[camillomiller]

It also wasn't so incredibly nasty, though. There were disruptions and some arrests, but the large majority of people were in the streets socializing, dancing, doing impromptu things they wouldn't be doing on a work day.

[dewey]

That's because they kinda expected everything to be back to normal in a few hours. If there would be some more catastrophic distributed outage there would probably be less dancing.

[AlecSchueler]

But wait either it was "pretty" or it wasn't. We've gone from "it wasn't pretty" to "Ok, it was pretty, but only because they expected a resolution."

[closewith]

Pretty for young and unencumbered, less so for the COPD patient with an oxygen concentrator, or the parent of an infant running out of sterile bottles, etc.

[goda90]

To sterilize a bottle you simply need boiling water without a significant amount of toxic materials in it. To get boiling water you need water, a container for the water, a combustible fuel, an ignition source, and a means of transferring heat from the burning fuel to the water. Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.

[closewith]

> Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.

That can get you sterile water, although it's extremely difficult to do and involves many more rocks than you'd imagine easily 5x the mass of rock to water to get a rolling boil for a full minute, but it doesn't get you clean water. Now you have sterile water with a lot of potentially very unpleasant dissolved solids. Certainly not something you'll be using to feed an infant.

[goda90]

Put the bottle in a smaller container of clean water inside the larger container of water with the top sticking out of the water so it doesn't overflow into it. It'll take longer to boil without the convection but you'll get there eventually. You can fashion tongs out of sticks to pull rocks back out after their heat has mostly transferred to the water while you put newly heated ones in.

[prmoustache]

it takes 5 minutes to build a simple but effective alcohol stove out of a soda can.

[djrj477dhsnv]

Sterile bottles? Millions of babies around the world are doing just fine every day without that.

[closewith]

With breastfeeding, which millions can't, for whatever reason (even if only prior preference, you can't turn it on at will). Bottle feeding young babies without the ability to semi-sterilise formula and sterilise bottles will lead to higher infant mortality.

[tonyoconnell]

Some parents of infants would be able to find a way to feed their children safely.

[closewith]

Obviously, but not all. I can't believe I have to say this, but prolonged blackouts (with all the downstream ramifications they bring to hygiene, temperature control, food safety, food availability, etc) would cause infant mortality to exponentially rise as days pass without power.

[20after4]

Without the power grid we are right back to the dark ages in a matter of a few days. Except at least in the dark ages people sort of knew how to survive. Now, only a minority of people really know how to survive without modern conveniences.

[collingreen]

Hopefully it isn't controversial to acknowledge that a few extra dead babies is actually a terrible thing not something you brush aside, right?

[camillomiller]

You mean everyone who didn't have an issue because modern hospitals have backup generators that can run for days, or even indefinitely if diesel-based?

[closewith]

The diesel supply in all countries is dependent on the grid, so days is the absolute maximum. The reality is often much less. During the recent power outage in Portugal, the Alfredo da Costa maternity hospital had only one hour's diesel and had to be resupplied by ministerial chauffeurs delivering Jerry cans of fuel.

Still, all the ancillary services that go into a hospital like water, sewage, medical gasses, cold chains, etc are all dependent on the grid, as are the people who make them work. If a large-scale outage happens, most hospitals will start losing patients within 24-48 hours and will close as functioning hospitals well within a week.

[lucianbr]

> Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications.

I think the subject of the thread is pretty clearly how to deal with interruptions that won't resolve themselves in a short time. It's on you that you choose to ignore that and focus on "was it pretty for a milisecond?"

[AlecSchueler]

Come on, what?

Now we've gotten to "Ok the claim was admittedly not true but it's your fault for pointing it out instead of going along with the groupthink" Is this the post-truth society we hear about?

The sub-thread was very clearly started by the idea that loss of connectivity might not be as bad as assumed, there was space to have some debate about what positives could be taken and how we could actually prepare to live with outages alongside preparing to negate them.

I didn't think much of it honestly, the original point of it not being so bad, but your comment has left me with the feeling that the internet can't fall soon enough.

[camillomiller]

moving the goal post must be fun, especially when you can't understand you're doing it, thus completely degrading the debate!

[killerstorm]

Cooking, refrigeration and water pumping depends on electric power. It can definitely get nasty if it lasts for more than a day

[BLKNSLVR]

This is one of the reasons I'm looking at extending my solar system to add a battery and islanding, so I can have a regular resupply of some amount of power/electricity for the necessities in case of extended outages.

I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.

Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/

Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.

[axelthegerman]

Solar and battery for refrigeration seems a waste.

If you own a house I'd look into very old school options like digging a deep hole to store your food in a dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work for weeks or months without a single milliwatt

[card_zero]

A "cellar"? :)

Or if you want to get technical I guess "root cellar".

[wat10000]

That sounds really inconvenient (am I going to keep my food down there all the time, or is the plan to carry the entire contents of my refrigerator down there in an outage?) not terribly effective (RIP all the frozen stuff) and probably not any cheaper. Plus the hole can’t be used for other things like charging my phone.

[chairmansteve]

Convert a chest freezer into refrigerator and you don't need batteries.

https://www.notechmagazine.com/category/refrigeration

[card_zero]

That's very smart and might end my quest for a truly quiet bedroom fridge, if it really only runs two minutes in an hour. (Light fridges marketed as "quiet" just produce near-constant annoying fan noise, quietly.)

[20after4]

It really works, and if you fill half the space with water then it'll only need to run once or twice a week (assuming you don't open the lid often)

[michaelt]

Have you looked at hotel minibar fridges? They're generally pretty quiet.

[Dylan16807]

It'll work just great to keep half the things in my fridge safe and none of the things in my freezer safe.

Refrigeration is top priority and I would happily buy solar panels just to keep it working (plus leeching a few watts for my phone).

[ta1243]

Solar+battery is great for a few weeks locally with no power, or a couple of days nationally.

It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.

[antisthenes]

> It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.

A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house?

Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?

[ryandrake]

If society actually suffers a sustained "collapse," access to electricity won't even be among your top-20 problems. You're going to be more worried about how you're going to obtain water, food, and protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.

[antisthenes]

> protect yourself from the roving looters and/or warlords that will immediately spring up in the absence of law and order.

This is a hollywood meme.

The reality is that aggressive looters/warlords will be very quickly disposed of and the remaining ones will fall in line and become semi-official protective militia forces, who will labor alongside farmers in small communities if they don't want to starve.

Food scarcity will be a much bigger issue that some nutcase trying to loot my solar panels.

[20after4]

For folks with a private well, electricity is the key to fresh water. At least for a while.

[XorNot]

This is exactly it. The other part is not just water pumping but operating the sewer systems - if the lift stations are down the whole thing fills up in about a week and the basic plumbing in your house - and thus pretty much entire city, stops working.

Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.

[GardenLetter27]

Only because it didn't last overnight and wasn't at the peak of summer.

Otherwise you're throwing out all fresh food, supermarkets couldn't process payments nor most restaurants either, etc.

[whiplash451]

Did you check with hospitals, prisons and daycares how things went?