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Comment by spacedcowboy | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Sorry to rub salt in the wound, but a power cut every month seems very high for a rich area in a rich country. Having lived decades across different cities across western Europe I've experienced power cuts maybe two or three times - and otherwise only on vacation in developing countries.

Our services here all have more or less publicly owned infrastructure with private providers handing the contracts and energy supply. I guess that must be a happy middle ground, and having a private corporation handling infrastructure seems a bad idea all around.

Oh hell yes, I know it is. I moved from the UK 20 years ago. In thirty-odd years of living in the UK prior to that, I had a power cut precisely once - in the great storm of 1987 [1].

I’m leaving the US and going back to the UK in a few months - just waiting until the end of the school year for the kid’s sake. I don’t like what the USA has become, and I can retire nicely now, so it seems like a good time. I’m looking forward to not needing power-walls in the future, as well as 4 actual seasons :)

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_storm_of_1987

[editing this post because apparently I can't edit my previous one, and it's been "flagged". I assume this is because I'm saying some not-nice things about Mr. Musk and someone got their knickers in a twist over it because the comment about generators seems fairly innocuous. Snowflakes. Maybe he wouldn't be called out (worldwide) as a nazi if he didn't do nazi salutes in public...]

Re: noise complaints, I'd suspect that most neighbors wouldn't mind if you had a generator running during a power outage - especially if you offer to share to keep their fridge cool.

Yeah.. I tried that argument... I spent quite some time talking to the (very nice, but immovable) city people.

The response was that the ordinance is there for a reason, and even if I were to keep to that offer, and even if my neighbors were happy with that, if the house is sold or new neighbors move in, things might deteriorate and they'd have problems trying to have the generator removed.

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