First, let's note the referenced article IS A SALES PITCH.
Second, electrical outages are a normal thing in a storm prone country. The "outages" aren't news, it's only meaningful if they're growing more frequent.
The article asks plaintively "is this the new normal" without ever establishing what the old normal was.
When taking into account the higher population and higher electrical demand per person, are large blackouts becoming more common in the US?
Per ai: no.
"The North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) tracks Bulk Power System (BPS) performance annually in its State of Reliability (SOR) reports. Key takeaways from the 2025 SOR (covering 2024 data):
The BPS "remains highly reliable and resilient." Core metrics like frequency response, misoperations, and many transmission outage categories are stable or improving.
Severe weather (hurricanes, winter storms) caused the most impactful outages, as in prior years. In 2024, events like Hurricanes Helene and Milton led to millions of (mostly distribution-level) customer outages, but BES restoration was often faster than historical averages for similar storms due to hardening efforts. No major operator-initiated load shed during key winter events.
There were notable events, but the Severity Risk Index (SRI) and other indicators do not show a clear upward trend in frequency or severity of large-scale BPS disruptions when viewed over multiple years. Distribution outages (local, below 100 kV) are more visible to customers and can be widespread, but they are outside NERC's primary jurisdiction."
I fully agree our policies toward the increasingly critical electrical grid infrastructure are incoherent. That's said: quit buying into advertisers insisting the world is ending and here's some snake oil that will fix it.
They would do well to stop being so obsessed with AI and apply some genuine intelligence to their interface design.
Of course they're going to be obsessed with AI. Look at how much money they've dumped into it. They have to make it work, no matter how few of the individual users of their products use or want it. If it all turns out to have flushed billions of dollars down the toilet, that flushing is going to take managers' careers with it, so they're desperate to find a way, any way, to point to some AI-integrated 'feature' they've added and say "Here. This is where AI makes a difference."
I should have added:
"In general, renaming things does not fix a problem."
Though heaven knows, lots of stupid people try it.
Why not just discard the whole idea of DST instead of putting it into permanent effect?
The whole concept is an attempt to redefine time as a way of addressing perceived social problems. Schedule activities around the clock, not the clock around activities.
Not surprised that someone exploited a vulnerability, but surprised that deployed military personnel are allowed to use civilian communication systems.
They sold off their Lenovo brand in 2014.
Lenovo was never an "IBM brand." IBM sold them their client computing assets in 2005, and their x86 server assets in 2014, but Lenovo has never been a part of IBM.
Murphy's Law, that brash proletarian restatement of Godel's Theorem. -- Thomas Pynchon, "Gravity's Rainbow"
