121–130 of 267 posts
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> That 90% number seems really hard to believe As context, I spent three years driving right around Africa, and before that two years driving from Alaska to Argentina. I've seen my fair share of collapsing infrastructure (Congo... Mali... Sudan, etc.) and what happens in just a few days without electricity. In less developed countries the impacts are actually much less than they will be in our developed countries, be…
You the guy with the YouTube channel?
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.
The book “One Second After” deals with an EMP attack on the US. I don’t understand why we are not better prepared.
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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.
So yes, windmills will come to a halt because they are designed to. Or, more specifically, they will feather their blades and continue to rotate idly while not producing power in order to ensure adequate hub lubrication.
There is a significant concern that, even in a scenario where all power plants are undamaged, it would take a significant period of time for plant operators and distribution system operators to restore service due to the need to more or less restart everything. Something very similar happened during the California power crisis and the great Northeast blackout, in which undamaged power plants were offline for an extended period of time due to the difficulty of restoring grid condition to normal.
Even under normal conditions of a stable grid, when power plants start (e.g. due to expected increase in demand) it takes hours from startup to connection to the grid. Most renewable generation methods (except hydro) and the newest natural-gas turbine plants can start much more quickly (e.g. 15 minutes), but this assumes that they will be connected to a grid which is operating at their design frequency, which would be very difficult to achieve if there has been a significant loss of generation.
And just to worry a bit more, a significant amount of electrical generation, especially in plants capable of load following (quick response to demand), is via natural gas. Natural gas distribution also relies heavily on compressor stations which run on, well, electricity. These stations have backup power capability but recent experience in the Southwest, during the 2011 winter, shows that this is not entirely reliable, and that severe events can disrupt the natural gas supply as well.
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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…
It has to be something that's just not accounted for in your worldview, something you couldn't expect based on anything you know about. A meteorite wouldn't be a black swan for us, but I think it would be for a society that hadn't discovered them yet. A meteorite strike on London circa 1800 would have been a black swan, because at the time people (Europeans, anyway) thought that shooting stars were atmospheric phenomena. Large rocks falling from the sky just wasn't in their cosmology.
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This is how things are supposed to work. The federal government is give very specific enumerated powers per the constitution. The founder are would be appalled by the size and scope of the federal government. One thing they did not account for was lack of loyalty people have towards their own state.
States are supposed to be using national guards to protect things they buy from seizure by the federal government? Can you explain why you believe that?
How much should we worry about this? http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk... was prepared by Lloyds of London after the 2012 detection of a large solar flare by a satellite in interplanetary space. (That one missed the Earth.) Their estimate was $600 billion - $2 trillion dollars of damage from an event that happens roughly once ever 150 years on average. Therefore the amortized cost of this r…
It might be a good investment for anyone to stockpile some of these things, assuming you can sell them for 100x what you paid when The Event happens. Which, if my made up math is correct, means several entities probably already have done so.
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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 vo…
You can rise up and fix the system and get the leader you deserve, or you can complain about and do nothing else, and in that case you'll end up with the leader you deserve.
Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and basic decency, no matter what. Even if they make a mistake. Especially then. People deserve better.
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assuming you can sell them for 100x what you paid That would be a dangerous assumption. Price is a good method of discriminating between who wants something and who needs something. But just try and raise prices during a pandemic and there will be 1) laws and 2) calls of "price gouging". If The Event really happened I bet that any transformers would be taken by the state/feds within 24 hours. And such an action would…
Never has there been a better time to find evidence on this particular debate... Here's a relevant search of Google News: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&biw=1265&... Choice headlines include: PPE suppliers accused of 'blatant profiteering' as prices inflated by up to 825 per cent. Cost of PPE soars due to price gouging, surge in demand ... Protective equipment costs increase over 1000% amid ... Th…
So, you would need to establish solid pricing history for your stockpile.
(source: worked with a mil commander who had been peripherally involved with an event where they snagged ~100 very backordered top end Sun workstations off the shipping floor. also currently work on DOD projects)
What you are reading is likely commercial transactions. You should also note that some of those vendors have been snd will be busted by the FBI for price gouging. E.g., one guy in Brooklyn got busted with truckloads of N95 masks & PPE, they just arrested him, logged the gear & donated it.
Your multiple needs to be very sane, or you are relying only on luck - they like to make examples of that kind of of behavior...
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You can rise up and fix the system and get the leader you deserve, or you can complain about and do nothing else, and in that case you'll end up with the leader you deserve.
This is more of the same sanctimonious toxicity. You don't know me. I already donate to act blue. I already go to political rally's. I already help get friends to go vote. I already am a member of local political groups. I am still not represented. No state or federal ballot I have ever cast has counted. Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and b…
It's not meant as a flippant comment. Taxes are an exchange from citizens to state, in return for a certain duty of care.
Yes, the system is set up to inflict severe punishment on dissenters - because tax money enables (or disables) government.
But, the more people who rally around your political protest, the more effective it becomes...