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dewey parent
That's because they kinda expected everything to be back to normal in a few hours. If there would be some more catastrophic distributed outage there would probably be less dancing.
AlecSchueler
But wait either it was "pretty" or it wasn't. We've gone from "it wasn't pretty" to "Ok, it was pretty, but only because they expected a resolution."
closewith
Pretty for young and unencumbered, less so for the COPD patient with an oxygen concentrator, or the parent of an infant running out of sterile bottles, etc.
goda90
To sterilize a bottle you simply need boiling water without a significant amount of toxic materials in it. To get boiling water you need water, a container for the water, a combustible fuel, an ignition source, and a means of transferring heat from the burning fuel to the water. Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.
closewith
> Even if you don't have a metal pot you can do stuff like heating rocks and then stacking them on cool rocks inside a plastic, glass, ceramic, wood, etc container filled with water to get to a boil.

That can get you sterile water, although it's extremely difficult to do and involves many more rocks than you'd imagine easily 5x the mass of rock to water to get a rolling boil for a full minute, but it doesn't get you clean water. Now you have sterile water with a lot of potentially very unpleasant dissolved solids. Certainly not something you'll be using to feed an infant.

goda90
Put the bottle in a smaller container of clean water inside the larger container of water with the top sticking out of the water so it doesn't overflow into it. It'll take longer to boil without the convection but you'll get there eventually. You can fashion tongs out of sticks to pull rocks back out after their heat has mostly transferred to the water while you put newly heated ones in.
closewith
You're romanticising the situation with nonsense solutions.
prmoustache
it takes 5 minutes to build a simple but effective alcohol stove out of a soda can.
djrj477dhsnv
Sterile bottles? Millions of babies around the world are doing just fine every day without that.
closewith
With breastfeeding, which millions can't, for whatever reason (even if only prior preference, you can't turn it on at will). Bottle feeding young babies without the ability to semi-sterilise formula and sterilise bottles will lead to higher infant mortality.
tonyoconnell
Some parents of infants would be able to find a way to feed their children safely.
closewith
Obviously, but not all. I can't believe I have to say this, but prolonged blackouts (with all the downstream ramifications they bring to hygiene, temperature control, food safety, food availability, etc) would cause infant mortality to exponentially rise as days pass without power.
20after4
Without the power grid we are right back to the dark ages in a matter of a few days. Except at least in the dark ages people sort of knew how to survive. Now, only a minority of people really know how to survive without modern conveniences.
2 More Comments →
collingreen
Hopefully it isn't controversial to acknowledge that a few extra dead babies is actually a terrible thing not something you brush aside, right?
camillomiller
You mean everyone who didn't have an issue because modern hospitals have backup generators that can run for days, or even indefinitely if diesel-based?
closewith
The diesel supply in all countries is dependent on the grid, so days is the absolute maximum. The reality is often much less. During the recent power outage in Portugal, the Alfredo da Costa maternity hospital had only one hour's diesel and had to be resupplied by ministerial chauffeurs delivering Jerry cans of fuel.

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.

lucianbr
> Thanks to war, geopolitics, and climate change, Europe will have more frequent and more severe internet disruptions in the very near future. Governments and businesses need to prepare for catastrophic loss of communications.

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?"

AlecSchueler
Come on, what?

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.

camillomiller
moving the goal post must be fun, especially when you can't understand you're doing it, thus completely degrading the debate!

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