Comment by ndr
Comment by ndr a day ago
I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.
Comment by ndr a day ago
I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.
> and quite a few people commented that they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning
Hangover from the port.
Instead of doing drugs or chatting, I'd read a book on my Kobo.
The thing with the stuff you mentioned. I already drank enough alcohol jn my life to not bother with it anymore. Same with card games. And random chitchat.
With my neighbors? For sure. Friends? Don't live near me anymore. How am I going to chat with my friends if they're hundreds of kilometers away? By way of a (smart)phone, which requires power.
We actually saw the effect of downtime during covid. In the beginning, a massive appreciation for health services. We all know how long that lasted. In the beginning, it was us against the virus. Eventually, we were fighting with each other, even over details. Rest assured, offensive propaganda services from secret agencies learned a lot from that (one may guess which one primarily).
If it was so awesome that wine drinking and chit-chat, why aren't we doing it? A pretty simple explanation is: because it ain't awesome. Yes, a change of pace can be regarded as a fun challenge or change of pace. Heck, it may even open up people to changing their life. But look how much we remote work post covid. Policies were reverted.
People absolutely drink wine and chit-chat with each other. They can't during the day usually because they have work.
It seems to me that these modern anti-social tendencies are actively driving a wedge between most people and their surroundings, making people further isolated from each other. Young people tend to spend time in doors alone because they don't know _how_ to interact with strangers. But they should because being alone is literally damaging to your health.
Being far away from friends is bad for you[1]. Being socially isolated is bad for you. Promoting a lifestyle in which you don't have friends and don't talk to strangers is akin to promoting a lifestyle in which you don't exercise.
It's not "awesome", it's a necessary component of living healthily as a human being.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/social-connectedness/risk-factors/index.... - I found this source from the CDC but there are numerous others
The power grid went down in a large area of the US about 20 years ago. The biggest issue I saw was the gas pumps didn't work. Cars were lined up, many abandoned, just waiting for the power to come on some they could get gas. I was in college at the time, but home for a few days. I heard rumors that the power was on west of us (where my school was), so I just started driving west, hoping I found where the power was on before I ran out of gas. Thankfully, that worked out.
But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.
It’s absurd that we don’t require gas stations to have generators on-site. They have all the fuel they need to power them right there!!!
Now nobody else can get more fuel for their generators when the gas stations don’t have power either.
This was a big issue during the power shutoffs during LA fires this year.
Gas stations are private businesses, and they typically make almost nothing on gas, most of their margin is in the c-store.
Requiring every single one of them to invest in a 5-6 figure power backup solution with hundreds or thousands in yearly maintenance costs, so they can sell their lowest margin product to accommodate those who can't plan ahead during a disaster that happens maybe once in a decade event is pretty absurd.
How does one plan ahead for a multi-day regional power failure, that may only happen once in their lifetime? Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline stored in their garage just incase? Or maybe we all invest in personal solar generation at our homes, with enough battery capacity to power an electric car and the home through those short winter days? This would cost tens of thousands of dollars for every household in the country. What about renters? Are they out of luck? Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally absurd, does it not?
I guess a government/population that cared about resilience would require them to add a few pennies/gallon onto the price to pay for backup generators. Maybe also bigger storage tanks.
I had to get gas every day for my generator during the outages. Only one gas station in down was in an area that still had power. If you don’t live in so cal and have to deal with public safety power shutoffs, quit talking out of your ass. Our power grid is so unreliable here that they really need to make the gas infrastructure more resilient.
When shit goes down, people need to be able to get fuel. The populace at large is never going to be prepared enough to deal with every gas station in the area going down. Raise the cost of gas by 10 cents to cover the costs. If every station is mandated to do so then they won’t have any issues with the margins as they will simply all raise prices in concert.
Think the some of the worst of it was for people stuck in elevators. Don’t have exact numbers but there were A LOT of them. Emergency services were very busy freeing people. My wife was stuck on a train and that wasn’t so great either. Toilets overflowed, ran out of water, eventually evacuated and walked to the previous station. They were lucky to be only a couple km away.
It also wasn't so incredibly nasty, though. There were disruptions and some arrests, but the large majority of people were in the streets socializing, dancing, doing impromptu things they wouldn't be doing on a work day.
That's because they kinda expected everything to be back to normal in a few hours. If there would be some more catastrophic distributed outage there would probably be less dancing.
But wait either it was "pretty" or it wasn't. We've gone from "it wasn't pretty" to "Ok, it was pretty, but only because they expected a resolution."
Pretty for young and unencumbered, less so for the COPD patient with an oxygen concentrator, or the parent of an infant running out of sterile bottles, etc.
> Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications.
I think the subject of the thread is pretty clearly how to deal with interruptions that won't resolve themselves in a short time. It's on you that you choose to ignore that and focus on "was it pretty for a milisecond?"
Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
This is one of the reasons I'm looking at extending my solar system to add a battery and islanding, so I can have a regular resupply of some amount of power/electricity for the necessities in case of extended outages.
I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.
Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/
Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
Solar and battery for refrigeration seems a waste.
If you own a house I'd look into very old school options like digging a deep hole to store your food in a dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work for weeks or months without a single milliwatt
This is exactly it. The other part is not just water pumping but operating the sewer systems - if the lift stations are down the whole thing fills up in about a week and the basic plumbing in your house - and thus pretty much entire city, stops working.
Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.
Only because it didn't last overnight and wasn't at the peak of summer.
Otherwise you're throwing out all fresh food, supermarkets couldn't process payments nor most restaurants either, etc.
Did you check with hospitals, prisons and daycares how things went?
I guess it depends on your perspective. Here in Portugal, lots of people ended up sitting on their patios, chatting with friends, cooking on the grill, playing cards, sipping wine, and generally having a pretty good time. There was a collective groan around the small village where I live when the power came back on, and quite a few people commented that they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning.