Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 161 posts

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#121

Post by graemep »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #84
anon291 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most westerners are woefully misguided in their interpretation of eastern religions. We are still people. I'm always shocked when Europeans or Americans single out Christianity as some uniquely malevolent force. People are like this. We have always been like this. Being atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, pagan, heathen, etc -- it doesn't make you superhuman. We're all capable of this and the soone…

Much religion depends on magical thinking and/or blind appeals to authority. IME it facilitates bad behavior that's less likely to be tolerated by more rational belief systems.

The big genocides and mass murders of the twentieth century were motivated by non-religious (the holocaust) or atheist (in the Soviet union, China, and Cambodia) ideologies..

Even historically religious motives for "bad behaviours" were rare.

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#122

Post by concordDance »

picafrost wrote: post #119

BBC's 'Mammals' [0] spends a portion of one of its episodes discussing the plight of howler monkeys in Costa Rica. [1] These monkeys die frequently to electrocution as urbanization continues. The power lines look like reasonable crossing routes above the dangerous and hostile human world. The solution they implemented was to build canopy bridges safe for the monkeys. This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing…

> This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do.

Depends on the ratio you put on human vs animal lives. Money is fungible, the more you spend on walkways the less you spend on road signage or MRI machines.

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#123

Post by rightbyte »

grg0 wrote: post #37

The monkey was a foreign nation state sponsored insider testing the nation's grid. Sri Lanka is in trouble, and authorities are mobilizing fast and expanding the surveillance state to thwart future threats before they are realized. They are deploying AI at scale.

I think you need to add a "/s" for mocking insane fearmongering jingoist statements nowadays. Just saying.

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#124

Post by Boltgolt »

roncesvalles wrote: post #110

Holy clickbait. The title implies that Sri Lanka is totally out of power like Haiti, but that's far from the truth. >Ninety-minute power cuts were implemented on Monday and Tuesday to manage demand. An investigation into the outage was being conducted by the energy ministry. This is the extent of the "outage". It's more of a capacity reduction than a grid failure.

Mentioning "load shedding" would have made a more accurate title

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#125

Post by cies »

entropicgravity wrote: post #98

I presume the monkey got fried.

> There were no immediate details on whether the monkey survived the incident.

I was also thinking about the monkey. Sadly we don't know.

Also: if a monkey can cause this much drama, I'm not sure if the monkey is to blame (as per the title). This is gov't pushing the blame to the monkey imho.

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#126

Post by test6554 »

concordDance wrote: post #122
picafrost wrote: post #119

BBC's 'Mammals' [0] spends a portion of one of its episodes discussing the plight of howler monkeys in Costa Rica. [1] These monkeys die frequently to electrocution as urbanization continues. The power lines look like reasonable crossing routes above the dangerous and hostile human world. The solution they implemented was to build canopy bridges safe for the monkeys. This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing…

> This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do. Depends on the ratio you put on human vs animal lives. Money is fungible, the more you spend on walkways the less you spend on road signage or MRI machines.

Some places attract tourism because of the local wildlife. Take that away and eventually they wouldn’t be able to afford MRI machines anyway.

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#127

Post by graemep »

egberts1 wrote: post #114
abe94 wrote: post #2

can coming into contact with a single transformer disrupt power to the entire island?

Yes. Having lived on a 8-mile by 5-mile island, power grid USED to be fed with a single transformer before the state funded a power company to take over and properly re-grid it. Silly as it may sound, outage was easily triggered by a wildlife (beavers by flooding, hawk-arial-nest, chipmunk tunnels, male-deers pushes it, badgers weaken foundation, even bees and ants) by disrupting poles that support the grid. They'll…

> Having lived on a 8-mile by 5-mile island

That is a whole lot smaller than Sri Lanka which is 268 miles by 139 miles and has a population of about 22m. Size similar to Ireland, population about 80% that of Australia.

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#128

Post by statictype »

eudhxhdhsb32 wrote: post #74
esperent wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing that's stopped me from going to Sri Lanka so far is not lack of fiber. It's that every time I look up a genuine travel video of the place, they talk about how much the tuktuk drivers hassle any white person trying to walk around. Outside of the few main hotspots, people don't hassle you in Bali. They are an incredibly friendly and polite people in spite of the tourism. Of course, Bali isn't completely hassl…

> they talk about how much the tuktuk drivers hassle any white person trying to walk around. That wasn't my experience when I traveled there 3 years ago, and I walked around quite a bit. My biggest complaint was the lack of good local restaurants, even in big cities. The juice bars were pretty great though. Still miss wood apple. Another issue was the insanely reckless driving and incessant honking. Even with the ple…

It’s all relative. Having lived and driven in India for many years, the driving in Sri Lanka is very organized and civil.

But I get what you’re saying.

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#129

Post by hoveringhen »

master_kuro wrote: post #61
lostlogin wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The relatively recent genocide also points to a high level of dysfunction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide

This is absolutely insane. It's almost cartoonishly monstrous. Why isn't this better known? The way the Tamils were treated is so pure a representation of evil that I can barely get through the Wikipedia page. This was the work of Buddhists, too! I've been taught that Buddhists were peaceful and non-violent by creed, but clearly not if the only Buddhist majority nation is capable of such abomination.

Buddhists are humans too ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ There's also the Rohingyan genocide where Buddhist nationalism is involved.

If you want to read a good non-fiction on the Sri Lankan civil war, check out "The Divided Island" by Samanth Subramaniam.

Re: Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide outage

#130

Post by paulryanrogers »

graemep wrote: post #121
paulryanrogers wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Much religion depends on magical thinking and/or blind appeals to authority. IME it facilitates bad behavior that's less likely to be tolerated by more rational belief systems.

The big genocides and mass murders of the twentieth century were motivated by non-religious (the holocaust) or atheist (in the Soviet union, China, and Cambodia) ideologies.. Even historically religious motives for "bad behaviours" were rare.

Were those genocides really motivated by of a lack of religion or other factors like racism and authoritarianism?

> Even historically religious motives for "bad behaviours" were rare.

Doubt. Still, even if that's accurate, my point was that raising people to be easily manipulated sheep doesn't produce a robust society. It just makes them easier to exploit. MLMs are common in predominantly Mormon communities for a reason.

Post reply on HN