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Start your own Internet Resiliency Club

(bowshock.nl)
579 points todsacerdoti | 3 comments | 16 Jun 25 07:38 UTC | HN request time: 0.656s | source
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lljk_kennedy ◴[16 Jun 25 08:38 UTC] No.44287646[source]▶
> One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone doesn’t work

I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic

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ndr ◴[16 Jun 25 08:40 UTC] No.44287653[source]▶
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.
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camillomiller ◴[16 Jun 25 08:45 UTC] No.44287686[source]▶
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.
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killerstorm ◴[16 Jun 25 09:06 UTC] No.44287782[source]▶
Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day
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BLKNSLVR ◴[16 Jun 25 09:40 UTC] No.44287937[source]▶
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.

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ta1243 ◴[16 Jun 25 11:09 UTC] No.44288447[source]▶
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.

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antisthenes ◴[16 Jun 25 13:02 UTC] No.44289130[source]▶
> 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?

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ryandrake ◴[16 Jun 25 15:50 UTC] No.44290739[source]▶
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.
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1. antisthenes ◴[16 Jun 25 19:39 UTC] No.44292728[source]▶
> 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.

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2. apitman ◴[16 Jun 25 22:29 UTC] No.44293971[source]▶
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.
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3. antisthenes ◴[17 Jun 25 14:39 UTC] No.44299829[source]▶
There are a lot more of regular reasonable folks who own guns (approximately 134 million in USA) than those who have some kind of meme warlord fantasy.

Which is to say, normal people really don't like shooting each other, and they REALLY don't like being shot at, so most normal folks would eliminate the threat of crazy warlords first, then form some kind of organized militia group to repel small groups of raiders/thieves.

Any large group of raiders would very quickly fall victim to its own internal politics and lack of resources, because they don't produce anything. You can't have a group that's 100% raiders.

It's just not going to look like Mad Max, ever. Sorry to disappoint.