Aside from covid of course…
My prediction is a texas-style grid failure but with a wider scale. Where I live, the electrical infrastructure is crumbling and there were a number of 1-2 day long outages this year which is new. Also a generally very poor area so little resources or motivation to fix or reinforce anything.
My mother-in-law is a higher up manager in a large Midwestern power company. The absolutely turboskullfuked supply chains have completely undermined the power companies ability to handle any sort of crisis. Last week they found out that new power meters have a 52 week lead time, and refurbishing old units won’t meet demand.
This week’s crisis: they are out of power cable. The big thick shit for high tension transmission, down to the thinner guage stuff for residential hook ups. After a rough summer of damaging storms, and no reliable supply for new cable, they are fucked.
So the first real winter storm is going to take months to clean up. Good thing this is the Midwest where bad winter storms never happen.
My dad is a shift supervisor at a facility that makes raw plastic for use in medical devices and supplies. Things like IV bags, vent tubes, and most medical devices like dialysis machines all require virgin new plastic for sanitary reasons. He can’t get raw materials to make plastic, and his customers are getting desperate.
Those are both new to me. r/shortages is the spookiest subreddit of the year. We can’t manufacture a wooden door right now.
Most efficient system. My fiancee is a union foreman for a mechanical general contractor. They can’t get anything they need. Every day I hear “so my (whatever is today’s crisis) is going to be delayed indefinitely. They said don’t call us, we’ll call you.”
Every single day. I’m unemployed, counting pennies so I can stock up on the medical supplies I need l, because I know for a fact that supply chain will fall apart soon.
I’m in manufacturing and it’s getting real for me as well. I can’t get certain materials because they closed the American factory and opened one up in India during the pandemic. I’ll be at a standstill in a few weeks :joker-dancing:
It’s both the most interesting and the most terrifying time I’ve lived through as a Marxist. So many points where the contradictions are boiling over. All of the links in the supply chain are interconnected and failures in one part will cascade unpredictably across base and superstructure. So many underlying dynamics present- cardboard shortages because Amazon has grown to the point that they can buy up all of the cardboard for their packages. Something big is going to give and everyone apart from the socialists seems to be in a death cult devoted to pretending the reasons why don’t exist. Real Cassandra foreseeing the fall of Troy energy.
Real talk, find short term solutions to a power crisis. A small solar panel for electronics, a small cache of food and medicine, and a contingency for warmth. Now is the time to prepare. Also, make connections in your area with other leftists.
you can make a small oven out of sheet metal i think, use a window and some pipe as exhaust. You can then also use that oven to cook on. It’s not gonna be a good oven, but it will be better than nothing. Edit: put it on short legs(bricks), and those legs on a non flammable surface(metal sheet, or tiled floor), also have some metal on the wall closest to the oven, just isolate all flammable surface in the environement, and for the love of god look up an actual fire safety manual.
Can’t they do rolling blackouts/load shedding to prevent grid failures, and keep power on at key places like hospitals? Even broke global south countries with no resources by comparison to the USA have figured this out. Or is it a case of not admitting how bad shit is, and just being in denial until the grid fails?
Or is it a case of not admitting how bad shit is, and just being in denial until the grid fails?
ding ding ding! consumers thinking they are getting their money’s worth in a monopoly until everything has fallen apart is the goal.
Noam Chomsky wrote something about this didn’t he? Defund state institutions so they perform badly and consumers want private services, use corruption to ensure a private company gets a monopoly, private company overcharges and underdelivers. Repeat until AnCap utopia ™ is reached and society collapses.
I’m not sure but that sounds right. Whether or not he said it, that is definitely what we are dealing with. I’ll just start shooting(targets in Minecraft) if I have to use ups instead of USPS in a few years.
anti vax terrorism. probably not a huge disaster but it’ll be a thing
People in this thread are worried about the electrical grid. Somebody in another thread mentioned the Carrington Event. This sort of an end of civilization event isn’t exactly likely to happen. But for fun here’s some stuff from the page that I edited down…
The Carrington Event was a powerful geomagnetic storm in September 1859. A solar coronal mass ejection (CME) hit Earth’s magnetosphere and induced the largest geomagnetic storm on record. The storm created strong auroral displays and caused serious damage to telegraph systems. A solar storm of this magnitude occurring today would cause widespread electrical disruptions, blackouts, and damage due to extended outages of the electrical grid.
[…]
In June 2013, [it was estimated that] the cost of a similar event in the present to the U.S. alone at US$0.6–2.6 trillion, which at the time equated to roughly 3.6% to 15.5% of annual GDP.
I really don’t understand why this scenario wasn’t made into a major Hollywood disaster movie a long time ago. It’s super filmic.
Fuck the GDP cost, there is no fucking way in hell society ever recovers from the universe deciding to flip the switch on the electrical grid to off.
