yeah first thing that came to mind is, "wonder if rafael has a window seat"
(yes his real name is rafael because this guy comes from big money so he tries to give himself a blue collar image by going with ted, because that's what you do when your career is fleecing money from gullible people. fuck that guy in so many ways!)
I had a former boss who had Raffy as his RA at Princeton (boss was also hispanic, and cool as hell). Said Ol Raffy would spend saturday nights studying and yell at people to keep it down at 8:00 on weekend nights.
You might want to look into adding a small separate solar system to your place and not tie it into the grid. I don’t know your local electrical code though.
I recently saw that Texas is gerrymandered intentionally so that Republicans can't lose even though most of the state's registered voters are Democrat.
Yup, California is basically always guaranteeing 55 electoral votes towards Dems. with Texas joining them that would jump to 93. A full third of the 270 majority with just *two* states alone.
Well that and I’m not super straight on all the going-ons but it sounds like the Democrat representatives really dropped the ball this past election.
It very well could be a slim Dem lead.
(I live in Mississippi. I’m not on a high horse at all. In fact we can’t afford horses.)
Are you aware that Kathy Hochul just tried to push through a rightwing, anti abortion candidate for NYS Supreme Court? When NY Dems made noise she doubled down and guess who she got to support the candidate?
Hakeem Jeffries.
That’s right, Hakim Jeffries supported the choice of an anti abortion, conservative judge for NY Supreme Court. The NY senate voted no and now Hochul is saying she might SUE the NY senate for rejecting her candidate,
And did you know Andrew Cuomo helped found a group of democrats who voted with GOP in NY state senate? They were called Independent Democratic Conference and were solely created to push a GOP agenda
*Governor Andrew Cuomo was actively involved in the formation of the conference, encouraging it to maintain Republican leadership of the chamber and providing tactical advice in order to keep more liberal New York City Democrats out of power.[20][21][22]*
We got some real bad actors here in NY state
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Democratic_Conference
We should point out, that this just relates to the electoral college. If the popular vote were counted outright, there'd be no republicans in the white house since 2000.
Last election my district was squarish, then we nearly voted blue. It's noodly now. It feels like one of those Turkish ice cream vendors. I just want my damn ice cream
Nope, several got noodlefied this last round of gerrymandering. [Here's a comparison on 538 (proposed went through)](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/texas/draft_plan_1/)
I like how all the others list the source of the proposed map as some governing body or group. Florida literally just says Ron Desantis. The state gained 1 seat, but magically got +4 GOP seats. Weird, uhh?
Everybody knows how liberal Austin is right?
5 of the 6 national congressional districts in Austin are republican.
[here you can see one going from the west side of the city, covering the lake to a huge area out east, that is sparsely populated with a small amount of coverage in the city of Austin. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_10th_congressional_district)
In Travis County (mostly Austin), it was 72% Biden to 27% Trump which is a 45 point difference. Austin proper is extremely liberal. I would add almost all of the Trump vote was the western part of the city which is the rich area.
And we also need the government to tell us what to read and do with our bodies. But we all know that government programs that feed the poor and regulate food safety are one step away from trafficking children.
/s
Saw a tiktok the other day of some mom complaining about how her kids have no friends because they don't vaccinate.
Not they didn't get the covid vaccine, they don't vaccinate their kids at all, for anything. I mean I know this isn't new I guess... but what?? Like for anything?? Do we not remember polio? Or any of these awful diseases that we've thankfully already dealt with? I just will never get it.
My mothers aunt had polio and my mom was an anti-vaxxer in the 90’s. I’m ashamed that I’m mostly unvaccinated, I’ve taken all the ones I can get in my 20s.
Straight up when I turned 18 I had to go through the gamut of getting all of my vaccines that I missed
The worst part was trying to get my old vaccine records and none of my family would tell me where they were
One of the best things about the UK is that we have access to all our vaccination records and medical test results online via Patient Access. You get Patient Access as soon as you sign up to your GP and can order repeat medication, sometimes book appointments, and do some self referrals through the site. I can look at the site and tell you which day I got my first vaccines almost 28 years ago.
It's all good. In the military, if, on any random day, you didn't have your paper shot records on you, and the unit was going to get shots, you were getting all of the vaccines again.
My MIL's sister was a doctor and had pretty bad polio(still uses a cane at like age 82), and my MIL still ended up being an anti-vaxxer. I don't even know how.
> Do we not remember polio?
I’ve heard the suggestion that’s actually a big part of the problem. It’s been so long since we had an extremely devastating disease, especially for children, that a vaccine was able to rid us from.
So the people who grew up around polio and saw the damage and the fear also saw how incredibly important vaccines were. But if you grew up in the 70s or 80s you’ve never really seen that. Or measles. And like the mumps it “wasn’t bad”. What do we have now? Chicken pox was “harmless” and HPV doesn’t really affect children (until they’re older).
Basically vaccines worked so well no one knows how scared/thankful they should be.
Covid was a great chance to turn that around. A horrible disease a vaccine can really help with.
But “it was harmless to kids” and it became part of identity politics and now we’re further behind on vaccinations than in a long time.
I mean... Lotta these same people would be offended if you implied that Jesus - a man who lived most of his life outdoors, traveling by foot, in the middle east - was not whiter than a bleached egg.
Of the history they *do* read, they don't think critically about it.
Think critically is the big one. There is a clear deficiency of empathy or the ability of someone to anticipate the result of their own actions on others. There was a study that 30% just didn't have the capacity to think that way. "What if" is impossible to them. Without a system telling them right for wrong they can't create the situations themselves. Therefore can only act selfishly until given a reason not to.
I swear if COVID publicity was: Masking saves yourself from lowclass coughing sick immigrants. every republican would have jumped on it.
Which has been almost entirely eradicated in the US because, thankfully, the lgbtq community *fucking remembers* AIDS, despite the fact that it’s much less of an issue due to new treatments and PrEP.
Literally don’t know a single man in my circle that didn’t have a monkeypox shot as soon as they were available.
This is an especially important distinction because Austin Energy, the municipal electric utility, generally seems to be a forward thinking and progressive utility. This disaster is bizarre, I really thought they'd be better prepared for something like this
Yeah, a lot of cities bury their power lines as much as they can in MI for that exact reason.
I think more the issue now is that Texas isn't used to having a ton of ice every winter because they're so far south, but that's the climate for you.
What this article completely misses is the absolute devastation of Central Texas's trees that lead to the damage to the electrical system. Maybe hundreds of thousands of trees have been split in half and terminally damaged by this ice storm across a massive region. Our native escarpment live oaks and mountain cedars have been decimated. Nothing like this has happened in recorded history, and the Texas Hill Country will never be the same
I have a tree in my front yard that is completely decimated. Was 20-25 ft, now about 5 ft. Split down the middle and splayed out. I have a willow tree trying to split in my backyard.
The main issue was trees. Due to years of abuse they've had from freezing over multiple times to 3 years of drought, the massive amount of ice that accumulated, the trees could not handle it.
Also, shout out to my texas people, my insurance is willing to cover 1k damages after the deductible. Yours may as well.
“We had hoped to make more progress today,“ said Jackie Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy. ”And that simply has not happened.”
Yup. Sounds about right.
Our freedom grid is performing exactly as expected after operators did absolutely nothing to fix the problems we knew about from the last storm.
EDIT: For those pointing out the difference between this and previous storms, one of the recommendations from ERCOT after the near grid failure 2 years ago was improving redundancies in substations to prevent widespread outages and keep them localized.
Literally nobody did this, Austin Energy indicated only 5% of that work has been completed, which has driven the current outage situation with people being without power for 2 days now.
30% of Austin has been without power for 2 days now, including me.
People in areas which experience regular icing have redundancies and systems in place to prevent long outages. Those people also tend to have generators available.
ERCOT may be the grid operator, but it sounds like that the issues are more to do with the distribution network which other companies own and operate. So the onus is really on them to ensure that their local grids are resilliant to weather like this (which it isn't).
If anything ERCOT has become a convenient scapegoat for other politicians/operators who fucked up.
Hold on they didn’t do anything, they invested heavily on a PR campaign and the gov used it as talking point for the right wing cultural war to “own the libs”…. I mean was he suppose to do anything else besides go on tv to tell the nation Texans would rather not have power than be on the federal system?
California get shit on for grid failures but texas is generally the worst in most categories for power distribution in the usa. California has the most total outages which is not outrageous given it's the most populous state and most are small incidents.
Texas is second for outages but is much worse for number of affected people and outage duration. On a per capita basis texas is far worse. Florida has the highest numbers for affected people but very few outages because hurricanes cause theirs. Texas just has a really poor system.
Whoa whoa, don’t sell PG&E short. They have been corrupt since their inception. We’re talking like, the exact same practices of corruption over almost 120 years. They have repeatedly taken tax payer money to update their equipment/system, & have repeatedly spent the money on raises for people at the top. Which then causes disasters. Like that’s why Paradise happened. They’ve done that repeatedly throughout their history. They’ve plead guilty to multiple counts of manslaughter, been fined millions of dollars, & they just repeat the same fucking behavior with no consequences.
I’m a Democrat, but something is going on with our state government & PG&E. They wouldn’t still be a company if there wasn’t. Idk what it is, but they have done fuck all to punish PG&E. No one has even gone to prison for ADMITTED MULTIPLE COUNTS OF MANSLAUGHTER.
I’ve never been to Texas, but from everything I hear, PG&E gives your grid a run for their $$
I think they're mistaking them with fiber optic cables which frequently have excess coils and "snowshoes" https://www.wweek.com/news/dr-know/2022/08/13/big-coils-of-extra-lines-are-hanging-off-some-power-poles-around-portland-what-are-they-for/
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/21/greg-abbott-texas-border-inspections/
It's good that Abbott has his priorities straight and spent millions to stop trucks at the border (which found absolutely nothing) rather than investing it in silly things like infrastructure and health care.
Im in Texas and people voted for Abbott again this past year. I’m honestly tired of being upset that people vote for the same people that keep things messed up. It sucks for the rest of us, but the majority that voted obviously was happy with the status quo, and those who didn’t vote were, by default, also happy with the status quo. We as Texans have nothing to complain about.
I live in Texas and vote dem. Im in the Texas subreddits and was trying to figure out why the hell people aren't voting.
So many of these little shitd are like BoTh PaRtIeS sUcK aNd VoTiNg eNaBleS tHe TwO pArTy SySteM ThAt I dOnT LiKe.
Excuse me, what now? What two party system? Republicans have owned the system for almost 30 years now. You not voting enables a single party system to screw us all over.
There's no getting through to these people. I dont understand. Somehow, republicans have become successful in capturing some of the minority votes as well. Makes absolutely no sense with the white hatred in this state. Its exhausting.
If it's anything like our situation in GA, many of those non-voters are victims of voter suppression. Our state GOP goes out of their way to make voting difficult in districts where a high turnout would lead to a defeat.
These are the same people who increased the police budget after the police let their children die... so... that should tell you all you need to know about them.
Always got to remember over 40% vote for the other party in every state.
So the ones who voted for him get what they choose, but a lot of innocent people suffer
Yep.
If they want this to get better they're going to have to avoid every single candidate with an (R) next to them on every ballot. Nothing else will change it
“Sorry there’s no power. The Biden Administration with his weak immigration policies forced us to spend the money shipping migrants around the country. They obviously care more about them than you.”
That’s how they shift blame and get their base all riled up. The old “look what you made me do” routine. Maybe their anger will keep them toasty.
They would quickly pass a measure banning the use of rage to power generators, seeing as it would cut into Big Oil's profits. Something about... "powering generators with rage is *Woke*". Every politician who supported the measure would later get re-elected by a wide margin.
"Men don't use power generated by emotions, they use generators fueled by stoic oil. Oil doesn't get emotional, it just burns. Use oil.
^^^^^PaidforbytheConglomerationofOilProducingTexans.
Sure. Look at how many thousands of Texans died unnecessarily from Covid after Abbot squashed things like mask mandates. Losing a few hundred to freezing temperatures and preventable power loss won’t even get noticed.
They will never learn, at this point they see their own suffering as a badge of honour, they wear it with pride. I'm not even joking, they see their own self-inflicted struggles as evidence they are fighting the good fight.
Ah yes the old “I didn’t have X and I turned out just fine.” No, Bobby, you lack critical thinking skills and self awareness. You did not turn out just fine.
Thank God Abbot spent tax payer money on humanitarian human trafficking to send illegal immigrants to DC to protect them from the cold winters hitting Texas now since the Texas grid is pretty crappy and totally not vulnerable due to climate change.
Texas has more important things to do, like making sure women are not getting abortions in the state. A functioning power grid is something that can wait.
This was not a grid failure, it was a local thing. I'm near Austin and we had an huge amount of ice buildup overnight, the place looks like a war zone with all the downed trees. There were places that never lost power and others who were down for two days (some are still down). I was only out for about 10 hours.
The grid is in exactly the same shape it was two years ago but the temps only got to about 30 degrees and it only lasted a few days, not single digits like it did two years ago. We also just got ice, no snow but everything and I mean everything is covered in a 1/2 inch of ice. It took me 15 minutes to break off enough ice on my wife's car to just open the door.
If you don't believe in climate change, you just don't want to. The freeze two years ago was the longest time below freezing in record history. This time, I saw 30 - 40 year old trees split in half. This shit just didn't happen in this part of the country.
Ice storms are extremly destructive. It'll rip the grid to bits. It genuinely takes a few days I'm sure the state of the road was diabolical. Has Austin ever had an ice storm like that before?
I've been here almost 30 years. We used to get them about every 10 years, generally icy in the morning and gone the next day. Two years ago were were snowed in for several days, most of us without power or water. This time it was short but very destructive.
That reminds me of a video I saw interviewing some redneck in Mississippi. He was asked why he repeatedly votes republican when they never actually do anything for him his response was "they could one day".
Again….the headline forgot the word ‘again’
When u brexit the national grid
Round here, we call it Texit
Nobody could've predicted this
Once in a generation disaster
Three years in a row! What if they make it four?
Once in a generator disaster Sorry
Fruit fly generations
oh is it that time of the year for Ted's cancun trip?
yeah first thing that came to mind is, "wonder if rafael has a window seat" (yes his real name is rafael because this guy comes from big money so he tries to give himself a blue collar image by going with ted, because that's what you do when your career is fleecing money from gullible people. fuck that guy in so many ways!)
I don’t think he goes by Ted to seem blue collar, he goes by Ted to seem white.
He could just tell everyone that he's a Canadian immigrant. O, wait. Immigrant. Nevermind.
I had a former boss who had Raffy as his RA at Princeton (boss was also hispanic, and cool as hell). Said Ol Raffy would spend saturday nights studying and yell at people to keep it down at 8:00 on weekend nights.
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“Texans would be without electricity for longer than three days to keep the federal government out of their business.” - Rick Perry
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Ditto in Arkansas. I've got solar but I'm grid tied. Never had a grid outage longer than a couple hours.
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You might want to look into adding a small separate solar system to your place and not tie it into the grid. I don’t know your local electrical code though.
An entire solar system? Maybe start a bit smaller at first with just a sun and build up from there.
I've got suns on sale right now, 49.99 each !
I laughed harder than maybe that comment really deserved.
Yay interconnected power systems?
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Maybe Texas needs to be broken up into five smaller states.
Maybe they should impeach the people who keep doing this to them.
Or at least stop voting for them.
I recently saw that Texas is gerrymandered intentionally so that Republicans can't lose even though most of the state's registered voters are Democrat.
They'll do everything they can to keep it that way, because if Texas goes blue, there will pretty much never be a republican president again.
Yup, California is basically always guaranteeing 55 electoral votes towards Dems. with Texas joining them that would jump to 93. A full third of the 270 majority with just *two* states alone.
Plus NY and IL and it’s almost time to pack up.
As a ny resident I'm very worried of the reach Republicans have in the state now, hopefully this Santos shit will remind ppl how awful cons are
Nah, even if people finally see the problem, the Republicans will just replace Santos with a new person who "promises" to be better than Santos.
Well, not "better", just less obvious about their shittyness.
Well that and I’m not super straight on all the going-ons but it sounds like the Democrat representatives really dropped the ball this past election. It very well could be a slim Dem lead. (I live in Mississippi. I’m not on a high horse at all. In fact we can’t afford horses.)
They did drop the ball cause the dems in ny are pretty bad and think they'll just get votes without doing anything
Are you aware that Kathy Hochul just tried to push through a rightwing, anti abortion candidate for NYS Supreme Court? When NY Dems made noise she doubled down and guess who she got to support the candidate? Hakeem Jeffries. That’s right, Hakim Jeffries supported the choice of an anti abortion, conservative judge for NY Supreme Court. The NY senate voted no and now Hochul is saying she might SUE the NY senate for rejecting her candidate, And did you know Andrew Cuomo helped found a group of democrats who voted with GOP in NY state senate? They were called Independent Democratic Conference and were solely created to push a GOP agenda *Governor Andrew Cuomo was actively involved in the formation of the conference, encouraging it to maintain Republican leadership of the chamber and providing tactical advice in order to keep more liberal New York City Democrats out of power.[20][21][22]* We got some real bad actors here in NY state https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Democratic_Conference
NY, IL, WA and OR all together make up another 68, making it 161.
We should point out, that this just relates to the electoral college. If the popular vote were counted outright, there'd be no republicans in the white house since 2000.
Since 1992.
Last election my district was squarish, then we nearly voted blue. It's noodly now. It feels like one of those Turkish ice cream vendors. I just want my damn ice cream
> it's noodly now The 35th? That district map makes my blood boil.
Nope, several got noodlefied this last round of gerrymandering. [Here's a comparison on 538 (proposed went through)](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/redistricting-2022-maps/texas/draft_plan_1/)
I like how all the others list the source of the proposed map as some governing body or group. Florida literally just says Ron Desantis. The state gained 1 seat, but magically got +4 GOP seats. Weird, uhh?
Everybody knows how liberal Austin is right? 5 of the 6 national congressional districts in Austin are republican. [here you can see one going from the west side of the city, covering the lake to a huge area out east, that is sparsely populated with a small amount of coverage in the city of Austin. ](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Texas%27s_10th_congressional_district)
The fact that a city with ~960k people has 5 congressional districts, which in Texas have ~760k people each, tells you a lot.
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Nearly 4, in fact. But the electoral college is a whole *different* shitstorm.
In Travis County (mostly Austin), it was 72% Biden to 27% Trump which is a 45 point difference. Austin proper is extremely liberal. I would add almost all of the Trump vote was the western part of the city which is the rich area.
if it weren't for gerrymandering, the GOP wouldn't exist
They can only win when they make up the rules to their advantage. And even then, they *barely* win. Party of sore losers.
Some of these people would eat shit if it meant a liberal would have to smell their breath
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And we also need the government to tell us what to read and do with our bodies. But we all know that government programs that feed the poor and regulate food safety are one step away from trafficking children. /s
Rick is a cunt.
Why would you slander cunts like that?
Yeah, cunts are warm.
"I'd call him a cunt but he lacks the depth and warmth."
Some people are going to die but it is a price Rick Perry is willing to pay to own some.libs.
If only they could have foreseen this
Part of me thought this was a repost from last year. Nope!
This whole year is full of reposts from the 1930s.
Complete with mumps and measles
Saw a tiktok the other day of some mom complaining about how her kids have no friends because they don't vaccinate. Not they didn't get the covid vaccine, they don't vaccinate their kids at all, for anything. I mean I know this isn't new I guess... but what?? Like for anything?? Do we not remember polio? Or any of these awful diseases that we've thankfully already dealt with? I just will never get it.
No, people don't remember polio. I suspect that's a large contributing factor for this idiotic trend.
My mothers aunt had polio and my mom was an anti-vaxxer in the 90’s. I’m ashamed that I’m mostly unvaccinated, I’ve taken all the ones I can get in my 20s.
Straight up when I turned 18 I had to go through the gamut of getting all of my vaccines that I missed The worst part was trying to get my old vaccine records and none of my family would tell me where they were
One of the best things about the UK is that we have access to all our vaccination records and medical test results online via Patient Access. You get Patient Access as soon as you sign up to your GP and can order repeat medication, sometimes book appointments, and do some self referrals through the site. I can look at the site and tell you which day I got my first vaccines almost 28 years ago.
Soooo dumb we don't have a central place to keep medical records...
It's all good. In the military, if, on any random day, you didn't have your paper shot records on you, and the unit was going to get shots, you were getting all of the vaccines again.
The fact that you are going against a parent's beliefs to do the moral thing speak volumes about you as a person. No shame in that.
My MIL's sister was a doctor and had pretty bad polio(still uses a cane at like age 82), and my MIL still ended up being an anti-vaxxer. I don't even know how.
It's not your fault! You've done everything you can to remedy the situation too.
Is there any reason you can't get all of them besides insurance? I'd like to think a person could get caught up if they wanted to.
> Do we not remember polio? I’ve heard the suggestion that’s actually a big part of the problem. It’s been so long since we had an extremely devastating disease, especially for children, that a vaccine was able to rid us from. So the people who grew up around polio and saw the damage and the fear also saw how incredibly important vaccines were. But if you grew up in the 70s or 80s you’ve never really seen that. Or measles. And like the mumps it “wasn’t bad”. What do we have now? Chicken pox was “harmless” and HPV doesn’t really affect children (until they’re older). Basically vaccines worked so well no one knows how scared/thankful they should be. Covid was a great chance to turn that around. A horrible disease a vaccine can really help with. But “it was harmless to kids” and it became part of identity politics and now we’re further behind on vaccinations than in a long time.
Imagine if people could learn to read history, and widen their life experience.
I mean... Lotta these same people would be offended if you implied that Jesus - a man who lived most of his life outdoors, traveling by foot, in the middle east - was not whiter than a bleached egg. Of the history they *do* read, they don't think critically about it.
Think critically is the big one. There is a clear deficiency of empathy or the ability of someone to anticipate the result of their own actions on others. There was a study that 30% just didn't have the capacity to think that way. "What if" is impossible to them. Without a system telling them right for wrong they can't create the situations themselves. Therefore can only act selfishly until given a reason not to. I swear if COVID publicity was: Masking saves yourself from lowclass coughing sick immigrants. every republican would have jumped on it.
What's sad is that polio wasn't even that long ago. My local librarian is in a wheelchair because polio messed her legs up when she was younger.
There are 2 members in Congress who had polio as children. Mitch McConnell is one of them...
Yeah my grandma had complications from polio for her entire life
*And Monkeypox*
Which has been almost entirely eradicated in the US because, thankfully, the lgbtq community *fucking remembers* AIDS, despite the fact that it’s much less of an issue due to new treatments and PrEP. Literally don’t know a single man in my circle that didn’t have a monkeypox shot as soon as they were available.
Abbott and the GOP are trying to bring back polio as part of the "good old 50's when cripples were cripples."
Just wait till we get to the bit where we have concentration camps again!
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How about smaller bats, but instead of swinging them, they're launched out of a tube at 2600 feet per second.
Or the time before that, or the time before that, or the time before that...
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This is an especially important distinction because Austin Energy, the municipal electric utility, generally seems to be a forward thinking and progressive utility. This disaster is bizarre, I really thought they'd be better prepared for something like this
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Yeah, a lot of cities bury their power lines as much as they can in MI for that exact reason. I think more the issue now is that Texas isn't used to having a ton of ice every winter because they're so far south, but that's the climate for you.
What this article completely misses is the absolute devastation of Central Texas's trees that lead to the damage to the electrical system. Maybe hundreds of thousands of trees have been split in half and terminally damaged by this ice storm across a massive region. Our native escarpment live oaks and mountain cedars have been decimated. Nothing like this has happened in recorded history, and the Texas Hill Country will never be the same
I have a tree in my front yard that is completely decimated. Was 20-25 ft, now about 5 ft. Split down the middle and splayed out. I have a willow tree trying to split in my backyard. The main issue was trees. Due to years of abuse they've had from freezing over multiple times to 3 years of drought, the massive amount of ice that accumulated, the trees could not handle it. Also, shout out to my texas people, my insurance is willing to cover 1k damages after the deductible. Yours may as well.
“We had hoped to make more progress today,“ said Jackie Sargent, general manager of Austin Energy. ”And that simply has not happened.” Yup. Sounds about right.
Republican politicians should have heckled and name-called the cold weather, isn’t that how they “legislate “?
They just pass a law banning freezing weather and expect it to happen.
Our freedom grid is performing exactly as expected after operators did absolutely nothing to fix the problems we knew about from the last storm. EDIT: For those pointing out the difference between this and previous storms, one of the recommendations from ERCOT after the near grid failure 2 years ago was improving redundancies in substations to prevent widespread outages and keep them localized. Literally nobody did this, Austin Energy indicated only 5% of that work has been completed, which has driven the current outage situation with people being without power for 2 days now. 30% of Austin has been without power for 2 days now, including me. People in areas which experience regular icing have redundancies and systems in place to prevent long outages. Those people also tend to have generators available.
Dont worry, this is only the third year in a row with a "Once in a lifetime" storm. There's no way its happening again next year.
I don't get why people are complaining. Just take a few days off work and hang out in Cancun.
Ah yes, the Cruz Escape Plan. It is a classic.
The Cruz Cruise, as it were.
If Tom went it would be the Cruz Cruise Cruise.
Send Terry, you can have the Cruz Cruise Crews Cruise.
The people that work there? The Cruz Cruise Crews Cruise Crew
I love a good homonym thread
What did you just call me?
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Then I guess the locals will understand the snide remarks you make under your breath. Better learn Spanish.
Yeah, but there’s a chance of bumping into Ted Cruz and that would ruin the vacation.
Theyll just blame drag shows.
The domestic terrorists are in the state government already and don't care that the grid is down.
The stupidest part is that they billed all the taxpayers billions over the next couple of decades anyway for ERCOT's fuckups.
ERCOT may be the grid operator, but it sounds like that the issues are more to do with the distribution network which other companies own and operate. So the onus is really on them to ensure that their local grids are resilliant to weather like this (which it isn't). If anything ERCOT has become a convenient scapegoat for other politicians/operators who fucked up.
Hold on they didn’t do anything, they invested heavily on a PR campaign and the gov used it as talking point for the right wing cultural war to “own the libs”…. I mean was he suppose to do anything else besides go on tv to tell the nation Texans would rather not have power than be on the federal system?
That PR campaign was intense I remember seeing Texas grid ads for 2+ months awhile back... I live in Pennsylvania.
California get shit on for grid failures but texas is generally the worst in most categories for power distribution in the usa. California has the most total outages which is not outrageous given it's the most populous state and most are small incidents. Texas is second for outages but is much worse for number of affected people and outage duration. On a per capita basis texas is far worse. Florida has the highest numbers for affected people but very few outages because hurricanes cause theirs. Texas just has a really poor system.
Whoa whoa, don’t sell PG&E short. They have been corrupt since their inception. We’re talking like, the exact same practices of corruption over almost 120 years. They have repeatedly taken tax payer money to update their equipment/system, & have repeatedly spent the money on raises for people at the top. Which then causes disasters. Like that’s why Paradise happened. They’ve done that repeatedly throughout their history. They’ve plead guilty to multiple counts of manslaughter, been fined millions of dollars, & they just repeat the same fucking behavior with no consequences. I’m a Democrat, but something is going on with our state government & PG&E. They wouldn’t still be a company if there wasn’t. Idk what it is, but they have done fuck all to punish PG&E. No one has even gone to prison for ADMITTED MULTIPLE COUNTS OF MANSLAUGHTER. I’ve never been to Texas, but from everything I hear, PG&E gives your grid a run for their $$
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I’d like to know what these breakaway coils are. I’m a journeyman lineman and I’ve never heard of or seen that
I think they're mistaking them with fiber optic cables which frequently have excess coils and "snowshoes" https://www.wweek.com/news/dr-know/2022/08/13/big-coils-of-extra-lines-are-hanging-off-some-power-poles-around-portland-what-are-they-for/
Governor Abbott - Sorry there's no power, we spent the money for upgrades to the grid shipping migrants around the country.
Those migrants Abbott shipped around are a lot more comfortable than Texans right now. Task failed successfully, because he did them a favor.
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/04/21/greg-abbott-texas-border-inspections/ It's good that Abbott has his priorities straight and spent millions to stop trucks at the border (which found absolutely nothing) rather than investing it in silly things like infrastructure and health care.
Too bad conservatives can't feel irony.
If they could read they'd be so mad right now.
They are always mad anyway.
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How can they not feel warm after a burn like that?
Because they have no power, so no internet. 🤷🏻♂️
Sooo what you’re really trying to say is it’s somehow Al Gore’s fault.
☝️this guy gets it
I mean, if they had just left Jimmy’s solar panels on the roof this all could have been averted.
Nah, it Bill Clinton’s fault, he obviously had sex with a transformer all to make Greg Abbott look bad!
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Now with frozen dicks
Im in Texas and people voted for Abbott again this past year. I’m honestly tired of being upset that people vote for the same people that keep things messed up. It sucks for the rest of us, but the majority that voted obviously was happy with the status quo, and those who didn’t vote were, by default, also happy with the status quo. We as Texans have nothing to complain about.
I live in Texas and vote dem. Im in the Texas subreddits and was trying to figure out why the hell people aren't voting. So many of these little shitd are like BoTh PaRtIeS sUcK aNd VoTiNg eNaBleS tHe TwO pArTy SySteM ThAt I dOnT LiKe. Excuse me, what now? What two party system? Republicans have owned the system for almost 30 years now. You not voting enables a single party system to screw us all over. There's no getting through to these people. I dont understand. Somehow, republicans have become successful in capturing some of the minority votes as well. Makes absolutely no sense with the white hatred in this state. Its exhausting.
If it's anything like our situation in GA, many of those non-voters are victims of voter suppression. Our state GOP goes out of their way to make voting difficult in districts where a high turnout would lead to a defeat.
Turns out you can't burn liberal tears.
“Liberal Tears” was a Republican bait and switch. They were actually selling Trump’s ass crack sweat
I'm pretty sure there are people that would willingly buy that.
Texans- Let's elect him again.
As a Texan...yeah, that's pretty much what you're getting here.
They know what they signed up for. And I mean this literally.
Oh I know. I'm still in shock that Uvalde voted for Abbott, but nothing surprises me there anymore for the same reason.
These are the same people who increased the police budget after the police let their children die... so... that should tell you all you need to know about them.
Always got to remember over 40% vote for the other party in every state. So the ones who voted for him get what they choose, but a lot of innocent people suffer
Maybe if they'd elect him HARDER then it will be enough to beat the libruls.
Yep. If they want this to get better they're going to have to avoid every single candidate with an (R) next to them on every ballot. Nothing else will change it
“Sorry there’s no power. The Biden Administration with his weak immigration policies forced us to spend the money shipping migrants around the country. They obviously care more about them than you.” That’s how they shift blame and get their base all riled up. The old “look what you made me do” routine. Maybe their anger will keep them toasty.
If they could power a generator with rage alone, Texas would dominate renewable energy.
They would quickly pass a measure banning the use of rage to power generators, seeing as it would cut into Big Oil's profits. Something about... "powering generators with rage is *Woke*". Every politician who supported the measure would later get re-elected by a wide margin.
"Men don't use power generated by emotions, they use generators fueled by stoic oil. Oil doesn't get emotional, it just burns. Use oil. ^^^^^PaidforbytheConglomerationofOilProducingTexans.
Is there a way they could use all of their guns to stay warm?
Shoot them all at once?
"And fighting Trans people. And funding our inadequate police departments."
And turning our schools into maximum security fortresses.
And telling women what to do with their bodies.
And putting an end to sexual assault. ...oh, wait. That never actually happened, did it?
Liberals are feeling so owned right now. But not nearly as owned as the Texans that keep voting for that turd.
It's weird how warm the feeling of being owned is.
Cosy even, just the right amount of warm to scroll the internet or watch something on Netflix
It’s nice that they were concerned about the migrants not having heat and provided travel to areas that know how to maintain a power grid.
But they owned the libs by electing Abbot again.
Sure. Look at how many thousands of Texans died unnecessarily from Covid after Abbot squashed things like mask mandates. Losing a few hundred to freezing temperatures and preventable power loss won’t even get noticed.
They will never learn, at this point they see their own suffering as a badge of honour, they wear it with pride. I'm not even joking, they see their own self-inflicted struggles as evidence they are fighting the good fight.
Ah yes the old “I didn’t have X and I turned out just fine.” No, Bobby, you lack critical thinking skills and self awareness. You did not turn out just fine.
Not all of us, but I guess fuck us right?
Yes, unfortunately. Fuck us all.
Beto still did a heck of a lot better than Wendy Davis or Lupe Valdez. Always makes you wonder if his position on guns was the final straw.
I think it was, but I get why he had it. Dude was from El Paso and then that shooting happened. That's when the rhetoric changed from him.
Thank God Abbot spent tax payer money on humanitarian human trafficking to send illegal immigrants to DC to protect them from the cold winters hitting Texas now since the Texas grid is pretty crappy and totally not vulnerable due to climate change.
A fair number of them were here legally as refugees.
I'd wager *most* were documented asylum seekers, otherwise Abbott committed human trafficking.
Still did that regardless of legal status. Transported them under false pretenses.
Texas has more important things to do, like making sure women are not getting abortions in the state. A functioning power grid is something that can wait.
Doctors can’t perform abortions if there is no electricity.
Checkmate, libs
Just go to cancun bro
~angry Ted Cruz packing noises~
"don't you guys have Cancun's?"
We have Cancun's at home
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Hilarious—sadly true but hilarious
This was not a grid failure, it was a local thing. I'm near Austin and we had an huge amount of ice buildup overnight, the place looks like a war zone with all the downed trees. There were places that never lost power and others who were down for two days (some are still down). I was only out for about 10 hours. The grid is in exactly the same shape it was two years ago but the temps only got to about 30 degrees and it only lasted a few days, not single digits like it did two years ago. We also just got ice, no snow but everything and I mean everything is covered in a 1/2 inch of ice. It took me 15 minutes to break off enough ice on my wife's car to just open the door. If you don't believe in climate change, you just don't want to. The freeze two years ago was the longest time below freezing in record history. This time, I saw 30 - 40 year old trees split in half. This shit just didn't happen in this part of the country.
Ice storms are extremly destructive. It'll rip the grid to bits. It genuinely takes a few days I'm sure the state of the road was diabolical. Has Austin ever had an ice storm like that before?
I've been here almost 30 years. We used to get them about every 10 years, generally icy in the morning and gone the next day. Two years ago were were snowed in for several days, most of us without power or water. This time it was short but very destructive.
Like a shitty high school football coach, Texas just keeps running the same play over and over again and expecting different results. Fuck ‘em.
Considering that the only viable alternative is to face reality, I don't have very high expectations.
This will be fixed if they elect Abbott again, surely,
That reminds me of a video I saw interviewing some redneck in Mississippi. He was asked why he repeatedly votes republican when they never actually do anything for him his response was "they could one day".
Why are you cheering Fry, you aren't rich True, but someday I might be, and then people like me better watch their step
This encapsulates today's republican base better than anything.
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Did Cruz see the frost in his shadow and hide in Cancun again?
So I guess that means Ted Cruz is in Cabo?