Darkpriest

It's about the conflict of interests more than anything, especially at times, where there were voices to remove some more right leaning news networks from cable https://thehill.com/policy/technology/539868-house-democrats-press-cable-streaming-companies-for-carrying-misinformation Given the possible content of the new TV, would it also appear there? I wonder what will be its content and I'm sure there will be some conflict of interests in dealing with a TV, that seems to be aimed at Trump supporters. Hence I expect a lot of 'screaming' at some point. I stopped taking notice and care of US "culture" - recently i only had a look at Disney related news, but did not even delve into the whole fired actress debacle.

This is all too funny https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/feb/23/al-jazeera-rightwing-media-platform-conservatives-rightly So will screaming left now target muslims in their worldview challanges?

On one hand, you could say that's the explanation, then however the question stands, why to invest i wind and alternatives at all if they cannot support the grid in harsh conditions, when another part is failing? To be more precise, why spend effort and resources on building something faulty, instead of putting the same resources to secure something less faulty?

Possibly, depends which version of corona will become the dominant now.

I like your confirmation bias. It's consistent and can be relied upon. In essence, we are saying the same. 1) Wind power in Texas was unreliable, and could not produce sufficient auxiliary power to reduce strain on the natgas sources during the increased demand at the time of freezing weather 2) Nat gas failed to provide electricity within its technical capacity due to: a) spike in demand, b) insufficient support from renewables, c) failure of gas pumping infrustructure in cold weather. Both of which ultimately come to a point about grid infrustructure being vulnerable to cold weather due to lack of proper investment in "winterization" Technology wise, gas, oil and coal infrustructure should be more resistant to cold weather and you can see in other countries that renewables fail at certain negative temperature and increased snowfall levels due to their nature of producing power - they need unobscured space and minimum waste of energy in their production process. "winterization" had also its efficiency limits.

@BruceVC even in Sweden they had to switch to non-green energy... https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-19/why-even-pristine-sweden-struggles-with-green-energy-quicktake

I do not think that Coal failed at all. What did fail is: - Solar and Wind due to weather conditions - a lot of it could be predictable, as people managing the grid should be aware that their turbines are not cold resistant. The actual plant production failure caused power to drop. - Nat gas overcapcity failed to cover, as a lot of it was also not cold resistant. Technically, they had the capacity in this part to cover for expected wind failures, but the gas pumping infrastructure failed, not the actual process of turning gas to power at the plant.

It's not a lie. First you have failing wind power, then a spike in the power output on the natgas, trying to cover up, and then you get another failure in the grid. "Ice storms knocked out nearly half the wind-power generating capacity of Texas on Sunday as a massive deep freeze across the state locked up wind turbine generators, creating an electricity generation crisis." "Wind power failed to deliver it’s expected power – almost 40% of expected power – in part due to lack of winterized wind turbines" Natural gas made up the difference, but then suffered from lack of supply from non-winterized delivery I've mentioned, that it's not clear cut, but at the core of it was wind farm that failed big time, and other areas were not in shape to cover for the drop in the winter conditions. Key part of the message, is that a lot of infrastructure is simply not cold resistant.

Out of curiosity, @Azdeus, would you know, what is the temperature, where the anti-icing tech is failing anyway? Is it temp and moisture, or exposure time, or both?

As I understand, Israel is still very strict with their borders and quarantines, and so far had no other strain of the virus making appearance there, correct?

To be honest, I find a contract, which does not give a consumer a fixed price, a bit predatory. I can understand higher bills due to higher consupmtion, but the price per unit should be set by the contract without exceptions. Any disaster related spikes should fall onto the operator, so they will either insure against that, or hedge by delivery contracts from other areas/sources. As for the Texas power issues, they were related to wind farms failing, but the other side of the story is, that those windmilss were not designed and built with 'winterized' option. Question is, why?

To be honest, initially I thought that Covid would be a trigger for the freefall and bust of various systems. However, I quickly realized, that FED and ECB were just given a green light to pump trillions into the system to keep it going. Paradoxically, COVID became a catalyst for record heights, even, when regular street economy is suffering. Wait until rent moratorium expires in US.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-media-facebook-idUSKBN2AK01S Austarlia will most likely push FB to yield and accept some form of payment, as in the background there is already a political union building, which consists of Australia, Canada, France, Germany, and it also is fitting the tune played by India. I believe Russia works on a law or is already proceeding one, which will allow them to fine Social Media tech, if they will censor any Russian citizen, who did not break a Russian law. Some other more nationalistic leaning countries, are also looking in that direction.

Some text, that might be of your interest. Interestingly enough, the author also fits with my expectation for the crash time window. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/two-pins-will-pop-stock-market-bubble

Fair enough, however this also means less traffic and less ad revenue for FB. I guess they could choke it up. However, governments like money, and you can be sure, that they will now move into space, where FB will have to compromise its core business practice. They will target the traffic generated by Australian taxpayers amd demand portion of that ad revenue and revenue from selling behavioral profiling information be paid as a tax. (and you can be sure, that they will drop on the platform the resposnsibility to ensure identity of its user, if that user is a local taxpayer or not) And as it was also said, not only that content was blocked.

Theu do not publish for free, they use the traffic those generate and make money off that. There are no "free" services. You are paying them with your data usage.

This just will make other countries hardline more on US tech. India is doing it with Twitter, EU is very slow, but eventually they will hammer on US tech, and they lose nothing if FB would be removed, as they do not see much money from SM making money of EU users. Sure, some lifestyle of 'influencers' amd services around them will have to change, but that's not much of a loss either.

@Zoraptor Capacity and production are not equal. Usually a grid should have ample room for growth in use of power. You do not want to catch up with demand on a yearly basis, so in that scenario it is not unreasonable to have a capacity to switch between different sources. Sure, if there will be part of the grid failing, you will likely not be able to meet the total regular demand, but there is a chance, you'd not be completely out, and with reduced use, you'd enough to get by. @Guard Dog I'd say it's partially the fault of how most peoples' psych operate. People tend to have the bias towards denying possibility of something bad happening to them. There is even a nice term to describe this in behavioral sciences. Remember early stages of COVID where people were making jokes of China and would say, that this can't spread and affect their lives? To people saying that this could have been prevented by gov, etc. Perhaps true, given enough money and resources, most likely yes. However, planning for odd years out and maintaining something and spending a lot of resources on something that may or may not happen once in a decade asks for a question, who would be paying for that? Resources and money are not unlimited (even though FEDs printing machine tries to defy the latter). You need to weight risks and sometimes choke up some loss if a risk materializes, if as an overall net outcome of actionn/inaction is still on the positive side in the long period. Sure, it sucks to have people lose their life, be hungry etc, but reality is, you can't have all the people covered with all safety nets and services. Natural limitations of scarcity of resources come to play. You can have valid questions if the magnitude of losses could be reasonably expected to be lower. The answer is, most likely yes, but more government and beurocracy is not the best answer. What EU is proving us, the exact opposite is true. Too much regulations and government can actually hinder efforts in dealing with various crisises.

There is some merit to the fact, that you can't rely 100% on 'green' energy (the methods of production, getting resources, and longevity&waste of used elements put that green to a question mark) If you have a blizzard for 5-10 days with -20C then your solar panels, and largely wind turbines, and sweet water turbines are very inefficient in producing power vs consumption to maintain them somewhat operational. The best green energy we can hope for is a nucler fusion reactors, which then could be supported by solar and turbine based energy creators (to secure and diversify sources) In EU you had countries already buying energy and CO2 permissions from other countries, where electricty is mostly fossil fuel or nucleal based, just because the green energy production suffered during this winter. I can't say I'm surprised though, to see any crisis being used to bash each other and oversimplifing causes and exaggerating impact of these simplified causes. Note: there was a snowfall even on Sahara this winter.

These guys are onto something. I'd say, that within 2 years there will be a trigger event, which will lead to a heavy negative yield on almost all classes of investments, barring some groups of physical assets. And this time, all the tools are already spent. https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/number-blows-world-everything-bubble-edition

It's predictable, in areas where you have snowfalls and cold weather, green energy is a myth, at least in current tech. For heating houses, you could go geotherm, but you still need electricity and a lot of it, ubless you want to go back to candles and pen and paper work or other manual work. I recall even Germany had to fire up some still not closed coal based plants to 100% just to get by, but if this weather will persist they will jave shortages as well. Tried running Tesla recently in -20C?

You os have a demand, the prices wouldn't go up, if there were no people thinking that this is worth to pay that much to live in an area. Population is also not static, the number of it changes. If the amount of houses did not change, but the population doubled, then even if the median did not change, the total number of people able to pay higher prices did increase. On principle, I'm against the UBI. Who will pay for that? What is the limit of people in a ratio of working to non-working before it breaks? How resilient it is towards changes in demographics and productivity of the given demographics? @Elerondalso didn't live in the area and time, when everyone was employed (nevermind that productivity went to the crapper and everyone was overall poorer)

@Guard Dog Probably something, you might be interested in to read. https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/can-fed-both-tap-brakes-and-floor-gas

https://www.ft.com/content/71e53321-3719-4f10-9406-c614a5ddc1b8

https://www.reuters.com/article/russia-military-iran-china-idUSKBN2A81Q8