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this post was submitted on 06 Feb 2026
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Has anyone considered that turning off the power might not even be possible without turning it off at hospitals and other critical locations...?
Critical locations like hospitals have backup generators.
all critical locations have huge DC batteries specifically design to take over during a short outage. Then generators.
There would always be a risk any backup systems fail. As another commenter pointed out, in other countries it would be illegal to cut power like that for that kind of reason. And that's a good thing. Power is literally keeping people alive and shouldn't be turned off because it seems mean to leave it on.
But a better point is, no one discussing this knows what downstream effects could happen if they killed the power. Seems kind of crazy to me to pretend we do.
A backup system that isn’t tested regularly is not a backup at all, just the illusion of one.
If you can’t turn the power off with 24h notice then nature will turn it off with zero notice at the most inconvenient moment.
They should indeed do regular tests of their backups. They should also ensure technical staff is on-site during those tests.
I do not follow the logic of people being so blinded by their love of cats that they literally think they can become electrical grid engineers and know all the risks, just because they want to know them.
It does not matter if every single vulnerable building has backups and tested them yesterday (obviously none of that could ever be close to true), it's still a non-zero risk to human lives, for one cat.
They reroute and turn off sections of wiring all the damn time for maintenance, they have crews out in the field who are literally going around, turning some lines off after turning others on, and doing routine work on lines, transformers and other components. It's not life and death, it's just a company being cheap and lazy.
If having a love for life and wanting better outcomes and hope and inspiration for innocent life baffles your sense of logic, then maybe your sense of logic is flawed and holding you back from emotional growth.
It's amazing because electrical grids are designed to be able to have sections shut down at any time. The intended purpose is literally to prevent a catastrophic shutdown.
Imagine pompously stating that your suggestion is somehow more logical on the basis of 1) there's a good likelihood you aren't an electrical engineer and 2) that there's some kind of genuine risk here (because apparently this guy thinks the whole lynchpin to the fucking grid happens to be this exact pole).
Dunning Kruger, at its finest. Glad to see you still have your head on straight.
No no, I'm sure that old wooden pole with the ceramic donut insulator, splinters and dangling wires is powering like fucking NORAD or something. 🙄
No really, thank you. There is a segment of people who think themselves "progressive" in spaces like Lemmy but are utterly heartless and exist like soulless automations when it comes to the stuff that actually matters in our lives like protecting the innocent and making sacrifices for small things that make someone or something else have a better experience in life, even if the risk "outweighs" the reward. It's denying the human experience to make that kind of calculation.
Imagine how much better our world would be if everyone, everywhere stopped what they were doing to help someone or something innocent in need. We wouldn't have the fucking Epstein files right now. It actually makes my blood boil and I deleted a few comments here before moderating my tone to be more civil.
It is a sentiment that treats potential loss of life like rounding errors instead of tragedies (big and small).
Tolkien's words live in my brain
Yah there people in here, on Lemmy of all places, making the argument for the stability of businesses.
I feel the effort we put into the smallest acts of kindness is a much better measure of who and what we are as a species.
I'm sure some of the folks responding in here may be on the spectrum or failing to express their arguments and reasoning in a neurotypical way, but for the rest, I hope they actually never learn what it feels like to be the entity depending on someone or something to save them for no reward to themselves. It's a rotten, hopeless feeling and the callousness that people embrace to justify allowing others to experience that, well that's a state that spreads quickly through our society when we allow it to fester. Always push back on heartlessness.
It is easy to choose not to care about anything, it is very hard to care about everything. I myself am dealing with having learned to turn my heart off to certain things. Things that would just be too overwhelming to carry.
A friend of mine died recently and it was incredibly shocking. He was much younger than me, I guess he was driving too fast on his bike. One of my first thoughts was that I could have been kinder to him. Maybe if I'd reached out more, stayed more consistent in his life, maybe he would have stayed more tempered.
We can't know what will happen to us nor the people around us. We can only dictate our words and actions. I, however, am much less kind than you — I hope that those who can't be bothered to exhibit the slightest bit of empathy are cursed to suffer in the ways they've been overtly willing to ignore. I hope they experience what it is to decay and have the world fade around them.
It would be poetic. Aneurotypicality is not an excuse for callousness.
I'm sorry for your friend, and yes mortality puts life into new perspectives.
But I want to make it clear... I am not kind. I just have values I live by, knowing what your values are is your guiding star when you can't decide to care about something or everything. I have a train-wreck derailment of people I've made angry in my life by sticking to my values and principles, and I feel zero regret about it, because I know my values are correct, and I don't compromise at a certain level.
I am getting increasingly distressed by how alien this seems to modern generations, and how many people are open about the fact that they can't decide or figure out how to build their values and seem to default to "attitude" over ethics.
I think it's easy to associate adhering to values with being unkind (those values could easily exhibit kindness, depending on what they are).
I just don't believe you're unkind. If you were, your values wouldn't tell you that we should shut down power to a neighborhood for a cat. You would just think something like 'glad that's not my problem' and move on. I don't think that people who are unkind are bothered by things like this, because again 'not my problem'. You have made it your problem by caring, and are thus precluded from being unkind (in my opinion).
Sure go ahead and assume I want the cat to die. Which I didn't. What the fuck.
The cat was rescued apparently anyway.
You're digging yourself into a hole that seems oblivious to normal human feelings and getting irate at the responses. This is all you baby.
The cat isn’t part of the equation, I gave no opinion on that. The risk of never testing your failure response is much higher than the risk of testing your failure response.
If a test happens to save a cat? Lucky cat. If not, they’ll still have to test it at some other point anyway.
I never remotely commented that backup systems shouldn't be tested. Bizarre.
No you're just trying to suggest that a test can't be pushed up because you hate cats.
Unless you genuinely just do not understand what they mean, which is likely.
Since you're going to assume the worst possible reading, I will assume projection on your part.
So you genuinely don't understand, ok got it.
If their back up system fails then it’s their fault for not keeping it up to date. Seriously, my husband is an engineer who designs these battery systems. They do not “fail” if they are maintained and replaced properly.
Patently absurd. Technology often fails regardless of what you do. Inviting that failure would be negligence and should be illegal.
The one thing I know for sure about any engineer is that we are intimately familiar with the concept of things failing when it's least convenient.
We've got the Lemmy/Reddit worldview out in force. We should shut down vital infrastructure, risking life safety of many, for a cat. I say this loving cats: that's silly.
Yeah, I knew when I commented it might get some backlash, but the strength of it is somewhat depressing. Isn't Lemmy supposed to be mostly rational intelligent people?
I guess it just tells us how commonplace it is for people to declare a risk either worth it or non-existent without a fucking clue about the actual risk they are talking about.
In any case, thank you for demonstrating that there are still some sane people left out there.
Are you fucking insane.
I want going to be so forthright, but nail on head.
Apparently, yes.
I would be astonished if that janky, raggedy wooden pole connects to anything but neighborhood housing.
Say what you mean: "I do not care what is true because what I want to happen is way more important".
Or "your claim 8s unlikely and would have been the reason given by Xcel if true"
Just adding that these operations are federally regulated to remain in operation. They likely don't even have the choice if they can't justify the liability.
Careful, a bunch of downvotes and nasty comments probably are coming your way despite there being a good reason for such regulations.
Lol, I was an electrical product investigator/inspector for 15 years. I've dabbled in being a pariah of sorts. But thanks for the heads up! A level head is a balm these days.
I guess by not turning it off they risked people being electrocuted and possibly result to a brownout within the area, seeing how eventually resulted to bystanders attempting to rescue the cat and a bad PR.
Personally I think it's just a lapse in risk analysis on the electric company.