[HN Gopher] Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey ca...
___________________________________________________________________
Sri Lanka scrambles to restore power after monkey causes islandwide
outage
Author : abe94
Score : 185 points
Date : 2025-02-13 13:47 UTC (3 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| abe94 wrote:
| can coming into contact with a single transformer disrupt power
| to the entire island?
| remram wrote:
| I guess that depends on the kind of contact, and how much spare
| capacity you have. If you're running with very little spare, a
| single transformer malfunction might be impossible to make up
| for entirely.
|
| A good reminder that efficiency is often at odds with
| reliability.
| Aurornis wrote:
| Their grid is maxed out. Losing any single major section pushes
| it over the edge. They have to use rolling blackouts where
| different parts of the grid are turned off throughout the day
| to keep the overall system under the limit.
|
| Sri Lanka has about as many people as Florida and lower per-
| person energy usage. Their country's power grid is smaller than
| that of many US states.
| raggles wrote:
| I imagine there was some sort of cascading failure involved, as
| in the transformer tripped, but this then overloaded another
| circuit which then tripped, or there was a power swing that was
| unsustainable, then you get over\underfrequency tripping off
| load and generators... this can get quite complex quite quickly
| in power systems, especially smaller systems found on islands.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Not in a healthy well-managed grid. Alas, this is Sri Lanka
| baq wrote:
| When ercot tells Texans to turn off their ac this is exactly to
| prevent a cascading failure which trips all breakers everywhere
| because one transformer died on a maxed out grid.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Yes.
|
| Having lived on a 8-mile by 5-mile island, power grid USED to
| be fed with a single transformer before the state funded a
| power company to take over and properly re-grid it.
|
| Silly as it may sound, outage was easily triggered by a
| wildlife (beavers by flooding, hawk-arial-nest, chipmunk
| tunnels, male-deers pushes it, badgers weaken foundation, even
| bees and ants) by disrupting poles that support the grid.
|
| They'll trip the breakers at the transformers.
|
| Even leak PCB oil from within a transformer to a point of
| melting the copper winding coil inside the transformer, but
| that was a manufacturing flaw, not nature intervention.
|
| So yeah, it seems harder to do and less frequent without
| monkey, but non-monkey-disruptor has been known to happen.
| graemep wrote:
| > Having lived on a 8-mile by 5-mile island
|
| That is a whole lot smaller than Sri Lanka which is 268 miles
| by 139 miles and has a population of about 22m. Size similar
| to Ireland, population about 80% that of Australia.
| Acrobatic_Road wrote:
| but was the monkey alright?
| xyst wrote:
| Very unlikely
|
| > The animal had come into contact with the transformer at the
| station, disrupting supply to the entire country
|
| Bro was cooked
| ridiculous_leke wrote:
| Another example how human civilization, in its present form,
| is generally incompatible with Earth's flora and fauna.
| Obviously, going back to stone-age is not a solution for us.
| But we certainly need to update/devise methods that do not
| harm anyone living creatures (or at least the sentient ones).
| Poor monkey had no idea what he got into and suffered a
| brutal death.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we certainly need to update /devise methods that do not
| harm anyone living creatures (or at least the sentient
| ones)_
|
| Nature is brutal. I distinctly remember a hike where I
| stumbled on a mother bear (RIP) tearing apart a still-alive
| baby elk for her cubs. Human civilisation has done a lot of
| damage. But we might also be able to spare a lot of
| sentient suffering, bringing care to the biosphere and
| taking station as nature's ethical guardians. Food for
| thought if you find yourself going full misanthrope.
| rectang wrote:
| Humans are far and away the most cruel species that has
| ever walked the face of the earth. No other species has
| the capacity to invent torture, using our analytical
| abilities to keep the victim alive indefinitely while
| inflicting the most vicious agonies possible (e.g.
| torturing the child in front of the parent).
| justinclift wrote:
| You've not seen cats toying with their prey?
| rectang wrote:
| Bears with baby elks, cats with their prey, orcas playing
| catch with baby seals... none of them come close to what
| humans are capable of when they put their reasoning to
| work in service of inflicting agony.
|
| Have you ever visited a museum exhibit on torture? The
| engineering creativity that has gone into exploiting
| physiology and psychology to cause unendurable,
| unimaginable pain is astonishing. You'll want to look
| away. You'll want to forget, to believe once again that
| cats are worse... but cats are to a first order
| approximation indifferent to suffering, in contrast to
| humans hellbent on maximizing it.
|
| JumpCrisscross is taking a techno-optimist's perspective,
| but while I personally believe that humans should
| voluntarily seek to serve as "ethical guardians" and to
| minimize "sentient suffering", I don't trust them to do
| it. Not as individuals, since empathy is a weak force
| compared with first-person pain. Not as cogs within
| societies where inflicting pain is often a means to
| gaining and maintaining power.
| labster wrote:
| I guess you are not a cat owner
| danparsonson wrote:
| I would also like to Orcas with baby seals to your list.
| Sorry.
| rectang wrote:
| I already brought up orcas and baby seals in a sibling
| comment[1], forty minutes before your response appeared.
| Have you grappled with my reasoning there?
|
| [1]
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43035760#43064754
| danparsonson wrote:
| So you did, my mistake.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Are you judging by the median or the extreme? I dont
| really see why the latter would be a reasonable way to
| asses species.
| rectang wrote:
| I'm primarily responding with skepticism to JumpCriscross
| about humans minimizing "sentient suffering" -- which
| would be measured by the aggregate of total suffering
| inflicted by all members of a species.
|
| The extremes contribute the most in the ledger of
| agonies, but I don't think they are the most relevant --
| rather I fault human nature for tending to produce
| extremes. Is it Vladimir Putin who is personally
| responsible for all the suffering inflicted by the
| Russian state, or can we say that the environment from
| which Putin emerged played a role?
|
| Thanks to their reasoning abilities, humans have enormous
| capability to inflict violence and suffering, which is
| not matched by a commensurate empathy which would
| dissuade violence.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think there is a tremendous amount of empathy, if one
| isn't blinded to it. For every person that dies a violent
| death, there there are thousands engaging positively with
| friends, family, loved ones.
|
| If you care about sums, you must also acknowledge
| positive within the Russian state as well? On a given
| day, it also has lovers meeting, mothers nursing
| children, friendships.
|
| Surely, humanity doesn't have enough empathy to dissuade
| violence, but that is an argument about purity, not
| aggregates. The typical person spends an exceedingly
| small amount of time engaged in violence, and this is a
| testament to both our empathy, intelligence, and the
| social systems we have built.
| rectang wrote:
| All those Ukrainians basking in that tremendous Russian
| empathy...
|
| It only takes a moment for you or your loved ones to
| receive death or grievous injury, but not to worry
| because they're "spending an exceedingly small amount of
| time engaged in violence". Rape might be over in minutes!
| And besides, it only affects... how much of the
| population?
|
| Those who are most confident about human righteousness
| are the least qualified to minimize "sentient suffering".
| It is often said that one's foes "only understand
| violence", and the essential truth in that assertion is
| that indirect empathy is utterly insufficient compared
| with direct, personal pain as a motivator for changing
| behavior.
| beardedwizard wrote:
| Have you seen what animals do to each other on a daily
| basis?
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I watch Congress on CNN. Yes.
| greenavocado wrote:
| Thats what C-SPAN is for
| nkrisc wrote:
| Have you _seen_ what other animals do to each other?
|
| The monkey was probably dead before it felt anything.
| xyst wrote:
| A real life example of a "chaos monkey".
|
| Folks, doesn't matter if it's physical or digital. Test your
| systems for resiliency
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| This happened on February the 9th - 10th
|
| This wikipedia article was marked for deletion, so just in case
| https://archive.ph/wip/7fvmI
|
| Other forums are mentioning conspiracy theories about political
| oponents sabotaging the current (new) government.
|
| No skin in that game
| taspeotis wrote:
| Yeah this wasn't even interesting when I read about it a week
| ago
|
| Hacker "Olds" amirite
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Why would someone want to delete an article that was absolutely
| complete rubbish? Wikipedia may have standards, but they are
| really really low.
|
| Of course it was all the monkeys fault, for being part of a
| geographic location, with poor energy planning, poor
| infrastructure support, in a third world country, all the
| things intervening primates need to shovel disinformation.
|
| "The nationwide blackouts were attributed to a massive
| disruption caused by a monkey which had apparently intervened
| to trigger an irreparable damage which made it unable to
| restore the electricity in most parts of Sri Lanka immediately
| after the incident had unfolded." ( This from the Wikipedia
| article is not Artificial Intelligence, its shocked monkeys
| forced to type randomly type ).
|
| Damn that damn monkey, and his triggering intervention of
| irreparable damage. Just what do they think AI will do with all
| this world salad? Was it written by AI or was it written by the
| monkey as a suicide note? or the place went to sh*t-hole Level
| 5 when Arthur C Clarke died?
|
| Inquiring minds what to know, why third world problems require
| primate interventions?
|
| This could have happened anywhere? Puerto Rico? New York in
| 1977? London 2003? Was it all the work of intervening primates?
|
| When your premise is utterly absurd, you can drive the point
| anywhere: Shock the Monkey.
| jll29 wrote:
| As much as I love REUTERS, this one is incomplete: what about the
| monkey? And can we have a photo?
| ceejayoz wrote:
| I'm guessing you can get the general idea from a photo of some
| charcoal briquettes.
| journal wrote:
| How dare you force my brain to use more of it's processing
| power to understand the reference in your comment. /s
| lmpdev wrote:
| You can't photograph what no longer exists...
| aaron695 wrote:
| Monkey photo - https://www.hirunews.lk/english/396308/monkey-
| blamed-for-the...
| daeken wrote:
| Just a heads up to those clicking, the monkey is super dead
| in the photo.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| "A group of monkeys who entered the Panadura Power Station had
| ended up in a spat." Yes, it is incomplete.
|
| https://bmkltsly13vb.compat.objectstorage.ap-singapore-1.ora...
| spike021 wrote:
| Not nearly the same thing but this reminds me of the Playstation
| game, Ape Escape. Real classic.
| jihadjihad wrote:
| Ape Escape was great, and IIRC it was the first game that went
| all-in on the new DualShock controllers. You couldn't even
| catch a monkey unless you nailed both sticks perfectly at the
| same time!
| nsbk wrote:
| Definitely one of my favorite games on the original PlayStation
| and a great fit for the newly added capabilities of the
| DualShock controller
| cozzyd wrote:
| This has the hallmarks of curious George
| bl4ckneon wrote:
| Expect there is no next episode when he gets in contact with
| high voltage electrical equipment...
| Henchman21 wrote:
| Ah yes, the last book in the series: _Curious George and the
| Electric Fence_
|
| Truly, a classic
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Monkey business. Shock the monkey. ooh!
| roenxi wrote:
| It is hard to think about Sri Lanka without recalling [0] that
| this is the country which recently attempted to institute a
| fertiliser ban. My default assumptions about their general
| infrastructure management are unflattering.
|
| [0] https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/fertiliser-
| ban-d...
| jamal-kumar wrote:
| Wow that's crazy. You know when Greenpeace is saying they
| messed going organic up that they probably really messed going
| organic up...
|
| https://www.greenpeace.org/aotearoa/story/on-sri-lankas-fert...
| duxup wrote:
| I like to think folks who know what they're doing, AND
| pushing dramatic change know that HOW you get there is as
| important as anything else. Behave recklessly and you've got
| no support anymore and you've undone your whole plan.
| Steven420 wrote:
| That very well could have been the plan
| lostlogin wrote:
| The relatively recent genocide also points to a high level of
| dysfunction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tamil_genocide
| ignoramous wrote:
| As for the civil war, things could have ended differently,
| except Prabhakaran seemed to have been gripped by arrogance.
| Though he was fighting for Tamils, paradoxically, Prabhakaran
| also became the big killer of Tamils. He annihilated all
| competing Tamil militant groups ... ... it all led
| to [Prabhakaran's] last apocalyptic decision to fight to the
| last day -- and the last Tamil. Through Kumaran Pathmanathan,
| KP, the LTTE 'foreign minister', we offered to bring out all
| the combatants and civilians from the war zone. When KP went
| to finalise the deal, Prabhakaran refused. The rest is
| history.
|
| https://www.thehindu.com/books/books-reviews/the-ltte-
| chiefs... / https://archive.vn/B2Gxv
|
| Unfortunate for the Tamils how it all played out, with little
| intervention or pressure from other regional powers. The past
| violence and pogroms were already indicative of the State's
| intent; they didn't need a second invitation.
| duxup wrote:
| It's the story of most warlords / strong men types.
| Ultimately anything less than full obedience makes them the
| enemy, even (sometimes especially) the folks you are
| presumably fighting for.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Little intervention? Literally every world power and some
| of the minor ones went out of their way to support the
| nationalists. The United States being a major reason why it
| was kicked off. We eventually incorporated the Sinhalese
| nationalist strategies in Afghanistan.
| master_kuro wrote:
| This is absolutely insane. It's almost cartoonishly
| monstrous.
|
| Why isn't this better known? The way the Tamils were treated
| is so pure a representation of evil that I can barely get
| through the Wikipedia page. This was the work of Buddhists,
| too! I've been taught that Buddhists were peaceful and non-
| violent by creed, but clearly not if the only Buddhist
| majority nation is capable of such abomination.
| defrost wrote:
| Westerners rarely associate Buddhism with extremism or
| violence, but Buddhist movements in Asia have often raised
| few qualms about the use of force. Buddhist authorities
| have, at times, justified violence against the faith's
| enemies and supported authoritarian regimes.
|
| * https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/16/myanmar-rohingya-
| coup-b...
|
| * https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/myanmar-s-
| extr...
|
| These links are _just_ Myanmar.
| anon291 wrote:
| Most westerners are woefully misguided in their
| interpretation of eastern religions.
|
| We are still people.
|
| I'm always shocked when Europeans or Americans single out
| Christianity as some uniquely malevolent force.
|
| People are like this. We have always been like this. Being
| atheist, agnostic, Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu,
| pagan, heathen, etc -- it doesn't make you superhuman.
| We're all capable of this and the sooner everyone realizes
| this the sooner we can work to prevent tragedy.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Much religion depends on magical thinking and/or blind
| appeals to authority. IME it facilitates bad behavior
| that's less likely to be tolerated by more rational
| belief systems.
| anon291 wrote:
| The arc of history simply does not show that. We can
| point to the various issues in communist states (not
| criticizing communism but all the communist states are
| undoubtedly atheist).
| fsckboy wrote:
| not criticizing communism? pray tell, what species are
| you considering? - E O Wilson
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Was it the absence of religion that created issues in
| communist states? Or perhaps authoritarianism, hero
| worship, overly centralized planning, low trust culture,
| or some other combination of factors at play?
|
| History's arc is much longer than communism, and religion
| is tied to some pretty horrific events.
| throwanem wrote:
| What beyond self-contradiction is "rational belief?"
| starspangled wrote:
| The worldview of many atheists I know seems to depend on
| magical thinking, holding of contradictory beliefs, and
| blind appeal to authority when it comes to the
| government.
|
| I don't think there is clear cause and effect when it
| comes to religion and irrational behavior.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Certainly exceptions exist to every rule or trend.
|
| Having visited over a hundred churches (for thousands of
| services), they are the only place I've consistently seen
| people teach and accept things that what everyone can
| plainly see is false. Children are taught that fallacies
| are better than critical thinking, wherever it serves
| their belief system.
| psychoslave wrote:
| People often easily conflat religion, theology and
| theocracy. But an atheist dictator that would put death
| sentence for anyone that engages in a religion would
| obviously not be more ethical than some religious
| zealtoth doing the same for atheism. I'm not aware of any
| politically powerful atheist in history that went this
| path. I mean, most likely Stalin was atheist, but I doubt
| it ever was a matter to send people to gulag. Atheism is
| just rare as an ontological belief, so it makes sense
| most faith intolerance happened between religious devots.
|
| Note that strictly speaking, atheism is just rejecting
| the existence of any god. That doesn't necessarily make
| magic out of the equation. Though certainly atheism is
| generally associated to the rejection of any
| superstitious belief.
|
| But just believing that ZFC make a sound mathematical
| foundation doesn't make you an advanced flawless
| logician. People stay mere humans, whatever they believe
| might be the most relevant foundation to use their more
| or less weak reasoning ability.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Dictators of all kinds put people to death. Religion
| teaches people to blindly trust in authorities. It's a
| nasty combination.
| graemep wrote:
| The big genocides and mass murders of the twentieth
| century were motivated by non-religious (the holocaust)
| or atheist (in the Soviet union, China, and Cambodia)
| ideologies..
|
| Even historically religious motives for "bad behaviours"
| were rare.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Were those genocides really motivated by of a lack of
| religion or other factors like racism and
| authoritarianism?
|
| > Even historically religious motives for "bad
| behaviours" were rare.
|
| Doubt. Still, even if that's accurate, my point was that
| raising people to be easily manipulated sheep doesn't
| produce a robust society. It just makes them easier to
| exploit. MLMs are common in predominantly Mormon
| communities for a reason.
| psychoslave wrote:
| You do understand that the Coran state very explicitly
| that apostate should be killed, and while this is nice to
| pretend holy books are all about metaphors, it won't
| change much to the mind of those who think they are
| acting in good faith with divine commands when they
| murder heretics.
|
| Of course, atheist compatible doctrines too can can be
| taken as reason to go kill those who dare to believe
| otherwise. But they can't pretend they have a book
| directly inspired by some super being that justify their
| actions. That is, one can also adulate Marx and kill
| random dudes because that's fair within their
| interpretation of das Kapital.
|
| https://islam.stackexchange.com/questions/10768/death-
| penalt...
| anon291 wrote:
| > Why isn't this better known?
|
| The external affair minister of India, Mr Jaishankar,
| recently excoriated a European politician over Indians
| handling of Ukraine. He said 'Europe needs to get past the
| mentality that Europe's problems are the world's problems,
| while the world's problems are not Europes problems '.
|
| And this is where that attitude comes from
|
| India has dealt with genocides at its borders in Sri Lanka
| and Bangladesh, and yet most Europeans and Americans have
| no idea. The United States of America criticized India for
| helping Bangladesh during it's Pakistan sponsored genocide,
| and actually understood military action against India to
| protect Pakistan's ability to slaughter Bangladeshis.
|
| Again, in Sri Lanka, no one cared
|
| Yet the moment India undertakes it's strategic interests
| regarding cheap Russian oil, suddenly the whole world
| starts pointing fingers
|
| There's a lot that goes on in Asia that is simply not
| reported. If you read American media it's almost like that
| part of the world doesn't exist
| user_7832 wrote:
| Somewhat related and tangential, there's this
| concept/subreddit of "it's always the same map" [1] where
| basically some counties/regions have most/neutral
| coverage (US/Canada, Western Europe, Australia, Japan
| mainly), some have limited/biased coverage (India, China,
| Russia maybe), and many (mainly Africa or smaller
| Asia/Oceania countries) have none at all. An earthquake
| in some pacific island killed 150? Never heard of it. Two
| dead in a school shooting in Arizona? Straight to
| Reddit's frontpage.
|
| Mind you, I'm not saying deaths anywhere are good of
| course - but the reporting is terribly biased in a way
| that many may not even realize, especially if you live in
| one of those "western" countries and primarily consume
| English media/news. Heck, just look at what is commonly
| considered "core countries" [2]?
|
| 1 - https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/4buox6/tragic
| _world_... 2 -
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_countries
| lanstin wrote:
| I grew up in the US and considered myself relatively
| worldly and educated, and when I started visiting Sri
| Lanka and India and reading papers published there and so
| on, when I heard US press discuss news from India or Sri
| Lanka, I was really shocked at the deep level of general
| ignorance; and I am not talking Fox here but NPR and
| Washington Post.
| anon291 wrote:
| The shocking part to me is that Indian news is usually
| conducted in English so it's not even inaccessible. It's
| written by English speakers for English speakers, yet
| everyone seems mystified at what goes on in the
| subcontinent
|
| Like I get why people find it difficult to understand
| Mandarin. But this is English news we're talking about
| ...
| psychoslave wrote:
| If you want the CCP propaganda in English, you have
| plenty of material out there I think, you don't even need
| those trivial to use machine translators.
| roenxi wrote:
| > I've been taught that Buddhists were peaceful and non-
| violent by creed, but clearly not if the only Buddhist
| majority nation is capable of such abomination.
|
| There are a couple of Buddhist majority countries;
| Cambodia, Thailand, Mongolia, Laos and more. Also, judging
| a religion from its adherents worst atrocities is a mistake
| - for example, look at history. It is hard to rank them
| given the high level of sickening background brutality but
| if we're just commenting on religions not living up to
| their values the crusades (particularly #4) are difficult
| to top.
| krainboltgreene wrote:
| Because America helped cause it.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| We just romanticize some things we know less (eg buddhism)
| to somehow be more noble than the things we know more (eg
| christianity). The noble savage (aka dances with wolves
| syndrome) is just as much a fallacy as the savage savage
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noble_savage
| hoveringhen wrote:
| Buddhists are humans too -\\_(tsu)_/- There's also the
| Rohingyan genocide where Buddhist nationalism is involved.
|
| If you want to read a good non-fiction on the Sri Lankan
| civil war, check out "The Divided Island" by Samanth
| Subramaniam.
| graemep wrote:
| The wikipedia page is one sided and only puts the case for
| calling iu a genocide. As a mixed race and entirely ethnic
| minority Sri Lankan who lived there for much of the civil war
| I do not think genocide is an accurate characterisation,
| although there were certainly many atrocities.
|
| It was also made possible by the populations fear of the
| other side who were extremely nasty ethnonationalists,
| "ethnically cleansed" areas under their control, and were the
| inventors and most prolific users of the modern suicide bomb
| (the type the west associates with Islamic terrorists). A
| common response to criticism of the killing of civilians
| during the war were things like "we are fighting fascists".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberation_Tigers_of_Tamil_Eel.
| ..
| master_kuro wrote:
| I read your comment because I thought it would provide
| another perspective on the situation, which is always a
| good thing. However, the link you shared as well as your
| rhetoric only made me more sympathetic towards the Tamil
| minority.
|
| Here's my understanding on the conflict.
|
| 1. The Sinhalese majority were given mandate by the
| British.
|
| 2. They used this mandate to apply incredibly
| discriminatory practices towards the Tamils.
|
| 3. Constant rabble-rousing by Sinhalese politicians
| intermittently led to race riots, in which Sinhalese mobs
| carried out pogroms and murders against Tamils.
|
| 4. Due to almost laughably blatant policies targeting
| Tamils, such as an affirmative action policy designed to
| reduce the number of Tamil students at universities, a
| group of Tamil students formed a league to protest the
| matter. These students would become the forerunners of the
| tamil militant groups.
|
| 5. Further barbarism from the Sinhalese majority, such as
| the destruction of culturally important Tamil heritage (for
| instance, the destruction of an important library), seeding
| racial tensions.
|
| 6. A rebel group carries out an ambush against the Sri
| Lankan army, seemingly as retaliation for the assassination
| of one of their commanders. The result of this was a week
| of rioting where innocent Tamil civilians were murdered,
| raped and tortured by Sinhalese mobs. This event is known
| as Black July. To readers: do not view the wikipedia page
| for this event if you're sensitive. The first image depicts
| a Tamil man being stripped and beaten before being murdered
| by grinning Sinhalese youths.
|
| 7. War starts, and the rest is history.
|
| I don't blame the "other side" for being extremely nasty
| ethnonationalists. In fact, I'm very surprised they didn't
| become violent militants earlier by how badly they were
| treated. Whilst I can't condone the ethnic cleansing they
| carried out, I can on a human level understand why they'd
| carry out such crimes when they'd been so viciously treated
| by their victims in the past. The sexual violence that
| seemingly became routine for Tamils is some of the most
| sickening that I've ever read. I had to take a break and go
| for a walk after reading some of the accounts.
|
| My job requires me to have some level of awareness to the
| subtleties of conflict. Having studied the aspects of
| international relations that pertain to war, I've learned
| how complex a lot of these internal struggles can be. As
| such, I try to be fair in my assessments of ethnic
| conflicts. It's usually not straightforward to charactise
| one side as villainous and one side as victorious. Having
| pored over accounts from government affiliated sources, the
| only consistent perspective that Sri Lankan commentators
| seem to provide in their support for the killing of
| civilians is their strong belief that Sri Lanka must be a
| Buddhist nation and that Buddhism has a special place in
| the state constitution. That's literally the only thing
| that they have to support themselves without circular
| reasoning (and is ironically a key feature of fascist
| polity). Otherwise, it's "We treated the Tamils like
| subhumans, actively discriminated them into poverty and
| kept murdering them and rioting in their areas. Now they're
| fighting back, so we're justified in committing genocide".
| How on Earth do you justify that without having a
| revisionist stance, or claiming that the clearly documented
| discrimination against Tamils didn't happen?
|
| What happened to the Sri Lankan Tamils is a travesty beyond
| reckoning. The fact that it has been forgotten and that the
| Sri Lankan government that stirred this conflict is still
| at large is a miscarriage of justice so severe that it
| calls into question any legitimacy of international law and
| human rights.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| What happened was that they ran out of forex and couldn't buy
| it any more. The government subsidises it heavily.
| graemep wrote:
| Not really, the government tried a short term solution to a
| lack of forex, which caused a drop in agricultural
| productivity which lead to much worse consequences about an
| year later.
| coin wrote:
| More specifically the activist Vandana Shiva talked Sri Lanka
| into outlawing conventional agriculture and only use organic
| methods.
|
| "In Sri Lanka, Organic Farming Went Catastrophically Wrong"
| https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farmi...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| This story keeps rising from the dead as if it was a simplistic
| anti-technology action when in fact (as has already been
| mentioned in this thread) _Sri Lanka 's economy had collapsed
| to the point that it could not afford to pay for inputs to
| industrialised agriculture, including chemical fertilisers_.
|
| I'd addressed many of the usual specious claims made on this in
| a thread from 2022, here:
|
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32419111>
|
| In particular, the situation was, as I'd put it there, "the
| driver was not 'let's de-grow the economy', but 'we can't
| afford what we had'".
|
| (The larger context of that particular thread was degrowth, on
| which I'd addressed some other points separately here:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32419768>.)
| nreece wrote:
| Related: just today came across this post on X..
|
| "Sri Lanka will become next Bali as long as it gets fiber."
|
| https://x.com/strzibnyj/status/1890628037529727220
| sureIy wrote:
| I love how people compare places to Bali and Cancun and then
| lack everything that people like about those places.
|
| Having a beach is not enough. You can find beaches everywhere.
| Bali beaches aren't even that good.
| TowerTall wrote:
| I live on a small island in Thailand, and here, "becoming
| Bali" is a term that describes a place that has been over-
| constructed with bungalows and villas; it has become very
| crowded and very expensive. Most tropical islands started out
| as hippie places where all houses were cheap, rudimentary
| wooden bungalows, but then mass tourism and housing investors
| moved in and pushed the "original hippie population" out and
| replaced them with expensive villas. That is what is meant by
| becoming Bali. My guess for the origin of this expression is
| that Bali was the first place where this happened.
| chris_va wrote:
| I don't suppose you can recommend a place in Thailand that
| is not "becoming Bali" but still tourist friendly enough
| for non-locals to visit without feeling guilty about
| ruining the vibe?
| sureIy wrote:
| Thailand has a long coast. Point at any small/medium
| settlement or island and Google it. Even Phuket has areas
| that aren't super developed. I visited Koh Yao Yai and it
| was indeed chill, maybe too chill because there was
| nothing to do there after a couple of days.
| esperent wrote:
| The thing that's stopped me from going to Sri Lanka so far is
| not lack of fiber. It's that every time I look up a genuine
| travel video of the place, they talk about how much the tuktuk
| drivers hassle any white person trying to walk around.
|
| Outside of the few main hotspots, people don't hassle you in
| Bali. They are an incredibly friendly and polite people in
| spite of the tourism.
|
| Of course, Bali isn't completely hassle free. But you _can_
| just walk down the street there, at least outside of the main
| hotspots. Taxi drivers will hail you, it 's a bit annoying, but
| they're polite and will drive on when you say no thanks.
| eudhxhdhsb32 wrote:
| > they talk about how much the tuktuk drivers hassle any
| white person trying to walk around.
|
| That wasn't my experience when I traveled there 3 years ago,
| and I walked around quite a bit.
|
| My biggest complaint was the lack of good local restaurants,
| even in big cities. The juice bars were pretty great though.
| Still miss wood apple.
|
| Another issue was the insanely reckless driving and incessant
| honking. Even with the plentiful metal bars and hand straps,
| trying to stand on a crowded bus while they fly around
| mountain curves is a total body workout.
| statictype wrote:
| It's all relative. Having lived and driven in India for
| many years, the driving in Sri Lanka is very organized and
| civil.
|
| But I get what you're saying.
| nisalperi wrote:
| As a local, Sri Lanka turning into Bali is one of my biggest
| anxieties at the moment. I've grown up around the hospitality
| industry all my life, it's not a good outcome for locals.
| Tourism should be considered an auxiliary industry not the
| primary industry.
| graemep wrote:
| I agree. Its highly volatile, and has a huge environmental
| impact.
|
| The ups and downs of tourism during the civil war illustrated
| it clearly. So did the impact of the Ukraine war (there used
| to be a lot of Russian tourists).
|
| I was shocked by how cheap hotels had once again become when
| I last went back to Sri Lanka (2023)
| sgt wrote:
| Well, the Russian tourists are back... touring...
| grg0 wrote:
| The monkey was a foreign nation state sponsored insider testing
| the nation's grid. Sri Lanka is in trouble, and authorities are
| mobilizing fast and expanding the surveillance state to thwart
| future threats before they are realized. They are deploying AI at
| scale.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| Obligatory: Did they forget to mount the scratch monkey?
| rightbyte wrote:
| I think you need to add a "/s" for mocking insane fearmongering
| jingoist statements nowadays. Just saying.
| psychoslave wrote:
| Is that for sarcasm?
| BLKNSLVR wrote:
| Unfortunately it's looks as if Cyber Squirrel 1* hasn't been
| updated since 2019.
|
| This disruption would be one of the more successful operations.
|
| *https://cybersquirrel1.com/
| nuccy wrote:
| The operations are international and are carried out not only
| by squirrels, weasels (some say martens) are also involved. One
| of those (unlikely unintentionally) had shutdown the Large
| Hadron Collider at CERN in 2016:
|
| 1. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-36173247
| gibspaulding wrote:
| It's unclear whose side the mustelidae are on. Some have been
| known to collaborate with the physicists.
|
| https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/felicia-ferret-
| particl...
| allenrb wrote:
| The best line: "There were no immediate details on whether the
| monkey survived the incident."
|
| Going way out on a limb here, but perhaps the monkey who
| disrupted equipment carrying enough power to mess up the entire
| country was most likely charred into an unrecognizable state. But
| hey, maybe it got lucky!
| spikedavis wrote:
| This monkey's gone to Heaven
| milleramp wrote:
| Don't you know you're going to shock the monkey
| AdamJacobMuller wrote:
| There are no details because nobody can find the monkey. It's
| now a cloud of ash.
| swivelmaster wrote:
| Viral marketing for the new Oz Perkins movie is getting really
| out of hand!
| pythonguython wrote:
| The title sounds whimsical, but animals cause a significant
| amount of outages. Around 5-10% are caused by animals. When I
| interned at a power company I saw them install "squirrel guard"
| insulating equipment terminals
| MichaelZuo wrote:
| Yeah from what I recall it was just important enough to
| actually push through system wide, but not important enough to
| bother with a PR effort.
|
| Speaking from experience as being the intern responsible for
| pushing through most projects in Toronto during the summer of
| 2016.
| DecentShoes wrote:
| No it didn't.
|
| A lack of redundancy caused an islandwide outage.
| Jailbird wrote:
| I heard similar but haven't found a "no, it wasn't a monkey"
| article yet.
| athenot wrote:
| The point is that the monkey was only the _trigger_. But the
| full cause of an outage is much more than just the trigger.
| It 's a monkey this time, could have been an operator or a
| storm...
|
| Digging a bit deeper, they appear to be running with very
| little margin, if any. Meaning redundancy and protection
| against cascading failures is limited.
|
| Fixing the real cause is expensive, so it's often easier to
| just blame the trigger--though admittedly in this case it
| makes for a great headline. :)
| nullc wrote:
| or a kite.
|
| It's not like the monkey deployed special monkey skills
| beyond "occupy space while being electrically conductive".
| Jailbird wrote:
| OK, in all fairness I did think all we were talking about
| was the trigger, not the underlying vulnerable system
| (which I already had understood to be less than solid
| over the years.)
| billfruit wrote:
| In other words the monkey was only the straw that broke the
| camels back.
| orbital-decay wrote:
| According to the report the faulty busbar caused a frequency
| drop, I doubt this could have been prevented by having more
| redundancy, the failure mode was more complex than that.
| vineyardmike wrote:
| Technically, the monkey caused the island wide grid to fallback
| to the (reduced) redundancy mode of their power station...
|
| > Sunday's disruption also affected the island's only 900 MW
| coal fired power plant, causing it to operate in safe mode, the
| CEB said. "All efforts are being made to restore the grid to
| full capacity but power cuts will be implemented to manage peak
| demand hours in the night," the CEB statement added.
| chintan wrote:
| As per the Ramayana (Hindu mythology), Hanuman (the monkey God)
| had set the city of Lanka on fire.
| https://hinduism.stackexchange.com/questions/15588/why-did-h...
|
| Just a strange coincidence.
| entropicgravity wrote:
| I presume the monkey got fried.
| oniony wrote:
| I guess that all depends upon whether or not it was a super-
| conducting monkey.
| cies wrote:
| > There were no immediate details on whether the monkey
| survived the incident.
|
| I was also thinking about the monkey. Sadly we don't know.
|
| Also: if a monkey can cause this much drama, I'm not sure if
| the monkey is to blame (as per the title). This is gov't
| pushing the blame to the monkey imho.
| miyuru wrote:
| preliminarily report for the incident is here.
|
| https://pucsl-my.sharepoint.com/:b:/g/personal/chinthakal_pu...
| roncesvalles wrote:
| Holy clickbait. The title implies that Sri Lanka is totally out
| of power like Haiti, but that's far from the truth.
|
| >Ninety-minute power cuts were implemented on Monday and Tuesday
| to manage demand. An investigation into the outage was being
| conducted by the energy ministry.
|
| This is the extent of the "outage". It's more of a capacity
| reduction than a grid failure.
| Boltgolt wrote:
| Mentioning "load shedding" would have made a more accurate
| title
| picafrost wrote:
| BBC's 'Mammals' [0] spends a portion of one of its episodes
| discussing the plight of howler monkeys in Costa Rica. [1] These
| monkeys die frequently to electrocution as urbanization
| continues. The power lines look like reasonable crossing routes
| above the dangerous and hostile human world. The solution they
| implemented was to build canopy bridges safe for the monkeys.
|
| This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do.
| Wouldn't it be nice if we could call it the humane thing to do?
| In general, "humane" seems to stop with human lives, despite the
| fact that we like to style ourselves caretakers of this planet.
|
| [0] https://www.bbcearth.com/shows/mammals
|
| [1]
| https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/5ZpLHZzWv93X70kvP2...
| concordDance wrote:
| > This isn't cost efficient but it's the right thing to do.
|
| Depends on the ratio you put on human vs animal lives. Money is
| fungible, the more you spend on walkways the less you spend on
| road signage or MRI machines.
| test6554 wrote:
| Some places attract tourism because of the local wildlife.
| Take that away and eventually they wouldn't be able to afford
| MRI machines anyway.
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