US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M
themoneyillusion.com
themoneyillusion.com
In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I did not mention any party, that perennial misdirection to their collective heist. Also don't fall for the other smoke screen of small vs. big government. I demand at least a competent government.
For politicians truth is whatever you make people believe it to be.
Meanwhile engineers and scientists struggle daily to find the hard facts of the world to painstakingly build or discover something that improves lives. We should be disgusted and revolted at who is leading us right now. We should drive these fools out office and strip them of any respect.
If we don't, there will be no one competent left in position to rebuild from this, or the next, catastrophe that "nobody" could have expected. Or maybe there will be some states or localities that can get their act together, and the rest will be a wasteland of warring cultural and racial tribes.
The voters didn't ask nor vote for our government. The government picked the voters...
Please don't tell people that they would ever deserve our current leaders. People deserve safety, stability, and basic decency, no matter what. Even if they make a mistake. Especially then. People deserve better.
It's not meant as a flippant comment. Taxes are an exchange from citizens to state, in return for a certain duty of care.
Yes, the system is set up to inflict severe punishment on dissenters - because tax money enables (or disables) government.
But, the more people who rally around your political protest, the more effective it becomes...
That being said, you seem to be quite active politically and doing more than most in this arena. At what point do you give up and move to where you think you'll be represented? This is assuming you have the means to go elsewhere. Some people operate on moving to where they are treated best, that includes the option of a different country.
I guess it's easy to make those kinds of remarks when you know you won't be the one paying that price, huh?
If I'm not willing to pay the price, I should not expect change.
No individual can just "rise up and fix the system".
I agree wholeheartedly that a democratic government reflects its voters. A largely apathetic, non-voting populace exaggerates the effect of gerrymandering, campaign finance and media manipulation.
Also due to the electoral college and the winner-take-all way in which voting is designed in the U.S, your vote for president only matters if you live in a swing state. If you live in California or New York, there's basically no point in voting for president because there's such a large Democratic majority and it's winner-take-all.
I am well aware, but that has nothing to do with the almost half of eligible voters who didn't vote at all. Californians who didn't vote in 2016 (~9m) far outnumber Hillary's margin over Trump (~4.3m). There's only "no point voting for president in California" because 9m Californians don't vote. That's nothing to do with "the system", that's a choice that every single one of those 9m voters is making.
Which brings me back to my original point, which is that voter apathy exacerbates the influence of gerrymandering and campaign spending in winning elections.
Winner-take-all in any state that leans predominantly in one direction means that your vote doesn't matter. Unless those 9 million people happened to all be of the Republican party (extremely unlikely), it wouldn't have made any difference had they voted or not. Winner-take-all means all the delegates go to the winner.
It has everything to do with the system. Instead of just preaching that people should vote, maybe take a look at why they aren't. Maybe some don't because they can't get off work and unlike many other countries, election day isn't a national holiday. Or maybe because they don't feel like it makes a difference. If you don't live in a swing state, then one is right to feel like their presidential vote doesn't make a difference because as I just explained, it doesn't, and it shouldn't be that way.
Perhaps if more people voted in places like CA, the discrepancy between the popular vote and the actual winning candidate would be shown to be so absurd that we could actually get a movement going to successfully change how we elect our leaders.
Then again, it's possible (likely?) that would be matched by more people in red states voting such that the margins would end up the same.
Of course, you might mean that you just want the half of non-voters who agree with you to vote, but that's a different thing.
Hell, ignoring the deplorable level to which standards have been lowered by perverse incentives to pass students, the US only has an average of 80 HS graduation rate.
These are your voters. People who struggled to make it through high school have just as much of a day over your governments, your legislation, as you do. Do you expect uneducated and/or ignorant voters to make good decisions?
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-graduation-rate-s...
Start with considering skewed results when an electoral process is skewed by asymmetric warfare of an adversary.
Or consider regulatory capture by small subsets of the society, not visible until the damage is done....
It's not just voting. I'm to blame for inaction and not running for office. As an engineer I could have something credible to say about many pressing issues. By why would I ever enter a race that is decided not on any values I uphold, but by manipulating the under-educated. Somehow the message did not win many races: "Vote for a scientist or an engineer or you may die from the next catastrophe that nobody believed us when we said we should prepare for it."
To say that we'll run out of competent people to lead is nonsense.
In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusion that the majority of the population of the U.S. deserves the work of engineers and scientists at this point. Now - obviously, you could say "well, they didn't ask for the engineers/scientists help" - but they definitely want the ability to receive some sort of medical care, and if they stop having a new phone to buy every year on the dot... some vocal portion of the populace will be quite unhappy.
Getting into how I actually feel about politics would be pretty irrelevant/pointless. However - I do think the U.S. is at the point where the average HN goer would agree the current government is a shitshow. Making that statement - I obviously agree with it. However, I've reached a point where I truly believe I'd rather have another four years of this administration, in a sincere hope that things keep going downhill and get exponentially worse, just so some drastic form of change and restructuring will have to happen - either that, or just the U.S. becoming a completely failed nation and engineers/scientists just jump ship to a more competent country.
Not trying to troll in the slightest in posting this. Am I crazy, or does anybody else feel the same way?
(On the grandparent, I have to agree that occasionally I feel like the development of society at large is kept hostage by morons. Not only politics, but practically everything seems to be built for the lowest common denominator. It may really be that one day in the future some kind of Galt's Gulch is needed. Only Rand is going to be turning in her grave. If not for any other reason, then because in this gulch the members are pissing on her grave.)
It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she tried to paint a realistic picture, ultimately Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction that falls apart when placed within real-world constructs, especially 50+ years on after its publication.
At the heart of it, what Rand appeared to most argue in Atlas Shrugged was against regulation and governance that superseded the inalienable rights of citizens plus centralized power in an authoritarian state and took away the economic agency of the individual. That doesn't preclude a functioning republic where people can own businesses, own the rights to their creations, and still pay taxes for the benefits of services best provided by government.
Now here's the irony: Rather than coming for our system via communism, which was Rand's concern, instead it was nominal capitalists who came to destroy the system via regulatory capture. I don't see what the right-wing, nominal capitalists in the US have done to be any different than the moochers in Rand's book.
The major difference is that only some insignificant weirdos in the fringes have not agreed that communism is stupid in practice. Brutalist aynrandian ideology is much more prevalent problem and needs to be somehow gotten into same ridiculed state as communism as an actual feasible ideology.
a) You're spot on she didn't want to destroy the govt. She was explicitly a minarchist, and she swapped major arugments and ridicule with the Ancaps of the time (like Murray Rothbard)
b) The communism hate gets floated most, but my read of Atlas Shrugged was that she placed the collectivists at the same evil level as the church, crony capitalists, and postmodernists, to the point of having characters who 1-dimensionally represented each of them (she's literally got a lobbyist character called "Wesley Mouch").
That's why it's always hilarious to me when I see neocon congressfolk saying that Atlas Shrugged is their favorite book: she hated the church as much as the government (and would've likely hated those politicians as well).
Poked around some articles after writing some of this, found this one to be pretty neutral and illustrates my point a little better: https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/the-paul-ryan-ayn-rand...
Moving to a smaller country, I don't know how I would feel in World War just because of population numbers and physical location. Given the arguments we can see between humans in U.S. states, and knowing how trivial it truly is to something like the ideologies of the CCP... I fully expect serious global conflict within my lifetime. That's the one thing I do atleast think I feel safer with being in the slightly rural MidWest than a smaller country....
Maybe this is getting away from the point of things. But fuck. I've experienced a lot of physical pain in life from my body falling apart, but in my mind, the horrors that could be experienced in war makes it seem like nothing. I'd just not like to die in a horrible way because of dumb fucking shit. However, that's probably stupid of me seeing as how that's how most of human history has been.
Everyone will be losers but as things currently stand, China would loose the most.
Furthermore: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underground_Great_Wall_of_Chin...
(A variant of a worst case I haven't even considered before is a full nuclear Armageddon, and then Command and Control survives to take nuclear potshots for years afterwards. For instance if one party has still substantial conventional forces but the other manages to from time to time scrounge up another nuke and launch it.)
I could see them have more ICBMs than apparent, but successful SDI I don't think is possible, not against nuclear strike submarines in any case.
As someone who has made the transition from teenager to young adult during the Trump era, I feel like I've lost a game I never even had the chance to play. We have clearly gone so far off course but very few seem interested in steering us back to reality (between the impeachment "trial", the primaries, and our handling of COVID-19).
After four years of the disaster that is the Trump administration, any establishment Democrats like Biden elected to office will be praised no matter what they do, simply by virtue of not being Trump. But that's not real progress. They'll continue to neglect wealth inequality / infrastructure / privacy / technology issues.
And Trump isn't the problem, he's just a convenient distraction from the fact that big money controls both parties. It's just that establishment Democrats more or less want to maintain the status quo, while conservatives are using Trump to brazenly roll back regulations.
Four years from now, we'll have even more damning evidence about the true long-term economic/social/environmental damage done during his term (as if it weren't clear enough). If he's not in office long enough, this will all be blamed on the next president, adding more fuel to the fire for a likely 2024 run.
Or worse: Someone more cunning but just as evil comes along, charming voters while more adeptly covering up their true intentions.
Our only hope this that enough voters get really pissed off enough to vote in every local, state, and federal election consistently enough for the next couple decades so that we can start to heal.
Biden's not going to inspire that. Bernie, maybe, had the chance to. Trump will do it. And if we can't survive another four years of Trump, we don't deserve to.
Once the older generation dies out and the younger generation takes over, we'll start to see some real progress. Imagine where we could be if more of our politicians resembled people like Andrew Yang - young normal uncorrupted people who grew up in the internet generation. The problem is that most of our politicians are too old (average Senator is 61 years old) and are completely removed from the real issues facing Americans.
We'll see progress, to be sure (and that's good!), but it won't be as dramatic as you think. It'll likely be similar to the last several generations of progress.
Bernie didn't even inspire people to vote for him in the primary; how was he going to inspire people if he got nominated?
I'm not saying he would've 'won'; it's quite possible he positioned himself as too much 'non-establishment', or perhaps too little. but saying he didn't inspire people to vote for him in the primary is not evident, IMO.
The fact he didn't win is evidence of that, surely?
That's how we got this administration in the first place. There is no rule that smashing the system has to leave you with a better one.
You talking like, U.S. declaration of Independence, or more/less recent than that...?
While my mind is fuzzier now, I like to think it was a "things change for the better" else - engineers/scientists completely stop giving a fuck about helping the U.S.
And also there's no rule that says it will get worse, either. When you have competent people making the rules, there's a good chance it gets better
Trump said he'd smash the system, and I'll admit I thought he would. That was one monumental lie.
The world is not better by any measure.
However, I will fix it for you, zero percent of the US supports Trump or believes he has made the country a better place. There is a zero percent chance he will win the next election. Is that the delutional propoganda you prefer?
Strictly speaking, that's not true. The world is now aware of how painfully unprepared we are for cataclysmic events, like pandemics.
The world now also knows how dangerous China is due to the dangers of offshore supply chains, the disinformation they spread which endangered lives, and the dangerously strong influence they have over the WHO.
These are all good things and we're better off knowing them.
There is no logical link between willfully making our own government incompetent and corrupt just so we can realize how unprepared we are. That sounds like a self fulfilling prophecy.
Maybe you've known it. The people at large did not and now they do. Anti-China policy was often viewed as racist. Don't underestimate the power of common knowledge to influence the political winds.
That may well be ok for you to say but thousands of people have already died as a direct consequence of Trump's presidency. Hundreds of thousands more have been penalised for their race, beliefs, sexuality, etc. Generations to come will suffer because of the regulations they're undoing and the courts they've packed with Federalist wingnuts. Have some compassion, c'mon.
Not making an argument for either side, I just don't think it's whataboutism to argue that the variance of the incompetence of US presidents isn't very high.
Bush: thousands dead through incompetence in the USA (Katrina, 9/11) Obama: Trump: thousands dead through incompetence and malice in the USA (ICE, COVID-19)
I've taken out the "overseas wars" because that's shared across all of them.
And almost all those people are people whose lives will not be affected negatively by 4 more years of the terrible administration, so they get to enjoy moral outrage while others bear the burden of feeding their moral indignation.
On the other hand, people whose lives are actually getting destroyed don’t have the same luxury. On a personal note, I have colleagues whose entire lives have been upturned thanks to this administration, but fortunately they are extremely skilled so they were simply able to recall rate by building their lives elsewhere in a country where the administration is not trying to make their lives miserable. The same cannot be said for the many millions of others who are suffering negatively thanks to the admin (especially the many tens of thousands who will be dead due to COVID who wouldn’t have been in a bare minimum competent admin).
While it may seem daunting, changing the system before a point of no return would historically be the right move.
Historically, the most likely outcome of your strategy is a shift towards more oligarchs and feudalism.
Have a look at Russia, Iraq, China (post ww2), etc.
I don’t think there is any reason to be optimistic about “drastic change” being change for the better. It very well can go both ways, and historically tends to the worse.
Also, at least recently https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay
I didn't like it that much, but didn't need too much suspension of disbelief to see it as a realistic possibility.
Think of all the televangelists, megachurches, religious fundamentalists and so on. What happens in dire times? People flock to such things. There is no 'rationality" in it, just instinct. Thereby worsening the chance of the outcome you wish for.
I felt the smarter way would be to ridicule these horror clowns as much as possible, so their incompetence would obvious to almost everyone. But somehow that seems to not even matter.
I'm clueless as to why. It does not compute!
What pisses me off more the problems themselves in our society (terrible healthcare system that ties healthcare to employment, outrageous university tuition + student debt crisis, homeless crisis) is the fact that we all know and agree these are problems, have known for decades, yet do nothing about it. 9 of the 10 warmest years in history have occurred since 2005, yet we do little to nothing about climate change. Epidemiologists and public health experts saw the coronavirus pandemic coming in January, yet it takes the crisis actually hitting us to start acting. We get some fiscal stimulus, but the people get relative scraps while most of it goes to wealthy corporations. I still don't even know if I qualify for the COVID checks because the government website tells me "Payment Status Not Available".
For example take tax filing. In most countries, filing taxes is effortless and takes about 2 seconds - log into a government website, verify that the information the government already has on you is correct, and submit. But in the U.S., citizens are forced to waste time manually filling out all these tax forms and pay private companies money (eg. TurboTax, now there is e-filing, but ). It doesn't matter if you're Democrat, Republican, or a member of the Nazi Party, we can all agree that making tax filing take as little time and effort as possible is superior to having to take more time and effort. Yet in 2020 I still have to pay TurboTax to help file my taxes because the U.S. government is too incompetent to make it as easy as countries like Sweden, South Korea, etc.
We can definitely improve things significantly by electing better politicians, but that can only go so far within the confines of our current money-driven two-party system. We need a system that more accurately reflects the will of the people. Rank-based voting would enable third parties, liquid democracy would enable citizens to vote directly on issues without having to be beholden to elected officials. Experts should be in charge of their domains of expertise, specially when it comes to science (eg. public health experts in charge of public health policy). Politicians can decide what gets taxed, who gets the money, and vote on laws, but beyond that we need competent people managing what they're competent at, and a system that's proactive rather than reactive.
Too bad it's taboo to even suggest that a system of government devised over 200 years ago when people were riding around on horses may not be the most efficient in the 21st century.
EDIT: Rather than simply downvoting because you disagree (which is not what the downvote tool is designed for by the way), how about taking a second to explain what you disagree with?
As an example; more voters know how much they spend on Netflix or Amazon Prime than how much they spend on government, meaning they are better equipped to hold streaming services accountable than their government, even though the latter costs them (at least) hundreds of times more.
Well that's factually false because taxpayers can see all the information and verify it for themselves (that's what they're supposed to do before they verify it). Who exactly is arguing that making tax filing easier is "anti-democratic"? A couple American tax extremists? The Intuit lobby?
If the U.S. can't even make something as simple as tax filing easier, then the U.S. is hopeless when it comes to bigger issues. We're already the only country without universal healthcare and where an undergraduate degree at a public school costs six figures. How can we fix those bigger and more "complex" problems if we can't even fix something as dead simple and bipartisan as tax filing?
Here in Sweden I receive my tax form pre-filled in a digital mailbox (basically a PDF of the tax form I'd get through snail mail on a website), I can see on the first page the total amount of tax paid, how much I owe or will receive as tax return and then another section with more details about interest I've paid, how much of that was deducted from my taxes, etc.
In about 5 minutes I have an overview of all the taxes paid from my income, how much went to the national, kommun/local government and I'm done.
I don't follow what is the argument about how making this process simple is considered anti-democratic.
The article actually quotes and links surveys proving the point.
having taxes included in the price when I buy something at a store makes lige easier for consumers. I dont need to know everytime I pay some tax exactly how much has been paid.
I honestly read your comments as a sort of astroturfing with your use of 'many' as if to mean a significant number of people, rather than the reality, which is 'some people', indicating a whole lot less people but more than 1.
you are being worked over by special interest groups who are being led on by some rich people who have their opinions and are forcing every one to live by them.
TurboTax lobby officially to make tax filing difficult in the US, they will also spend money under the radar to give voice to the 'individual' who is anti tax because it benefits Turbo Tax not because they align with the individual, but because it helps their bottom line.
Normally I’m all about Hanlon’s razor (assume stupidity before malice), but given the absurd amount TurboTax spends lobbying against any meaningful simplification you can’t fully pin place this on gov’t incompetence.
But ultimately TurboTax doesn't vote on laws, politicians do. By blaming TurboTax, you're alleviating politicians of their personal responsibility.
FPTP voting collapses into a two-party system, which ultimately leads to a government and people at war with itself. Under such a system, compromises become impossible, sabotage the norm, and nobody can get anything meaningful done anymore. The loudest man wins.
The cultural baggage comes from the Cold War. If you look at popular media from the time, you'll see a very strong connection between "communism" and "science" (because the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life). American TV, books and movies conflated science and anything "sciency" with commies and conspiracies to enslave the common man, but it's hard to blame them since they were taking their cue from the spirit of the times.
To this day, there are few countries with such a heavy distrust of science as America has. And since the alternatives for explaining complex things are religion, superstitions, and "folksy wisdom", it's no wonder that such people get elected to office. And since it's a two-party system, belligerence is a virtue.
the USSR placed such great faith in science as the saviour of their people and a vindication of their way of life
In all three cases, the leading relief efforts (and vast improvements to Soviet agriculture) were provided by those "anti-science" Americans.
Given what a horribly ignorant "anti-science" place America is, it's baffling that so many of y'all want to go there to live.
My point is that the USSR's fanatical devotion to a flawed religion of "science" had ripple effects to the USA, their sworn mutual enemy. When one side takes on a slogan to rally their tribe, the opposing side must distance themselves from it, which in this case meant that America distanced itself from trust in their own scientific institutions for fear of appearing to support the enemy tribe's position (it was an ideological and cultural war, and everyone was watching). That official distrust of science spread into a cultural distrust that resonates to this day.
Note: I'm not blaming America here; this is the nature of culture (regardless of who it is), and it couldn't have happened any other way in their competition, given Moscow's "science the saviour" position. It's just unfortunate that this is part of the fallout.
http://www.lloyds.com/~/media/lloyds/reports/emerging%20risk... was prepared by Lloyds of London after the 2012 detection of a large solar flare by a satellite in interplanetary space. (That one missed the Earth.)
Their estimate was $600 billion - $2 trillion dollars of damage from an event that happens roughly once ever 150 years on average. Therefore the amortized cost of this risk per year is $4 - $13 billion.
If a substantial fraction of the risk can be mitigated over the next decade for $300 million, it would be cheap at 10x the price. In fact Berkshire Hathaway probably has enough exposure to this risk that it makes financial sense for them to not debate over who pays and to just create the stockpile to reduce potential future insurance claims.
[1]https://www.insurancebusinessmag.com/us/news/breaking-news/t...
In the end people subsist on irradiated rats and mutant vegetables but they're doing great because each of them are owed millions of pounds by Lloyd's of London which may or may not exist anymore.
Risk assessment.
Hands up who anticipated SARS-CoVid-2 -> covid-19? ... OK who mitigated it with a fortuitous insurance policy? ... OK who simply happened to have enough cash in the bank by accident?
Now look at the grid. Any grid.
For whatever reason, the US managed to take the idea seriously for decades and then not really be prepared once it actually happened.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2020-03-27/coronavi...
CA has a stockpile that was allowed to deteoriate due to budget cuts. So the initial impression was that we weren't prepared, but then we reassessed the situation and gave away at least 500 ventilators to other states as we felt more confident.
Luckily, Bay Area and LA residents travel to China a lot, so we already had substantial herd immunity by February 1.
You can see that in the Santa Clara dashboard, which never showed an emergency situation:
https://www.sccgov.org/sites/covid19/Pages/dashboard.aspx#ho...
Not the "sky is falling" narrative that HN and the press keep trumpeting, is it?
Ummn, what? This sounds like an entirely made up factoid, and certainly isn't supported by the dashboard. The estimates of how many people in a population have to have had COVID-19 are very high. Even if you buy the Stanford study, which is itself controversial, the estimated numbers for how many have been exposed to the virus are still an order of magnitude below what you'd need for herd immunity.
The “criticism” on those studies are more hypothetical and not universal. It’s like “this study could be wrong because X”, and “that study could be wrong because Y”, but there are more than enough now to draw statistical conclusions.
The difference between 20% (NYC antibody positives) and herd immunity estimates (75%) is not an order of magnitude.
No, we don’t have herd immunity, but enough that the rate of infection is slowing.
And actually, at this rate we’ll get to herd immunity before a vaccine is found. Maybe the lockdown breakers are ironically the ones that (1) saves the economy (2) ends the corona pandemic.
You don’t think that has something to do with the fact we drove our economy off a cliff by asking (or forcing) people to stay home?
24,708 people have died in NY so far, but we'd need 82775 to die to get herd immunity. That's about 1% of NYC's population. Of course, NYC's population is a lot less since so many people left the city as this was getting started, and it also takes a while for many hospitalized people to lose their fight with this disease, so the 24,708 is an undercount. It also undercounts excess mortality.
Still, if we neglect all of that, you're looking at 3 million Americans dead in order for your strategy to work.
After we sacrifice the 3 million, we don't even know what the immunity will look like. Our experiences with other coronaviruses are not all that promising. People may be reinfected within months.
The NYC study is interesting; of course, it's a random sample of people at grocery stores and community centers i.e. "those who are out and about in a pandemic", not a truly random sample. But it's intriguing nonetheless.
Still, I'm not sure what the course of action that it supposedly suggests is: make everywhere in the USA 3x as infected as NYC at its peak? That's 40K more dead there and I doubt that the extrapolation to the rest of the country would be fun.
The rate of infection is slowing because of shelter-in-place orders. Suggesting we're to the point of developing herd immunity is completely baseless and improbable.
Some states like CA were prepared
Unfortunately a number of different failures of government resulted in that preparation being completely squandered. Leaving the US completely unprepared when it actually happened.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/12/opinion/ventilators-coron...
Which, if my made up math is correct, means several entities probably already have done so.
That would be a dangerous assumption.
Price is a good method of discriminating between who wants something and who needs something. But just try and raise prices during a pandemic and there will be 1) laws and 2) calls of "price gouging".
If The Event really happened I bet that any transformers would be taken by the state/feds within 24 hours. And such an action would have the support of 99% of the populace.
Of course they would pay you. But it would be at 1x your cost, not a nickel higher.
Here's a relevant search of Google News: https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en&biw=1265&...
Choice headlines include:
PPE suppliers accused of 'blatant profiteering' as prices inflated by up to 825 per cent.
Cost of PPE soars due to price gouging, surge in demand ...
Protective equipment costs increase over 1000% amid ...
There are indeed some headlines of investigations regarding price gouging in such matters. But it appears that high prices are being paid. And with lots of outrageous stories of millions being paid and the product never showing up, I'd feel relatively safe charging some sane multiplier as long as the product actually exists.
The entire US nation needs 30 HV transformers in total and there is essentially no competition for those resources within the US, leading to an extremely illiquid market based upon a good that cannot be easily moved and can be easily seized with force.
PPE demand is measured in millions per day, is a resource in high demand by both nation and non-nation entities, and cannot as easily be seized by force as each unit item is the size of a dollar bill (and shipments can be protected, etc).
So, you would need to establish solid pricing history for your stockpile.
(source: worked with a mil commander who had been peripherally involved with an event where they snagged ~100 very backordered top end Sun workstations off the shipping floor. also currently work on DOD projects)
What you are reading is likely commercial transactions. You should also note that some of those vendors have been snd will be busted by the FBI for price gouging. E.g., one guy in Brooklyn got busted with truckloads of N95 masks & PPE, they just arrested him, logged the gear & donated it.
Your multiple needs to be very sane, or you are relying only on luck - they like to make examples of that kind of of behavior...
The only reason suppliers can get away with profiteering and price gouging is that ultimately, most of them aren't based in the USA and so there's no way for the US federal government to get their goods without either paying the price they demand or starting a war.
Though this discussions seems a bit provincial. Won't the sun knock out the same things all across the planet? Why are we only talking about the US?
Sure, the failure of the correct combination of 9 might be able to shut down the grid. That's only likely to happen as the result of a direct, human-planned attack - any disaster would inevitably have to destroy more than the minimum to get a correct combination, probably including a whole bunch of smaller transformers. And crucially, destroying just those key transformers alone wouldn't be enough to stop the grid from being restarted - the generation infrastructure is distributed locally throughout the grid, so even if regions couldn't be reconnected they could operate independently with reduced reliability and capacity if necessary. In order to cause a massive months-long blackout that killed 90% of Americans, any event would have to destroy a whole bunch of local, distributed infrastructure, and stockpiling a handful of transformers would not be enough to replace that.
This could happen at any time due to a solar flare. The coronavirus has made it pretty clear that America is completely unprepared for any sort of major deviation from "normal".
This is the nature of the US system of competitive federalism. States only coordinate with the federal government when either (a) it's politically expedient, because the ruling party in the same for both at that time, or (b) the federal government forces this issue, at which time lawsuits ensue.
It's helpful to think of the US as more a series of regions that sometimes fall under a shifting umbrella government than an actual, single entity.
Interestingly, Germany is also a federal state. Yet we never seem to hear about federal regions of Germany disagreeing with each other and fighting with the Federal government like we hear about the US. Any Germans want to spill the tea on German inter-regional political drama?
This ain't true¹. Most of the landmass of the Americas is covered by federated states, sure, but the vast majority of states are unitary.
The more relevant factor is the size of the state's territory. With a few exceptions (like China), most big countries are federated, and most small countries are unitary.
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¹: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/46/Ma...
After doing some back of the envelope calculations, about 17% of the countries in the Americas are federated and 16% in Europe, so it's actually pretty similar. But countries in the Americas have a much bigger size disparity than in Europe which really makes the federated areas stand out.
It got cemented due to Slavery as we basically carved up the country between slaves states and free states, and ultimately fought a civil war to deal with this bifurcation.
It’s been our long history, it defined us.
Edit: Whoops, I did the American thing again and forgot there are other countries in the Americas.
For reference, do you hear about any internal German politics?
(Not to say that you can't see the faultlines in other European societies though. Ireland's parties inherit from her civil war. The UK has not entirely given up on anti-Catholicism, and has forgotten that its own most recent civil war only ended in 1998. I would put money on East vs West still being somewhat live in German politics, but conducted with a good deal more dignity)
Seems to me like our main difficulty deviating from normal is the fact that a 20% decrease in demand kills off 10% of businesses within weeks and causes 20% of people to instantly get behind on their rent. There's no slack in the system.
Actually, it is:
https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/495519-maryland-gov...
“The National Guard and the State Police are both guarding these tests at an undisclosed location [because] the federal government seems to be interrupting supplies that are being sent elsewhere in the nation, and so I wanted to make sure that we received what we ordered,” [Illinois Gov. J.B.] Pritzker told reporters at an April 15 press conference.
"... the federal government is quietly seizing orders, leaving medical providers across the country in the dark about where the material is going and how they can get what they need to deal with the coronavirus pandemic. Hospital and clinic officials in seven states described the seizures in interviews over the past week." [Emphasis added]
Is that enough of a trend for you?
I meant that aside from the conflict over PPE - which has happened more than once - I am not aware of instances of the state and federal government working against one another.
The solution would be the states deciding among themselves who should get what, with the richer states being OK with getting less than they would otherwise get.
There's the Western States Pact (CA, OR, WA, NV, CO), and NY just announced an eastern states consortium (NY, NJ, MA, CT, PA, RI, DE).
Add to the fact that several states have had to take drastic measures like calling in their national guard to protect their own PPE shipments from being seized by federal agents, and it's hard not to argue that several states are in fact struggling against the federal government in a completely unprecedented way.
Can you explain why you believe that?
What's gained by coordinating Covid response in Spokane and Fresno?
> There is no published model disclosing how these numbers were arrived at, nor are we able to validate a primary source for this claim. Testimony given by the Chairman of the Congressional EMP Commission, while expressing similar concerns, gave no estimate of the deaths that would accrue from a prolonged nationwide grid collapse.
I'm highly suspicious that that number is exaggerated in order to inspire action on what still seems like a worthwhile issue.
Unfortunately discussion in this thread will be dead before anybody will finish comprehensively reading that report.
With the recent failure of the federal government during what should be a significantly easier to manage emergency, I find the 90% to be more believable than I would have just a year ago.
[1]: https://www.powermag.com/expect-death-if-pulse-event-hits-po...
As context, I spent three years driving right around Africa, and before that two years driving from Alaska to Argentina. I've seen my fair share of collapsing infrastructure (Congo... Mali... Sudan, etc.) and what happens in just a few days without electricity.
In less developed countries the impacts are actually much less than they will be in our developed countries, because the people there are used to things failing, and their lives go on regardless. i.e. many people have beasts of burden to carry loads and farm, they have bicycles or walk to get around and they grow their own food.
For us, it won't be so easy.
- Very quickly all the perishables in the stores go bad, and food shortages become very real very fast.
- ATMs don't work - therefore no cash for anyone.
- Gas and diesel are very hard to get out of underground tanks without electricity (yes, you can hand pump it or use a generator... but how many of those are sitting around ready to go?)
- Communications go down - no cell phones, no internet, no radio, no TV. It's extremely hard to get accurate information in that scenario.
- Soon everyone is just focused on survival, so many other basics fall by the wayside. Garbage collection. Sewage, drinking water, medical supplies and much more all stop working.
- In places with low population density and where people have some "homesteading" skills this might not be so bad - they can just shoot a cow once every few weeks or whatever. In downtown LA, NYC and Chicago, it's extremely bad.
In just a few weeks you have mass hysteria, and things go downhill fast. Just look at the scenes in the big box stores when COVID-19 hit of people getting violent and stockpiling toilet paper. Now imagine how desperate everyone would be if the power was out, and in all likelihood will be out for months.
As a teen, back in my fancy country, there was a highly unusual power outage in my country, in summer (which is really nothing extreme over here). Nonetheless, it caused chaos. offices had to be closed because there was no air conditioning and office windows couldn't be opened, trains had issues, people panicked, etc. I remember even back then thinking that if shit would ever properly hit the fan, I'd head to a place where at least the populace wouldn't panic. It's a societal panic and chaos that I fear more than having no power or water, or a 'proper' rule of law. Broadly speaking.
Not to me. The real number could be even higher, at least for the USA population.
Without electricity, here are just a few things that come to mind:
1) no water to your house. Have fun drinking out of the nearest river. There won't be a hospital you can go to when you get cholera or dysentery or heavy metal poisoning.
2) have fun using a chain saw (you do have one?) to chop down nearby trees so you can cook your food. How many cans of spam do you have right now in your pantry?
3) One tank of gasoline. The one in your car. That's it. Gas stations can't pump out of their tanks. It wouldn't be hard to get the 10,000 or 20,000 gallons out of their storage tanks by portable pumps. It's a day or two worth of gas. Many stations get daily gas deliveries, they don't have much inventory around.
4) No electricity means refineries can't operate. No diesel for trucks to deliver the gasoline that refineries can't produce. How many refineries can operate for long, if at all, without external electricity?
5) A lot of oil and gasoline moves by pipelines. These need significant energy for pumping along the way. No electricity, no pipelines.
6) No food being shipped from farms. No energy for factories to process it, e.g. refine grain and slaughter cattle.
7) How long can diesel-electric trains run with the diesel they have on hand? A few weeks? Of course, subways and overhead-electric trains would be totally non-functional.
8) Have fun in urban areas like NYC. I can't imagine what a place like that would be after a week or two without water or power and without working sewage.
I'll just stop right there. I could probably come up with another 100 things without really trying.
On the bright side, who will be OK:
1) A lot of the third world. People whose daily existence depends on subsistence farming can survive for years. Many of them don't have electricity right now.
2) Some farmers in the USA. They probably have hand-pumped wells (a relic from bygone days) and plenty of food on hand.
3) Some groups like the Mormons. They (at least on paper) prepare for those kinds of things.
4) People like the Amish. They would probably do OK.
5) Survivalists in general. They have stocked up on food, and they have guns. They will be happy to shoot you dead if you come to them to take their food. And if they run out of food they will be happy to go looking for you and shoot you dead and take your food.
Just 150 years ago none of this would have been an issue. We didn't have electricity and we had much lower population density.
But now, if we lose electricity nationwide for an extended period of time, we are way beyond fucked. We're mostly dead.
Windmills that e.g. farmers and other rural people install on their property would probably be OK. It should be easy to disconnect them from the grid and have them power local equipment. But without some sort of energy storage, it would be dangerous to try to operate on just windmill power. Too variable. Most equipment wouldn't deal with it very well.
But there is one other strong positive I forgot to mention. PV power. That's becoming more and more available. Such a massive change in just the last few years.
PV would let pockets of people do well. Also, having something like a Tesla car or Powerwall, coupled with rooftop PV, would be a game changer for those people. A setup like that could do pretty well if decoupled from the external power grid.
So yes, windmills will come to a halt because they are designed to. Or, more specifically, they will feather their blades and continue to rotate idly while not producing power in order to ensure adequate hub lubrication.
There is a significant concern that, even in a scenario where all power plants are undamaged, it would take a significant period of time for plant operators and distribution system operators to restore service due to the need to more or less restart everything. Something very similar happened during the California power crisis and the great Northeast blackout, in which undamaged power plants were offline for an extended period of time due to the difficulty of restoring grid condition to normal.
Even under normal conditions of a stable grid, when power plants start (e.g. due to expected increase in demand) it takes hours from startup to connection to the grid. Most renewable generation methods (except hydro) and the newest natural-gas turbine plants can start much more quickly (e.g. 15 minutes), but this assumes that they will be connected to a grid which is operating at their design frequency, which would be very difficult to achieve if there has been a significant loss of generation.
And just to worry a bit more, a significant amount of electrical generation, especially in plants capable of load following (quick response to demand), is via natural gas. Natural gas distribution also relies heavily on compressor stations which run on, well, electricity. These stations have backup power capability but recent experience in the Southwest, during the 2011 winter, shows that this is not entirely reliable, and that severe events can disrupt the natural gas supply as well.
Actually, no. If you want to read what happens in such an event, see section 3.8.2 of the PJM Emergency Procedures Manual.[1] You get DC current to ground in AC transformers, which results in saturation of the magnetic elements and transformer heating. It's a heat problem; it has to be dealt with in minutes, not milliseconds.
That document is addressed to the people in the grid control room. There used to be a training course on line which explained this in simpler terms.
A Black Swan is a "high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare event that is beyond the realm of normal expectations". But we know that the Carrington Event happened in 1859, and that it's only a matter of time before a big solar flare will affect Earth in the same way. So this is not a Black Swan.
But yes, we should prepare for foreseeable rare events.
At some point, you have to pick a threshold on the probabilities involved... These events are likely independent & identically distributed (i.e. hard to predict for any year), and I'd call sub-1% annual chance pretty rare.
But I'm receptive to a different threshold... But you can't just say "Black swan only counts for previously-inconceivable events".
Edit: I'm assuming covid-19 is structurally different than Sars, mers, Ebola, & H1N1 purely based on the global effect it has had to date. If you found those others as pandemics (not according to WHO though), then you can remove it as Black swan.
Put another way, it seems reasonable to me that "no one alive has experienced it before (and probably not their parents either)" is a decent threshold.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is...
It's not a black swan because everyone with half a brain could say that there would eventually be a global pandemic respiratory disease. H1N1 was technically one, it just happened to be mild. We thought there was going to be one in 1976 and raced to vaccinate everyone against it. These things happen, like earthquakes. Nobody knows when, but if the San Andreas went tomorrow it wouldn't be a black swan.
Did anyone anticipate it enough to put their money where their mouth was? A fortune, and a major service to humanity, could have been made by a private individuals stockpiling PPE in vast quantities.
You say anyone with half a brain anticipated it. I didn't. Did you buy 500k N95 masks and put them in a warehouse?
Knowing someone will happen is easy. I know for sure that a large meatorite will hit the earth and cause mass deaths and crop failure, but I have no idea in how many 100s, 1000s or millions of year it will happen. If it happens tomorrow it would be a black Swan *
* an example only, we would get plenty of advanced warning.
It has to be something that's just not accounted for in your worldview, something you couldn't expect based on anything you know about. A meteorite wouldn't be a black swan for us, but I think it would be for a society that hadn't discovered them yet. A meteorite strike on London circa 1800 would have been a black swan, because at the time people (Europeans, anyway) thought that shooting stars were atmospheric phenomena. Large rocks falling from the sky just wasn't in their cosmology.
The response to this pandemic has actually worried me quite a lot on this front, because it seems likely now that anyone who stockpiled PPE at pre-pandemic prices and tries to resell during the pandemic at a price high enough to justify their initial investment will be accused of price gouging and possibly have their stockpile seized.
Which has the effect that nobody has an incentive to build a reserve of things that will be useful in a future crisis, even if that crisis is foreseeable.
So yeah, it's easy enough to say "I think there's at least a 5% chance per year of an event which results in at least 10 million people who will want to buy a portable generator" (which is 10x the amount normally sold in a year). I genuinely do think that's a true statement, and it would imply that the number of generators currently being produced would need to be at least 50% higher to meet demand averaged across all times rather than typical times, which is a pretty big difference in a pretty big market. Normally when you think you know something the market doesn't, you can bet against the market by investing in whatever the market is undervaluing, and if you're right you make money. In this case, I'm not sure how you would go about doing that. Investing in companies making generators doesn't increase production. Buying generators and leaving them in a warehouse risks your stockpile being seized in the case where you were right about the risk. I'm honestly not sure how I would go about putting my money where my mouth is here.
All the day-to-day costs and risks can just totally swamp the potential upside, even before the regulatory risk of seizure or being forced to sell your stockpile at pre-crisis prices. Price-gouging laws are already on the books, so it's not like it would be that much of a surprise.
Stockpiling costs money, and it costs more money the longer it takes for your bet to pay out, just like a short. Masks expire, rubber perishes. You have to bet on the timing, not just that it will eventually happen. A 100-year event will take 100 years to pay out on average, so how much money can you afford to lock away in anticipation of something that might not happen in your lifetime? The opportunity cost isn't zero.
I've seen examples floated: World Wars, Rise of PCs or Internet, Chernobyl, September 11th, etc, etc. All of these possibilities were posited by smart people well in advance -- again, it's a matter of setting thresholds on the probabilities.
Wikipedia says Taleb gives three criteria for black swan phenomena:
1. The disproportionate role of high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology. 2. The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities). 3. The psychological biases that blind people, both individually and collectively, to uncertainty and to a rare event's massive role in historical affairs.
Given these criteria, how could a San Andreas earthquake NOT be a black swan? (And by "San Andreas earthquake" I mean The Big One, not one of the many smaller tremors that occur all the time.) Because we know that, one day, The Big One will eventually occur? Or because we can prepare for it to some degree (though I'd argue there are magnitudes that The Big One could hit that even the most earthquake safe of buildings aren't prepared to endure in CA).
For example, winning the jackpot on a slot machine is not a black swan, no matter how small the probability.
- If we had extra transformers on hand, how would you protect them from also being damaged?
- If a solar flare is powerful enough to damage these transformers, would it also have damaged a large proportion of devices that use power? I.e. even if you could get the electric grid working, would there be working systems of any complexity to use the power?
* The transformers could be stored in a manner designed to keep them from being damaged by this event (off? physically disconnected? In large pieces?)
* I think things are surge protected at local levels so appliances would be fine.
Long distance transmission lines are very long, fairly thick, and very exposed. The result is that the surges that they experience are several orders of magnitude stronger than, say, inside of your washing machine or a transformer unconnected to the wire. That surge doesn't hurt the wire, but it can blow the transformer when it hits it.
And hence the problem is mostly in blown transformers. If you have other transformers on hand, you swap them in and most of the system should be up.
Transmission cables are very very big antennas. Don't connect your spare transformer to that big antenna and it is perfectly safe.
You're correct though, that the entire energy industry skews old and is at risk of losing a lot of knowledge as talent retires.
The real risk is squirrels and trees though. Flora and fauna do not play well with transmission equipment.
I was skeptical, but this seems right (at least circa 2012). Here's a source:
https://www.energy.gov/sites/prod/files/Large%20Power%20Tran...
(summarized in the Concluding Remarks section)
Seems like no? haha. To his credit, he admits he is not an expert and asks us to tell him why he is wrong. Unfortunately, when I read the comments, it seems like none of his blog readers are experts on the subject, either. So, maybe not "Monday Morning Quarterbacking," but certainly Armchair Quarterbacking.
Which would be painful as hell but hardly 90% of population dies level painful. Author seems to be assuming more widespread damage I guess. In which case a handful of HV transformers aren't like to be the biggest headache. I'd imagine there is a hell of a lot more sensitive equipment out there than HV transformers. Internet, stock market, comms etc.
For example, converting car engines as power generators, fixing these High voltage transformers, etc.
People adapt, they will build power generators based on whatever they find, industries will shift to make photovoltaic panels and electric production will become local, etc.
Yes it's 90% of people dying if there is no electricity and everybody stays home waiting to die.
1 billion people in the world live without electricity.
The solar flares are a minor risk compared to the main actual risk (war or sabotage), if there is a war, no matter how many High voltage transformers you have in stock, they are going to be destroyed.
It doesn't appear that we have left this paradigm at all. The only group that has improved is the consumers, households have significantly cut back leverage since the 2008 crisis. But companies have not. Companies don't feel they have any responsibilities to prepare for these long tail situations, and governments don't seem capable of doing it. leaving it to central banks to throw trillions at the problem after the fact.
In many places there is a high incentive to mess things up, but little incentive to fix them.
I think the secondary effects of the covid shutdown are going to highlight some very poor decisions. Mainly rallying the economy, rather than making it more robust. I'm interested in seeing what happens with housing specifically.
Two things come to mind: - stock buybacks can be eliminated with legislation - Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac are still under government conservatorship
Might be worth jamming into the Green New deal.
If it's just a couple, then sure, fund this one.
But if there are thousand of possible rare disasters - how can you possibly fund them all?
Of course, not all disasters are global and every country or region will have its own rare disasters to prepare for.
How much did covid-19 cost?
The solar flare risk (at ~1% per year [1]) seems much more likely than many of the other items there. Supervolcanos, pandemics, war, and AI also seem like salient risks, but we probably shouldn't worry about e.g. gamma ray bursts or asteroids.
[1] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/201...
In Cyprus, we had such an event in 2011, when 2000 tons of explosives Russian tried to smuggle into Syria, were intercepted by a U.S. Navy and redirected to be offloaded here (because the ship carrying them was formally registered here and flew a Cyprus flag - really being owned by the KGB), and these explosives went off in the summer heat, wrecking a power station that produced 70% of the electricity here.
We only had about 2 hours of blackout per day and a recommendation to limit a/c use, for about a month.
Power transmission is super resilient and relay protection is a whole science of it's own. Especially in the U.S. when there are many virtually independent, privately owned and loosely interconnected transmission systems, which puts it at a relative advantage.
It's quite possible because their failure probabilities aren't independent. A geomagnetic storm could take most of them out at once. Like respiratory pandemics, this is an event that happens every ~century.
(E.g., we may have satellites that can be taken as weak indicators, but they are not designed for this, and there is no clear decision authority starting from possibly ambiguous satellite data to prophylactically shutting down power for 300M people against their will. Hopefully, recent events have made clear that "leaders will get their act together and act decisively during an emergency" cannot be the default assumption.)
I couldn't agree more that our electric grid needs more investment. I won't pretend to know better than the PUCs and the utilities about how that should be spent or what should be passed on to the ratepayer. The only thing I do know is that my company (Kevala) has mapped tens of thousands of substations, transmission lines, and HV transformers, so it seems we would have a lot more to back up than those 30. Good time for non-wires alternatives?
To whatever extent 'terrorism' is a real threat (and not just an excuse to maintain the military budget), many other dangers like pandemics and an EMP event and climate change were outlined decades ago. F-35s and aircraft carriers and hundreds of military bases won't cut it against them. Nor will faith.
Governments have a different risk model than a for profit business.
For profit businessEs can’t in any way financially justify to it’s stock holders the spending of money to protect against something that might never happen.
I ran DR & BC for a very large global firm, I reported to the Board, and I can tell you these people thought I was insane, even to protect against things like fires.
“When was the last time you heard of a large office building having a major fire with more than a couple of casualties?” This was actually said to me when I was proposing to improve the company’s fire protection system. I got out voted and they “ saved” the money. They still haven’t had a fire, so as far as they are concerned I was stupid.
Electric companies are necessary so they know if something does go horribly wrong they get bailed out.
> In testimony before a Congressional Committee, it has been asserted that a prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population.
Okay, this sounds like an interesting assertion. Can we back this up? Is this just alarmism? Where's the data?
> Yes, $300 million dollars for a stockpile of 30 HV transformers is far too expensive to prevent 90% of the public dying and the rest reduced to cannibalism.
I see. So now we're assuming some off-the-charts assertion, which is dubious at best[1], is absolutely true. The cannibalism is thrown in for extra flair. Gotta' get them clicks somehow.
> Update: I forget to mention that I’m far more worried about accidental nuclear war, bioterrorism and AI run amok than I am about solar flares.
Anyone that's seriously worried about "AI run amok" (whatever that means) doesn't understand the first thing about AI.
[1] https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/weapons/a25883/nor...
An event that has a low probability of occurring but that (if it occurs) will be highly catastrophic is exactly the scenario that calls for hedging. Most critical systems have already diversified by building in redundancies (generators) and an insurance check wouldn’t be very useful for keeping the rest of us alive.
True. I meant "insurance" in the general sense (clarified my post). Insurance can be any number of things, as you mention, including hedging and diversification.
Put short, this is a serious matter, but not in the way it is presented here. It would be a herculean effort to take out 1 let alone the suggested 9. Especially in a coordinated fashion. EVEN IF it was achieved.. This would only cause localized issues. Not takedown. “THE GRID”
This is a much larger discussion but a few things to consider:
1. There is no singular "grid". It just does not work that way. There are thousands of generation and transmission companies throughout the US. They all maintain there own “grids”. There is connectivity to provide ways to connect grids to sell/buy/shed power. But these connections are controlled and can be simply… disconnected. 2. Without going on a major diatribe on the many different attack vectors and inherent vulnerabilities in the energy sector…. Suffice to say.. The easiest and most sure way to take out a transformer is physical. They would need to be destroyed or disabled. Digital/remote interference would require an immense effort and campaign… we are not talking breaching the 9 locations… we’re talking hacking millions upon millions of connected devices and coordinating load to take out a transformer or the grid as whole…. The coordination and effort necessary for either are staggering. 3. There are in fact spares and inventory… just not in the hands of the feds.
I feel like 5 months ago we’d be sitting here dismissing the notion that a face mask shortage is a trivial problem, all countries can just suddenly ramp up production. But we couldn’t.
This did not prevent "Northeast blackout of 2003" when bunch of states in the US and province of Ontario in Canada went without power for 3 days. I remember it quite clearly. Was not big fun. Luckily my friends and I with families went camping on the lake so did not really suffer other than some little disaster in a fridge ;)
The blackout's proximate cause was a software bug in the alarm system at the control room of FirstEnergy, an Akron, Ohio–based company, which rendered operators unaware of the need to redistribute load after overloaded transmission lines drooped into foliage. What should have been a manageable local blackout cascaded into the collapse of the entire Northeast region.
How fragile we are.