Two Writers I Admire
I have read 2 works by this author (Matt Richtel), the first of which (just below) was just excellent.
The first was my very favorite book of a few years ago:
The story is about a young guy who was caught texting while driving, causing an accident that killed one guy and badly maimed another.
The kid and his mother initially “lawyered up” but then [spoiler ahead; beware] dropped his entire defense and became a well-respected spokesperson to keep this from happening to anyone else.
The second excellent work was by another writer named Matt Ribel, whom I had mistaken for Matt Richtel with a similar name.
was in Wired July/August 2022: https://www.wired.com/story/sun-storm-end-civilization/
I thought this was a badly needed warning to our civilization … in 1859 when this happened telephone lines burst into flames and one telegraph operator even had current leap out of his forehead to fry the telephone boxes.
The story is full of other possible catastrophic effects of this sort of event.
But technical fix: capacitors the cost of a postage stamp (per ratepayer) — extremely cheap to protect our civilization from this sort of thing.
Even with that, the article (from 2022) says that the author contacted lots of electric utilities and only one responded.
I initially thought “write your congressman” was the answer, and I wrote a Medium article suggesting this. But with the current political landscape with MAGA vs. democrats, nothing much substantive can happen.
So instead: call your local utility. I called my local utility, Puget Sound Energy, and they assured me they were working on it. (I think I will call again after publishing this article).
Call yours too … let’s not let our civilization be more disrupted than it absolutely has to be the next time this happens, which could be tomorrow!
