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Comment by Scoutmaster | Hacker News Reader

Yesterday I spoke with a Generac (home standby generator) dealership owner in the Houston area, and they are getting swamped with calls (80 a minute at times) and they have 20 people manning the phones.

One of the problems I see is that people aren't prepared. I live my life by the motto "Be Prepared" (see username). One of the Merit Badges I teach is Emergency Preparedness, and with camping, my Scouts are okay going without electricity and electronics. Even if you're not interested or able to participate in Scouting, swing by your local Scout Shop and pick up an Emergency Preparedness Merit Badge booklet and learn what you can do to Be Prepared. It doesn't extend to just hurricanes.

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We live in a society and preparing as a group means that we can efficiently use resources and focus our energy on things that are interesting instead of everyone being overly prepared. Everyone going out and buying a generator is expensive, wasteful and incredibly inefficient. Why isn't it reasonable to just expect reliable infrastructure and quick responses to issues?

Maybe it's unreasonable to expect reliable infrastructure after getting many examples of how the infrastructure is not reliable.

You and I are highly unlikely to be able to fix the infrastructure; we can, however, be prepared for doing without it.

Due to occasional failures we should now throw our hands up and label systemic undercutting, and poor governance as unfixable.

Because things are bad sometimes let's excuse unlimited incompetence when expected situations are ignored and cause inevitable catastrophic failure.

Sometimes plans fail so let's excuse failure to plan.

When a huge storm blows through with minimal fuss because preparation and regulation was taken seriously let's downplay the risk and deregulate and dismantle safety apperatus as they are clearly unneeded....

It goes on and on... why did we hire these security guys we never have breaches, why did we hire these sys and network admins everything always works, why do we have all these pesky earthquake codes no buildings have fallen recently...

After nearly 40 years I still can't understand the mental gymnastics required to be so obdurate. It's just nihilistic slash and burn thinking isn't it.

I think it is better to put that energy into improving things and building a better future for everyone. As a country it feels like we have forgotten that we can work together to do big things. I still think we can.

Sadly we do not live in such a society in most of the country. It’s every man/woman and family for themselves. Covid laid that bare where I live.

What you're describing here makes our society sound particularly weak. You're basically describing a society that can't be bother with the basics of survival, we're only capable of having those taken care of for us so we can focus on whatever we think is interesting and actually worth our time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEb9cL3-kf0

I can’t imagine having no plan for backup power in a hurricane corridor

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