When I was like 10-11 a cop choked me and poked me in the eye while I was walking home not saying anything to them. my dumbass brother had wrote cuss words in chalk in the neighbors driveway which I had nothing to do with. My parents refused to help me file a complaint
Your parents, like mine, were propagandized long before you were born and only knew to give absolute control to authorities. I hope they are better now.
Yet the far right sees no problem when their dear leader wears make-up, wears lifts, a girdle, a diaper and won’t go out in the rain because it will muss up his hair-do.
A lot of sarcasm here, but I fail to see how deregulation or Texas’s separate grid contributed to this problem. I see two main contributing factors:
The storm wasn’t projected to hit Houston this hard. The projected track had it making landfall way down the coast in Corpus Christi just 48 hours before, and the day before that it was projected to hit Brownsville, a solid 350 miles away. Houston was not projected to be the target until the last minute, so many people were caught unprepared, including Centerpoint Energy.
Houston’s tree canopy is massive. Sure, Houston has a ton of concrete and deforestation, but it remains on the edge of the Piney Woods, and especially in north and east Houston many areas are completely blanketed in hundred foot tall loblolly pines and sweetgums that are prone to breakage in hurricane force winds. Power lines were shredded, and many homes were damaged by falling trees
Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps. If it were just a one-off event it might be able to be waved away, but a pattern of failure is emerging.
Whether the storm was projected to hit as hard or not doesn’t really matter, tropical storms and hurricanes are not some new event in that area of Texas, yet the state and local governments seem utterly unprepared. It was only a year or two ago that basically the exact same thing happened, and apparently nothing was done about it to shore up their services. It’s an inefficiency of the private sector, they’re not capable of providing vital services because their primary motivation is not reliability and efficiency, it’s profit and cost cutting.
You don’t see this happening in other states with the same frequency. I’ve never had the grid where I am fail, and we get both extreme heat and cold and occasional tropical storms.
Except this happens every year, during storms, during heat waves, during cold snaps
Does it? We had the snow storm in 2021 that hit the news, but after that, are you lumping every local outage in Texas you see in the news together and blaming the “Texas grid?” People did the same thing when we had a severe ice storm here in Austin in Feb 2023 that knocked out power for several days. Well Austin has a municipal utility because we have not deregulated here, so Austin Energy was responsible for that one, and the problem was ice and trees. People were all over reddit blaming the “Texas grid” at the time, when the issue was ice and trees in a localized area.
Let me be clear I in no way support deregulation. I grew up in Houston when Houston Lighting & Power was our utility, though, and we had outages back then too, because we experience severe weather really often in Houston, and there are a bunch of trees that knock down power lines.
Are you saying you’ve never lost power to your house? I’m curious where you live where there aren’t pretty widespread outages after a hurricane that brings you several hours of 80mph sustained winds. Anyway my entire point was this outage in Houston has nothing to do with the “Texas grid” or deregulation. You could certainly criticize Centerpoint for not being better prepared to repair the outages, but the outages were going to happen regardless
ERCOT says that every summer, but also that article says there’s a “12% chance” of rolling blackouts, not that they’re planning them. Last summer was our hottest on record, as it was many places, and there were no rolling blackouts. This summer in Texas hasn’t been nearly as hot as it was last year.
Here are similar articles about pretty much everywhere else:
Again, these outages are due to downed power lines, not ERCOT and not generating capacity. Does everyone here really not understand the difference lmao
You’re literally the only person who has had anything productive to say here, so when you say “we,” I’m not sure who you’re referring to. Yes, better grid redundancy would mitigate outages. At the same time, I’d like to see any kind of evidence that Houston has poor grid redundancy compared to any other city of comparable density, or that “profiteering and cost cutting” have played a role.
My previous point stands that ERCOT and the Texas Interconnect being independent has absolutely nothing to do with this
Except that the only reason your grid is independent is so they can cut corners on quality and soak you for every penny they can. If they were connected to the rest of the country they’d have to conform to superior codes.
Of course today’s politics apply! Nothing about the 1940s applies to today’s grid. They’ve had 80 years to get your lousy grid up to a modern standard and every year the rest of us have to bail your state out when it inevitably breaks down. They’ve had 80 years to soak you suckers for every last penny they can, but instead of making them fix their hardware and lower prices, you’d rather strut around bragging you could be your own independent country. It doesn’t make y’all look good.
Uhhh…what bailouts are you talking about? What have you done for us exactly?
What happened in Houston here was a hurricane knocking down power lines, not a “grid failure.” The complaint is that it’s taking Centerpoint Energy 48-72 hours longer to restore power than they probably could have if they had more effectively prepared.
It should be noted my utility rates (at my municipal utility, owned by the City of Austin) are really reasonable, well below national averages, so I don’t know how you think I’m being “soaked for every last penny.”
Power in TX is about .09/kilowatt hour where as in MI it’s .215 during the summer. This is slightly SE of houston in an area not connected to the ERCOT grid. Power was also out for ~4 days for all the reasons you mentioned.
i hear you, fellow texan. no fan of ercot, but reading this thread has been infuriating.
for anyone else reading my comment - some years ago, i lived in oklahoma for a little while. years of drought, one year a lot rain. lots of trees with a lot dead branches weighted by new growth, then that winter an ice storm hit. trees bigger than my car came crashing down and it was all over the town i lived in. for three days in the silence, you could hear branches cracking and falling. two houses down a tree went right through their living room. one end of our street was impassable for several days until someone could cut one tree into small enough pieces to clear it.
needless to say, power was out. parts of town had power back within days, some parts of the state, if i remember correctly, didn’t have power for weeks.
grid stability or redundancy couldn’t have prevented that problem.
Appreciate you. Outages like this happen all over the country when there are severe weather events, especially hurricanes. Folks on here seem to have a poor grasp of electrical systems and why the power’s out in parts of Houston
How exactly do you “see” these factors, are you sure you’re not cognitive dissonancing? Storms change course all the time and those trees have been there for years. Being prepared for the occasional hurricane isn’t profitable.
There’s always a chance, it’s just very small. These corrupt justices are the end game for the republican party, the odds of any of them breaking ranks to convict is very low.
That said, it’s almost certainly not about conviction, so much as upholding the rule of law and creating political pressure and support for something like packing the court.
Ever played Suzerain? There’s a timeline where this is possible, but you gotta play it right.
That said, this speech would make a big impact in that game. But it’s obviously fictional and based in the beginning of a the Cold War within the Eastern Bloc, so it’s more realistic in expected outcomes than the reality of 2024 United States. Maybe they can make a hardcore mode DLC based on those societal and political conditions.
In truth, regardless of camps, all Americans should be livid if they are those that refer to themselves as real Americans—honestly, patriotic conservatives the most, in protection of the constitution. Unfortunately that unity is gone, so the words will get washed away by a torrent of bias before they can be pondered on.
Kind of. The genre is hard to explain. You would like it if you’re into grand strat. I’ve done four playthrough and two DLC,.each time taking on different tactics and stances.
It is functionally a well written and presented ‘choose your adventure’ political drama.
There are elements of randomness and gameplay systems, but it is not really a grand strategy game with a whole extremely complex simulation engine undergirding it, the way Paradox games are.
I would say that it does count as a strategy game in the sense that navigating toward outcomes you want does take a good bit of understanding how power politics works within basically the Cold War era, particularly from the standpoint of a non aligned nation.
Maybe you could say its like the Paradox games, if they stripped most of the numbers mechanics, made them less complex and not the focus, and were left with mainly narrative events and focus trees, but those were done in great detail.
Note
I played this game basically right when it came out, several years ago, and it may have changed since.
it is not really a grand strategy game with a whole extremely complex simulation engine undergirding it, the way Paradox games are.
This might actually be a plus for me, for as much as I want to love those games, I always ultimately get bogged down in that shit.
I haven’t played in a while, but I have over 100 hours in EU4, with at least a half a dozen of the dlc, and I can say that I still don’t truly know how to play those games “properly.” The level of detail is simultaneously insane and dumb (sometimes their approximations of real life things are understandably absurd). I love the idea of them though.
I just got a new PC with a little more juice, and picked up Victoria 3 and have been debating if I should start watching tutorial videos or not…
Completely and wildly different genre, but I’ve been very intrigued so far with Workers & Resources: Soviet Republic as a city builder with a pretty impressive amount of detail. It’s unique among the genre as the main goal isn’t financial, but more focused on the well-being of your citizens. Lots of public housing, public transport, walking paths… There are two currencies, and if you choose to deal with the West you have to use a separate currency.
I feel like if I’m going to put the time into a complex “simulation” game at this point, it might be that one.
I’m not advocating for it, but like, if they are dead they can’t really speak up about their opinions. Again, not condoning murder, but just thinking through the logic on this.
Not a non-zero possibility, considering how often Biden is confusing names now. Just present his name in a brochure that seems to talk about the middle east and needing to assassinate a target, that gets it an automatic human right’s pass.
The motion will get assigned to a committee, run by Republicans, where it will die. Even if there is a sympathetic Republican on that committee, all House members are up for re-election in November, and voting for this is a sure way to get the MAGAs all up in their grill and would likely lead to that person losing a ton of MAGA support, and likely losing their job.
AOC knows this and is doing this to help Democrats in vulnerable districts, to help turn the House in the next Congress. “Elect us into the majority, and we will actually look into this.”
You are arguing that Republicans are, ”To busy keeping their job to do their job”. While that may be true in some cases, I fear that for some of them, breaking the Supreme Court like this was the goal all along.
None, but what matters is getting voting records so that later this year or in 2026 during House races, they can show who made an attempt to punish the traitors to our democracy, and who is in full support.
I imagine the IRS is going after millionaires for the same reason it goes after poor and lower middle class people: they lack the resources to mount a defense.
Billionaires have enough money that they could stall indefinitely. Or at least until they can fund a president that will just pardon them.
In 1944, the highest tax rate was 94%! By 1953, it had dropped. To 92%. We need to go back to that. The richest will find ways around it, but that’s not a reason not to do it.
This headline uses “millionaires” to mean “people with over a million dollars in annual income” rather than “people with over a million dollars in net worth”
That’s not your run of the mill “successful career with a healthy 401k” millionaire, that’s at least ten-millionaires, mostly hundred-millionaires, and possibly some billionaires by net worth.
He’s pretty damn Evil he sent his newphew to abusive boarding school in Georgia called Hidden Lake Academy similar setup to cedu one of places Paris Hilton ran from
The dad went into the house, and when he returned to the car between 30 and 60 minutes later
This is the part that really confuses me, they were home. I get that parents sometimes need a break from their kid but:
You’re home, so take your kid inside and then you go somewhere else.
30 to 60 minutes?!? I can understand taking 10 minutes (which is still a dangerous amount of time) but WTF was going on for 30 to 60 minutes.
I know it’s not the point of the article, but I’m also annoyed at the idea of someone intending to run their car for 30-60 minutes for no reason. I will admit I’ve left my car running just for the comfort of A/C while I’m waiting, and I don’t live in Arizona heat, but dude was home.
That’s Standard dad-poop session.he must’ve really been turtling. But if it came down to it, i would poop my pants and let my kid live. But i’m a good dad.
If actors want to have an opinion that’s fine. But commenting like they have any clout or authority to ask something like this? Screw that. I’m tired of the entertainment crowd messing around in politics.
I don’t find the degree to be any sort of credential. The degree could be in theater arts, which has no bearing on politics.
I’d like to see your statistic of “most people”, and what sort of degrees they might have that are relevant to asking a candidate to drop out of a race.
All that said, the real point is that someone who is an entertainer is using their public clout in a manner to attempt to influence a politician, or at least public opinion of said politician. As I said, I’m tired of entertainers mucking about in politics.
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