Behold Texas

We need Stoics, now more than ever.  People have gone insane.

"If someone is able to show me that what I think or do is not right, I will happily change, for I seek the truth, by which no one was ever truly harmed.  It is the person who continues in his self-deception and ignorance who is harmed." - Marcus Aurelius

 

We've talked about being prepared before.  We talked about it at the beginning of this post, last April.

It's become apparent that many, many of the people in charge of the things that we all depend on are woefully inadequate to the task.  Cold weather is not unheard of in Texas.  Extremely cold weather, while unlikely, happens.  And yet the Texas infrastructure was not engineered (winterized) for a cold-weather event - because apparently it never freezes there.

In case you have been living in a cave this past week, here's a very condensed rundown:  A blast of cold weather moved into Texas.  Electrical load (demand) increased dramatically as everyone turned on their heat.  At the same time, electrical generation fell off.  Power plants were not winterized adequately to deal with this cold snap.  Large sections of the grid had to be de-energized to save the remaining power plants from being overloaded.

Electrical generation has to exactly match electrical demand at all times, in real-time.  When you lose generation, you *must* reduce load.  This is done by de-energizing large sections of the grid.  As a result, people first lost their electricity and heat, then their water, and eventually natural gas - as the gas compressors use electricity.  Large swaths of Texas' electrical distribution were dumped to prevent a complete grid collapse.  There is a very balanced article about how events unfolded here.

Below is a picture of Houston, Texas... from December 1983, when it froze for 10 days straight.  Cold weather is not as uncommon as some people would lead you to believe.  It happens, and then everyone acts as though it's never happened before, and could never happen again... Because they don't want to do the right thing, which is to spend the money needed to make the system robust.

Part of me wants to say, "Well, if they don't care, why should I care?".  The other part of me wants to scream and say "You greedy scumbags!  You had ONE THING to do - why can't you do it right?"

There's more to it, of course.  The article I linked earlier goes into greater detail as to the causes and initial conditions than I'm willing duplicate the effort on.  No: My issue is with management who won't take the basic steps that any responsible head of household would do:  Take a few simple steps, just in case unlikely bad things happen.  So maybe you lose a little $ on your next block of stock options.  People's lives depend on you.  Jesus.  

And some people "Want the government to run more like a business."  Really???   So the government can constantly be blind-sided and unprepared for shit that *anyone* could have seen coming???  Businessmen are greedy, not all that clever (proof above), and prone to extremely short-term thinking (proof above).  Why on earth would anyone want the government to be operated like that?  End rant.