That's 20 years without any significant problems in the grid, apart from small localized outages.
It's not hard to start taking things for granted if it works perfectly for 20 years.
Many people don't even have cash anymore, either in their wallet or at home. In case of a longer power outage a significant part of the population might not even be able to buy food for days.
Even if you have cash many shops would not sell anything in case of a mass outage because registers are just clients which depend on a cloud to register a transaction. Not reliable but cheap when it works.
The real question is how long can some of the smaller banks' datacenters stay up.
Lest also forget the Crowdstrike drama where many supermarkets simply went dark, in some instances for nearly 24 hours, despite working communication links. But I digress.
Literally true. However:
- If it takes them 10 minutes to fire up the generator, then 5 minutes to restart the network and registers, that is no big issue (in a many-hour outage)
- At least in my part of the USA, many supermarkets do have generators - because storm damage causes local outages relatively often, and they'd lose a lot of money if they couldn't keep their freezers and refrigerators powered. Since the power requirements of the lighting and registers are just (compared to the cooling equipment) a rounding error, those are also on generators.
Seen it done in USA, for a Target next to a Kroger grocer. Kroger lost everything that needed cold after reserve either ran out or wouldn't start, but Target had a contingencies contract and lost no product.
But both major supermarkets nearby worked on diesel generators and payment by card worked flawlessly. I guess they had satellite connection.
It might have been more complicated in small villages but people living in rural areas ually still use a lot of cash.
However I assume this can work offline with the data being uploaded later though, as basically all the small supermarkets and shops were still open here (_incredibly_ chaotic though), and on the big supermarkets card payments were working (TBF, even the free wifi was working there, I guess they probably have some satellite connection).
So, what's really interesting is that these sorts of social collapses have happened. In fact, they often happen when natural disasters strike.
When they do happen, mutual aid networks just sort of naturally spring up and capitalism ends up taking a backseat. All the sudden worrying about the profits of Walmart are far less important than making sure those around you don't starve.
As it turns out, most people, even managers of stores, aren't so heartless as to let huge portions of the population starve. Everyone expects "mad max" but that scenario simply hasn't played out in any natural disaster. In fact, it mostly only ends up being like that when central authority arrives and starts to try and bring "order" back.
You can read about this behavior in "A Paradise Built in Hell" [1].
Looting only ever happens when areas hve started being evacuated and most shop owners + law enforcement are elsewhere.
I often wonder if we should leave energy/telecommunications in a state where they can and do fail with some degree of frequency that reminds us to have a back up plan that works.
I had thought that the (relatively) recent lockdowns had taught us how fragile our systems are, and that people need a local cache of shelf stable foods, currency, and community (who else discovered that they had neighbours during that time!)
For something like this, a local electricity generation system (solar panels, wind/water turbines, or even a ICE generator) would go a long way to ensuring people continued to have electricity for important things (freezers)
If we're talking about a situation where the grid goes down, the mobile internet is most definitely not working.
0:49 and light came back, and woke us for a moment.
So yeah, you need local first POS applications.
And who's fault is that? Why did europe allow this?
Why will the US allow this, eventually?
In Spain it's now illegal to pay with cash for transactions over 1000EUR. Absurd.
In Norway they recently made it mandatory in most circumstances to accept cash for transactions up to 20,000kroner (~1700EUR): https://www.norges-bank.no/en/topics/notes-and-coins/the-rig...
I don't know how true the relationship between the cashless lifestyle and safety actually is, but it works and I feel ok; I'm not sure that the prospect of a few hours of national blackout once in 20 years will make me change my mind significantly.
As an added benefit, no bank knows where I bought and when, which I find is a great advantage over the alternatives. (I also use Gpay; this comes from someone who just found a good middle point without forgetting about the more reliable, physical and privacy friendly option)
I didn't mean literally zero cash, but once the bulk of your transactions are by card, you don't need to constantly go to the ATM and replenish your cash reserves
Of course I get that carrying coins and notes is cumbersome, but if we've managed to live all through the 80's and 90's with it, I think we can manage to keep doing it. 100% digital money is giving up on a huge level of self-determination and privacy that I wouldn't feel comfortable with, but I guess as newer generations grow up already pre-adoctrinated and not being able to compare the before-and-after, in the end society will end giving up.
I don't think it's just a generational divide.
I do understand the privacy and self-determination problems of a cashless society but I have to admit I'm just to weak-minded to care about that in practice; the practicality of just paying even for just coffee with my phone is just too big for me to care for it.
Not sure I understand how that's different than today? You set a time and place, then you meet there, are people doing more than that today? Seems the youngsters understand this concept as well as older people, at least from the people I tend to meet like that.
> the practicality of just paying even for just coffee with my phone is just too big for me to care for it.
Interestingly enough, no matter if you had cash or card yesterday you couldn't get a coffee anywhere, as none of the coffee machines had power and even in the fancier places where they could have made the coffee without power, they didn't have electricity for the grinder itself, so no coffee even for them.
no, today people are continuously updating you about their whereabouts and assume you can just change time, place continuously and if you don't have the phone people get lost and panic. Ok I'm exaggerating of course, but there is a grain of truth in this
I once used an aggregator app to summon a handyman to my place. My request was simple: move two pieces of furniture around my very small apartment.
So I find a reputable service within the app, I schedule it, and they send a guy. He shows up to my door breathless, with some kind of sob story about a vehicle breakdown. I dismiss that out of hand and he gets to work. He did a fine job and it didn't take very long.
Then we get to the point of settling up, so I announce I'm going to pay in the app. He looks really disappointed and says he usually takes cash. I realized at this point that he was ready to shake me down, and also he would incidentally be discovering where I stashed my cash, when I reached for it with him there in the room. So disappointed. So I send the money out in the app and I show the confirmation screen to the guy. And I felt so bad that I followed up with a tip in the same fashion.
But at the end of the day he was just a garden-variety cash-in-hand scammer and I had no reason to feel guilty, because I had unwittingly outwitted him by trusting the app. And the company had no qualms about it.
Another time, I had a very short cab ride to the laundry. And it did not take long for the driver to spin a gigantic tale about his auntie addicted to gambling used up all their savings and they was really hurting for money. I was shifting uncomfortably wondering why I was hearing this. So the cabbie parks the car and his POS machine shuts off. He's like "oh it's out of order" so here he is, shaking me down and expecting me to go fetch cash to put in his grubby hands.
I stared him up and down, started taking photos, and got out of there. I discussed with dispatch. They said if he's not accepting cards and I intended to pay by card, I owe him nothing.
So again a cash-in-hand sob-story scammer was foiled. The cab service was crazy enough to assign him to pick me up additional times. This is why I ride Waymo, folks!!!
The laborer was simply trying to actually get paid vs. deal with the overhead of the app. Somewhat shady perhaps - since it routes around the company taking their cut for finding him the work, and likely avoids taxes. I've paid these sorts of guys cash every single time I've used such a service and exactly zero of them have "shook me down" or cared where I stored the money. They make so little already I'm happy to help them out with a smile.
Cabbies simply want cash for pretty much the same reason. They get charged an astronomical "service fee" by the cab company, and likely are avoiding taxes as well. I agree that such a situation is more shady in general, but I've actually had (NYC) cops side with cabbies on this topic and force me to go get cash at the ATM or get arrested. I also use car services now over cabs whenever possible due to this reason - mostly for convenience, never out of fear of being robbed though.
The chances of you getting mugged/stolen from for using cash are just the same as the chances of you getting mugged for no apparent reason walking home. Perhaps the collective dis-use of cash has reduced these odds, but you specifically is utterly irrelevant.
Yes, well, I choose not to participate in shady shit like that. Is that OK that I prefer to make transactions as laid out by their employer and not every random guy?
> happy to help them out with a smile
So you choose to be knowingly complicit in tax-avoidance schemes. That's fine; you do you, but some of us steer clear of shady shit, just on principle, you know? Perhaps the company deserves their cut as well -- they get paid so little already, amirite?
Also if there was nothing unusual about their choice of payment, then why must they regale me with these shitty sob stories? Am I supposed to be moved to tears at their hardship and heroism at making it to my door, that I must promptly cover their expenses? They are not panhandlers, they are service providers.
No, I ordered a service and I pay for the value of the service, according to the Company's rates. The cab company was clear about it: either I pay how I want to or I don't owe them. Nobody's arresting me for refusing to fork over cash. That's a scam.
That's not the only time I was cash-scammed by a cab driver. They will pull every trick in the book, and surely they compare and trade notes on their marks.
It gets even worse: my simple insistence on transacting with the cab company earned me fake receipts. Yes, they faked every receipt that they sent me in email. The totals were all fudged down to be much smaller than what I paid, including a $0 tip. It was very very obvious, especially when the rides booked in the app were generating duplicates showing different calculations. I reported it twice to their backend developers and they said that there were some coding errors in device drivers; please stand by for a fix. LOL!
That's a scam to ensure that taxpayers can't get reimbursed for out-of-pocket medical expenses. Most/all cab companies provide NEMT services as well, and they can't stand when people go outside of insurance companies. So they falsified my receipts.
And again, that's why I trust Waymo.
You can do as many electronic transactions as you wish without internet or electricity, provided you have something with charged battery. Problem is the transaction cannot be verified without internet, but when internet gets restored, all transactions can be applied.
That technology exists for more than a decade, so banks will implement it in 20 or 50 years. Most sane people will not wait patiently for half a century till some software engineer implements electronic transactions with COBOL, and we will use some kind of blockchain much sooner than that.
Nahhh - some banks have some parts of the infrastructure in COBOL. Specifically larger retail banks often have their ledgers in COBOL. Most of them want rid and are actively getting rid. Most places have had programs to root COBOL out since before 2000, but there are residual implementations remain. The ledgers are the hardest place to deal with because of the business case as well as the awkwardness. Basically there's not much of an advantage (or at least hasn't been) in modernizing so keeping the thing going has been the option. Now people want to have more flexible core systems so that they can offer more products, although not so sure that customers want this or can consume it. Still - it supports the idea of modernisation so not many people are keen to challenge.
The most common big implementations I come across are in Java.
Anyway point remains, electronic transactions with no internet or electricity is a solved problem, and banks don't want to solve it or they can't due to incompetency or maliciousness.
Currency transactions worth their weight in gold, it is of utmost importance for transactions to always be published to a central authority right away. If they don't have to be published, they should not exist at all. Imagine people buying stuff without anyone knowing right away! That should never, ever exist, for any reason.
[1] https://thenextweb.com/news/ancient-programming-language-cob...
I can imagine it and it happens all the time. Your version sounds very dystopian.
Most of our modern economy and systems are built to reduce redundancy and buffers - ever since the era of “just in time” manufacturing, we’ve done our best to strip out any “fat” from our systems to reduce costs. Consequently, any time we face anything but the most idealized conditions, the whole system collapses.
The problem is that, culturally, we’re extremely short-termist- normally I’d take this occasion to dunk on MBAs, and they deserve it, but broadly as a people we’re bad at recognizing just how far down the road you need to kick a can so you’re not the one who has to deal with it next time and we’ve gotten pretty lazy about actually doing the work required to build something durable.
This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.
Systems like electric grid, internal water management (anti-flood) shouldn't be lean, they should be antifragile.
What's even more annoying that we have solutions for a lot of those problems - in case of electric grids we have hydroelectric buffers, we have types of powerplants that are easier to shutdown and startup than coal, gas or wind/solar(which cannot be used for cold start at all).
The problem is that building any of this takes longer than one political term.
Of course not, they're optimising shareholder profit.
How do you make those systems antifragile rather than simply highly resilient?
I postulate the grid as a whole is antifragile, but not enough for the renewable era. We still don’t know what was the root cause of the Spanish blackout almost 24h after it happened.
> This is a solution that teenager put in management position would think of(along with hire more people as solution to inefficient processes), not a paid professional.
What kind of comment is this? Toyota has been using and refining it for decades. It wasn’t invented yesterday by some “teenagers”. Such a state of HN’s comment section.
JIT is definitely not perfect as exposed during the Covid period, but it isn’t without merits and its goal isn’t “reducing safety margin”.
Then we have JIT in computing, such as JVM.
Sure it is. That's exactly how it achieves the higher profitability. Safety margin costs money. Otherwise known as inefficiency.
Slack in the system is a good thing, not a bad thing. Operating at 95% capacity 24x7 is a horrible idea for society in general. It means you can't "burst mode" for a short period of time during a true emergency.
It's basically ignoring long tail risk to chase near-term profits. It's a whole lot of otherwise smart people optimizing for local maxima while ignoring the big picture. Certainly understandable given our economic and social systems, but still catastrophic in the end one day.
I would expect a paid professional in management discipline to be aware of such nuance but alas proven wrong again.
That should have been enough to scrub anyway, but there was clearly political pressure to launch.
I do agree that they need to specifically design anti-fragile.
We've had substantial disruptions, but they've not been particularly irrecoverable or sustained.
The chips shortage has been difficult, but it's also been little more than an inconvenience when you look at it in terms of goods being available to consumers or whatever.
I fell into the other poster's trap, talking about something emotionally charged that isn't really responsive to what I said initially.
Sad whomp whomp horn: the economy is going to be negatively affected by covid disability and death on an ongoing basis and a new pandemic will still cause so much fear the economy will shut down.
I do agree on Covid disability. Early on we saw some pretty dire predictions, but since then it's mostly been an exercise in muddying the waters. Lots of wheel-spinning about what constitutes long Covid when they should have simply been collecting data on the various symptoms. Better to not see the problem than have to deal with it.
Look at how we were handling AIDS before we discovered it was HIV destroying the immune system. Long Covid is still at that stage--we are seeing a slew of highly varied effects rather than the mechanism.
And a lot of people thinking it was an overreaction proves nothing. People don't get a vote on reality.
But I wonder from a reliability (or lack of cascading failures) point of view whether synchronous islands interconnected with DC interconnects is more robust than a large synchronous network?
I feel like to many technologists, the internet is still "the place you go to to play games and chat with friends", just like it was 20 years ago. Even if our brains know it isn't true, our hearts still feel that way.
I sometimes feel like the countries cutting off internet access during high school final exams have a point. If you know the internet will be off and on a few days a year, your systems will be designed accordingly, and if anything breaks, you'll notice quickly and during a low-stakes situation.