this post was submitted on 05 Dec 2024
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No Stupid Questions

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

dissolves for whatever reason

As if we all don't know the reason.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I think the point is the reason didn't matter for proposed question

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

That makes sense to me. Haha

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

At first, LOTS of “I told you so” comments on social media. These would quickly disappear as the shit really hit the fan.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Lol you think there's gonna be social media

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You do realise that other countries have internet servers too?

Americans might lose access to social media, and the internet in general, but much of the world will still be online.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

I don’t think that was the implication. If the US literally devolves into anarchy that is an extremely far gone scenario. It would be globally disruptive. If a meteor erased Europe, the US would also collapse to a lower tier of existence. It’s not just a one way thing or some statement of American supremacy. But it is unlikely that if the US totally collapses, American social media companies would not be able to pay for their Europeans data centers to stay on. So yeah you would probably lose Reddit, Facebook, Insta, and a good big chunk of everything people mean when they say “social media.”

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

You think there would be no social media left if Twitter, Reddit, Facebook & Co. went down? Using Lemmy?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

But they would still exist, they'd just use servers in other countries.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Until the bills for running those servers start piling up. Most/all those companies are headquartered in the US, and it likely wouldn’t be trivial for employees in other countries to suddenly start accessing finances etc. if the US offices are unexpectedly shuttered.

There’s also a huge knowledge drain that could impact the operation of those servers. I work on a devops team that manages web services serving around 15 countries. All but one of my teammates are in the US. We occasionally have to deal with hardware failures in our AWS cloud environments that requires manual intervention to recover from, for example. If that sort of knowledge is lost, or even severely limited, then it can easily lead to cascading failures that makes a site completely inaccessible.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago

Excellent point

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago

America gets a cold, the world gets the flu.

And that is just the economic impact.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

We would need to ignore how destitute the rest of the world would need to be for a superpower to full-on collapse in its entirety. I'm also assuming you mean that there's zero semblance of order or organized society.

The military would get recalled and leave American bases, strategic territory, and other occupied areas undefended and open to capture. Economies that rely heavily on trade with the US would need to find new trading partners to prevent potential economic collapse and it might not even save them if they can't get similar enough agreements or pricing. There are countries that also rely heavily on straight US aid, either monetarily or goods, that would collapse themselves or force them to align with whichever country would give them new aid. Global healthcare would dip without the drugs manufactured by the US. No American commodities like oil or food makes prices of those commodities go up everywhere else.

People around the world would be afraid. Whatever you may think of the American government and US politics, the average US citizen/resident is quite removed from the goings on of the federal government. The states on their own have a lot of independence and some would likely survive a collapse in federal leadership, but if federal, state, and local government all collapsed together it would be something serious enough to warrant attention from other countries with similar structure to the US.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Is oil an American commodity? Appreciate this might be a different #nostupidquestions.

I always assumed that oil was primarily a middle eastern thing hence the US's interest in it.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61545

The middle east is definitely a major producer of oil, but the US produces even more.

However, what would likely impact the world more than a reduction in crude production is that the US has the largest refinery capacity and exports 15% of the petroleum products it makes. Global refinery capacity is 103.5 million barrels per day, the US constitutes 18.4 million of that. While it's relatively quick for other oil producing nations to bump up their crude production, any major disruption in refining would have huge effects on the prices of petroleum products. Refineries are very expensive and complex. They cannot be scaled up quickly unless there is idle capacity to bring back online.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Red states would be fucked without that stream of blue state money coming in...lol

[–] [email protected] -2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Because there always needs to be someone dragging the rest down?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

Countries with mutual treaties are going to get attacked. China would definitely take Taiwan and maybe the Philippines.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago

The world economy would utterly collapse.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Economic chaos for a little while, and then everyone would just go on with their lives. Economically it would matter of course; America became the richest power after the first world war when all of Europe needed loans to fight their "great war", causing the greatest transfer of wealth the world had ever seen.

But culturally, I'm betting the number of people who would give a shit if the United States stopped bossing everybody around is far less than they think it is.

The american sense of importance is strongest mostly in their own heads.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago

Don. I've put up with your shenanigans for months. Enough. Stop asking stupid vitriolic questions.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

That would be pretty nice to see functioning anarchic societies. You are using the wrong term, you mean anomy.

I think we will get a bit of a taste of that in the next years.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Why do you say anomie instead of anarchy is the term OP should be using?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Because most people use the word anarchy for a society without rules and without order. Right of the strongest, 365 days The Purge or something like that. But anarchism isn't about that, but about a peaceful way of living without hierarchies and rulers. I was sure, that is not, what OP meant.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

My question was about OP's use of the term. Why do you think he misused it? "What do we do if X happens" ---> "anomie is different from anarchy" seems like a non sequitur.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

As I wrote before, I think OP meant to ask what happens if the US falls into a state of anomy. Nearly everybody who talks about that, uses the word anarchy instead, which is wrong.

Should be clear enough now, I hope.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 3 weeks ago

Why do you think he was wrong? He didn't say anything that suggested he didn't know the definition of anarchy.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

The next biggest economy would likely fill the power vacuum, which at the moment would be China.
European countries would likely band together but still align their policies closer to Russian polices because they're a more imminent threat than China.
There would probably be several small brush wars as countries try to to consolidate power amongst regional areas like North America and the Middle East.
Fragile ceasefires backed by American influence would pretty quickly dissolve like between North and South Korea.
And in a few decades everything will settle into a new "normal" just like it did when other great empires have lost their influence.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

We would give a brief "Oooohh"
and then go on with our lives.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Somehow I doubt that would be the result.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago

The powers already out in their mom's basement. All they got is a cell phone so...

[–] [email protected] -1 points 3 weeks ago

The crash of the US market would bankrupt many organisations that rely on US liquidity to exist.