We’re on day 4 without electricity, so this will be a brief post. Things I’ve learned or had reinforced:
- Prepping for the apocalypse is silly but prepping for a disaster is not. This time has been inefficient and uncomfortable, but not especially problematic. Compared to Asheville, we got off quite easy, a fact made all the clearer by our fortune to maintain a fairly normal life thanks to the most modest of preparations: a couple charged phone banks, LED lamps, batteries, a propane tank and grill, and coolers pre-filled with ice.
- Price controls during a disaster, formal and informal, remain problematic. More than few people saw their esteem of Clemson drop as fans descended on the region for the football game and grab up every bag of ice they laid eyes on to facilitate their tailgating, a problem that probably could have been averted by simply letting the price of ice quadruple.
- Public goods matter and government remains a superior way of providing and coordinating large swaths of them. Not to get all Nozick and Rawls on you, but think of it this way: disaster response and coordination requires scale. Any institution that emerges that is superior in providing such responses will have the scale of government, will be a de facto government, regardless of whether you call it a government or not.
- Power lines. Bury the damn power lines. God how I miss living where the bulk of power lines were underground. I never knew how good I had it.
- Hank was right. Propane and propane accessories are where it is at.
Stay safe everyone.
Economist Writing Every Day 
“Bury the damn power lines.” – – Europeans (who maybe bury their power lines because they lack cheap telephone poles?) shake their heads over the headlines that regularly report massive power outages from storms in the U.S.
Or even — be aggressively proactive about taking down limbs and whole trees that MIGHT take out a power line. But no…
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Probably more likely that’s it’s easier to do in Europe given it’s tiny size and massive population density compared to the Americas.
Europeans see things through a European lense, which is often out of focus outside of Europe.
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They cannot bury the lines everywhere. I asked a while back because whenever I was in certain part of Houston my signals went crazy. I asked that because of certain conditions they were unable. I prefer bury. In California, they make them look like Christmas trees. In Orlando they make them look like Mickey.
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