Without Power, Puerto Rico Is Cash Only
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Its not cash only anymore. ATM service is coming back up to a lot of the island. Banks are opening and things are looking up.
Life is somewhat getting back to normal. The big issue is that people are now realizing that they are out of jobs. Its why Im moving to Atlanta this month. Things are bound to get interesting once the poor run out of money.
Btw, going to use this space (and please excuse me) to let the community know that Im available for hire. Please email me at pryelluw@gmail.com for more details or tweet at me @pryelluw
You can find a link to my resume on my profile. Willing to relocate whithin the continental US.
Only willing to consider Atlanta, or other cities in Southeast? (Raleigh-Durham is another big regional employer of programmers, and hires lots of Python folks)
Also, I'm guessing things are only looking up in San Juan, right? The outlying areas still have no clean drinking water, food, or medicine from what I'm seeing.
I have no issues with relocating within the US (as long as its not Alaska).
I live near San Juan (about 3o mins out and things sure are better than in other areas. But people are still currently in a state of shock and havent realized the implications of the catastrophe. My dad lives where the eye entered and it looks lime a set for the walking dead tv show.
- Puerto Ricans are US citizens
- So as long as they know English then [working in the U.S. is] relatively easy.
What you think the comment says: "Puerto Ricans are US citizens as long as they know English"
"Puerto Ricans are US citizens as long as they know English..."
...instead of:
"Puerto Ricans are US citizens so as long as they know English..."
In the mountain towns they still dont have any comms and no water or gas.
In the north west the lines for gas/water are miles long.
Lots of people are leaving. It will be really interesting to see how the long term effects play out, even if only 25% of the population moves to NY, Chicago, DC, Orlando, Philly, etc.
Solving the problem requires repealing all the laws that yoke PR to mainland companies without providing any of the actual benefits, but that would require the current Congress to want to give PR something like statehood, if not statehood itself.
North Florida is heavily republican, South Florida is heavily democrat.
Status Quo is maintained.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/01/mitt-romney-new...
- Report on the Competitiveness of Puerto Rico's Economy [1] - An Update on the Competitiveness of Puerto Rico's Economy [2] - Characteristics of the Island's Maritime Trade and Potential Effects of Modifying the Jones Act [3] - Shipping Co.: Maritime Cabotage Complicates Logistics and Adds Costs [4]
[1] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/regional/Puert... [2] https://www.newyorkfed.org/medialibrary/media/outreach-and-e... [3] http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-260 [4] http://reports.weforum.org/global-enabling-trade-2013/view/s...
1. Hurricane Irma had impacted the island about a week before. Debilitating or destroying some lf the infrastructure.
2. The goverment wad already working 24/7 to recover from Hurricane Irma.
This had been a perfect storm of sorts. The area was recovering from a hurricane, the economic environment was weak, and people's outlook was less than stellar.
Combine all of this with a catastrophic event and you get what we have: an overworked government with scarce resources, an infrastructure that was in need of updating and repair, and a general sense of hopelessness from the population.
The federal government is helping a lot but this is an unprecedented event that piles up on the work they were doing on Houston and Florida. Couñd they do more? I dont know if they have the resources. You just cant expect one entity to handle multiple incidents plus being at war on the middle east (and possibly NK).
There is little to do in efficiency. You can surely bring in logistics experts (like the military did), but you cant bring in enough human resources in a timely manner.
Airlifting sounds practical but Im not sure if it would have helped when the ports authority was just overworked and understaffed.
This was just the perfect storm. It destroyed my beautiful country. That's life. Its why we gotta live in the moment and stop to smell the flowers from time to time.
It seems to me there should be a skeleton of resilient roads spanning the land for disaster relief distribution, but maybe that's a naive opinion.
Puerto Rico's situation is worse because of several compounding factors that work against them: the scale of the disaster, communication and coordination issues, logistical challenges, and a belligerent rhetoric coming from the topmost levels of the US federal government despite lower-level federal employees being part of of a burgeoning, although so far inadequate recovery effort.
But in each of these disasters, the hard questions to which society offers zero answers begin long before the disaster actually strikes. Universities and research organizations have long studied reasons why people don't evacuate, and while discretionary answers exist, many people simply report being unable to afford the expenses of a temporary relocation away from one's regular job for a disaster that's forecasted to perhaps occur 3-5 days out.
You can invoke the argument that it's literally a matter of life and death and that ought to be worth any expense, but that's not helpful when people may not have cash on hand, or quick access to easy emergency credit that would be guaranteed by some higher party. It's truly unfortunate that situation is that disaster aid for forecastable disasters only kicks in once it has already struck, and not days before when its inevitability becomes clear.
In Puerto Rico's current case, the breakdown of societal structures due to lack of electricity, lack of electronic communication, lack of fuel, lack of distribution capability is unfortunate enough, but the degenerate functioning of life is just bizarre; people are now trying to get by in a worst-of-both-worlds hybrid of subsistence tribalism and wage-earning capitalism, where they both have to forage for food and water and barter for supplies, while at the same time giving the rest of their cash-on-hand to large corporations like CVS for stuff that's still on the shelves; and any changes to this status quo are reliant on random individuals' goodwill -- like a shopowner who decides to give away supplies -- instead of any organized directives from top-down.
The bottom end of capitalism often looks quite like subsistence tribalism.
> many people simply report being unable to afford the expenses of a temporary relocation away from one's regular job for a disaster that's forecasted to perhaps occur 3-5 days out
Well, yes. You can be sure that everyone outside the disaster zone will be along to restore capitalism before they restore electricity. The disaster is temporary but the economic structure remains. It's not even clear that being homeless in NYC on your own is better than being homeless in the ruins of your community. It may be better to turn up to your non-functional workplace and keep your job than evacuate and lose it.
http://www.naplesnews.com/story/weather/hurricanes/2017/09/0...
(I think well-off people underestimate how much ordinary capitalism looks like imminent disaster to people at the sharp end - it's no use if the stores are open and the hospitals working if you can't afford food or healthcare.)
"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."
Discussing the political systems that promote the reliance on the somewhat fragile systems of technology the article is discussing is not unrelated nor generic.
If you feel that politics is a flamewar topic, please do civic engagement a favor and learn how to practice political discussion with less flammability.
What does this mean?
And student loan default is really hard to do; you can get forebearances for practically any reason. There is zero excuse to default on student loans; they have every payment plan imaginable.
"Keep your government hands off my medicare."
"The bottom end of capitalism looks like subsistence tribalism"; how powerful, how insightful! Why don't we start with the fact that millions of those people would not be alive in the first place without the modern, evil, capitalist system?
A strategy that maximizes possibility of success regardless of who is president rather than expecting whoever happens to be president at the time to figure it all out after the fact seems like it would be a better idea, yet from the little I've read on the matter it seems like the latter was the chosen approach.
1. Pay by the end of the month and it doesn’t effect me. No interest.
2. Otherwise, 1% to 1.5% of the balance in interest month over month. You have to pay at least the interest every month.
3. If I need to borrow, I can do it on the strength of my accounts receivable and my ability to collect interest payments reliably.
4. If I don’t get payed back, I can take someone to court when things are back to normal and yes, the court will side with me.
4.b There's always ways to create incentives to pay debts.
It has worked this way for hundreds of years in parts of Latin America and other areas of the world with fluctuating infrastructure.
If so, I'd argue that the switch is the result of convenience and accuracy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rai_stones
Ownership of the stones was maintained by oral history rather than by possession.
What’s your source for economists clinging to the barter hypothesis? Even my high school economics taught the barter hypothesis was an incorrect assumption of Adam Smith’s, and that credit is the father of modern money.
"Core Econ", chapter 10.1 "Money and wealth"
Money makes more exchanges possible because it’s not hard to find someone who will be happy to have your money (in exchange for something), whereas unloading a large quantity of apples could be a problem. This is why barter plays a limited role in virtually all modern economies
Amusingly, they cite Graeber's Debt Ch 2, despite implying exactly the thing that chapter argued against: that barter was the primary vehicle for exchanging goods in pre-money societies.
We read Greg Mankiw's Principles of Economics [1]. It's the Harvard undergraduate text--orthodox as they come.
Saying barter plays a limited role in virtually all economies, modern and historic, is different from saying it was money's progenitor, as Adam Smith wrongly speculated. The former is true. The latter is not.
TL; DR Money and banking isn't always taught in introductory economics. The "bartering noble savage" myth is not something economists cling to.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Principles-Economics-7th-Mankiws/dp/1...
In effect money of any kind replace the accountant by making sure that the buyer do not double spend by handing over the tokens that allow him to buy in the first place.
Doesn't one need to pay the debt collector? It seems like this wouldn't be too useful if many people owe a small amount of money.
So yeah if it was $15, you might be hard pressed to get a debt collector to care.
4b: Of which incentives are you talking about? The other points you've mentioned are trivial, this is the only point that has problems. If you solve 4b somehow someday you'll be making a huge benefit to the world, a revolution greater than Bitcoin.
Most people who take loans in situations like this are members of the community and are grateful for the opportunity. There’s always a level of write-off, but the system doesn’t need to guarantee total repayment.
If you look at the bottom of ads, you'll sometimes see the resulting legalese. They get around this by things like layaway and larger chains will actually have their own insured lending institution.
This will vary by jurisdiction, as not all countries are the same. I am going to speculate that Puerto Rico is the same, as it is a US territory, but that's speculation.
This is what annoys with me with all the cryptocurrencies. They try to recreate the economics of gold as a money, a money whose supply is fixed. Modern money is a ledger who owes how much. That has no fixed supply. So we would need a cryptocurrency whose supply is not fixed but what anyone can create. Of course, there are challenges there to make it work...
[0]: http://www.cnn.com/2017/09/27/us/puerto-rico-aid-problem/ind...
It would be nice if there was a credit card machine that was powered by the phone line directly.
Edit: Most of the small businesses I worked at growing up in rural Oklahoma had mechanical imprinting machines with carbon paper receipts so that they could process credit card payments offline.
Satellite internet is also very expensive too.
I wonder how prevalent this is still? I've heard of restaurants keeping one around just in case. I wonder what the fee would be for imprinted credit card transactions?
My most recent Citi DoubleCash card doesn't have embossed numbers. Could I still do an offline transaction?
We let you set limits on count/amount/time of offline transactions. After you come back online we send email a report telling you how many offline transactions you did and how many authorized and didn't authorize. This serves as a feedback loop to encourage fixing connectivity issues.
PCI-DSS (payment card companies) requirements forbid the slabs' use anymore. You instantly fail your payment card audit if you have one on site, and that can cause you to assume liability for all subsequent customer fraud incidents for the next X months, and in bad cases massive fines and possibly losing your payment processing equipment licenses (the ability to take EFT cards of all types)
It's not considered secure storage of cardholder data, just as bad as if someone wrote down the cardholder information in full.
Interestingly enough, mail-order magazines still try to get you to write down your CC data directly. I wonder if that is sanctioned?
When I gave him my credit card for the deposit, I expected him to use some fancy wireless reader, or maybe the iPad's camera to be used to scan it.
Instead, he took out a pencil and a notebook, and, within 15 seconds, made a perfect imprint of the card by placing it behind the paper and carefully painting the area with the pencil at a low angle.
For a while after electronic transactions companies would lug them out when the "lines were down," but I haven't seen one in quite a while.
Here is a "modern," light weight plastic version:
https://banksupplies.com/199-48500?origin=google-shopping&gc...
Nothing like needing a bottle of water and only having $20s.
I also keep the spot price and a copy of global exchange rates from each purchase of my gold so I can back it out to what it’s worth. You know, just in case.
You never know until you know.
>I also keep the spot price and a copy of global exchange rates from each purchase of my gold so I can back it out to what it’s worth. You know, just in case.
do you think you'll present your certificates to marauders and they'll just say "i guess you're right 1 oz is the fair market value for this water"?
i had a similar argument with someone about gold as a store of value years ago: the value is market determined. no one in the apocalypse is going to care about any price you have a record of because there will be no markets.
Edit: Fuck I hope google sheets is still up when the time comes. I should probably print them.
The small backpacker sized solar cells are fairly worthless for charging a modern smartphone - the difference between the current they put out and power draw by the phone is too great, even with a supplemental LiOn battery pack.
I backpack a lot so I’ve got tons of random “survival supplies” but two key things are:
- little gas stove(1)
- can opener
(1) - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00B4FY8YO/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apip_oKN...
- ziplock bags (to poop in)
- whiskey. I have 10L of whiskey in there
MREs are fine (the new ones are far tastier than the ones we had in the 80's), but the Mountain House "bucket" of freeze-dried food has a 30 year shelf-life, as long as you don't open the bucket and keep it out of the sun. It's a higher cost up front, but essentially never has to be replaced until you use it.
It’s like the quietest generator. Zombies will never hear it.
Prepaid cell phones can be topped up by buying a code at a Shoppers for cash. Even your hydro bill will take a money order if you have cash but no bank account.
Having said that, almost every time I pay more than 20 in cash, the seller gives me the eye, puts the money under a UV light, and I feel like some sort of a criminal.
Only once has it resulted in them calling a manager over. Every other time, it gets strange looks, a chuckle, a smile of mirth, or a groan. Either way, it's something unusual for them to hear in what is likely a repetitive job.
I assure you that quip is not unusual in the least, just another repetitive part of the job.
I am assuming there's some good with the bad.
It's kinda weird to think that at a time when there are huge shortages of basically everything it makes sense to use shipping space on something whose value is purely symbolic.
I do get that they're shipping plenty of other things and the cash is probably a pretty small piece of the total space, but still it's worth thinking about.
A symbolism so powerful it can override human nature. I wouldn't be so quick to underestimate the importance of it.
Going back to bartering is a great way to induce a depression.
20:1 the Bitcoin people would propose some sort of buffered/delayed transaction solution. Of course that wouldn't work as there's no way of telling when you'd have restored power or connectivity. Puerto Rico is looking to have nothing for several weeks if not longer, much like the Ice Storm of 1994 in Western Tennessee.
A lot of counterfeit gold has insertion of other metals in the center (tungsten for example which has a similar density)
https://static6.businessinsider.com/image/505a1d2eeab8ea8610...
Wikipedia: Because the density is so similar to that of gold (tungsten is only 0.36% less dense), tungsten can also be used in counterfeiting of gold bars, such as by plating a tungsten bar with gold
The metal was just a convenient pick because it was useless for tool and weapon making, and didn't degrade quickly if left in some damp place.
But that doesn't matter.
All you're saying here is that it's going to be a few more years and a much higher bitcoin price until you convert over.
That's your loss.
Because the truth hurts the value of Bitcoin. Bitcoin people have paid groups on many discussion sites to downvote any negativity. I'm almost sure the administration here allows it because vote manipulation should be easy to detect, and that's knowing how the vulnerable upvote/downvote system works.
No false promises. No silver bullet. Just a social experiment.
The way you put it sounds like the early bitcoin believers were pretentious know-it-all getting over their head.
What we tried to do was just something new related to money. And we did. We took risk. We were mocked. We invested time, energy and resources in a system we knew was experimental, unreliable and untested.
And it did a dent.
I would add, despite very negative people like you.
Have fun when you run into the same lesson left unlearned from the 70s - distributed permission-less databases like blockchains cannot scale without becoming centralized. The more people that wish to participate, the growth rate starts jumping from exponential to exponential * log with the bandwidth and storage requirements to ensure every other node on the network is properly updated.
"People didn't create bitcoin to replace cash. Years ago, the community tried to create an alternative to all existing money systems. That's all."
Cash is a money system. You contradict yourself.
You mean it may fail ? Yes, we are aware. Since the beginning. That's what "experiment" comes from.
> Cash is a money system. You contradict yourself.
Being an alternative is not being a replacement. Just like the bike is an alternative to a car, and not a replacement for it.
You seem to have a terrible grudge against bitcoin. I'm sorry about it, but it's irrelevant here. You may like it or not, but don't give the early community objectives we didn't have.
We never sold a magical solution. We were not some 14 years old kid in a hoodie screaming "kill the banks".
We hoped. A lot. We dreamed. We did noticed and disliked a lot of flaws in our current systems and institutions and explored other ways.
But as intelligent people, we know very well the limit of the project and how much it can hurt.
So keep your negativity to yourself. It's uncalled for, and definitely unwanted.
Bitcoin can, as of now, scale to support the current needs of 10 billion humans. Some of those solutions are still being completed (eg: beta, not golden master) but there's little theoretical risk, and while there will be bugs there's little indication of anything stopping it, should that level of adoption be desired.
Most likely you don't understand what bitcoin actually is.
If every single human were mining, no, it certainly could not. If there are only a few miners and a bunch of participants, maybe. To boot, Bitcoin can't even support my needs. It's too slow for transactions unless I pay some other middleman, it can't cut my gemstones, it can't solder my LEDs, it can't run my Verilog sims, it can't raise my cat or feed my husband. Bitcoin doesn't sate my thirst nor does it provide me with my medicine - actual needs.
"Most likely you don't understand what bitcoin actually is."
I don't need to understand bitcoin to understand that we tried exactly this back in the 70s and apparently people didn't learn the lesson THEN. Distributed permissionless databases simply can not scale if everyone participates. The technology then, as now, simply does not exist to handle that amount of storage and bandwidth. It likely won't in another 50 years, if we even make it that far.
Having over 30 years of experience in computers and networking and databases, I look at this and say "Go back to school, one with a proper education involving some actual history regarding computers and databases and networking." All you learn is how to code and don't learn about what's already been done or tried, so everything is new to you when it was already seen, tested, or envisioned before I was even born.
It's pretty hard for me to teleport a $100 bill to someone a continent away, so Bitcoin works as analogous to cash as so far been invented.
I agree that Bitcoin does in no way replace paper cash, simply complements it by extending many of it's features to the digital space. It also can be improved on drastically.
As for physical bitcoin, which can be transacted offline. Just hand it over like a dollar bill:
Still mostly useful for larger amounts, though, due to the relative high cost of hardware, but it's new.
Yes, that's a thing.
You need a record of all transactions for tax purposes. If I give merchant a dollar, they give me a donut, and don't record the transaction, that's a crime - they're not paying sales tax/VAT on that, and also obtaining unrecorded tax that is used to pay "black salaries" in cash without paying the appropriate income & social security taxes.
The ritual of giving a receipt to you (and you putting it straight into the waste bin) visibly demonstrates that the business routinely creates the receipts for all (most?) purchases, it ensures that in the vast majority of cases the receipt actually gets produced, and if a business is routinely not producing these receipts (or having fake info in these receipts) then this would be clearly visible to the general public. This ritual has a certain social value in enforcing tax compliance, so that's why it's required despite the paper cost.
If you want EMP resiliency, you may want to invest at least a few billion into it. Of course, steering the governmental budget to spend money on stuff that only raise electrical bill and will only prove its worth in an emergency and catastrophic situation is a hard pill to swallow, especially when there are competing priorities.
We're not going to get it from China. Anti-static Mylar bags are touted on Alibaba as "EMP protection". They're not.
[1] https://www.pmddtc.state.gov/regulations_laws/documents/offi...
Note that this is not just theoretical. The American Starfish Prime nuclear test did significant damage to electrical systems in Hawaii, and the Soviets destroyed a power plant in Almaty with one of theirs.
1. How much energy is released?
2. Over what time period?
3. In what forms?
4. At what distance from the target / victim?
A bullet which misses you by a millimeter might as well be 1,000 km away. It requires direct contact with tisue to transact damage. Where it hits you also matters, and in many cases, a light interaction with an extremity (hand, foot) may do little damage, whilst a trunk or head shot will be critical or instantly lethal. Much of that comes from the transmission of fluid shock through the body. (Watching super-slow-motion video of bullets impacting various targets on YouTube is ... interesting and informative.)
A nuclear bomb delivers energy to the target in four major forms:
1. Prompt ionizing radiation. This is a pulse which lasts for a tiny fraction of a second, and is rapidly absorbed even by the atmosphere. It can be lethal or disabling at relatively close range.
2. Thermal pulse. Depending on the size of the weapon, this will ignite directly exposed flammable materials at ranges from a few hundreds of meters to a hundred km or so. This can be mitigated with white or reflective paint, or intervening structures.
3. Blast wave. This is the physical shockwave of the weapon (as well as any material picked up by it) which causes much of the direct damage.
4. Radioactive fallout. This is long-term radiation delivered generally downwind of the blast site. Exposure follows the seven-ten rule. For each increase by a factor of seven in time, the radiation falls by a factor of ten. A 1,000 rad dose 1 hour after the blast is 100 rads 7 hours after, 10 rads 2 days (49 hours) later, and 1 rad after two weeks.
The detonations of nuclear weapons are fast, on the order of a microsecond (on one-millionth of a second). In large part it's the ability to deliver all its energy virtually instantly which gives a bomb its power. An alternative understanding comes from the idea of "generations" of nuclear interactions and their timescale -- a typical nuclear blast occurs over about 50 generations, after which the core has generally spontaneously disassembled past the point of sustainable reactions.
(There's a pretty good Quora article on that point here: https://www.quora.com/How-long-does-a-nuclear-explosion-take)
Chemical explosives are far slower -- I believe closer to milisecond (thousandth-of-a-second) range. Or: a nuclear explosion is as much faster than a chemical explosion as a chemical explosion is to change taking a full second.
A table of chemical reaction velocities peaks at 10,000 m/s, or 1 km/s, or 1m / 0.001s, suggesting a typical deonation period of 0.001ms - 1ms.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Table_of_explosive_detonation_...
Meteor and meteorite impacts are often described in terms of megatons or Hiroshima-bomb equivalents. The Chelyabinsk meteorite is estimated to have released the energy of 20 - 30 Hiroshima-sized bombs, approximately 400 - 500 kilotons of TNT. However:
1. It did so primarily at an elevation of ~30 km,
2. over a period of 5 - 10 seconds,
3. in the form of light, heat, and sonic blast
Much the same as you experience the same total change in kinetic energy whether you decelerate from 100 kph in 10 seconds or 0.01s, the difference is in the total shock and stress, as well as the energy delivered.
TL;DR: a modest-sized nuclear blast high in the atmosphere or above it could have relatively modest ground impacts whilst delivering a strong EMP effect.
(That last line was a pretty good answer and did not really need the rest of the post above it, informative as it was ;-)
But the general case of such events is one element I've reflected on.
Sometimes it's physical disruption or damage. Very often though it's interference with energy cycles or communications and control. See various neurotoxins or the effects of cyanide (it blocks ATP cycling in mitochondria -- directly affecting the cellular energy cycle).
EMP is an energy signal that causes direct physical damage to long-length or fragile conductors, disabling both energy transmission and processing equipment, and communications systems.
Optical comms systems are unaffected, however. And systems based on microwave repeaters don't have the long-length conductors that telegraph systems did in the case of Carrington.
Granted, it would suck for a while.
On the bad side, people quickly run out of pen and paper, and the ham radio network desperately wants a hard fork to support side chains.
Still mostly useful for larger amounts, though, due to the relative high cost of hardware, but it's new.
Can't seem to find it again, though.
How would you be able to calculate the current value in fiat, if you had power but no internet?
For that matter, how could you verify that someone hadn't transferred the balance in a transaction that didn't exist in your (now offline) ledger (if they had internet and you didn't)?
At some point, if you're being practical rather than ideological, isnt cash the clear winner in these situations? YMMV if your currency isn't as stable as USD though
Ammunition is the universal apocalyptic currency. You can hunt with it and you can protect your family, food, and possessions with it. It is shelf-stable and easily subdivided. It can be put in a box and buried or carried in your pocket. Lots of people own guns but few have significant stashes of ammunition. A staple of chaotic times.
Water, that’s obvious, but you need a way to collect it and clean it. Those are their own currencies.
Diesel powers computer-less trucks like my old Land Rover Defender 110. Probably the last running vehicles in an apocalypse. It also runs generators and water pumps. It can potentially be manufactured by civilians.
https://www.goldeagle.com/tips-tools/how-long-does-diesel-fu...
Ammunition is tricky because there are so many "denominations" (i.e. calibers). It would certainly come in handy. One of the biggest benefits of the M16 for the US military was that it was standardized, meaning every branch used it and they all used the same caliber.
I think canned food would be important too. Quite a revolutionary concept we take for granted (we can thank Napoleon). Fun fact, canned food was invented 48 years before the can opener.
I think drugs and alcohol would be a huge currency. Always have been in one form or the other.
Of course most people in cities would be hosed after the canned food ran out, unless there was a severe population drop.
Read the book "Alas Babylon," it is a good fiction about nuclear war.
This is, of course, assuming society starts to reform and not all knowledge is lost. There will still be pockets of tech and society left, and there will still be power sources that stay running - like hydro.
Humans are pretty resilient and adaptable. If we don't kill the entire population off, we will probably be okay. Maybe not okay as an individual, but okay as a species.
As impractical as it seems at first glance, the best post-apocalypse vehicles (barring an EMP scenario) would be electric since scavenged solar panels could provide the energy source for generations without significant degradation. Scrounging for electricity-based energy generation is much more practical than petrol-based resources that degrade, need refining, etc.
Batteries won't last as long as the solar panels, but as a personal observation, I've noticed that my parents hybrid Prius still has over 95% battery health after almost 15 years. High-quality batteries with well-engineered charge controllers have really impressive life spans in terms of maintaining their charge capacity!
Note: This has no impact on your argument. I only mention it because I love me some physics.
Here's a citation, if you're curious:
https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/34421/does-the-m...
The short version is that it will have less mass when the battery is discharged. However, you're not going to be able to detect a difference on your bathroom scale.
Again, this is being posted as a mere factoid and not meant to argue your point.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/comp.society.privacy...
The other problem is generating the energy. Yes solar panels are a good energy source in an apocalyptic scenario, but the power they give out is really limited compared to fuel. 10m2 of solar cells will generate around 5kW per day (assuming no nuclear winter). With current EVs that would give you a range of around 10-15 miles once charging loses are taken into account.
kinda hard without power
I assume you are asking out of curiosity, since that would not help anything on a practical level. There is no shortage of cash, the problem is getting it to people.
People don’t know how the Jones Act effects PR (and Hawaii and Alaska). People don’t know the gaps in representation and resources that PR’s status creates.
Mention “PR” and coworkers are more likely to think “Pull Request”. Puerto Rico is just not on anyone’s radar unless you are from there or vacation there.
Especially roads. It's not just roads being blocked by debris. Many are washed out. Bridges, too. Unlike Houston and Florida, Puerto Rico is mountainous. Just getting access to the interior of the island is tough.
This may result in San Juan returning to close to normal while people are still dying in the hinterlands.
The fact that they have no representation means there is no vote to win so politicians don’t care. And the fact that they don’t pay federal income tax is justification to completely ignore them.
Honestly, at this point I expect another storm to roll through before the end of the season and a mass emigration to NYC or Miami.
America is simply too big for people to care all that much about what happens in far flung areas. Hearing about flooding in Louisiana is like about flooding in Bangladesh. Unfortunate, but not my problem.
That doesn't apply to Puerto Rico obviously, but the average American may not feel capable of making a difference there, as they can't get there.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-media-really-has-ne...
If this weren't the case, there would be an opening for media that isn't completely out of touch...
EDIT: Spontaneously-organized mutual assistance certainly isn't just a Houston or Texas or U.S. phenomenon; I just remembered a story about Muslims in a small Indian fishing village who organized to help their Hindu neighbors after the 2004 tsunami [0].
[0] http://www.questioningchristian.com/2005/01/indian_muslims_.... — the comments include comments from people saying they were from that fishing village.
The operative word was emphasized. A Texas redneck with a lifted truck can’t drive his beast to Puerto Rico to go have fun pulling an army truck out of a swamp.
New Orleans: 70% non-white, median household income $37k
Flint: 63% non-white, median household income $44k
Puerto Rico: 98% latino, though most are also classified as white, median household income $19.5k
Houston: 50% non-white, median household income $61.5k
Houston is whiter and richer than New Orleans, Flint and Puerto Rico. I think we're kidding ourselves if we think this doesn't play into why the responses are different from both the government and people in other parts of the country.
Still mostly useful for larger amounts, though, due to the relative high cost of hardware, but it's new.
So everyone pays tithe to a single organization that creates 'trustable' units of physical currency. So new!
At least with cash you're not destroying the physical currency every time you use it. (That and the Mint's security measures are just a liittle more advanced than "we put some epoxy on a USB stick")
There are still gullible people who believe those so-called 'banks' actually have their government paper bonds. Yes I purposefully used this term to emphasize that those notes are not cash or money. Money is a commodity, and the paper credit is (should be) a receipt for it. A dollar is 1.505g of gold.