“Water management, traffic management, sewage disposal…the list is long and really it all boils down to the fact that infrastructure demands in cities of today can not be handled manually. Or at least not without expanding the public workforce by a factor of twenty or more”

That would be good for jobs, bad for reliance on internet, but who cares, as I said, if you’re brought up in the 80′s and 90′s you wouldn’t have had the internet anyway (dialup at best)

“The loss of electricity alone would put paid to civilization completely. The loss of the internet might not. It would just start a die-off back to 18th century levels of population.”

18th century? Internet? nah more like 1970s.

Water management, traffic management, sewage disposal…the list is long and really it all boils down to the fact that infrastructure demands in cities of today can not be handled manually. Or at least not without expanding the public workforce by a factor of twenty or more.

The loss of electricity alone would put paid to civilization completely. The loss of the internet might not. It would just start a die-off back to 18th century levels of population.

As for those growing up before the internet…no. Imagine you’re living in the 60′s. Just that the concept of “cash” has to be reinvented, the nearest potable water is 20 miles away, there is no public transportation and every road is congested by the street wreckage caused by every light signal ceasing to function. Hell, even if you could find a free street to drive your car you’d have to drill a hole into the fuel tank of the nearest gas station since the pumps wouldn’t work.

To top that off the infrastructure meant to carry food into outlets fails alongside the systems designed to carry waste out of the city. Within the week you’d be living in a sewer and fighting other rioters for the canned goods.

Rural areas would get off light. The urbanites would get it in the neck.

All it takes is for the lack of electricity and there goes your internet, those of us who grow up before the internet would manage fine, shame about those aforementioned water companies if they heavily rely on prepubescent technology.

If you could separate them, however, the loss of the internet would be far worse than a mere blackout. End-of-civilization kind of worse, in fact. Drop wall street for a week and see what happens. The economy will tank completely literally overnight. As in “The ability to pay for services just vanished, and companies can not function”.

Even the ability of the water companies to supply water through the pipes would end. People just don’t understand how connected we’ve all become in those few years since the invention of the latest medium of mass communication.

As if we couldn’t, by this time, refute any of his ill-bred arguments by simply copying and pasting what we answered the last twenty times he tried them…

“Strawbear” as in “Worse than a straw man”?