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In a Cashless World, You'd Better Pray the Power Never Goes Out (mises.org)
schwit1 quotes the Mises Institue: When Hurricane Maria knocked out power in Puerto Rico, residents there realized they were going to need physical cash — and a lot of it. Bloomberg reported that the Fed was forced to fly a planeload of cash to the Island to help avert disaster. "William Dudley, the New York Fed president, put the word out within minutes, and ultimately a jet loaded with an undisclosed amount of cash landed on the stricken island. [Business executives in Puerto Rico] described corporate clients' urgent requests for hundreds of thousands in cash to meet payrolls, and the challenge of finding enough armored cars to satisfy endless demand at ATMs... As early as the day after the storm, the Fed began working to get money onto the island."
For a time, unless one had a hoard of cash stored up in ones home, it was impossible to get cash at all. 85 percent of Puerto Rico is still without power... Bloomberg continues: "When some generator-powered ATMs finally opened, lines stretched hours long, with people camping out in beach chairs and holding umbrellas against the sun." In an earlier article from September 25, Bloomberg noted how, without cash, necessities were simply unavailable:
For a time, unless one had a hoard of cash stored up in ones home, it was impossible to get cash at all. 85 percent of Puerto Rico is still without power... Bloomberg continues: "When some generator-powered ATMs finally opened, lines stretched hours long, with people camping out in beach chairs and holding umbrellas against the sun." In an earlier article from September 25, Bloomberg noted how, without cash, necessities were simply unavailable:
"Cash only," said Abraham Lebron, the store manager standing guard at Supermax, a supermarket in San Juan's Plaza de las Armas. He was in a well-policed area, but admitted feeling like a sitting duck with so many bills on hand. "The system is down, so we can't process the cards. It's tough, but one finds a way to make it work."
That's why gold doubloon is king, always has been, always will be.
Nah. If you're planning for the collapse of civilisation - even temporary - bottled water, canned food, gasoline etc, are king. When the lights go out, gold will suffer just as much from superinflation as anything, but a can of beans will always be worth a day's food.
No point in planning for an apocalypse after which Walmart is still open, but only takes Krugerrand.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
Make the trade, drink the water quickly, then attack the guy to get my diamond back.
If he was particularly smart, he would have waited for me to collapse and take the diamond. If he was particularly strong, he'd attack me and take it.
Back before ATM's and the Internet, banks would run out of cash in times of unexpected demand. And in a disaster situation, people sure as hell aren't making bank deposits. The situation would have been a little better back then than it is now with 'electronic money', but probably not a lot. There still would have been a shortage of the means to exchange 'abstractions of value'.
Arguably, we COULD have it better today, with sufficient backup and redundancy - generators and batteries, radio data links, etc. - but haven't invested enough to make it happen. Then again, given a few massive EMP's, all bets are off.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.
Post-Irma, at least half of the GAS STATIONS in South Florida were closed for at least a few days. Why? No (working) backup power. By law, they're required to have generators, but apparently the state doesn't require them to test, maintain, and certify them as operational. So gas stations grudgingly installed generators after Hurricane Wilma, then didn't do jack shit to maintain them for the next 12 years. Irma came & went, and lots of those generators didn't work.
For Dade & Broward counties, Irma side-swiped us as a weak category 1 hurricane. Our power grid & stores were dysfunctional to some degree for a week. If we'd gotten directly hit by a *major* (cat-3 or above) hurricane, we'd be in AT LEAST as fucked as San Juan is now.
The REAL danger in future storms is going to be people who remember what happened to gas stations after Irma, and to make sure it doesn't happen to them again, go into the next storm with 20 5-gallon cans of gas in their garage. Guaranteed, we'll have at least one news story of a *horrific* fire caused by someone storing EGREGIOUSLY unsafe quantities of gas in an even MORE unsafe location.
As a matter of public safety, local governments need to MAKE SURE that gas will be abundantly and readily available at most 8 hours after the last hurricane-force winds, convince the public that gas WILL be readily available, and actually pull it off. Otherwise, people will do *really* unsafe things because it seems like a lesser evil compared to being unable to buy stuff they need.