A world without power
jacquesmattheij.com
jacquesmattheij.com
When I lived in Switzerland I was surprised to find that every modern building has a nuclear bunker in the basement, and that even now they are kept up: supplies are rotated, there are inspections, etc. At first it seemed quaint, but then I realized that as arguably the richest country in the world, they're not as interested in getting richer as they are in preserving what they have -- thus different forms of insurance, including even bunkers. I now find that quite smart, actually.
The Swiss have deliberately made it very, very difficult to perform a conventional invasion of their country; the geography makes it a natural fortress and they've studiously added to it.
If conventional invasion is impossible, then the next option is weapons of mass destruction. Relatively cheap and effective. The Swiss have no WMD deterrent of their own, therefore they have to bet on survivability. Hence the bunkers.
As a country they definitely take the very long view.
Keeping bunkers actually works well with that. And they're not really wasted space — people use them as wine cellars, washing rooms or whatever else.
Similarly, in wartime, everyone needs strictly neutral parties to get a lot of the humdrum business of war done.
Through Swiss front companies the Nazis could obtain critical war supplies (vanadium, I think it was); similarly the allies could obtain critical intelligence through the availability of Switzerland as a staging post into Austria and Germany.
"These credits and the deliveries of war material and other products [...] contributed to the war efforts of one of the belligerents. Not only had we abandonded integral neutrality, but - even worse - in so doing, we were as a rule deviating from the very notion of neutrality. "
http://www.uek.ch/en/schlussbericht/synthesis/ueke.pdf
Almost 600 pages but if you have a spare bit of time and really interested you could do a lot worse than looking at this, it is one of the most candid introspective pieces about world war II.
They also turned away plenty of Jewish refugees, as well as secreting gold stolen from concentration camp victims.
Their record during WWII is shameful.
Its ridiculous to single out the Swiss as shameful in WW2, looking at norms 70 years ago would make all people "shameful" in some way.
However, in the credit column, they have that whole "Defeating Nazi Germany" thing, which Switzerland does not.
Edit: My apologies, there were clearly plenty of other atrocities (eg Rape of Nanking if you consider that as part of WW2), but it is simply is not accurate to claim that Swiss were evil and the US were shining knights.
I don't have some across the board policy, perhaps because friends have been scarce of late. Since basically no one speaks to me, I don't currently have any need to make judgement calls of that sort. But my personal history suggests I am disinclined towards sweeping judgements of any sort. (shrug)
Are you actually equating all acts of 'shamefulness' during the 30s/40s at the same level? Your statement is tantamount to equating the actions of the allies with the axis, which is obviously ludicrous. The Swiss acted uncharacteristically selfishly and shamefully, even when compared to the record of the US. There's no need to jump to some half-baked defense of the Swiss, they deserve every bit of criticism leveled at them for their actions during WW2.
The first of which was exactly the same in the US (and possibly less justified; given it's size, the US could have absorbed Jewish refugees much more easily than the Swiss).
The second was almost certainly done at a smaller scale by US banks, and is mostly just because the US didn't have the opportunity since fewer Holocaust victims had their Gold in American banks than Swiss banks. It's ridiculous to think that Americans were so much more moral than the Swiss just because they had fewer opportunities to steal.
If there are other things that the Swiss did that were so shameful, I am interested in knowing.
Well, that's not really true. Your post acted as a rebuff of the criticism of Switzerland, based on the logic that the US undertook similar actions. You said Switzerland "shouldn't be singled out" for criticism, yet OP wasn't singling Switzerland out but merely adding information to the topic at hand, which was Switzerland's record during WW2. So why even bring the US up? Nothing they did eliminates the need to remind people of Switzerland's abhorrent actions during WW2, and yet you still state this shouldn't be done ("Its ridiculous to single out the Swiss as shameful in WW2.")
Secondly, the statement that I quoted of yours made quite a specific argument that you didn't mention most recently, regarding how Switzerland's actions should be viewed in perspective of the times. I argued it was fallacious to say that flattening the morality of the issue just because standards were lower during the war results in less of a need to discuss Switzerland's crimes during this time. You haven't attempted to refute this point, yet your latest post still made the statement that "I was only replying specifically to the two claims that you made [Swiss rejection of refugees and theft from Holocaust victims]" (which is aside from the fact that I am not the original author of the post you first responded to.)
So it's still curious why you felt the need to rebuff gadders criticism of the Swiss during WW2 given that it was on topic, even acknowledging similar actions take by the US.
The reason I bring up the context of other countries at the same time period is not to say the actions are admirable, I am providing context of what else was happening at the same time. I think many people don't fully realize that actions that used to be routine would be reviled through the lens of today's politics and norms; examine any one country and you can easily condemn anyone.
I assumed the response most readers would have with that knowledge is to vilify the Swiss while still holding the Allies in high esteem.
This is not to say all they did was right, and the fact that they still keep making and selling weapons is not exactly great as well, and a lot of Swiss were unhappy with sheltering any refugees, but the general idea of keeping neutrality and protecting as much as they could — which was, basically, people already there — was good. Remember, also, that Switzerland helped many troubled countries in later years.
It's not like the US welcome Jewish refugees either.
(I have nothing new to say about the Holocaust.)
The morality of the death penalty itself is a reasonable thing to argue over. The idea that some current implementations (chair, gas) are better than firing squad (or hanging/beheading for that matter) seems nuts.
Of course, given the choice, I'd probably choose to go the same way as my dog went. Sleep.
Of course, while this is a very humane way to execute an euthanasia (either of animal or a human), talking about the least inhumane way to carry out an execution is somewhat ridiculous. The most humane way is to just not do it.
Also, it's totally off-topic.
As far as I can tell from my hasty research, all states in the USA claim lethal injection as their primary method (note: 17 states do not practice capital punishment). A few still have electrocution, firing squad, hanging, and gas chamber on the books, but they seem to be vestigial laws or "backups" in the event that lethal injection is deemed unconstitutional.
That said, according to this site [0] there have been recent executions by firing squad (2010), electrocution (2010), hanging (1999), and gas chamber (1999).
[0] http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/views-executions?order=exec_...
It was breathtaking, that night, to look up at the clear sky and see the countless stars blazing down without having to compete with light pollution from the city. Normally you have to go several hours into northern Ontario to see the like.
One of the things that impressed me was how civil everyone was. I was at the downtown library when the power failed, and the 2 km walk home was filled with curiosity (just how big is this thing?) but free of incident.
Even at intersections, nearly everyone slowed down or stopped and eased through without trouble. On a few corners, self-appointed crossing guards helped maintain order - in fact, those tended to be the worst intersections, because drivers would cede responsibility to the crossing guard instead of responding directly to the conditions.
Hmmm.
Okay considering the downvotes I suppose I should have laid out my point at first: We use far far more water than we actually need. In an emergency situation it's not extremely hard to get a couple of gallons a day to people.
Unless by water supply we actually mean turn off the rain. I have no response to that one. That's not going to impact society, that's going to kill almost every bit of land life across the entire earth.
So yes, flush toilets would be the least of your concerns, what with the zombie apocalypse in full swing and everything.
Our building had elevator service because the condo board had, in preparation for y2k, bought a big-ass generator. It provided elevator service for the entire week—although it was a close thing, since we were beginning to run out of diesel for the generator, and two of the board behind the generator were starting to scorch from the heat of the exhaust…
By preparing for a disaster that never came, the condo was ready for the disaster that did come.
We now keep a few hundred dollars in our house in the event of something like this happening again (so we have access to foodstuffs). When we can afford it, I plan on getting a household battery backup system and a solar charging system that feeds the battery backup (we don't really have room for a generator, and I don't think it makes sense).
It was an amazing little event in Toronto with a lot of friendliness around the neighbourhood.
The main problem is high-voltage transformers, which are built mostly by hand by highly-skilled labor. There's a fairly simple way to protect them, but no utility does it.
You mean a faraday cage? Will wrapping it with foil work?
> There is a quick and relatively cheap fix to help protect these transformers from geomagnetically induced currents: They can be retrofitted to block the inflow of GICs. But no utilities anywhere routinely protect their multimillion-dollar transformers in this way.
Most of grid 'defenses' involve some temporary disconnection of components; the robustness question is how quickly you can reconnect again - is it an automatic switch after half a second, or does it require sending repair squads to thousand remote locations.
Faraday cages only work for high frequencies, but geomagnetic storms and EMP's are low frequency, and will pass right through a faraday cage. (Unless you made an incredibly thick one.)
You need Mu-metal for this kind of shielding. (Not that it would work here anyway - the currents are induced in the long powerlines, not in the transformer.)
Also, foil it very thin, so it only works for frequencies above 50Mhz or so.
My laymen speculation is that this would be much worse than just transformers, given how computers are penetrating every aspect of our lives. Imagine the impact to our society if transportation and electricity failed simultaneously.
The markets did not correct the situation (jacques gas station is not now the preferred suppliers for all Ontario) So a simple regulation (you must be designed to keep your service flowing) seems to deal with a huge amount of this - power companies that don't have rolling brown outs get to be in business the next day etc
Uh, not even close. His employees embezzled more than $150,000.
I'm pretty sure my Canadian accountant would be quite upset at your conclusion. Cash disappearing has nothing at all to do with accounting.
Additionally infrastructure has the strong tendency to externalize costs. In the example of the posting, the power company has somewhat lower income ( and needs to repair its grid), but actually damages are spread all over the place, like the guy who has to firesale his pizza before the ingredients are bad. So for the utility company it makes sense to just go for 99% reliability and insure some downtime, but on a larger level the total damages incurred for the economy will not be insured.
Infrastructure is therefore a case, where the problem is not over regulation, since we deal with a monopoly anyhow. The problem is that at best wrong regulation. ( Assuming the power outage was not caused by some freak accident.)
The tricky part is having a government powerful enough to be able to create smart regulations without allowing established interests to "help" write those regulations at the expense of their upstart competitors.
Also, I'm not sure why making Jacques' gas station the preferred supplier would be a meaningful expected market response. He already stated that they turned over a month's fuel in two days, that should have made him a pretty good profit.
It's also telling that when power goes down, or there's a big event (inclement weather and so on), there's a rash of panic buying, some incredibly ugly behaviour (looting, greedy price increases) but offset by some truly wonderful behaviour (free gas to stranded people? Friends for life at that stage). Society might be a veneer of polish, but at it's core there's still a lot of incredibly nice people.
(Which reminds me, I really must read that book again).
Making the electrical grid robust against deliberate attack is much more expensive and difficult than making it robust against natural disaster. Given how poorly our systems deal with natural disaster ...
It might not even worth attacking power stations. Some smart , well-educated engineers (of the kind who were recruited for the September 11 attacks) could easily point out critical chokepoints in the industrial system. Maybe there's a single plant which produces the most common antibiotics -- or maybe they all rely on a particular ingredient of which 90% is only found in one place. And so on and so forth.
Modern society -- every society -- largely works on trust and a fair amount of spit and duct tape concealed under polished chrome exteriors.
I mean, a rich, resourceful industrial society like the USA could easily spring back from even a very large, well-coordinated surprise attack by a motivated, intelligent attacker. But not before losing a lot of lives and money.
Compared to what a calculating and malicious sort of person could dream up, the attacks so far have been movie plots.
I mean heck, the Pentagon has plans for invading Canada.
Also I guess doing serious damage to power grid isn't beyond the realms of possibility? You could of course bomb a substation, but I guess there are more subtle (and difficult to repair) ways you could inflict the damage if you took control over a small part of the grid. I guess I should stop speculating and leave the specifics to those in the know ;).
Big (and long lasting) infrastructure failures will have more damaging impact on both the local economy[0] and people's "ease of mind" than a random mall bombing.
[0] - remember the recent jwz story about power cable? How as long as it wasn't repaired, it costed the city $13k/hour? http://www.jwz.org/blog/2002/11/engineering-pornography/
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-10-25/windmills-overload-...
I don't think this is much of an issue, though.
The grid has become so interconnected with such highly fluctuating loads that it's a miracle we haven't seen a serious outage yet.
Basically Germany uses Polish, Czech and Hungarian grids as a load leveler and as a way to transport power inside the union to countries they have deals with. But exactly those grids are amongst the oldest and weakest that we've got.
This is not a simple problem and the potential for error is much larger than you'd expect given the number of people that rely on these systems. So far so good. I personally believe that Germany should pay for the conditioning equipment to deal with the varying load of their windplants, the load patterns are a direct consequence of using wind energy and it should not fall to Germany's neighbours to fund a chunk of infrastructure that solely exists to deal with the wind surges.
In the United States every windplant has a conditioner at the uplink to make sure that the relatively fragile long distance network does not suffer. That's one single economic entity so there is no externalization possible.
But in seriousness, I find the issue interesting, but it seems solvable.
The problem is economical/political - who will have the authority to say that we'll disconnect generator X and won't pay for it's electricity since noone needs it at that specific time.
- The network is heavily loaded pre-blackout (most large networks are these days)
- A major interconnect trips out (e.g. from a tree strike or protection maloperation)
- The other line is out of service (e.g. for maintenance) or is taken out by the same event (e.g. by storms)
- Power flow is redirected through other weaker interconnects causing voltage instability
- Cascading voltage collapses take out the network
Examples: India 2012, European blackout of 2006, Indonesia 2005, northeast blackout of 2003, Italy 2003 (a bit different because the operators cocked this one up as well).
The point is that you can target one or two major transmission lines (usually in the middle of nowhere) and bring down the system. A coordinated attack on several major interconnects could really cause some damage.
As it happens I was watching a TV-series yesterday that has this exact plot/theme, not exactly HN material as it's Sci-Fi but anyway: The world loses power globally. Anything using power is dead. Planes, Cars, batteries, etc.
Not sure if it's a hit that will last but I found it entertaining and it made me think a bit, what would I be able to do to survive something like that? What would my plan be?
I'm not about to go all doomsday prepper but I guess it does not hurt to at least have an idea.
Or just be prepared like in the story, preparing for the worst as we usually do when designing redundant solutions.
OTOH I'm surprised how much in terms of magic could be expalined given the technologies we have or can imagine right now. For instance, if we ever get our hands on working nanotech, all the elixirs and magic potions that change you in different ways could be reality (you'd just be ingesting a bunch of pre-programmed nanorobots / viruses along with a tasty juice) :).
If you were able to show a person from the past a mobile phone, some video or even the time machine you would need to do so.. they would probably believe you were some kind of god or that the things you showed were magic.
(Some were smart enough to figure the basics out, of course, which made them highly valuable.)
On the island there was no increase in crime, in the rest of Ontario no more than otherwise or maybe even less, I have not researched this but it definitely didn't turn into a riot. The gas line was special in that it was isolated and that everybody there had 0 resources. But it still gave me quite a bad vibe.
If the power is out over a longer period of time it's the lack of food and clean water that will cause a problem, mostly, but because of the concentration of people in cities the modern society relies too much on food being brought to us.
I guess you have already thought about this to some extent, I just know that most people in the city have never been hunting, and depending on where you live I guess they never have gone fishing either.
I think I would like to be able to survive on my own out in the forrest/woods by hunting/fishing, even if there hopefully will never be a need.
Edit: English is complicated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivors_(2008_TV_series)
Also loved the little episode with bikers, as I'm fascinated with their craft. Hope there is a going to be a followup about them.
This. Is not as simple as it sounds.
It is why some colleagues of mine stubbornly refuse to write software for medical appliances: even if they design as if their lives depend on it, they might make a mistake and cause serious harm.
It takes a while to learn your limits ... and to become a "sage". Once you become a "sage", you realize that you don't actually know much in the grand scheme of things. More people look up to me now that I know less ... That's pretty amusing in its own way.
I'm not saying we should all be running around waving our hands in the air and acting like our hair is on fire, but if you want to talk about single points of failure, you apparently need look no further than your nearest wall outlet.
This is exactly why it is so difficult to convince politicians and the general public that infrastructure spending is absolutely worthwhile. Even though it makes the entire economy more efficient and fail-proof, most people take it for granted until it fails.
Maybe it's not frequent enough (and, with anti-gouging and no consumer loyalty, not a worthwhile investment), but that just means the business model is broken. Either do it as a subscription service (if you have amex platinum, you get access to a network of hardened gas stations; or, if you pay $50/yr), or have government do it.
If the homeland security people lost $1-2b in budget and it got used to put generators and caches of supplies at them (maybe just a cell site with long runtime), we'd be a lot better off.
I wrote about it here: http://joubert.posterous.com/modular-mobile-power
even today, something to keep in mind as we design and implement Internet dependent/co-dependent systems and processes?