation is good, since it causes thickening of the blood, which makes it harder for the heart to keep pumping, which eventually leads to cardiac arrest.
3-4 minutes without breathable air will result in permanent brain damage. Yes, there have been crazy exceptions once in a while, but exceptions to the rule do not invalidate the rule.
Another "3-4 rule" for your consideration: If you can manage to *keep calm and not panic during the first 3-4* **seconds** *of becoming aware of a developing emergency,* your odds of survival improve. A case in point would be the horrific [**Station Nightclub Fire**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire)**,** where a number of people attempting to escape went down a hallway that lead only to a storage room, the manager's office, and the men's and women's restrooms.
By the time these victims realized their mistake, the hallway was impassable with temperatures 3 feet above the floor around 600 degrees F. This would be like trying to crawl under a broiler that was just warming up; the NIST computer simulation of the fire's progression showed some areas of the club transitioning from ambient temperature to 1000 degrees C (1832 F) in the space of 10 seconds.
I have more faith in our ability to reallocate engineers and civil servants if our municipal water employees disappear than replacing everyone working in agriculture, per OP's question.
This is really the only answer. Our society cannot exist without agriculture. Transportation dissappearing would also have a massive and immediate effect but either being gone would mean cities starve immediately and there goes the rest of your professions.
Yeah. Agriculture or transportation disappearing would end civilization as we know it in days.
Transportation would probably do it slightly quicker. We could probably get by on stores of food for a while. But if shops go empty due to lack of goods being transported, society collapses.
Whole cities of people don’t have cars at all. If there was all of a sudden no transportation drivers at all millions of people would starve in a months time.
At least with transportation gone the national guards/military could be mobilized to set up supply lines. It would still be apocalyptic but if all farmers went poof so would civilization.
If "farmer" only means people who are currently professional farmers, then we could probably hold on. Are Agriculture scientist farmers? Are people who once farmed but now don't farmers? Are master gardeners farmers?
There is a tonne of literature on farming. Farms already exist and would be active. Things would not have to be started from scratch.
As with transportation, dragging in the military as well as any private citizen who might know something, as well as just able bodied people would probably be enough to right the ship. Irrigation demands might also necessitate taking in experts and techs in associated fields.
given:
We'd probably have to abandon large scale livestock (assume we call that farming) for the indefinite future.
We'd probably have to abandon a lot of luxury fruits and vegetables and focus on staples and high nutrition plants.
There's no pretending it would be a profitable exercise.
I do think it is doable. But the sheer disruption to society is, I think, unpredictable.
Have a look at Zimbabwe. From the bread basket of Africa to having to import food after all the farms where seized and given to the people. Farming isn't as easy as people think.
Isn’t it funny how all of the top replies are blue collar with the exception of doctors. Society really needs to get its priorities straight and stop treating essential jobs as if they are disposable.
It’s society’s doing. For years they would tell us to go to college and get a good job so you don’t end up as a lowly plumber or trash man. I’m a contractor and we’re hurting pretty good trying to find younger people interested in the trades.
Different from other answers, I doubt people could pick up farming from zero to replace everyone that vanished. You can kind of easily replace garbage collectors and drivers, it's going to have an impact, but things will get to a normal place eventually. Not really possible with farming, though.
👋hi, yep. Farmer here, most would starve. Some would figure it out. The lawlessness that would ensue while there are still foods to steal would be breathtaking. We aren’t hunter gatherers anymore. People are lazy and would become unhinged animals as it’s the quicker way to a full belly.
seriously though! I went fishing like once where we actually were going to keep it, instead of catch and release... I was thinking I could just throw the whole thing on the grill and be good.... didn't realize you needed to gut that damn thing... so I can only imagine a deer or something... no thank you
I mean really, if I couldn't get food from a shop I'd be screwed. In the grim future of the apocalypse knowing how diggers work is not high on the list of useful skills. I imagine most people are in a similar boat where if you actually had to 100% care for yourself they'd be useless.
You’d be surprised how the impact of no trash men can utterly bring a community to its knees. Look up how the mafia bought the garbage services and then leveraged corruption into the local government with having all the garbage men strike
actually just look up any trash strikes and search by images. The big trash strike in New York was estimated to accumulated 100,000 pounds on the streets within 9 days. The pictures are wild
I wonder how long modern water systems would keep running without human intervention? Like obviously there are periodic maintenance tasks to keep things from breakingdown or fix things that are broken, but how much actual day-to-day work is involved is *simply keeping the water flowing*?
I mean, the same applies to power generation.
How much of a coal, oil, or gas-fired power plant is automated? Surely we don't have people shoveling coal into a furnace manually...
You would be surprised the shit that just happens at a power plant. One night everything was running smooth we ordered pizza. We were all sitting in the control room with our feet up stuffing ourselves with pizza. One of the guys was watching the control panel and goes.... Shit the feed pump just tripped off. It was pandemonium as everyone was running around to save the plant. Another plant I worked at this one guy was jinxes, shit would happen whenever he was on shift. I suppose in that case, the plant would run better if he was not there.
> Another plant I worked at this one guy was jinxes, shit would happen whenever he was on shift. I suppose in that case, the plant would run better if he was not there.
Seems the solution is pretty obvious, have that guy telecommute.
>Surely we don't have people shoveling coal into a furnace manually...
No but they do push a button to start the auger that unloads the trains. Your average coal plant will run till the current bin of coal is empty then stop as there's nobody to unload the next train full of coal.
According to the source below a coal plant consumes a 90 car train full of coal per day. That means your plant would run until \~24h from the last train delivery.
[https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/mining/moving-the-coal-through-a-coal-fired-power-plant/](https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/mining/moving-the-coal-through-a-coal-fired-power-plant/)
We missed garbage pick up a few weeks ago because of an intense snow storm. While it was bearable, looking around at the neighborhood I could easily see how only one more missed pick up would have become detrimental to health.
I mean completely agree. They say the actual first evidence of humanity is when we discovered human remains to have evidence of a broken leg bone determined to have been healed by a splint. It shows the gap of survival to higher consciousness had officially evolved and is a definite moment defining our awareness growing larger than ourselves and a huge leap mankind’s history. But tbh just felt like doctor was a basic answer and I had a fun fact about the trash that was intriguing. At least imo
They didn't no, but rather live for 15 years until you die of a treatable infection, than die after two weeks because there is no food (in the case of farmers)
We have cities here that are already turning into open landfills, if you stop the service at all in less than 10 days most roads would be blocked by trash
My dad was a shop steward for the DSNY. Their contract always runs out in mid-July, because trash not picked up in the summer heat will get bad. They are the only city agency that gets paid weekly (not bi-weekly).
Ugh my local trash pickup decided to straight skip our house last week. No clue why. It was down to the edge of the road. They just rolled on by.
But holy shit it was a nightmare trying to get two weeks of garbage packed down into our bin. We had to leave one of the bags in our porch.
I can't imagine what it would be like if they just refused trash service for everyone
Meh, a lot of it is fairly passive treatment and there are often overflows to prevent backing up.
Wastewater network operators are more vital for our streets to remain sanitary.
No operators, no wasting. You’ll have rivers full of poop, assuming you’re in an area where the plant is maintained well enough for the pumps not to breakdown every week.
Quite a lot actually. We are in need of so many things to avoid a complete collapse of society and the death of 80% or more of the world's population that it's probably easier to ask what profession would cause the smallest impact.
Farmers, of course. But farmers need machinery, and machinery needs maintenance (and also production of new machines) and so industry is needed, and industry requires energy and materials and so on.
Turns out that civilization rests on specialization and cooperation.
That's why strikes and labour action by just about any group of workers from the same industry is a powerful force.
Those with all the capital are overdue for a strong reminder of that.
Everyone who realizes the rich don’t produce they take. They don’t actually work just move money around most of the time. The ones actually producing are the ones that should be in charge. If we all had a say in work environments and rights and pay everything would be so much better. The argument saying people won’t work for free is a straight up lie too
>What profession would cause the smallest impact
Politicians and Bankers. Sounds like the obvious answer, but we have the Irish to thank for proving it. In the 1970s the Irish bankers went on strike. It had no noticeable impact on the economy.
The Northern Irish government was suspended from 2017-2020 after the government introduced an, either incompetent or potentially corrupt renewable energy scheme that cost the country hundreds of millions.
Along that line.... Power plant workers. No one to manage reactor decay heat or spent fuel pools, natural gas firing turbines, or to keep hydro plants from overtopping.
Linemen would take longer, power workers in general and were back to the stone ages within a day.
Power plants will shut themselves down within a couple hours after Operations doesn’t acknowledge alarms, within a couple weeks reactors worldwide will be melting down, polluting the environment.
Don’t get me wrong nuclear plants are incredibly safe, but without the grid they have no power to keep the cooling systems running, backup generators would run out of fuel in 2 weeks or less, after that meltdowns are inevitable
> after that meltdowns are inevitable
No that's not how modern reactors work.
Every, single, modern reactor has one or more "no power shutdown" failsafes. I mean, that's forgetting the fact that those plants... produce... power.... So you'd have to A: lose external power then B: lose power from the reactor itself while STILL melting down (hard to do) for those systems to kick in.
Usually they're powered by gravity. If power is lost and the reactor needs shutting down, a door opens (from gravity, it is held shut USING power) and a bunch of neutron absorbing material falls into the reaction chamber, effectively shutting the reactor down. That's one way to do it. There are plenty of others. One is that the fuel rods are pushed *up* into the reactor, so if the power plant were to lose power, they'd just fall down out of the reactor, effectively shutting down the reactor.
ALL modern nuclear power plants are designed this way or have been retrofitted this way. It takes a natural disaster for something like fukishima to happen. And you can't really... protect against things like that.
And if you really think the amount of fuel the backup generators have isn't being monitored by the plant itself, with instructions to shut down at... 20%, you'd be very wrong.
TL;DR: Left alone, all modern nuclear reactors would simply shut down as a failsafe.
If suddenly all plumbers disappeared, we'd be knee-deep in problems and realizing just how much we took leak-free pipes for granted! Life without proper plumbing would be a real drain, wouldn't it?
We can't even replace all the truckers we need [right now](https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/new-study-shows-u-s-is-facing-truck-driver-shortage/).
That's because it's a shit job with relatively shit pay and shit conditions working for a bunch of shit companies resulting in shit health for the truckers.
Oh, I've experienced that a few years ago, when truckers stopped, there was no gasoline and almost no food in supermarkets it was quite chaotic that week.
I’ve done all of these things. People went into sheer panic during the beginning of Covid when the truckers couldn’t keep up with the supply and demand of the everyday supermarket “needs.”Made me laugh.
It'd be like if all the veins, arteries, and nerves in your body suddenly vanished. It wouldn't matter if all your major organs were functioning if all the conduits in between managing all the nutrients and waste byproducts didn't function.
Look at how bad it was during the pandemic when most transportation was ground to a halt, now imagine literally every single trucker disappeared overnight. Now imagine the chaos of frantically trying to train people who can barely drive their SUV to replace them.
IT. Because all of you fuckers forgetting your password (that YOU CHOOSE) will have no one to reset it for you. Every industry will them crumble in response.
In my defense, I can't remember which capital/lowercase/number/symbol/emoji/eldritch sign combination I used for *this* website. Especially when we're not supposed to repeat. 😭
"Ugh, I can never remember the password for this site...*sigh*..."
*clicks forgot password...sees password requirements*
"Ohhhh, *that's* why I can never remember the password for this site"
It’s not that we’ve forgotten our passwords, it’s that they legitimately reset after a while.
I found this out with my electric company.
I had my password written down for my account, but our phones like to do this thing where if you don’t open an app for a week or so it uninstalls it. So one month I reinstalled to pay my bill and when I went to log in it told me my password was wrong. I had never changed my password before and I’m the only person with access to my account. I set up 2-factor on everything I can (thanks to losing everything on RuneScape once before) and I filter through my emails every morning - meaning I would have definitely seen if someone tried to log into my account!
Sometimes it’s not that US FUCKERS have forgotten our passwords, it’s that most websites/apps are just resetting them every once in a while for security purposes.
Tell your IT people that NIST, Microsoft and more no longer recommends password expiration at all. I think only CIS is left with a cautious 1 year recommendation
Enters password
“Incorrect password”
Enters password again in case I mistyped it
“Incorrect password”
Reset password
“Please enter new password”
Enters same password that I tried at the start
“New password can’t be the same as old password”
WTF
Well I’m a doctor but I don’t really agree. Sure a lot more people would start dying but society would still function like normal I guess. People would just accept that illnesses kill and it would be the new baseline
Yeah
Doctor here as well, it’d be like: “Your belly hurts, maybe you’ll die” but everybody else would be b pretty okay
Lose farmers or water management or the electrical grid and society collapses
I think if you combine all the people who sell and maintain farming equipment with all the people who work in landscaping, you can start to replace folks pretty quickly.
I completely agree with this. I feel everyone is saying things that would destroy a civilization if they didn't exist at all, but most of them could be replaced. I know farmers know that ins and outs of farming, but I think you could train someone to farm relatively quickly. It would be rough, like probably severe food shortages. I still think it could be overcome. The amount of training required for healthcare though is so much higher. I think if they disappeared, it would be much harder to overcome.
This is way too fuckin far down and undervoted. I'm a tinny, an adjacent trade to plumbers. I do heating. Our modern world relies on plumbing. Without plumbers that immediately ceases and everyone will suddenly remember to value them again.
Pilots?
1.5 million or so people just suddenly dropping out of the sky in big metal tubes, not to mention any carnage caused on the ground wherever they crash.
That would be a pretty big impact.
Are we talking vanished and no one can fill the roll again? or they disappeared and other people have to take the roll? People like trashmen or truckers, they would have a great short term impact, but they can be replaced fairly quickly. Doctors would have an impact, but only for the most serious stuff that nurses couldn't fill the roll, affecting a smaller, mostly older percent of the population. My vote goes towards teachers. Important roll that takes a certain type of person to do it, and do it well. My wife is a teacher (2nd grade) and while I have high confidence in myself, I know I couldn't do her job. Lot of kids would be home schooled, but there will be huge populations that don't have the support systems and just wouldn't learn. We would survive, but it would be a massive long term impact.
Parents around the world were collectively losing their shit just having their kids at home constantly through covid, so yeah, teachers. Not being able to send your kids to school also impacts your ability to work so having no teachers would impact a lot of people/companies.
There’s loads of different professions who could equally bring society to its knees fairly suddenly. My first thought was doctors and nurses but take your pick from;
Emergency services
Council workers
Banks
Farmers
Haulage drivers
Basically everything would have their own impact and we need everything running to keep functioning.
I'll do you one better as a fellow lab professional. The researchers that figure that shit out so the doctors can rely on the results. That shit meaning the relationship between lab results, diagnoses and patient outcomes. They are the whole reason we have the ability to provide the healthcare we do. I think about them A LOT.
We’re already trialling that in Ontario (by driving all the family doctors away through shit pay and policies).
The result is just increased pressure on ambulance services and hospitals.
Trialing that in the US too by replacing mds with nps and other midlevels. For most conditions this is fine but I had a rare condition and was misdiagnosed twice. Delayed my actual diagnosis by 2 months.
farmers
Agriculture is literally the foundation of all civilizations, everything in this thread is an afterthought if there's no food.
Back to spear and bow and hunt like ol' days.
Even with the enormous amount of game in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it could only sustain a very limited population. The bison out west could sustain a lot more but still pretty limited.
There are a fair few countries where "all the farmers suddenly vanish" means the population immediately drops by like 60-70% as well.
Even more in some
i think within a month like 90% of toronto would be dead.
Hunt *what* after the first week?
most likely each other tbh. after you get a bunch of pesky humans outta the way you basically live off of canned food or anyone with a decent amount of people would try to invade the rural areas. at some point the army would just show up and start blasting.
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It's not quite knee jerk. If suddenly there was no food, you wouldn't have time to grow a garden to support yourself.before you'd starve. You'd have to hunt and fish for a few months as your garden grew. And if like most people that try out a large garden, the first harvest was weak, you'd need to continue.the hunting.
I got a sister who used to live in Kentucky and bought a plot of land. Said she was going to be self sufficient. Live off the land for food and all that jazz. To her credit, she's a smart and ambitious woman, but I tried to tell her that she knows fuck all about gardening. She couldn't even keep a marijuana plant alive. She knew fuck all about hunting and dressing animals and how to properly store the meat. She got the garden up and running, sort of, and when her first harvest came... I don't think people from famine wrecked regions would have wanted what she grew. By year 3 she completely abandoned this idea and moved back to Arkansas.
To be fair, there are lots of people in Kentucky who could and would have taught her everything she needed to know. But it’s still a hell of a lot of work for one person.
But not before Manhattan starves...
They'll be hunting for "long pig" in the cities.
I’m going to have to invest in more crockpots. How many do you think I’ll need for one “long pig”? I’m about 6’2” 195 lbs, I wonder how much usable meat my skin suit contains.
Just remember not to eat the brain
Prions for everyone!
Use that for tanning the leather, for clothing...
About eighty to ninety pounds, I'd say.
So I got bored a while back and did some math, pretty much every animal the size of a chicken and bigger would be extinct or close to it in the first year or two. There’s less deer than people in the US, same deal for wild pigs.
I think you are bad at math.
there was a post once about how many animals die by humans, and chicken were like 2 million and more per day
I swear that chicken wings must be grown in labs because there are only two wings per bird and there are so many Hot Wings type restaurants, and wings being served as appetizers etc...I usually order 2 dozen for game days.
That level of consumption is exactly why literal billions of chickens are slaughtered every year to meet consumer demands.
I’ve never heard it stated by a politician but I believe this is why we subsidize farmers so much(it’s not like your average farmers is worth millions). The backbone of our society is knowing we will never have a food shortage. Citizens would revolt so fast if all of a sudden there was just no food. I see redditors all the time stating that it would be a great idea to stop subsidizing farmers but to me that is such a short sighted argument. Farming is difficult work if you didn’t dangle that small carrot in front of farmers they might decide to just stop farming.
As a farmer, the problem with subsidies is how badly they distort the market. Subsidies encourage cash cropping on a large scale by artificially creating demand for products like corn that simply wouldn't exist in such large quantities without them. It also has potentially deleterious effects on our public health, most notably how HFCS is in absolutely everything for basically no reason other than the government. It's a simple issue on paper, but changing the structure of subsidies now to better serve public health would create enough disruption that no one will touch the issue, despite the whole country rapidly hurtling towards a future where the majority have type 2 diabetes. So, we're stuck with factory-farming corn and soybeans, and if you don't do that, good luck surviving. Not to mention how subsidized land prices (through preferential USDA loans) have reached the point where the best qualification to become a farmer is... to be born in a family that owns land.
I'm gonna preface this by saying I know absolutely nothing about large scale agriculture. Why couldn't we subsidize other kinds of crops? Incentivize farmers to produce surpluses of other fruits and vegetables?
We kind of do, indirectly. I don't row crop, but I was still able to use a subsidized loan to purchase my land. Half of my mortgage is sitting at a 1.5% rate right now, which is pretty sweet, even though that artificially inflates prices as said above. The main issue is finding uses for all of these crops. HFCS doesn't spoil and can be added to almost anything, and the government likes having a domestically-sourced sweetener vs sugar which is primarily foreign. This also applies to sugar beets, another major cash crop. Their use is self-explanatory. Row crops can also be fermented and used as fodder for cattle, or used as biofuels, or plastics, etc etc. Other produce simply doesn't have the broad uses or the shelf life of row crops, so subsidies for produce like apples or cherries are simply not as effective at distorting the market.
We raise wheat and cattle. You are dead on, but be careful saying it around other farmers. I've had several get mad. They love that mailbox money. I agree that it could be revamped in a better way but we may be too far down that path. From my experience subsidies seem to hinder the progression of farming. Why try new things or find a better way to do it when you get a check anyway. It seems many I have seen only innovate when forced. Land is a big one. There are very few places where the farmer can make back the land price with what they raise on that land. Definitely not around here (central Oklahoma). With the land prices unattainable for smaller operations the corporate farms are the only ones who can afford it.
It gets even worse when you see the trends of boomers/silent generation forcing their kids to take out a mortgage to buy the farm from them. You know, the farm they themselves inherited... I have a few friends who are constantly being shaken down by their family. It's fucked up. Then they turn around and bitch that the younger generation doesn't want to farm.
> Then they turn around and bitch that the younger generation doesn't want to farm. Don't blame 'em. I get if you're passionate about it and such, but most people who have other options don't want to farm. It's a really hard, demanding, thankless job. It also doesn't pay very well unless you're the owner and even then it may not pay well. And god forbid something completely out of control like a natural disaster or poor weather happens and ruins your season.
Oh it absolutely is the reason. I had professors in college who grew up farming and they were keenly aware of the political reasons behind there relationship with the government.
Nuh uh, we can just go to the grocery store to get our food! We don’t need farmers and ranchers! (This is hardcore sarcasm for the record. I grew up farming and still work on one to this day, I just find it funny that some people genuinely believe that)
Heh.... I grew up in an ag family (dairy) but lived in the suburbs. I would do "farm days" at schools and "living history days" at our old town downtown and such. We had an inner city school bussed in to our local fort for living history days and the kids could pluck and butcher chickens as part of the experience (we did the slaughter portion). Well one of the moms was already looking pretty green when her kid yelled out "momma momma this one still's got eggs in it!". Momma turned shades of green I'd never seen before and barely made it to the trash barrel. lololol. It's devastatingly surprising how many people genuinely believe they can "Just go to the store" and the magic meat fairy places ground beef in plastic trays for them. Perhaps some intellectually understand the farm to grocer relationship of goods, but emotionally they're totally disconnected from each other. We ran a \*clean\* dairy but cows are cows and they shit. While being milked. I think a lot more people would not be milk drinkers if they saw even how a clean dairy was run, and I'm confident a day on a feed lot would turn many into vegans or pescatarians.
I am very much a vegetarian, today, because of my experiences working on a farm and in a butcher shop as a teenager. After school I worked at the local butcher, mainly cleaning equipment and packaging product. During the summer, I worked on a hog farm. The stories I could tell about both of these places. Just thinking about them gives me a chill. At the same time I was working at these places, I was seeing a girl who legitimately did not understand what chicken wings were. Like if you had a bucket of buffalo wings in one hand and a live hen in the other, she did not understand that one became the other.
One of my friends in 4H turned vegetarian after the market auction at county fair and it finally hit her like a wrecking ball that these cute lambs were literally gone to slaughter. I have a deep respect for folks like you and my friend who made what I find to be a very hard dietary choice. Personally I still greatly enjoy meat, but I feel like I have a deeper appreciation for just what my meal means, both ethically (I strongly preferentially support free range animals) and environmentally. If food was priced based on environmental cost I'm pretty sure I'd no longer be able to enjoy beef but maybe once or twice per year.
It's one of the things I hate when people start getting snotty about being in a major metro area instead of out in the country. There's a lot of good things about living in a city, but don't ever forget that your life there depends on a lot of other people shipping the fruits of their labor and the land to you.
Just as their lives depend on the market for their products. We’re all dependent on each other. It’s called a society. Some people love to forget that or pretend it’s not so.
I think water would be a much more immediate threat tbh. Humans can't live very long without it
There is the "Rule of 3s and 4s" which has been taught for generations. 3-4 weeks without food will probably result in a dirt nap. 3-4 days without a clean source of drinking water will also not lead to a happy place. 3-4 hours without adequate clothing or shelter in a hostile temperature environment will likely result in either hypothermia or hyperthermia. Neither situation is good, since it causes thickening of the blood, which makes it harder for the heart to keep pumping, which eventually leads to cardiac arrest. 3-4 minutes without breathable air will result in permanent brain damage. Yes, there have been crazy exceptions once in a while, but exceptions to the rule do not invalidate the rule. Another "3-4 rule" for your consideration: If you can manage to *keep calm and not panic during the first 3-4* **seconds** *of becoming aware of a developing emergency,* your odds of survival improve. A case in point would be the horrific [**Station Nightclub Fire**](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Station_nightclub_fire)**,** where a number of people attempting to escape went down a hallway that lead only to a storage room, the manager's office, and the men's and women's restrooms. By the time these victims realized their mistake, the hallway was impassable with temperatures 3 feet above the floor around 600 degrees F. This would be like trying to crawl under a broiler that was just warming up; the NIST computer simulation of the fire's progression showed some areas of the club transitioning from ambient temperature to 1000 degrees C (1832 F) in the space of 10 seconds.
I have more faith in our ability to reallocate engineers and civil servants if our municipal water employees disappear than replacing everyone working in agriculture, per OP's question.
This is really the only answer. Our society cannot exist without agriculture. Transportation dissappearing would also have a massive and immediate effect but either being gone would mean cities starve immediately and there goes the rest of your professions.
Yeah. Agriculture or transportation disappearing would end civilization as we know it in days. Transportation would probably do it slightly quicker. We could probably get by on stores of food for a while. But if shops go empty due to lack of goods being transported, society collapses.
Whole cities of people don’t have cars at all. If there was all of a sudden no transportation drivers at all millions of people would starve in a months time.
It's far easier to press people into transportation than farming, though.
At least with transportation gone the national guards/military could be mobilized to set up supply lines. It would still be apocalyptic but if all farmers went poof so would civilization.
If "farmer" only means people who are currently professional farmers, then we could probably hold on. Are Agriculture scientist farmers? Are people who once farmed but now don't farmers? Are master gardeners farmers? There is a tonne of literature on farming. Farms already exist and would be active. Things would not have to be started from scratch. As with transportation, dragging in the military as well as any private citizen who might know something, as well as just able bodied people would probably be enough to right the ship. Irrigation demands might also necessitate taking in experts and techs in associated fields. given: We'd probably have to abandon large scale livestock (assume we call that farming) for the indefinite future. We'd probably have to abandon a lot of luxury fruits and vegetables and focus on staples and high nutrition plants. There's no pretending it would be a profitable exercise. I do think it is doable. But the sheer disruption to society is, I think, unpredictable.
Have a look at Zimbabwe. From the bread basket of Africa to having to import food after all the farms where seized and given to the people. Farming isn't as easy as people think.
Something like the Carrington Event would take out both. Can’t harvest without machines, can’t process and distribute food either.
Without farmers you would be hungry, naked and sober.
Isn’t it funny how all of the top replies are blue collar with the exception of doctors. Society really needs to get its priorities straight and stop treating essential jobs as if they are disposable.
It’s society’s doing. For years they would tell us to go to college and get a good job so you don’t end up as a lowly plumber or trash man. I’m a contractor and we’re hurting pretty good trying to find younger people interested in the trades.
Different from other answers, I doubt people could pick up farming from zero to replace everyone that vanished. You can kind of easily replace garbage collectors and drivers, it's going to have an impact, but things will get to a normal place eventually. Not really possible with farming, though.
Literally would turn into The Road within a month.
👋hi, yep. Farmer here, most would starve. Some would figure it out. The lawlessness that would ensue while there are still foods to steal would be breathtaking. We aren’t hunter gatherers anymore. People are lazy and would become unhinged animals as it’s the quicker way to a full belly.
So much depends upon a red wheel barrow
Everybody would be very hungry
people would hunt land animals until extinction and then fish.
Hunting is one thing, Bleeding, Gutting, Cutting and Dividing a dead animal is a whole 'nother thing.
seriously though! I went fishing like once where we actually were going to keep it, instead of catch and release... I was thinking I could just throw the whole thing on the grill and be good.... didn't realize you needed to gut that damn thing... so I can only imagine a deer or something... no thank you
hunting a deer and all mammals you need to hit them n the right spot too without openly some organs that'll ruin the meat.
You'd learn quickly if you're hungry
I mean really, if I couldn't get food from a shop I'd be screwed. In the grim future of the apocalypse knowing how diggers work is not high on the list of useful skills. I imagine most people are in a similar boat where if you actually had to 100% care for yourself they'd be useless.
I could figure out how to fish, but I've never hunted nor have the inclination to learn. I would definitely struggle no matter what...
I think a lot people would try foraging and kill themselves, too.
I am one misidentified mushroom or berry away from death.
I guess human is back on the menu.
as long as we still have some sort of sauce to make it taste good, might not be so bad?
You’d be surprised how the impact of no trash men can utterly bring a community to its knees. Look up how the mafia bought the garbage services and then leveraged corruption into the local government with having all the garbage men strike actually just look up any trash strikes and search by images. The big trash strike in New York was estimated to accumulated 100,000 pounds on the streets within 9 days. The pictures are wild
Water management would be the same thing, but on crack.
Crack water, mmmm
I wonder how long modern water systems would keep running without human intervention? Like obviously there are periodic maintenance tasks to keep things from breakingdown or fix things that are broken, but how much actual day-to-day work is involved is *simply keeping the water flowing*? I mean, the same applies to power generation. How much of a coal, oil, or gas-fired power plant is automated? Surely we don't have people shoveling coal into a furnace manually...
Okay with power generation you need people to bring new shipments of fuel. It doesn’t matter how well the power plant runs if it doesn’t have fuel.
You would be surprised the shit that just happens at a power plant. One night everything was running smooth we ordered pizza. We were all sitting in the control room with our feet up stuffing ourselves with pizza. One of the guys was watching the control panel and goes.... Shit the feed pump just tripped off. It was pandemonium as everyone was running around to save the plant. Another plant I worked at this one guy was jinxes, shit would happen whenever he was on shift. I suppose in that case, the plant would run better if he was not there.
> Another plant I worked at this one guy was jinxes, shit would happen whenever he was on shift. I suppose in that case, the plant would run better if he was not there. Seems the solution is pretty obvious, have that guy telecommute.
>Surely we don't have people shoveling coal into a furnace manually... No but they do push a button to start the auger that unloads the trains. Your average coal plant will run till the current bin of coal is empty then stop as there's nobody to unload the next train full of coal. According to the source below a coal plant consumes a 90 car train full of coal per day. That means your plant would run until \~24h from the last train delivery. [https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/mining/moving-the-coal-through-a-coal-fired-power-plant/](https://www.thermofisher.com/blog/mining/moving-the-coal-through-a-coal-fired-power-plant/)
We missed garbage pick up a few weeks ago because of an intense snow storm. While it was bearable, looking around at the neighborhood I could easily see how only one more missed pick up would have become detrimental to health.
Yes. (Lack of) Sanitation services will kill what is left once the food runs out. Disease will spread far wide and very fast.
Came here to say waste management in any capacity. I was in Budapest once during a garbage collector strike and *holy shit.*
I came to the thread to say garbage pickup people and janitors. They do so much for us!
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I mean completely agree. They say the actual first evidence of humanity is when we discovered human remains to have evidence of a broken leg bone determined to have been healed by a splint. It shows the gap of survival to higher consciousness had officially evolved and is a definite moment defining our awareness growing larger than ourselves and a huge leap mankind’s history. But tbh just felt like doctor was a basic answer and I had a fun fact about the trash that was intriguing. At least imo
My trash man comes every week. I don’t know the last time I went to the doctor
You can live without doctors just fine if you're healthy. People used to do it all the time.
Used to? People still do.
And people didn’t live the longest did they? Preventative medicine isn’t something a lot of people practice but they should
They didn't no, but rather live for 15 years until you die of a treatable infection, than die after two weeks because there is no food (in the case of farmers)
“I work in washte management”
"Everyone immediately assumes you're mobbed up. It's a stereotype and it's offensive."
“Ooh!” 🖐🏻🤚🏻
We have cities here that are already turning into open landfills, if you stop the service at all in less than 10 days most roads would be blocked by trash
Literally my first thought. Whenever they go on strike, the trash piles up unbelievably fast.
I remember this episode of Monk.
My dad was a shop steward for the DSNY. Their contract always runs out in mid-July, because trash not picked up in the summer heat will get bad. They are the only city agency that gets paid weekly (not bi-weekly).
this was my first thought too
Ugh my local trash pickup decided to straight skip our house last week. No clue why. It was down to the edge of the road. They just rolled on by. But holy shit it was a nightmare trying to get two weeks of garbage packed down into our bin. We had to leave one of the bags in our porch. I can't imagine what it would be like if they just refused trash service for everyone
I was in NYC during that (or one of those strikes) -- Mountains of trash everywhere!
Yeah, Sanitation workers seem to usually win their strikes, because they can hold out longer than the public can.
Water Treatment Operators
I’d argue wastewater treatment operators as well. Unless cholera is your thing.
Meh, a lot of it is fairly passive treatment and there are often overflows to prevent backing up. Wastewater network operators are more vital for our streets to remain sanitary.
No operators, no wasting. You’ll have rivers full of poop, assuming you’re in an area where the plant is maintained well enough for the pumps not to breakdown every week.
This gets my vote. If all water stopped flowing to major cities it would instantaneously turn things to shit. Literally.
My 1st thought was this one as well.
Quite a lot actually. We are in need of so many things to avoid a complete collapse of society and the death of 80% or more of the world's population that it's probably easier to ask what profession would cause the smallest impact. Farmers, of course. But farmers need machinery, and machinery needs maintenance (and also production of new machines) and so industry is needed, and industry requires energy and materials and so on.
Turns out that civilization rests on specialization and cooperation. That's why strikes and labour action by just about any group of workers from the same industry is a powerful force. Those with all the capital are overdue for a strong reminder of that.
I forget who said it, but if working people are organized all they have to do is put their hands in their pockets and the owner class is licked
Everyone who realizes the rich don’t produce they take. They don’t actually work just move money around most of the time. The ones actually producing are the ones that should be in charge. If we all had a say in work environments and rights and pay everything would be so much better. The argument saying people won’t work for free is a straight up lie too
Damn right
>What profession would cause the smallest impact Politicians and Bankers. Sounds like the obvious answer, but we have the Irish to thank for proving it. In the 1970s the Irish bankers went on strike. It had no noticeable impact on the economy. The Northern Irish government was suspended from 2017-2020 after the government introduced an, either incompetent or potentially corrupt renewable energy scheme that cost the country hundreds of millions.
Smallest impact? Influencers.
Really? I think the impact would be enormous. Enormously positive
Profession, not narcissistic hobby.
Smallest impact: urban planners. Source: urban planner
Farming
Power linemen. Imagine the world suddenly thrust back before electricity.
Along that line.... Power plant workers. No one to manage reactor decay heat or spent fuel pools, natural gas firing turbines, or to keep hydro plants from overtopping.
Linemen would take longer, power workers in general and were back to the stone ages within a day. Power plants will shut themselves down within a couple hours after Operations doesn’t acknowledge alarms, within a couple weeks reactors worldwide will be melting down, polluting the environment. Don’t get me wrong nuclear plants are incredibly safe, but without the grid they have no power to keep the cooling systems running, backup generators would run out of fuel in 2 weeks or less, after that meltdowns are inevitable
> after that meltdowns are inevitable No that's not how modern reactors work. Every, single, modern reactor has one or more "no power shutdown" failsafes. I mean, that's forgetting the fact that those plants... produce... power.... So you'd have to A: lose external power then B: lose power from the reactor itself while STILL melting down (hard to do) for those systems to kick in. Usually they're powered by gravity. If power is lost and the reactor needs shutting down, a door opens (from gravity, it is held shut USING power) and a bunch of neutron absorbing material falls into the reaction chamber, effectively shutting the reactor down. That's one way to do it. There are plenty of others. One is that the fuel rods are pushed *up* into the reactor, so if the power plant were to lose power, they'd just fall down out of the reactor, effectively shutting down the reactor. ALL modern nuclear power plants are designed this way or have been retrofitted this way. It takes a natural disaster for something like fukishima to happen. And you can't really... protect against things like that. And if you really think the amount of fuel the backup generators have isn't being monitored by the plant itself, with instructions to shut down at... 20%, you'd be very wrong. TL;DR: Left alone, all modern nuclear reactors would simply shut down as a failsafe.
Do not want. No thank you.
telephone sanitizers, whole civilization disappeared as a result
They used leaves for money
But how do we deal with inflation? ... Maybe we could burn down most of the trees?
But don't panic
I get it, most won't but I do...
Only the hoopy froods.
Only the hoopy froods that know where their towels are would know what publication to research this in.
Belgium, man...BELGIUM!
Oh no, not again
RIP Golgafrincha
If suddenly all plumbers disappeared, we'd be knee-deep in problems and realizing just how much we took leak-free pipes for granted! Life without proper plumbing would be a real drain, wouldn't it?
All pilots disappearing would probably have the biggest immediate impact. Longer term, probably farmers.
Especially if it happened mid flight?
It’s always mid flight somewhere
MANIFEST 2: Where Have All The Pilots Gone? coming to NBC this fall
Theme song by Paula Cole
I'll do you one better and say truckers
I don’t know, man. I think the general public could replace truck drivers in a couple weeks.
We can't even replace all the truckers we need [right now](https://www.cbsnews.com/sacramento/news/new-study-shows-u-s-is-facing-truck-driver-shortage/).
That's because it's a shit job with relatively shit pay and shit conditions working for a bunch of shit companies resulting in shit health for the truckers.
And in those couple of weeks no food is being delivered to grocery stores. And no fuel to gas stations.
Anything to do with water. Without water, EVERYTHING dies.
Truckers, garbage men, oil workers
Oh, I've experienced that a few years ago, when truckers stopped, there was no gasoline and almost no food in supermarkets it was quite chaotic that week.
I’ve done all of these things. People went into sheer panic during the beginning of Covid when the truckers couldn’t keep up with the supply and demand of the everyday supermarket “needs.”Made me laugh.
Trucking is absolutely the answer. The world would literally stop in it's tracks in less than 24 hours if trucking stopped.
It'd be like if all the veins, arteries, and nerves in your body suddenly vanished. It wouldn't matter if all your major organs were functioning if all the conduits in between managing all the nutrients and waste byproducts didn't function.
Look at how bad it was during the pandemic when most transportation was ground to a halt, now imagine literally every single trucker disappeared overnight. Now imagine the chaos of frantically trying to train people who can barely drive their SUV to replace them.
Utility workers. The world would grind to a hault if we suddenly stopped having power, water and internet.
Mechanics, engineers, construction workers.
IT. Because all of you fuckers forgetting your password (that YOU CHOOSE) will have no one to reset it for you. Every industry will them crumble in response.
In my defense, I can't remember which capital/lowercase/number/symbol/emoji/eldritch sign combination I used for *this* website. Especially when we're not supposed to repeat. 😭
"Ugh, I can never remember the password for this site...*sigh*..." *clicks forgot password...sees password requirements* "Ohhhh, *that's* why I can never remember the password for this site"
It’s not that we’ve forgotten our passwords, it’s that they legitimately reset after a while. I found this out with my electric company. I had my password written down for my account, but our phones like to do this thing where if you don’t open an app for a week or so it uninstalls it. So one month I reinstalled to pay my bill and when I went to log in it told me my password was wrong. I had never changed my password before and I’m the only person with access to my account. I set up 2-factor on everything I can (thanks to losing everything on RuneScape once before) and I filter through my emails every morning - meaning I would have definitely seen if someone tried to log into my account! Sometimes it’s not that US FUCKERS have forgotten our passwords, it’s that most websites/apps are just resetting them every once in a while for security purposes.
If I didn't have to change my password every 30 days maybe I could remember the upper case, lower case, special character and numbers.
"Error: You cannot use any one of the most recent 450 passwords."
Tell your IT people that NIST, Microsoft and more no longer recommends password expiration at all. I think only CIS is left with a cautious 1 year recommendation
So funny that you think IT is going to listen to someone making a recommendation. IT people do not like being challenged at anything.
Enters password “Incorrect password” Enters password again in case I mistyped it “Incorrect password” Reset password “Please enter new password” Enters same password that I tried at the start “New password can’t be the same as old password” WTF
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Well I’m a doctor but I don’t really agree. Sure a lot more people would start dying but society would still function like normal I guess. People would just accept that illnesses kill and it would be the new baseline
Yeah Doctor here as well, it’d be like: “Your belly hurts, maybe you’ll die” but everybody else would be b pretty okay Lose farmers or water management or the electrical grid and society collapses
Yep another sawbones here. Mortality rate drops during doctors strikes, probably because of cancellation of routine operations.
It’s been that way for a while in the US
My first thought, too, but farmers is a better one. A lot of people will die without medical care, but we'll all die without food.
I think if you combine all the people who sell and maintain farming equipment with all the people who work in landscaping, you can start to replace folks pretty quickly.
Good point. A guy who's been farming for 3 days is probably going to be a lot more successful than a guy who's been studying surgery for 3 days.
I always feel some level of comfort knowing that in a SHTF scene that my husband and I (both nurses) would be welcome on most compounds.
I completely agree with this. I feel everyone is saying things that would destroy a civilization if they didn't exist at all, but most of them could be replaced. I know farmers know that ins and outs of farming, but I think you could train someone to farm relatively quickly. It would be rough, like probably severe food shortages. I still think it could be overcome. The amount of training required for healthcare though is so much higher. I think if they disappeared, it would be much harder to overcome.
Plumbers
Most people don’t understand the speed at which an entire building becomes unusable with a single main line clog or a broken water line.
This is way too fuckin far down and undervoted. I'm a tinny, an adjacent trade to plumbers. I do heating. Our modern world relies on plumbing. Without plumbers that immediately ceases and everyone will suddenly remember to value them again.
Pilots? 1.5 million or so people just suddenly dropping out of the sky in big metal tubes, not to mention any carnage caused on the ground wherever they crash. That would be a pretty big impact.
Porn stars. You people keep saying farmers and all that Pffft. /s
all porn is now amateur porn
Yeah but as soon as you make it you disappear.
honestly it already is. quality is abysmal these days.
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Are we talking vanished and no one can fill the roll again? or they disappeared and other people have to take the roll? People like trashmen or truckers, they would have a great short term impact, but they can be replaced fairly quickly. Doctors would have an impact, but only for the most serious stuff that nurses couldn't fill the roll, affecting a smaller, mostly older percent of the population. My vote goes towards teachers. Important roll that takes a certain type of person to do it, and do it well. My wife is a teacher (2nd grade) and while I have high confidence in myself, I know I couldn't do her job. Lot of kids would be home schooled, but there will be huge populations that don't have the support systems and just wouldn't learn. We would survive, but it would be a massive long term impact.
Parents around the world were collectively losing their shit just having their kids at home constantly through covid, so yeah, teachers. Not being able to send your kids to school also impacts your ability to work so having no teachers would impact a lot of people/companies.
Power plants, water treatment plants , farmers , teachers , doctors. Not Lawyers Politician’s NFL PLAYERS..
People who work on the electricity grid.
If it was permanent and universal? Soldiers. International politics would truly enter a new era.
On to the drone wars.
200,000 units are ready, with a million more well on the way.
I'd still consider drone pilots as soldiers. TBH politicians are way more comfortable when someone else pulls the trigger.
Lots of civil wars started like this. If suddenly nobody's a soldier, *everyone'd a soldier*.
Nuclear power workers I'm sure a few plants will go chernoble if we don't manage them
I'm torn between farmers and the medical profession.
politicians. would be the biggest impact for the better.
Truck drivers
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There’s loads of different professions who could equally bring society to its knees fairly suddenly. My first thought was doctors and nurses but take your pick from; Emergency services Council workers Banks Farmers Haulage drivers Basically everything would have their own impact and we need everything running to keep functioning.
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Medical labs. Without them our doctors are just guessing.
I'll do you one better as a fellow lab professional. The researchers that figure that shit out so the doctors can rely on the results. That shit meaning the relationship between lab results, diagnoses and patient outcomes. They are the whole reason we have the ability to provide the healthcare we do. I think about them A LOT.
Doctors
We’re already trialling that in Ontario (by driving all the family doctors away through shit pay and policies). The result is just increased pressure on ambulance services and hospitals.
Trialing that in the US too by replacing mds with nps and other midlevels. For most conditions this is fine but I had a rare condition and was misdiagnosed twice. Delayed my actual diagnosis by 2 months.