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wang_li • yesterday at 10:57 PM • 1 reply • view on HN

Comparing a volcanic eruption, a totally stationary event with predictable flows, that affected 3500 people in a town, where most of the residents have since left because of the problems living there, to a class 4 hurricane that crossed over six states, hundreds of miles, and affected millions of people, is dumb.

I've lived in the Seattle area since 2007. There has not been any power outage that affected 3000+ homes that has lasted longer than a day.

Additionally, Seattle area does not have common snow storms. It has extremely infrequent snow storms and thus has no reason to have lots of cold weather equipment. What we do have is frequent wind storms and lots and lots of trees (orders of magnitude more trees than all of Iceland, for example) and the wind often knocks trees into power lines and those are fixed in less than a day. In terms of neglect, that's not a problem. The longest outage I've ever had in the suburbs is 18 hours.

The real reason for the long duration blackouts is not failure to maintain infrastructure, it's because of natural disasters that damage and destroy entire swaths of infrastructure in a single event over thousands of sq km.

That someone, somewhere once used some accusation about a trait of populations as a form of discrimination does not mean that every recognition of that trait in a different population is also discrimination. Like, we can look at a person and say "oh, he never finished high school" that doesn't mean we're irrationally discriminating against him. You discriminate on exactly this basis every single day. You don't have people who don't know driving/cooking/medicine/engineering/automobile repair/etc. provide those services to you. I guess you're a bigot.


Replies

runarberg • yesterday at 11:12 PM

> Comparing a volcanic eruption, [...], to a class 4 hurricane [...], is dumb.

I agree. One can judge America’s lousy infrastructure and lack of action plan on its own merits. There is no reason to bring Europe into this. All I am saying is, America’s sparse population, nor the education level of immigrants is not an excuse.

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