Complex systems, like the human body, are incredibly robust (failure rates of the death penalty in the US, for example, are surprisingly high), and incredibly fragile (we've all heard stories about the person who slipped on the ice, hit their head and instantly died). We get used to the robust and we sometimes forget the fragile.
When I lived in Switzerland I was surprised to find that every modern building has a nuclear bunker in the basement, and that even now they are kept up: supplies are rotated, there are inspections, etc. At first it seemed quaint, but then I realized that as arguably the richest country in the world, they're not as interested in getting richer as they are in preserving what they have -- thus different forms of insurance, including even bunkers. I now find that quite smart, actually.
Switzerland's bunker policy is the logical extension of that country's historically defensive posture.
The Swiss have deliberately made it very, very difficult to perform a conventional invasion of their country; the geography makes it a natural fortress and they've studiously added to it.
If conventional invasion is impossible, then the next option is weapons of mass destruction. Relatively cheap and effective. The Swiss have no WMD deterrent of their own, therefore they have to bet on survivability. Hence the bunkers.
As a country they definitely take the very long view.
It's also worth to notice the way Swiss survived WWII. They sat on critical supply routes, and organized guerilla before anyone could invade, giving them an incredibly strong bargaining position.
Keeping bunkers actually works well with that. And they're not really wasted space — people use them as wine cellars, washing rooms or whatever else.
The US also turned away plenty of Jewish refugees. US and the UK refused to let Black Free French soldiers take part in the freeing of Paris since they wanted it to be a "white victory". The US also put Japanese Americans in internment camps.
Its ridiculous to single out the Swiss as shameful in WW2, looking at norms 70 years ago would make all people "shameful" in some way.
>Its ridiculous to single out the Swiss as shameful in WW2, looking at norms 70 years ago would make all people "shameful" in some way.
Are you actually equating all acts of 'shamefulness' during the 30s/40s at the same level? Your statement is tantamount to equating the actions of the allies with the axis, which is obviously ludicrous. The Swiss acted uncharacteristically selfishly and shamefully, even when compared to the record of the US. There's no need to jump to some half-baked defense of the Swiss, they deserve every bit of criticism leveled at them for their actions during WW2.
I was only replying specifically to the two claims that you made.
The first of which was exactly the same in the US (and possibly less justified; given it's size, the US could have absorbed Jewish refugees much more easily than the Swiss).
The second was almost certainly done at a smaller scale by US banks, and is mostly just because the US didn't have the opportunity since fewer Holocaust victims had their Gold in American banks than Swiss banks. It's ridiculous to think that Americans were so much more moral than the Swiss just because they had fewer opportunities to steal.
If there are other things that the Swiss did that were so shameful, I am interested in knowing.
>I was only replying specifically to the two claims that you made.
Well, that's not really true. Your post acted as a rebuff of the criticism of Switzerland, based on the logic that the US undertook similar actions. You said Switzerland "shouldn't be singled out" for criticism, yet OP wasn't singling Switzerland out but merely adding information to the topic at hand, which was Switzerland's record during WW2. So why even bring the US up? Nothing they did eliminates the need to remind people of Switzerland's abhorrent actions during WW2, and yet you still state this shouldn't be done ("Its ridiculous to single out the Swiss as shameful in WW2.")
Secondly, the statement that I quoted of yours made quite a specific argument that you didn't mention most recently, regarding how Switzerland's actions should be viewed in perspective of the times. I argued it was fallacious to say that flattening the morality of the issue just because standards were lower during the war results in less of a need to discuss Switzerland's crimes during this time. You haven't attempted to refute this point, yet your latest post still made the statement that "I was only replying specifically to the two claims that you made [Swiss rejection of refugees and theft from Holocaust victims]" (which is aside from the fact that I am not the original author of the post you first responded to.)
So it's still curious why you felt the need to rebuff
gadders criticism of the Swiss during WW2 given that it was on topic, even acknowledging similar actions take by the US.
I understood the original post as implying that the Swiss were effectively Nazi sympathizers since they turned away people fleeing the Holocaust; the statement is very misleading when stated alone. I mention the US did the same and they are very unlikely to be accused of being Nazi collaborators.
The reason I bring up the context of other countries at the same time period is not to say the actions are admirable, I am providing context of what else was happening at the same time. I think many people don't fully realize that actions that used to be routine would be reviled through the lens of today's politics and norms; examine any one country and you can easily condemn anyone.
I assumed the response most readers would have with that knowledge is to vilify the Swiss while still holding the Allies in high esteem.
I want to point out, bad behavior doesn't excuse other bad behavior, and I wish people wouldn't argue using that tenet. Also, the fact that something was a norm at one time doesn't excuse it either.
Except the US did not go to war against Nazi Germany to close the concentration camps, but for their own self interest. Every single nation acted in their self interest during WW2, and excluding the single outlier of the Holocaust, I haven't heard of any actions by any nation that were any more or less moral than that.
Edit: My apologies, there were clearly plenty of other atrocities (eg Rape of Nanking if you consider that as part of WW2), but it is simply is not accurate to claim that Swiss were evil and the US were shining knights.
It is a common Americanism to talk like we singlehandedly defeated the Nazis, as if no other nation really contributed. I've discussed it with a few foreign friends. I am not in any shape to discuss it intelligently at the moment. Just thought I would note that this egomaniacal hero complex is one of this nation's foibles.
I don't have some across the board policy, perhaps because friends have been scarce of late. Since basically no one speaks to me, I don't currently have any need to make judgement calls of that sort. But my personal history suggests I am disinclined towards sweeping judgements of any sort. (shrug)
Hitler had absolutely no chance of long-term victory against UK and USSR, and Swiss also saved untold amounts of people who otherwise would have nowhere to go. They turned away plenty of refugees (IMO needlessly), but they saved plenty who otherwise would have no hope. And while they could make a stand, ultimately they wouldn't make that much on an offensive. Seriously, they were surrounded, the most they could do was make transport expensive. Which they did anyway, just without sacrificing a lot of people for some pompous reasons.
This is not to say all they did was right, and the fact that they still keep making and selling weapons is not exactly great as well, and a lot of Swiss were unhappy with sheltering any refugees, but the general idea of keeping neutrality and protecting as much as they could — which was, basically, people already there — was good. Remember, also, that Switzerland helped many troubled countries in later years.
Their neutrality lasted from 1945 until, depending on what you count, the 1970s, the 1990s, or the 2000s. Are you suggesting that they would have had a harder time holding off Hitler than holding off the US and USSR, who were the guys that beat Hitler?
Well the other thing the Swiss have cultivated is their neutrality. From the neutrality and the natural fortress flows their long history banking. Historically the Powers would not think of invading Switzerland, because ... where else in Europe can you safely house your fortune? If you even hinted at it, you wouldn't be welcome.
Similarly, in wartime, everyone needs strictly neutral parties to get a lot of the humdrum business of war done.
Through Swiss front companies the Nazis could obtain critical war supplies (vanadium, I think it was); similarly the allies could obtain critical intelligence through the availability of Switzerland as a staging post into Austria and Germany.
"These credits and the deliveries of war material and other products [...] contributed to the war efforts of one of the belligerents. Not only had we abandonded integral neutrality, but - even worse - in so doing, we were as a rule deviating from the very notion of neutrality. "
Almost 600 pages but if you have a spare bit of time and really interested you could do a lot worse than looking at this, it is one of the most candid introspective pieces about world war II.
Of course, but Swiss were not the only country that declared neutrality. Netherlands did that both during World War 1 and 2. And both countries were strategically interesting. Thanks to both geography and effective deterrence Switzerland was able to enforce its neutrality, while Netherlands wasn't.
For anyone looking to learn more about Switzerland's robust and imaginative defense system, John McPhee's La Place de la Concorde Suisse is an absolutely fascinating read:
That's because the USA switched from effective execution methods like the firing squad and hanging to a method of dubious efficacy and humanity. Given the option, I think many people would opt for the tried and true methods instead of a pseudo-medical death chamber.
I'm not really sure why this is being downvoted. At least with a firing squad the person dies nearly instantly. The anticipation may be slightly worse however.
I am entirely unclear on what is worse about being shot by 10 soldiers with rifles than being strapped to a chair, and having all the paraphernalia attached in order to have thousands of volts applied.
The morality of the death penalty itself is a reasonable thing to argue over. The idea that some current implementations (chair, gas) are better than firing squad (or hanging/beheading for that matter) seems nuts.
Of course, given the choice, I'd probably choose to go the same way as my dog went. Sleep.
Of course, while this is a very humane way to execute an euthanasia (either of animal or a human), talking about the least inhumane way to carry out an execution is somewhat ridiculous. The most humane way is to just not do it.
> The idea that some current implementations (chair, gas) are better than firing squad (or hanging/beheading for that matter) seems nuts.
As far as I can tell from my hasty research, all states in the USA claim lethal injection as their primary method (note: 17 states do not practice capital punishment). A few still have electrocution, firing squad, hanging, and gas chamber on the books, but they seem to be vestigial laws or "backups" in the event that lethal injection is deemed unconstitutional.
That said, according to this site [0] there have been recent executions by firing squad (2010), electrocution (2010), hanging (1999), and gas chamber (1999).
Finland has a similar policy. Since 1958 every building above 3000m2 was required to have a bomb/fallout shelter. Current spec extends to buildings with more than 1200m2 (used to be 600m2 until 2011, which was deemed too expensive) floor space. In 2008 there were 43 000 shelters for 3,6 million people (total population 5,3M). Shelter should be no more than 250 meters away.
The Great Outage of 2003 was a fun time. We had a gas stove so we could still cook dinner (though as a newspaper columnist friend of mine wrote at the time, the entire neighbourhood was suffused with the smell of everything out of every fridge cooking on the barbecue), and several neighbours came by to share a glass of wine on our front porch.
It was breathtaking, that night, to look up at the clear sky and see the countless stars blazing down without having to compete with light pollution from the city. Normally you have to go several hours into northern Ontario to see the like.
One of the things that impressed me was how civil everyone was. I was at the downtown library when the power failed, and the 2 km walk home was filled with curiosity (just how big is this thing?) but free of incident.
Even at intersections, nearly everyone slowed down or stopped and eased through without trouble. On a few corners, self-appointed crossing guards helped maintain order - in fact, those tended to be the worst intersections, because drivers would cede responsibility to the crossing guard instead of responding directly to the conditions.
It was fun because you knew there would be an end to it and the power would go back on. If it lasted a month and there was no communication, survival mode would kick in.
IMO, it would take far less than a month for things to turn ugly. Once the refrigerators are empty. Also, it depends on whether there is water coming out of the faucets--if pumps are required to maintain pressure, then there will be little water. It could turn ugly very fast.
Great, now that people are supplied for a couple days let's get into the meat of it. People with wells can supply their neighbors and sell excess water for a nice profit, the police and fire department can take over the reservoirs and help with transport and filling containers...
Okay considering the downvotes I suppose I should have laid out my point at first: We use far far more water than we actually need. In an emergency situation it's not extremely hard to get a couple of gallons a day to people.
Unless by water supply we actually mean turn off the rain. I have no response to that one. That's not going to impact society, that's going to kill almost every bit of land life across the entire earth.
Humanity got by without a lot of things for a very long time. But around 1800, the population begun to climb. After taking 200,000 years to reach our first billion we, reached our seventh just 200 years later. A sudden reversion to the conditions known by America's Founding Fathers would leave ~7/8th of the global population unsupported.
So yes, flush toilets would be the least of your concerns, what with the zombie apocalypse in full swing and everything.
We had just gotten back from camping—our camp stove was still handy—and my parents called just as the outage happened (we were outside on our balcony so wouldn't have noticed anyway). We had some cash on hand, so we were able to go over and buy ice and some necessities with cash from the local grocery (that no longer exists).
Our building had elevator service because the condo board had, in preparation for y2k, bought a big-ass generator. It provided elevator service for the entire week—although it was a close thing, since we were beginning to run out of diesel for the generator, and two of the board behind the generator were starting to scorch from the heat of the exhaust…
By preparing for a disaster that never came, the condo was ready for the disaster that did come.
We now keep a few hundred dollars in our house in the event of something like this happening again (so we have access to foodstuffs). When we can afford it, I plan on getting a household battery backup system and a solar charging system that feeds the battery backup (we don't really have room for a generator, and I don't think it makes sense).
It was an amazing little event in Toronto with a lot of friendliness around the neighbourhood.
It was interesting, too, that the outage coincided with the Mars close approach. I had a hard time understanding why my fellow Torontonians were not not all staring skyward as I was.
The main problem is high-voltage transformers, which are built mostly by hand by highly-skilled labor. There's a fairly simple way to protect them, but no utility does it.
I've actually worried about this one a lot after reading about the solar storm of 1859. For those of you who haven't read about it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859) I highly recommend reading up on it. The TL;DR version is that one of the largest solar flares ever recorded was produced on the surface of the sun and the ensuing geomagnetic storm that passed by earth was so strong it was able to power telegraph machines that were not plugged in.
My laymen speculation is that this would be much worse than just transformers, given how computers are penetrating every aspect of our lives. Imagine the impact to our society if transportation and electricity failed simultaneously.
If the grid goes down continent-wide and stays down, we're not running computers or pumping liquid fuels anymore. We're not delivering fertilizer and other chemicals to farms, either, not that it matters much since if we could produce our normal crop we couldn't deliver it.
> First, the intense magnetic field variations in the magnetosphere induce electric fields and currents over large areas of Earth's surface. In turn, this geoelectric field creates what are known as geomagnetically induced currents, or GICs, which flow in any available conductor, including high-voltage transmission lines, oil and gas pipelines, railways, and undersea communications cables. These interconnecting networks essentially act as giant antennas that channel the induced currents from the ground. Hit with a 300-ampere GIC, a high-voltage transformer's paper tape insulation will burn, its copper winding will melt, and the transformer will fail, either right then and there or in the future.
> There is a quick and relatively cheap fix to help protect these transformers from geomagnetically induced currents: They can be retrofitted to block the inflow of GICs. But no utilities anywhere routinely protect their multimillion-dollar transformers in this way.
Well, if both the transformers and actual long distance wires survive the event, then the grid can be brought back up.
Most of grid 'defenses' involve some temporary disconnection of components; the robustness question is how quickly you can reconnect again - is it an automatic switch after half a second, or does it require sending repair squads to thousand remote locations.
People suggest faraday cages all the time, but they will not work for things like this!
Faraday cages only work for high frequencies, but geomagnetic storms and EMP's are low frequency, and will pass right through a faraday cage. (Unless you made an incredibly thick one.)
You need Mu-metal for this kind of shielding. (Not that it would work here anyway - the currents are induced in the long powerlines, not in the transformer.)
Also, foil it very thin, so it only works for frequencies above 50Mhz or so.
My lesson is slightly different - regulation really does matter. I know many (myself included) subscribe to a small (ish) government - but infrastructure is one of those areas that has to be regulated.
The markets did not correct the situation (jacques gas station is not now the preferred suppliers for all Ontario)
So a simple regulation (you must be designed to keep your service flowing) seems to deal with a huge amount of this - power companies that don't have rolling brown outs get to be in business the next day etc
Maybe I'm using the term "accounting" a bit loosely. It's not the accountants job to monitor day-to-day cashflow, that's more a bookkeeper's or manager's job. If they're crooked, it's a bit harder to catch (especially if they are able to offset cash losses with by opening secret a line of credit with a supplier).
Actually, I think this is a great example of how you can get ahead of yourself regulating - I'm assuming you think the lesson should be that all gas stations should have generators? In some communities the gas station probably is a life and death concern, but in most it isn't - so requiring all gas station owners to invest in and maintain a generator is an expense (passed on to consumers, like all regulation) with a very low return. And we haven't even considered unintended consequences: When gas stations are critical infrastructure, having a generator in your garage (but no fuel stored) makes more sense, so you risk overloading the gasoline supply by shifting all energy consumption to it, thus causing it to become unavailable anyway.
Also, I'm not sure why making Jacques' gas station the preferred supplier would be a meaningful expected market response. He already stated that they turned over a month's fuel in two days, that should have made him a pretty good profit.
I'm with you on the need to regulate critical infrastructure.
The tricky part is having a government powerful enough to be able to create smart regulations without allowing established interests to "help" write those regulations at the expense of their upstart competitors.
The bigger issue is that power appears to be over-regulated-- there is a single government monopoly provider, so when that provider went offline all was lost.
The power grid ( as the fiber grid) is a natural monopoly. The reason is, that it costs $x to get to n costumers. The second guy needs also $x to build his grid, but can only expect n/2 customers. ( Or he has some great trick to get all of the customers, but then one monopoly is just replaced by another.)
Additionally infrastructure has the strong tendency to externalize costs. In the example of the posting, the power company has somewhat lower income ( and needs to repair its grid), but actually damages are spread all over the place, like the guy who has to firesale his pizza before the ingredients are bad. So for the utility company it makes sense to just go for 99% reliability and insure some downtime, but on a larger level the total damages incurred for the economy will not be insured.
Infrastructure is therefore a case, where the problem is not over regulation, since we deal with a monopoly anyhow. The problem is that at best wrong regulation. ( Assuming the power outage was not caused by some freak accident.)
Power grids tend to have the properties of a natural monopoly, but note that power itself does not (ex. solar panels). The challenge is to regulate the existing monopoly in ways that do not discourage innovation in providing the more general end service that is not a monopoly.
It's funny, we're so highly dependent on electricity for everything that there's not more failsafes in place. Generators aren't exactly super cheap, but they're at a price point where if your business requires power then having one in the wings is useful. Even more surprising that a big petrol station wouldn't have one.
It's also telling that when power goes down, or there's a big event (inclement weather and so on), there's a rash of panic buying, some incredibly ugly behaviour (looting, greedy price increases) but offset by some truly wonderful behaviour (free gas to stranded people? Friends for life at that stage). Society might be a veneer of polish, but at it's core there's still a lot of incredibly nice people.
Price increases are the natural response from market forces given the reduction or merely risk of reduction in supply. This has at least two important beneficial effects: 1) people are less likely to panic buy 2) the incentive for supplying increases.
No doubt, free market economies do love price increases but it's often at a level that could be viewed as price gouging to make money off someones misfortune. Whether that's a truly bad thing is probably a longer conversation for a different day (is there a morality in the marketplace, and so on).
Every Infrastructure-We-All-Rely-On (electricity, water, roads, medicine, banking IT) person I've ever talked to says a variation on the same thing: it's a good thing that terrorists are so fond of "hollywood plots".
Although most infrastructure things seem to be distributed and don't usually have single points of failure that would make good targets for terrorist attacks. Or am I mistaken?
You could poison water. After 9/11 in Warsaw, Poland we had some jounralists sneak up to a municipal water storage facility and pour powdered sugar to water supplies on camera to show how easy would it be to do the same thing with another, more lethal, white powder.
Also I guess doing serious damage to power grid isn't beyond the realms of possibility? You could of course bomb a substation, but I guess there are more subtle (and difficult to repair) ways you could inflict the damage if you took control over a small part of the grid. I guess I should stop speculating and leave the specifics to those in the know ;).
Big (and long lasting) infrastructure failures will have more damaging impact on both the local economy[0] and people's "ease of mind" than a random mall bombing.
Don't know about the power grid, but I think at least in Europe it seems to be networked among several countries. If one country does not produce enough power, it can import power from other countries. Unless there is a single main line between the countries, it seems difficult to destroy.
On the contrary, it's a huge problem. Sooner or later there will be the surge they can't deal with and then we could easily get the same cascade issues that destabilized the North American grid during the outage. Island mode - the disconnection of all external connections - is the failsafe of last resort but by that time there will be large areas of Europe in the dark ages.
The grid has become so interconnected with such highly fluctuating loads that it's a miracle we haven't seen a serious outage yet.
Basically Germany uses Polish, Czech and Hungarian grids as a load leveler and as a way to transport power inside the union to countries they have deals with. But exactly those grids are amongst the oldest and weakest that we've got.
This is not a simple problem and the potential for error is much larger than you'd expect given the number of people that rely on these systems. So far so good. I personally believe that Germany should pay for the conditioning equipment to deal with the varying load of their windplants, the load patterns are a direct consequence of using wind energy and it should not fall to Germany's neighbours to fund a chunk of infrastructure that solely exists to deal with the wind surges.
In the United States every windplant has a conditioner at the uplink to make sure that the relatively fragile long distance network does not suffer. That's one single economic entity so there is no externalization possible.
Technically it is trivial to fix the overload by disconnecting part of the generators (at their entry-point, not an "island mode") so that the grid will survive - it can be even done automatically in a fraction of a second, although the wind generators themselves will suffer damage.
The problem is economical/political - who will have the authority to say that we'll disconnect generator X and won't pay for it's electricity since noone needs it at that specific time.
So the terrorist plot would be to overload the power grid. Since they come from oil rich countries, they'd probably have the spare energy to do that :-) Place some oil powered generators at strategic locations and blam - darkness...
But in seriousness, I find the issue interesting, but it seems solvable.
If you look at the major blackouts around the world over the last 10 years, a large chunk of them were caused by a variation on a similar theme:
- The network is heavily loaded pre-blackout (most large networks are these days)
- A major interconnect trips out (e.g. from a tree strike or protection maloperation)
- The other line is out of service (e.g. for maintenance) or is taken out by the same event (e.g. by storms)
- Power flow is redirected through other weaker interconnects causing voltage instability
- Cascading voltage collapses take out the network
Examples: India 2012, European blackout of 2006, Indonesia 2005, northeast blackout of 2003, Italy 2003 (a bit different because the operators cocked this one up as well).
The point is that you can target one or two major transmission lines (usually in the middle of nowhere) and bring down the system. A coordinated attack on several major interconnects could really cause some damage.
The US Marine Corp's readable little doctrinal manual Warfighting succinctly describes strategy as the process of identifying weaknesses in your enemy's system and exploiting them.
(Which reminds me, I really must read that book again).
Making the electrical grid robust against deliberate attack is much more expensive and difficult than making it robust against natural disaster. Given how poorly our systems deal with natural disaster ...
It might not even worth attacking power stations. Some smart , well-educated engineers (of the kind who were recruited for the September 11 attacks) could easily point out critical chokepoints in the industrial system. Maybe there's a single plant which produces the most common antibiotics -- or maybe they all rely on a particular ingredient of which 90% is only found in one place. And so on and so forth.
Modern society -- every society -- largely works on trust and a fair amount of spit and duct tape concealed under polished chrome exteriors.
I mean, a rich, resourceful industrial society like the USA could easily spring back from even a very large, well-coordinated surprise attack by a motivated, intelligent attacker. But not before losing a lot of lives and money.
Compared to what a calculating and malicious sort of person could dream up, the attacks so far have been movie plots.
Interesting thought about the small factory. I guess they would initially be a bit difficult to identify. Or rather, I wonder how difficult that would be. And is the department of defense doing it - do they know what choke points they should protect?
I'd be surprised if there isn't, somewhere within the vastness of the Pentagon, a team who does exactly this. Probably a few dozen plans on file already.
I mean heck, the Pentagon has plans for invading Canada.
Eliminate price gouging laws and give gas station owners an incentive to buy generators and this problem goes away. Also gives an incentive to truck gas in from afar.
Obviously people view increased prices during a crisis to be morally repugnant, hence the laws. Just sayin' it would work.
It's very interesting to see how quickly things turn ugly (or at least uglier) in situations like that. With power down for two days, did they see any increase in crime beyond what you described?
As it happens I was watching a TV-series yesterday that has this exact plot/theme, not exactly HN material as it's Sci-Fi but anyway: The world loses power globally. Anything using power is dead. Planes, Cars, batteries, etc.
Not sure if it's a hit that will last but I found it entertaining and it made me think a bit, what would I be able to do to survive something like that? What would my plan be?
I'm not about to go all doomsday prepper but I guess it does not hurt to at least have an idea.
Or just be prepared like in the story, preparing for the worst as we usually do when designing redundant solutions.
Revolution is the silliest TV show ever contrived. 15 years in the power outage, they still wear clean tailored designer clothes. Resistance fights the only organizing and governing force, why?, just because. Electricity is out (or rather blocked), but diesel engines don't work either - surprise, many diesel engines don't depend on electricity to operate.
Furthermore, they seem to have spent 15 years killing each other while nobody attempted to build or rebuild any non-electric infrastructure: They mentioned not being able to produce bullets, there seems to be only one train that is restored, and so on.
The industrial revolution happened before we had electricity, so you'd think they'd find a way to restore some kind of industry.
Is one of the plot points that every skilled worker was wiped out? Otherwise I have a hard time believing that in just 15 years people have forgotten the basics of electricity and thus how to rig up a simple generator(among other tools).
The uneven-but-mostly-OK post-apocalypse show Jeremiah (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_%28TV_series%29) dealt with this problem in a better way: the Apocalypse MacGuffin was a disease that killed everyone who had been through puberty. The show was set 15 years after the "big death", so the characters were all people who had been too young to understand how these things worked when they were still working.
(Some were smart enough to figure the basics out, of course, which made them highly valuable.)
I like the premise because exploring the ramifications is interesting and useful. Unfortunately they then turn to magical plot devices. I was very let down by that; it got steadily less entertaining after the first few episodes (just like Fringe).
In a similar vein is S.M. Stirling's Dies the Fire series. While it requires some suspension of disbelief, especially in so much as being able to accept the premise that certain technologies suddenly cease working, it's an enjoyable 'what if' senario of a series.
I think I'm largely blind to such things when it comes to TV entertainment (and mostly movies). I never even thought of diesel engines not needing electricity, but that did not stop me from finding the show entertaining. I think I just naturally assume that since it's fiction anyway, the rules do not have to be followed. If entertainment and fiction always had to follow the rules of physics and our world, we wouldn't have anything like magic.
The science doesn't have to be technically correct but if you start waving around magic wands it's simply not sci-fi anymore, which is a shame if your interest was piqued by the 'sci.' Some amount of rules always has to be followed in narratives; e.g., 'the parrot did it' in a whodunnit is (most likely) not acceptable.
> If entertainment and fiction always had to follow the rules of physics and our world, we wouldn't have anything like magic.
OTOH I'm surprised how much in terms of magic could be expalined given the technologies we have or can imagine right now. For instance, if we ever get our hands on working nanotech, all the elixirs and magic potions that change you in different ways could be reality (you'd just be ingesting a bunch of pre-programmed nanorobots / viruses along with a tasty juice) :).
That's true! You could explain 'magic' as simply being something your current technology could not explain.
If you were able to show a person from the past a mobile phone, some video or even the time machine you would need to do so.. they would probably believe you were some kind of god or that the things you showed were magic.
Overall crime wasn't that bad, I think that the people that were doing these things were in part doing it simply to get home (the guy with the hose, I'm not sure what the guy that took off with the fireextinguisher was up to, presumably no good and removing a fireextinguisher from a gas station is a pretty serious thing).
On the island there was no increase in crime, in the rest of Ontario no more than otherwise or maybe even less, I have not researched this but it definitely didn't turn into a riot. The gas line was special in that it was isolated and that everybody there had 0 resources. But it still gave me quite a bad vibe.
I think some crime is to be expected, people break the law when society is working, and I guess if you are already breaking the law to survive, if something happens you aren't suddenly going to change your ways.
If the power is out over a longer period of time it's the lack of food and clean water that will cause a problem, mostly, but because of the concentration of people in cities the modern society relies too much on food being brought to us.
I guess you have already thought about this to some extent, I just know that most people in the city have never been hunting, and depending on where you live I guess they never have gone fishing either.
I think I would like to be able to survive on my own out in the forrest/woods by hunting/fishing, even if there hopefully will never be a need.
A much better series was the original BBC 'Survivors' from the mid-70s, then re-made a few years ago. Though it was a plague not power outage, the basis of society then does look at using mills and other early-industrial revolution technologies to help survival.
This is a brilliant story. I wonder how other infrastructure coped with the outage (water supply network and sewers). Living in a dormitory in Russia, we had outages in water supply periodically (once it lasted for whole two weeks) and that quickly translated into a horrible mess of insanitary.
Also loved the little episode with bikers, as I'm fascinated with their craft. Hope there is a going to be a followup about them.
Systems that relied on pumping for pressure ended up under boil water advisories. Detroit, Cleveland, others. I think water pressure was mostly restored 3 or 4 days in though.
The tap water in Detroit never tasted the same afterwards, though no one else in my family felt the same way. I felt like I could taste and sometimes smell chlorine. Even the last time I visited Detroit (years later, and in a completely different part of the surrounding area).
The Detroit water system completely lost pressure. My assumption was that they upped the chlorine content to compensate for possible contamination in the system. They probably never reduced the concentration (either by design or by accident).
> if you’re in the infrastructure business design as if lives depend on it.
This. Is not as simple as it sounds.
It is why some colleagues of mine stubbornly refuse to write software for medical appliances: even if they design as if their lives depend on it, they might make a mistake and cause serious harm.
Smart guys. Know your limits. I have daily fights on this subject :) (colleagues, all in good humor but serious all the same, we'd rather not ship than ship something that breaks which has slowed us down in a terrible way).
I once designed an ultrasound system that was used to decide the magnification of the plastic lens implanted in a cataract patient's eye. It scares me more now than it did then (the late '80s / early '90s).
It takes a while to learn your limits ... and to become a "sage". Once you become a "sage", you realize that you don't actually know much in the grand scheme of things. More people look up to me now that I know less ... That's pretty amusing in its own way.
It's funny how over the years my programming style changed. First it was 'C100', then it was more and more complex with ever increasing mastery of the language and ditto for other languages that I'm familiar with. Now I find I've come full circle. I keep things as simple as possible even if I know the 'perfect' (but more complex) way to solve something I'll stick to simple patterns and bullet proof rather than 'clever'. It took me a long time to come to the realization that clever code really isn't.
"Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? " - Brian Kernighan (Sourced from wikipedia)
Of course, if the folks who are smart enough to be scared of making mistakes won't write the software, that means it'll be written by folks who are too dumb to be scared or just plain apathetic...
The real trick comes not in preventing mistakes, but limiting the damage they can cause. I'd love everything I do to work perfectly the first time, but seeing that I'm human, that's just not going to happen. While I'm not in the medical industry, any mistake I make could easily cost thousands of dollars or more (I work on WePay's financial infrastructure) if I don't put appropriate fail safes in place.
I remember watching the first episode of "Connections" when I was a kid and being pretty badly frightened by the power-loss scenario that James Burke described: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgOp-nz3lHg
A reasonable part of this conversation is the possibility that an EMP could be deployed in our atmosphere that would knock out power from coast-to-coast. US government commissions have been setup to study this, and they have come back with dire predictions about how quickly society would collapse in that event. And, if you'll pardon the author's bias, someone recently wrote (http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/19/north-korea-...) about how North Korea's new ICBM capabilities threaten the US right now.
I'm not saying we should all be running around waving our hands in the air and acting like our hair is on fire, but if you want to talk about single points of failure, you apparently need look no further than your nearest wall outlet.
>>Infrastructure is invisible, as long as it works.
This is exactly why it is so difficult to convince politicians and the general public that infrastructure spending is absolutely worthwhile. Even though it makes the entire economy more efficient and fail-proof, most people take it for granted until it fails.
I've never understood why gas stations don't have generators. They already meet most of the permitting requirements (having underground tanks is the big thing), are generally staffed, and are fairly well distributed.
Maybe it's not frequent enough (and, with anti-gouging and no consumer loyalty, not a worthwhile investment), but that just means the business model is broken. Either do it as a subscription service (if you have amex platinum, you get access to a network of hardened gas stations; or, if you pay $50/yr), or have government do it.
If the homeland security people lost $1-2b in budget and it got used to put generators and caches of supplies at them (maybe just a cell site with long runtime), we'd be a lot better off.
One of the things I often like to point out to those that criticize India's unreliable infrastructure is this: If it came to be that India were at war, taking out its power stations would give very little benefit to an enemy. Most industries and businesses have made provisions for generators and inverters (huge batteries that store electricity for a few hours of use) so as to not depend on the flaky power utilities
I think the trick is to distribute power generation and other services and goods manufacturing as widely as possible. Ideally, each individual home or building could provide for its own basic needs, or at least a significant portion or backup. I think that new technologies (nanotech, biotech, greentech, etc.) and popular dissemination of older technologies could make this possible.
When I lived in Switzerland I was surprised to find that every modern building has a nuclear bunker in the basement, and that even now they are kept up: supplies are rotated, there are inspections, etc. At first it seemed quaint, but then I realized that as arguably the richest country in the world, they're not as interested in getting richer as they are in preserving what they have -- thus different forms of insurance, including even bunkers. I now find that quite smart, actually.