The movie "The Day After Tommorrow"
New York City. Flooded and frozen over. Obviously nothing is being shipped out or shipped in. And Manhattan has precious little area devoted to food production, with food storage almost exclusively a basement, 1st and 2nd level activity- meaning that with the flooding and freezing, that most of the food, but for that in cans, is ruined.
Hundreds or thousands of people holed up in the NY Public Library and in other buildings.
Telephones work, even in flood zones.
No one complains about inorperatable toliets.
Heat is displayed as a problem with the 'solution' given as burning books (while leaving more useable burnable furniture unscathed).
No one gets very hungry. We see one man steal a pack of hot dogs during the flooding, then weeks or months later a group breaks into a vending machine.
Obviously those writing this movie had little comprehension of the technologies making city life -- aka supporting larger numbers of people in a given area -- so bearable. Things as electricity, and other modes of heating (gas, steam etc). Things as drinkable water. And water for bathing and waste. And edible food. And the transport necesary for bring such food and other supplies from elsewhere.
Apparantly we are to believe that simply living in higher densities is so intrinsically good that none of these things matter - sort of like alcohol being so safe as to not require retail product labeling of the ingrediants such as the type of sweetner?!
IMHO it's no accident that we get this sort of blissful neglect of technologies and their development -- reflected in the movies AND in education with its neglect of sciences -- as if we should be so ashamed to be humans that we dare not innovate.
The Day Our Minds Are to Stand Still
http://continuingcounterreformation.blogspot.com/2010/12/day-our-minds-are-to-stand-still.html
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