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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
Joined: 19 Jan 2012
Posts: 647
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 Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 3:53 am
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| Horsefellow wrote: | | Although it seems a bit like throwing a dart at a dartboard as to what ruffles peoples feathers these day. I don't envy anyone who's job is to be a social media manager. |
If you can’t figure out why people in general might not be ok with the idea of making a tasteless joke about an ongoing situation that has cost human lives then yeah, you’d probably be a terrible social media manager.
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AmpersandsUnited
Joined: 22 Mar 2012
Posts: 633
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 5:58 am
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| ATastySub wrote: | | If you can’t figure out why people in general might not be ok with the idea of making a tasteless joke about an ongoing situation that has cost human lives then yeah, you’d probably be a terrible social media manager. |
That depends on the brand and audience. Plenty of them mock their complainers. Genshin Impact's social media account knows most of their audience are fine with the incest/underage fanart they retweet so when people do complain that the official account retweets that stuff they make fun of the complainers and do it even more and revel in the trolling. Or the time J-List posted a meme about finding a hentai loving girlfriend and that upset people for some reason but they never recanted it or anything. .
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TexZero
Joined: 25 Oct 2017
Posts: 583
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 7:06 am
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| ATastySub wrote: |
| Horsefellow wrote: | | Although it seems a bit like throwing a dart at a dartboard as to what ruffles peoples feathers these day. I don't envy anyone who's job is to be a social media manager. |
If you can’t figure out why people in general might not be ok with the idea of making a tasteless joke about an ongoing situation that has cost human lives then yeah, you’d probably be a terrible social media manager. |
Odd, i've not seen many people in this thread who stated they're from the afflicted areas complaining so i can't fathom why you'd want to do so on our behalf.
There's a pretty famous adage about laughter being the best medicine as someone who went through this myself and had no heat, power and water for 3 days i don't find the meme offensive in the slightest and do see the humor in it.
Now if you'd like to be outraged on our behalf then by all means do so over something less petty than an image on twitter. Like perhaps start rallying your means and efforts are toward any of the various humanitarian missions or charities if your not in Texas. If you are then during the next Election cycle do something productive and vote out the elected officials that failed.
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AkumaChef
Joined: 10 Jan 2019
Posts: 821
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 9:37 am
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| ATastySub wrote: | |
You're trying really hard to frame this as a hard logical choice when in reality you're just repeating some soulless propaganda. I went to engineering school too! Did you happen to take any ethics classes? Learn about Bhopal? Exxon-Valdez? Deepwater Horizon? How about the Texas City Refinery in the very state? Etc etc? Turns out this isn't a dumb trolley problem of "do we have enough money saved up or should we let people freeze to death? |
Yes, I studied all those things. I'm not sure what they have to do with the matter at hand though. You are correct that this is no no trolley problem, it's a question of what sort of extreme conditions the grid is designed to handle. And no matter how high you set the bar--no matter how extreme the conditions you spec the grid for--it's always possible that a disaster happens which can exceed that limit. Which is what happened here. Give me a number: what sort of temperatures should the Texas grid have been spec'ed for? A once-a-decade winter storm? A once-every-50 years one? Once-every-hundred years? Be specific.
| Quote: | | Oh well the coffers can't handle it!" The people and companies that set up this stupid trolley did it for profit. |
How do you know that? As I mentioned in my earlier post, my local power company is a cooperative. There is no profit, yet they still have to deal with the same problems, both in spec'ing the grid in the first place and in dealing with the fallout when problems happen.
| Quote: | |
They then refused upkeep on their systems for more profit. When there was suddenly a repercussion for their actions in the form of costs they instead chose to let people freeze to death. |
The choices were made years before when the infrastructure was built and installed. It's not as if any decision made last week had any impact on the disaster. The grid couldn't handle a winter storm of the magnitude which we received. The only way it could have survived it is if it were built with lower temperatures in mind when the when the plants/substations/turbines/etc were originally spec'ed and installed years ago. It's a balancing act. Customers hate paying for excess capacity and extra factor of safety.....except of course when that capacity is actually needed. It's certainly a balancing act.
| Quote: | | And now they're furthering hurting those affected by charging them exorbitant prices rather than pay themselves for the situation they caused. I don't run a company built on gouging a resource people rely on. My finances are completely irrelevant, as are yours. |
I find the high prices charged by on-demand metering to be exorbitant and unconscionable. It makes me wonder why anyone would ever sign such a contract in the first place. But it also has nothing whatsoever to do with the grid failing.
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AkumaChef
Joined: 10 Jan 2019
Posts: 821
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 10:14 am
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| Agent355 wrote: | |
This. It’s about protecting human lives. And it can be done through basic regulations. The good thing about these weather events being relatively infrequent is that the costs of insulating the power grid can be spread over years before it’s needed.
But Texas energy distributors didn’t even adhere to basic practices that would’ve minimized damages, because they’ve been fighting regulations for years. |
Obviously it's about protecting lives, and nothing could be more important. But it's not so easy as implementing "regulations". In the end it all comes down to a number set by that regulation: how high a reserve capacity is needed? What kind of extreme temperatures, both high and low, must the grid be rated for? what kind of wind speeds in the case of hurricanes/tornadoes? What kind of earthquake resistance? All those things come down to a number--a specific factor of safety or % reserve capacity. Regulations can try and drive those things higher, but ultimately we never know when the bar is set high enough. But we do know that those things all drive costs higher and everybody complains about that so its easy to understand why companies and cooperatives face a balancing act. Imagine what would have happened if Texas energy companies went to their customers 5 years ago and said: "you know what, we think our grid is under-prepared for a once-in-a-lifetime winter storm, so we want to spend a few billion to strengthen the grid. This will result in higher bills for the next few years while we pay for all the new equipment upgrades" You know as well as I do that customers would pitch a fit.
And speaking of "profit", it's always possible that stricter regulations can be lobbied for by the very companies who provide equipment to the power grids. The profit motive can creep up here as well. You bet the people who make transformers, electrical cable, parts for substations, switches, generators, etc, would LOVE it if someone suddenly mandated a stronger grid. If I went shopping for a backup generator for my home I'm pretty sure the dealer would much rather sell me the $20k high-capacity model rather than the $10k standard capacity one. No price is too high when lives are at stake, right?
ATastySub mentioned Exxon Valdez in an earlier post. In the case of the Valdez people were quick to ask why the ship only had a single-thickness hull. After the accident regulations were strengthened and those kinds of ships required double-bottom hulls instead. Yet double-bottom ships still cause oil spills. There was a very serious one in Mauritius last year with the MV Wakashio, a very modern ship. You could make regulations calling for something absurd like quintuple-bottom ships and there will still be spills, and there will still be people totally ignorant of the situation asking why "the proper regulations weren't in place". Regulations can help but they are not a magic bullet. The Valdez would still have spilled oil even if it were a ship built to stricter standards with a double hull. And speaking of shipping at the risk of going off-topic here: there have been numerous dangerous engine failures, including fires, of large ships all around the world in the last few years. The cause? VLSFO (very low sulfur fuel oil) mandated by stricter environmental pollution regulations.
It's easy to point at the differences in regulations between Texas's grid and those of other states, but ultimately nobody knows if those regulations would have actually worked or not. Power grids in more strictly regulated areas fail during natural disasters and periods of extreme weather too. I'm not opposed to regulation, I just don't think it's a magic bullet which could have avoided the disaster which befell my state.
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Redbeard 101
Oscar the Grouch
Forums Superstar
Joined: 14 Aug 2006
Posts: 16935
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 1:45 pm
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| TexZero wrote: | |
Odd, i've not seen many people in this thread who stated they're from the afflicted areas complaining so i can't fathom why you'd want to do so on our behalf.
There's a pretty famous adage about laughter being the best medicine as someone who went through this myself and had no heat, power and water for 3 days i don't find the meme offensive in the slightest and do see the humor in it. |
So you speak for everyone affected by it then? I mean you criticize one user for a particular behavior, and then showcase the very same one yourself. That being speaking for others. If you're going to criticize someone for talking for others then perhaps you should not assume yourself that just because you are ok with something, everyone else as well. This is also hardly a case of socially one group speaking on the behalf of another disenfranchised group that they are not apart of (or some facsimile of that notion), as you are insinuating.
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Cardcaptor Takato
Joined: 27 Jan 2018
Posts: 4820
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 2:57 pm
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| Horsefellow wrote: | |
You don't, but that's marketing these days. Quirky Twitter accounts memeing and trying to attract a younger audience who's into that stuff. |
I feel reasonably certain HiDive was the only social media corporate account that made a joke about the Texas storm. Certainly no major corporations and not even Wendy's did who is the queen of social media corporate trolling. I think it should also be pointed out that it wasn't just a joke about the storm but the joke was comparing Texas being hit by the storm to an anime villain attempting to sexually assault another character. And it feels weird we're not talking about what the joke was in all this and speaking about it in this weird abstract way.
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
Joined: 19 Jan 2012
Posts: 647
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 3:16 pm
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| AkumaChef wrote: |
| ATastySub wrote: | |
You're trying really hard to frame this as a hard logical choice when in reality you're just repeating some soulless propaganda. I went to engineering school too! Did you happen to take any ethics classes? Learn about Bhopal? Exxon-Valdez? Deepwater Horizon? How about the Texas City Refinery in the very state? Etc etc? Turns out this isn't a dumb trolley problem of "do we have enough money saved up or should we let people freeze to death? |
Yes, I studied all those things. I'm not sure what they have to do with the matter at hand though. You are correct that this is no no trolley problem, it's a question of what sort of extreme conditions the grid is designed to handle. And no matter how high you set the bar--no matter how extreme the conditions you spec the grid for--it's always possible that a disaster happens which can exceed that limit. Which is what happened here. Give me a number: what sort of temperatures should the Texas grid have been spec'ed for? A once-a-decade winter storm? A once-every-50 years one? Once-every-hundred years? Be specific.
| Quote: | | Oh well the coffers can't handle it!" The people and companies that set up this stupid trolley did it for profit. |
How do you know that? As I mentioned in my earlier post, my local power company is a cooperative. There is no profit, yet they still have to deal with the same problems, both in spec'ing the grid in the first place and in dealing with the fallout when problems happen.
| Quote: | |
They then refused upkeep on their systems for more profit. When there was suddenly a repercussion for their actions in the form of costs they instead chose to let people freeze to death. |
The choices were made years before when the infrastructure was built and installed. It's not as if any decision made last week had any impact on the disaster. The grid couldn't handle a winter storm of the magnitude which we received. The only way it could have survived it is if it were built with lower temperatures in mind when the when the plants/substations/turbines/etc were originally spec'ed and installed years ago. It's a balancing act. Customers hate paying for excess capacity and extra factor of safety.....except of course when that capacity is actually needed. It's certainly a balancing act.
| Quote: | | And now they're furthering hurting those affected by charging them exorbitant prices rather than pay themselves for the situation they caused. I don't run a company built on gouging a resource people rely on. My finances are completely irrelevant, as are yours. |
I find the high prices charged by on-demand metering to be exorbitant and unconscionable. It makes me wonder why anyone would ever sign such a contract in the first place. But it also has nothing whatsoever to do with the grid failing. |
You may know of them but it sure sounds like you didn’t learn anything from them if you can’t figure out why they’re relevant. Also no, it’s not my job to provide a specific number. Plenty of professionals have done so for years. It’s why Texas literally broke away from other grids so that they wouldn’t have to comply with those numbers Someone else already linked one report but here you go again https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.texastribune.org/2021/02/22/texas-power-grid-extreme-weather/amp/. As for the Exxon I cannot believe the message you took from that was somehow “see actually regulations don’t work.” Of course there were future spills, for other reasons that also require addressing. Also you know why your co-op also struggled? Because it’s connected to the failing Texas Grid that cut itself off to avoid regulation. People are suffering because of a history of decisions that placed their safety as a non-priority. You seem to want to argue semantics about exact numbers over it to justify that. I cannot fathom your reasons for doing so, but your last comment about contracts really sums up a lot. Who else were people supposed to get power from? A state outside of Texas? Should they have signed a contract with a power company from Washington and had them run a line on down? What are you even talking about? This really turns your argument into “if they didn’t want to freeze to death they shouldn’t live in Texas” and if you can’t see why that statement is exactly why this situation needed to be fixed long before this happened then I don’t know what reality you’re engaging with.
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AkumaChef
Joined: 10 Jan 2019
Posts: 821
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 5:07 pm
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| ATastySub wrote: | |
You may know of them but it sure sounds like you didn’t learn anything from them if you can’t figure out why they’re relevant. Also no, it’s not my job to provide a specific number. |
The point is that someone has to come up with a number, and it's always possible that a storm or disaster can exceed that number. This remains true whether that number comes from the utility company itself or an outside regulator. My point isn't that regulation is bad. My point is that regulation isn't a magic bullet that could have avoided the disaster. If the regulations specify a capacity of X but the demands are X+1 then the failure still happens.
Sure, one can argue that Texas didn't follow the standards that others did. But that doesn't mean that Texas would have been OK had they followed those same standards. As I mentioned above power failures due to natural disasters and unusual weather conditions happen in other (regulated) states too. The solution to this problem is far more complex than distilling it down to "oh, well, Texas should have followed the regulators".
| Quote: | | As for the Exxon I cannot believe the message you took from that was somehow “see actually regulations don’t work.” Of course there were future spills, for other reasons that also require addressing. |
That was basically my point. There will always be additional factors that regulation does not address, therefore pointing the finger at lack of regulation (or money-hungry executives) is insufficient to solve the problem.
| Quote: | |
Also you know why your co-op also struggled? Because it’s connected to the failing Texas Grid that cut itself off to avoid regulation. |
My Co-Op didn't struggle. My power remained on 100% of the time and the co-op was able to provide power to neighboring areas who had less power.
| Quote: | | People are suffering because of a history of decisions that placed their safety as a non-priority. You seem to want to argue semantics about exact numbers over it to justify that. |
The reason why I'm raising the point of specific numbers is to illustrate that this is--to some degree at least--an intractable problem. No matter how high people prioritize safety with regulations it is always possible that they aren't prioritizing it high enough, or that problems will creep in from other areas beyond the regulations as we just covered with the Valdez example. I'm also not justifying their actions--I think Texas' reserve capacity was not sufficient--I am stating that simply blaming profit hungry executives at power companies or lack of regulation is a vast oversimplification of the situation. Let's say Texas was the most highly regulated state in the union. How would we know the situation would have been any different? If people don't have exact numbers we cannot answer that question, and I refuse to put blind faith in "more" regulation. How much "more" is enough?
| Quote: | | I cannot fathom your reasons for doing so, but your last comment about contracts really sums up a lot. Who else were people supposed to get power from? |
When you choose to live somewhere you research the area. You look at the crime rate, proximity to your employment, quality of schools, parks/nature, water quality, air quality (smog), etc. If I was looking at moving somewhere and the local power company mandated a market-rate contract I'd scratch that off the list. It's no different than if the bank only offered me a variable-rate mortgage on my home--no thank you, I'm not signing that. And likewise I wouldn't sign up for a variable-rate credit card either. If, for some reason, I was forced to live somewhere with an uncapped variable rate for my power contract I'd make darn sure I had alternative sources of energy for heating my home. Signing any sort of variable-rate financial contract is playing with fire, and when people do that they sometimes get burned. As I wrote before I think it's unconscionable that some power companies do that but it's hard to point the finger at them alone when the customer agreed to the terms.
| Quote: | | This really turns your argument into “if they didn’t want to freeze to death they shouldn’t live in Texas” and if you can’t see why that statement is exactly why this situation needed to be fixed long before this happened then I don’t know what reality you’re engaging with. |
It has nothing to do with simply "living in Texas". I'm not talking about the average customer who lost their power. I'm referring to those with variable-rate contracts specifically, who are a minority of Texans. The reason I'm talking about them is because of your comment in an earlier post. You wrote:
| Quote: | | And now they're furthering hurting those affected by charging them exorbitant prices rather than pay themselves for the situation they caused. |
I can only assume you were referring to those few customers who had variable rate contracts here because the average Texan was not charged exorbitant rates at all. I actually got my power bill yesterday, it was lower than last month's. Did you happen to see some cherrypicked news articles about some customers being stuck with huge bills and assume that applied to the majority of people in Texas? Most Texans aren't facing "exorbitant rates" at all, and those people who are willingly took that risk.
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ATastySub
Past ANN Contributor
Joined: 19 Jan 2012
Posts: 647
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Posted: Tue Feb 23, 2021 8:00 pm
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Just because you really want to make it your job to defend corporate greed does not mean others need to do the job of point by point disproving you. There are plenty of resources available to you. Your "there's no way of knowing if things would've been better" is borderline insulting in the face of human history, especially during a pandemic when the same logic is being used against vaccines. Preventative measures never look fancy because when they do their job right incidents don't occur. You're free to drive without a seatbelt on as much as you like, but I, nor anyone else here, has the responsibility to debate you on why you think they're unnecessary in the faces of those that could've been saved by them. It's ridiculous that you think the risk in this situation was the responsibility of the victims and not those that actually created the circumstances. This thread was about a tasteless joke in a time of tragedy which was appropriately apologized for, and you've successfully derailed it in the cause of finding ways to blame the victims for it in order to remove empathy for them. I'm done feeding you more reasons to soapbox on it least this become a repeat of the BLM thread where you did the same.
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