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579 points todsacerdoti | 1 comments | 16 Jun 25 07:38 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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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dewey ◴[16 Jun 25 08:49 UTC] No.44287705[source]▶
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.
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AlecSchueler ◴[16 Jun 25 11:14 UTC] No.44288481[source]▶
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."
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closewith ◴[16 Jun 25 12:08 UTC] No.44288793[source]▶
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.
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tonyoconnell ◴[16 Jun 25 12:36 UTC] No.44288968[source]▶
Some parents of infants would be able to find a way to feed their children safely.
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closewith ◴[16 Jun 25 13:00 UTC] No.44289122[source]▶
Obviously, but not all. I can't believe I have to say this, but prolonged blackouts (with all the downstream ramifications they bring to hygiene, temperature control, food safety, food availability, etc) would cause infant mortality to exponentially rise as days pass without power.
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20after4 ◴[16 Jun 25 18:48 UTC] No.44292303[source]▶
Without the power grid we are right back to the dark ages in a matter of a few days. Except at least in the dark ages people sort of knew how to survive. Now, only a minority of people really know how to survive without modern conveniences.
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briansm ◴[17 Jun 25 05:07 UTC] No.44295921{3}[source]▶
I would disagree. The dark ages were hundreds of years ago, the electric grid is much less than a century old. Plenty of countries have unreliable supply and rolling blackouts and have adapted to it or have just never became accustomed to the luxury of 24/7 electricity on demand. Being without juice is not the end of the world.
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1. closewith ◴[17 Jun 25 07:13 UTC] No.44296459{4}[source]▶
Those places generally have the luxury of 24/7 electricity, normally via diesel gensets, for key parts of their infrastructure, such as fuel transfer, hospital, food supply.

The places that don't have the fallback ready access to fallback diesel genset, like rural South Sudan or Burundi, are pretty close to an end of the world scenario.

Don't romanticise disaster. If a developed country indefinitely lost power, a huge swathe of the population would die, starting with the infants, elderly, and chronically ill. Then hunger and disease would come for the rest. Nonsense ideas that we'd MacGyver or bushcraft our way out of trouble are infantile.