Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are you going to do, nuke the hurricanes?
In a war, I mean.
Then why would you reply to someone talking about devastation as the result of a natural disaster?
How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
291–300 of 310 posts
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#292Indefinitely. Unless you have a very narrow definition of society. People forget that things like industrialization and capitalism are very recent inventions, and throughout our species history we've had many many different ways of organizing ourselves. Heck, the society of the 1970s is pretty radically different than today. But I'm surprised to see fertilizer production not listed. Ammonia fertilizer is whole intege…
The useful definition of society is “society” here is “society as we know it”. So, how long until there is widespread civil unrest and loss of life. I’d say about a week, maybe less, depending on the location and scope of the outage. Clean water will quickly be a problem.
People should be keeping a week off water handy if they live somewhere this is possible. It's not hard to, it's relatively inexpensive, and it's pretty much fire and forget.
If you live in somewhere threatened by climate or earthquakes or volcanos, store some food, water, and basic medical supplies!
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
How is it possible to fly a confederate flag after the civil war? How is it possible to be a nazi sympathizer after WWII?
Aren't those people, in Germany without the Confederate Flag since the German Empires flag from WW1 is used instead, quite often the same people?
There are plenty of folks who support “states rights” (to slavery) but don’t support fascism. They just don’t realise that they are fascist themselves (government by corporations, profit before people, find some minority group to blame for all your problems, etc)
There are also folks caught up in pro-fascist organisations simply because they want to express their general anger at the world for not living up to their expectations.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Soon, islanding of homes, and the spread of more micro grids, means that a lot of the older reasoning in this article won't make much sense This. Not only is it not mentioned in the article, it seems to be largely absent from the minds of planners, as the development and implementation of micro grids is mostly ad hoc and haphazard. But the lessons learned from the war in Ukraine, as well as the increased likelihood…
Unfortunately, the massive influence of central grid profiteers make the obviously beneficial (especially in times of disaster and war) move to micro grids progress at the slowest possible pace.
The thing about microgrids is that maintenance falls onto the owner.
You still require specialized knowledge and perhaps team of people who can handle it to maintain the microgrid and repair it.
You still require supply chains for the complicated parts that cannot be easily replaced, mostly batteries and inverters. In a shortage situation, central grids will be under pressure to be fixed immediately, but your single set of wind turbines or solar panels might not be.
So the way I see it, microgrids would be maintained by cities and communities instead. The level of distribution would make it similar in action to the times of old coal power plants, one per city.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
The issue with those was that they were indeed very ecologically dirty, especially the lignite mines from Gorj. You can actually see the devastation that they have brought on the ecosystem even from satellite images [1]. I agree though, if one takes a step back and looks at the whole thing (i.e. if you add the socio-economic conditions) this was a very bad decision. I personally don't think renewables will be able to…
We actually have a pretty awesome energy mix in Romania. It's a hard thing to rank, but we could be in the top 3. A lot of hydro, a fair amount of nuclear and we're expanding the nuclear, and a bit of hydro as well. Plus quite a bit of wind, and an almost-working program to encourage private individuals to install solar and sell back to the network. Yes, as part of that mix we had some horribly dirty old school plant…
The coal power plant however gives you little flexibility for all the maintenance cost.
Can it burn wood? Nah. Biogas? Nope.
Do you have coal everywhere? As we found in Poland it's a scarce resource controlled mostly by a few parties and hard to store and transport in required bulk. I wonder how much of your coal is imported.
The proper replacement would be biofuels, if anything.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#296Earlier quoted context omitted.
Absolute nonsense, Russia will invade what they call "little Russias" because they believe they are superior and that the people in those land belong to them, and that the resources belong to them. NATO has nothing to do with Russia's urge to invade and oppress other cultures, but NATO is a way for such countries to defend themselves. So if a professor claims to have expertise and not understand these basic facts tha…
You mean such as the academic who spent his entire career studying the politics of the area?
That's an argument to authority, but there are many many more authorities that would disagree vehemently, and could back it up with specific statements. For example, Timothy Snyder, who is a historian specializing in the area, but really any sort of fair sampling would find that most Russian Studies professors would not be willing to uncritically repeat Kremlin propaganda like the "realist" school of international relations.
Plus, the idea that Russia had to invade a country to stop NATO expansion, if that's what's being asserted, is so farcical because countries want to join NATO to avoid getting invaded; it's a rather comical reversal. NATO expansion would stop really quickly if Russia would cease wanting to conquer neighboring countries; saying that Russia has legitimate security concerns just means that someone believes all these sovereign nations bordering Russia are not actually sovereign and should be part of Russia, which is again just repeating Russian imperialism as being right because it's right.
Plus, Putin has been pretty explicit in his writings on Ukraine, as he pretends to be a historian. Putin just wants to eliminate Ukraine as a nation and force Ukrainians to be subservient to Russians, it's all there out in the open in his writings. Denying this is kind of like trying to argue that Mein Kampf wasn't Hitler's real thoughts, and that Germany had to invade Poland and then the USSR simply for their own security concerns.
But if you can recall the name of this academic, it will be pretty quick to refute the specific claims made by other authorities in the area.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#297I'm surprised that this article doesn't even mention the ongoing, continual attacks on the civilian Ukrainian electrical grid, in a concerted effort to take it out with thousands of cruise missiles and loitering drones. Perhaps not all countries will be as determined as the Ukrainians are in their constant repairs, but even with half of their generation capability destroyed, and so many substations targeted, the effe…
I suggest a far simpler technique in the modern society: just use a long list of crapware vulnerabilities. Instead of expensive missiles just use cracked from the factory EVs, smart ovens, boiler, p.v. inverters, ... to simply create peaks loads (both demand and demand drop) and you have crushed the enemy "smart" grid without much effort, physical damage and still having it functional if you want to invade. Oh, did y…
Ukraine's electrical grid has been under severe cyber attack for years by Russia. I suspect their defenses have come pretty hardened, and Ukrainians are no slouch when it comes to software.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who lives "out in the country" I can tell you from experience that city people will walk right past a field full of food without even recognising that it is food. They're too used to seeing the polished, buffed and packaged thing that ends up in the supermarket.
That sounds quite harsh. People that live in cities aren't stupid.
Wheat looks like grass if you aren't familiar with it.
ditto potato plants - only the roots are what you want, and as they're invisible, if you don't know what a potato plant looks like, you'll have no idea you're looking at food, as OP says.
I could go on for a while, but you get the gist.
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
My experience differs. The right leaning members of my family strongly support Russia and the left leaning strongly support Ukraine. It’s caused a lot of strife in my family. And I don’t think the right folks feel like they’re on the fringe. They do watch a lot of Fox, but they’re not Q folks, afaik at least.
Odd, I know lots of right folks and none support russia, they just don’t support sending more money to Ukraine, either bec they believe the accurate reports of widespread corruption (which Biden himself attested to 6 years ago) or bec they’re isolationist and don’t really believe our interventions have helped “spread freedom” anywhere. And would rather we dedicate our resources to bettering our own clearly failing co…
> And would rather we dedicate our resources to bettering our own clearly failing country.
The vast majority of our support is in the form of weapons, and the vast majority of those weapons come from existing inventory.
Even the new spending is just money cycling back to US weapons manufacturers.
What good would weapons do to solve our domestic issues?
Re: How long would society last during a total grid collapse?
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
For most normal countries that aren't engaged in a power struggle against the world order it is probably safest for them if no one else can have them. The problem with nukes is that any one competent holder of nukes can basically trigger mutually assure destruction, so more actors are likely going to be more dangerous than the danger from the current holders.
so why should "west" have them as opposed to someone else?
No one is arguing "should".