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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 w

• camillomiller 1y ago
  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.
  • killerstorm 1y ago
    Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
    • BLKNSLVR 1y ago
      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/ https://air-stream.org/ Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
      • axelthegerman 1y ago
        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
        • card_zero 1y ago
          A "cellar"? :) Or if you want to get technical I guess "root cellar".
        • wat10000 1y ago
          That sounds really inconvenient (am I going to keep my food down there all the time, or is the plan to carry the entire contents of my refrigerator down there in an outage?) not terribly effective (RIP all the frozen stuff) and probably not any cheaper. Plus the hole can’t be used for other things like charging my phone.
        • chairmansteve 1y ago
          Convert a chest freezer into refrigerator and you don't need batteries. https://www.notechmagazine.com/category/refrigeration https://www.notechmagazine.com/category/refrigeration
          • card_zero 1y ago
            That's very smart and might end my quest for a truly quiet bedroom fridge, if it really only runs two minutes in an hour. (Light fridges marketed as "quiet" just produce near-constant annoying fan noise, quietly.)
            • 20after4 1y ago
              It really works, and if you fill half the space with water then it'll only need to run once or twice a week (assuming you don't open the lid often)
            • michaelt 1y ago
              Have you looked at hotel minibar fridges? They're generally pretty quiet.
        • Dylan16807 1y ago
          It'll work just great to keep half the things in my fridge safe and none of the things in my freezer safe. Refrigeration is top priority and I would happily buy solar panels just to keep it working (plus leeching a few watts for my phone).
      • ta1243 1y ago
        Solar+battery is great for a few weeks locally with no power, or a couple of days nationally. It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
        • antisthenes 1y ago
          > It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target. A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house? Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?
          • ryandrake 1y ago
            If society actually suffers a sustained "collapse," access to electricity won't even be among your top-20 problems. You're going to be more worried about how you're going to obtain water, food, and protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.
            • 20after4 1y ago
              For folks with a private well, electricity is the key to fresh water. At least for a while.
            • antisthenes 1y ago
              > protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order. This is a hollywood meme. The reality is that aggressive looters/warlords will be very quickly disposed of and the remaining ones will fall in line and become semi-official protective militia forces, who will labor alongside farmers in small communities if they don't want to starve. Food scarcity will be a much bigger issue that some nutcase trying to loot my solar panels.
              • apitman 1y ago
                What makes you so confident it would pan out that way rather than the meme way? Especially if potential warlords only have the memes for inspiration.
    • XorNot 1y ago
      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.
      • g0db1t 1y ago
        [dead]
  • dewey 1y ago
    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.
    • AlecSchueler 1y ago
      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."
      • lucianbr 1y ago
        > 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?"
        • AlecSchueler 1y ago
          Come on, what? Now we've gotten to "Ok the claim was admittedly not true but it's your fault for pointing it out instead of going along with the groupthink" Is this the post-truth society we hear about? The sub-thread was very clearly started by the idea that loss of connectivity might not be as bad as assumed, there was space to have some debate about what positives could be taken and how we could actually prepare to live with outages alongside preparing to negate them. I didn't think much of it honestly, the original point of it not being so bad, but your comment has left me with the feeling that the internet can't fall soon enough.
        • camillomiller 1y ago
          moving the goal post must be fun, especially when you can't understand you're doing it, thus completely degrading the debate!
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  • whiplash451 1y ago
    Did you check with hospitals, prisons and daycares how things went?
  • GardenLetter27 1y ago
    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.
• tmountain 1y ago
  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.
  • deleted 1y ago
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  • Aachen 1y ago
    Right, it's fun to sip wine and chew bubblegum for a day, but that's not the scenario people are worried about
  • Fnoord 1y ago
    > 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.
    • maplant 1y ago
      You've had enough random chitchat to last a lifetime?
      • Fnoord 1y ago
        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.
• al_borland 1y ago
  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.
  • tcoff91 1y ago
    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.
    • geraldhh 1y ago
      absurdities not withstanding, this might actually be a good idea.
    • dghlsakjg 1y ago
      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.
      • chairmansteve 1y ago
        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.
• cogogo 1y ago
  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.