"Dennis Lee Bieber"  wrote

| There is also a story of day-traders relying upon moving from exchange
| to exchange around the world -- when a flare or similar shuts down the
| transference of bids and financial information. And the day-traders are
all
| calling doom because their money isn't moving and they are afraid
| somewhere, someone is making money because they couldn't bid. I think the
| story resolution (which likely didn't help the doom-sayers) was that ALL
| the markets would roll-back to a point just prior to the flare effects,
and
| start from that state.
|

  Interesting. I wonder how they stored the backup
they used to find those records. Hopefully not
in the cloud. :) I guess that demonstrates how hard
it is for us to even imagine what it would mean now
to have nothing left but paper documents, with no
transportation but horses and no communication
but the Pony Express. After all, if all the circuit boards
are fried then we can no longer run any modern
machinery. There'd be no infrastructure. Most of us
would probably starve, as we looked at our petunias
in window boxes and wondered whether they're edible.
Getting our investments back would be the least of it.

  But if you look at rural life, many of those people
could make it. They're more connected to neighbors
and more dependent on things like picking wild greens
and shooting deer. They often have wood stoves.

   In the suburbs and cities it would be dark. Just
stopping the trucks into NYC would turn it into a
prison of millions of starving maniacs. It's an amazingly
delicate balance to house so many people in one place.
Imagine adding to that no phones, no cars, no power,
probably no water.
   They had a tiny, tiny taste with the hurricane a few
years back, where yuppies had to hike across town,
so they could charge their phones, so they could get
a weather report and find out what was going on. But
that only lasted for a day or so. They were never in
serious danger. Maybe their quinoa casserole for the
neighborhood cocktail party spoiled. That was probably
about the extent of it.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05