Month: February 2021

There's been guffawing on both sides over the fact that Texas now has its own electricity crisis to match the one California had in 2019. This is because there are a surprising number of people who judge the success of conservatism and liberalism by which state is "doing better." It's a weird little game.

In this case, though, it turns out that both states suffered from the exact same problem: private companies that declined to bother themselves with taking safety seriously.

In the case of Texas, their power operators didn't engineer their systems to fail gracefully in the face of a huge weather event. That's expensive! This left them with only one option when that event finally occurred: they pulled the switch on millions of customers and left them completely without power for days. This was because they didn't want to spend the money to do things right, and Texas regulators let it slide.

California, on the surface, looks entirely different, but is actually nearly identical. The simple story is that the long series of blackouts in 2019 were caused by a manic wildfire season. But why should wildfires cause blackouts? Not because the fires damaged power plants or transmission lines. It was the other way around: faulty transmission lines can cause wildfires. And why can they do that? Because even after a decade of lawsuits, judicial orders, and attention from regulators, PG&E refused to fix its thousands of spark-prone power lines running through national forests. Everyone knew how to do it—better maintenance of transformers, clear cutting areas around transmission towers, etc.—but PG&E just didn't. So when the high winds came, they shrugged and turned off people's power instead. After all, they're already bankrupt thanks to other acts of negligence. They can hardly afford a spate of new lawsuits claiming that their transmission lines destroyed entire towns—as they had the previous year in Paradise.

It doesn't take a degree in engineering to figure out the solution to these twin crises: private utilities need to be regulated in a serious way. They won't spend money on avoiding seemingly rare events unless someone makes them, and that someone is the state legislators, the regulatory commissions, and judges. They've now failed in the two biggest states in the union. Who's next?

A Texas power official says they were "seconds and minutes" away from long-term catastrophe:

In an interview with the Texas Tribune, Bill Magness, the president of the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, said that if the utility did not cut power on Monday, the amount of energy going offline due to the storm, combined with a surge in demand amid the intense cold, could have caused widespread blackouts lasting for months, leaving the state in an “indeterminately long” crisis.

....In that disaster scenario, demand for power would have overwhelmed the supply of energy on the grid, which could potentially cause power stations to blow and equipment to catch fire. Once physical infrastructure takes such severe damage, it can take months to repair and would demand a slow process to return power sources back to the grid.

Wait. If demand for power is too high, power plants can blow up? Sort of like a bad Star Trek computer when you ask it a difficult question?

I know nothing about power generation, but seriously? You can make a power plant blow up simply by demanding too much electricity? I would sure like to hear an explanation for this. Is it common to all power plants and grids? Or just those in Texas?

And there's also this:

ERCOT has a last resort option: ordering transmission companies to reduce demand on the system with rotating outages for customers....Usually, those outages are limited to less than 45 minutes. But this week, the outages lasted days. That’s likely because after ERCOT ordered companies to stop providing power to customers, even more power generation tripped offline, and it was not able to “roll” the outages effectively, Johnson explained.

So if the power deficit is too big, they can't even roll their rolling blackouts, as they usually do? They just have to choose some unlucky schmoes and cut their power for days?

It sure sounds like Texas power utilities are badly fucked up. They apparently have almost no ability to fail gracefully, something that every engineer in the world counts as a high priority. But I guess it would have been too expensive, and who expects bad weather in Texas, anyway?

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 18. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

A new law has been proposed in Australia that would require social media companies to pay for the news items they promote. Facebook has responded by cutting off all news feeds in Australia, and the Australians are not happy:

Facebook’s brazen move could easily backfire. Facebook is facing new regulation and legal scrutiny globally, and the move is a clear demonstration of the harm that can be caused by a company wielding such enormous power over free expression.

....“Their decision to cut off news in Australia is a demonstration of their raw technical power and their willingness to use it for their own ends,” said Drew Margolin, professor of communication at Cornell University. “It reminds me of Mr. Burns’s decision to block out the sun in the Simpsons movie ­— it stokes fear but also encourages resistance.”

....Following Facebook’s move, hundreds of publishers lost access to revenue and readers previously gleaned from the site.

Hold on a second. I have two thoughts:

In a nutshell, one party (news publishers) wants to charge another party (Facebook) higher rates. This kind of thing happens all the time. It's practically the foundation of capitalism. If the buyer decides the price is too high, they don't buy. That's all Facebook did.

Second, aren't we all up in arms about Facebook's news feeds and how they're destroying democracy? Shouldn't we be delighted to see them cut off news altogether?

Wait. Three thoughts. Shouldn't Australian publishers be ecstatic to no longer be under the Facebook lash? Now they can promote their work without having to worry about Facebook's endless algorithm changes and paywall hacks. More generally, publishers need to make up their minds. Is Facebook good for their business because it sends lots of traffic their way? Or is it bad for business because it steals ad revenue from them?

Now, it's true that Facebook is doing this as a way of pressuring the Australian government to back off. They are undoubtedly afraid that if Australia passes its law and gets away with it, similar laws will spread across the rest of the world in short order. Still, what's wrong with that, beyond normal concerns about a big company lobbying for its interests?

There is something incoherent about our attitude toward Facebook. We don't just think of them as a big, powerful company, but as practically a demon lord run amok. If they run a news feed, they're single-handedly undermining civil society. If they cut their news feed, they're trying to destroy the news business. Meanwhile, the evidence that Facebook's curation of news actually changes much of anything in the real world is surprisingly thin.

My mini-vacation to the Eastern Sierra produced many pictures, but most of them will have to wait until I get home to edit and process them. However, here's one that I took on my first day. I was facing east, away from the Sierras, as the sun was going down. It turns out there's a few minutes just before the sun dips below the mountains when it's shining brightly on the trees in the foreground but not at all on the hills in the background. This produces a wonderful contrast.

The Eastern Sierras practically beg for black and white, and this picture in particular is far better in black and white than in color. That's true for a lot of the photos I took, though not all of them.

Now that the GameStop fiasco has finally settled down, how did things turn out for everyone?

If you bought GME in early January and then ignored everything and just held onto it, you've done OK: your stock has doubled in value. Congratulations!

But what if you played the bubble? Then it worked out just like every other bubble in history. If you bought low and sold at the peak, you made a fortune. But if you bought into the mania in late January, you lost your shirt.

So now the question is: what kind of people mostly profited from the huge runup? And what kind of people mostly lost everything when the bubble burst? The answers to those questions, if we ever get them, will tell us whether this was a "people's revolt" or something a little less salutary.

Here’s the officially reported coronavirus death toll through February 17. The raw data from Johns Hopkins is here.

This morning the Census Bureau released numbers for retail sales in January, and the news is good: they're up 5.3% compared to last month.

I don't really understand why anyone would care about how the January numbers compare to December, though. It would be better to compare them to January 2020. Or, better still, just take a look at the raw numbers over time:

After the big dip in 2020, retail sales recovered immediately. Since June of last year they've been consistently above trend—and in January they were way above trend. If my arithmetic is correct, this means we've nearly made up completely for the spending collapse in March-May of last year. This is all thanks to the coronavirus rescue bills that we've passed so far, with the one wending its way though Congress right now set to finish the job.

Despite the pandemic, spending is high; savings are high; and earnings are high. There are still legitimate fears about whether employment will rebound completely this summer, but that's true of nearly all recessions. Overall, we have good reason to be pretty optimistic about the state of the economy.

This is why I hate Fox News. I'm sure everyone there knows perfectly well that wind turbines played only a minor role in the recent Texas blackouts, but they don't care. Anyone watching their broadcasts will come away believing that the whole thing is the fault of woke environmentalists and the stupid green power that they somehow forced Texas to use.

That's millions of people who will believe this, and they'll pass it along to millions and millions more. Fact checkers will earnestly explain what really happened, but no one will hear them. Within a week or so it will be part of conservative legend that green power wrecked the Texas power grid and forced millions of people to freeze their asses off until fossil fuels came to the rescue.

So forget QAnon. There aren't that many true believers, and the few who exist don't have the brains or the organizational power to do very much harm. Fox News is just the opposite: they have both serious brainpower and a huge audience at their beck and call. They're the ones responsible for the election of Donald Trump, not a bunch of pathetic conspiracy theorists.

We've all seen a million giraffes, so I know that my giraffe needs to offer a little extra. No problem. Behold the tongue action as this giraffe munches on a branch of some kind at the San Diego Zoo.