I doubt everything would be as idyllic as you describe if the blackout went for longer.
Hangover from the port.
Instead of doing drugs or chatting, I'd read a book on my Kobo.
The thing with the stuff you mentioned. I already drank enough alcohol jn my life to not bother with it anymore. Same with card games. And random chitchat.
We actually saw the effect of downtime during covid. In the beginning, a massive appreciation for health services. We all know how long that lasted. In the beginning, it was us against the virus. Eventually, we were fighting with each other, even over details. Rest assured, offensive propaganda services from secret agencies learned a lot from that (one may guess which one primarily).
If it was so awesome that wine drinking and chit-chat, why aren't we doing it? A pretty simple explanation is: because it ain't awesome. Yes, a change of pace can be regarded as a fun challenge or change of pace. Heck, it may even open up people to changing their life. But look how much we remote work post covid. Policies were reverted.
It seems to me that these modern anti-social tendencies are actively driving a wedge between most people and their surroundings, making people further isolated from each other. Young people tend to spend time in doors alone because they don't know _how_ to interact with strangers. But they should because being alone is literally damaging to your health.
Being far away from friends is bad for you[1]. Being socially isolated is bad for you. Promoting a lifestyle in which you don't have friends and don't talk to strangers is akin to promoting a lifestyle in which you don't exercise.
It's not "awesome", it's a necessary component of living healthily as a human being.
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/social-connectedness/risk-factors/index.... - I found this source from the CDC but there are numerous others
That much anyone can figure, and my point is, that threshold of sustainable density can be way lower than commonly thought. We're just too used to it, like we're used to burning fossil fuel. There might be a "peak density", hopefully after population growth resumed on the high orbit and beyond.
But if the power, and the gas stations, don't work anywhere. It won't take long before we start running out of food and other utilities start to fail.
Now nobody else can get more fuel for their generators when the gas stations don’t have power either.
This was a big issue during the power shutoffs during LA fires this year.
Requiring every single one of them to invest in a 5-6 figure power backup solution with hundreds or thousands in yearly maintenance costs, so they can sell their lowest margin product to accommodate those who can't plan ahead during a disaster that happens maybe once in a decade event is pretty absurd.
Ready.gov has instructions.
> Should everyone have several hundred gallons of gasoline stored in their garage just incase?
oh, c'mon.
Do you or any one person you know use several hundred gallons of gas over the course of a few days on critical things? If that is the case, then yes, by all means you should have a private gasoline backup supply since you are running some sort of industrial scale operation.
If you are worried about it, just make sure you have a several day supply of gasoline on hand. For most people that use about a tank of gas per week that means filling up when you are at half tank. For those of us, like me, who live in a place where a generator is occasionally useful, a couple of jerry cans full of gas are typically already on hand. Hundreds of gallons could keep me powered up for weeks at a minimum unless I was really trying to use a lot of power.
For most people, gasoline is used exclusively for their car, which has a multi-day gas supply storage mechanism built in.
Lets say we require all gas stations to have the ability to pump gas during a blackout. Then what? It doesn't solve any of your hypotheticals. Without a beefy generator and a professional crossover switch, you aren't powering your home with gasoline. What is a working gas station going to do for a renter, or apartment dweller?
In any case. If things get actually desperate, it isn't that hard for a handy person to wire a generator up on the spot, and get gas pumping, although at that point, what are the chances that the payment network is online. At that point you can just run the pump by hand if it's truly desperate.
> Suggesting individuals prepare for this seems equally absurd, does it not?
Not absurd at all. Experts and the government actually suggest that people do some of their own preparations for disasters. They suggest that you have enough on hand to survive for 48 hours without outside help. There are entire government initiatives, campaigns and organizations based on this exact premise. Check out Ready.gov for the USA federal version. You can probably find state and local level initiatives where you are too, if in the US. Almost every large, multi-day, regional blackout in living memory is weather related, which also means it is predictable.
It's hard for me to imagine gas station convenience stores doing enough volume for this to make any business sense.
The business model for a typical gas station is to bring people in with competitively priced gas, since people are incredibly price sensitive to gas, and then make money with high margin c-store items. Most of the things in a c-store have triple digit margins. That's why you'll see plenty of c-stores without gas stations, but its pretty rare to see a gas station that doesn't have a business attached.
While I can count on one hand the number of times I walk into the store at a gas station in a given year, I know others who buy things on a daily basis, to the point that they’re on a first name basis with everyone there and the employees start asking questions if a few days go buy without a visit.
When shit goes down, people need to be able to get fuel. The populace at large is never going to be prepared enough to deal with every gas station in the area going down. Raise the cost of gas by 10 cents to cover the costs. If every station is mandated to do so then they won’t have any issues with the margins as they will simply all raise prices in concert.
It sounds like there wasn't really a problem with gas availability, in your case. You were able to get enough gas to comfortably power a generator with no preparation during one of the biggest emergencies the city has ever seen. During the LA fires, the power cuts were to small enough areas that you could have just driven to a different area of the city. That sounds inconvenient, but hardly worth the effort of building independent power generation sources for the 10k+ gas stations in your state.
A far better solution is to do what we do in my part of Canada: a competently run power company that doesn't arbitrarily shut off power due to failing infrastructure setting billions of dollars worth of city on fire. We don't have PSPS's despite living in a very fire prone place with extreme weather because our infrastructure is maintained much better.
Instead of forcing everyone to subsidize individual power plants for gas stations to do long tail risk mitigation, California should maybe invest in a grid that doesn't regularly cause billion dollar fires.
Still, all the ancillary services that go into a hospital like water, sewage, medical gasses, cold chains, etc are all dependent on the grid, as are the people who make them work. If a large-scale outage happens, most hospitals will start losing patients within 24-48 hours and will close as functioning hospitals well within a week.
I think the subject of the thread is pretty clearly how to deal with interruptions that won't resolve themselves in a short time. It's on you that you choose to ignore that and focus on "was it pretty for a milisecond?"
Now we've gotten to "Ok the claim was admittedly not true but it's your fault for pointing it out instead of going along with the groupthink" Is this the post-truth society we hear about?
The sub-thread was very clearly started by the idea that loss of connectivity might not be as bad as assumed, there was space to have some debate about what positives could be taken and how we could actually prepare to live with outages alongside preparing to negate them.
I didn't think much of it honestly, the original point of it not being so bad, but your comment has left me with the feeling that the internet can't fall soon enough.
I'm not sure how far into "prepper" that makes me. I don't have a store of canned food or weapons or a generator. I started down this track to keep my home lab (on which I self-host a bunch of stuff) online / protected through outages.
Additionally, the city in which I live has an ad-hoc amateur WiFi setup which connects over several kilometres. I used to be a member a long time ago but, ironically (in this context) getting fiber internet meant I kinda lost interest. It's one of those things that had just never gotten back to the top of my priority list: https://air-stream.org/
Feels like they're ahead of game on this topic.
If you own a house I'd look into very old school options like digging a deep hole to store your food in a dark&cool place - forgot the name for it but it'll work for weeks or months without a single milliwatt
It's terrible in a society-collapse way - makes you a target.
A target for what? People to come charge their phone at your house?
Why would you be a target if 50%+ of population have solar setups?
Cities are not setup to support their current populations without those services and once you run out of buffer things go downhill quick - wastewater is an enormous and immediate disease hazard.
Otherwise you're throwing out all fresh food, supermarkets couldn't process payments nor most restaurants either, etc.