how a smaller town like black mountain has managed to get water, power, internet, back online quicker than asheville (~10x size) is really fascinating to me.
i'm realizing that my kind of lazy assumption is that if you're bigger > you have more resources > therefore you do more faster.
this observation is not about winning or who got there first who or something.
it's more the fascination of my assuming that the bigger thing, with more resources, could self-sufficiently get its resources back online quicker than the smaller thing.
annnd, that external forces would get drawn into the big thing quicker than the small thing.
-- this seems to be true in the small, and rural, towns tucked into valleys. but my sense is that's more a logistics than anything else.
-- asheville and black mountain are both accessible relative to more remote places.
some other questions on this observation:
- what's the nature of a big thing?
- what's the nature of a small thing?
- how fast can the big thing move? how much bureaucracy is attached to it?
- how fast can the small thing move? what are its motivations vs. its content to be small? even then, what's the nature of its small-ness (300 spartans vs. 300 persians)?
- how well do people have to know each other in either the big or small thing prior to needing massive cohesion? like in response to a 1,000 year flood. there's a general sense that the U.S. was united after 9/11 right, so seems possible at the biggest of scales.
- is there a bias towards helping the small thing because you assume the big thing is more self-sufficient? did black mountain get more external help because, whether assumed or know, it had less at its fingertips right away?
- can any of this be generalized enough to be meaningful?
- or, is it so hyper-specific to the makeup of each small or big thing that you really can only understand it in retrospect?