[lljk_kennedy]

> One of my nightmares is waking up one morning and discovering that the power is out, the internet is down, my cell phone doesn’t work

I dunno.... as I get older, this sounds more and more idyllic

[talkingtab]

To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.

We do not yet have an awareness of our dependence on technologies, nor of how fragile those technologies can be. If someone had suggested years ago that perhaps we should prepare for a disruption in say, the egg supply, that would have provoked laughter. And jokes like, well I really don't like eggs. Or what about toilet paper hoarding? Given just those two events alone, one might decide that disruptions are at least somewhat of a possibility. That our past assumptions of an unending supply of goods and services might not hold in the future.

It is a funny comment, and there are several dependencies I personally would not miss. Until I did.

Personally, the interesting concept is resiliency in general.

[dghlsakjg]

> To perhaps add a dimension to the issue, imagine that one day you woke up and the roads were not functional. Many people would have a great time, as long as they knew the roads were going to be functional later that day. If it turned into a longer problem, the disruption would have vast and unpleasant consequences.

To be fair, this is a real scenario for people in snowy/and or rural areas. It isn't uncommon for people in my area of Canada to get snowed in for a few days.

[ndr]

I see the sarcasm but you're likely not simulating this hard enough. This is what happened in most of Spain and Portugal during the recent power outage and it wasn't pretty.

[tmountain]

I guess it depends on your perspective. Here in Portugal, lots of people ended up sitting on their patios, chatting with friends, cooking on the grill, playing cards, sipping wine, and generally having a pretty good time. There was a collective groan around the small village where I live when the power came back on, and quite a few people commented that they were disappointed that they'd have to work in the morning.

[al_borland]

The power grid went down in a large area of the US about 20 years ago. The biggest issue I saw was the gas pumps didn't work. Cars were lined up, many abandoned, just waiting for the power to come on some they could get gas. I was in college at the time, but home for a few days. I heard rumors that the power was on west of us (where my school was), so I just started driving west, hoping I found where the power was on before I ran out of gas. Thankfully, that worked out.

But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.

[cogogo]

Think the some of the worst of it was for people stuck in elevators. Don’t have exact numbers but there were A LOT of them. Emergency services were very busy freeing people. My wife was stuck on a train and that wasn’t so great either. Toilets overflowed, ran out of water, eventually evacuated and walked to the previous station. They were lucky to be only a couple km away.

[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.

[nunodonato]

During peace, yes. If there is any sort of crisis, no

[lljk_kennedy]

You're right, of course. Notice I edited out the Swan Lake reference in my quote - https://www.npr.org/2021/08/19/1029437787/in-1991-soviet-cit...

[junon]

When Whatsapp and a bunch of social media went down a few years back I took a stroll outside that evening here in Berlin and the streets were weirdly buzzing. It was a bit surreal.

Maybe some sort of bias but I also view things this way.

[pino82]

I can remember I was at a birthday party and the entire topic of the f*cking evening was when it will be online again. With everybody checking every 23 seconds.

I left that 'party' quite early.

[StefanBatory]

> "and when I turn on the emergency radio (if you have one), all you hear is “Swan Lake” on repeat."

Why did you cut out that part?

[anupulu]

Not if you work at a hospital, for example.