Hacker News Reader

Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

It's really too bad we didn't have a major CME in the 90's. That was the perfect time for a good lesson in redundancy and why you can't and shouldn't jettison "the old ways" so quickly. Perhaps its not too late now, but the pain will be considerably higher. Earth lucked out in so many ways, but a CME spanking in the 1990's is asking for too much I guess.

View on HN

That's just the anthropic principle for you: If we'd have been any less lucky, we wouldn't be here to write about it :)

I think you miss the point s/he's making: back in the 90's we were much less reliant on computers than today, much more cash based. It would have been a wake-up call, today it would be a calamity.

The 90s were not that long ago, we should restore and document and know the old cash-based ways while we still have those experts and those workers with us. Great thread and reminder about these things.

I would like to think that the servers that run ACH networks, IBM mainframes that actually store your account balance, etc are shielded from CME and even an EMP.

But the vulnerable side then becomes the power grid and Internet backbone. Part of a resilient disaster plan would be to allow ACH and other payment traffic to take priority if we were relegated to a low bandwidth connection. If we cannot transfer money, we will collapse, plain as that, once panic over food security sets in.

An EE friend said that we do not have enough transformers to replace if a critical number of them fried. Substation level components could be a huge bottleneck if we had another Carrington event.

I know for a fact at least one insurance company’s IBM aix mainframes are in an underground emp proof (faraday cage which connects through the door) vault.

In which no one follows the protocols, so someone ran an extension cord into the cage, because some supervisor couldn't charge his phone in there.

Or something similar.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com