7 ms·

Just to highlight this: the last significant power outage in Western/middle Europe was 2003. [1] That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid,

Just to highlight this: the last significant power outage in Western/middle Europe was 2003. [1] That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages. It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years. Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_Italy_blackout

genewitch 1y ago
> a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days. And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this? Why will the US allow this, eventually?
- LunaSea 1y ago
  Anti tax evasion and money laundering measures
- olyjohn 1y ago
  Why will the US allow this? Because there's too much money to be made by middle men who want their cut of the transactions.
- ithkuil 1y ago
  I don't know but I find it very practical to not carry piles of cash in my pocket and home and know that we're less likely to get robbed just because of the cash we have. I don't know how true the relationship between the cashless lifestyle and safety actually is, but it works and I feel ok; I'm not sure that the prospect of a few hours of national blackout once in 20 years will make me change my mind significantly.
  - layman51 1y ago
    It does seem safer to not carry cash. However, I remember around May 2024 that there were some reported incidents in Chicago were in the early morning hours, there were some groups of robbers who would force victims to do something I found especially worrying: they would be forced into resetting their phone password and logging into their mobile banking app. I’m not sure what ended up happening in these cases.
  - j1elo 1y ago
    Today I was able to walk into a grocery store, pay for food, and go home to have a warm lunch (having a gas stove also helped tremendously). The matter was having a 10€ note at home. Not what I'd call "piles of cash". As an added benefit, no bank knows where I bought and when, which I find is a great advantage over the alternatives. (I also use Gpay; this comes from someone who just found a good middle point without forgetting about the more reliable, physical and privacy friendly option)
    - ithkuil 1y ago
      I think I have 10€ laying around at all times, possibly in loose change between my home and car. I do not always walk around with that in my pocket and I never have more than 500€ at home. I didn't mean literally zero cash, but once the bulk of your transactions are by card, you don't need to constantly go to the ATM and replenish your cash reserves
      - j1elo 1y ago
        And I myself didn't mean that I happened to have a measly 10€ note at home, I normally have around 300 minimum, to spend organically on purchases. Of course I get that carrying coins and notes is cumbersome, but if we've managed to live all through the 80's and 90's with it, I think we can manage to keep doing it. 100% digital money is giving up on a huge level of self-determination and privacy that I wouldn't feel comfortable with, but I guess as newer generations grow up already pre-adoctrinated and not being able to compare the before-and-after, in the end society will end giving up.
        ithkuil 1y ago
        I got my first cell phone as a full bearded adult so I do remember the times where you carried cash and the time you could actually meet people in places without having to constantly update one's position. I don't think it's just a generational divide. I do understand the privacy and self-determination problems of a cashless society but I have to admit I'm just to weak-minded to care about that in practice; the practicality of just paying even for just coffee with my phone is just too big for me to care for it.
  - artursapek 1y ago
    Cash is extremely easy to conceal. fear of burglary is a ridiculous reason not to have some saved for a rainy day
    - AStonesThrow 1y ago
      More or less. I once used an aggregator app to summon a handyman to my place. My request was simple: move two pieces of furniture around my very small apartment. So I find a reputable service within the app, I schedule it, and they send a guy. He shows up to my door breathless, with some kind of sob story about a vehicle breakdown. I dismiss that out of hand and he gets to work. He did a fine job and it didn't take very long. Then we get to the point of settling up, so I announce I'm going to pay in the app. He looks really disappointed and says he usually takes cash. I realized at this point that he was ready to shake me down, and also he would incidentally be discovering where I stashed my cash, when I reached for it with him there in the room. So disappointed. So I send the money out in the app and I show the confirmation screen to the guy. And I felt so bad that I followed up with a tip in the same fashion. But at the end of the day he was just a garden-variety cash-in-hand scammer and I had no reason to feel guilty, because I had unwittingly outwitted him by trusting the app. And the company had no qualms about it. Another time, I had a very short cab ride to the laundry. And it did not take long for the driver to spin a gigantic tale about his auntie addicted to gambling used up all their savings and they was really hurting for money. I was shifting uncomfortably wondering why I was hearing this. So the cabbie parks the car and his POS machine shuts off. He's like "oh it's out of order" so here he is, shaking me down and expecting me to go fetch cash to put in his grubby hands. I stared him up and down, started taking photos, and got out of there. I discussed with dispatch. They said if he's not accepting cards and I intended to pay by card, I owe him nothing. So again a cash-in-hand sob-story scammer was foiled. The cab service was crazy enough to assign him to pick me up additional times. This is why I ride Waymo, folks!!!
      - artursapek 1y ago
        Lol what? How do you know either of these guys were trying to rob you? They prefer cash because they can take it under the table and not report it for taxes. Everybody knows that.
- petertodd 1y ago
  > And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this? In Spain it's now illegal to pay with cash for transactions over 1000EUR. Absurd. In Norway they recently made it mandatory in most circumstances to accept cash for transactions up to 20,000kroner (~1700EUR): https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-right-to-pay-cash/ https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-rig...
  - ricardobayes 1y ago
    The 1000EUR limit doesn't apply between private individuals; for businesses, you will find many other European countries also don't take large cash payments, for security or convenience reasons. E.g. you can't buy a car from a dealership for cash in "cash is king" Germany either. They expect a wire in almost all cases.
  - sapiogram 1y ago
    I don't think anyone is going to starve to death because they can only spend 1000EUR...
- emporas 1y ago
  We will use better technology for electronic transactions. Most of banks worldwide still use COBOL for most (all?) their software infrastructure. You can do as many electronic transactions as you wish without internet or electricity, provided you have something with charged battery. Problem is the transaction cannot be verified without internet, but when internet gets restored, all transactions can be applied. That technology exists for more than a decade, so banks will implement it in 20 or 50 years. Most sane people will not wait patiently for half a century till some software engineer implements electronic transactions with COBOL, and we will use some kind of blockchain much sooner than that.
  - sgt101 1y ago
    > Most of banks worldwide still use COBOL for most (all?) their software infrastructure. Nahhh - some banks have some parts of the infrastructure in COBOL. Specifically larger retail banks often have their ledgers in COBOL. Most of them want rid and are actively getting rid. Most places have had programs to root COBOL out since before 2000, but there are residual implementations remain. The ledgers are the hardest place to deal with because of the business case as well as the awkwardness. Basically there's not much of an advantage (or at least hasn't been) in modernizing so keeping the thing going has been the option. Now people want to have more flexible core systems so that they can offer more products, although not so sure that customers want this or can consume it. Still - it supports the idea of modernisation so not many people are keen to challenge. The most common big implementations I come across are in Java.
    - emporas 1y ago
      They use Go as well, I know someone who writes it for banks, but most of their infrastructure is written in COBOL. There are some sources [1], and some people have told me the same in person, not in exact numbers or percentages, but roughly the same. Anyway point remains, electronic transactions with no internet or electricity is a solved problem, and banks don't want to solve it or they can't due to incompetency or maliciousness. Currency transactions worth their weight in gold, it is of utmost importance for transactions to always be published to a central authority right away. If they don't have to be published, they should not exist at all. Imagine people buying stuff without anyone knowing right away! That should never, ever exist, for any reason. [1] https://thenextweb.com/news/ancient-programming-language-cobol-can-make-you-bank-literally https://thenextweb.com/news/ancient-programming-language-cob...
rini17 1y ago
There are now ubiquitous wireless POS terminals for card payments that can be recharged from emergency sources of electricity(like cars). As long as the mobile internet works it's possible. Of course this only little alleviates the disruption.
- userbinator 1y ago
  As long as the mobile internet works it's possible. If we're talking about a situation where the grid goes down, the mobile internet is most definitely not working.
  - jadyoyster 1y ago
    Surprisingly mobile networks seemed to stay up in Portugal. I'm not sure to what extent and if they lasted for the whole duration of the blackout. They definitely limited consumer use though.
    - JaumeGreen 1y ago
      I love in Spain and in my zone I didn't have Internet access until after 22:00, and it was sloppy at best. 0:49 and light came back, and woke us for a moment. So yeah, you need local first POS applications.
    - 20after4 1y ago
      Most mobile base stations have a limited backup battery and some have generators on site. I'd expect telephone infrastructure to have 24-48 hours of backup in the USA and I don't know why Europe would be much different.
      - jhugo 1y ago
        Population density is pretty high in many European inner cities. Most of the cell sites around here are on top of apartment buildings and I doubt they have a genset. Here in central BCN the mobile network was completely offline within an hour or two of the power going out.
citrin_ru 1y ago
> Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.
- brewdad 1y ago
  In a multi-day event like we are talking about here, couldn't a shop owner revert to a paper ledger? I mean, it would suck and transactions would take much longer but if the alternative is people starving or having your inventory looted by a desperate mob, a nineteenth century solution seems preferable.
  - ryoshu 1y ago
    They can and do. They will also do deep cuts on prices/give away for free for refrigerated and frozen goods because those will just get tossed and neighborhood goodwill is still a thing in some places.
  - chihuahua 1y ago
    There was a 4-day power outage here (Seattle suburbs) last fall, and one of the auto parts store made an effort to serve customers even though they didn't have any power. I paid cash, and I forget whether or how they did credit card transactions (possibly by writing down CC numbers on paper.) They made a lot of phone calls to a different store to get prices for items.
    - spiddy 1y ago
      I'm located in Barcelona, and yesterday lot of transactions on mini markets / pharmacies were not possible because the item prices were unknown, adding to the fact there was no phone lines available to reach out.
- bill3478 1y ago
  Many supermarket chains (in the West at least) have satellite links at their major locations because they can't afford to close a store just because the local ISP had an issue. The real question is how long can some of the smaller banks' datacenters stay up.
holoduke 1y ago
Well if the situation happens that people can't buy food, things will easily become nasty quickly. People will break open stores and use violence to get what they need. So cash money won't really help a lot in a serious situation.
- prmoustache 1y ago
  Shop owners would just take notes on who buy what and let people go with the items. Looting only ever happens when areas hve started being evacuated and most shop owners + law enforcement are elsewhere.
  - 71bw 1y ago
    And then take it up the butt from the taxman once he finds out.
- ricardobayes 1y ago
  The "civism" was well noted in the Spanish case, as far as I know, the whole country passed this incident without a single case of security issue. During the whole thing, people were extremely kind and polite. People sitting in dark bars was kind of "funny" how people clinging to their normal lives even in emergencies.
cogman10 1y ago
> Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days. So, what's really interesting is that these sorts of social collapses have happened. In fact, they often happen when natural disasters strike. When they do happen, mutual aid networks just sort of naturally spring up and capitalism ends up taking a backseat. All the sudden worrying about the profits of Walmart are far less important than making sure those around you don't starve. As it turns out, most people, even managers of stores, aren't so heartless as to let huge portions of the population starve. Everyone expects "mad max" but that scenario simply hasn't played out in any natural disaster. In fact, it mostly only ends up being like that when central authority arrives and starts to try and bring "order" back. You can read about this behavior in "A Paradise Built in Hell" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell
awesome_dude 1y ago
But but but, muh crypto is the future </sarcasm> I often wonder if we should leave energy/telecommunications in a state where they can and do fail with some degree of frequency that reminds us to have a back up plan that works. I had thought that the (relatively) recent lockdowns had taught us how fragile our systems are, and that people need a local cache of shelf stable foods, currency, and community (who else discovered that they had neighbours during that time!) For something like this, a local electricity generation system (solar panels, wind/water turbines, or even a ICE generator) would go a long way to ensuring people continued to have electricity for important things (freezers)

genewitch 1y ago

> a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days. And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this? Why will the US allow this, eventually?

LunaSea 1y ago
Anti tax evasion and money laundering measures
olyjohn 1y ago
Why will the US allow this? Because there's too much money to be made by middle men who want their cut of the transactions.
ithkuil 1y ago
I don't know but I find it very practical to not carry piles of cash in my pocket and home and know that we're less likely to get robbed just because of the cash we have. I don't know how true the relationship between the cashless lifestyle and safety actually is, but it works and I feel ok; I'm not sure that the prospect of a few hours of national blackout once in 20 years will make me change my mind significantly.
- layman51 1y ago
  It does seem safer to not carry cash. However, I remember around May 2024 that there were some reported incidents in Chicago were in the early morning hours, there were some groups of robbers who would force victims to do something I found especially worrying: they would be forced into resetting their phone password and logging into their mobile banking app. I’m not sure what ended up happening in these cases.
- j1elo 1y ago
  Today I was able to walk into a grocery store, pay for food, and go home to have a warm lunch (having a gas stove also helped tremendously). The matter was having a 10€ note at home. Not what I'd call "piles of cash". As an added benefit, no bank knows where I bought and when, which I find is a great advantage over the alternatives. (I also use Gpay; this comes from someone who just found a good middle point without forgetting about the more reliable, physical and privacy friendly option)
  - ithkuil 1y ago
    I think I have 10€ laying around at all times, possibly in loose change between my home and car. I do not always walk around with that in my pocket and I never have more than 500€ at home. I didn't mean literally zero cash, but once the bulk of your transactions are by card, you don't need to constantly go to the ATM and replenish your cash reserves
    - j1elo 1y ago
      And I myself didn't mean that I happened to have a measly 10€ note at home, I normally have around 300 minimum, to spend organically on purchases. Of course I get that carrying coins and notes is cumbersome, but if we've managed to live all through the 80's and 90's with it, I think we can manage to keep doing it. 100% digital money is giving up on a huge level of self-determination and privacy that I wouldn't feel comfortable with, but I guess as newer generations grow up already pre-adoctrinated and not being able to compare the before-and-after, in the end society will end giving up.
      - ithkuil 1y ago
        I got my first cell phone as a full bearded adult so I do remember the times where you carried cash and the time you could actually meet people in places without having to constantly update one's position. I don't think it's just a generational divide. I do understand the privacy and self-determination problems of a cashless society but I have to admit I'm just to weak-minded to care about that in practice; the practicality of just paying even for just coffee with my phone is just too big for me to care for it.
- artursapek 1y ago
  Cash is extremely easy to conceal. fear of burglary is a ridiculous reason not to have some saved for a rainy day
  - AStonesThrow 1y ago
    More or less. I once used an aggregator app to summon a handyman to my place. My request was simple: move two pieces of furniture around my very small apartment. So I find a reputable service within the app, I schedule it, and they send a guy. He shows up to my door breathless, with some kind of sob story about a vehicle breakdown. I dismiss that out of hand and he gets to work. He did a fine job and it didn't take very long. Then we get to the point of settling up, so I announce I'm going to pay in the app. He looks really disappointed and says he usually takes cash. I realized at this point that he was ready to shake me down, and also he would incidentally be discovering where I stashed my cash, when I reached for it with him there in the room. So disappointed. So I send the money out in the app and I show the confirmation screen to the guy. And I felt so bad that I followed up with a tip in the same fashion. But at the end of the day he was just a garden-variety cash-in-hand scammer and I had no reason to feel guilty, because I had unwittingly outwitted him by trusting the app. And the company had no qualms about it. Another time, I had a very short cab ride to the laundry. And it did not take long for the driver to spin a gigantic tale about his auntie addicted to gambling used up all their savings and they was really hurting for money. I was shifting uncomfortably wondering why I was hearing this. So the cabbie parks the car and his POS machine shuts off. He's like "oh it's out of order" so here he is, shaking me down and expecting me to go fetch cash to put in his grubby hands. I stared him up and down, started taking photos, and got out of there. I discussed with dispatch. They said if he's not accepting cards and I intended to pay by card, I owe him nothing. So again a cash-in-hand sob-story scammer was foiled. The cab service was crazy enough to assign him to pick me up additional times. This is why I ride Waymo, folks!!!
    - artursapek 1y ago
      Lol what? How do you know either of these guys were trying to rob you? They prefer cash because they can take it under the table and not report it for taxes. Everybody knows that.
petertodd 1y ago
> And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this? In Spain it's now illegal to pay with cash for transactions over 1000EUR. Absurd. In Norway they recently made it mandatory in most circumstances to accept cash for transactions up to 20,000kroner (~1700EUR): https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-right-to-pay-cash/ https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-rig...
- ricardobayes 1y ago
  The 1000EUR limit doesn't apply between private individuals; for businesses, you will find many other European countries also don't take large cash payments, for security or convenience reasons. E.g. you can't buy a car from a dealership for cash in "cash is king" Germany either. They expect a wire in almost all cases.
- sapiogram 1y ago
  I don't think anyone is going to starve to death because they can only spend 1000EUR...
emporas 1y ago
We will use better technology for electronic transactions. Most of banks worldwide still use COBOL for most (all?) their software infrastructure. You can do as many electronic transactions as you wish without internet or electricity, provided you have something with charged battery. Problem is the transaction cannot be verified without internet, but when internet gets restored, all transactions can be applied. That technology exists for more than a decade, so banks will implement it in 20 or 50 years. Most sane people will not wait patiently for half a century till some software engineer implements electronic transactions with COBOL, and we will use some kind of blockchain much sooner than that.
- sgt101 1y ago
  > Most of banks worldwide still use COBOL for most (all?) their software infrastructure. Nahhh - some banks have some parts of the infrastructure in COBOL. Specifically larger retail banks often have their ledgers in COBOL. Most of them want rid and are actively getting rid. Most places have had programs to root COBOL out since before 2000, but there are residual implementations remain. The ledgers are the hardest place to deal with because of the business case as well as the awkwardness. Basically there's not much of an advantage (or at least hasn't been) in modernizing so keeping the thing going has been the option. Now people want to have more flexible core systems so that they can offer more products, although not so sure that customers want this or can consume it. Still - it supports the idea of modernisation so not many people are keen to challenge. The most common big implementations I come across are in Java.
  - emporas 1y ago
    They use Go as well, I know someone who writes it for banks, but most of their infrastructure is written in COBOL. There are some sources [1], and some people have told me the same in person, not in exact numbers or percentages, but roughly the same. Anyway point remains, electronic transactions with no internet or electricity is a solved problem, and banks don't want to solve it or they can't due to incompetency or maliciousness. Currency transactions worth their weight in gold, it is of utmost importance for transactions to always be published to a central authority right away. If they don't have to be published, they should not exist at all. Imagine people buying stuff without anyone knowing right away! That should never, ever exist, for any reason. [1] https://thenextweb.com/news/ancient-programming-language-cobol-can-make-you-bank-literally https://thenextweb.com/news/ancient-programming-language-cob...

rini17 1y ago

There are now ubiquitous wireless POS terminals for card payments that can be recharged from emergency sources of electricity(like cars). As long as the mobile internet works it's possible. Of course this only little alleviates the disruption.

userbinator 1y ago
As long as the mobile internet works it's possible. If we're talking about a situation where the grid goes down, the mobile internet is most definitely not working.
- jadyoyster 1y ago
  Surprisingly mobile networks seemed to stay up in Portugal. I'm not sure to what extent and if they lasted for the whole duration of the blackout. They definitely limited consumer use though.
  - JaumeGreen 1y ago
    I love in Spain and in my zone I didn't have Internet access until after 22:00, and it was sloppy at best. 0:49 and light came back, and woke us for a moment. So yeah, you need local first POS applications.
  - 20after4 1y ago
    Most mobile base stations have a limited backup battery and some have generators on site. I'd expect telephone infrastructure to have 24-48 hours of backup in the USA and I don't know why Europe would be much different.
    - jhugo 1y ago
      Population density is pretty high in many European inner cities. Most of the cell sites around here are on top of apartment buildings and I doubt they have a genset. Here in central BCN the mobile network was completely offline within an hour or two of the power going out.

citrin_ru 1y ago

> Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.

brewdad 1y ago
In a multi-day event like we are talking about here, couldn't a shop owner revert to a paper ledger? I mean, it would suck and transactions would take much longer but if the alternative is people starving or having your inventory looted by a desperate mob, a nineteenth century solution seems preferable.
- ryoshu 1y ago
  They can and do. They will also do deep cuts on prices/give away for free for refrigerated and frozen goods because those will just get tossed and neighborhood goodwill is still a thing in some places.
- chihuahua 1y ago
  There was a 4-day power outage here (Seattle suburbs) last fall, and one of the auto parts store made an effort to serve customers even though they didn't have any power. I paid cash, and I forget whether or how they did credit card transactions (possibly by writing down CC numbers on paper.) They made a lot of phone calls to a different store to get prices for items.
  - spiddy 1y ago
    I'm located in Barcelona, and yesterday lot of transactions on mini markets / pharmacies were not possible because the item prices were unknown, adding to the fact there was no phone lines available to reach out.
bill3478 1y ago
Many supermarket chains (in the West at least) have satellite links at their major locations because they can't afford to close a store just because the local ISP had an issue. The real question is how long can some of the smaller banks' datacenters stay up.

holoduke 1y ago

Well if the situation happens that people can't buy food, things will easily become nasty quickly. People will break open stores and use violence to get what they need. So cash money won't really help a lot in a serious situation.

prmoustache 1y ago
Shop owners would just take notes on who buy what and let people go with the items. Looting only ever happens when areas hve started being evacuated and most shop owners + law enforcement are elsewhere.
- 71bw 1y ago
  And then take it up the butt from the taxman once he finds out.
ricardobayes 1y ago
The "civism" was well noted in the Spanish case, as far as I know, the whole country passed this incident without a single case of security issue. During the whole thing, people were extremely kind and polite. People sitting in dark bars was kind of "funny" how people clinging to their normal lives even in emergencies.

cogman10 1y ago

> Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days. So, what's really interesting is that these sorts of social collapses have happened. In fact, they often happen when natural disasters strike. When they do happen, mutual aid networks just sort of naturally spring up and capitalism ends up taking a backseat. All the sudden worrying about the profits of Walmart are far less important than making sure those around you don't starve. As it turns out, most people, even managers of stores, aren't so heartless as to let huge portions of the population starve. Everyone expects "mad max" but that scenario simply hasn't played out in any natural disaster. In fact, it mostly only ends up being like that when central authority arrives and starts to try and bring "order" back. You can read about this behavior in "A Paradise Built in Hell" [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Paradise_Built_in_Hell

awesome_dude 1y ago

But but but, muh crypto is the future </sarcasm> I often wonder if we should leave energy/telecommunications in a state where they can and do fail with some degree of frequency that reminds us to have a back up plan that works. I had thought that the (relatively) recent lockdowns had taught us how fragile our systems are, and that people need a local cache of shelf stable foods, currency, and community (who else discovered that they had neighbours during that time!) For something like this, a local electricity generation system (solar panels, wind/water turbines, or even a ICE generator) would go a long way to ensuring people continued to have electricity for important things (freezers)