Maybe they're an especially egregious example because of how fucked up their power grid is, but odds are it's not gonna be that much better when the rest of the country gets their own unique climate disaster.
I work in the power transmission industry, can confirm. Lots of utilities have been coasting by on the infinite money train with disturbingly inadequate records of their capital infrastructure. In other words, cost cutting and schedule rush has led to a lot of changes being done and never being recorded in their systems (more than just red pen on paper drawing at the stations lol), causing absolute mayhem 5 years later if they never get applied and an outage occurs at a station.
Place these tendencies in catastrophic weather patterns on an increasing basis and we better get ready for some frank discussions on electricity.
I often wish to leave the industry, but honestly the electric grid of today is so vital that I feel there is work to be done with it from a labor education perspective. I'm no anprim, if we have any chance at society as we would like to see it, we need electricity, and without knowledge of how to maintain and build these systems, we are behest to those that do have the knowledge. Scary stuff all around tho
we are definitely going to need people like you to rebuild the crumbling infrastructure here after we eventually achieve victory over the capitalists
We are going to need a hell of a lot more than me. And in a ton of different industries. Why is this community not sharing its technical/industrial knowledge now so that when shit really gets hot (when we won't be talking about working/technicals) we actually have some clue as to how to rebuild what we believe should be rebuilt/gotten working again? Its questions like this that reminds us how far we have to go. We need a large portion of every vital industry on our side, we need open discussion of supply chains and the possible choices we may face. I think a lot of everyday "non-political" or lib people are waiting for serious answers to these questions, and may be swayed by them.
EDIT: Also, thank you, I do appreciate your saying that. I'm an engineer stuck around reactionary/lib engineers chasing high pay management gigs totally disconnected from the struggles of pretty much another other job (the stereotype of the asshole tunnel-vision engineer is true). So disheartening discussing organizing or anything out of status quo. They frequently bash the unions we work with in our processes, and the number of awkward hour long political discussions where I started nervously making sure the manager wasn't around are numerous. All in all though I have it really easy and I feel bad for having pretty much no issue finding a job where they're willing to do what they can to keep you. If anyone is ok at math and willing to deal with awkward people, go into electrical engineering, specifically power engineering. The movement will eventually need you, and in the meantime you'll have a fairly safe bet of having a job out of college.
I totally understand that fear, and at my last job I felt the same way. And obviously you have to be careful, my personal level of tolerance is sharing industry secrets but not ones that are specific to my company or its clients. I really do think the important task is determining from a process standpoint for each important industry, how do we get input resource plus labor and capital resource to equal the desired product, but in a way removed from capitalism? Each productive industry has its own answer, and those answers can only be come to through talking to the people doing these jobs and understanding the processes from a higher level.
Regardless, DM me if you'd be willing to chat a bit about your work, I really want to talk to other engineers about their luck with organizing, generally the political leanings of each, how open the workforces are to anything not reactionary/lib? Totally no worries if not, if I was reading this I would totally worry I was a fed or something lol
EDIT: Personally I've been contemplating starting a project of interviewing workers, asking how their work is organized (no specifics), what their firm takes as input from what kind of other firm), what they produce, if they feel their work is important, etc. I feel that left circles have avoided the labor conversations for a while now, always approaching from a much more holistic level, but these details need to be discussed. No one knows what anyone else does anymore, what anyone else's work contributes to and how it relates.
start now teach me. first basic thing is how to fix your own sink and how plumber putty works
Basic plumbing stuff is probably gonna be what I focus on in the next place that I live, I'd like to at the end of this decade be able to functionally service pretty much anything household.
Thankfully with plumbing there are a billion videos out there demonstrating techniques
For what in particular? Do you have a current plumbing problem or are you just trying to learn tips of the trade?
Stuff like this and the recent shit in Texas really makes me feel kinda bad low key for dedicating my life to music and the entertainment industry. Really wish I would have learned more about handling shit and not just being another complacent person depending on others for basic things. Gonna work on it tho
Its never too late, and don't let bullshit entryism get in the way of you learning solid skills.
In a real equitable society, the line between artist and worker shall be no more (at least not anywhere near what it is today). Any skills you pick up now can only help our movement and provide good example for what we stand for.
Really, the best way for us to gain popularity is through mutual aid, but not simply the usual kinds, but also in labor. If we as a movement were to go neighborhood by neighborhood offering to fix simple household issues, think of how many minds we could change. Perhaps thats a bit idealist, but I think there is something to the whole jack of all trades laborer in the leftists movements.
Yeah, it’s weird but I think about when last podcast on the left covered Jamestown, how they described him initially building his movement was just being willing to go out immediately and fix people’s problems. Obviously he had ulterior motives but I think it makes sense that people respond well to having their material needs met and conditions improved
Thanks, yeah I learned where my water main was fit the freeze and that’s kinda what started it, been watching tutorials on YouTube since haha I’ll definitely follow up on these suggestions
Yeah actually I was looking at volunteering at my local habitat for humanity but I was worried about being in the way. Thanks for this it’s definitely made me feel better about it
How much do you know about generation and storage? Some friends and I hope to be self-sufficient someday, so I'm going to have to learn a lot about renewable energy
Unfortunately most of my experience has been in pretty much every step between generation and utilization (storage or usage). But I can certainly dig through my materials and see if I can get something useful for you. Do you have any particular questions in mind? Or are you mainly kind of looking for where to start?
Not only will it not be any better, it will be so so so much worse when this begins to happen on a nationwide scale.
Dash of power outages. Sprinkle in some unprocessed water. Two tables spoons of crop failures. Stir together with some fascist (any flavor is fine; season to taste). Bake at 4° above normal
Bro just weatherize your power grid for catastrophic floods, +120F highs in the summer, -60F winters*, and VOTE
* (for a limited time until the Arctic dies)
It's already happening. Don't you remember the apocalyptic orange skies from the fires last summer?
good thing all the geologists are probably just wrong about the yellowstone supervolcano
eh. I'd be more fitting for the US hegemon to suffer a difficult elongated collapse brought about by the climate change it largely caused and did nothing to stop
We'll just need to assemble disasters of earth, wind, water, fire, and heart, then Anti-Captain Planet can be summoned and end our miserable existence.
Surely this country doesn't need a national jobs program. There's nothing that needs fixing in the Greatest Country On Earth.
Okay, so I suppose I should start preparing for the end of the world now :(
Well, depends who you are. For the politicians this is no problem. There is a political solution to this. Texas gets 7% of its power from wind, and that hasn't done so well in the cold. They can just blame everything on Democrats pushing wind power and get away with doing nothing then get re-elected.
Honestly, isn't that what they do after all the other disastrous events, like school shootings. Blame it all on some random issue Democrats are associated with to deflect blame and then hope everyone forgets about it.
But it's not even true that wind did badly, renewables in Texas are performing at expected levels. It's the natural gas power plants that are the big problem in the cold. But good luck telling that to some chud, as you said republicans will just blame it on the democrats for pushing renewables and hope everyone forgets about it.
We did have some wind turbines freeze but a, that doesn’t account for the catastrophic level of failure bc we still mostly get our energy from gas plants like you said. And b, it’s because the wind generators weren’t properly winterize bc texas skimps out on infrastructure any chance it gets. They work fine in other colder states and in Europe we just purposely didn’t prepare for this, I’m not entirely sure they didn’t consciously do it so they could politicize it like this when it inevitably hit the fan.
Snow-piercer level blizzards from NY down to TX, hurricanes in the gulf, hurricanes AND the eventual tsunami for Hawaii.
Alaska will become habitable.
Yeah if you like butterfly sized mosquitos and methane permafrost explosions
I've spent so much energy and willpower trying to avoid full jollification. It's kind of a sunk-cost thing at this point.
Hurricane Katrina was really the first time, but I see your point.
And Puerto Rico that still hasn't fully recovered. Just been privatized by McKinsey
I had this thought when the sky went all Planes of Oblivion last year
The permanent state of exception will easily subsume a permanent state of climate disaster. i am become prepper, destroyer of ravioli cans
Most the the Country can handle winter. Texas is it's own special place of stupidity.
Now the heat, that'll cause brown outs.
The rockies saved us in california. However if the low pressure finds a way over the mounts we are fucked worse.
I don't even own shoes, cause I wear flip flops and shorts year round. No one cna drive in thr slight rain. Nothing is weatherized. We have no cold weather prep. Hardly anything has insulation despite the heat.
Every state hooked up to the national grid is weatherized. Texas is not. Cuz it's a state filled with independent big brains.
I am pictureing every single powerline snaping the seccond snow touches them personally. Least wise. Every building collapsing from the extra weight of a small ammount of snow. Yeah, we could still have power.
I am just picturing that none of the infrastructure to use it would stand a challenge that was never planned for. And back in the 70s when most thr stuff was built, could never have been planned for.
Dude get a grip you live in one of the most regulated states. One that sees snow every winter. One that has skyscrapers built to with stand vearthquakes. A state that sees gnarly wind storms on a seasonal basis.
Texas is a unregulated shit hole. This has happened several times before down there. This time it's just the longest.
I dunno, I mean. I am sure you are right.
However, I think in general we didn't expect to see climate change over whelm our infrastructure so soon. I know I didn't at least. So I feel we must use this data point and revise our predictions upwards sharply. As this is going to happen potentially every year going forward with increasing intensity
My mind is just absolutely blown by this situation
This has happened every decade since the 90s in Texas. It's a constant problem that they have been told to fix. And instead of fixing they just pulled their grid from the national grid.
But yeah the rest of the nation's infrastructure is a joke. Texas is just 3rd world joke level
Idk man, you should listen to a podcast called Ashes Ashes. They'll give you a pretty good idea what is coming for the climate issues. Wet-bulb temperatures are very fun, and as someone who generates a lot of heat personally, I already have a hard time in the summers already.
