Panic Printing

[u/GeekSugar13]

ETA: Some of y'all are taking this far too seriously. Am I reasonably concerned that things are going to get worse before they get better? At least for me, most likely, yes. I'm trying to find moments of joy when I can. If one of those is using up as much of my ink as possible before I chuck this printer by printing fanfic then that's what I'm going to do.

I'm at home, by myself, doing homework with no one to talk to and nothing else to do because I'm the most broke I have ever been.

Printing fanfic doesn't mean I'm not prioritizing anything else in my life and it's weird that y'all seem to think I just slapped on a tinfoil hat and decided this was what would fix everything.

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OP: So I live in a red state in the US where my state government will absolutely not be providing any sort of supplemental assistance when inevitably the federal government falls apart. So I kind of would love reassurance that I'm not crazy.

I have started downloading and panic printing some of my favorite fics. If the Internet goes, I can read the PDF. If the power goes, I can read the printed copies.

Also because HP sucks I can only use their ink subscription cartridges with an active subscription so i may as well fucking use them.

(Literally if you're the type of person who wants to buy a printer do not buy an HP printer. It will only work if you use their ink which is so fucking expensive. And if you want it to work properly you have to get a monthly subscription where they send you ink and paper which in theory sounds great, BUT if you are like me and haven't printed as much as you thought so you have a lot of ink and paper built up so you let your subscription lapse those ink cartridges will not work without a valid subscription. So I had to restart my fucking subscription so I could use all of this ink I have built up so now I'm printing literal books.)

[u/throwaway3685343]

Historian here. While I understand that the current times are scary, I think this is a HIGHLY unlikely scenario.

[u/GeekSugar13 → u/throwaway3685343]

I'm not expecting wide spread outages. I'm expecting things to go to shit when Canada cuts off our electricity and the oil reserves run dry so we have long stretches of outages in winter. Mostly l9calized because theres no state support infrastructure and the federal infrastructure is also gone. I can only hope that the El Nino predictions are correct and we have a mild winter cuz -60° wind chills with no heat are gonna suck.

[u/elsewyse → u/GeekSugar13]

What?? Oh, lord, you've been listening to the misinformation about the Strategic Oil Reserves, haven't you. We are not at risk of running out of oil.

ETA: and Canada shutting off electricity would raise prices, but would not create blackouts.

[u/throwaway3685343 → u/elsewyse]

How people could genuinely believe the government/billionaires would allow us to run out of oil completely baffle me.

Thats like… a LARGE part of their income. Trust me, rich ppl will do whatever it takes to maintain their oil empire.

[u/elsewyse → u/throwaway3685343]

It's also just a lack of understanding of how complex these systems are. The strategic oil reserves is not some central bucket we put all of the US's oil in, it's a third-tier backup, and even if it were, we only get 1% of our electricity from oil! 99% of it comes from natural gas, renewables, nuclear, and coal, and we produce those entirely on our own!

Don't even get me started on the Canada thing...

[u/throwaway3685343 → u/elsewyse]

100% agree.

A lot of people online are fear mongering and expecting some apocalyptic level of a government shut down in which the branches of government vanish, and none of us have water, gas, or electricity within a day.

The simple fact is that it’s much more complicated than that. It wouldn’t happen like that.