> As long as we’re throwing shade at EU vs US, I can’t remember the last time the US had a nationwide blackout, certainly not in my lifetime!
Talking about "national" in the sense Spain (pop. 48M, 506,030 km²) is roughly equivalent to a few US states. A similarly (population/area) sized outage occurred a couple of decades ago:
Indeed, and that’s the main problem: you can’t remember or know anything.
It’s is a known fact that in general the US power grid is orders of magnitude less reliable than in Europe. And the excuse of “the weather is more extreme” is just that: a lame excuse.
Just count the number of American households that have generators and/or batteries vs the Europeans if you really have an honest desire to know anything about anything.
The US has three “independent” grids so losing them all would be hard. But I believe at times Texas has gotten close, and East went pretty dark at some point recently.
CA of course has rolling blackouts for other reasons.
2021 would have been a non-event if people in Texas weren't propagandized about some nonsensical "Independence" bullshit.
A few more interconnects with the rest of the country and it wouldn't have even made the news.
this is after decades of Texans bragging about their independent power supply. Many Texans still believe outright lies about the blackout, like it being "caused" by green energy sources, which was false.
It was caused by free market participants not spending capital to harden their network. Solar panels and Wind Turbines work great in the cold climate of Canada.
The storm that caused such a problem is a once every ten years storm. The grid companies all should have foreseen this with even minimal investment in planning. They didn't, because that's less profitable, and the "regulator" in Texas has no ability to punish them for pinching pennies on reliability and resilience.
There's five different grids in North America (Eastern, Western, Texas, Alaska, Quebec) so something would have to go very wrong for a nationwide blackout.
As was pointed out, the USA has three independent grids (east, west, and Texas) and EU countries are roughly comparable to states (except with less federal power). The equivalent of a European nationwide blackout would be a US statewide blackout, and those HAVE happened, definitely within your lifetime if you're old enough to use Hacker News, mostly in Texas.
Just goes to show how much people make things up and couldn’t be further from the truth (see other comments for why this information was released, this one is flat out wrong).
I suppose the interesting question is whether this is true of the newest devices or not. My wife's MacBook Pro lasted 11 years. It finally died this year. Can I expect the MacBook Pro that's replacing it to last 11 years too? Only time will tell. Hope so.
Didn’t they end up recalling those and changing the main boards for free (of course, those replacements were also having the same issues as the original boards). AFAICT they still refuse to touch a nVidia GPU over this. It is not a common occurrence.
It was a 2008 laptop and they decided it was a real problem by 2014 or so, so 'yeah' after 6 years and wet know what happened after. My iPod was replaced within an hour when it broke.
Which potential recession are we talking about? The one that was supposed to happen 3 months ago? or 6 months ago? Or 9 months ago? A year ago? 2 years ago? There’s so many potential recessions i’ve lost count!
You think that’s why it’s taken so long to move off of IPv4? Surely it can’t be _anything_ else, like lagging support for IPv6 in newer network routing protocols, bug related to those implementations with IPv6, or sometimes no support for IPv6 at all. Similarly for systems and applications that just have no concept of IPv6 at all. To single out the US as the reason why we have not moved off of IPv4 is laughable, the US has a pretty significant adoption of IPv6.
> You think that’s why it’s taken so long to move off of IPv4? Surely it can’t be _anything_ else, like lagging support for IPv6 in newer network routing protocols, bug related to those implementations with IPv6, or sometimes no support for IPv6 at all. Similarly for systems and applications that just have no concept of IPv6 at all.
Who do you think is making those poor protocols and buggy implementations? People who are affected by IPv4 address exhaustion - which is most of the non-US world - know how important IPv6 is and prioritise it. People who aren't affected and don't know anyone who's affected - which is people in the US - don't care (and I don't think this is some deep moral failing - it's normal and natural to not care about an issue that doesn't affect you), treat it as an afterthought, and the poor level of support you see is the result of that.
I think what would help is treating IPv6 as the new default. IPv6 is now good enough that can use it for IPv6-only network with NAT64/DNS64 at the edges for IPv4.
Businesses are the big holdouts in the US. They have existing complicated networks and address allocations, and don't see the need for an upgrade.
> I think what would help is treating IPv6 as the new default. IPv6 is now good enough that can use it for IPv6-only network with NAT64/DNS64 at the edges for IPv4.
That's already happening on new networks that need a lot of addresses (e.g. most big mobile carriers do this). IPv6 is pretty heavily used, but like most infrastructure you don't notice it until it breaks.
> Businesses are the big holdouts in the US. They have existing complicated networks and address allocations, and don't see the need for an upgrade.
"Businesses" is too broad a category. But fundamentally anyone who has plenty of addresses and isn't feeling the squeeze has no real incentive to upgrade, so why would they.
