Testing a Trash Can Faraday Cage

With how quickly AI is going basically all futures are weird in some ways. I've been thinking about how this affects me personally, and "try as hard as possible to keep AI from getting us all killed" is pretty high on the list. For me this mostly looks like donations and pandemic deterrence, but I also put some time into thinking about disasters. There are ways AI might go very well, or very poorly, and then there's the "messy middle" where we muddle through and things might fall apart some in the meantime. The big things here are making sure you have enough water and food for a while, along with critical medications and the standard "prepping" recommendations. But lately I've been thinking about what you might do for other risks, such as engineered pandemics, mirror bacteria, or fire suppression outages. And today, EMPs. An EMP is an electromagnetic pulse, and a strong one could destroy a lot of electronics. The most likely way we get one in the near future is a high-altitude nuclear detonation. This could be part of a nuclear war, or fighting around an AI takeover attempt. It's not totally known what effect an EMP would have on stuff. The initial pulse ("E1") is very short and the voltage it induces is proportional to the length of the conductor it hits. The power grid (famously involving long conductors) would be seriously damaged, especially the massive and hard to replace transformers. Unplugged electronics, however, are pretty safe: no long conductors to get high voltages. The best source I've found on EMPs is the 2008 Report of the Commission to Assess the Threat to the United States from Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Attack. They simulated nuclear EMPs and looked at how a wide range of common things were impacted. Generally things were fine as long as they were off and unplugged. On the other hand, this was all tech from two decades ago, and it's possible that things have changed. Many things now have more resistance to electromagnetism