Whenever I read about power outages in the states and the kind of mayhem they cause I think about how different the situation here is -- Lebanon that is.

We haven't had enough power to run the entire country ever since the end of the civil war in '90 so there's a rationing scheme whereby you get power during certain times of the day depending on where you live. People have just gotten used to having generators that kick in automatically about a minute after the power goes out and using UPSs to bridge the gap.

I just bought an apartment in a Beirut suburb and one of the main advantages the owner was touting was that the building has its own generator(so you don't have to deal with a distributor as those tend to have insane prices because they know that people need the electricity anyway).

Our startup just moved in to a proper office a couple of days ago. One of the problems we are now dealing with is that the A/C in that office is too power-hungry to run on a generator and we're having split units installed so we don't have to work in a sauna-like environment for the ~6hrs/day when there's no power.

I'm actually not complaining, you get used to this stuff and it's not that much of an inconvenience once you know how to deal with it. I know this was off topic, but this is what I'm reminded off every time a story like this comes up.