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US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

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Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#101

Post by steve19 »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #50
Noumenon72 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand how you have identified this as the problem. Sure, states haven't coordinated on lockdowns, testing, or mask purchasing. But it's not because they're struggling against the federal government, it's because there's no official policy to coordinate with. Seems to me like our main difficulty deviating from normal is the fact that a 20% decrease in demand kills off 10% of businesses within weeks and ca…

It’s more nuanced than that. As Gov Pritzker made public, states are having to bid against one another for PPE and driving up prices significantly because it’s every man (or woman) for themselves. He publicly castigated the federal government for not centralizing the acquisition of resources (which isn’t the same as footing the bill as they can allocate the materials (acquired at whatever better cost they can negotia…

If the feds did centralize acquisition and distribution all hell would break loose. Every allocation would be disputed and every allocation would be blamed on partisan allegiances.

The solution would be the states deciding among themselves who should get what, with the richer states being OK with getting less than they would otherwise get.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#102

Post by steve19 »

roywiggins wrote: post #57
beambot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Events like the Carrington & Covid seem to fit: high profile, hard to predict and rare. IMO, both qualify as Black swan. At some point, you have to pick a threshold on the probabilities involved... These events are likely independent & identically distributed (i.e. hard to predict for any year), and I'd call sub-1% annual chance pretty rare. But I'm receptive to a different threshold... But you can't just say "Black…

Not to be all Word of God, but Nassim Taleb does not consider COVID19 a black swan at all. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is... It's not a black swan because everyone with half a brain could say that there would eventually be a global pandemic respiratory disease. H1N1 was technically one, it just happened to be mild. We thought there was going to be one in 1976 and raced to vaccinate every…

Are any black swans going to be black swans in hindsight?

Did anyone anticipate it enough to put their money where their mouth was? A fortune, and a major service to humanity, could have been made by a private individuals stockpiling PPE in vast quantities.

You say anyone with half a brain anticipated it. I didn't. Did you buy 500k N95 masks and put them in a warehouse?

Knowing someone will happen is easy. I know for sure that a large meatorite will hit the earth and cause mass deaths and crop failure, but I have no idea in how many 100s, 1000s or millions of year it will happen. If it happens tomorrow it would be a black Swan *

* an example only, we would get plenty of advanced warning.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#103

Post by realtalk_sp »

phonon wrote: post #29
realtalk_sp wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly it might cost Berkshire even less to just reinsure against the risk.

Berkshire is the 5th largest reinsurer in the world[1], so not likely to happen... [1] https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/breaking-news/t...

Not sure what you're trying to imply. Reinsurers do in fact reinsure against their own risk. It's turtles all the way down.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#104

Post by glangdale »

redis_mlc wrote: post #94
harikb wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some states like CA were prepared, but the federal government can’t leave these things for states to fend for themselves. At some point somebody somewhere will try to save a few million to make a budget match. Federal government burned 10 times that amount, probably the same day, on military [1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...

> Some states like CA were prepared CA has a stockpile that was allowed to deteoriate due to budget cuts. So the initial impression was that we weren't prepared, but then we reassessed the situation and gave away at least 500 ventilators to other states as we felt more confident. Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1. You can see that in th…

> Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1.

Ummn, what? This sounds like an entirely made up factoid, and certainly isn't supported by the dashboard. The estimates of how many people in a population have to have had COVID-19 are very high. Even if you buy the Stanford study, which is itself controversial, the estimated numbers for how many have been exposed to the virus are still an order of magnitude below what you'd need for herd immunity.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#105

Post by te »

flipgimble wrote: post #99

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I di…

You might like Gaming the Vote by William Poundstone.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#106

Post by jimbob45 »

flipgimble wrote: post #99

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I di…

Nobody competent? I think I'd be quite competent, thank you very much.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#107

Post by FlyMoreRockets »

dmurray wrote: post #61
FlyMoreRockets wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Add asteroid strike at with the energy level of a nuclear warhead to that list. Fortunately, it is 71% likely to come down in the ocean.

It would have to be a lot bigger than "a nuclear warhead" to cause a global catastrophe rather than a local one, and it has to be more unfortunately aimed than just coming down over land. It would be pretty bad if the Chelyabinsk meteor had hit Tokyo or Mexico City, but as it happened it troubled glaziers more than doctors.

The problem with a sudden nuclear scale explosion is that it could trigger a nuclear exchange.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#108

Post by pupdogg »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #92
_bxg1 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That 90% number seems really hard to believe. Additionally, from the referenced article: > There is no published model disclosing how these numbers were arrived at, nor are we able to validate a primary source for this claim. Testimony given by the Chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, while expressing similar concerns, gave no estimate of the deaths that would accrue from a prolonged nationwide grid collapse…

That 90% number seems really hard to believe. Not to me. The real number could be even higher, at least for the USA population. Without electricity, here are just a few things that come to mind: 1) no water to your house. Have fun drinking out of the nearest river. There won't be a hospital you can go to when you get cholera or dysentery or heavy metal poisoning. 2) have fun using a chain saw (you do have one?) to ch…

I can understand your negative perception on such situations but do you honestly believe that wind mills will come to a screeching halt with such outage? No, I’m not implying that they will power the entire nation but I have a hard time believing that those small sunsets of folks will also not have power.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#109

Post by Afforess »

twomoretime wrote: post #100
flipgimble wrote: post #99

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I di…

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

This attitude is toxic and worse, incorrect. The majority of Americans did not vote for our President. I live in Austin, and my state district in TX includes a tiny slice of a city hundreds of miles away, Houston. Many state districts are like this, gerrymandered to prevent my vote from counting. Some places have it worse, DC, the capital, has no representation at all (fun trivia: Google the DC license plate).

The voters didn't ask nor vote for our government. The government picked the voters...

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#110

Post by toss1 »

twomoretime wrote: post #100
flipgimble wrote: post #99

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I di…

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

Which is only true as a tautology.

Start with considering skewed results when an electoral process is skewed by asymmetric warfare of an adversary.

Or consider regulatory capture by small subsets of the society, not visible until the damage is done....

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