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[wierd]

Again, I feel any topic of conversation (with the single exceptional category being topics that promote actual harm to people) should be fair game, with the prescribed antidote for "It makes me so very upset!", being to discuss the 180 degree position, and do so freely.  (EG, The religious prudes can jammer to each other about how horrible Grindr is, and how God will be most angry when judgement day comes-- Gay people can talk about how awesome technology is to facilitate dating, and how silly the religious prudes are.)

When Alice decides that her feels are so horribly offended that she needs to abuse social connections to do a good old fashioned Amish 'shunning', then Alice has quite simply gone too goddamn far.  It does not matter if Alice is for Team A (religious prude, and member of the morality league), or for Team B (Anarcho-lesbian feminist, with a bullhorn.) The very instant she starts trying to cause very real problems for members of "the other team", just because her feelings have been hurt, she has crossed the line.

[anewaname]

"Cancel culture" is an effective derogatory moniker.

It implies "they are attempting to take wealth/health/future from you" but the thing is intangible.

How does one reach compromise between two groups when the gain and loss is not measurable?

[Vector]

I think the only thing I want to add to this conversation is that viewing consistent access to respect and community status as less fundamental than consistent access to food is a decision that people are making.

[da_nang]

In other news, Rush Limbaugh is dead.

[nenjin]

Weird that in this day and age, Rush Limbaugh's brand of conservatism seems quaint and dated. Can't remember the last time I saw his name pop up in the news cycle.

[Vector]

The segment reading off names of people who died from AIDS with celebratory soundboard seems very on-trend still.

Other news, Biden spreads misinformation that children cannot transmit, get sick from COVID. Idiot.

[MorleyDev]

If you're on about the town hall, in the video I saw he was talking to someone about to go to school and said that children don't get COVID very often and that children aren't likely to tramsit it back home. He never said 'never' or 'cannot', just that the risk is lower. From the context and that they are specificalling aiming to open elementary and middle-aged schools, it's also clear he's talking about children around the age of the child he's talking to and not high-school aged teenagers.

The current evidence I've seen reported on is that it's teenaged children that are the riskier transmission vector for COVID to enter house, younger children seem to not play as big a part in the spread.

Now, if you are complaining that people hear "less risk" and assume that means it's completely safe or that you don't think the risk is acceptably low enough even with safeguards...well, the former is unavoidable when talking about what will always be a statistics game, and the latter is a fair debate to be had.

[Iduno]

Texas probably wasn't expecting all their wind turbines to freeze solid, which they've become increasingly more reliant on over the past few years.

It's a fair expectation. I also don't expect them to freeze. The main issue is that coal plant workers can't get into the plants because of ice. Wind is wildly unpredictable, but this particular issue is more refusing to put any taxpayer money into infrastructure because it's not profitable.

https://twitter.com/ryanlcooper/status/1361700969545932810

[Maximum Spin]

From the context and that they are specificalling aiming to open elementary and middle-aged schools, it's also clear he's talking about children around the age of the child he's talking to and not high-school aged teenagers.

The current evidence I've seen reported on is that it's teenaged children that are the riskier transmission vector for COVID to enter house, younger children seem to not play as big a part in the spread.

I think this is actually a higher-level distinction in the way people from different cultures use the word "children". For me, "children" can ONLY mean the age you're describing, never teenagers, much less, as some cultures use it, people at college age.

[Random_Dragon]

Bit belatedly, now that I'm back to having both internet and power, it seems like wind turbines aren't really a factor among the people who are actually in charge of fingerpointing, from what I've seen? The governer's been blaming the power companies having been told to winterize their stuff back in 2011 and having not done so, but no doubt general top-down policy has probably hindered the ability for said companies to actually get funds for all that shit, making it another "never my fault" situation.

ERCOT, last I checked hasn't responded with any blame-gaming just yet, only indicated that they were suffering damages and overload in general.

[Maximum Spin]

I'm also pretty sure that the wind turbines anywhere north of Texas haven't all catastrophically frozen over from the polar blast or spontaneously failed to operate as soon as it gets cold, so unless there's something uniquely Texan about this particular ice or the way things freeze when the temperature drops below 0C, this seems like a non-starter,

To be totally fair, I think those people were claiming that there was something uniquely Texan about the design of the wind turbines because nobody planned for them to get cold. While this doesn't seem to have been true, it is at least plausible, because Texas would totally do something like that.

[Random_Dragon]

So basically it's people simping for the oil companies. :V

[MrRoboto75]

So basically it's people simping for the oil companies. :V

You don't understand, windmills are gay.

[Dostoevsky]

I've written on this a couple of times in the last few pages, but more information is coming through so I can a (edit: amended, but not shortened) version of the Texas power situation:

- Texas's grid is mostly its own thing, walled off from interstate connections (unlike most states). They do this in part to avoid federal regulatory authority from FERC. While this does prevent most of the state from getting electricity from other states in situations like these, those other states are also not doing great right now and so only have so much to share/sell.

- Texas's grid is normally about 47% natgas, 20% coal, 20% wind, 10% nuclear (plus some smaller bits and pieces). But in winter the renewable general is lower in Texas for various reasons, and so the 20% is actually more like 10% expected. (Some comparisons of lost capacity are comparing to maximum capacities instead of expected capacities.)

- ERCOT, the texas electric grid regulator, has a planned worst-case scenario for situations like this. Compared to their projections, total electric demand was about 3 GW higher than expected (roughly 5%), wind was about 1 GW worse than expected (roughly 10-20%), and thermal power (this includes natural gas, coal, and nuclear) was between 16-30 GW worse than expected (roughly 40%!).

- As noted by others, frozen turbines did end up a problem here but other parts of the world already have systems to deal with it and prevent freezing.

- Frozen machinery is actually a common problem across lots of power sources! Frozen machinery at natural gas plants, coal plants, and even one nuclear plant caused significant outages. Edit: forgot to mention that freezing of coal piles can also be a significant problem - up until this TX situation it was by large the main source of generation-side reliability problems. (The vast majority of reliability problems writ large remain in the realm of the transmission infrastructure such as power lines.)

- That said, the biggest problem in Texas was availability of natural gas. Due to the way their pricing system is designed, electric generation is kind of last in line for getting resources (to provide the advantage of being cheaper theoretically). Natural gas for heating spiked at the same time as natural gas for power. (You may remember this from the NE power problem several years back.)

- Theoretically one can keep better reserves of natural gas on hand, but the Texas system is more focused on cheap power than preparedness and so didn't keep proper contingencies in place. (Some natural gas pipelines also ended up freezing, which doesn't help, and from what I've read drawing natural gas from reserve containers is actually harder in the cold.)

So a bunch of different factors in play, all of which combined in a very bad way.

ONE MORE EDIT: I should note that DOE has already issued an emergency order waiving environmental pollution laws for power plants (letting them run more / with less controls), so please don't blame those too.

[Random_Dragon]

So basically a clusterfuck, because down here when we fuck things up it's go big or go home.

You don't understand, windmills are gay.

They're pulling mills in the wind to turn the birds gay? :V