Or, everyone rallies in the first few years and the few survivors that are around work together and share resources, at least long enough that everyone gets theirs.

Yeah, the problem is: we’re both right. Some will go one way, some another - and when the two types intermingle, the results would appear to be inevitably regrettable.

Movies and video games are more entertaining when there’s over-the-top conflict, and I think that shapes our predictions.

Having lived in big cities where “bad neighborhoods” means one house out of a thousand might harbor some bad kids who go out and do bad things, I’ll say: the vast majority of people in most of society are basically good, some of them truly great, but it doesn’t take very many bad actors to bring down a whole 100,000 population area into fear and chaos and over-the-top responses to threats.

You want examples of over-the-top responses in real life? They’re rare, but cops doing outrageously terrible things isn’t just in fiction… a lot of real life is more cold, callous and brutal than a lot of fiction.

we’d learn to use horses/cows to pull the tractor implements before the tractors are kaput for good.

In a lot of ways, horses and cows are much more work and expense (inputs of valuable materials) to keep operating than a tractor, it’s why the horse drawn carriages died out so quickly - not because they’re slow or smelly, but because cranking up an engine that sits in a garage and waits patiently for you for days, or months, at near zero storage cost is infinitely more efficient than protecting your livestock from disease and weather and poachers and wild predators…

And, yes, in those places where people can maintain working animals, they will go to that expense to plow the earth by mule or ox or horse power instead of planting by human labor, but it is a big step up from desperation on the run to keeping beasts of burden in working order.

The biggest danger would be illness and injury.

That is a big one, particularly while the cities are filled with unburied rotting corpses.

Yeah, that does track, and when they don’t kill them just to show off that they can, they’ll also be doing it out of desparation, fear of starvation, and fear that the Amish women might drive knitting needles through their hearts.

More than a generation, yes. 100 years? Probably not.

So much unknown. Competition with other survivors with guns, knives, the ability to poison your well when you aren’t looking or burn your house down while you sleep… assuming NONE of those kinds of things EVER happen, then, yes, the happy cooperative commune that never murders each other over scarce resources could keep a basic tractor running for 30+ years. Throw in all those other challenges… just traveling to a supply depot to get a new spark plug could be risking your life.

Even the happy cooperative commune is going to need centuries of relative peace in order to reboot the supply chain to the point of making new spark plugs compatible with the old engine blocks - or new engine blocks when the old ones are too worn to rebuild.

Most of the first European settlers didn’t have those skills and either died or were rescued by native peoples, whom they later thanked by massacring them.

Agreed on both points - needing to know how to grow food and not die from your own sanitation shortcomings, and how to ruthlessly kill the competition, those are the skills that get you past Thunderdome.

Maybe they’re coy about it, but the Amish I have met aren’t big into firearms. Once there’s a farm with food and no guns and roving bands of hungry men with guns and ammo situation, the farmers usually doesn’t do well in the ensuing relationship.

All the bad ones. This answer doesn’t change whether you are using an llm or not.

Depends on the mineral content of the available water. If I hosed off solar panels with my readily available household water they’d be under a hard white (calcium carbonate) crust within a couple of dozen hosings.

Probably because they decided that the cost didn’t make sense anymore in the face of renewables.

The political costs of nuclear power are astronomical. Safety regulation is A) a very good idea, but B) grossly overblown and C) outrageously costly to implement to the levels NIMBYs demand. Satisfying them that a windmill isn’t going to fall over and kill them is a lot easier.

A thermal control loop seems like it might be helpful, but the cost would have to be weighed against the remaining efficiency of a simpler setup.

I could believe that it stays warm enough that ice can’t stay on the surface

When the sun shines, yes. After 30 days of straight overcast? Not so much.

Got news about snow and ice in Switzerland: it happens in the valleys during winter just as heavy as it ever does at the higher elevations.

Not just on the dam itself, but across the lake to reduce evaporation - like they’ve been doing extensively in Australia.

I mean, the dam is already wired into the power grid, the top of the dam gets far more hours of sun than the valleys, it’s almost as if “someone” didn’t think about things before being amazed at the outcome.

Putting solar panels in a valley in Switzerland is… a graphic demonstration of tunnel vision.

Simply treat the security team really well beforehand, like just being a good friend… billionaires then asked “but where does that end?”

This is how you know they have become a net detriment to society. This is why they believe so strongly in things like “return to office” “no UBI” and poverty level minimum wages.

The Amish are going to have a hard time with the AR15 hoarders…

farmer bob and his family died, but all of his shit is still there on his farm ready to be taken.

Good luck keeping Bob’s John Deere running for more than a generation.

1895 level skills

Try 1695. There will be bits and bobs of modern life around, but the core skills required are going to be very much what the European settlers in the new world needed.

people are such morons

Wait until you read about Cryonics…

Gas masks don’t help with total lack of oxygen. All you have to do is send pure nitrogen down the ventilation shafts, even if they tanked O2, that’s maybe 10 hours per tank per person - how many tanks do you think they got with their $55K “Villa de Armageddon”?