I get a lot of crap in my email, especially since trolls love to sign me up for weird mailing lists. This morning I got something from “Christian Reader Alerts”, and this is what it said:
It’s a weird little weapon that could kickstart WWIII.
A weapon so easy to produce…that fifth graders make a small version of it for their science projects.
A weapon so powerful, that it could cause a global economic crash, mass pandemics and vicious food riots…at the same time!
And latest reports from DHS reveal that majority of our enemies are preparing to use THIS against us.
>>Click Here To Find Out More>>
So I clicked There to Find Out More.
I’m only telling you all this to spare you. It takes you to one of those stupid canned video sites — you know, where it plays a video that’s just text, with a voice reading it, and there are no controls to skip ahead. I shrugged and let it play on in the background while I got other things done.
First, he reveals the threat to our American way of life: solar flares! Our power grid is so fragile, it could be taken out any minute. Also, people can build EMP bombs that do the same thing as a solar flare! The voice assures us that this catastrophe will strike the US in the next 11 to 13 months.
Then he paints a picture of what it would be like to live through an EMP strike. You wouldn’t notice anything. You’d wake up in the morning and find the stove doesn’t work, so your wife can’t fix you breakfast (that is merely the start of the horrors to come!). Then your kids complain that their cell phones don’t work. Then you notice the neighbors milling about outside…this is the last time you will see your neighbors because…RIOTS! FAMINE! DEATH! SAVAGES RUNNING IN THE STREET! Without electricity, we collapse back into the Stone Age, the Middle Ages, the 17th century (he’s not really clear on which era we’ll occupy after the EMP.)
But, he says, you and your family can survive. We have the secret. And the secret is…>mumbles on apocalyptically for ten more minutes&hellip>< and the secret is…live like the Amish. The voice’s collaborator lived with the Amish for years studying their ways, and they’ve collected all their tips into one book that’s worth at least $500. What price on the survival of your family, after all? They thought about selling it to you for $150, but as grand humanitarians, they’ve now decided to release it at cost for only $37, plus shipping and handling. Act now. Limited time only.
It’s all so clearly aimed at the Fox News demographic: old fearful gullible Christians. And it makes no sense. Losing the power grid and having your cell phone stop working is so disastrous that all your survivalist gear and your basement packed with canned food won’t save you, unless you learn from the Amish how to live without electricity or cell phones.
You know what? I wouldn’t want to live like the Amish anyway.
Isn’t living without electricity and phones called camping?
Maybe -you- wouldn’t want to live like the Amish, but I can totally rock one of those chin beards.
So, live like the Amish, eh? First, you’ve gotta find a bunch of like-minded folks, then find suitable agricultural land, which you’ll probably have to take by force, as the banking system will be down, or the owners might want to farm it themselves. Then there’s the seeds you’ll need, & ….
Did they explain all that? (Sorry, I couldn’t face looking at their promo crap.)
Given the prevalence of viruses on sites geared towards that faux news demographic I hope you’ve run your antivirus now that you’ve been to their site.
Sounds like a lovely place to pick up a Trojan.
FINALLY, someone on the show Doomsday Preppers got a book deal!
I bet the sequel will be about world ending earthquakes when the magnetic poles of the Earth reverse. Or how to survive in the Post Apocalyptic Wasteland that is Future America in the devastating wake of overinflation of the American dollar. Doesn’t matter, because the tips are always the same: Bunker, guns, shit ton of canned goods. Always.
I already lived through a solar CME (coronal mass ejection) Apocalypse when it shut down the power grid (… thanks Quebec …) for the entire Northeast. There was a bit of plunder (in NYC of course), but nothin much, during a few days of “no electricity”. So, does that make me a Contrarial Survivorist? EMP’s no real threat; too hard to build one at home. EMP is side effect of megaton bomb exploded at high altitude, and not national, but locally disruptive. The power grid is a GRID; cut one line and the power can flow around the break.
Nice to advocate Amish (if you want); but really(?) trying to scare people into Amish life(?) Can that possibly be a good Amish-style? Maybe Amish Mafia has gone too far, and inspired this pushback.
I’d be interested to know why they’re asking for money for it, since they’re allegedly so convinced that in 11–13 months’ time, said money will be useless.
This fetishization of the Amish is so damn gross. They’re not pristine living artifacts who have nothing to do with modern technology. They’re just a religious order with some rules and how closely they adhere to those rules differs between communities. They’re part of modern society and take advantage of stuff just like everybody else. They’re as reliant on it as everyone else, too. It’s just not quite as obvious because they put up arbitrary limits that rarely have much impact on actual survival, but the power can go to the barn, or their little store on the edge of their property, or it’s cool to have gas-powered tractors so long as they don’t have rubber tires, or maybe they’ve got a phone out on the pole at the corner, or maybe they decided halogen lights and a fridge are okay for some mumbleymumbley magic reason, and if a baby is born with a threat to its life that baby’s getting bundled off to the hospital like every other kid…
IME, if you’re “English” and you’ve got Amish friends, chances are good they will a) ask you to drive them places in your car, b) use your smartphone every time they see you, b) eat all the most processed, sugary crap they can get their hands on. They will not prepare you for your imaginary techno-apocalypse.
They. Are. Modern. People.
First, he reveals the threat to our American way of life: solar flares! Our power grid is so fragile, it could be taken out any minute.
That’s actually not far from the truth. They’re exaggerating to stoke the fearful book sales, but a flare can indeed take out a national grid. It just has to be an unusually large one, and thus far too powerful to be emulated by any single EMP device.
You won’t find any there. Birth control is evil, you know.
It’s true that anyone could build an EMP device. However, building one that could outperform taking a hammer to any object within arms reach is a lot more tricky.
A respectable flare would indeed be no joke. Back when there was just one “grid” of wires around the country & world, it got cooked. See (old reliable):
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859
and/or
http://www.history.com/news/a-perfect-solar-superstorm-the-1859-carrington-event
Isn’t Goldeneye about an EMP weapon? And that doesn’t turn out too bad, right? I mean, I would get to go on an international adventure with a beautiful hacker–while being chased by an equally beautiful villain who’s trying to kill me with her thighs–get to crash around St. Petersburg in a tank, and then finally visit a gigantic Cuban satellite dish hidden under a lake that’s also somehow a secret bad guy lair.
Now I just have to figure out how to steal an EMP-protected helicopter (well, first I should probably figure out how to fly).
#8, Daz:
Simple: renting an entire luxury resort for yourself and a band of chosen survivors is very expensive, even if you only have to pay for about a year. And you have to get the entire resort, it’s all or nothing. There are several good reasons for this:
While you’re partying away you can use empty guest rooms to store canned goods and other survival gear. Occupants would only get in the way.
If you choose an island-based resort you’ll also be safe from raiders. In the short term you may have to massacre the remaining population of the island but long term only naval raids are pose any serious concern. A howitzer on the roof or submarine by the beach (both perfectly legal under the 2nd amendment, I assume) should offer suitable protection from those. And of course you’ll have rifles, grenades, machine guns and – ideally – a squadron of F-16s and an attack helicopter stashed away as well.
Next, generous tips for the hotel staff are vital! When the final day comes they will make loyal (thank you sub-minimum wage!) conscript riflemen to fend off the initial waves of looters. As time passes and things calm down they can be turned into provisions to extend your food supply. Just pretend you don’t have 500 tons of canned ham in rooms 100-250 and have the staff draw lots to decide who gets eaten.
Of course the resort also has a pool which supplies drinking water. It’ll reduce the burden on your water supply and rain should replenish it every so often. If you choose a modern resort you’ll also have access to power from solar panels and batteries as well as regular power generators in the basement, assuming you can find the fuel.
So money really is key to surviving, especially if you want to do it in style.
Amish would not be as affected as other by a massive 1859 like event because they don’t live in cities.
And living in a rural zone is the best protection against a lot of doomsday “threats” : mass pandemic, nuclear war, solar storm, zombies, robotic uprising…
But it’s currently the best protection against having a job for 80% of the population… Too bad.
@twas brillig, #7:
Nice power grid youze got there. Shame if somethin’ happened to it.
The EMP collapse trope comes up every so often. There are things worth pointing out:
1) Nuclear forensics is quite good. By looking at the isotope mix thrown off by a bomb, nuclear forensic analysts can tell everything ranging from the specific layout of the centrifuge cascade that was used to refine the plutonium, to the breeder reactor in which it was made. (sources: Reed “at the abyss”, Rhodes “twilight of the bombs”, Khan “eating grass”) The political entity that did it would be identified and wiped off the face of the earth.
2) The US and USSR engaged in extensive atmospheric testing in the late 1960s (e.g: the HARDTACK test series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hardtack_I ) which was specifically intended to measure the EMP effects of high altitude tests. Devices ranged from the dozens of kilotons to 3.0 megatons. It turns out that, yes, EMP is created but the inverse-square law applies and there is no magic. Peak bursts of EMP from the HARDTACK tests were about 4 times as bad as the worst measured solar storms.
What’s bizzare is that the conspiracy nuts and fear-mongers that promote this threat seem to not know about the HARDTACK tests and their results, and they also ignore the geopolitical reality that H-bombs are something that radicals only get their hands on in bad movies. A terrorist organization that had an H-bomb and a mechanism for delivering it would probably not waste it on an EMP dice-throw; they’d go for a ground-burst in Washington, NYC, San Francisco or LA – all of which are reachable by water. That is a sure payoff. Because of the difficulty in getting an H-bomb it’s a very unlikely scenario, anyhow. An EMP burst would not throw the US back to the stone-age though it’s fairly certain that a lot of smart phones and server racks would need to be replaced, plenty of network infrastructure would survive and so would technological civilization. The US is pretty big! An EMP burst in LA would probably have no damaging effect on electronics in NYC and vice-versa.
Whenever this topic comes up I try to explain to the scared wingnut about the HARDTACK tests and that – yes – our government already tested to see if that idea would work on anyone else and abandoned it as a weapon of mass destruction because it’s not mass destruction-y enough. If the US, which is the god of nukes, decides not to weaponize something to do with nukes, it can only be that it’s not effective.
komarov #15:
Clearly you have put much thought into this. Which could be considered quite scary. :-)
A friend of mine built an EMP device. It was basically a bank of capacitors and a coil of copper wire in a vacuum bulb. He’d put a quarter inside the coil and fire off the capacitors. The wire would vaporize and become a superconducting plasma for a fraction of a second. The intense magnetic field would shrink the quarter to the size of a nickel, and that was the purpose of his device. The EMP was a side effect, and you wouldn’t want your phone to be withing 10 feet when it went off. He thought he might be able to build one that could take out a car at 30 feet, but that’s about the limit of what someone with an advanced technical education can do. Nobody is taking out the entire grid with a home-built device. That would require multiple high-altitude nuclear blasts, or a massive coronal flare in the right direction.
I already know what I’m gonna do if the grid drops. Drive out to my parent’s place, make sure that everything is okay, and then use their 1987 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica to ingratiate myself to the local warlords that will inevitably develop, by calling myself the “Master of the Books” because I’m pretty sure that I’ll be the only literate and scientifically person within 100 miles.
Which reminds me, with the coming of the EMP I can FINALLY, prolly, raise up a generation or two of young’uns on the metric system. “Miles, pounds, inches, and gallons… these were the measurements of a before-time, a decadent and corrupt time. We do not measure as they-who-failed-us did measure. Now eat your jerked dog, and do not talk of such painful times to me!”
I have met cranks that expect (want) there to be a societal collapse because they seem to fantasize themselves as saviors.
I’d be much more concerned about a massive CME than an EMP device for the reasons Marcus Ranum elucidated @18. A CME on the order of the 1859 event, though, could be really interesting, to say the least. I heard guys like Alex Fillipinko speak of the consequences a CME that powerful in rather severe terms.
Driving past an Amish buggy at night and seeing a lighted dashboard and blue ground effects pretty much destroyed that illusion for me.
I think I will write book warning people how to avoid dying by falling off the toilet, getting run over by traffic or drowning whilst drinking a glass of water. All of these things are far more likely to cause you a problem in the next 11-13 months than an EMP.
Since each of these things are far more statistically likely to happen than the EMP then my book is far more valuable than the $37 one. My information is a AT LEAST 100 times as valuable. However, I am not going to charge $37 x 100 per copy. Once written a copy will cost a mere $100, just cos I am generous that way.
Re: The Amish. I live in North Central PA; the Amish are in various pockets around here. Like most religious cults, it’s male-dominated and promotes ignorance and generally favors not giving children access to modern medicine. Like most religious cults in the US it has an element of tax-dodgery, as well. A young woman growing up Amish is certain to be ignorant and have little opportunity to be anything but a source of babies and manual labor. A young man growing up Amish is likewise, though may have a chance of having a woman and children to boss around someday, or getting high enough up the ladder that they can boss around several families. Oh, the traditional joy of it!
It’s not only tax laws like social security that are selectively ignored for the Amish. They regularly engage in animal abuse of varying degrees. Trotting a horsecart on pavement destroys the horse’s legs over time. Pulling a plow isn’t exactly fun, either. If the animal can’t work anymore, it’s dead. I’d argue that it’s abuse to use horses to plow fields and pull carts where there are non-feeling diesel engines available. Or, if the Amish want to be low tech, maybe they should fucking walk or carry the fucking horses. There are groups of Amish that flout hunting laws and just beat through the woods and slaughter what they want. And, of course, like any religion there are hypocrites. One of my friends who owns a farm in the middle of an Amish enclave knows one guy who owns a chain of Amish “scratch and dent” stores who moves his residence every 3 years because that’s how long you have to remove all the modern conveniences from a house once you’ve bought it. He drives what she calls “the Amish Mercedes” – a beautiful shiny black cart pulled by 2 matched black horses.
I’d say the Amish population of fuckheads is probably the norm for humanity in general, i.e.: there are some really shitty bastards who tend to claw their way to the top. There’s the usual stories of sexual abuse that you find in any closed community/cult that is male-dominated and has a code of silence. Etc.
If a terrorist group wanted to do damage to power grids they wouldn’t fool around with trying to create an EMP device. They could do much more damage with a bunch of two or three man teams, each with a Barrett .50 caliber rifle, running around shooting up unguarded power infrastructure like substations. If they wanted to put a more destructive power into the operation they’d use RPGs or Carl Gustavs. 81mm mortars in the back of vans and pickup trucks would be even more nasty.
I have met cranks that expect (want) there to be a societal collapse because they seem to fantasize themselves as saviors.
Yes!
Here’s the funny way to deal with those clowns:
Survivalist clown: “A plague of streptococcus is going to kill 95% of the population and I’m going to be ready!”
Me: “You just said you’ve only got a 5% chance of surviving, why not have a beer instead?”
Survivalist clown: “I have a generator and tons of canned food!”
Me: “Then there’s a 5% chance I’ll survive and make my way to your place where there’s a 95% chance you’ll be dead and I’ll eat your canned food.”
They don’t realize that great calamities are fractal; your chance of surviving the die-off has very little to do with whether you’re ready or not, and a tremendous amount to do with whether you’re lucky. That’s embedded in the “die off” probability in the first place.
They could do much more damage with a bunch of two or three man teams, each with a Barrett .50 caliber rifle, running around shooting up unguarded power infrastructure like substations.
No need for such heavy, traceable firepower. The ceramic insulators or the oil reservoirs in the transformers wouldn’t stand up to much smaller weaponry.
See:
http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/06/business/la-fi-grid-terror-20140207
(Though it’s interesting that the article claims the attackers used “semiautomatic weaponry” uh… how did they know that?)
The way to collapse the power grid is to deregulate the electrical industry and let the capitalists go wild. Has everyone forgotten all the brown-outs in California in 2000/2001?? That was Enron. If you really want to fuck things up, put some libertarians in charge of the power companies and in a few years everyone’s going to be living like the Amish.
The Amish? Obligatory Weird Al link.
The Mellow Monkey @ 9:
I haven’t met any Amish people myself, but a former co-worker was friends with one. According to her, he loved to ride around in her car and watch her TV.
By the way, most of the people who build big data centers know about solar flares. It’s part of the basic competence of data center engineering.
Uninterruptable power supplies give conditioned power and would allow orderly shut-down. transient voltage surge suppression systems are installed at multiple levels, usually between the main power and rows of racks, and they’ve all got back-up power generators. I got to visit IBM’s business resumption center in Armonk back in the early ’00s and their backup generator was drool-worthy: it was powered by a diesel locomotive and a room full of batteries. They could keep a mainframe running as long as the fuel held out. Badass stuff indeed.
Google for “Google data center generators” and you’ll see rows and rows of great big diesels standing by to take the load. Data centers these days are not built by complete morons – it’s an entire artform that requires years to master. A buddy of mine builds data centers for Terremark and it’s really funny to watch his face when you tell him about the EMP attack theory (which I did, once) he turned purple and spluttered like someone trying to spit out a mouthful of live cockroaches.
Yeah, sure, a few devices would die. Devices die all the time anyway and there’s a huge replacement/replenishment capability. When the EMP-heads say that we’d be thrown back to the dark ages they’re forgetting that Apple can get a new iPhone to millions of people overnight and they do it all the time.
Wasn’t there a fairly well-documented thing a few years back where they discovered that many of the Amish youth were drug dealers, and it was regarded with shoulder-shrugs by the Amish because only the non-Amish were the victims?
#26 Marcus Ranum
I’d argue that it’s abuse to use horses to plow fields and pull carts where there are non-feeling diesel engines available.
You could argue that all you like, but not very convincingly.
pshhaaw. Now is the age of Cyberwarfare, more can be done by just a single hacker cracking into the control algorithms of the power grid, to just shut it down, and installing a virus that denies reactivating the grid. EASYPEASY. </end sarcasm>
<seriously:> The Feds have a Cyberwarfare Defense Dept. Must be a serous threat to form a Fed Dept. Dept.s cost big bucks. <sarcasm> They would never spend bucks on something harmless.</sarcasm>
No, you see, what they mean by “it will kill 95% of the population” is that you take the whole population and don’t include them (or their family, friends, pets, etc.). Since they are a very tiny piece of the total, it’s still 95% (within error bars) even after you neglect them for no especially compelling reason. Thus, that way to measure it gives you the probability that you wanted. While it’s true that may not tell you anything about reality, you can at least brag to your friends about it. This is all standard practice. Nothing funny going on here.
It’s nice to see that you’re being so open-minded about it.
I worked on a large power line installation a few years back. After the FBI reported that the line had actually been mentioned by name in some Al Qaeda reports, many of the climbers were payed large sums of money to bolt anti-climb guards on the towers in more isolated areas. Many of us laughed ’cause all you’d need is a sawzall and a few batteries.
No references to this yet?
karmacat @1:
Fire camp in Forks of Salmon, CA?
twas brillig @7:
Hell, about a decade ago, my parents, up in coastal Maine, went three weeks with no power because of an ice storem. No cell phones, either. And no land line phone.
Oddly, no riots.
Marcus Ranum @28:
Sort of like Lystrosaurus at the PT. Or mammals at the KT. Or any other mass extinction.
Live like the Amish? Pshaw! They don’t have truly “primitive” lives…they have clothes, buggies, and plows. They build sturdy houses and barns that require hammers and saws. If you want to survive the EMT apocalypse you’ll need to adopt the life style of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon or the Etoro or Kaluli in New Guinea.
Or you could just have a wander through Lehman’s Non-Electric Catalog for free.
….I wonder what sort of emissions requirements they’re subject to. O.o
Marcus Ranum @18
Centrifuges aren’t used in plutonium production. You’re thinking of uranium-235 enrichment.
What truly amuses me about this is I just spent $37.49 at the hardware store buying my son various electronics so he could experiment with the stuff he just learned in an extracurricular science class. Granted, he’s not yet in 5th grade and I don’t think he plans to build an EMP, but it’s nice to know that I am doing my part to contribute to the downfall of the world.
Centrifuges aren’t used in plutonium production. You’re thinking of uranium-235 enrichment.
Agh! Yes! I misspoke.
ThorGoLucky hit the nail on the head. Everything the extreme right-wingers do seems to be based on the belief that they are the heroes of an action movie. It’s why they’re so eager to go to war, why they carry guns everywhere, expecting a violent crime to occur, why they expect the president they don’t like to become a fascist and start persecuting them, and so on.
Re: the Amish and animal abuse
It is not necessarily abusive to use horses as beasts of burden in the modern age. The thing is, for many Amish their horses are a commodity and nothing more. The training methods are often quick and brutal, looking for fast results. Regular veterinary care is often not in the cards. Horses are run into the ground with the high speed trotting on pavement and when they come up lame they are shipped to auction houses (New Holland being the most notorious example) to be sold, most commonly ending up by-the-pound to a meat buyer. The ones that don’t end up being shipped to Canada or Mexico for slaughter are often hard to retrain to be companion and working horses because of their prior treatment, and may never be fully healthy.
Shit, I wanna see these nickel quarters now. I wonder if it distorted Washington’s face amusingly.
Daz, #19:
Not at all, these things just come naturally to me. So there’s no need to worry … I think.
Mond, #25:
I’d also recommend including a book on the dangers of papercuts. You could sell the books as a box set – with an entirely justifiable mark-up price for the fine box.
Robro, #40:
Writing a book on an out-of-contact tribe hidden in the jungle somewhere poses a fine conundrum. You could probably expect to be sued for false advertisement with your book being submitted as evidence.
Regarding the animal abuse discussion:
#47 does sound a tad abusive. A bit like lighting a cow on fire to cook a steak. You don’t have to do it that way but some people find it to be simpler, so there you are.
Even without the wonderful description I’d be inclined to go with mechanisation where feasible, since ‘backbreaking labour’ is not something that should only applied to humans. Of course I’m not the sort of person to make a fuss over religious restrictions. If god says you can’t use a tractor to pull the plow he can bloody well pull it himself, but of course some people will disagree with that. In any case the field would remain unplowed which I find rather telling. (lazy sod!) Oh well, if religiously inspired negligence in health- and childcare is legally permissible, animal abuse would probably be par for the course.
It’s not just the extreme fringe who are ginning up the hysteria about EMPs. Catholic (right-wing) talk radio had some guy called Dr. Peter Pry on last week muttering darkly about how the Obama administration are ignoring the risks of EMPs to the nation — claiming that 9/10 Americans would be dead within a year of an EMP strike if something wasn’t done to prevent it. He tapped Iran and North Korea as likely culprits.
Dr. Peter Pry claimed he served on something called the “Congressional EMP Commission” but even so, my bullshit detector was going off.
Turns out it was right. The Congressional EMP Commission was a real thing, and they put out a couple of reports during the Bush administration, but while they warn of potential regional catastrophic damage from an EMP attack if nothing is done to harden the national grid, it’s nothing like the nonsense Peter Pry was spouting.
Not surprisingly, it also turns out that Dr. Peter Pry is guilty of inflating his credentials. He didn’t serve on the Congressional EMP Commission, he was a staffer whose only role, it seems, was as a liaison between the commission members and Congress. Nonetheless, he seems to be an “expert” to whom neocons turn on a regular basis if they want to ratchet up the hysteria a notch or two. No wonder this country is in a mess.
Actually, I gave a talk on the sort of destruction that could result from a Carrington-type solar particle event (the 1859 event referred to by jstackpo @ 13 above). It turns out that there was a very similar event that missed Earth but hit one of the STEREO satellites. Such an event if it scored a direct hit on Earth could result in a couple trillion dollars worth of damage. However, the answer is not to live like the Amish, but to upgrade current infrastructure. We are already probably mostly immune to the sort of event that knocked out Hydro Quebec. So, there is a real threat, and these guys are scamming the Faux News crowd on it.
When I read “that fifth graders make a small version of it for their science projects.” I thought creating a paper mache volcano spitting out vinegar-baking soda lave big enough to destroy civilization would be wicked.
komarov @ #49 — Who’s writing a book? That’s way modern. If you’re going to live like that, you have to wing it.
wow just wow I did not click on the link but the copy read like it would have been read by someone who sounded like an old K-TEL”music library” add or in the same voice as the guy advertizing the drag races.
As someone who lives in earth quake country I am always aware of what is likely to happen when a big one hits. You learn to have a few days or weeks supply of different items to “be prepared” including some cash. unless you live very rural a few weeks is good after that the water will be gone and so will you if the rest of the country does not reconnect ant way.
As for the Amish my understanding is that they get good prices for what is essentially organic produce from their farms which they sell to the “outsiders”, One of their big problems is getting new land for the children to farm.
uncle frogy
I understand that the Amish refer to all the rest of us as “English”. (I dunno how that works out for the Scots and the Irish.) That has been referred to a couple times in this thread, but it isn’t obvious.
Other than that, there really aren’t a set set of rules for the whole bunch. Local agreements and personal preferences seem to be it. I gather that it is more about making a group distinct from the rest of the world, than living in a particular way. (They can’t keep ahead of the technological world, obviously, so they lag behind – kinda like your uncle who hates gays and dresses old-style (no, not your hipster uncle).)
My mom had a lot of Amish friends. They’d help her with quilt restoration, she’d drive them around some. There is a large group near her town – I tend to avoid it after I about got trompled by a team of big draft horses drifting into my lane.
I have traveled the back roads of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois a few times, and saw several groups with different standards. My favorite is still the modern brick house with attached garage for a very shiny buggy – I hope the garage door opener is hardened for EMP. I stopped at a coin-op laundry where was a hitching post out front – judging by the mud-hole, it got a lot of use. One kid was stylin’ in a two-wheel buggy. I could hear clopping for miles, in the evenings – that has to be bad for the horses’s legs. I did see some very nicely cared-for horses. I have passed some farms that had quite a smell.
(For some reason, it startles me that Amish don’t have accents.)
A GOP burst, however…
HolyPinkUnicorn @ 14, Goldeneye was a good movie, but you left out Sean Bean.
I always figure that those of us who are NOT prepared for an apocalypse are a little more inclined to try to keep everything else working, too. My crazy uncle is convinced that he can go and get along without all the assholes that seem to surround him. I figure that I need to keep in good with the nice folks who make corrective lenses, mineral oil, water heaters, tiramisu, panda vids, ukuleles, sambal, croissants, butter, buttered croissants, buttered-panda vids …. um, anyhow, I need civilization, I even need it to advance a bit, and I seem to get along with most people. (Except those damn margarine-panda fans. Ew.)
I apologize. I should not have used the word “crazy” in describing my uncle. I thought of him using that term when I was much younger, and I need to find a better way to describe what is not a mental illness, no matter how outdatedly described, but is more rampant selfish jerkism that he should have outgrown. Sorry.
So when there was a five week power outage in Auckland, NZ, in 1998 was there much in the way of rioting and looting? Pandemics? Anyone catch a cold maybe? Or did they think ‘Bugger this, let’s do something practical to solve the problem”?
I’m not sure that helps.
Given that this sort of usage accounts for most of the use of the term “crazy” it seems more straightforward to just stop using it to describe mental illness and retain all its other utility.
The Amish are a mixed group. Some sects are very strict, and consistently stick to a 19th century standard, others are wiling to work around such inconveniences. In one review from wood working magazine the author provided a picture tour of a fully equipped and modern shop powered entirely with hydraulics driven by a diesel engine instead of electricity off the grid. The article mentioned that same hydraulic loop was used to run a heavily modified washing machine and drier. The later burning diesel fuel in what looked to be a re-purposed marine space heater to generate hot air. All the controls and timers were mechanical. It reminded me of a more practical steam punk project.
The results of an EMP attack or CME is highly uncertain.
Power companies are constantly upgrading their protective systems, grounding, and redundancy. Ironically the municipal utilities are usually more conscientious on these sorts of issues. The Private POCOs seeking to protect shareholder value, tend to hold off on such improvements.
Many modern communications methods, fiber optic cables, and wireless communication can be highly resistant to the longer wave EMP damage. Generally shorter electrically conductive line have some inherent immunity. Generally if the conductor is less than 30 inches it is going to reject the waveform.
To confuse things a lot of books and articles have been written asserting assumptions and supposition as hard facts. ie: it is assumed modern cars with electronic ignitions and controls will stop working after an EMP. In as least one well documented case a modern car was accidentally parked near an Air Force magnetic pulse test bed and even after many pulses it started and ran. When asked why, an automotive engineer claimed that because automobile control systems need to avoid EM interference the systems are all fairly well shielded.
I would love to see the Government demand that all POCOs bring all their systems up to the highest standards of EMP resistance. I would like to see investment made in a reserve of main transformers being mothballed and ready to go for any event so key systems can be restored quickly even it is takes years for all of the transformers to be replaced. I wish the NTSB would demand that all vehicles driven on the highways have some basic level of EMP resistance.
#48, Rey Fox
Search for ‘coin shrinker’ or ‘coin shrinking’.
http://www.capturedlightning.com/frames/gallery/coins4.jpg
Regarding comments above about high-altitude EMP caused by nukes… this isn’t what the initial scaremongering is about (hint: they talk about 5th graders making these things. 5th graders do not generally build uranium centrifuges or breeder reactors). It is talking about flux compression generators, probably explosively-driven ones.
They’re not magical new technology (the principles have been about since the 50s, I think) and they don’t need anything more complex than WW1-era technology to build. Unfortunately for the doomsayers, we’ve not exactly been overwhelmed by EMP attacks in the last 50+ years (they’d be an effective prelude to all sorts of things hampered by modern security or organised response), and in order to make these things work on a country-crippling scale you need a huge level of organisation on the order of a popular uprising. Modern intelligence services are in fact capable of noticing domestic movements of this scale.
The last time that I bought distributer cables for my truck, the box said something about “shielded”. See, spark plug wires carry hella electricity, snapping on and off constantly. That pretty much makes an electromagnetic pulse, and the sparking plugs make another. So the cables are shielded to keep the pulsing down, and to keep the old AM radio from snarling.
I am saying that under the hood of a car is already EMP-prepared, or at least aware. And given all the electronics and radios that are around, designers are probably shielding stuff. I think that the metal hood of a car is pretty good protection, too.
I recall hearing about some guy who had such an illegally-overpowered CB radio in his truck that he could kill a car just by keying his mike next to it. I didn’t believe it.
I was once listening to AM radio whilst somebody buzzed the house in an old Piper Cub. That was the only time that I heard electrical interference over any distance at all. The plane had magnetos, which basically do EMPs.
All in all, I’d say we are not at risk of EMP attacks, but we should prepare as much better as we can as we go.
That’s an oddly specific timeframe…
Well it does include April 1st 2016 as a launch date…
#64, Menyambal
Tests have been done (and I suspect, are still being done) on the effects of EMP on vehicles. In short: the older your car, the better. Modern cars have a lot of delicate ICs making them go. Best case scenario is that your dashboard stops working and the engine control magic survives, but it isn’t a certainty. Seems like almost all pre-80s and most pre-00s vehicles would survive though.
But I quite liked that Dark Angel (TV series) …
#64 Menyambal, #67 anym,
Now you are into my realm. My job is testing automotive electronics for electromagnetic compatibility, EMC for short. When telling people what I do, my short answer is that I ensure your airbags don’t go off when your cell-phone rings. (Don’t worry, there isn’t any chance of that happening.)
What I test is mainly airbag controllers, but they are just as well shielded as engine controllers.
We expose automotive components to 200 V/m fields with continuous wave oscillations from 150 kHz to 3.2 GHz. We also subject them to amplitude modulated signals in the same range, and radar pulse signals with a field strength of up to 600 V/m.
We also subject all the pins on a device to ESD discharges, these vary from 3 kV to as much as 20 kV sparks. You can generate a larger spark by rubbing a balloon with a cat, but those levels rarely occur in an automotive environment.
Finally, most engine controllers have a fail-safe mode where the car will still start and drive even if the software is corrupted or the ee-proms have been damaged. It will burn more gas and the shift points will not be as smooth, but the car will operate.
A nearby EMP might take out a few cars, but most of them will be fine. They might cough, or even stall from the EMP, but will be able started and driven.
And, for what it’s worth, because there is a lot more electromagnetic noise in electric vehicles they are even better protected.
flex #69:
What’s shift point?
Doh! Automatic transmission. Please ignore my previous. I got it just after hitting ‘Post comment.’
I’d enjoy the nice week-long vacation while stuff got repaired, though if people’s furnaces could be knocked out by an EMP, that could become problematic in a hurry, as it’s rather cold out. All in all, the doomsayers seem to be forgetting that we can repair or replace anything damaged by an EMP unless the entire world were hit at once, and probably even if it was. Don’t we have enough real problems? Why do people feel so compelled to invent fake ones? (It’s money, right?)
As others have pointed out, massive CMEs (along the lines of the 1859 event) are a real concern, and not just to the power grid. Orbiting satellites are at risk, as are telecoms networks (the 1859 event took down telegraph systems); the cost to the USA alone of a similar event nowadays has been estimated in the (low) trillions of dollars.
As for cars, my understanding (based on a military co-worker who used to spend time down at the White Sands Missile Range, where they did EMP testing, and could occasionally cause cars to stall on the highway) is that there is a range of cars that are affected.
– Old pre-electronic ignition cars are pretty much immune to any lasting effects because the electrical system is very simple. (And the cars tended to have heavier metal frames acting as Faraday cages.)
– Modern cars are too well shielded to be easily knocked out; as pointed out above, spark plugs tend to throw a lot of EMI around inside the engine hood. Spark gap transmitter, anybody?
The only cars likely to be seriously put out by anything other than a really close hit are those built during the early years of electronic ignition systems, before they were shielded well. And there aren’t a lot of those cars left on the road anymore because the poor shielding tended to leave them susceptible to other problems anyway.
This is being advertised to conservatives, right?
Does that mean that they’ve all got their doomsday kits stashed in the basement next to their stockpiles of gold and silver?
EMP? I saw that movie.
There is one thing I’m gonna build in case of and EMP, a stirling driven fan. I just can’t fall asleep without a fan.