Using the term whistleblower in this manner is inappropriate; actual whistleblowers are individuals who bring to light illicit acts by organizations or governments at great personal risk.
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
This is how humans are with all catastrophes–there isn't enough money until after something really, really bad happens and suddenly there is enough money to fix the issue.
NYC is extremely vulnerable to a 9/11 style attack on the fresh water aquaducts. Fuller wrote about this all the way back in the 60s in Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth:
Thus under lethal emergencies vast new magnitudes of wealth come mysteriously into
effective operation. We don’t seem to be able to afford to do peacefully the logical things we
say we ought to be doing to forestall warring-by producing enough to satisfy all the world
needs. Under pressure we always find that we can afford to wage the wars brought about by
the vital struggle of "have-nots" to share or take over the bounty of the "haves." Simply
because it had seemed, theretofore, to cost too much to provide vital support of those "have-
nots." The "haves" are thus forced in self-defense suddenly to articulate and realize productive
wealth capabilities worth many times the amounts of monetary units they had known
themselves to possess and, far more importantly, many times what it would have cost to give
adequate economic support to the particular "have-nots" involved in the warring and, in fact, to
all the world’s ’have-nots."
> This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.
Indeed but it stands to reason that this outage will last maybe a few hours until the grid has recovered. A nationwide full blackout is a scenario that's on a "once a quarter century" level, and the last one in 2006 was resolved after two hours. It's Europe, not the US - our grids operate on much, much stricter requirements and audits on resiliency, hell since last year we got an active warzone in the ENTSO-E grid and it hasn't been too much of an issue!
Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.
As for "I can't buy eggs in a supermarket now"... lol. People need to learn to chill down a bit. You won't die from having to wait a few hours to be able to buy the eggs.
> Not much of value will have been lost in the meantime. The only ones who are truly and beyond screwed by such events are large smelters and similar factories where any prolonged downtime leads to solidification of the products which, in extreme cases, require a full reconstruction.
I think you've left out a few things, I remember doing on site work at a pharma company that required some downtime on one of their lines and if we went over the allotted time, they would be charging us up to 2 million EUR an hour. Hospitals and critical services SHOULD have backup generators etc, but depending how long this lasts a lot of things can become a major problem.
The majority of the cases will be fine, but when there's mass confusion and interruption like this, there's always horrible stories that come out.
> None of that changes the difficulty of a black start.
That's the beauty of the European grid: it is not a black start event for Spain, at least as long as even a single link to any of the neighbouring countries is available.
The difficulty is still the same: for each piece of the puzzle (substations, high voltage power lines, transformers, generators, loads), they have to wait until enough power is available at the connection point, and carefully manage the power balance so it's neither too much nor too little (and if they get it wrong, things trip offline and they have to start all over), while the grid is in a degraded state (often meaning no alternative paths, so a single fault can set them back several steps). The only difference being that the black start "generators" are these still working international links (which could be very far from the important parts of the national grid).
It might be faster to instead black start several independent power islands in parallel, and connect them together as a final step. At least in my country (Brazil), that's how it's done for large-scale blackouts, even when some of the country still has power; it was done that way for the partial blackout in 2023, and there's a written procedure on how to do it (which is available on the operator website, if you know where to look). In 2023, some areas failed to black start for one reason or another, and had to wait for power from the outside; other areas managed to black start as expected, and were then synchronized with other areas until everything came back together.
The grid is not just an aggregation of individual sources and sinks; it takes active effort to keep them all working together in a useful way without just collapsing again into another cascading failure. For that reason, your solar inverter doesn't come on until the grid operator wants the solar inverters to come on in your section of the grid.
It's tempting to think of the grid as something grid operators control, feeding power from point A to point B, but the grid is actually largely uncontrolled - the power just flows wherever it wants to - and the only controls they have are turning on and off generators, adjusting their throttle, disconnecting loads (rolling blackouts) and sometimes opening circuit breakers (though this is not normally useful). They don't even have precise real-time monitoring of the whole grid - only specific measurements in specific locations, from which the rest is estimated using lots of maths (which is how you would design it too, if measurement devices cost $100,000 apiece). That's why it's not a trivial task to keep it working.
However, you're able to have your own, private miniature grid, on which you can power your own loads from your own generators. It's even possible to do this with solar inverters! You will need to specifically seek out this capability, and get extra hardware installed, which is probably why you don't have it. You need a "transfer switch" to definitively disconnect your private grid from the main grid when you're using your private grid capability - it's not allowed (and not safe, and will blow up your equipment anyway if you force it) to just feed power onto your local unpowered section of the grid.
Solar inverters could simulate inertia by not running at 100% most of the time, but you do want the free energy machines to run at 100% as much as they physically can, because it's free energy, which means there's no buffer for simulating inertia. It's been commented many times that batteries can be used to simulate inertia. You can also literally just add inertia, in heavy spinning lumps of metal that don't do anything.
Germany has dozens of links to its neighbours. We don't need much in terms of "black start" capacity, that's just pointless fearmongering by fossil fuel and/or prepper propaganda sites.
As long as even a single link to any of our neighbours is up and running, it can be used to start the rest of the grid - which is exactly what was done in the 2006 outage and why that one took barely two hours to be resolved. The only truly screwed country at the moment is Portugal because all their grid links run through Spain.
> 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.
I was on a plane during the Northeast Blackout of 2003. Landed, got in my car, and attempted to leave the parking garage but with no power the automated EZ-Pass payment wasn't working nor were the credit card machines. Most people, myself included, had neither sufficient cash nor a checkbook on hand. Huge logjam of cars. The workers ended up getting the old school handheld metal credit card machines that created an imprint of the credit card on carbon paper from some long forgotten storeroom and using them.
Many years ago I worked in a Safeway grocery store. We would have occasional power failures that would leave the entire store dark; we would all be given flashlights to help customers find their way out.
The cash registers, though, had backup power, so the store could still take their money.
I worked as a cashier at a large UK supermarket when I was a student. In our training we were told that if there was an outage with the cash registers we should ask shoppers to estimate how much their groceries cost and accept what they told us. Payment could be by cash or cheque.
Apparently when this had been done in the past shoppers were generally honest & relatively accurate.
Many situations call for pen-and-paper backups. Giving out receipts the old way should, in theory, be a possibility, then backfill the computer system later.
Sure, but if we are talking about backup in outages you can also get credit card payments when power is down using something like a Stripe Terminal.
This is actually exactly the case that I had in one trip to Andorra: the power was down for 2 hours while we were choosing equipament for skiing. The shop had no issues getting our orders done though, because they just manually filled the orders with pen-and-paper and did the payment with a credit card terminal connected to a smartphone.
In my experience, for the 4G/5G network to be down something really serious must be happening. I had long power outages (more than a few hours, in some cases even days) that affected multiple regions in places that I lived before that still had working cell network. I assume cell networks have backup power and preferential usage of the power grid, but I am not a specialist.
And I am not saying that you shouldn't accept money as backup, of course you should. But what I am saying is that you can still accept credit cards even during most power outages.
Same as Software Engineer, it is impossible to have perfect, 100% reliability, but it doesn't mean we can't improve from 99% to 99.9%, for example, to have a better service.
Used to work for a telco. Cell sites have battery backup. Some have generators. Any fibre repeaters also will, as do any radio based backhaul sites. The HLR/core network etc will run indefinitely due to generators & strict fuel supply contracts for said generators.
If a city has an extended power outage such that the battery backed cell network goes down, then everything else will be failing too and payments are the least of your problems.
Without electricity the water system depressurized, which contaminates it. After about a week the sewage pumping stations have backed up so the sewer system is starting to fail.
Modern cities cannot operate without electrical power given their scale and density.
It is bizarre to think the biggest problem is "how do we keep a transaction of value?"
Like, just declare an emergency and let business owners be reimbursed by the government.
Credit card processing existed before widespread telecommunications infrastructure. Maybe we should require payment cards to have raised numbers like they used to so the old carbon copy machines continue to work.
Credit cards and payment networks have always explicitly supported "Offline" processing like that.
The kind of fraud that system enables isn't really common.
In Lisbon's airport they are temporarily back to just stamping the passports without the biometric stuff. There are already reports that the checks are being lax.
I was in a Tesco when there was a power outage - the self checkouts all died (and rebooted into a custon Debian based OS with a Chromium front end by the looks of it), but the staffed tills still worked and could accept Chip+PIN but not contactless.
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers. And no price tags.
I know someone who works at a supermarket, and (some of?) their point of sale (POS) systems have a small UPS that can run for a couple of hours to ride through smaller outages.
I used to install those systems, and it's a couple minutes at best, if they've replaced the batteries recently, which they never have. It'll give them time to finish the transaction they're in the middle of ringing, then shut down cleanly, because the server in the back room _should_ have a bit more battery to keep the database consistent.
PoS systems aren't particularly power-hungry, but store owners never want to spend an extra cent, so they go with the smallest UPS they can manage. (And arguably if they went with a big overkill UPS, its after-outage recharging power would be larger so you'd be able to put fewer registers on a single circuit, so it's not as simple as just dropping in a bigger UPS.)
Very good point that nowadays many stores rely on barcodes and product IDs to get prices, and don't label individual items... So even pen and paper to keep track of takings is no use since they can't even figure out prices if the system is down!
> My supermarket, for example, only has electronic cash registers.
That's insane to me, in the EU anyway it's not permitted to only accept electronic payments..
> Retailers cannot refuse cash payments unless both parties have agreed to use a different means of payment. Displaying a label or posters indicating that the retailer refuses payments in cash, or payments made in certain banknote denominations, is not enough.
They have to accept cash in the US as well. The post you're replying to is just saying that they can't ring anything up or accept any payment without power.
I just look to Gaza strip as an example how society continues operating under extreme adversity from the western powers, incl. total lack of electricity distribution for more than a year and a half and full blockade of water, food, and medicine.
I don't think this is true, and I would like to see an explanation of how it might be that quantifies the effect: are we talking electric field strength or magnetic field strength? Modern parts are generally better at ESD than old ones, as well.
gas stations, at least in europe, have "safety zone" around them.
also depends on data center, some datacenters are directly in middle of european city. in most dense part of city and dense in europe or asia is something else then dense in america.
I agree that bitcoin is a poor solution for anyone but a small elite. But as long as you have the mobile network on diesel generators (which you do in countries where power cuts happen regularly), something like M-PESA still works.
Without power or an internet connection you can't validate that the btc hash is unspent, avoid double spends, or validate that your taking ownership of it made it to the blockchain and was confirmed for a few blocks.
Sure you can transfer the private key from one device to another, but (a) you can't know the other person didn't retain a copy of it and (b) you would be limited to spending the exact amount you have in an existing transaction because you couldn't send a transaction to the chain that splits it.
You've to got a reputation system with identities also stored on the blockchain, and you accept the transactions only from the most trustworthy people. Counterfeit paper currency exists, and counterfeit bitcoin (not BTC) transactions might exist, but not every person is equally suspect of using counterfeit money.
Sure, but then you aren't really using bitcoin. The whole point of bitcoin was to be a trust less system where transactions are verified cryptographically on the blockchain.
Transacting bitcoin private keys without going to the network and trusting the other party to not scam you defeats the whole purpose.
You can use cash but it mostly does not work in case of big chains or stores. They need to have access to their SAP/ERP software...It is not about payment for a long time.
Running a generator to power a point of sale machine and maybe an offsite server is a lot easier than generators to power the whole electronic payment chain.
Let me introduce you to the physical receipt block which is made of paper and can be filled up with a pen, and what is still often used in, for example, Christmas markets.
Depending on the country it’s not that easy. Maybe something changed in the meantime but where I am those blocks are prefilled-numbered and stock needs to be controlled.
It’s not like you can (could?) keep a block „just in case” and thus many shopkeepers wouldn’t even bother in case of outages.
Depending where you live a good old trust can be a currency. Humans are great when it comes to adaptation, I bet I could just write on paper name, CC number and leave it on a paper for shopkeeper and everything would resolve just fine..
I hear you, and in my second job 20+ years ago we were still trained (in a cursory fashion) to use physical charge slips in case of a POS system network outage, a full power outage would strain my imagination for ability to transact business at the majority of stores other than small mom and pop operations, and tbh even if such an outage had happened to me in 2005, I would not expect my department store to remain open and conduct sales.
Most retail workers are GenZ and struggle to understand what this would even look like because they’ve never conducted any transaction without POS computers (for looking up prices, for tallying them, for figuring tax and total, and computing change), so even if a dusty manual in the stockroom technically spells out a method of ringing sales using nothing but pen and paper and maybe a solar calculator, I would be surprised if any of the clerks working any given day would have the initiative to initiate an offline protocol. Most likely the store manager would usher customers out, lock up the store, keep the staff for 30 minutes to see if it came back on, and then go home.
> How do you open the cash register for change when power is out?
I've only seen a few but I believe they have springs on the inside and roll on little wheels similar to how desk draws roll. Most can be opened with a key to trigger that event.
Many countries require receipts to be sent to the tax services instantly. In many cases a long enough power cut (days) would render all transactions illegal
(And in many cases you cannot legally pay large amounts of money in cash, it has to be electronic)
Which countries exactly? I've traveled in UK and France and in both countries when the online cash register was down, they opened their physical ledger, made an entry and gave me a physical handwritten paper receipt written with pen and ink. They said they would make enter the same data online when the online cash register comes back up.
My understanding is that this (NF525) only applies to computerised cash registers (software must be certified NF525 compliant), which there is no obligation to use in the first place.
So it is perfectly legal to use pen and paper and a cash box.
Most governments are not as stupid as the anti-government wingnuts would have you believe. They will not prosecute you for taking transactions non-electronically during a power outage.
In some countries whenever you print a receipt, a copy is also sent to the IRS equivalent of that country. Obviously there are events where that can't happen due to technical reasons outside of the store's control.
Which countries? And, again, I doubt that this is the full picture because there are many cases where people simply don't "print a receipt" perfectly legally...
Germany for example mandates printing a receipt. The receipt must be stored in a certified storage inside the cash register and is signed cryptographically, including the hash of the previous receipt such that there is a hash-chain of printed receipts. Therefore each printed receipt that the customer takes home (and maybe at some point hands in to the tax office for some reason) can be used to check the integrity of the cash register storage and all prior receipts in the chain.
Same in Portugal. Sync with the tax authority can be immediate or deferred (every x days). Obviously, you can still invoice manually using a receipt book, in case of failure or unavailability of software systems.
Thanks! European red tape madness strikes again... At least in France cash registers are not mandatory (for now...) so there is a way around this madness.
This is a bit more than just red tape madness, it's a strategy to make businesses more transparent.
This is about trying to reduce non-reported transactions and too many people dodging their reporting. Even if the rules for cash registries and reporting are detailed,
a) that's not really expensive for businesses - it's easy to automate and there are quite a number of competitors;
b) compared to accounting and tax rules, they are dead simple.
Receipts or invoices are the basis for a firm's whole economic activity, including the underpinning of their financial reporting, their tax burdens etc. And businesses failing to provide receipts erodes not only the tax base, but also any rights a consumer may have.
Its actually less red tape. Getting a second copy of a given invoice is trivial, processing of invoices for tax rebates is also mostly automatic (such as health and education expenses); tax invoicing uses well-defined formats, so its trivial to migrate between systems, and perform all kinds of analysis. Also, it increases transparency - you know that eg. the VAT you're paying is not ending in the vendor's pockets.
No power is different than no internet, so that was different. We were a 24/7 store (7-Eleven) and sometimes we would close if it was a prolonged power outage. No one has 100% uptime, not even 24 hour gas stations.
Why would an employee tracking device be necessary to make transactions? It is just people without a cash position performing mental gymnastics in an attempt to justify it, by trying to bring it down to the level of electronic payment methods they convince themselves that, in a similar event, they would be no better off with cash, when in fact they almost certainly would. A merchant who refuses cash on account of a disabled cash register, under these circumstances, is not a serious one, since to do so would be to refuse all business. Those merchants who are so encumbered by scale and bureaucracy that they would be completely incapacitated should be circumvented.
> When the power is out one cannot pay with cash either - because the cash register is offline.
Cash registers can be connected to small UPSes to ride through smaller outages. You wouldn't need a larger battery if all you want to do is ride through a few-hour outage, or even a whole business day (8-12 hours?).
from: https://news.sky.com/story/large-parts-of-spain-and-portugal...
This is literally the whistleblowers about cashless society have been warning everyone about for well over a decade now.