This just inspired me to buy an emergency weather radio.

For several years I've been idly speculating about the obvious vulnerability of substations to simple physical attack. A dozen rounds from a high-powered rifle could knock out a substation, and there are only like fifty million such rifles in the US.  I'm surprised that America's many enemies (both internal and external) haven't taken advantage of this.

This is the discussion of the premiere episode of James Burke's late '70s BBC Connections series, how power/electricity is the backbone of our world. Take it away (for any reason) and our society falls apart since basically none of us know how to accomplish life-critical work without it. The episode (and series) is on Archive.org: https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections/S01/S01E01+-+The+Trigger+Effect.mkv

I've long wondered about the possibility of  attacks like this: the thing I thought of (for the UK) was to destroy a few motorway and railway bridges on critical roads.  If you do it at the right time you kill nobody immediately, but the consequences are catastrophic.  Attacks on the grid are even better.

At the far end of this is an EMP attack: a nuclear weapon set off above the atmosphere.  It kills nobody directly, but the country below it has no power for months.

And 'for months' means 'essentially permanently': there is a pretty small amount of time that things like electricity can be gone for before things can't really recover.  This is something that I learned during the 2007-2008 financial crisis, when I worked in IT in a bank (in the UK).  Lots of people were saying 'we should just let the retail banks fail', but nobody who understood the banking system said that, because they knew that 'let them fail' meant 'now money does not work any more' and that if the system was down for more than a couple of days at the outside it could not be put back together again in less than months.  So, months with nobody having any money: what do things look like at the end of that period?  ('Not letting the retail banks fail' is very different than 'not sending many senior people in those banks to gaol'...)

I’m not prepping … you’re prepping 👀

We lived through a day long county-wide blackout here in Spain, it was very interesting how people reacted. No phones for information was really a serious issue, the network went down a few hours after the blackout when the batteries ran out . There were queues for radios in the shops - I actually went to sit in the car to listen to the radio. The first few hours all of the point of sale terminals and credit cards still worked and there was a bit of a festival atmosphere, but by hour 8 or so we started to wonder what we should do. We've got gas at home to cook, went to bed early, and woke up at 02:00 to all the lights turning back on. But I can tell you a few days of that would have been chaos! 

From Bladerunner 2049: "Everyone remembers where they were at the Blackout ... I was home with my folks, then ten days of darkness. Every machine stopped cold. When the lights came back, we were wiped clean. Photos, files, every bit of data... Ffft! Gone. Bank records, too. Didn't mind that. It's funny it's only paper that lasted. I mean, we had everything on drives. Everything, everything, everything! My mom still cries over the lost baby pictures."

@kottke A TIL gem in this is that someone got to name an energy sector company "Amperesand". 🧑‍🍳👌

Personally I think the more likely disaster scenario is mass loss of satellites due to SpaceX being incautious idiots and allowing a cascading set of collisions, but por qué no los dos, eh? sigh.