
I was reading this article in Texas Monthly the other day:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news/el-paso-electric-winter-storm-2021/
It’s about how El Paso is actually just fine, thank you very much, and the reasons why they are doing so well have everything to do with what is fucked up about the rest of the state’s power infrastructure. Nine years ago, El Paso suffered a major catastrophe of its own in the aftermath of a major winter storm. Since that time, they spent a shitload of money to build new infrastructure and winterize existing facilities. But the most significant piece of this puzzle is that they are not a part of the Texas power grid and pretty much never have been. This is due to matters of geography, history and politics that I don’t really care to get into the weeds over on a DOT. Suffice it to say that one of the major reasons why El Paso (and a few other regions along the Texas border with other states) is doing so much better is because they belong to one of the two major interconnected grids in North America. The Western Interconnection covers 14 states, a couple of Canadian provinces and a little bit of Mexico. The Western Interconnection is also subject to federal regulation, which means they aren’t designed as a Randian-esque wet dream of freedumb and self-reliance.
Now, to be fair to history, the Texas grid was developed prior to the point when FDR signed the Federal Power Act which created the two major grids and brought a bunch of new regulation with it. So, Texas—being Texas—simply chose to opt out. They didn’t need no stinkin’ federal gubmint to tell them what to do. They were better off on their own.
Except, as a certain former mayor has reminded us, only the strong survive. The problem, of course, is that these sovereign state idiots don’t really know what that means. If you’re on your own, then you are vulnerable by default. If, however, you are part of a larger group—a collective, if you will—then you are stronger precisely because you are part of that group. Sure, only the strong survive, but what’s that other saying? Oh yeah: there is strength in numbers. Put that in your boot and drink it.
It seems this has been quite the topic of conversation in Texas—the nature of the Texas grid, the means by which it is governed, and the role of the state legislature in setting up 90% of the population for a real-life version of Lord of the Flies. However, let us not kid ourselves into thinking that there will actually be some kind of reckoning. Between their bullshit statements about the Green New Deal and the shit-filled-pie-throwing battle royal between the governor, the state’s energy regulator and the legislature, there will be no major changes coming. There most certainly will not be a push to join up with the federal system and subject themselves to that damned commie regulation. Oh sure, there’ll be a few bucks tossed at insulating a few power stations and a few officials will be asked to fall on their swords, but you can bet your ass that ultimately not much will change. What will change, however, is that the people living in Texas will be forced to become even more self-reliant. They will wire their homes to run off of generators, and they’ll dig wells, and stock up on more guns so their neighbors, who either didn’t have the foresight or the money to make the same preparations, will eat hot lead when they come looking for a warm place to sleep. In effect, Texas will become even more psychotic about their Lone Star pathos, and will continue to devolve ever further into third world country status with humanitarian crisis after humanitarian crisis bringing the state to its metaphorical knees. Texas residents most certainly will not demand a better government that might ask for a few extra tax dollars in exchange for not freezing to fucking death, because everybody knows that the only good government is no government at all.
But, luckily for them, there’s a federal government which can bail them out by sending money and resources to help the people that would otherwise die at the hands of their disinterested and malicious leaders. Then, the minute the situation is stabilized, those same leaders will tell the feds to get the fuck out and stop treading on them. It’s sort of an odd reversal of the abusive relationship: the party with the power (figuratively and literally) gets slapped in the face by the party without the power.
Anyway, here’s some interesting shit:
I honestly wonder if Chuck Schumer knew what he was in for when he made Bernie Sanders the Chair of the Senate Budget Committee.
We already knew this, but now we have economic research to prove it. Attractive people have advantages basically everywhere—even in places where one wouldn’t think to look.
Naomi Osaka is kicking ass and taking names.
I really, really hope that Facebook eats all the shit in the world over this. They can afford it and still be obscenely profitable—they simply don’t want to pay, and figure they can twist the collective arm of an entire nation to get what they want.
https://www.bbc.com/news/56127158
Time for some tunes:
It’s National Margarita Day (?) so I guess there is that. Sadly for me there is precisely one decent Mexican (or really Tex-Mex) restaurant in my neighborhood that I would go to for take-out. All the rest are worse than Chipotle (and we have no Chipotles where I am), and this place has no liquor license, so they wouldn’t be offering margarita specials to celebrate this historic day.
I thought National Margarita Day was May 5th.
“When the snows fall and the white winds blow, the lone star state dies, but the pack of states who organized together survives.”
Texans imagine themselves the Germanic Barbarian lone warrior when the reality is they were the two singletons who got slaughtered at the beginning while everyone else huddled together behind their shields.
…I’ve seen various different complaints about the tactic of surge pricing for rideshare apps like uber in the past & it does seem pretty close to price gouging when you get down to it
…but the texas power companies looking to have customers compensate them for a wholesale price spike brought about in no small part by their own failure to invest at an infrastructure level (which as I understand it is arguably the biggest contributor to both the outages & the corresponding hike in wholesale prices for the remaining supply) seem like they ought to be prosecuted?
…if your state has millions without power & utilities are disrupted to the point that a boil water notice is issued to many & the federal government declares a major emergency I fail to see how you justify dumping a bill for (in some cases) the best part of $20,000 on customers for the week you dropped the ball spectacularly & people died as a result
…any claim that that’s just how the numbers work out as per the agreed contract seems to rely on treating it on the basis of “business as usual” when that couldn’t be further from the truth
Tx has a public utilities commission, I think they would be the ones to sort out what costs will be borne by ratepayers.
The fact that AOC is raising $ for Texans impresses me beyond belief. She is a bigger person than I am.
She’s a much bigger person than I am, although I can see for her part of the motivation might be setting the example of “this is how your representatives SHOULD behave.” Not that it will make any difference to the knuckledraggers because all they see is some dirty socialist using a sneaky ruse to lull them into a false sense of security only to try and take away their freedumb.
I really like the Voltage song, sometimes I lean a little bit Americana and country (not often, but it has been known to happen, especially Hiss Golden Messenger). I added the entire album that your featured song comes from to my current play list – thank you, good sir.
As for Texas, I can’t even. We saw my son over the weekend, and he explained to me why this Texas attitude and crisis is a thing, using a thought experiment from a long-ago college class. He said “Now Mom, you believe in, and have raised me to believe in – and act – ethically, for the good of all people. So, suppose you are placed in one room, and 100 people are placed in another room. You are given a gun. The choice is – if you shoot yourself within x number of minutes, the 100 people are freed. If you do not, the 100 people are killed. Not a question, right? You kill yourself so that 100 other people can live. That is not the choice of many others, and you just don’t understand that.”
That can be applied directly to the actions of that ex-mayor, Ted Cruz, and others…
Don’t thank me, thank @farscythe. He’s the one who turned me on to Voltage.
Hell, if any of those Texas shitbags were put in a room with a gun and given that choice, they would try to find a way to shoot the other 100 themselves just to make damned good and sure they survived.
This seems like a rather extreme example to me and if I could I would post the Denis Leary song, I’m an Asshole because frankly, I would not shoot myself in this scenario.
I’m no hero.
…much as I do get the point of principle involved & concur that it’s hard to see how logically you can arrive at a single life being of greater value than 100…there’s still the part of me that is overly fond of a line from a sage francis tune
…the middle part might seem like an obstacle if the 100 are doomed by my survival…but assuming the hurt is equal that last bit sure sounds like they might be out of luck?
…I do like a good thought experiment but sometimes I wonder if the ones that are less extreme work better for much this sort of reason…I mean if you had a choice to give 100 people $1 or keep $100 yourself most people would take the c-note…but if you could have a single dollar or give a dollar each to 100 people I’d suspect more people would opt for the give away…well…maybe not in texas but hopefully that made sense to someone besides me?
Here is a charming article about Zuckerberg overruing Facebook’s standards and allowing Alex Jones to dodge a ban.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/ryanmac/mark-zuckerberg-joel-kaplan-facebook-alex-jones
This adds to the pile of evidence that Zuck’s motive is not profit. He has hit the saturation point of money. Now, even when his own people tell him how the far right is screwing up Facebook, he doesn’t care.
There are a couple of interesting insights in the article. One is that Zuck’s top political advisor, Joel Kaplan (former Scalia clerk and best bud of Brett Kavanaugh) kept urging Zuck to avoid stirring up Trump because it would only encourage him. That was the same thought process of a lot of the liberal and press establishment, and it turns out the American right is a self-outraging machine.
The second is that because of Zuck and Kaplan’s leadership, everyone hates Facebook. Why does that matter? Because every one of these idiots operates on a level of skimming Machiavelli’s Prince. In particular, they know the short passge about how it is better to be feared than loved, and make it the key to their operating system.
Except that was a throwaway line, and the heart of what Machiavelli argued came next. Above all else, leaders must not be hated. People rise up against leaders when hate exceeds fear, and Zuck is piling up the hate points by listening to Kaplan.
Ah, yes. The Prince. Maybe as misunderstood as Nietzsche. If you are trying to get “in” with the ruling family, as Machiavelli was, it only makes sense you would write a them work justifying pretty much anything in the name of maintaining rule. The Prince is very Machiavellian in its aim and purpose.
I think it’s pretty clear now that Zuckerberg is basically a right-wing hate speech supporter. I used to think his actions were strictly profit-motivated, but at a certain point tolerance becomes tacit agreement. Zuck is well beyond that point now. Once you step in on the side of Alex Jones, you’re officially a scumbag.
…maybe someone should hide their copy of the prince & give them the tao te ching?
…I’m sure they’d prefer to be scarcely known…but the way thing are going the subjects certainly seem disinclined to claim the achievement of said purposes as their own…so I’d say zuck’s more despised than feared these days?
I think that’s very wise about rulers being scarcely known. George Pataki was Governor of New York for 12 years, including during 9/11, and he had a very contentious relationship with Mayor Giuliani, but in NYC we knew little of this and if you asked 100 New Yorkers (NYC residents) to name the governor most couldn’t have done it, I bet. Now we have Governor Cuomo, whom I think most of you have heard about it, and he’s like he’s Orwell’s Big Brother, you can’t get away from him. We are micro-managed to within an inch of our lives. This is partly situational, since de Blasio is so inept and ineffectual and the only time you hear from him is when something blows up in his face or he says “we are going to do this” and within minutes Cuomo will say. “I am the governor, and we’re going to do that.” Trump was that way. Seems like we had eight years of smoothish sailing under Obama and then suddenly the media couldn’t keep up with Trump’s manic, unhinged tweeting. I look forward to the calm, steadying hand of President Biden.
Attractive people are more successful — we can file that under “duh.” Most of us average folk realized that in middle school. Here’s a good breakdown of 11 reasons why:
https://www.businessinsider.com/beautiful-people-make-more-money-2014-11#attractive-people-are-more-sought-after-as-romantic-partners-11
Now my attractive vs. unattractive (okay, well, average — I’ll give myself some credit) story, because I always have a story. I had to take over a test preparation class, oh, 25 or so years ago. I worked for a well-known standardized test prep company part-time, because I had three jobs at the time, because English major. The center manager called and basically begged me to take over the class because the current teacher “didn’t know the material” and “needed more training.”
I came in and met the guy and he was gorgeous (listen, I don’t go in for this bullshit where cis guys say they don’t know when another guy is good-looking — we ABSOLUTELY do and anybody that says otherwise is lying). Tall, muscular, dazzling smile, looked like a model. And he was an idiot. I mean, this is SAT test prep so in theory you learned everything you need by your senior year in high school. It doesn’t go beyond geometry. And he STILL couldn’t handle it. But he was beautiful, so …
Anyway, I agreed to take over the class and it was the worst teaching experience I’ve ever had, and I had a murderer in one of my college classes. It was 75% giddy teenage girls, and 25% sullen teenage boys who had absolutely no hope of competing with Matt the Greek god. I told them I was there to take over and the girls practically rioted. We’d agreed to say Matt had a family emergency and then all the girls wanted his contact information. I said no, of course. For the rest of the course, every single kid sat in sullen silence. For weeks. I’d ask questions and NOBODY responded. The girls refused to participate and the boys didn’t want to look like suck-ups in front of the girls. If you’ve taught you know how awful a dead class is, and it happens, but it’s usually one class, and next week picks up. This never picked up. I dreaded that class like nothing before or since.
The real issue was the center manager, a young woman, REALLY liked Matt, of course, because every woman and a significant percentage of the men who met him REALLY liked him. And she bypassed all the rules (you needed minimum SAT scores, teaching experience, had to do teaching demonstrations, etc.) to give him a job and to protect him once he proved he wasn’t up to it.
So do attractive people get all kinds of breaks in life? Oh, yes, yes, they do.
So I don’t know about other industries, but the IT contract firms are notorious for hiring attractive young women to be reps. Like pharmaceutical sales.
One time a firm (I think it was Beacon Hill) had a male rep come in with the female reps to chat up some managers, and one of my male coworkers was like “who is he? is he new? does he work here now??” This male coworker was always really worried about losing his job, despite being very qualified and very productive.
Anyhoo
One of the other guys I work with laughed and was like “just look at how handsome he is! He’s not working here, he has that job because he’s good-looking.” And yes, when we tried talking to him, he was not hired for his communication skills.
Oh happy day!
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-tax-returns-grand-jury/
Yep. It’s time to have a hard look at the former president’s OTHER crimes.
Just saw that in the elevator on my way to getting my 2nd shot. That is great and surprising news.
Jesus, “without comment” from the deck that he stacked. “So bring it on…”
Excellent break-down on Texas, @butcherbakertoiletrymaker. I have family in Austin who are the complete opposite of Cruz/Gomert/Abbott/Perry voters (so they don’t deserve these ass-hats), and the biggest point of despair for them is that this will not lead to meaningful change down there.
Did they happen to send a mariachi band to Ted’s house?
Gah, didn’t take.
Of course, even Austin is pretty well screwed ever since the Republicans gerrymandered the city to get split up among a bunch of other Republican districts. The one, lone vestige of sane representation in the statehouse got wiped out.
awww daft punk split up
*pours one out*
welp…they must be nearly pensioners by now anyway