I did not see much fear. I was at work and it took about two hours for us to realize the outage was not just local. The cafeteria had gas burners and served everything they could to empty the refrigerators. We all at lunch and discussed whether those who lived far away (train trip) would need to sleep at work (they might have, I don't know what happened to them). I made the relatively short 75 minute walk home across the city.

The atmosphere was quasi-festive and most people were quite relaxed, enjoying an unexpected afternoon off. Younger people filled the bars which were serving everything they could. There were long lines at supermarkets and an occasional fellow toting a box of supplies, but mostly there were just huge numbers of people in the street and completely collapsed traffic flow (the police were out in force almost immediately, directing traffic). In the part of Madrid I was in about 1/4-1/3 of the population is from South America and I suspect most of them have seen this all before anyway. The only real stress I saw was from people that need a train to get home (because the trains weren't running) and a had a walk of more than 2-3 hours.

I got cell phone signal when I was near two hospitals which were fully operational.

It was interesting that almost immediately, while I was still at work, everyone said power was out in Portugal and France too. After an hour or two some were claiming problems in Germany, but this seemed already to be unfounded rumors.

Some younger people couldn't walk home because they didn't have google maps ...

"Bar" doesn't mean the same thing in every country. In Spain although a bar serves alcohol of all kinds it is also where one eats breakfast and lunch and gets a coffee. They are indispensable social centers and even a tiny town of 150 has one.

Town? More like village. You can have a nearly empty church, but there's no village without a bar.

These percentages are similar to those that one sees for alcohol consumption or problematic gambling.

The business model of the casinos and the drug dealers and the alcohol venders is the same - you need a huge pool of unproblematic recreational users to find the problematic users who generate the bulk of your profits.

The same model works for video games and social media.

I really hate this projecting of the software gaming industry's behavior back into the "original" vices.

The casino, liquor store and drug dealer all make the same margin regardless of who they're selling to. If anything the problem users are more likely to cause problems for them so they'd rather make the money on casual users and scale.

Having your whole operation be basically a wash except for all the money from a few people with problems is fairly unique to digital gaming and the software industry.

The top 10% of drinkers consume the majority of alcohol. Their average consumption is over 10 drinks per day, which I think clearly suggestions a problem. I think it's hard to imagine that losing >50% of revenue wouldn't matter to sellers.

Gambling is also very skewed. Studies place it something like 5% of in person gamblers accounting for 50% of profits or 1% for online gambling. I would guess for sports betting it's similar.

Of course it's not even really specific to vices, the top 10% of travelers take around 50% of flights, and you see similar effects in pretty much every area of consumption.

The issue is related to addiction.

People can’t get addicted to flying in the same manner as we have seen people get addicted to gambling or to some of these social media applications.

While it may be true that margins are independent of the buyer at a given scale, margins certainly do depend on scale. If 15% of the population is buying 75% of the alcohol (these are not ridiculous numbers), cutting that 15% out would put many alcohol producers (in particular those who sell cheap) out of business.

I don’t think it would put them out of business. Rather they would have to increase costs to stay in business.

Essentially a disturbing way to look at it is that the people with alcohol addiction are allowing everyone else to be able to consume alcohol for cheaper than it would otherwise be.

Same phenomena exist for other addictive things like sugar in soda and free to play video games. (Although obviously soda and video games are nowhere close to alcohol in terms of destructive potential for those who develop an addiction).

If we want to go really wild with associations, I think the original discussion about the 90-9-1 in The Atlantic was looking at contributors to Wikipedia...!

"Good reporting is presenting facts about all sides."

Nonsense. Good reporting is about carefully filtering the evidence and reporting the essential stuff. Sometimes that's heavily skewed to one "side" or the other. What's suspicious is when it's always the same side.

This is more precise but you probably mean the same thing. Just that discussion has degraded toward the idea that there are always political sides to every fact, the "everything is political" crowd.

Folks used it to clear old tree stumps too.

Some of those fbi agents are active participants and true believers too.

That's because a bar is generally required by law not to serve someone already drunk.

You're ignoring the costs of buying and selling and supposing incorrectly that property always appreciates on a relevant time scale.

I am doing no such thing. Down payment goes straight to principal, so that's equity banked from day one. And you're going to have to define "relevant time scale" because property demonstrably appreciates over time.

Students often produce this algorithm by mistake in first year programming. It works in spite of the fact that they don't know what they are doing.

If you have to count on the military to save you, you are lost already.

I'm not in the US, but I used to admire them, and I certainly understand that whatever happens to the US has a huge impact on the rest of the world. They used to be the backstop guarantee for democracy in the west, but now they've turned their back on allies.

I wouldn’t even say ‘turned their backs on’ - more, ‘are actively trying to shake down’.

Being ignored would be a blessing here.

Can't help but agree. If Trump and federal law enforcement refuse to allow for the peaceful transition of power, and the military has to step in (if they even would!), we've lost, plain and simple.

Not as much as if they won’t step in.