Fuck The USA

I'm old and have been through a lot of storms, including hurricanes, tornadoes, and even earthquakes. Power was always restored within a day. Five decades of storms, power always restored quickly.

A few years ago, where I live there was a minor storm. Some wind gusts, nothing hurricane level, heavy rain... power was out for us for five days. This wasn't a storm of significance, nobody would take time off work for it. Tens of thousands of people without power.

There is something fundamentally wrong with US government today. I am in a state with Democratic control for decades, with some of the highest taxes in the nation.

In the past, crews from Canada would go down to the US and help restore power when there's disasters. I wonder if that still happens?

Infairness, natural disasters will fuck up any developed nation, but you'll see huge differences in the way their peoples and governments respond.

But it certainly brings out the worst in people. For example, in Japan, I think our government responds fairly well to natural disasters and our infrastructure has been built a little better to withstand them. But social media is rife with fake news about foreigners looting in the aftermath.

It was for a while. Then they stopped taxing the wealthy and opened loophole after loophole for corporations.

On a good day, the US is a developed country in decline.

“Are we sure America is a developed nation?” Well, if people die because they can’t afford health care, then NO

Actually... in their defense, some towns were completely wiped out by floods, it's quite a massive "once in a lifetime" storms we've been getting thanks to climate change. I've a friend in Indiana that works for insurance as a mold specialist, he was out quite a bit last week and had to go to sites in a boat.

That said, you want a real target to shit on? He told me the company isn't honoring almost any claims since most aren't sold on real flood insurance (it's not a place known to flooding). None the less, they're soulless ghouls.

Edit: oh also, this probably goes without saying but the feds are barely doing shit about it.

Why’s he putting power steering fluid in the generator?

Ice Storm '98, Rural Ontario (North Gower) - 3 weeks without power, and since we were on a well and electric heat, no running water or heat.

Ontario invested in putting a lot of wires underground after that, I can tell you that modern life is far to dependent on the grid, and when that grid is above ground due to poor infrastructure development, it can take weeks to restore all of the downed lines. In our case, they even mobilised national guard to get things cleared up.

Canada and the US are both large, and the infrastructure funds are split up over large regions based on population. Cities have modern infrastructure that is more resilient, but much of the rural regions still rely on basic wooden poles and above ground wire that is easily compromised. When the governance for a larger region that encompasses both the larger cities and the rural regions wants to do large investment into the rural regions to even the energy and water security for folks, there is often a two edged sword pointed directly down their throat; one side sharpened by the city populations percentage of citizens who do not see or comprehend the world beyond their immediate sphere, and the other by the rich who have already invested in fixing the issue for themselves with power redundancy (because they can) and of course, their businesses (who the media would of course always talk about as though their businesses were "separate entities" from the affluent).

It took the Ice Storm of '98 for the funds to be invested into the solution in terms of putting more wires underground in Ontario, what will it take for the scales to tip for those in these affected states? What will it take for us to realise how broken these political systems are?

no, he's using a petrol generator

the occasional time we lose power during storms here in Australia, day or two at most fir me, I plug into my EV using V2L. Runs the refrigeration, Internet, couple lights, USB charging etc

Nope. America has multiple nations, some of them developed, like Canada or Mexico, and some of them undeveloped, like the US.

Fuck, 11 days is rough. Worst I ever had was 1 and a half day like 2 years ago and it showed me how difficult this is. Cannot imagine a whole week of that, let alone 11 days, probably still counting.

I remember an ice storm from when I was a kid, maybe 30 years ago, that left us without power for what might have been 3-7 days. We were lucky in that my stepfather had the money to get a generator, so we could keep the food cold, and plug in heaters and such. I don’t remember much of it, just things like showering by candle light and such. We lived in a decently sized city, where this sort of extended outage was unheard of.

In modern day, I’ve heard from people that live in the sticks, losing power for 1-2 weeks after bad summer storms. For them they just accept it.

Similar happened around Pittsburgh PA about a year ago. Storms came through and took out tons of power lines leaving people without power for well over a week. The “local” utility was impacted way more than surrounding utility providers due to years of underinvestment in infrastructure maintenance despite regularly raising rates. Turns out that’s what happens when it’s majority owned by overseas sovereign wealth funds (in this case mostly Singapore). When line must go up, maintenance becomes just a cost to be deferred. Good news is there was a ton of blowback and things have gotten better. The state PUC opened an investigation and have prohibited rate increase requests for multiple years at this point. We have had more short flickers but a lot less actual outages so maybe they really have learned a lesson? (Not holding my breath on that one)

Hey guys. You can stop it. But it’s not gonna be by asking nicely. (Or asking in a stern voice either)

Gary, Indiana is definitely not

Pretty soon we'll slap an export tariff on O&G; the Americunts can then really own the "shithole country aura" they keep trying to export to us up here.

We are a developed genocide

The people that turned out to vote in Indiana voted for Trump 2 outta 3 times. I thought they wanted this.

seriously. my state needs to approve balcony solar and battery.