Hi Dark, Point well taken. The sad fact of the matter is that the majority of people living today lack basic survival skills. When there was the big hype over y2k in the late 1990's a survey was done to determine how many people had the basic survival skills to live several days or even months without power. Not surprisingly the survey showed that a huge majority of the U.S. population were woefully unprepared for any kind of crisis longer than a couple of days let alone months.
As I recall the survey asked about very basic items like a box of matches to start a cooking fire or to light a candle, candles for light, a months supply of canned foods, jugs of water, etc. Turns out that the average person living in major cities like New York City and Chicago didn't have a box of matches or a candle. Can food supplies were what one would expect. That is maybe enough for one or two weeks tops. Just enough to hold the family over until the next run to the store. Not exactly hope for an extended crisis. Bottom line, I think should something that bad ever hit the United States, United Kingdom, or any other industrialized society the lack of being able to read books etc via the computer would be the least of a blind person's worries. Basic survival would be paramount over being able to read books in braille, via e-book, or whatever. I should know as I've been there before. What I mean by that is about 8 years ago we had a snow storm that knocked out the power county wide. It was out for about eight days in the middle of winter. Fortunately, at the time I was living next door to my dad, and while we didn't have power the gas was still working. That allowed us to have heat from the gas heaters, heat up a bowl of soup on the gas stove, and kept us alive. Not only that my step mom likes to collect scented candles and we were burning them all week long for light and to read by in the evenings etc. Obviously, we survived the ordeal, but we were lucky. We happened to be better prepared for that crisis. I can remember listening to news reports on the radio where firemen and county rescue workers were picking up families and taking them to relief shelters to keep them alive simply because they weren't prepared to survive that kind of crisis. They relied too much on modern conveniences, and when it was gone they had absolutely nothing to fall back on. Cheers! On 8/7/12, dark <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi Alex. > > I had a very similar experience as far as school goes. I'm afraid though, > while I do agree braille still has some minority uses, I'm not entirely > convinced by the "if the power went" arguement. Under that reasoning, well > shouldn't we all also stop using our electric ovens and learn to cook over > wood fires? The same goes for washing machines, electric dryers, and just > about anything else. If we took this arguement to it's logical > conclusion, ---- well maybe we ought to stop cooking our food in case we > were ever without the means to make fire. In fact I'm pretty sure that back > > when the first proto humaan had the bright idea of throwing a pointy stick > at their prey someone said "ug ug! this spear bad! if throw spear from > distance, how we learn to run fast after mammoth! what we do when have no > spears? ug ug!" > > Okay, this is probably a little extreme, but you see the point. We can only > > adapt to the current situation we're in, and the technology we have before > us, sinse if we start playing the what if game we could be here forever. > > Btw I'll also add on a practical level, if we were! in an appocalypse > situation we'd also be without the means to make braillers, so we'd better > also all learn to use a stylus :D. > > Beware the grue! > > Dark. > --- Gamers mailing list __ [email protected] If you want to leave the list, send E-mail to [email protected]. You can make changes or update your subscription via the web, at http://mail.audyssey.org/mailman/listinfo/gamers_audyssey.org. All messages are archived and can be searched and read at http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]. If you have any questions or concerns regarding the management of the list, please send E-mail to [email protected].
