US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M • Hacker News Board

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#231

Post by poulsbohemian » Mon, May 04, 2020, 5:52 PM UTC

beefield wrote: post #168

Animats wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the plot of "Atlas Shrugged".

Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely becaus…

(I don't want to get into a pedantic fight over Any Rand / objectivism / Atlas Shrugged, I simply want to share an alternative viewpoint)

It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she tried to paint a realistic picture, ultimately Atlas Shrugged is a work of fiction that falls apart when placed within real-world constructs, especially 50+ years on after its publication.

At the heart of it, what Rand appeared to most argue in Atlas Shrugged was against regulation and governance that superseded the inalienable rights of citizens plus centralized power in an authoritarian state and took away the economic agency of the individual. That doesn't preclude a functioning republic where people can own businesses, own the rights to their creations, and still pay taxes for the benefits of services best provided by government.

Now here's the irony: Rather than coming for our system via communism, which was Rand's concern, instead it was nominal capitalists who came to destroy the system via regulatory capture. I don't see what the right-wing, nominal capitalists in the US have done to be any different than the moochers in Rand's book.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#232

Post by Feuilles_Mortes » Mon, May 04, 2020, 6:42 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #224

Feuilles_Mortes wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands in the Middle East died from Obama's presidency. At a certain point you start to think that the "lesser of two evils" strategy just shifts the playing field to be ever-increasing in its evil across the board.

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Absolutely. I don't mean to make the issue a partisan one, but to point out that it is distinctly non-partisan (at least between the Democrats and Reuplicans).

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#233

Post by beefield » Mon, May 04, 2020, 7:13 PM UTC

poulsbohemian wrote: post #231

beefield wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely becaus…

(I don't want to get into a pedantic fight over Any Rand / objectivism / Atlas Shrugged, I simply want to share an alternative viewpoint) It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she…

To me both communism and right-wing (brutalist aynrandian) capitalism are the same in some sense. Both are somewhat nice ideologues in naive theory. But if you bring them to real world, communism brings you Soviet Union and right-wing capitalism brings you regulatory capture moochers or warlords, depending a bit on your flavor of capitalism.

The major difference is that only some insignificant weirdos in the fringes have not agreed that communism is stupid in practice. Brutalist aynrandian ideology is much more prevalent problem and needs to be somehow gotten into same ridiculed state as communism as an actual feasible ideology.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#234

Post by twomoretime » Mon, May 04, 2020, 7:20 PM UTC

Afforess wrote: post #109

twomoretime wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's an old saying that people deserve their rulers.

This attitude is toxic and worse, incorrect. The majority of Americans did not vote for our President. I live in Austin, and my state district in TX includes a tiny slice of a city hundreds of miles away, Houston. Many state districts are like this, gerrymandered to prevent my vote from counting. Some places have it worse, DC, the capital, has no representation at all (fun trivia: Google the DC license plate). The vo…

You miss the applicability of the saying because you drastically overestimate the capability of the average American.

Hell, ignoring the deplorable level to which standards have been lowered by perverse incentives to pass students, the US only has an average of 80 HS graduation rate.

These are your voters. People who struggled to make it through high school have just as much of a day over your governments, your legislation, as you do. Do you expect uneducated and/or ignorant voters to make good decisions?

https://www.publicschoolreview.com/average-graduation-rate-s...

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#235

Post by viscoelastic » Mon, May 04, 2020, 7:42 PM UTC

theonething wrote: post #185

flipgimble wrote: post #99

This article has an unexpected resonance for me after several weeks of pandemic lockdown. Just three months ago I would have laughed it off. Now I am increasingly pissed off. In the US, but I see reflection of this in Europe as well, has allowed irresponsible puerile imbeciles to be elected. These people play games with wealth and power, with no regard to the lives and well-being of the society that pays for it. I di…

Are you referring only to the current administration? Aren't prior administrations also guilty since they did not prepare for an electrical grid collapse either?

As op predicted, there is always one that tries to derail the discussion into the false distinction between parties, administrations or what have you. As opposed to working towards solutions that may save lives, let's spend the next decade or two throwing blame and arguing. Classic use of what-aboutism to muddy the waters.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#236

Post by viscoelastic » Mon, May 04, 2020, 8:00 PM UTC

cglace wrote: post #169

s5300 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quite tired and ill right now so I'm unfortunately not going to be able to write this out even slightly well... but for some reason, I want to post the thought anyway so I will. (Note: I'm a U.S. citizen) In short: As an engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home I couldn't escape even with scholarships... I simply can't come to the moral conclusio…

Good luck with that. There is a very large portion of the population that believe this administration has left the world better than they found it.

30 millions jobs lost and counting. 70,000 deaths in the US alone. No international cooperation. No organized plan to contain the pandemic, or even demonstrate confidence. to the markets. The endless stream of scandals before that can only be dismissed if you buy into the endless propaganda machine.

The world is not better by any measure.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#237

Post by cglace » Mon, May 04, 2020, 8:17 PM UTC

viscoelastic wrote: post #236

cglace wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that. There is a very large portion of the population that believe this administration has left the world better than they found it.

30 millions jobs lost and counting. 70,000 deaths in the US alone. No international cooperation. No organized plan to contain the pandemic, or even demonstrate confidence. to the markets. The endless stream of scandals before that can only be dismissed if you buy into the endless propaganda machine. The world is not better by any measure.

I don’t know why you are trying to convince me or why you think providing figures will change the fact that a large portion of the country feels one way. You can’t argue your way out of that fact.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#238

Post by beambot » Mon, May 04, 2020, 8:32 PM UTC

roywiggins wrote: post #57

beambot wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Events like the Carrington & Covid seem to fit: high profile, hard to predict and rare. IMO, both qualify as Black swan. At some point, you have to pick a threshold on the probabilities involved... These events are likely independent & identically distributed (i.e. hard to predict for any year), and I'd call sub-1% annual chance pretty rare. But I'm receptive to a different threshold... But you can't just say "Black…

Not to be all Word of God, but Nassim Taleb does not consider COVID19 a black swan at all. https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-pandemic-is... It's not a black swan because everyone with half a brain could say that there would eventually be a global pandemic respiratory disease. H1N1 was technically one, it just happened to be mild. We thought there was going to be one in 1976 and raced to vaccinate every…

By your logic, I literally cannot think of a single candidate for a Black Swan event.

I've seen examples floated: World Wars, Rise of PCs or Internet, Chernobyl, September 11th, etc, etc. All of these possibilities were posited by smart people well in advance -- again, it's a matter of setting thresholds on the probabilities.

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#239

Post by jyrkesh » Mon, May 04, 2020, 9:26 PM UTC

poulsbohemian wrote: post #231

beefield wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that it is precisely the opposite in certain important details. John Galt did not want a functioning society funded by money tax^H^H^H stolen from him. He did not want the society to offer medical care or education to "engineering student with quite severe chronic illness that also got fucked over by abusive parents/a broken home" He went to strike and pushed for existing society's destruction precisely becaus…

(I don't want to get into a pedantic fight over Any Rand / objectivism / Atlas Shrugged, I simply want to share an alternative viewpoint) It seems to me that Ayn Rand / Atlas Shrugged get used to justify a lot of brutalist ideas, even among her direct inheritors. Having watched some of her interviews and read several of her books, I'm not convinced that the elimination of government was her intent. Further, while she…

Hopefully not getting too lost in the pedantry, and I'm absolutely not a Rand supporter (though I had my 16-year old Atlas Shrugged phase where I actually read the whole damn book).

a) You're spot on she didn't want to destroy the govt. She was explicitly a minarchist, and she swapped major arugments and ridicule with the Ancaps of the time (like Murray Rothbard)

b) The communism hate gets floated most, but my read of Atlas Shrugged was that she placed the collectivists at the same evil level as the church, crony capitalists, and postmodernists, to the point of having characters who 1-dimensionally represented each of them (she's literally got a lobbyist character called "Wesley Mouch").

That's why it's always hilarious to me when I see neocon congressfolk saying that Atlas Shrugged is their favorite book: she hated the church as much as the government (and would've likely hated those politicians as well).

Poked around some articles after writing some of this, found this one to be pretty neutral and illustrates my point a little better: https://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/the-paul-ryan-ayn-rand...

Re: US unprepared for an electrical grid collapse, but it costs only $300M

#240

Post by jyrkesh » Mon, May 04, 2020, 9:30 PM UTC

zimpenfish wrote: post #224

Feuilles_Mortes wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thousands in the Middle East died from Obama's presidency. At a certain point you start to think that the "lesser of two evils" strategy just shifts the playing field to be ever-increasing in its evil across the board.

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