kravietz 🦇 @kravietz@social.privacytools.io

@Danbert8

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.

@Danbert8

> 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

@Danbert8

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).

Did Jeremy Rifkin approve of that 😱

@Danbert8

> 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.

@Danbert8

Because if you live in a house of energy efficiency of camping tent, 90% of your heating actually heats the air above, and this is hurting everyone. This is the classic concept of "externality".

Market economy doesn't deal with externalities, because it's an idealised model. You deal with externalities specifically with regulation and taxes, which is bringing the external cost back into the market equilibrium.

@Danbert8

You have a distorted view of what a "free market economy" is. Price-supply-demand only works under certain assumptions.

So if you do have to heat your house *at all* and you still have to choose between cardboard and energy efficient walls/windows in 2021, and the latter is considered a "luxury", then it certainly *is* a systemic problem, aka a "government one".

@Danbert8

> don't weigh any benefits of lower regulation

I currently live in a country that allows home owners to legally have fuse boards from 1942 and single-glazed windows in 2021, and I find this "lower regulation" harmful and dumb on so many levels that it hurts.

@Danbert8

> 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

@Danbert8

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.

@kmic To chyba trza oblać 😀

@Danbert8

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.

@charbelwave

God made science, so shut up and love science.

@Danbert8

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".

@Danbert8

Ha!

https://www.texastribune.org/2011/02/08/texplainer-why-does-texas-have-its-own-power-grid/

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.

@zloygik Блин, конечно - только что читал интервю с отцом с 2018 года и вот...

18 February 2014, Kyiv, Ukraine 🇺🇦 professor Nikolai Kuznetsov and his son Igor, beaten by Berkut police during Euromaidan protests. 3 days later president Yanukovych fleed to Russia.