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Comment by labrador | Hacker News Reader

For some perspective, Sri Lanka is about the same size and population as the greater Los Angeles area. I can't begin to imagine Los Angeles grinding to a halt with no fuel, intermittent electricity and many essentials in a precarious state. It would be chaos.

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Sri Lankan's can live off the land and the sea. I asked one of them about the upcoming crisis. He showed me his very modest house on a relatively small plot of land and said: "See: there are coconut trees on my land. We will not starve."

He'd better be close to the sea-- there's this infamous coconut-only dieter who basically starved to death:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/August_Engelhardt

After 15 years...

This is a very naive view of how the food economy works. It's not some Edenic paradise where everyone maintains a homestead. It's an Asian country in 2022. There are plenty of people in the countryside; though it's questionable that they can automatically feed themselves off the land).

But 25% of the population lives in Colombo alone, in a population density double that of New York City's.

> I can't begin to imagine Los Angeles grinding to a halt with no fuel, intermittent electricity and many essentials in a precarious state.

I don’t know about LA but in the Bay Area we call this “fire season” and it happens every year towards the end of summer.

I really don't understand all the hyperbole about California "fire season." Is it like other places where people develop their opinion about it through social media rather than actually being there outside?

I've lived in the Bay forever and was affected by being without electricity once. There have been maybe 10 actually smoky days in the past few years. People only seem to talk about it online. Definitely not much fretting over it or "grinding to a halt."

It varies by area: in the hills, there have been several power shutoffs in the last few years. The big wildfires that PG&E got assigned liability for made them greatly widen the criteria they use to shut off power to prevent wildfires: Los Altos Hills claims it happens once or twice a year: https://www.losaltoshills.ca.gov/469/Public-Safety-Power-Shu...

I also live in the Bay Area (but in a rural area) and have experienced dozens of power outages over the past few years (some fire and some not). Plenty is smoky days.

I agree on the hyperbole on the internet, but your experience seems to be on the opposite end of the spectrum.

After living in Solano county (That’s the bay as far as I checked) for 10 years and paying $500 a month for electricity to cool a 900 square foot house that would go out weekly between July and November, while repeatedly watching neighboring communities burn down due to ineffectual public services until I left for a more functional state with none of the same problems, yea, I think I’m pretty qualified to have an opinion.

With such a small house and that high of a cooling bill, why have you not invested in better insulation/more efficient air conditioning?

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