Comment by matltc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by matltc | Hacker News Reader

So like a month of food and water? If the big electrical grid pop happens <https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/18/magazine/national-blackou...>, we're looking at years, which no storage solution can accommodate. So while this is sensible for most outages, doesn't do much for this event, which becomes quite possible if (1) China moves on Taiwan and (2) USA intervenes on behalf of Taiwan. I would expect that China would activate their dormant ICS and telco access in such a circumstance to knock the US out of the conflict basically immediately

I suppose this could be true with the rest of CRINK since they are all capable cyber adversaries, but China is on another level in terms of capability and it's their best lever with little cost. I suppose they have to calculate whether the US would bring out the nukes in such a circumstance

> I would expect that China would activate their dormant ICS and telco access in such a circumstance to knock the US out of the conflict basically immediately

If they could do this, wouldn't they already have moved on Taiwan?

What makes you say that? The cost to China to invade will still be incredible with zero US intervention. Wsj had an article last December <https://www.wsj.com/world/china/how-china-chinese-invasion-t...> on what this might look like

Does the US still have enough material to intervene over Taiwan anyway?

But in any case a month makes it more likely you can try and find another source. Better to have some runway than none?

> enough ... to intervene over Taiwan

Probably not. My guess is the Pentagon's calculation would be that the cost to intervene would be unacceptable and could not be sustained anyway; many reports say the US would deplete their ammo stocks for such a conflict in like a week, and that was _before_ the blunder in Iran

> Better ... than none?

For sure. But doesn't solve the problem of "how do I survive if the power grid goes down for over a year?" Best solution is to get out of USA prior to that event. I don't think any amount of prep will significantly change your outcome in that scenario if you remain in the US.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com