>>Regulation is often not the voice of the little guy, since what drives regulation is too commonly dependent on political power derived from large campaign donations.

As far as the US, that's only true for the last 45-50 years. Basically, when Nader and other consumer advocates started getting auto safety legislation passed, the Big Three upped their lobbying game, and other corporations followed suit. And for the most part, they successfully froze the people out of Congress.

I do agree that regulations can also create artificial barriers to entry as well. Regulations in and of themselves are neither good nor bad, but that level of subtlety rarely enters American politics.

>> but there is often ample consideration for the wellbeing of the have-nots.

Obviously not in the United States, which has the worst health outcomes in the developed world.

>> We aren't dying in droves from the inconvenience of temporarily being without electricity

I guess it depends on your definition of "droves". Dozens of Texans have died due to a completely preventable disaster. Texas looks like a third-world country right now. And as a proud Texan, that is a punch to the gut.

>> Modeling infrastructure systems to reflect worst case scenarios is seldom ever practical, or a wise allocation of resources

You are implying that the recent ice storms are a "worst case scenario," which is disingenuous and wrong. Other countries and states handle this type of weather with no problem, and so can Texas. We just need to stop letting idiot asshole economists design our power grid.

You may need to review your sources again. The main cause of failure was freezing pipes at oil and natural gas plants. Yes, some turbines froze, but overall the renewables provided more capacity than was expected.

>>Consumers have been reaping the benefits of wind and solar only because these have been massively subsidized.
As opposed to what? The entire US government (and especially Texas) externalizes the massive (health, environmental, political) costs of ravenous oil and gas extraction. Any good-faith discussion of "massive subsidies" needs to acknowledge this ugly fact.

>> Yes they could have weatherized them, but that's expensive and in a place that doesn't normally freeze I as a rate payer would not like to pay extra to do things that aren't typically necessary.

How expensive is it compared to the damage wrought by the weather? The weather that we knew was coming, because it happens every 10 years or so.

My guess it is was much, much cheaper to do the right thing and winterize everything, rather than fix the damage after the fact. Not to mention the human lives that were lost, or the insane power costs you quoted.

I'm a native Texan and I don't ever recall a politician, ERCOT rep, or local power provider asking me how much more I'd be willing to pay for some insurance against winter storms. My guess is that if Texans were actually brought in to that discussion, instead of it happening behind closed doors, we would have overwhelmingly approved the extra costs.

>> The actual cause and blame lies in an unprecedented storm.

Not unprecedented in the least.

>> I know everyone wants a throat to choke, and use it as a political spanner,

And what do you want? To absolve Texas' leaders from blame on what is clearly a failure of their leadership? Texans once held their "energy independence" as a point of pride. This storm pulled our pants down at the free throw line, and now the whole team can see how tiny our peen is.

>> if you think that's harassing and dehumanising workers then you've clearly never had a job, because guess what? pretty much every employer on earth expects you to perform and has regular performance review processes.

I've had plenty of jobs, including warehouse jobs, but never one where I was strapped to a PDA that constantly bleats at me to speed up. I can't remember a job one where injuries are so common, that management has put ibuprofen dispensers at every corner. Where I almost never see anyone, but I'm not allowed (under threat of firing) to listen to music. How are you supposed to find any mental or physical repose with that metrics-based boot on your neck all day?

>>As I say, get a job and understand how the world works, stop believing everything you read on the internet. I mean congrats, you managed to find a handful of the disgruntled failures that prefer to blame their employer than sort their shit out and get their act together.

I do have a job-one with an employer that respects me as a human being. When I saw my coworkers being treated unfairly at my old job, I brought it up to senior management, and finally left when nothing was done (my former employer is NOT doing well, by the way).

If I had no self-respect, I would meekly fill boxes in silence all day, shredding my body in exchange for free ibuprofen, $15/hr, and the hope of one day having shitty health insurance. And in my off time, I'd defend my employer on message boards by calling my coworkers who demand better conditions "disgruntled failures."

I'm sure you've tuned me out by now, but for anyone else who's reading, I recommend reading this whole thread ( https://slashdot.org/comments....) , especially the "America is a sweatshop" post that perfectly details why Americans have such low expectations from their employers. We should demand more.

Hooray for anonymous Amazon shilling.

May I retort:
- Amazon hires Pinkertons to infiltrate and suppress unions ( https://www.vice.com/en/articl... ).
- Amazon uses metrics as an excuse to harrass and dehumanize workers ( https://slashdot.org/comments.... ).
- Instead giving their employees a reasonable amount of breaks, Amazon fills their warehouses full of ibuprofen dispensers ( https://www.goodreads.com/en/b...) .

I especially recommend the last link if you want to really understand what the future of work is for the majority of Americans. And please, let's not pretend that Amazon is a benevolent employer.

Upending your life and career to join a PHIL HARRISON-led project, no less. Do they know nothing about the industry in which they work?

>> All this whining about what America should be, or should have been, ignores the central fact that its people determine what it is.

That's a pretty naive take. We're actually an oligarchy ( https://www.bbc.com/news/blogs... ). Even if we ignore the blatant corruption in our system, the Electoral College, the Senate, Congressional District boundaries...they've all basically designed to suppress majority opinions.

We'll never have socialized medicine (despite it being favored by 54% of Americans and 70+% of Democrats) because the underpopulated and lowest-educated states can permanently outvote the populated, educated states. Georgia turned blue? Who cares, we still have the filibuster and the Dakotas! And if even that changed, Senator McConnell's extensive court-packing means that any socialized medicine initiatives will be thrown out as unconstitutional for at least the next 40 years.

>> No one is standing in the way of this do-nothing administration with their non-plan. It's just organically happening. Like bullshit does.

The Democrats are trying to pass a huge stimulus bill over Republicans. So they are trying SOMETHING. How long it lasts until they throw up their hands and blame Joe Manchen/Mitch McConnell etc as their excuse to do nothing, I don't know.

But for right now...they are actually trying to do something besides virtue-signal. Very unlike the Democrats, but I'm happy to see it.

>> The intelligence wasn't proved to me. It was proved enough to worry me. It wasn't proved enough that I'd take it to a court of law. That's often true in battlefield intelligence -- Gen. Frank McKenzie

Tell me why should I believe General Frank McKenzie or the rest of the revolving parade of losers than have dumped trillions into Afghanistan and Iraq, with hugely negative results for both the occupiers and the occupied? The "proof" is that they found some Taliban guys with a bunch of cash...in a country that has no functioning currency and traffics lots of opium.

>> The fact that Trump convince the GOP that Russia is our friend is most troubling.

Surprisingly, it's possible for Russia to be an enemy of the US WITHOUT paying bounties for dead American soldiers. Just as its possible to realize that Russiagate and Bountygate were completely built on lies, without supporting Trump or the GOP.

Maxine Waters, an "extremist leftist?"

Honey, she takes more money from the banking industry than pretty much anyone on either side of the aisle. And she's quick to punish anyone who actually tries to regulate them (such as Katie Porter-kicked off the Finance Committee for doing her job).

She's one of the worst corporate Democrats out there, which is saying something for a party that is getting waaaay too chummy with Wall Street.

I don't know about "large international companies" in general, but WFH/global hiring practices are pretty standard in tech companies. I'm pretty surprised that Spotify is just now officially accepting this.

Bit of a self-own that you read my comment and immediately rush to defending the Dems' credulity and willingness to be played by the endless warriors/military-industrial complex/deep state/whatever you want to call them. Liz Cheney, is that you?

"Well, Bitcoin is a thing now. Guess we can stop
mining gold, lithium, etc" - No one, ever.

Bitcoin doesn't fix any of the problems you mentioned. In fact, it wastes a tremendous amount of energy and does nothing to change the status quo around extractive practices or the banking industry.

Bitcoin is already a major contributor to global warming, and when those glaciers melt, guess what is going to happen? More mining in previously-pristine places!

That's a pretty shitty legacy to leave our descendants, isn't it?

Excellent points. There's a lot of contradictory forces at work here. Trump and the neocons both supported Cold War v2 against China, but Trump actually tried to pull back from the neocon's disastrous endless wars.

Most Dems bought the Bountygate stories (despite the total lack of proof), putting them on the side of neocons and endless warriors. Biden is making noise about China's human rights violations, but if he's truly the status quo leader he wants us to believe he is, then he will look the other way and keep doing business.

That's why to be truly secure, you need a chain of firewalls, Huawei to block the NSA backdoors, Cisco to block the CCP backdoors, etc...etc...