Politics US Edition (2021-vol 2)

[Guard Dog]

This isn’t a bootstraps lecture it’s a common sense lecture. People along the gulf and Atlantic coast to go through this kind of thing literally every year with hurricanes. And I don’t think a weeks worth of canned goods takes up so much space that not everybody can do it. Weather systems don’t sneak up on anyone you know it’s coming. You don’t know how bad it’s going to be. No one could forecast the kind of electrical and structural failures that came with the storm. But it’s not prescience to imagine that something like this can happen because it does all the time. I am saying it makes sense to store a weeks worth of food and supplies and I really don’t see how 99% of families can’t do it.
 

Used 1 gallon milk jugs make great water storage vessels. Rather than tossing them into the recycle bin fill them up with water and put them in the closet. A propane single burner stove and a 5 pound tank will set you back about 10 bucks. You can cook a weeks worth of meals on it and make hot coffee on it. Buying a weeks worth of preserved food can be a burden when you’re on a tight budget but you don’t have to do it all at once.

look I get it people don’t think about what if. But they should. Noah built the ark before the rain started.

[PK htiw klaw eriF]

19 minutes ago, Guard Dog said:

This isn’t a bootstraps lecture it’s a common sense lecture

The way you're framing it certainly is, and the reference to Noah's ark is even more bizarre given the context of that story. You can't really shouldn't store propane tanks indoors which effectively makes them off limits for people in apartments and not everyone has the room for several gallon milk jugs or a week's worth of preserved food to deploy when necessary. Like most bootstraps lectures, it presupposes a set of conditions that aren't universally applicable and eschews systematic analysis of why things got so bad in favor of tut-tutting the people whose lives have just imploded.

[Gromnir]

3 minutes ago, Guard Dog said:

This isn’t a bootstraps lecture it’s a common sense lecture.

you are being ridiculous and am thinking you have no grasp whatsoever regarding common sense. if people by the thousands were waiting in line to get food, then how likely is it they have a week of food stored for the possible crisis which may or may not happen in a year or ten? "sorry honey. i know you are hungry, but that canned food is for an emergency." be reasonable. without heat in sub-freezing temps, your family of four living in an apartment is not gonna be able to stay warm with your propane tank. the five gallon propane will heat the food you do not have, but it won't provide real heat.  50% o' the country is upside down--they owe more than they have. a large % o' the population is living paycheck to paycheck. the elderly and the disabled and the homeless? how many veterans living on the streets with mental health issues are being ignored during best of times? think they got a propane stove and a week o' food stored somewheres?

those who have means should take measures to protect themselves from disasters. reality is that many thousands in texas will not have means. so yeah, whether you admit or not, is a bootstrap lecture and you deserve same recognition as the ex-mayor highlighted recent in this thread.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[Gfted1]

"Ive done absolutely nothing to help myself and its not my fault!!!!! Squeal with me!"

[Guard Dog]

No that propane tank will not keep them warm. In fact using it indoors should be kept to a minimum for obvious reasons. Nothing will keep you warm in a situation like that. Nothing better than blankets and clothes. And if not every one waiting for food could have prepared for what happened I guarantee you some of those thousands could have and lessened the burden on the ones who could not. 
 

This IS common sense. Do you have a fire extinguisher in you kitchen right now? 
 

Yes there are a lot of people in desperate situations. One thing folks who are not can do to help them is not be in their way by being unprepared.

[Gfted1]

I cant help but wonder if the same clowns beleaguered souls also didnt have space in their home/money  to stock up during the Covid lockdown. Probably had to wipe their fanny with their own socks?

Pehaps we could sell Texas back to Mexico, and Alaska back to Russia, and use those funds for some sweet sweet UBI. You know who can afford a bag of rice and 10 gallons of water? Thats right, people on UBI.

[Malcador]

43 minutes ago, Gfted1 said:

I cant help but wonder if the same clowns beleaguered souls also didnt have space in their home/money  to stock up during the Covid lockdown. Probably had to wipe their fanny with their own socks?

Pehaps we could sell Texas back to Mexico, and Alaska back to Russia, and use those funds for some sweet sweet UBI. You know who can afford a bag of rice and 10 gallons of water? Thats right, people on UBI.

Why are they clowns, exactly ?

 

Edited February 18, 2021 by Malcador

[Malcador]

1 hour ago, Guard Dog said:

No one could forecast the kind of electrical and structural failures that came with the storm.

Well, apparently FERC could. But they're EVIL Gubment folk.

[Gromnir]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Well, apparently FERC could. But they're EVIL Gubment folk.

after the winter o' 2011, texas was warned by the feds that their power grid were at serious risk if similar cold weather conditions were to occur. which brings us to 2021.

gd food and water recommendations is swell and all for those who can manage, but is kinda irrelevant at this point. those who have died already did not expire from starvation brought on by the lack o' electricity or supermarket produce. rule o' threes tells us you got 'bout three weeks before you die o' starvation. am given to understand that today is the first day large numbers o' texans has been w/o potable water as water treatment plants finally started to fail. 3 days w/o water. am not thinking there is much relevance to 3 minutes w/o air. we were always told first rule o' survival were to make sure you had viable shelter as exposure were your most immediate threat to continued existence.

gd is offering advice to those with means to prepare for a different disaster than the one confronting texans at the moment. worst part is the disaster were not only predictable but predicted. is another situation where the market fails to address a problem. government regulation habitual condemned by a few boardies is exact what woulda' prevented the unnecessary suffering o' texans today.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[Gfted1]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Why are they clowns, exactly ?

 

Tis just a pet peeve of mine when people do piss all to prepare for or work through a situation and then whine piteously about how enough isnt be done for them. Moronic excuses flowing like the finest whiskey.

[Hiro Protagonist]

If you didn't spend the money on back up generators, satellite dish for communications, built a fireplace, chopped wood and prepped for food for months on end, then it's your own damn fault. Personal responsibility folks.

[Malcador]

Those damn windmills blew Ted Cruz' plane off course, too.

[Gorth]

Fear not. No cost is too high for the Texas crusaders in their epic struggle against sustainable energy

 

On a serious note, @Darkpriestgot it right a bit further above, the solution is to diversify and not put all your eggs in one basket. Avoiding single points of failure in your system is sort of a mantra today in the airline industry (except Boeing).

[Zoraptor]

We should be fair to Boeing's incompetence, they managed to design a plane with a single fundamental problem- wanting to fly itself into the ground- and find multiple points of failure (attitude indicators, pitot tubes, software) that could manifest it, rather than just one; and paywalled one preventative measure.

There are always single points of failure in an electrical grid unless you're designing with massive redundancy, and fundamentally even then you will still have a hard upper limit at some point at very least. Economically the push will always be to supply just enough power to meet demand because anything else is expensive and the power is potentially 'wasted', hence all the work on things like thermal storage (eg sodium 'batteries') for solar. Somewhere like New Zealand has a natural advantage due to having lots of hydro power for load balancing near instantly, but even here a problem with something like the HVDC line could see the North Island in trouble, despite there being 2 cables rather than one because those cables are high hundreds of km long and extremely expensive. A transformer/ cable issue (with redundant capacity in theory, point of failure was deferring maintenance on 2 cables which both failed) 23 years ago led to major power outages in Auckland for 5 weeks and the 2003 New York+ blackout was infamously caused by a load sharing failure cascade due to a software error.

I certainly wouldn't blame people in general for not being prepared for something highly unusual, but I do think it has to be pointed out that by and large people don't die of exposure/ hypothermia when they have access to hot food/ drink, which a gas cooker does provide. Though of course you also have the problem of carbon monoxide poisoning if you overdo it.

[Hurlshort]

The idea that these people are simply unprepared and should be blamed is pretty callous. These are people that are likely adept at dealing with hurricanes and heat waves. They are facing something nearly unprecedented for the region.

[Darkpriest]

@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. 

Edited February 19, 2021 by Darkpriest

[Elerond]

Quote

Anyone can look at Texas and observe that fossil fuel resources could have performed better in the cold. If those who owned the plants had secured guaranteed fuel, Texas would have been better off. More emergency peaking units would be a great thing to have on hand. Why would generators be inclined to do such a thing? Consider, what would be happening if the owners of gas generation had built sufficient generation to get through this emergency with some excess power? Instead of collecting $9,000 per MWH from existing functioning units, they would be receiving less than $100 per MWH for the output of those plants and their new plants. Why would anyone make tremendous infrastructure that would sit idle in normal years and serve to slash your revenue by orders of magnitudes in extreme conditions?

https://judithcurry.com/2021/02/18/assigning-blame-for-the-blackouts-in-texas/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

[213374U]

neeeeeeeever mind

Edited February 19, 2021 by 213374U

[Guard Dog]

Never mind. This was nothing you want to read and I’m Done talking about this s—t anyway. 

 

Edited February 19, 2021 by Guard Dog
Never mind

[Gfted1]

According to the weather forecast that Im looking at right now, between 22-28 Feb, the high temperatures for the day (in my area) will be 34/41/39/34/39/40/43F. Why is this noteworthy? Because it is above freezing and due to the hella amounts of snow that we have on the ground the news channels are warning of flooding due to the snowmelt. Now I could walk down a few flights of stairs and check the operation of my sump pump, or I could do absolutely nothing at all to prepare for possible water intrusion. One of these actions can potentially prevent problems, while the other will allow me the opportunity to immediately whine into the internet the minute my service are restored. Hmm, what to do, what to do?

[BruceVC]

Whoever is to blame  for the unpreparedness of Texas doesnt really concern me as much as  I feel very sorry for citizens of Texas and what they are enduring, the footage shown around the  winter damage looks very harsh

Pipes bursting, no water and people sleeping in cars to keep warm are evocative images to forget

And yes Ted Cruz is a coward 

Edited February 19, 2021 by BruceVC

[Guard Dog]

I doubt there’s a man or woman anywhere in central Texas that didn’t wish they were in Acapulco. But you have to wonder what the hell Ted Cruz was thinking. That does NOT look good. Especially since he has been so critical of others who have done the same kind of crap.

but what do I keep telling you guys? There are no angels in hell. Just different flavors of devils

[Guard Dog]

 

Screw them. If Sunny can’t come then I don’t go

[Gfted1]

Heh, one of my friends is like that too, she wont go anywhere without her giant pit bull. So since I got my new kitties we had to move the drinking to her place.

[InsaneCommander]

Is this legit?