61–70 of 77 posts
Anyone else read ted koppel's book?
Yea, came here to post about it. Was a riveting read with some great interviews. It being Ted Koppel, he got access to some really high placed people. [1] 1: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/books/review/lights-out-b...
A large outage like SF, if it wasn't done in a controlled manner, could be grid overload. Or to prevent grid overload, utilities might need to shut down a regular on a high voltage supply line, which causes an overload somewhere else in the system, and automatic cutoff switches force a blackout.
Similar events have happened over the years starting in a remote state and ending in a California blackout. Often it's due to aging infrastructure which goes down unexpectedly, which then causes a chain reaction that hits other parts of the grid. If winds took down power lines in LA, this could cause a backup which could take out SF. It's possible that either LA or New York could have caused the SF blackout, or vice versa. If one part of the grid starts to go down it puts pressure on the rest, and things start to pop.
Note: I'm talking out my ass here, but it's based on news reports of previous outages.
Crazy conspiracy theory: the Chinese and/or Russians have most likely already compromised our power grid and other infrastructure control systems and are waging covert economical war by disrupting important services.
It's a valid hypothesis and not crazy at all. If this were random I'd expect totally random cities, not the three most economically significant. It might not be covert economic warfare, but more of a covert demonstration whose audience is intended to be the US government. "We have lots of dangerous 0-days, and there's a lot more where these came from." In that case public credit would never be claimed. It reminds me…
I don't think SF ranks in the top 3, I'm almost certain that Chicago would rank higher in economic significance, and I'd guess that Houston is above SF, probably Boston too.
Despite SF being so popular in the technology space, it's really quite a small city -- only around 800K people, compared to nearly 4M in LA, and 2.5M in Chicago.
EDIT: I found a ranking from 2010 and SF is #9
https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/america...
New York LA Chicago Wash DC Houston Dallas Philadelphia Boston SF
I was once informed by someone working at a major energy company that if the utility frequency dropped to a certain specific value it could cause uncontrollable systemwide cascading blackouts. I don't remember the value, but I wish I did. A large outage like SF, if it wasn't done in a controlled manner, could be grid overload. Or to prevent grid overload, utilities might need to shut down a regular on a high voltage…
North Korean retaliation for us hacking their missile launch last week?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not likely because of Hanlon's razor: "don't attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
This takes precedence: "Once is an accident. Twice is a coincidence. Three times is an enemy action" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moscow_rules
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not likely because of Hanlon's razor: "don't attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity". [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon%27s_razor
Hanlon's Razor is not an established law of reasoning or of philosophy. Quoting it is not a valid counter argument without additional reasoning given.
Remember last time nefarious hackers infecting computers at power plants were in the news, that later turned out to be antivirus finding some spam on completely unrelated computer?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hanlon's Razor is not an established law of reasoning or of philosophy. Quoting it is not a valid counter argument without additional reasoning given.
That's why I said "not likely" rather than "impossible". It's just conservative Bayesian prior. Remember last time nefarious hackers infecting computers at power plants were in the news, that later turned out to be antivirus finding some spam on completely unrelated computer?