Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, February 17, 2021
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106 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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The market doesn’t always know best.
In Texas, the circular firing squad is forming up. Immediately, the usual suspects shot at windmills and solar panels as the culprit. When that proved to be BS, the Governor blamed ERCOT our power regulator conveniently forgetting which party has been in charge of Texas since the 90s. My useless Freedom Caucus congressman, Chip Roy sends this out:
Conveniently forgetting that his former employer, the billionaire funded Texas Public Policy Foundation has pushed deregulation for years.
We’ve (me, personally, not the city) been alright here in San Antonio since apparently we are served by the same substation that feeds the nearest hospital and other essentials and is not subject to the rolling blackouts. My son, in Houston was without power for a day and half but it apparently returned at 1000 last night. Unfortunately, there is freezing rain goin on outside. Just hoping some power lines don’t break. All in all, good times.
‘Even for the Rich, It’s Hard to Access’ America’s wealthiest are discovering the vaccine is one of the few things money can’t buy.
Awwwwww, pobrecito… Guess you’ll just have to stand in line along with the rest of us peons. Hope you can hold your breath.
FTFT, They will definitely be getting a bill.
@Sleeping Dog:
Do you really think that fully regulated and/or government-owned power companies would have planned for this? It’s been 30 years since temps got this cold in Texas, and I can’t find when the last major ice storm was.
No comment on the charges being dropped except to wonder if a black person would be treated with a similar leniency (BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA…. No I don’t) but I do want to say that lawyers like Barnes make me think maybe Shakespeare was right.
Seen on the intertubes:
A reporter asked Michael Jordan if the 90s Bulls could beat Lebron James’s Lakers.
“Yes”, said Jordan.
“By how much?”, asked the reporter.
“Oh, two or three points.”
“Why so close?”
“Well, most of us are almost 60 now.”
A more perfect expression of libertarianism would be hard to find.
@sam: I’ve been through Colorado City. It is a dying or dead little town in West Texas, about 4000 population ,just off the interstate. Pretty sure they receive more tax dollars than they contribute.
@Mu Yixiao:
They didn’t have to plan for this; they just had to plan for “something happens that requires some backup generation capacity”. Which they used to do, and were considering continuing to do, and which other places still do.
@Mu Yixiao:
If you look at what failed in TX and you look at how your Wis utility companies keep the power on in the winter, yes some government intervention in the market, of the kind that happens in most of the country, would help. Would there be no one without power? No, some would be out, but the numbers would be far smaller.
US conservatives falsely blame renewables for Texas storm outages
Much stupidity at the link, like
According to Politico, Trump wanted to put a comment about McConnell’s triple chins in yesterday’s screed. He was dissuaded from doing so, possibly by someone who reminded Trump that he himself is carrying around what appears to be a 10 pound bag of lard on his neck.
The Atlantic Council is hosting a webinar today entitled “Reclaiming reality: Deradicalization and rehabilitation after the January 6 attack”.
As one who used to drive thru Texas most every winter I can say with certainty that Texas is no stranger to shitty winter weather. Redundancy in power grids is a thing everyone needs from time to time.
@Mu Yixiao: 2011. Temperatures plummeted. Generator went down. No, we didn’t have much renewables then. There were rolling blackouts then. We bought power from Mexico through 3 interconnects. So this is not new. It is a matter of money. And work. Much easier to worry about who is using which bathroom.
@Mu Yixiao:
Texplainer: Why does Texas have its own power grid?
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El Paso’s not seeing power outages like the rest of Texas – here’s why
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My highlights.
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@Mu Yixiao
Do you have any additional free market hot takes you want to share?
Here’s a more current and local article:
Texas largely relies on natural gas for power. It wasn’t ready for the extreme cold.
So no, it is not renewables.
@Mu Yixiao:
They would not have planned for this, but they would have had some redundancies/backups built in. There would have been some without power, but not the extreme problems they are having. Less of an either/or, and more of a scale.
Regulated power would have been mandated to have some backups in place. Texas went the route of “meh, it won’t happen here” and this is the result.
@DrDaveT:
They did need to plan for this. Natural gas deliveries to the generators were being curtailed due to very high residential demand. A bunch more gas-fired generation wouldn’t have done any good. And there’s a good chance additional reserves would be gas-fired because you can get those running quickly. There are no easy answers to the question of what do you do when half of your annual production is gas-fired, as is the case in Texas, and there’s a shortage of gas. IIRC, this has become a big source of concern for the New England reliability planners, because there has a been a huge shift to gas there.
This reminds me of an old joke about an economist and two others trying to open a can on a deserted island.
The architect of Texas’ electricity market says it’s working as planned. Critics compare it to late Soviet Russia.
I guess involuntary blackouts count as “forcing consumers to cut back on energy use”.
The economist solution to opening the can? “Assume a can opener”.
What are the skies like on other planets?
Mostly they’re different colors than the sky on Earth. But from Mercury, Venus, and Mars, you can see something else: the Moon.
Earth’s moon is large and reflective enough to be seen by the unaided human eye from all these planets. Not all the time the Earth’s visible, as it would sometimes be too close to the Earth and get lost in the glare, and sometimes it would be behind the Earth as seen from these worlds. But form time to time, you’d see a double planet.
Now, the ancients knew the planets were different from other lights in the sky, because they moved against the background stars, sometimes even backwards. But all planets visible from Earth with the naked eye (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn*), are single points of light until you aim a telescope at them.
So ancients living on Mars, say, might have deduced the third planet from the Sun to have a satellite, like Mars has two, and might have stumbled on the fact that planets are worlds long before they came up with telescopes.
Or maybe not. It’s hard to say due to the lack of any people on Mars.
* Uranus can be seen with the naked eye at times, but it’s so faint and it moves so slowly compared to the other planets, that it isn’t recognizable as a planet. It wasn’t until Herschel saw it through his telescope that it was discovered to be a planet. Prior to that, it had been seen and cataloged, often with lesser quality telescopes, numerous times as different tings (star, asteroid, nebula, comet, etc.)
@OzarkHillbilly:
It was on the local news today that here in Mass. we have a problem with people pretending to be the caretakers of those 75+ so they can get shots ahead of others.
@Mu Yixiao:
It’s a good point. But Texas system guaranteed that outcome. There is very little incentive to do maintenance let along upgrades. Think about what that article said: when things started to go south, energy prices went from a few dollars to up to $9000 – the suppliers will probably come out ahead. Why should they spend their own money on maintenance and upgrades? Their earnings are protected no matter what happens.
So yes, a good sensible mixture of market incentives and government regulations is necessary. But letting the energy company lobbyists write the bill, which I suspect is literally what happened in the Republican controlled state of Texas, is either stupid or corrupt, or a mixture of both.
For years CATO was an advocate for electricity markets and doing away with vertically-integrated rate-regulated utilities. Somewhere here I have the piece they wrote after their experts got done with their post-mortem on the California crisis. Their conclusion was that once the costs of all the necessary markets — current power generation and transmission, spinning reserve, long-term reserves, etc — were included, the market solution was as expensive as the old way of doing things and probably less reliable. When you look at PJM and CAISO over time, they’re constantly having to diddle around with additional markets to solve problems.
@OzarkHillbilly: I agree that the “Rare Event” excuse is extremely lame. The Texas system has neglected maintenance for decades, has not changed the basic control or infrastructure despite changes in where people live, what industries are located there, dramatic changes to the generating facilities and where those facilities are located. There are a lot of potential “rare events”. Texas isn’t ready for any of them. Like a third world country, the owners milk the work of previous generations for as long as they can and then, once the infrastructure is completely driven into the ground, will come with their hands out lecturing everyone about how “It’s time to reinvest for Texas!”
@Scott: ” I’ve been through Colorado City. It is a dying or dead little town in West Texas, about 4000 population ,just off the interstate. Pretty sure they receive more tax dollars than they contribute.”
I’ll bet sight unseen that they run a police car on the interstate to steal money from travellers.
I’m sure it will come out in the wash, but I wonder how many home owners and small institutions that invested in small generators hooked up to natural gas lines are finding that their generators can’t run?
There are also huge numbers of people across the country that use propane as a heat and cooking source, which is a great way to enjoy a lower cost of living, and in most cases a household can go through the winter on a single fill of propane. But whether you are in an unskirted single wide, or a tight and efficiently built home, the propane use increases exponentially when the outside temperature plummets.
leaving out the proper space between the a and the p reversed the meaning of this sentence.
The site I moderate where science types laugh at creationists has been down for 30+ hours. Guess where the server is?
@sam: I wish it were limited to Libertarians, but his attitude is the norm now for Republicans. “I don’t believe the government should provide services! Elect ME!”, and then when things go south, “You are lazy shiftless and, no doubt, brown. You shouldn’t expect services from the government!”
Actually, as I read that, he’s got a point. Republicans have made it clear since Reagan that they don’t think government should provide services, and instead their main job as a politician is to get prayer in schools and protect the statues to the founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Do the people who voted for these clowns really have any right to complain? Facebook should require proof that you didn’t vote Republican before you are allowed to complain about shoddy government services.
@CSK: Where ever there is a system, there are people trying to game it.
I guess I’ve finally blocked enough idiots on social media because I’ve yet to hear w/r/t Texas “whatever happened to global warming???” durr durr durr
@Teve: Reminds me of this case, where a missing comma resulted in a windfall to the little guys for once, to the tune of $5M
@Teve:
As someone who hasn’t blocked my old Trumpy friends, let me assure you that they’re still happy to share that insight, complete with the self-congratulatory chuckle.
@Bary: In west Texas? No f’n way. They don’t have enforced speed limits in west Texas. I once talked my way out of a *Missouri State Police* speeding ticket of 87 in a 70 by explaining that the night before I had been driving in Texas and that morn I had just taken over the driving again and my foot thought I was still in west Texas. It was more apology than excuse. He let me go.
**in general, if a MO SP pulls you over you are getting a ticket. Don’t argue, just say yes sir and take it like a man.
@Owen: Our MFA sells it at a contracted price one can lock in, in the fall. Then if the price doubles in February when you need a refill, you are paying the contracted price from the fall.
@Kathy:
Surely you’d need a mirror.
Sorry. Yes, I do realize I’m a grown-up.
@Teve:
LOL
Nice catch. I grabbed the quote off their site and didn’t notice the mistake.
@MarkedMan: i’ve told the story before, but 12 years ago I met this guy who was really smart and interesting and funny, and we both liked kicks and Miatas and became fast friends. And then he went into the army. And a few years later I started noticing he was saying shitty things to my women friends on Facebook. One friend in particular is a very smart lawyer. She’ll do a 2-week contract gig at a firm in downtown Chicago, then spend 2 months following bands around and getting hammered. And he started calling her stupid. And it came out last year that he’s become a Trumper. We had a mutual friend in common named Jennifer, and when I was dealing with this shit I texted her and asked her what she did about him, and she said “oh that guy? I blocked him years ago. He’s a piece of shit.”
@Loviatar: ^^^^ pedant 😛
@Teve: (to be clear I’m calling myself a pedant)
@Michael Cain:
That’s certainly true.
I was assuming that reserve capacity would use a different mode from base capacity, as it is with surge capacity. Base load is covered out of fuels with low unit cost and high startup/shutdown costs, while surges are covered using fuels with high unit cost that are cheap to bring online. At least, that’s how it worked back in the 90s when I last looked closely at this — let me know if that has changed nationally, or is different in Texas.
@Teve:
Are you? That’s not the way I read it, I though you were just hanging me out to dry.
—–
P.S. how do you put in the emojis?
@Loviatar:
For the humor impaired; I am joking
@Loviatar:
I draw mine on the screen in crayon. No one seems to react to them though…
@Loviatar: Are you? That’s not the way I read it, I thought you were just hanging him out to dry.
@Loviatar:
You do the old time punctuation mark smileys: like ” : ” and ” ) ” without the quotes and spaces in between 🙂 , 😛 , 😉
@Mu Yixiao:
Well we don’t have to think about whether the commercial sector would planned for it do we?
Once again, “The Market” is a tool to serve people. Hyper-focus on its ‘efficiency’ is a perversion of its intended mission. Planning for–and setting aside resources to execute a contingency that might occur every 10-15 years is not efficient. We’ve seen the same dynamic with the Pandemic. Once a century virus that kills millions? We ain’t spending money to set things aside for that shit on my watch—let the next guy/gal deal with it.
You cannot drive a car on the road (for long) by looking over the hood ornament. The market worshipers pervert the very things about the market that make them useful–resilience–in exchange for the efficient return on capital to investors.
Market Culter Logic: Let’s see–styrofoam hammers are returning 13% ROI but these steel hammers only return 9%. Styrofoam hammers it is!
@Scott: Probably a smart man with flawed logic. The system should be designed to minimize price spikes when people are using their climate control systems FOR SURVIVAL vs for comfort. But this is a guy that believes the people serve the market.
@Michael Reynolds: Extra spine vertebra helps too…
@Kathy:
thxs 🙂
@Michael Reynolds:
As the old saying … nah, not gonna go there, wouldn’t be prudent. Today, for a limited time, my moon is in benevolence.
(Grinning chuckle emoji)
A look back for those looking for extracurricular activities:
Fyi, both Cracker and I skipped this event, IIRC.
To the sound of cheering spectators, the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City was demolished this morning.
I hopes this augurs the same for all things Trump.
@Jim Brown 32:
They did plan–just not enough. They have gas reserves–but they’re having difficulty getting them to the power plants. And…
[emphasis mine]
It’s not like the Texas grid is the wild west following some Ayn Rand bullshit view of the world.
@OzarkHillbilly:..**in general, if a MO SP pulls you over you are getting a ticket. Don’t argue, just say yes sir and take it like a man.
A few years ago I got stopped for running a red light. I had seen the cop parked on the roadside and when I looked up the light was red and I didn’t want to slam on the brakes. Besides, the officer might be sleeping. Ha!
He was at least half my age so I attempted to appeal to his Southern Illinois pedigree.
“Do you know why I stopped you?”
“I ran the red light.”
“Why did you do that?”
“I was listening to the Cardinal game.”
The man audibly groaned. I mean he almost puked.
This guy is a Cub fan I said to myself as he went back to his car to run my license.
When he returned with my ticket I said: “This is what I get for listening to the Stink Birds, I’m a Cub fan.” I knew it was too late to get the ticket ripped up but I thought I’d try it any way since I am a Cub fan.
“Me too! This is the year! This is the year!” he said as he literally pranced all the way back to his squad car.
And it was! June 2016!
@Michael Cain:
@DrDaveT:
New England does have a natural gas supply issue due to the dearth of pipeline capacity and reliance on LNG tankers. Electrical generation facilities deal with that reality by maintaining a stock of fuel oil at the generating plants so they switch as needed. Again it is recognizing a problem and investing in a back up plan.
@Jim Brown 32: Hear, Hear. I remember when I was sitting in the project review committee for a multi-billion dollar division of a company when I realized that no company was going to invest in projects they KNEW would take ten years. It was just math. We downrated future earnings at something like 14%/year, a very normal number. A project that takes 10 years has to generate 4-5 times as much per dollar invested as a project that takes 1 year. Add to that the risk of a 1 year project typically being small while that of a 10 year project is quite high and you realize that those long term things never get funded.
There was exactly one long term project that required very heavy investment that was actually funded. But it required two things: the analysts saying that we needed to be in this market or die, and then a totally fictitious* schedule that called for a 3 year march-to-market. I believe that second one was to protect the CEO, who would be crucified by those same analysts for spending tens of millions of dollars a year without a near-term ROI. I just checked and 10 years later it will just start being sold in non-US markets next year (always next year…) in order to generate the clinical data necessary for US release.
It’s one of the reasons why the markup is so high on medical devices. Given the demands of NPV and the extra time added to a project because of Regulatory requirements, they must eventually be sold at hefty markups, or investors would head to consumer electronics or flashlights instead.
@Mu Yixiao:
I’m not so sure of that. Remember that prices went up from a few dollars to $9000 over the course of the crisis. That sounds like Randian fever dreams to me. The quote you gave came from one of the companies involved. Of course they are going to say they were making investments. That doesn’t make it so, at least not in any meaningful way.
@Mu Yixiao:
It’s also not like “oversight by the Texas legislature” counts as actual oversight.
Implementation matters. It has been true for a very long time that commercial dumping of toxic waste has been “subject to oversight by the EPA” — but that has meant very different things under different administrations.
@OzarkHillbilly:
I got a speeding ticket years ago. He had me fair and square so I followed the unwritten rules and was friendly and smiling and took my ticket without complaint. It was starting to drizzle, but he stood there telling me at some length how I needed to be more careful and stay safe. I had to bite my tongue hard to not reply the rules didn’t mean I had to listen to a safety lecture from a guy riding a Harley in the rain wearing a toy helmet.
@MarkedMan: As I understand it, the Texas electricity market is a slightly better regulated version of what California was doing before the 2001 crisis there. In that situation, shortages are always immensely profitable for somebody.
@DrDaveT:
Locally-produced natural gas has always been cheap enough in Texas that they’ve used it for something over half of their total generation for decades. In the last few years it’s dropped to a little less than half because of all the cheap wind power that has become available.
Until the glut of fracked natural gas, the three US interconnections — Eastern, Western, and Texas — had quite different fuel profiles.
@Michael Cain:
Thanks; that makes perfect sense.
Rush LImbaugh died this morning.
@CSK:
Haven’t been so happy about someone dying since Scalia passed.
@CSK:
Hooo f—g Ray!!!
It is indeed a good day!!
The world is a kinder place today.
Rush Limbaugh, the incendiary radio talk show host, dies at age 70
Break out the 12 year old scotch.
@Sleeping Dog: I don’t think it a question of the market not knowing as it is a question of the market not caring. Deliver it, sell it to another party, spill in on the floor, doesn’t matter. As long as the surplus it gone, it’s all good.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Same thing happened to me during a business trip that took me through both Dakotas and Minnesota.
“Sorry officer, I was still driving like I was in North Dakota.”
“You are in southern Minnesota. North Dakota is 9 hours away.”
“Right, so you can imagine how tired I must be right now.”
That gave him a chuckle, and he gave me a written warning.
“Such outcomes are standard for first-time offenders facing misdemeanor charges, Illuzzi-Orbon said.”–This is true.
“Eliza Orlins…tweeted: ‘This isn’t surprising. This is how the system was designed to function to protect the privileged from accountability.’”–This, too, is true–and unsurprising.
Wow! Two competing truths. Who knew? Somewhere in the universe, a conservative’s head is exploding and a computer left over from a Star Trek episode has burst into flames, showering sparks everywhere.
Re: Rush. A truly evil, despicable man. The fact that the Gingrich era Republican Party made him their hero and kowtowed to him was one of the things that finally led me to register as a Dem.
To borrow from Betty Davis;
You should never say anything bad about the dead, only good. Rush Limbaugh is dead.
@DrDaveT: Yes, but without the government telling them “you have to be able to keep supplying power in the event of a system failure” where was the incentive to act on the need? Again the market’s answer is “no electricity production capacity? Don’t sell any. Problem solved!”
I wonder if the poor Texans* will get docked with a giant utility bill despite being without power for the worst of it. A one-two punch like that might just be enough to add a half point or even a full one to finally voting the Republican out of office there.
*Despite my previous comments I actually have a lot of sympathy for the average bloke there. Being cold is no fun.
I wonder if Trump will attend the Limbaugh obsequies,whenever or whatever they are, or find a way to weasel out of going. I don’t think funerals are his thing, unless he can be the center of attention. I recall that he turned his father’s eulogy into an ode to himself.
@Mu Yixiao: I can buy that their extreme winter event demand projections were off…which it was by a few percentage points.
I cannot buy that the fuel production and supply components weren’t winterized…enough.
My equipment overseas and the equipment I developed to deploy with troops were weatherized to extreme temperatures that were impossible to achieve absent a cataclysmic earth event. Our desert electronics were designed run in temps in excess of 150F.
What we see in Texas is not cataclysmic cold. Its temperature that’s unusual to Texas but has been navigated by producers in other places who do have the winterized equipment. Texas had a similar failure in 2011 so then there’s that.
Granted, I dont specifically know the energy production sector technology. But my experience in weatherization of gear is that, when purchased, its designed to ridiculous tolerances.
@MarkedMan:
It appears a wind farm is getting that $9,000 per kilowatt hour. I wonder who the heck is paying that much and if they are aware they are. At that rate one could easily get a monthly bill that about matches the selling price of a small house in Texas.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-16/skyrocketing-texas-power-prices-may-enrich-some-bankrupt-others
@Jim Brown 32:
If you’re talking about military gear, of course. Because it can be deployed anywhere and it’s got to be able to handle all sorts of different situations and extremes.
If you’re talking about something that’s going to sit in one place forever, you design it for the conditions you expect (plus a safety margin). In Wisconsin we don’t build structures to be earthquake proof*. We do, however make them resistant to tornadoes. The antifreeze in my car is rated at a minimum to -40. I remember when I lived in Texas, they had “free air and water” at service stations–because people would fill their radiators with plain water. It’s quite common to see houses up here without air conditioning; I’ve known people in Florida who didn’t have a furnace.
There are obviously degrees of winterizing–and I’m sure their are trade-offs that come with each of them. You don’t proof your equipment for antarctic conditions when the temps rarely drop much below freezing.
——–
* Even though we do have earthquakes here–there’s a fault line that runs down Lake Michigan. But they’re so small that it’s not something we worry about. If there’s ever one big enough to do damage, I don’t see people saying “Why didn’t you prepare for this?!”
@Jim Brown 32: Where are they finding the people who will buy styrofoam hammers (or are they working from a projected ROI)?
@Flat Earth Luddite: Depending on the day in question, I might have been there, but it’s more likely that was the day I was photographing the sheep grazing behind the barbed wire fence for my campus newspaper’s reply to the school president’s “Vision of Wholeness” speech.
@Mu Yixiao:
Sure. On the other hand, if there were a well-documented Global Shifting process underway that was projected to make earthquakes more frequent and more severe, that might change.
“There are obviously degrees of winterizing–and I’m sure their are trade-offs that come with each of them. ”
Correct. So since markets rule in Texas and they are low on regulations they built with minimal winterization which let them cut costs for the 99.95% of the time when they dont have really low temperatures. It means that the 0.05% of the time (or whatever the number is) when they have really low temps their system crashes. So as is typical of Texas, most of the time stuff is cheaper but then every now and then you have a fairly easily preventable disaster. Maybe you lose a few lives, maybe even a lot of lives, , but overall things cost less. It was a conscious choice so I wouldnt feel sorry for them.
Steve
@Neil Hudelson:
I’ve been let off the hook twice by cops just for admitting that I was indeed speeding.
Cop: Do you know how fast you were going?
Me: I’m gonna say 60? 62?
Cop: Do you know what the speed limit is?
Me: Here? Like, 45?
Cop: So. . . you were speeding?
Me: Absolutely.
@Jim Brown 32: I was living in an apartment building in Atlanta in the mid 90’s and we got a severe cold snap. The parking garage was the first floor of the building and the walls were super well ventilated, meaning the garage was essentially at shaded outdoor temperatures, i.e. well below freezing. All the first floor water pipes and drain pipes just ran, exposed and uninsulated, through that space. It was a huge mess when they started to split and it was a couple of days before we got water back, and the garage floor was essentially a skating rink until we got a good melting.
It was about then that I really understood the ramifications of the “conservative” anti-regulation thing. You know, “Building codes that call for insulation or other methods of protecting pipes were created by bureaucrats that just wanted to kill business and didn’t understand it doesn’t freeze in Atlanta”. I would guess Texas regulates their builders with the same attitude, so it wouldn’t surprise me to find out the problems weren’t with the power generating parts of the plants, but with all the normal infrastructure surrounding it.
@Mu Yixiao:
Earthquakes are not like the weather.
Still, if there was one that did some damage–say, a 3.5-4.0–one year, then a bunch of experts pointed out that the fault line appeared to be in a period of increased activity, and then 10 years later there was a 6.0–yeah, there should be SOME preparation.
And that’s what Texas needs to grapple with. There was, as a number have noted, a cold spell in 2011. There were 12 nights over a two-week period that were at or below freezing. We also know that these periods of intense cold are likely to increase and drift farther south as melting polar ice makes the jet stream “wobbly.”
The TL;DR on this is–severe cold has happened before, and recently–and we KNOW it has an increased chance of happening with increased regularity. So yeah, they need to start investing in cold weather equipment, and upgrading their grid to handle it. In fact, they should have already done so.
Update.
I visited the surgeon. I was very impressed. He examined the hernia externally, then saw the CT and PET, and just nodded at the images. I think he could tell what was where by touch and pressure.
Anyway, we agreed to schedule surgery when the insurance approval comes through, which ought to be sometime next week. he thinks he might do a minimally invasive procedure, but ins’t sure. So I’m looking at two days in the hospital (my first time hospitalized that I can recall).
He also said he saw no sign of anything to worry about in the PET, and agreed the blood analyses show nothing wrong. So that’s good.
Oh, and it turns out he was director of a government hospital our company supplies. He recalled signing contracts with us. Small world.
@DrDaveT:
I believe common practice used to be design for a flood or weather that would be expected once in fifty years, or once in a hundred. But I believe civil engineers and architectural engineers have realized for some time that the historical data is no longer valid. My brother’s hometown has had I think three hundred year floods in the last couple decades.
As to earthquakes, I had Republican friend who swore global warming was due to dust from volcanoes. I asked if he had some information vulcanism had gotten worse over the last hundred years. I don’t think he ever understood my point.
@Kathy: Good luck with the surgery. I’ve worked with a lot of surgeons that did hernia repairs (general surgeons, in the US) and having a good, experienced one is important. The fact that he is considering minimally invasive is a good sign. It’s preferable where possible (but it’s not always possible) and requires a fair amount of experience before a surgeon starts to use it.
Did he mention a patch? If so, did he say what kind? I’m curious because I helped some colleagues on a couple of patch projects.
@OzarkHillbilly:
A close friend of mine is a doctor. When she was a resident in NYC, she had a patient they scheduled for an MRI the next week. His wife jumped down my friend’s throat, demanding the MRI be done immediately. The wife’s response was, “but we have money.”
The lovely people came back next week for the scan.
@MarkedMan:
He did mention a patch, though I gathered it’s more of a mesh. He did not say what kind.
Texas is a mixed bag as far as a power market.
There are power generators who own and operation power plants, whether they be coal, gas, nuclear, solar, or wind.
There companies that own transmission lines who operate as a monopoly in the areas in which they operate. Houston’s lines are owned by Centerpoint Energy which is owned by a private equity firm (there’s a bad sign right there).
Finally, there are the power retailers which own nothing but customers and buy and sell electricity contracts.
Then there are the municipally owned traditional power companies in whey own all three. Like in San Antonio and Austin. These were acquired in the Great Depression when capitalism failed back then.
Then there are rural cooperatives left over from Rural Electrification in the 30s.
As a customer of CPS in San Antonio, my question to them is: Did any of our power generation go down and 2) Were we forced to sell power to compensate for the failure of others and therefore suffer for the failure of others.
@Kathy: My ex had to have a hernia repaired with that mesh about 10 years ago. About a year after the surgery, he started having terrible abdominal and testicular pain. Come to find out, the mesh had migrated and was actually strangling one of his testicles! He had to have it and the mesh removed. I see a lot of lawyer ads for hernia mesh these days, I’m guessing the early days of application had some speed bumps.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Im told they will be marketed to the South American caravans that will soon be invading the southern border.
@gVOR08:
Let me guess: your brother is from Ellicott City, MD?
@Jax:
Ouch. I’ll keep an eye out for complications.
I think the early days were back in the 80s. The FDA info on hernia mesh say they are better at preventing hernia recurrence.
@MarkedMan: Really take them to heart when they tell you not to put strain on it after the operation. Number one reason for poor healing is people thinking they are back to normal and doing too much. Best of luck!
@Kathy: if they are put in well and the patient gives them time to heal, they are great!
@MarkedMan:
I heard one shouldn’t drive for several days afterwards, which makes sense to me. Also, it would be a great chance to take some time off. Or half time off. I could still work at home if needed, and order in groceries.
The downside is I’d have to cook something simple and quick. I assume standing by the stove/counter for a few hours is a strain of sorts.
@DrDaveT: Moorhead MN. Across the Red River from Fargo. Odd situation, the Red flows north, so the snowmelt in the spring thaw feeds the river, but it forms ice dams further north and backs up. And it’s ancient flood plain, flat as a pancake, so once it’s over the banks it floods a lot of area. Shallow, but square miles.
They’ve now built extensive levees and pumping stations. My brother tells me that oddly, they don’t have motors for the pumps. With the fields flooded there are lots of Norwegian farmers willing to volunteer tractors. Back up to the pump, connect a shaft to a power take-off on the tractor, and they’re in business. I imagine the city pays for the diesel.
@Kathy: Cook a few days worth of food ahead of time and put it in the freezer or refrigerator. Surgery is not a lot of fun, and having some no effort options waiting might be exactly what you need.
Or have a friend be ready to drop off food.
And hopefully you’re up and about in a day and wondering why you have to take it so easy. But, it’s one of those better safe than sorry, might as well winterize the windmills situations. Good luck.
A couple of things I haven’t mentioned.
The hospital I’ll be having surgery in, requires a COVID PCR test before admission, and a chest X-ray. the former is common in all private hospitals, but it’s the first I hear about the latter.
All three doctors I’ve seen recently wear KN95 masks at all times.
From time to time, I learn about something or some practice I didn’t know about, and then i realize I’d run across it and didn’t even notice.
I do learn all the time about things and practices I didn’t know about. that’s the whole point of learning.
Anyway, I stumbled across an article today on “ghost” kitchens. Or virtual restaurants, if you prefer. these are restaurant cooking facilities without a restaurant attached to them, or complementary to one, or used as one while the restaurant is closed. They pretty much serve for catering (pre-pandemic), delivery, or pickup.
A common practice is for a brand, say Nathan’s Famous, to serve wings for delivery under a different name, like New York Wings. another common practice is for hotels in the pandemic to lease their kitchens to operators like these.
Well, last summer I got a ton of offers from Uber Eats for essentially free food, up to around $20-25. This doesn’t include delivery, or tips either for the driver or the restaurant. I did look around the app, though, and eventually ordered something.
What struck me as odd was a restaurant that sold only chilaquiles (fried corn chips in salsa with or without some kind of meat) and drinks. the address was in the app. I looked it up online, and it was a terrible looking street in a bad part of town. not a pale for a restaurant. the exterior looked like dilapidated, low rent storefront, with a steel curtain lowered. I assumed the address was wrong, or I messed it up when I looked it up.
Now I realize: ghost kitchen, for delivery only.
@gVOR08:
Moorhead gets slammed often and hard.
As you say, the river runs north so it can be melted and free flowing down south but it runs into still frozen river further north and has nowhere else to go to but to overflow the banks and spread out on the pancake flat land.
The flatness there is spooky. Fargo captured the feeling it a bit.
In the early 90s Moorhead downtown by the river was basically Waterworld one spring.