3 ms·

RE:market size, esp. proportional to texas land mass, that's not obvious to me. But I'm writing that as a not-an-energy person, just someone who spent an aftern

RE:market size, esp. proportional to texas land mass, that's not obvious to me. But I'm writing that as a not-an-energy person, just someone who spent an afternoon googling years ago to understand why energy operations people viewed things like solar/wind/etc. as local, not national. Finance and other non-operational people can certainly work more abstractly. RE:Weather, when gov-funded climate change scientists collectively predicted adverse weather phenomena would continue accelerating in accordance to global warming, and a lot of communities have been living through it? I started hearing about that 10-20 years ago, it's not news. Next you'll tell me that continued beachfront erosion merits gov bailouts of insurance companies because we couldn't predict that either..

rayiner 6y ago
Big rainstorms are not news, yet most public sewer systems are totally unequipped to deal with them. Hot days in summer are not news and yet Amtrak is unequipped to deal with them (http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/06/heat-restrictions http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/06/heat-restrictions). Around the country, there is a $4.5 trillion infrastructure backlog. https://www.asce.org/templates/press-release-detail.aspx?id=24013 https://www.asce.org/templates/press-release-detail.aspx?id=.... Almost all of that backlog is on the plate of public entities (road works, sewer works, bridges, etc.) Where do you live that the government has actually addressed crises that it faces in the present and has time to pro-actively address stuff scientists are talking about happening years in the future? Yeah, maybe competent and pro-active bureaucrats at a government power utility would have avoided this problem. It also could have been avoided by running power plants on unicorn manure, which I hear has natural anti-freeze properties.
- lmeyerov 6y ago
  This feels like rapidly shifting goalposts from my statement about energy being local and the local private energy companies cheaping out because they could Yes, a lot of people live in denial. In security-related areas of all kinds where the ROI is largely unobservable loss prevention, that's why leadership-level people know to ask for budget immediately after any incident... because important stuff doesn't get funded or enforced otherwise. And agreed, I'm not a superfan of Amtrak. There's a wide spectrum on how to do things. The more I learn about any individual one, the more I learn that most things appear broken from the inside, so I am both consistently awed things work in the daily case, and know that left alone, they won't in the edge cases.
  - rayiner 6y ago
    > This feels like rapidly shifting goalposts from my statement about energy being local and the local private energy companies cheaping out because they could It's not shifting the goal posts. A company that feeds into a market with 26 million customers is not so "local" that a free market can't work. That's bigger than most countries. And you've offered no evidence that a public utility would not have "cheaped out" on weatherization. > Yes, a lot of people live in denial. In security-related areas of all kinds where the ROI is largely unobservable loss prevention, that's why leadership-level people know to ask for budget immediately after any incident... because important stuff doesn't get funded otherwise. Disaster after disaster happens, and important stuff still doesn't get funded in the public sector. There is a $100 billion shortfall in water system funding: https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/drinking_water https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/drinking_w.... Did the Flint water crises have any effect on that? No. Because political entities that are accountable to voters for water rate increases aren't any more willing to invest in risk mitigation than private companies. > And agreed, I'm not a superfan of Amtrak. There's a wide spectrum on how to do things. Most public infrastructure in the United States is run like Amtrak. The D.C. Metro had to shut down automated train control (self-driving), which was a feature built into the system in the 1970s, because they had let the track sensors deteriorate so much. We had to shut down the subway in D.C. for weeks at a time a couple of years ago because it was literally killing people. New York's subway system is in the same sorry state: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/11/15949284/new-york-subway-crisis https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/11/15949284/n...

rayiner 6y ago

Big rainstorms are not news, yet most public sewer systems are totally unequipped to deal with them. Hot days in summer are not news and yet Amtrak is unequipped to deal with them (http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/06/heat-restrictions http://blog.amtrak.com/2015/06/heat-restrictions). Around the country, there is a $4.5 trillion infrastructure backlog. https://www.asce.org/templates/press-release-detail.aspx?id=24013 https://www.asce.org/templates/press-release-detail.aspx?id=.... Almost all of that backlog is on the plate of public entities (road works, sewer works, bridges, etc.) Where do you live that the government has actually addressed crises that it faces in the present and has time to pro-actively address stuff scientists are talking about happening years in the future? Yeah, maybe competent and pro-active bureaucrats at a government power utility would have avoided this problem. It also could have been avoided by running power plants on unicorn manure, which I hear has natural anti-freeze properties.

lmeyerov 6y ago
This feels like rapidly shifting goalposts from my statement about energy being local and the local private energy companies cheaping out because they could Yes, a lot of people live in denial. In security-related areas of all kinds where the ROI is largely unobservable loss prevention, that's why leadership-level people know to ask for budget immediately after any incident... because important stuff doesn't get funded or enforced otherwise. And agreed, I'm not a superfan of Amtrak. There's a wide spectrum on how to do things. The more I learn about any individual one, the more I learn that most things appear broken from the inside, so I am both consistently awed things work in the daily case, and know that left alone, they won't in the edge cases.
- rayiner 6y ago
  > This feels like rapidly shifting goalposts from my statement about energy being local and the local private energy companies cheaping out because they could It's not shifting the goal posts. A company that feeds into a market with 26 million customers is not so "local" that a free market can't work. That's bigger than most countries. And you've offered no evidence that a public utility would not have "cheaped out" on weatherization. > Yes, a lot of people live in denial. In security-related areas of all kinds where the ROI is largely unobservable loss prevention, that's why leadership-level people know to ask for budget immediately after any incident... because important stuff doesn't get funded otherwise. Disaster after disaster happens, and important stuff still doesn't get funded in the public sector. There is a $100 billion shortfall in water system funding: https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/drinking_water https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org/cat-item/drinking_w.... Did the Flint water crises have any effect on that? No. Because political entities that are accountable to voters for water rate increases aren't any more willing to invest in risk mitigation than private companies. > And agreed, I'm not a superfan of Amtrak. There's a wide spectrum on how to do things. Most public infrastructure in the United States is run like Amtrak. The D.C. Metro had to shut down automated train control (self-driving), which was a feature built into the system in the 1970s, because they had let the track sensors deteriorate so much. We had to shut down the subway in D.C. for weeks at a time a couple of years ago because it was literally killing people. New York's subway system is in the same sorry state: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/11/15949284/new-york-subway-crisis https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/11/15949284/n...