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Comment by lolc | Hacker News Reader

Whenever I read of an undersea cable breaking, I worry that the next world war has started. Seeing pipelines getting blown up for presumed geopolitical reasons hasn't reduced this anxiety.

I know these cables regularly break for ordinary reasons. And every time I hope it's just that.

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There's no point in being scared when running isn't an option.

Logically, I know you are correct, but that does nothing to help.

Probably nothing will, but understand I have significant sympathy for younger folks who are getting their first real taste of zero-sum geopolitics and have nothing to compare it to for scale/threat level. For those of us that grew up in the 80s the days headlines represent a slow news day from our childhood.

If you’re not that young and didn’t try mediation yet you definitely should. It can drastically reduce anxiety of future events, even if it does not reduce “problems” when they happen.

70s in Italy were wild. Cities were cratered, blood was on the roads monthly in a triple underground war between brigate rosse, neofascisti and the state, with the cia meddling trough gladio. 90-10 were bliss in comparison. Wouldn't claim these are golden age because as the first world stabilized the unaligned world became the proxy for the great powers' wars, to all that it entailed. The proxies are getting nukes now, and so the struggle between great powers is shifting again...

What a fascinating bit of history I’ve never heard of. Thank you for introducing me to it. This whole story of the gladio operation only being discovered because of an Italian investigator trying to crack an unsolved case around far right terrorism feels like it should have had a block buster movie made already.[1][2]

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1990/11/14/c...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felice_Casson

Checkout the Daniel Ganser book.

Running is an option for some.

Hah they can certainly afford to fund that delusion but I assure you if international logistics were to well and truly collapse they'd find out real fast the have-less native population in their bolt-hole country of choice 1. Aren't confused about where the canned goods are being hoarded 2. Are surprisingly adept at operating heavy equipment.

I'm not sure I completely understand what you mean.

For some people, none of that applies.

The super-wealthy think they can outrun any geopolitical shitstorm (up to and including WWIII) as is evidenced by the surge in luxury survival bunker construction in places like New Zealand.

Hey when I don't get an instant fix, I think that the positioning signal must have been intentionally degraded in my area! Incoming cruise missiles!

Even if another world war isn't starting, think of the data pollution from all those leaking bits!

Nothing to really worry about.

Being fiber optic cables; this will be light pollution.

But I just read that light pollution is poisoning the planet too.

This is a heavy topic.

Phantom Menace: “A communications disruption can mean only one thing: invasion.”

Or DNS.

Don’t forget BGP

Likely nothing you can do anyway, unless you've already moved to patagonia or something.

Many nations DDoS each other all the time outside of scope of a war. I can imagine them breaking cables as a similar hostile action without an implication of war, especially if it's difficult to prove who's the culprit.

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