Posted on 10/10/2024 3:15:08 PM PDT by george76
Once a huge champion of all things digital, I’ve come to develop serious doubts about the pace at which humanity made the switch from analog to the cloud. The hackings, outages, data breaches, and extended breakages all make the point. But the danger is even greater.
Most of the things we use today have not been stress tested. They are centralized and have a single point of failure. And they are very vulnerable. It could all stop in an instant with no sure guarantee of when it will come back.
A turning point came for me recently, while visiting a small basement laundry in Manhattan. The proprietor was still using a sewing machine from 1948. She would have nothing to do with newer models. After that, I started to take notice of the machinery of other merchants in my area. Many sewing machines are 75 years old and still working well. My cobbler uses equipment that is more than a century old. This is not uncommon.
They can all still do business with a generator and a good supply of fuel. They are prepared. This is also why people are holding on to their older gas-powered cars without all the snazzy stuff. They are more trustworthy, and you can fix what breaks. It’s better to maintain the old thing in good repair than move to the new thing that is not going to last long.
These days, few things are built for the long term. We buy smartphones and computers with full anticipation that we will buy new ones in a few years. Repairs are ever less possible. Home appliances are the same: kaput in five to 10 years. And so many are dependent on digital applications to work. The operations of locks on homes, cars, ignitions, lights, and so much more are wholly dependent on a web of hooks that require that everything is in perfect working order.
What if it’s all a house of cards?
Imagine a time when it all goes down, not for an hour or a day, but for weeks. Or months. This is precisely what people experienced in the areas most affected by Hurricane Helene. As is well known, the Federal Emergency Management Agency underperformed, but more importantly, it attempted to stop private efforts in multiple documented instances. Elon Musk had to take to social media to beg the government to let him offer free internet to people because all other options had died.
The money died. Credit cards stopped working. ATMs were dead. All communications came to a halt. The only way to transact was through cash, silver, gold, or bartering. Electric cars could not be charged. The locks on doors seized up. You could not access your bank. The internet was gone in a flash. In short, the whole of the 21st century vanished in an instant.
The only path out of this mess was with old technology. Gasoline. Generators. Matches and candles. Internal combustion. Radios with hand cranks. Cash. Books on physical paper. Paper maps. Thermometers. Blankets. Firewood. In the end, survival depended on analog things and analog skills. Though we’ve tried to reinvent the world so that it is not dependent on “fossil fuels,” know-how, and elbow grease, it just keeps reverting.
Remember during the COVID-19 crisis when everyone became suddenly obsessed with “touchless” everything? None of it made any sense because the virus did not spread on surfaces, and we discovered that pretty early on. But “touchless” technology went ahead anyway, and when restaurants reopened, people had to scan a code to access a list of things to order.
Customers hated it, and now many places have gone back to physical menus. We go to restaurants to get away from the digital world, not find ourselves newly immersed in it.
There is something deeply wrong with the attitude that touching things is icky and beneath us. It suggests an unwillingness to use the hands God gave us to better the world. On a theological level, it suggests disgust with the incarnation: Why would God ever become man if God wanted to be “touchless”? It suggests even a cult-like disgust with the physical world itself.
Fortunately, the word “touchless” seems to have lost its cachet. Even so, the word itself reveals a dangerously millenarian eschatology, the belief that history is somehow headed toward a full escape from the physical world and all its limits, including the need for work and the inevitability of mortality. It’s pure delusion. Disasters prove that.
Government has been running table-top exercises for decades with the idea of preparing for large-scale grid outages in the event of a huge weather event or a cyberattack. I can predict with 100 percent certainty that whatever plans they have in place, none will work. As our experience with Helene suggests, in the event of an emergency, the government may not be your friend but rather an obstacle, even a dangerous one.
My friend Mark Hendrickson experienced some of the worst of the hurricane. He writes: “I had never been without electric power for such an extended period of time before, and the experience vividly underscored something that I had known intellectually, like an abstract theory, but now felt at a deep, visceral level: how utterly dependent our society is on electric power.” For him, Helene prompted a fundamental rethinking of everything.
“Sitting at home during most of the power outage, time seemed to slow down. It seemed like every few minutes I had an impulse to turn on the TV to see how storm cleanup was proceeding, but—oops—no TV,” he writes. “Or I wanted to go online and see which teams had won sports contests, what was going on in the world, or even something as trivial as checking my current bank balance with the addition of the month-end interest payment. Oops—no internet.
“My thoughts turned to my dear Amish friends and neighbors when I lived in Pennsylvania. Our quiet candle-lit evenings at home during the outage now mirrored their evenings. Without the myriad distractions that electronic devices offer, there is more time for quiet reading or direct human interaction. In a society that has been becoming increasingly atomized, more personal connection seems appealing. Hmmm ... maybe now, with the power back on, I should choose one evening a week to forsake the electronic world.”
The scenarios above are about natural disasters. But we are actually more likely to encounter a crisis due to inflation than a natural emergency. It could just become too expensive to charge the cars or keep the lights on. Already I have friends whose utility bills are higher than their mortgages from 10 years ago. Somehow, people don’t think about this when they buy maximum square footage. Do you have an additional $15,000 to heat and cool it?
Most houses today, and certainly most office complexes, are designed to require electric-powered indoor air cooling and heating. We don’t use gas furnaces or rely on cross breezes anymore. Fireplaces are nothing but nostalgic vanities.
When all this building was going on for many decades, hardly anyone considered the contingencies. We built as if there were no eventualities for which to prepare.
There is another factor: forced government rationing of power. Dependency on the grid, electric cars connected to the internet, and app-controlled things are all very easily controlled by a third party. You may counter that these companies are all private and surely will ignore government edicts. We know now that this is not the case. Private companies become arms of the state under the right conditions. They will gladly comply to keep the paychecks rolling in and out.
The people who dealt with the worst of Hurricane Helene came face-to-face with the state of nature without all the comforts we’ve learned to take for granted. For my own part, it has caused me to rethink some matters. Keeping a stash of cash around is a good idea. Some bags of silver dimes are also essential. Having plenty of blankets is advisable.
The most important way to prepare is to have a strong network of friends. In the end, human bonds will prove more enduring than the power grid.
silver Roosevelt dime = $2.25
silver Washington quarter = $5.60
Does anybody have info on Wind farms in Florida??? Did the Wind propellors survive?
this happened in the time of Noah when he was 600 years old.
The clouds broke, and the fountains of the deep were opened up.
I believe that sometime soon the major amazon cloud, the microsoft cloud, oracle cloud, and govt clouds will all break and there will be much gnashing of teeth
Bookmark
no operational wind farms in Florida
The Central Bank Digital Currency will solve all of these problems related to losing electricity.
enjoyed 1 day with out power today. was sort of looking forward to more. but won’t lie: was grateful when it was restored.
Makes sense... If there were any, they would’ve likely been destroyed.
We’ve been without power many times, but the longest was 8 days after Snowtober which was the late October snowstorm that hit parts of Pennsylvania and Northwest N.J. About 16 inches of heavy wet snow on trees that had most of their leaves yet. Hundreds if not thousands of trees and power lines down. Then a 7 day outage after Hurricane Sandy. Both times the woodstove was a life saver, along with the gas generator. If we didn’t have food, well there are way too may deer around, and not to far away is some very good fishing. Never been a Boy Scout, but if my father taught me anything it was to “be prepared”.
I was thinking about when it all gets turned off. I downloaded the entire Wikipedia (109 gigabytes) onto a 128 g usb thumb drive) I also purchased the latest Rand McNally Large Scale Road Atlas 2025 (spiral bound) since there won’t be any online (Google) maps or any kind of online. Just in case I need to “bug out” to somewhere I’ve never been before.
Also have a couple of working CB walkie talkies and a shortwave radio.
I’m not even a prepper!
No power now at my abode, Wind ripped the solid box cover off of my King Ranch , tore ever rivet out. Landed in front of my neighbors front door.
Missed my explorer, her car, and the living room window. One of her angel statues in the back yard got a busted arm. I’ll fix that for her. All in all no major wind damage, but the main power lines look like the got shook loose last night.
Wind farms, not a good idea. I’d rather they drill for oil starting 20 miles offshore. The rigs would help the fishing.
I'm very curious as to how you accomplished that. It seems like a good thing to do.
We lived off grid for a few years. You quickly end up very busy doing the things that being off grid requires and the digital world seems unimportant.
Yes, I am overdue to buy a generator. We lost everything in our frig after PGE power was out for 12 hours in July.
Never mind the earthquakes, there is also the possibility of chicom, islamo fascist or eco-terrorism.
I always tell my kids to carry cash and keep cash at home but they don’t get it. Also good to stock bottled water and canned food. It does not matter where you are in the country.
Digital is finniky. Analog is more forgiving. I no longer have a wind-up clock or watch. I have a gas grill & fireplace — but how long can I survive without the water coming from the faucet? Water pumps (and filtration plants) require electricity to work.
We had very little hurricane prep to do at my home since we stay half prepared for just about anything. I keep about a dozen gallons of water stored away. My pantry has 3 to 6 months of food (according to how many we are feeding). We keep approx 10 gals of gas on site for the 2 generators and I order flashlights and batteries in bulk once a year. We have a couple of oil lamps and extra oil. We have a “BBQ pole barn” with a pit for cooking if needed. And, we have silver change if it got to the point of needing some cash.
As Helene approached, we thought about jumping in the RV and bugging out but then realized we were better off here in the woods near neighbors we know than just about anywhere else. We had lots of limbs down, lost one big white oak (not near the house) and were without power for about 12 hours. We managed fine and could have gone a week or so (we have in the past) before getting to the point of sniping at one another.
As to the dependence on computers in vehicles, both our vehicles are older models and not as computer reliant as the new cars of today. We plan to keep them going as long as possible.
That was when Climate Change began!
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