8 ms·

"A recent study published by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Colorado School of Mines, and University of Massachusetts-Amherst asserted that minority

by oblib 5y ago

"A recent study published by the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Colorado School of Mines, and University of Massachusetts-Amherst asserted that minority areas were over four times as likely to suffer from an energy blackout than white-majority areas." That's a problem.

jimbob45 5y ago
Poorer areas are going to have poorer infrastructure in place more susceptible to natural disaster. If you fix the infrastructure, it stops being as poor of a region and then the poor leave due to higher property taxes. Also “over [N] times higher” is usually a marker that you’re being misled. Four times 0.00001 is still an extremely small number, not even statistically significant.
- matmatmatmat 5y ago
  Statistical significance is whether or not the data support rejecting the null hypothesis. Effect size is the difference between the two samples. You can have statistically significant results with a very small effect size.
- edoceo 5y ago
  They said "minority" then you equivocate to "poor". Those are not the same thing. Also, TFA: "Income status of areas did not appear to be a strong factor"
username90 5y ago
They didn't shut down areas with hospitals or other important facilities. Likely there aren't many such facilities in minority areas.
- vlovich123 5y ago
  At the bottom of the article: the prescience of these important facilities decreased the probability of a shutdown from 0-6%. Probably look for a better hypothesis. What was also interesting is that it correlated with altitude of the meter which indicates a preference for wealthier neighborhoods. The problem is that the data Hash collected is incomplete and hard to draw conclusions from: * It’s a war driving effort of a small strip of Dallas * The data becomes impossible to capture as normal interruptions happen and reset the uptime counter. It’s also unclear to me if these uptime counters are affected by having a generator or other backup power supply. One of the examples he noted was a Chase Bank that hadn’t experienced an interruption at all.
  - nonameiguess 5y ago
    The effect sizes and neighborhood-level disparities were referring to a nationwide study of all blackout conducted by the cited universities (and LLNL), in case that wasn't clear. Hash's war-driving data from Dallas is totally separate. I live in Dallas and can tell you there was no disparity during this last winter storm. Unless you were critical infrastructure, they blacked out everyone. I live within spitting distance of city hall and I was still losing power every few hours for two weeks.
umvi 5y ago
Again though... this needn't be attributed to racism. It's not like power companies are like "hmm, grid is under strain, guess we better cut black people and latino people's power first" Re-frame the problem in terms of rich vs. poor. Now it makes sense because power companies (which are privatized in Texas) will prioritize fixing infrastructure for their reliable, paying customers over fixing infrastructure for more unreliable customers (which poor people tend to be). And it happens that some minorities have a higher probability of being poor (because of inter-generational poverty, or just being an immigrant coming from a poor country).
- corndoge 5y ago
  > Now it makes sense because power companies (which are privatized in Texas) will prioritize their reliable, paying customers over less reliable customers that might miss payments. Not that I necessarily disagree with this but do you have any data to back this claim up?
  - username90 5y ago
    When you have to pay thousands of dollars per mwh it is pretty likely that many in poorer areas wont pay. And yeah, that rate is not impossible in Texas, they even have a law capping how high it can go since it is a problem. Edit: I am pretty sure that many poor homes wouldn't be able to pay a power bill of a few thousand dollars, which is what you'd pay if you have variable rate and ran as normal throughout the texas power crisis.
    - amock 5y ago
      How many people had to pay higher than usual rates? As far as I can tell there were very few people who were on plans that passed those rates down to the consumer and I don't see any reason that poorer areas would have more people on that kind of plan.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- 5y ago
dukeofdoom 5y ago
US infrastructure hasn't improved in decades. All the top firms are now building new cities in the middle east and China. Parts of the US are stuck in the 1970 with nothing new built since then, and other parts are decaying back into third world infrastructure levels.

by oblib 5y ago

jimbob45 5y ago

Poorer areas are going to have poorer infrastructure in place more susceptible to natural disaster. If you fix the infrastructure, it stops being as poor of a region and then the poor leave due to higher property taxes. Also “over [N] times higher” is usually a marker that you’re being misled. Four times 0.00001 is still an extremely small number, not even statistically significant.

matmatmatmat 5y ago
Statistical significance is whether or not the data support rejecting the null hypothesis. Effect size is the difference between the two samples. You can have statistically significant results with a very small effect size.
edoceo 5y ago
They said "minority" then you equivocate to "poor". Those are not the same thing. Also, TFA: "Income status of areas did not appear to be a strong factor"

username90 5y ago

They didn't shut down areas with hospitals or other important facilities. Likely there aren't many such facilities in minority areas.

vlovich123 5y ago
At the bottom of the article: the prescience of these important facilities decreased the probability of a shutdown from 0-6%. Probably look for a better hypothesis. What was also interesting is that it correlated with altitude of the meter which indicates a preference for wealthier neighborhoods. The problem is that the data Hash collected is incomplete and hard to draw conclusions from: * It’s a war driving effort of a small strip of Dallas * The data becomes impossible to capture as normal interruptions happen and reset the uptime counter. It’s also unclear to me if these uptime counters are affected by having a generator or other backup power supply. One of the examples he noted was a Chase Bank that hadn’t experienced an interruption at all.
- nonameiguess 5y ago
  The effect sizes and neighborhood-level disparities were referring to a nationwide study of all blackout conducted by the cited universities (and LLNL), in case that wasn't clear. Hash's war-driving data from Dallas is totally separate. I live in Dallas and can tell you there was no disparity during this last winter storm. Unless you were critical infrastructure, they blacked out everyone. I live within spitting distance of city hall and I was still losing power every few hours for two weeks.

umvi 5y ago

Again though... this needn't be attributed to racism. It's not like power companies are like "hmm, grid is under strain, guess we better cut black people and latino people's power first" Re-frame the problem in terms of rich vs. poor. Now it makes sense because power companies (which are privatized in Texas) will prioritize fixing infrastructure for their reliable, paying customers over fixing infrastructure for more unreliable customers (which poor people tend to be). And it happens that some minorities have a higher probability of being poor (because of inter-generational poverty, or just being an immigrant coming from a poor country).

corndoge 5y ago
> Now it makes sense because power companies (which are privatized in Texas) will prioritize their reliable, paying customers over less reliable customers that might miss payments. Not that I necessarily disagree with this but do you have any data to back this claim up?
- username90 5y ago
  When you have to pay thousands of dollars per mwh it is pretty likely that many in poorer areas wont pay. And yeah, that rate is not impossible in Texas, they even have a law capping how high it can go since it is a problem. Edit: I am pretty sure that many poor homes wouldn't be able to pay a power bill of a few thousand dollars, which is what you'd pay if you have variable rate and ran as normal throughout the texas power crisis.
  - amock 5y ago
    How many people had to pay higher than usual rates? As far as I can tell there were very few people who were on plans that passed those rates down to the consumer and I don't see any reason that poorer areas would have more people on that kind of plan.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
5y ago

dukeofdoom 5y ago

US infrastructure hasn't improved in decades. All the top firms are now building new cities in the middle east and China. Parts of the US are stuck in the 1970 with nothing new built since then, and other parts are decaying back into third world infrastructure levels.