StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote:You know what really fucking sucks? Almost every area around me got power back hours before I did, and some areas got it at 4:00 AM!

Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote:You know what really fucking sucks? Almost every area around me got power back hours before I did, and some areas got it at 4:00 AM!

Pablo Sanchez wrote: You're just not important.

We had power until about 6:00 pm yesterday.

Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote: quote]We had power until about 6:00 pm yesterday.

Aya wrote:Admit it, Mike, it was the penguins. You know it. I know it. We all know it.

Ghost Rider wrote:Yeah I and a few other figured that was it.

Well this goes to everyone in that area...like Stravo, Dalton, yourself and others...hope everything turned out okay.

BTW nice rant .

I wrote:IMPORTANT NOTE

4:43pm EST5EDT August 15

The bulletin board has been temporarily brought down because of the massive cascade power failure that struck the northeastern United States and parts of Canada approximately 24 hours ago, far exceeding the time-limited capacity of my battery-backup system. I have been unable to get back on-line until now, when power was finally restored. Unfortunately, I have also been informed that power restoration may be only temporary.

Efforts are currently underway to move the bulletin board to an area outside the affected region. However, it is not known whether this operation can be successfully completed before power fails again, as the independent market operators who run the power grid admit that the reliability of the system is currently in a very "fragile" state.

Perhaps this incident, in addition to the growing string of business and industrial horror stories, will finally serve as a wake-up call to the self-professed neo-con experts who have been proclaiming for years that deregulation and market competition will create a stronger power market. The mantra that private industry will always be more efficient than public or regulated industry has been proven true, but people have forgotten that efficiency, by its very nature, breeds unreliability. This is because reliability and redundancy intrinsically require wasteful expenditure of resources in order to build over-capacity into the system. Conversely, efficiency intrinsically requires the elimination of any capacity which is not currently and immediately being used (much as the "Just in Time" manufacturing credo led to the entire North American auto industry shutting down after a strike at a single parts plant in Flint, Michigan once).

All preliminary indications are that this failure was caused by a power transmission grid which was being massively overloaded since an enormous spike in long-distance transmission ever since deregulation. It has become common to build local power grids with under-capacity and then simply buy up extra power from the cheapest distributor (regardless of location, even if he's a thousand miles away) when needed. This efficient but reckless practice is precisely the sort of thing that private industry tends to do when not limited by regulations, and it has vastly increased the load on the system which apparently caused this crisis (a significant failure in one transmission line causes the load to shunt onto other lines, which trips their overloads and shut them down, thus shunting even more load onto remaining lines, etc. in a massive cascade failure).

Of course, any who disagree with this rant can feel free to get on the bulletin board whenever it comes back on-line and vent their neo-con dogmas again.

Specialist wrote:Well it's nice to see this site back up and running again. Why is our power connected to the states? Who do you think is to blame?

RedImperator wrote: You. The whole thing is your fault.

Grand Admiral Thrawn wrote:Shut the fuck up, BITCH!

Specialist wrote:Well it's nice to see this site back up and running again. Why is our power connected to the states? Who do you think is to blame?

kojikun wrote:Mike, how can a power system be overloaded? I don't understand this whole AC power generation thing, I only know DC where the more shit you hook up the less power be device, not the more you hook up the more PULL on the generators. Can you explain that?

Darth Wong wrote:Was it big on the news? I would hope so, considering some 50 million people were affected.

I was very proud of our city for the way we hung together and dealt with the crisis, though. There was almost no looting or public disturbances, and volunteers went to many of the major intersections (all of which had dead traffic lights) and helped direct traffic until the cops arrived.

In fact, the biggest irritation was knowing that my board was down!

When I couldn't cook, I just went outside and fired up the ol' propane barbecue, and I brought my cast-iron frypan out there to fry up some eggs this morning. An old friend dropped by and we spent a few hours talking because he was stranded by the heavy traffic, so it was really not that bad (luckily, the water was still running, so we had flush toilets).

I was afraid there would be more public panic, but everyone was very calm about it. After SARS and everything else, I think the people of Toronto have just become accustomed to dealing with crises. I hope things went as smoothly for the guys in New York.