Watching Perseverance landing on Mars, team discussing future ESA orbiter to Mars, NASA rocket picking up samples from the ground and other top-class projects...
...in the other news people literally denying existence of viruses, people living in houses with single-glazed windows, no electricity because libertarianism...
Such disparities never end well in long term.
@kravietz wait, how is libertarianism causing power outages?
@kravietz right... So the federal rules would have made this winter storm not take out all the infrastructure? Or it would have allowed other grids to maybe supply some power when Texas' plants went down? Is libertarianism also to blame for California's rolling blackouts?
Sure, if you have deficit of power form your local sources, then you pull it from the other regions - that's the very point of the grid, isn't it?
Isolating a grid so that "feds don't mess with us" is just as dumb as calling for "totally decentralised power" as proposed by some fans of renewable energy.
> California's rolling blackouts
That's called "whataboutism".
@kravietz I'm just saying you have no evidence that libertarianism has anything to do with the blackouts. You have no evidence that connecting to a greater grid would have reduced the blackouts or their duration. It's complete speculation.
Do those other regions actually have excess capacity to share with Texas given the historic cold weather? Are the local transmission lines still operational enough to distribute it? Would fed messing with it prevented any of this?
Blackout happened because Texas grid made assumptions about max demand that came out to be too low, plus supply was reduced by power plant failures.
For a closed system, that was game over. This is due to the law of conservation of energy.
But since the law is valid for an *isolated system* the only way to game it is to expand the boundary of the system. This is precisely why all countries in the world are now expanding their grids.
Except for Texas, that is.
@kravietz every system is isolated on a big enough scale. On the wider grid scale there was also more demand than supply and power plant issues. Texas itself is larger than most countries of the world.
The problem as you state is that the assumptions the grid was based on was completely eclipsed by the conditions over the last week. Not much you can do about that on this large of a scale. Do you have any sources saying an outside connection would have been able to pick up the slack?
The larger grid, the more *chances* you have to pull some energy from someone who has surplus at given moment. By isolating itself Texas basically *guaranteed* its failure in case of unexpected demand peak.
And I have absolutely no sources for that, I'm watching Perseverence with a bottle of cider and I'm not doing any more free research today.
@kravietz I also watched Perseverance land and I'm all about science. But you attacking libertarians as anti science with the conjecture you are making is just as anti science as you condemn.
Maybe the chances are higher, maybe Texas could have fared better. But you also don't weigh any benefits of lower regulation and if on the whole less regulation is worse for the people of Texas. That's not a very scientific method.
Enjoy your evening.
> attacking libertarians as anti science
I'm not attacking libertarians as "anti-science", I'm just having a chuckle on them because the whole "BUT X, WOULD ,BE SOCIALISM" argument has nothing to do with science, it's just dumb tribalism.
https://write.as/arcadian/pragmatism-and-dogmatism-in-economy-capitalism-versus-socialism
@kravietz I get that the argument of socialism for anything done by government is bad. But condemning a tribe because they think like a tribe seems like dumb tribalism to me... Just from another tribe.
Also, remember that libertarians are a minority even in the USA and we don't get much say in anything. Texans believe they're a sovereign entity to themselves as an identity outside of most political lines. It's a weird state thing...
> Texans believe they're a sovereign entity
Any belief is perfectly OK if it works. If it doesn't, you die and your belief dies with you.
On the other hand, if you say "we're totally self-sufficient" and then you beg for external aid, which USSR, Ayn Rand and Texas mastered, it's just unconvincing.
Why is it odd? USSR was built on the foundation that Marxist economy is superior to "capitalist" (whatever that is). In long term it sucked. To survive they had to take loans from "imperialist" countries which they continued to loathe in official propaganda. That was 100% dogmatism (=no reforms) and hypocrisy (=borrow from those you criticise).
@kravietz it's odd because the USSR failed because they were unable to make central control of resources and production work and you're making the claim that more central control of Texas' power grid would have been better.
Also odd that you are poking fun of a natural caused disaster in Texas while celebrating the successes of science and space exploration considering Houston is pretty much the home of NASA.
I'm wondering how many Texans you know and how familiar you are with regulations here
@Danbert8
From libertarian point of view NASA is socialism, isn't it? 🤔
@kravietz sort of... NASA is exploration and research, not infrastructure or production of goods. I think centralized plan ING makes sense for a lot of expensive and long term research.
NASA has been made more efficient by private enterprises that are increasingly providing them equipment and services. Perseverance made it to Mars on the top of a ULA rocket made by a private company. Let the government plan the research and contract it out to the best private bidder.
100% agree and this is pragmatic approach, because public and private sector are just economic instruments with different characteristics, such as risk aversion, for-profit orientation etc. A mixed approach like NASA... just works.
@kravietz I think we share more philosophy than we differ.
I think more libertarian view would be a central body that has standards that power grids must meet to work together, but let each grid make their own rules and agreements to connect to each other. The government should be that central body that says 220v, 3 phase, 60hz, etc and then help mediate agreements between grids. But the CFR rules are way more than that.
> in favor of central planning
That's precisely the attitude what I'm talking about all the time!
If my water mains is frozen I will just go to a neighbour with a crate of beer and agree on a temporary hose to my house, because it's *pragmatic.*
If you* instead talk about "central planning" and your whole family suffers without water, then you're just like the Mosquito Coast (1986) guy, dogmatic and trying to prove a point, nothing else.
* "you" used figuratively
@kravietz in your analogy with Texas though you can't exchange beer for water unless you accept and adopt all the water rules your neighbor has for your house as well. If your neighbor gave you a few hundred thousand rules you had to follow before they'd give you the hose, maybe you would just figure something else out, especially if that scenario was very unlikely and rare.
I'm still trying to find my ways around US political terminology...
So "socialism" is anything remotely related to the public or government, "central planning" now seems to be any trace of state-wide coordination.
Look, sometimes coordination makes sense from technical and logistical point of view.
Capitalism won with Marxism because it was pragmatic and adopted any ideas that worked. Now if you reject any ideas because they "don't belong", it's simply dogmatic, not pragmatic.
@kravietz I'm all about coordination if it makes sense from a technical and logistical view. The pragmatic solution would be to allow Texas to connect their grid to their neighbors while allowing them to use their own regulations. Forcing them to adopt rules from a dysfunctional federal government in order to connect is what the problem is.
> connect their grid to their neighbors while allowing them to use their own regulations
Yes, and allow me ride public transport while allowing me to apply my own tariffs, right?
The whole concept of "common good" assumes that *sometimes* is makes sense to make loss financially in order for *everyone else* to benefit, but that includes yourself too. We pay taxes for public education and healthcare (well, not in US) because everyone benefits from that directly or indirectly.
@kravietz there isn't a problem with having differently regulated and controlled networks being connected though as long as there are agreements in place and a way to convert at the connection. Not sure how it works for you, but here I can get off a local train and get on an airplane to travel. But the rules for what I can take on an airplane are way different than what I can take on a train. Why can't you connect with different regulations as long as they are compatible?
What I assume federal grid operators are doing is balancing supply and demand on the scale of the whole country and with international connectors, for the sake of long-term resilience.
If you are a state strong on the supply side, you may feel you are making less profits than you could, because the regulator is capping your output to balance supply with others.
Now, you *are* making less profit locally, but you are buying resilience for it.
@kravietz I don't work in the power sector, but I am in the energy industry and manage assets across the country. Texas does a lot of internal regulation, and I'd say it's no worse or better than the federal for the most part. But I can see why they might want independence considering the way federal rules are written and managed.
It also doesn't help that Texas and the federal regulators know pretty much nothing about the industries they are regulating...
@kravietz did Ayn Rand beg for external aid? Or did she receive government benefits that she was eligible for and paid into?
I'm against deficits and money printing, but am I cashing government stimulus checks? Heck yes I am. I consider it an offset to inflation and a tax refund. Maybe that makes me a hypocrite, but I didn't get to vote on it.
Odd bringing up the USSR begging for aid while condemning libertarians in favor of central planning... Also not sure how Texas has mastered it...