This is classic “efficiency” vs “antifragility.” There are some things that are okay to ocassionally fail, and for those it’s often good to pursue efficiency. But for something critical like electricity, the market all decided - with good financial justification - that it would be more profitable to just let the system fail occasionally than to be hardened against long-tail events.
In systems engineering if we want this to not happen we usually intentionally add volatility, things like putting chaos monkey into your infra so that long-tail failures become common and thus the necessary hardening can’t be missed.
I’m not quite sure what this would look like for an electricity market. Maybe something like huge fines for having your capacity go off-line, which require insurance, and the insurers thus require winterization or they charge way higher rates which make your plant uneconomical. Or a regulation that says all plants must be winterized to a certain degree thus the cost of electricity will just be higher for everyone to pay for mitigation of long tail risk. The fines approach is more indirect but - assuming it works - it leaves room for edge cases and innovation that the “orderly but dumb” regulation does not.
What I don’t understand about the Texas electricity market is that, despite how “free” it is, price per kwh isn’t terribly competitive compared to more tightly regulated states - having the highest average residential rates in the West South Central region: https://www.eia.gov/electricity/monthly/epm_table_grapher.ph...
What seems most remarkable to me is that we've got a fair amount of anti-free-market vitriol in the replies around here but nobody feels a need to provide any argument or evidence.
The only person waving evidence around in this thread demonstrates that Texas has substantially lower electricity prices than the US average. And the article argues that there are edge cases where the market design could be improved. But I am well aware that the US has a range of regulatory strategies around power and I'm sure people have done detailed, exhaustive comparisons that are of high quality on the effects and outcomes of different regulatory approaches. Surely there are mountains of evidence that could be pointed to here.
Is it to much to ask that the opinions are supported by evidence? Electricity outcomes aren't that complex. The important variables are price, reliability, safety and pollution if you like.
Texas having a power crisis recently just isn't that big a deal for arguing about regulation vs deregulation on either side of the fence. Highly regulated systems also have crisises, regulators aren't perfect and nobody claims they are.
What seems most remarkable to me is that we've got a fair amount of pro-free-market vitriol in the replies around here but nobody feels a need to provide any argument or evidence.
You need to provide evidence for the claims that the free market improves things, not the other way.
Although I am certainly more than happy to make pro-free-market arguments (and have on occasion even in relation to the Texan power grid) I am stepping back from that for today.
If the plan is to decide what is good and bad by innuendo that is a lousy plan and we can all probably agree on that point. This is the perfect opportunity to debate using facts and evidence rather than all sitting in a circle and observing that none of us have any. These whingers should leave some space for people who intend to be guided by facts.
Depends on your definition of "free market". If you mean libre non-profit exchange between consenting peers, i'm all for free market. If you mean a profit-based economy where the people who "own" everything dictate life conditions for the rest of us, i'm pretty much against it.
> Is it to much to ask that the opinions are supported by evidence?
Economy is not a field i'm familiar with so i can't unfortunately provide evidence, but it always appeared to me that with some notable exceptions, regulations protecting consumers from corporations had great effects: lower prices, better quality, better customer service...
Half the articles i read about the USA seem to be about medication prices rising twofold every few years despite being well-studied/produced for decades (like insulin), or ISPs injecting their own advertisement or blocking services from competitors or making lawsuits against municipal ISPs, or people raising debt just for having a lawyer or receiving an education, etc.
There's a lot i hate about France (where i reside), but i'm certainly glad we have "medicare for all" through a national insurance (sécurité sociale), net-neutrality regulations, and free legal defense and education. Although as some would point out, the french governments of the past 30 years or so have been hard at work to dismantle all that.
Competition does not advance humanity. Cooperation is what brought humanity so far (see also: Kropotkin, Graeber, etc). Competition does not reduce costs, except occasionally when a mogul wants to capture the market (like free.fr did when they offered 30€/mo unmetered xDSL back in the early 2000's, which they don't do anymore now that they've become big enough to assert their position).
Don't get me wrong, i'm not advertising for State monopoly. On the contrary, i laud autonomous projects and infrastructure and i'm very critical that in France it's illegal to even build your own house for private usage (unless you follow very strict regulations) or to produce your own electricity (unless you sell it back to EDF). I just don't think that what most people refer to as a deregulated "free market" (based on money and private property) has better outcomes except for the 1% who own everything.
Famous anecdote in french FLOSS circles: when the telecoms regulator (ARCEP) began the process to "open competition" for the ISP market, there were hundreds of ISPs across France and the dozens of representatives couldn't fit in a room at ARCEP offices. A few years later than that, there were only 5-10 represented operators left. Now you can count them on one hand, and the ARCEP people seem happy/relieved about that, as if they'd done their job implementing "competition" by reducing the number of competitors.
Markets are open, gray, black, or closed. There are no "free markets".
"Free markets" rhetoric is a catchy slogan for might makes right. No contracts, no rule of law, no fair and impartial arbitrators, no opportunity for recourse (tort). So not a market.
> The only person waving evidence around in this thread demonstrates that Texas has substantially lower electricity prices than the US average.
Only if one ignores consequences (externalities).
System failures leading to fatalities, casualties, losses incurred by other businesses, parents staying home with kids because schools closed, customers getting stiffed with emergency pricing, retail rush on generators and propane, etc.
Your basic Freedom Markets™ scenario of using disaster (capitalism) to bulk transfer wealth from customers and tax payers to gate keeping elites.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
> ...just isn't that big a deal for arguing about regulation vs deregulation on either side of the fence.
What about accountability? Consequences?
Where in your thesis are victims able to be made whole?
--
Markets have rules. That's what makes them markets. No rules, no markets. Then it's just an extortion racket, no matter how much lipstick you put on that pig.
If you read all the books covering the history of the deregulation of the regulated electric industry in the US, their reasoning was clear. Many years ago, under regulation (and still for those areas of the US that aren't in a market), it was the job of planners to determine the load growth and to build enough supply to meet demand and get a steady ROR. We did really bad at this in (I think it was the 80s), so there was a lot of pushback in making customers pay for generation they didn't need. At the same time, combined cycle plants made it possible to finally de-monopolize the generation side of things. The theory was the free market would be more innovative than the regulated utilities and less wasteful.
"Made possible" also meant that coal burning plants were obsolete and we needed to restructure the generating system so they could go out of business without making the utilities go under.
So much in the energy literature looks like a clock that stopped. For instance you still see cost estimates of advanced combustion systems from the 1970s that have been carried into the future without adjusting for inflation and changes in technology.
People still compare nuclear power to coal but they quit building coal plants circa 1980 for the same reason they quit building nuclear plants -- the capital cost of the steam turbine is an order of magnitude more than a gas turbine, so even if you get the heat for free a current generation coal or nuclear plant is going to struggle to compete against the power plants we've been building since the 1980s.
The US built coal plants in the 1990s and even in the 2010s. These last ones started construction in roughly the years 2003-2008, when US natural gas prices were elevated and (many thought) due to go up even more:
Coal's brief renaissance was halted by a triple-whammy of lower gas costs (from shale), lower wind costs, and lower solar costs. It's soon to face another whammy: falling grid scale battery costs. I don't think that the continental US will ever build another coal generating station. But that happened more recently than 1980.
A big part of that is the 70s/80s inflated destroyed capital budgets and reduced capital spend.
Regulators always have a bias towards rate reduction. Once the deregulation movement set in, power generation became a fat hog ready to be exploited. In some cases, investors even got to use tax free municipal borrowing facilities.
If you can't raise prices, you can't optimize profits!?! Hospitals, "have all the customers" they're going to get, but prices go up (faster than inflation) every year anyway. Note that insurance companies are often regulated on their cost percentages, but if their payouts keep going up... they're profits can too! Ultimately, that may even lower their number of customers to only those who are most profitable. Win-Win!
I think it's kind of funny that some people think that "deregulated" markets are somehow magically efficient or competitive. Collusion and monopoly are inherently higher profit margin businesses and so incentivized by unregulated markets. Monopolies can be supply, transport, territorial, or temporal, but all optimize ROI.
Note that regulatory capture is yet another method of stifling competition and creating monopoly pricing power.
It looks like Texas has higher residential, but lower commercial and industrial rates than others. It may be that other states apply policies which depress residential rates at the cost of increasing ‘business’ rates.
That's exactly it. Residential service is naturally the most expensive to operate. National regulations impose price caps on residential. But Texas is the only state that isn't subject to those rules because they're not synchronously connected to another grid. Which on top of that makes them less reliable, and thus more expensive.
price per kwh isn’t terribly competitive compared to more tightly regulated states
Texas is half the price of residential electricity compared to California or New York. The other states in in the West South Central region are also low reg or deregulated, and have similar low prices. Texas was been a little lower a few years ago, not sure why it spiked up. There have been some coal plants taken offline, and the cost of outage last year also is affecting rates now.
Texas is uniquely dominated by energy interests. Most of the quacking about cheapness is just noise.
I have a relative who moved from an “expensive” northeast state to South Carolina. His big bitch was about taxes, but he didn’t really do the math. He saved on property taxes, but between more regressive sales tax, HOA, etc it doesn’t really compute.
Most significantly, he discovered the tyranny of local government is nothing compared to a HOA that actually runs public services.
I live in a town next to a border. On the other side of the river, I would save 4K in taxes every year. But I would pay more in car insurance, car registration, city property tax, public transportation and other smaller things. All in all, I pay maybe 1K more to live on my side of the river. That's completely sidestepping the whole issue of housing being way more expensive on the other side, which means I couldn't own a house.
Sometimes I feel like I'm the only one of my peers who has actually sat down and counted the beans. Everybody else just looks at the 4K and thinks I'm crazy to live where I live.
It's much easier to replace local politicians or constrain/require local government action via the courts than it is to do the same to an HOA, isn't it?
In either case, you can vote with your feet, but I prefer being able to vote with a ballot
Do the courts show up less for HOAs because owners sign arbitration clauses? I don't otherwise see why the courts should be less relevant to HOAs.
Well, except no one wants to be the guy suing the neighborhood but somehow suing the government lacks that stigma. But that's peer pressure not courts.
I sat on an HOA board as president with no prior experience. Getting involved usually isn't hard. One just has to be willing to show up and to do grunt work.
I am doubt there are many non-democratic HOAs so voting seems a wash between the two.
> Do the courts show up less for HOAs because owners sign arbitration clauses? I don't otherwise see why the courts should be less relevant to HOAs.
Sometimes arbitration clauses are the cause. More often, it's because a homeowners association is a private, non-governmental entity and the case between the property owner and the HOA is, legally, a contract dispute.
There's an often-brought-out idea that the Constitution, be it state or Federal, only binds the government and not private parties. "Twitter can censor whatever it wants but the Department of the Interior can't," that sort of thing. Governments at all levels have to follow the Constitution and are generally a lot more restricted in what they can do, and the presumption is that people have much more broad rights to push back through the courts.
But with an HOA, many of them have been set up as quasi-governmental bodies, as in they act like governments--some even have the power of condemnation and foreclosure through their position as technically holding a lien over all of the properties in the development--but they have none of the responsibilities of governments. And if a property owner sues, a court is largely limited to looking at the plain language of the contract and the instrumentalities recorded against the parcel and see if those are being followed. (Occasionally there are state laws that deem some contract provisions to be "against public policy" and unenforceable in that state's courts, but states are very reticent to do this for anything other than quick political wins, like overturning prohibitions on flag poles.)
If they are being followed, the court's ruling is "well, you signed it, tough cookies."
you couldn't have 50 companies in one place and even if you cold the fix cost are high o make it unprofitable, low regulation means less control not more competition in a natural monopoly, making all companies try t extract the most money without making too much attractive to new competences, if you look carefully companies (commercial and industrial) pay less than other countries because they have more bargain power against the power industry but regular citizens cant pay the extra money for a tailor connection and tent to pay what they being offered.
This average price is a bit complicated to look at, and requires even more understanding of the Texas market.
There are essentially two types of electric customers in ERCOT areas in Texas: those in co-ops and those in open markets where you can choose your Retail Electric Provider and plan. Your physical location determines which kind of market you fall into.
In a co-op, those residents do not get to choose their power plan. Their rates are decided by the co-op, you either have electricity at that rate or you don't.
The open market allows for people to choose from many different Retail Electric Providers offering all kinds of plans. Free nights and weekends, but your rate during weekdays is sky high. Discounts below certain usage, with surcharges going over. Discounts once you use a certain amount, with surcharges if you use too little. Different rate prices for different usage amounts. 100% renewable. 0% renewable. 15% renewable. Flat monthly rate. All kinds of various contracts you can sign up for.
In that open market, I can choose plans way cheaper than that average rate. I can sign up for a plan with 100% renewable energy with an average rate of 9.8c/kWh for 2,000kWh.
However, lots of people even in the open market just go with whatever plans they hear on the radio or TV. Any REP with a budget to have TV commercials is going to be one of the more expensive ones.
So yeah, some people just buy what they see on TV and pay through the nose. Some aren't really a part of this open market and get whatever their co-op wants to bill them. However, it can be much cheaper to shop online. I'm still on a 36mo contract for <9c/kWh, putting me cheaper than the average of every state.
If you notice in that EIA table, Texas has one of the lowest average commercial and industrial rates in the country. Commercial and industrial customers actually bother looking around at rates and aren't necessarily swayed by the slick looking guy on TV saying "free nights and weekends, 25c/kWh at noon!"
My wife got a contract with our provider, we pay normal prices during the day but get 100% free power from 8 PM to I think 5 or 6 AM. Can't really complain.
What does "normal" prices man? After everything is said and done, what is your normal effective per-kWh rate? Most people I've seen with these plans only really get a good deal with a plan like that with a good solar or battery install, or are truly never at home except for those free hours.
She pays the bills, she's happy, when she's happy about anything to do with money, with me burning through power with my gaming on several nights per week; it's got to be all good news. Always check to see whether your utility can work a deal.
Interesting idea! I read caminante's comment about usage caps in context and I'd check before purchasing a powerwall but even if caps were in place with our deal; the powerwall could be nice as a sort of home UPS.
I was looking at it for that use myself, but unfortunately power supply in my area but iirc either the differential in price didn't actually make a ROI or the pricing didn't fluctuate =(
7 cents for delivery, zero to five cents for power. 2.3 cents/kwh as of a few minutes ago.
I'm just surprised because maintaining a grid in an extremely dense urban area that hasn't gotten above freezing in several weeks and getting nuclear power which is very expensive should be a good deal more expensive than the wild west that is Texas energy markets and it doesn't seem to be.
9.3c/kWh is greater than my 8.8c/kWh. Your rates swing from a bit cheaper to mine to a bit pricer than mine, while mine is always the same. You would have to share your actual effective monthly cost for us to know if you truly paid less on average, as if it stays on the higher end you're paying a lot more but if it's only on the lower end then you're a good bit cheaper.
Maintaining the grid in a dense urban area is actually usually cheaper than less dense areas. More customers per mile of cable to offset the costs. Customers in urban areas usually don't impart as much load. There's more utility owned property per customer in a suburb than in a city by a good bit.
Note that it was massively unusually cold, not that it was just cold. A large part of the grid failure wasn't electrical equipment failing, it was really more of a lack of natural gas supply. There's no real long term storage for natural gas, so when you start using more than what suppliers are making you get shortfalls. Residential customers take priority, so gas companies couldn't get more gas. Gas generators were the primary expected generation capacity, but they couldn't get enough gas. Electric demand kept increasing but capacity started falling. Rolling blackouts were attempted. Sites critical to gas generation and supply were not listed as critical industrial customers so their circuits were higher priority to shed load (non-critical industrial and commercial first) leading to further gas shortages which led to further plant shutdowns which led to more circuits being shed. Those gas lines have a good bit of moisture in them. When the gas is flowing, it's not really a problem. When the producers stop because of power issues, lines freeze. Lines were unable to be unfrozen, so gas capacity really couldn't be increased to theoretical capacity even when the producers got power back on. So we had a number of plants which should have been able to operate but there literally wasn't any gas left to burn.
There were some other failures. A nuclear plant had a cooling system pipe exposed which froze. Coal plants had open piles of coal freeze solid without equipment to break up the pile and move the coal. Some wind turbines we're offlined as they were worried about icing as they don't normally need de-icing. The skies were really cloudy so solar didn't have as much output. But the vast majority of power failures were failures in natural gas supply.
Deregulation is about privatizing any possible profits a system might make. The goal is almost never to improve consumer outcomes, but to line the pockets of wealth donors and benefactors. Whenever someone argues for privatization, just follow the money.
Most of the market models have some means of pricing out spinning reserves or nearline capacity and other ancillary services that aren't necessarily spinning a meter. Unfortunately trying to determine the correct price incentives is complicated and it often only becomes apparent a serious mistake was made after an event. One element of this is that overall US power grid and associated infrastructure was hugely over-engineered from like 1940-1980 and some areas are only recently pushing the limits of 1960s era transmission and generation planning, in many cases because old nasty coal plants are closing and non-dispatchable renewables are cropping up at locations power plants wouldn't have made sense historically.
Other market operators in north America have different means of doing it. PJM's capacity market strategy ( https://pjm.com/markets-and-operations/rpm.aspx ) has been a reasonably successful, at least so far. CAISO has their resource adequacy planning but the changes in the western interconnect have been seriously straining both the market model and the reliability coordination in parts of California. Can't dig up a good link right now but there has been some discussion that one problem with ERCOT's forecasting was that it assumed demand stopped increasing once it reached a cold-weather ceiling, which may or may not have contributed to lack of early action in the 2021 storm. But they also have no good means of early opportunistic demand reduction, which might have trimmed several GW off peak demand during the storm as many empty buildings and industrial users were still up and running with no one able to safely go to the facilities and safely shut down unimportant loads.
I remain personally of the opinion that if it takes increasingly complicated rules and financial structures to get the desired results, that maybe the modern US concept of a deregulated power market isn't such a great idea to begin with, but it's not going away any time soon.
As I understand it, (ie, poorly), California pays for both power and capacity. Capacity payments are paid whether the plant is used or not, and capacity has fairly strict uptime requirements or it doesn't pay for that capacity.
I havent studied this in depth, but my intuition tells me that having capacity payments such that the grid as a whole has sufficient overhead for extreme events nullifies any "efficiency" arguments for having these market mechanisms in the first place.
Call me crazy, I think that Texas is doing exactly what it set out to do with deregulation. Run the grid more efficiently via market mechanisms. The method that is used to make the grid more efficient is simply to shave off the traditional 20% capacity overhead meant to cover these sorts of situations. There you go, slightly cheaper electricity 99% of the time.
It's worth clarifying that Griddy wasn't "charging" these rates in an effort to gouge, nor was this rate an active decision they made during the crisis. (You likely know this; just providing context for casual readers.)
Griddy charged a fixed monthly subscriber fee, and then passed through delivery charges, taxes/fees, and the 5-minute wholesale electric rate (IIUC, as set by the ercot market). These all came out of pre-paid customer deposits, generally backed by auto-pay when the account was below some amount. Griddy "charged" $9/kWh intermittently while demand was outstripping supply but the system was largely stable. This model was approved by the (de-)regulators.
After the large-scale blackouts, the public utility commission pegged the rate to the regulatory cap in the market for a few days. This was ostensibly to ensure maximum incentive to bring all possible generation back online (though plausible, I personally suspect this ended up just being a reward to large operators who owned both plants that were part of the problem, and plants still online to rake in market-cap rates for several days.)
Any retail power companies whose pockets weren't deep enough to stay solvent while paying ~200x normal wholesale rates for several days went under. In Griddy's case, bankruptcy was a step removed; these rates were passed through to customers via autopay until the transactions stopped clearing, either because the account was empty, or the customer removed the payment method. IIRC none of the providers were legally allowed to cut customers off during the emergency, so these turned into massive bills (though I think Griddy clarified pretty quickly that they wouldn't be pursuing anyone for these). Since Griddy was a pre-pay service, I doubt they had enough of a buffer to absorb these whole-sale costs without payment for long.
I don't think "let's save $5 a month and then have a catastrophic blackout" was a goal. I think it was the usual handwavey "the market will solve everything because good markets are so efficient" argument, which turned out as it usually does because the market isn't good.
It's like paying the ambulance squad for answering your call when you need medical help, and paying the ambulance squad to exist in the first place regardless of whether you call.
Both services are valuable. And both of them can be paid for in a market mechanism.
The usual justification for deregulation as in Texas, California, and other states is the supposed improved efficiency of generation assets as a result of these market mechanisms. I claim, to be fair without evidence, that the way these "efficiencies" are realized is to cut down on surplus capacity. As such, the existence of capacity fees and/or capacity markets, as they provide incentive to build surplus capacity, seem to me to be an argument against the existence of the market mechanisms at all. Simply:
1 - We need to deregulate because it will make generation more efficient.
2 - The only real way to make generation more efficient is not to have surplus capacity (this is my own claim).
3 - Market mechanisms are needed to incentivize surplus capacity, or else we wind up with blackouts.
I think that the fact that point 3 seems to follow is in fact a clear argument against point 1. Why deregulate if not for the supposed efficiencies in generation? If they're eaten up as soon as we have a separate market mechanism to incentivize surplus capacity, then the two markets don't do anything but justify one another. Just go back to vertical integration and be done with it.
Sometime ago I read an article (I don't remember the name or authors, sorry) that argued the problem with the old pre-deregulation vertically integrated utility model wasn't that the utilities were per se inefficient, but rather a form of regulatory capture. Namely the rate of return was fixed by regulation, so the only way to get more profits was by increasing capital investments. So that was what the utilities argued for to the regulators. Combined with the various Public Utility Commissions (PUC's, the bodies that handle the regulation) were more afraid of large-scale blackouts than high prices. So the result was a lot of excess capacity, which yes, increased reliability but also costs borne by the consumers.
When the industry was deregulated, yes customers got to enjoy lower prices, but that wasn't per se due to some supposed higher efficiency of private operators, but because the incentive to overinvest had disappeared and customers were reaping the rewards of previous investments.
Now, however, the chicken is coming home to roost, so to speak, as demand growth, retirements of old plants etc. have caught up with the previous excess capacity, so there is again a need for a cycle of investments. That will need to be paid for in one way or another.
SO here's the thing:
" 3 - Market mechanisms are needed to incentivize surplus capacity, or else we wind up with blackouts."
Market mechanisms DO incentivize surplus capacity. There are peaker plants stationed all over the US that operate under 24 hours a year. The rest of the time they're either paid to be on standby through a capacity auction, or they're just not paid.
SOme of these plants also exist in Texas. And they are there because companies crunched the numbers based on past data and saw that the money coming in for those few hours is enough to cover that whole year.
The thing is, those high pricing events, which usually happen during heat waves, are something you can quantify: how often do they happen, how much money can you make, how much money will it cost to set up and wait for those events. Probabilty and severity are both quantifiable.
The polar vortex events that hit Texas this year, last year, and 10 years ago, are something that is not quantifiable. I know, because otherwise my company would be quantifying it. SO it's high severity, incalculable probability - ergo a black swan event. The market cannot deal with those.
Predictable is a reason for a government regulation.
Without that, you need quantifiable.
What is the probability of a polar vortex this year? (P)
How many hours of high prices would that cause? (H)
What will the price be during those hours ? (Pr)
What is the probability that our grid uplink will go down and cut us off? (Pd)
So, on the profit side: P x H x Pr x (1-Pd)
Liability:
What is the probability that our failure to winterize will cause a blackout? (Pb)
How much damage will that cause ? (D)
How much of it is our legal responsibility? (L)
Pb x D x L
Now: how much will winterizing cost? C
The big question:
C ?>? Pb x D x L + P x H x Pr x (1-Pd)
Complicating factors: in Texas, L is 0. For everyone.
And P,H,Pr, and Pd are all non-zero, non-negligible, but not quantifiable.
How are you going to get investment money for a project that may, or with some probability may not, hit the jackpot sometime during the next century but otherwise lose money all the time?
Or just be transparent about that trade-off. It's a fair one to make. Putting batteries at mission-critical sites may be the better play than winterizing the entire grid, from hospitals to merry-go-rounds.
But this leaves for potentially unethical situations like vulnerable populations who cannot afford batteries or winterized electricity. Im thinking someone disabled living on disability probably can’t afford premium electricity bills even if they need to maintain their lifesaving and expensive equipment yknow?
That's not an argument for overpaying to winterize all the electricity, though - it's an argument to subsidise winterized electricity for those vulnerable populations, and the most efficient way to do that may well be to directly subsidise behind-the-meter or community-level batteries (it may instead be most efficient to subsidise or socialise winterizing of the grid as a whole, though).
In Texas when you are filling information to your RETAIL provider, you can notify them that you have health equipment that relies on electricity. I do not exactly know what kind of actions they take -- when you provide that info but I am assuming they are legally required to make certain accommodations.
The solution is to cut off industrial and commercial sites first, which draw the most power anyways, and keep residential zoning online as much as possible. The economy can take a break for one day.
I'm inclined to agree, because I think our civilization should exist to serve humanity, not use humanity simply as another disposable cog in the machine.
But that's not the way our legal and political system actually works.
I'm sorry, but that's on the datacenter provider to put their operations in such a free-market state. The fact that we would suggest that datacenters be allowed to run freely, and then tell residents that they need to stock up on batteries as opposed to mandating a winterized network is kind of appalling.
Datacenters should be able to stay online even with a full power cut. If your datacenter can't go days without mains power, you need to move datacenters.
This is reasonable, but the grid should support such separation then. Each building needs to be connected to a known tier of power grid, and parts of one building may need different tiers: e.g. an ICU that should stay powered no matter what vs the rest of the clinic that could afford to lose power without hurting anyone.
Unless it's already built, it's rather expensive to rebuild.
You probably don't want to cut off power suddenly to your water treatment plants, fabs (which have all kinds of dangerous chemicals), medical providers, and so on.
We don't have the collective power to save everyone, and if we overextend ourselves trying to do that, then there is a risk that the whole system collapses for everyone, or partially collapses and causes more pain than might have happened without spreading ourselves too thin.
We obviously need to struggle to make a good world for everyone, but nature is fucking brutal and it doesn't care about our sense of ethics.
> We don't have the collective power to save everyon
Except we do? We have plenty of resources if they were distributed more evenly. In this particular example, other states are able to provide energy during rare events because they did not choose to go with a pure market based system. They aren’t on the verge of collapse.
This is a platitude ignoring the actual facts of what went on. Producers of natural gas and electricity didn't implement the winterization mechanisms they needed to, in spite of the rest of the country doing so and decades of recommendations to do so. No one required them to do it, though, so they didn't.
The grid is a tiny fraction of our economy but the economy is extremely dependent on it. Ensuring the Texas grid could survive a winter storm costs less than 1% as much as even a single large scale blackout in cold weather. The difference is simply who needs to pay.
Grid operators only see the costs they don’t see the benefits thus an inefficient allocation of resources is guaranteed.
Back before electricity deregulation we were paying more for electricity but in the process of rate setting we were looking at it from a systems perspective in which reliability was considered holistically.
(The lower rates were not just from ‘efficient markets’ but also it being possible for high cost producers such as steam turbine coal fired power plants to go bankrupt in the fracked gas age w/o bankrupting the whole utility.)
Saving everyone isn't even a consideration. Saving the wealthy's profits is, and we can't save all the wealthy people's profits, so we prioritize the richest's
Truly mission critical sites don't rely batteries, they have diesel or gas generators, with UPS batteries or flywheels that keep key circuits live until the generators can take over. It's incredibly cost and size prohibitive to build a battery system capable of handling megawatt/hours of load, particularly when it's only going to be used on average a few hours per years.
In sparsely populated or geographically difficult areas (islands, semi-frontier areas, etc) that is common. It's not an exact comparison, but Texas has roughly equivalent GDP to Canada. They could certainly match Canada's power reliability if the state government cared to do so. Instead the single-party majority has been content for decades to let major events keep happening instead of making commercial entities meet more rigorous reliability requirements. It would certainly be significantly more cost-effective than eating 100-billion USD disasters.
Wow, that sounds horrible. I tried googling this since I hadn't heard about this before. I came across one 11 year old who his parents claimed died of hypothermia. However, the autopsy revealed that his death was due to carbon monoxide.
I’m not aware of any cases beyond that one - however, that case is still due to the failed electricity grid. When power went out and homes began to freeze, Texans fired up cars and generators to keep heat around. Harris county alone saw almost 600 cases of CO poisoning during the blackout.
Texas Republicans all decided - with good financial justification - that it would be more profitable to just let the system fail occasionally than to be hardened against long-tail events.
Fixed that for you. The Federal government will bail Texas out. Always has always will.
A few years ago there was an incident in California where someone emptied an AK-47 into a transformer, nearly, but not quite, causing a local blackout. And I have to wonder if it was a chaos monkey from one of our security agencies forcing the issue.
>Or a regulation that says all plants must be winterized to a certain degree thus the cost of electricity will just be higher for everyone to pay for mitigation of long tail risk
The Southwest Power Pool has such regulations which is why they didn't have the same level of issues in the parts of Texas they serve.
But they would have similar issues in some more extreme situation. Why is it obvious that the big storm that SPP has anticipated and expended resources on is the right one? Or will there be a report like this when that storm arrives and SPP also has issues?
Not SPP. FERC.
Winterization is required for any gear that's on an AC grid that crosses state lines. SPP is on the Eastern Interconnection. So all the players in SPP are required to winterize. ERCOT is entirely inside Texas, so they had a choice.
There is a winter weather event report that covers what happened in granular detail and lists all the initiatives in progress to lower the chances of something similar happening again.
It'd be interesting what the effect might be if one day of the week only non-renewables are allowed on the market and the renewable energy is required to be used/transferred elsewhere or is only paid a marginal rate.
A variety of corporations that donate heavily to the party that has been running Texas state government for 20+ year made a tremendous amount of profit when the PUC/ERCOT drove power costs to the max which has resulted in those corp donating heavily to the politicians who allowed it to happen so corruption can't be ruled out.
So, isn't this problem basically the mirror image of insurance? You pay for insurance in a normal year, and every once in a while you get a big payout. The energy companies need to have an incentive to winterize for a once/decade or less event. So, if they sell (i.e. are paid in a normal year) severe winter insurance, and the buyer gets half their windfall profits in a year when there is a shortage, and there is an informed (authorized to audit winterization efforts) buyer, then there is a market incentive.
Much simpler to just mandate that you have capacity available (and inspect and penalize if you aren't winterized), but that will essentially put a cap on the amount of solar, wind, and natgas energy production (until/unless you get much, much bigger battery capacity).
The design flaw is premature furloughing of generation sources that can survive extreme winter weather events, without sufficient replacements.
I'm not advocating to keep coal, I'm advocating for an intelligent phase-out of these sources, which just happened to be resilient against extreme winter events. The failure is lack of diversity and planning, all of the technology exists to solve this problem.
Both solar and wind were down. Wind turbines in Texas aren't weatherproofed either (cost) and it was generally dark and overcast. This didn't really matter since wind generation is a pretty small percentage of the grid and it was mostly gas generators (companies that produce natural gas for use in generation) that were the issue, but "more solar and wind" would have done nothing.
The correct answer seems to have been forcing the gas generators to winterize.
I don't think that'd help. There were a bunch of articles about how renewable power wasn't to blame and Texas politicians were lying by blaming it, but if you check the actual details the whole justification for that was that everyone knew solar and wind were fundamentally unable to keep the Texas grid supplied with electricty during winter due to low output and so the grid wasn't expecting to rely on them. That is, the argument isn't that they handled extreme winter weather well, it's that even in normal winters they're not useful.
Texas has huge and growing wind and solar resources. The entire west half of the state is windy desert. At one point you couldn't drive across I-40 without passing a 100-meter turbine blade convoy every few minutes. It's true that they can't supply the needs of the entire state yet, but wind power is hugely effective in the winter—provided you budget for cold-weather reliability.
It's very possible that in a competently run system, where both renewables and fossil fuels were properly hardened, wind would have meant the difference between blackouts and getting by.
Asking for resilience without at least simulating failures periodically is a fool’s errand.
Imagine if you asked for bids for a backup solution but only ever tested your backup when you really needed it. Likely after a few years of never actually needing to access the backups, the backup companies would start taking shortcuts either to undercut competitor’s pricing or to increase profits.
Another electricity market of similar scale that is also an energy-only market is the Australian NEM. It hasn't had an event similar to the ERCOT disaster of last winter yet, but there have been discussions about adding a capacity market mechanism.
A few interesting points about the NEM that help explain why it's avoided a simple situation.
1: There are multiple price caps that set a maximum price on energy.
2: There's a commonly traded instrument that effectively acts as an insurance product for retailers against high prices. This means peaking generators get paid every quarter, even if they plants don't run at all.
3: The Australian government is spending billions building pumped hydro and gas generators to ensure supply over and above what the private sector is willing to fund.
The Texas problem was persistent, insufficient supply - the extreme pricing was just a symptom of that.
Do participants in ERCOT's system not trade energy swap contracts? Why?
None of that new pumped hydro is online yet though - existing pumped hydro capacity in the NEM is minor (essentially only Tumut and Wivenhoe).
One reason that the NEM has been fairly robust might be that it is divided into regions with only moderate-capacity interconnects, such that each region is managed to be able to "stand on its own".
ERCOT has a price cap similar to the NEM, but as far as I am aware no equivalent to the Cumulative Price Threshold which limits how long the price can sit at market cap for. In the NEM roughly speaking after 7.5 hours the price gets dropped to back to $300 for 7 days.
This measure does get triggered occasionally, generally after transmission or generation failures combined with hot weather.
Both gas & electric markets did payout MASSIVELY to those who had resources because the pricing absolutely exploded by well over 10,000%. The Brazos Electric Co-Op went to bankruptcy court (ongoing) because they ran up a multi-billion dollar bill over the course of the week because they didn't want their fucking customers to freeze to fucking death.
If there's such a thing as financial rape, this was it. And yes Texans blamed ERCOT because blaming the right-wing politicians whom they answer to (via the Public Utility Commission) does not digest easily, and it turned out wind & solar couldn't be blamed either even if you could somehow make that Obama's fault.
It's the kind of massive shit show you get when politics is no longer competitive, much like California. Still better than CA, I guess, for the moment...
Wait no I'm not finished. Imagine there's a big hurricane, you gotta get out of town, low on gas, and you pull up to the gas station and the price is... $900.00/gallon. That's how much the price of electricity went up. That is GOUGING. That gas station owner would go to straight to jail if customers didn't murder him outright first. But because this wasn't retail, it was perfectly okay, even though millions of Texans are now paying for it, for years to come. What a crock of fucking shit.
Wait, wait, no I'm STILL not finished. Texas politicians made sure they walled off their own energy grid so that they wouldn't have "interstate commerce" and thus prevent federal oversight, which would not have allowed such extraordinarily low reserves in the first place. This is STRICTLY the fault of those politicians, and they answer for shit, because that's life in a one-party state, be it communist, fascist, democrat, or republican. Again: A crock of fucking shit. Fucking hell.
If you don’t raise prices, many people/companies will senselessly consume excess electricity they don’t need. Thus, you get power outages instead of merely high prices.
That being said, it’s not like most people have a real-time monitor of electricity prices so those that can will actually reduce consumption.
Ultimately, in a constrained system, either you raise prices (and ensure availability, at expense) or fix prices and ensure scarcity for those unfortunate enough to suffer it (Ie. Rolling blackouts, no fuel at the gas station, etc)
This was absolutely not the problem during the 2021 winter storm. There was an absolute lack of power to be sold, at any price. Raising the spot MWH prices to 9 billion USD would have made no difference in what could be brought on-line, only how badly load serving entities were getting screwed.
Empty office buildings all over the state that were lucky enough to be on critical circuits were beaming out lights the whole time because no one wanted to be the manager that got a building service worker killed trying to navigate icy roads to turn them off. Industrial sites were still running the whole time, with the Samsung fab near Austin still running for days after the near-blackout event until the power company disconnected them after days of asking. Distribution providers could not even rotate planned circuit disconnections because ERCOT would not let them turn anything back due to how narrow the spare capacity margin was.
Meanwhile rural electric cooperatives that didn't own generation went bankrupt and every generator that could be was already up and running. Any load serving entity that didn't also own generation is now going to be amortizing the costs of that through rate increases for probably the next decade.
> There was an absolute lack of power to be sold, at any price. Raising the spot MWH prices to 9 billion USD would have made no difference in what could be brought on-line, only how badly load serving entities were getting screwed.
Under the system Texas uses, it's the promise of those huge payments that encourages people to build excess peaker plants.
If you remove them, and don't replace them with something better, then outages will become more common.
The reason they exist isn't to hurt load serving entities.
> amortizing the costs of that through rate increases for probably the next decade
That's a good thing. That's the good outcome. The better alternative to giant peak fees, which is paying for capacity, has the same result: the base price is a little higher.
The bad outcome is entities that can't just amortize over a decade or longer.
>Raising the spot MWH prices to 9 billion USD would have made no difference in what could be brought on-line, only how badly load serving entities were getting screwed.
Why not? If it's expensive enough you'll get people flying in spare generators from out-of-state to supply the demand.
In the middle of a winter storm that has shut down nearly all transportation and frozen the well-heads for natural gas production? riiight.
Unless the Navy happens to have a few nuclear vessels parked in the gulf ready to hook up, it is literally impossible to move hundreds of MW of generation in a week, much less the 20 GW that Texas needed at the time.
That being said, it’s not like most people have a real-time monitor of electricity prices so those that can will actually reduce consumption.
It's worse than that, this was an extreme weather condition (temps as low as -2F/-19C) in a state where 60% of homes are heated by electricity and many of those use inefficient electrical resistance heating.
So even if residential users had real-time access to prices, they'd have to choose between paying any price or freezing. So it's not clear how elastic demand could be.
In the sense that a good heat pump can be over 400% efficient but electrical resistance heat is 100% efficient.
(ok, it's not scientifically correct to say that anything is over 100% efficient, and COP gets lower as the temperature decreases, but a good minisplit can still deliver a COP close to 2.0 down to 0 degrees F)
Arguably heat pumps would've made this worse, because although they decrease total power usage they increase the rate at which power usage goes up during cold spells, making the ratio of normal power usage to peak worst-case power usage even larger and harder for the grid to deal with. In systems that are well sized for the climate, this often means outright falling back to inefficient resisitive heating with all the resulting electricity demand from that.
There's not really much functional difference from my point of view between my heater and oven and fridge and lights not working because there is no electricity at my place due to a rolling blackout, and them not working because I had to turn them all off because the price has spiked so high I can't afford to use them.
If enough people are reacting to the spiking price, then it will peak at a much lower level, one where you'd feel okay running perhaps half of your things.
That's exactly what the paper that the linked press release is about looks into.
In an energy-only market, the intention is that the possibility of very high spot prices when energy supply is short is supposed to create an incentive to build expensive, robust plant that can meet the demand in such a situation. If you can stay online during the disaster, you can make a profit that makes up for having overspecced your plant for the remainder of the time. It can even make sense to have a quick-starting plant with a high short-run-marginal-cost that almost never runs at all - only starting up when supply is constrained or demand is very high, to take advantage of the high prices - a "peaker" plant.
The paper is positing that this didn't work because the risks of investing in such a business plan were too high.
The gas station analogy is a bad analogy -- understand that demand and supply are being balanced real time on the grid. That is not same with a Gas station or a group of gas stations.
A bit more sophisticated thinking is required here -- if you want people to maintain over-capacity, you either pay them during the good times or pay them during the bad times.
The grid went down due to temperatures across the state. That's not a capacity issue, that's a hardening issue. Capacity is having hot spares in a SAN or whatever. But those extra drives won't help you when your RAID array decides to up and die on you which is what happened here.
I don't know much about the situation in Texas but where I live (Australia) the typical situation - it differs from one state to another - is that you have a semi-deregulated market but with ceilings on rates "to avoid price gouging".
This means that it is basically illegal to provide a capacity for backup power that is only used intermittently. This is because the backup power needs to be priced high to justify having it sitting there all year doing mostly nothing.
Having banned a market solution, governments then stepped in to overcome the "market failure" by running and funding their own backup power supplies.
Source a friend who trades electricity for a living.
One reason the market there isn't providing resilience is that the end customers aren't buying resilience. They largely don't have contracts that explicitly incentivize the suppliers to provide it.
So in principle, I could have a contract with a supplier that says they have to pay me serious compensation if they cut me off - like, maybe the kind of money I'd have to deploy to quickly deploy and fuel a diesel generator. Under the Texas 2021 conditions, that might mean I've have to get the thing helicoptered in.
Presumably such contracts would focus the minds of the risk-takers.
Upthread, I read that the "market" in Texas consists of suppliers offering all kinds of different tarrifs, like free-after-midnight and so on. This makes it almost impossible for a consumer to compare different offerings. Some suppliers are offering apples, others oranges. We have this in the UK; successive governments have struggled to get consumers to switch suppliers. There is inertia. The variety of tarrif types means that the product doesn't behave like a commodity, because consumer energy contracts are not fungible.
Yeah, that’s why tech datacenters were up while people froze in their homes. Corporations know to negotiate these things. Individuals either don’t have the opportunity or prioritize price.
Is the flaw that conservative financial policy means no regulation for critical industries means that they make short term decisions to maximize profit knowing there's no downside if those actions kill people?
If the prices of energy go sky-high every time there’s a supply crunch, that’s a good thing for the investor, is it not? Am I missing something here? What is supposed to be the incentive to avoid that situation exactly?
You double your investment, and profit falls. Or, you invest nothing, and rake in the cash. Great plan. I just don’t understand why they expected anything else to happen. Markets are not magical unicorns, they’re just one way among many to set prices, sometimes they’re the best way, sometimes not. Conservatives deify capitalism to the point of absurdity.
The issue identified is that many plants weren't able to stay online to sell energy at the extreme prices that were bid. Those plants didn't make windfall profits for their investors, they weren't selling anything at all.
Essentially it reached a point where electricity wasn't available at any price.
Usually its just basic understanding of history, but there is a specific faction heavily in power in that area that chooses to pretend that things like this are unpredictable because it gains them influence and money.
If there is sufficient competition, anyone holding out for extreme prices will make less money than anyone that kicks in at moderate prices, and will usually make no money at all. Same for refusing to invest in more plants when they would easily be profitable.
Compare the gasoline market in the US. It's sufficiently competitive, so there is no way for gas stations to start refusing offers under $50 a gallon and wait for people to get desperate.
But that doesn't mean there will be enough plants, even if there is sufficient competition, it would just push out manipulators.
It is probably nitpicking on the "market" word, but...
About 1-2 weeks before the storm I ordered 10kW gas generator https://www.amazon.com/dp/B07Q1DLKBG for about $1350 (it is cheaper now because there is no storm coming :))
It uses about 0.9 gal/hour to produce 9.5kW (let's round to 10kW). This is real output as I powered the whole house with it, including 7.5kW electric HVAC heating element that are switched on when temperature falls below heat pumps' ability to pump heat from the outside (we do not have propane/natural gas.)
0.9 gal was probably like $2.5, meaning 1kW cost me just 25c vs regular price of about 11 cents when getting electricity from the grid.
Considering that people were paying $9/kW prices to the Griddy (https://www.vox.com/2021/2/20/22292926/texas-high-electric-b...) and the like, that $1,350 suddenly became a very attractive option. Except yes, you have to overbuild and not put efficiency at the top.
Furthermore, if electricity "market" was indeed a market, I would imagine there would be plenty of people ready to plug their generators to feed the grid. (i know it is not as straightforward of just plugging it into the grid and starting, but between $.25/kW and $9/kW I am sure solution could be found.)
Also, that "market" was forced to cap prices at $9/kW. The real market price was probably much-much higher.
The actual paper as well as the press release points something out that I think a lot of the "lol, Texas" discussion here is missing - many markets globally are Energy Only including all EU markets. (the only European capacity market is in the UK). So Texas is not some kind of buccaneering outlier in having an energy only market. Where they might differ is in how tightly they enforce security of supply requirements - had all the installed gas generation been able to run there would have been problem.
"Such 'energy-only' markets rely on investors to anticipate demand for all conditions and build appropriate resiliency into the system. They allow prices to soar during extreme events to incentivize preparedness."
Surely any such incentive is self-limiting? The more preparedness it creates, the less likely it is to pay out. The article talks about the uncertainty of there being a payoff, but not about how the incentive itself affects that uncertainty.
Very explicitly the latter, but predicated on the assumption that energy production is infinitely elastic — as long as you priced power high enough, someone will eventually generate it for you. In this case, however, you could run the spot price up as high as you wanted (and the PUC did!), but producers couldn’t bring additional capacity online, and consumers couldn’t moderate their demand (since they were constantly freezing, then thawing as soon as they got power back), so the market catastrophically failed with inelastic demand and production.
I was in power markets when Texas dereg happened, and our economist termed it a “priced to fail” market design. Wasn’t wrong!
Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar hell. It's just what we don't want here. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
Yes, a common story from big businesses. Like the T-mobile+sprint merger (and various other mergers). More jobs! Better Service! Help compete with the other big telcos!
The reality was layoffs, higher rates, and more profit.
Please don't take HN threads further into ideological flamewar hell. It's just what we don't want here. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.
It’s amazing to see comments like this on a technology focused website - an industry that has moved leaps and bounds due to competition and free markets.
I assume these commenters are either too young to have much life experience or young and idealistic without seeing how the world really works.
Or maybe some of us are aware of huge amounts of public grants that went into building up the foundations of that industry till it could operate without induced demand. And many of us also are aware of different constraints impacting monopoly creation and how capital intensive areas behave differently.
If you think government push ended with 8088, I fear you don't have any idea of history. Even in early 1990s, some companies pushing the edge only had customers because DARPA bankrolled it pretty much directly, a lot of success for many foundational tech in modern devices happened thanks to not just government grants for research, but grants for things like MOSIS.
Took some serious decades and big money to switch from government having outsized impact on demand.
One of the most important things for a modern cell phone is the GPS receiver. Most couldn't function without it. GPS was and continues to be a system funded by the US government. In fact, the opening of GPS civilian use in 1999 directly corresponds with the global rollout of cell phones in general.
A modern cell phone can function perfectly fine without a GPS receiver; only things like map functionality would be lost without it. What needs a GPS receiver (or other timing synchronization source; GPS is a simple and inexpensive one) are AFAIK the cell phone base stations.
> I mean for $1,000 I can have effectively a 1990’s supercomputer in my pocket. The government didn’t do that, greedy capitalists did.
Heavily reliant on research funded by the government, ambitious funding for things the internet, the financial stability and access to markets supported by the government, etc. Neither side of this is doing it on their own — it’s like trying to decide whether the wheel or chain deserves credit for making your bicycle work.
Nobody is saying the government made your phone. The point is that those private companies depended on a business environment stabilized by the government, workers educated by the government, research funded by the government, business opportunities created or protected by the government (e.g. patents), etc. I realize there’s a lot of libertarian propaganda in certain circles but it’s not like the last century’s guiding policies weren’t regularly recognized & discussed.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say. In communist Russia the government provided stability, research funded by the government, etc and could barely feed their population.
Capitalism is why we have super computers in our pocket.
Yet the standard of living in USSR was steadily rising compared to what it was before.
Thing is, those capitalists wouldn't have markets to exploit or tools to do so if not for over 50 years of government inducing the demand ("Silicon Valley" literally started because US Navy colocated a bunch of aviation projects, and later it pulled electronics industry there)
You can only have that because said supercomputer is manufactured in China, with semiconductors manufactured in Taiwan. Greedy capitalists absolutely did that, you’re right - and gutted the US in the process.
The "free" market gets too much credit: the best tech came from monopolies[1]
Android is more "free market" than iOS: network providers and OEMs can extend the source code to their requirements and "compete" to consumers detriment. The consensus on HN seems to be that the centralized planning/walled garden approach of iOS is superior.
1. I'm being intentionally provocative,but hear me out: Unix, the IBM PC, Angular, React, CUDA
The problem is, in most countries, electricity sales aren't a free market full of competition.
No-one here is arguing if the free market helped improve CPUs, but I think it's an entirely different question if things like free electricity + gas markets are useful (the evidence from Texas exactly seems to suggest "no").
How much life experience do young people need to understand that they're being screwed over and that the society in which they live is becoming ever more tilted towards the benefit of the rich?
Your constant amazement indicates that either you don't understand something, or the rest of the world are idiots can't see what's so self-apparent to you.
Our industry developed due to the labour put in by so many and central planning and funding by several governments, not due to free markets.
It's a literal idealist position to insist that free markets cause development, when the vast majority of material evidence across the world points to the contrary.
Please don't take HN threads further into tedious ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for. You posted over a dozen such comments in this thread alone—that's egregious.
Edit: your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle, and we ban such accounts regardless of what they're battling for or against. I've therefore banned this one. If anyone wants further explanation, see these links:
No one did it because the end goal was evil, they did it because it was profitable, and ignored any ethics surrounding it.
Capitalism is amoral by definition. It becomes immoral by obvious extension of the point of capitalism, maximizing profits. When something is legally allowed, you do it, including hurting people, as long as it's profitable. It's up to society to put up laws and regulations in which we can utilize capitalism as fully as possible within an ethical framework we can collectively agree on.
> Suddenly, when private property rights are extended to more and more of the general population
You mean through limitations to ownership and regulation of what enterprises can do, like owning other people?
Maximizing rights and freedoms on the macro scale means limiting some people's edge freedoms on the micro scale.
Since your account has been using HN primarily (maybe even exclusively) for ideological battle, and we ban accounts that do that regardless of what they're battling for, I've banned your account.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
No, they did it because they viewed "others" as less than human, or less deserving of dignity and respect, no different than a beast of burden. Slavery predates capitalism by millennia, so viewing others this way clearly doesn't share a causative relationship with capitalism. To contend that capitalism caused slavery is absurd. It's the only economic system in history that resulted in the enduring abolition of slavery. Modern, alternative economic systems still devolve into utilizing slavery to this very day.
You should read Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments, and The Wealth of Nations, which, in great detail, illustrate the economic inefficiency and moral repugnance of slavery in what we now call capitalism. Slavery was definitely not capitalistic, using your definition, purely from a profit motive perspective. It was horrible at maximizing profits.
The economic philosophy of private property, the quintessential foundation of capitalism, is on the basis that everyone has a right to individual liberty and autonomy (again, Adam Smith).
You should also read George Fitzhugh, the most prominent representative of anti abolitionist plantation owners. He was a staunch anti-capitalist specifically because the moral framework it is built on humanized black people and this sentiment was a primary driver in the abolitionist movement. Capitalists and abolitionists were extremely closely associated during the abolitionist movement.
>Maximizing rights and freedoms on the macro scale means limiting some people's edge freedoms on the micro scale.
No it doesn't. It means preventing others from stepping on universal freedoms of others, which is exactly the philosophical foundations of private property. This is categorically different than limiting freedoms. Preserving individual freedoms doesn't mean limiting them for some selectively.
That's not what happened in my country. Slavery was actually seen as unethical and unchristian until someone started to do the math that there was money in it.
Public attitudes changed after that.
Greed is not always good.
> No, they did it because they viewed "others" as less than human, or less deserving of dignity and respect, no different than a beast of burden. Slavery predates capitalism by millennia, so viewing others this way clearly doesn't share a causative relationship with capitalism. To contend that capitalism caused slavery is absurd. It's the only economic system in history that resulted in the enduring abolition of slavery. Modern, alternative economic systems still devolve into utilizing slavery to this very day.
Darwinism predates "Darwinism". Yours is not an argument.
People traded before states existed.
Rational actors didn't appear at the date when the model description of capitalism was defined. People kept slaves because they could (obviously). We can argue that they either did this for profit or for laughs. I know what I'd bet.
> You should also read George Fitzhugh, the most prominent representative of anti abolitionist plantation owners. He was a staunch anti-capitalist specifically because the moral framework it is built on humanized black people and this sentiment was a primary driver in the abolitionist movement. Capitalists and abolitionists were extremely closely associated during the abolitionist movement.
"We treat the Abolitionists and Socialists as identical, because they are notoriously the same people, employing the same arguments and bent on the same schemes. Abolition is the first step in Socialism: the former proposes to abolish negro slavery, the latter all kinds of slavery - religion, government, marriage, families, property - nay, human nature itself. Yet the former contains the germ of the latter, and very soon ripens into it; Abolition is Socialism in its infancy." - George Fitzhugh
> > Maximizing rights and freedoms on the macro scale means limiting some people's edge freedoms on the micro scale.
> No it doesn't. It means preventing others from stepping on universal freedoms of others, which is exactly the philosophical foundations of private property.
Meaning someone enforces your right to property from someone else having a different idea of freedoms.
You're not contradicting me. We can only have rights and freedoms by collectively agreeing where those limits are, and enforcing them as a society. That's what laws and regulations do.
>Rational actors didn't appear at the date when the model description of capitalism was defined. People kept slaves because they could (obviously). We can argue that they either did this for profit or for shits and giggles. I know what I'd bet.
We're literally discussing the causative relationship between a specific economic system, with specific foundations and philosophies, and moral and social progression, not the existence of amalgamous profit motive and how it was exercised in various social, political, and economic systems. Your point is entirely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Profit motive is not capitalism. Mercantilism is not capitalism. Trade is not capitalism. Feudalism is not capitalism. I know anti capitalists like to label anything that has profit anywhere in it as capitalism but that's intellectually dishonest and completely outside accepted economic history and philosophy. Slavery isn't practiced in societies where it is morally and ethically opposed. If profit was the prerequisite for slavery, and not dehumanization, then it would persist regardless of morality. Profit seeking via slavery is entirely contingent on dehumanization. Capitalist societies are the only ones in human history that have enduring humanization of everyone, and that's not a coincidence.
>George Fitzhugh quote
You seem very adamant about raising points that have nothing to do with the assertions I've made. However, since we're copying and pasting out of context quotes from Wikipedia instead of actually reading or even attempting to read Sociology for the South, Cannibals All!, speech transcripts, or anything contextually, here's some quotes, including from the same subsection you copied and pasted from, that illustrate his sometimes paradoxical views on socialism, and my primary point, that his stance was based on anything that humanized black people, and argumentation shared by many in this thread against capitalism:
"We entirely agree with the socialists, that free competition is the bane of modern society. We also agree with them, that it is right and necessary to establish in some modified degree, a community of property. We agree with them in the end they propose to attain, and only differ as to the means.[...] What madness and folly, at this late day, to form society for human beings regardless of human nature. Yet the Socialists are guilty of this folly, and gravely propose to change man's nature to fit him for their new institutions. How much more wise, prudent and philosophical it would be to recur to some old tried forms of society, especially as we shall presently show that such forms of society have existed, and do now exist, as will remove all the evils they complain of, and attain all the ends they propose."
"No association, no efficient combination of labor can be effected till men give up their liberty of action and subject themselves to a common despotic head or ruler. This is slavery, and towards this socialism is moving."
"The Abolitionists and Socialists, who, alone have explored the recesses of social science, well understand that they can never establish their Utopia until private property is abolished or equalized. The man without property is theoretically, and, too often, practically, without a single right."
"Liberty is an evil which government is intended to correct. This is the sole object of government.“
"The great object of government is to restrict, control and punish man ‘in the pursuit of happiness'."
"Socialism, with such despotic head, approaches very near to Southern slavery, and gets along very well so long as the despot lives."
"Free trade or political economy is the science of free society, and socialism is the science of slavery."
"Property is not a natural and divine, but conventional right; it is the mere creature of society and law… if private property generally were so used to injure, instead of promote public good, then society might and ought to destroy the whole institution."
"Slavery is a form of communism… The manner to which the change shall be made from the present form of society to that system of communism which we propose is very simple."
"The bestowing upon men equality of rights, is but giving license to the strong to oppress the weak. It begets the grossest inequalities of condition."
"Slavery relieves our slaves of these cares altogether, and slavery is a form, and the very best form, of socialism."
"Private property destroys liberty and equality."
"The failure of laissez-faire, of political economy, is admitted now by its last and lingering votary. Free society stands condemned by the unanimous testimony of all its enlightened members."
"Our only quarrel with Socialism is, that it will not honestly admit that it owes its recent revival to the failure of universal liberty, and is seeking to bring about slavery again in some form."
"None but lawyers and historians are aware how much of truth, justice and good sense, there is in the notions of the Communists, as to the community of property. Laying no stress on the too abstract proposition that Providence gave the world not to one man, or set of men, but to all mankind, it is a fact that all governments, in civilized countries, recognize the obligation to support the poor, and thus, in some degree, make all property a common possession."
Hopefully this is sufficient to illustrate that your copying and pasting of Wikipedia, whose editors have done a great job of curating his article to support their overwhelming political leanings, was very foolish and short-sighted. Read the books before you attempt to use them authoritatively.
>You're not contradicting me. We can only have rights and freedoms by collectively agreeing where those limits are, and enforcing them as a society. That's what laws and regulations do.
No, those freedoms and rights exist regardless of whether or not a society does. It's only the imposition of society or others that attempts to take those things away. You don't magically get rights because of society.
> You seem very adamant about raising points that have nothing to do with the assertions I've made. However, since we're copying and pasting out of context quotes from Wikipedia instead of actually reading or even attempting to read Sociology for the South, Cannibals All!, speech transcripts, or anything contextually, here's some quotes, including from the same subsection you copied and pasted from, that illustrate his sometimes paradoxical views on socialism, and my primary point, that his stance was based on anything that humanized black people, and argumentation shared by many in this thread against capitalism:
No, I raised a point that countered your claim that Fitzhugh opposed capitalism because it was closely coupled with the abolition. He opposed socialism just as much. Neither of your quotes negate that, which I think illustrates the further point that he's an unreliable narrator.
> Profit motive is not capitalism. Mercantilism is not capitalism. Trade is not capitalism. Feudalism is not capitalism.
May I ask, what is capitalism, to you?
> I know anti capitalists like to label anything that has profit anywhere in it as capitalism but that's intellectually dishonest and completely outside accepted economic history and philosophy.
I'm not anti-capitalist, I'm anti-"one tool for all jobs" and equally simplistic views.
> Slavery isn't practiced in societies where it is morally and ethically opposed.
Sure.
> If profit was the prerequisite for slavery, and not dehumanization, then it would persist regardless of morality.
This absolutely does not follow any chain of logic. There can be more prerequisites than one, and morality can supersede something else.
> Profit seeking via slavery is entirely contingent on dehumanization.
Sure.
> Capitalist societies are the only ones in human history that have enduring humanization of everyone, and that's not a coincidence.
Again, which capitalist societies? The US is a mixed economy, as is every other country in the western world. They are functioning because they have a better or worse enforced playing field and infrastructure, and yes, social programs.
> No, those freedoms and rights exist regardless of whether or not a society does. It's only the imposition of society or others that attempts to take those things away. You don't magically get rights because of society.
But you literally just said:
> We're literally discussing the causative relationship between a specific economic system, with specific foundations and philosophies, and moral and social progression, not the existence of amalgamous profit motive and how it was exercised in various social, political, and economic systems.
So either it existed before society or it didn't? Pick one, you can't have both.
Instead of asking me to read books you've picked out in a Gish Gallop, maybe you use the knowledge you learned from them and explain what capitalism is, when it came into existence, and which societies you believe embodies its principles.
Resorting to pedantry and refusing to expand your knowledge about the topic at hand by consuming literature contrary to your world view are indisputably bad faith.
There's no such thing as capitalism to me. The things I listed are demonstrably not capitalism
>So either it existed before society or it didn't? Pick one, you can't have both
Pick one of what? Rights exist independent of society. Society and government trampled on them for most of history. Some guys that led a revolution wrote a lot about this and the self evident nature.
As for your last request, I've done that repeatedly and you've repeatedly resorted to attempts to change the topic.
Capitalism and its principles, capitalist societies, and capitalist philosophers have consistently demonstrated the most rapid and prolific advances in ethics and morality in human history.
> Resorting to pedantry and refusing to expand your knowledge about the topic at hand by consuming literature contrary to your world view are indisputably bad faith.
I'm asking you specific questions. You are asking me to read books you have dictated, regardless of if I've read them or not. I'm asking about your interpretation, and you repeatedly ignore that simple, basic, foundational component of a discussion. I'm inclined to disagree what constitutes bad faith.
> There's no such thing as capitalism to me. The things I listed are demonstrably not capitalism
So is capitalism everything you haven't listed? Is the question too broad or difficult?
> Pick one of what? Rights exist independent of society. Society and government trampled on them for most of history. Some guys that led a revolution wrote a lot about this and the self evident nature.
Pre-society your rights went as far as you could throw a rock and defend yourself, or your tribe enforced it. You can call rights inherent all you want, but in practice the enforcability is the only thing that matters. Without society person A can walk into person B's house while they're sleeping and remove person A and now there's a new house owner. The rights and freedoms you describe require that we agree what constitutes those rights, so that we can agree on how they're enforced, through police and courts, through elections, and what rights you have to move from point A to point B, given that without this framework you could get landlocked by others ownership.
> As for your last request, I've done that repeatedly and you've repeatedly resorted to attempts to change the topic.
It would be easier to just copy and paste it than to write something else. You haven't though, or I wouldn't have asked. Please argue in good faith.
> Capitalism and its principles...
Which you won't define
> capitalist societies...
which you won't specify
> and capitalist philosophers have consistently demonstrated the most rapid and prolific advances in ethics and morality in human history.
Easy to claim if you don't have to substantiate it.
If you don't want to discuss the topic, and only deflect everything through vague references elsewhere, then what point is there in you posting?
Laws and regulations have done more to enable morally and ethically questionable behavior, via regulatory capture, than anything good.
The point is that this behavior is a bad human problem, not a capitalism problem. And historically, capitalism has lead to a massive reduction in bad human behavior on an unprecedented scale, largely due to the economic and moral foundations upon which it is built. Bad human problems reappear in countries as they reduce their participation in capitalism and reduce private property rights (see this in real-time in China literally right now, Cuba, N Korea, etc). They also magically disappear when former non capitalist states adopt capitalist economic policies and extend private property rights (Estonia & other former socialist states, capitalist African states vs socialist ones, etc.)
Adam Smith and other prominent economic philosophers that examined and supported what is now the capitalist system didn't just sit down and say "Well people ought to be able to maximize profit". There's a whole lot of exposition on how (via private property) and why (because every individual has a moral and economic right to bodily autonomy and the results of its labor).
> Laws and regulations have done more to enable morally and ethically questionable behavior, via regulatory capture, than anything good.
I don't even know where to start with this, but let's take things that have come up here, like the Boeing MCAS, or WV Diesel-scandal, etc. These were due to lack of regulation. They certainly wouldn't have been avoided by laissez-faire capitalism.
> The point is that this behavior is a bad human problem, not a capitalism problem. And historically, capitalism has lead to a massive reduction in bad human behavior on an unprecedented scale, largely due to the economic and moral foundations upon which it is built.
Sure, I actually agree with that. The point is that capitalism doesn't solve any of those human problems. You mention in passing that they do, due to "moral foundations". Please elaborate on these.
Without "bad human" problems, any economic system ever tested in history would work fine, including the ones you don't like.
The only reason modern "capitalist states" work is because they have a functioning state enforcing the playing field so game is fair.
Can it be abused? Yes, exactly like every other system. Is capitalism abused when no rules or referees are present? Of course, just like any other system.
Both of these are explicit examples of regulatory capture.
The FAA is heavily dependent on aircraft manufacturers to self certify. EU members met in Brussels to discuss the exact metrics VW was spoofing, but failed to implement a measurement strategy that would have easily detected this manipulation due to pressure from companies regarding the expense and time of tests.
>They certainly wouldn't have been avoided by laissez-faire capitalism.
You cannot substantiate this assertion. If the state did not have easily captured, monopolistic, and absolute authority over the certification and other confidence-instilling industries, then it's highly likely trustworthy, neutral third parties would exist and compete to assess and verify the safety and other metrics of various industry. In the restaurant industry, ServSafe and its competitors are a great example. There's also tons of nongovernmental safety and quality certifications in plenty of other fields with the potential for catastrophic failure and loss of human life.
>Please elaborate on these.
I've already cited Smith's books. Derivative and subsequent works regarding the rise and proliferation of the economic philosophy of capitalism are consistent in their message.
>Without "bad human" problems, any economic system ever tested in history would work fine, including the ones you don't like.
No they wouldn't, but that's completely unrelated to what's being discussed. The entire point I'm making is that capitalism's economic and moral foundations minimize the impact and scale of individual bad actors, to a degree unseen by any other system, while simultaneously enabling the common man to participate in innovation. It's an an objective fact consistently observable across time and space.
>The only reason modern "capitalist states" work is because they have a functioning state enforcing the playing field so game is fair.
That's a bold and completely unsubstantiated assertion.
Please actually read some of the foundational literature. Pretty much everything you've said is explicitly addressed.
> Both of these are explicit examples of regulatory capture.
> The FAA is heavily dependent on aircraft manufacturers to self certify. EU members met in Brussels to discuss the exact metrics VW was spoofing, but failed to implement a measurement strategy that would have easily detected this manipulation due to pressure from companies regarding the expense and time of tests.
Furthering this line of thought, are you suggesting that these companies complaining about expense and time of tests would volunteer into a trade organization (and pay for it no less, which is how they exist), that of course would still require the same tests to be effective? Otherwise the end result would just be another certification that consumers would want before buying, but wouldn't mean anything unless they entail stringent tests.
> You cannot substantiate this assertion. If the state did not have easily captured, monopolistic, and absolute authority over the certification and other confidence-instilling industries, then it's highly likely trustworthy, neutral third parties would exist and compete to assess and verify the safety and other metrics of various industry. In the restaurant industry, ServSafe and its competitors are a great example.
Not to knock the service industry, but airplanes and cars are a bit more complicated to evaluate.
> There's also tons of nongovernmental safety and quality certifications in plenty of other fields with the potential for catastrophic failure and loss of human life.
I would be much more interested in examples here.
> Please actually read some of the foundational literature. Pretty much everything you've said is explicitly addressed.
So please address it using your already obtained knowledge instead of dodging.
> Sounds like a great opportunity to do some self directed research and critical thinking instead of exercising confirmation bias.
This boils down to "I am right without any arguments, and if you can't see that then you should figure out how I'm right yourself". It's not a great look.
> No thanks, I'm not willing to invest any more time in curing the ignorance of someone unwilling to seek truth for themselves and who only asks questions in bad faith
Exactly, and I would be remiss to leave out in an absurdly short period of time on the scale of human history. It's so far beyond coincidence it's laughable to contend that it might be.
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't post like this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Also: we ban accounts that use HN primarily for ideological battle, regardless of what they're battling for or against. It's not what this site is for, it destroys what it is for, and I had to ask you about this already.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
No, we don't care if someone is "conforming to liberalism", we care whether they're conforming to the HN guidelines. It's common for people to think that we're secretly siding with their opponents when we do this kind of moderation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but that sort of perception isn't based in fact.
Liberalism is the root of this obsession with civility, while our countries get bombed and pillaged. If you ban polemics, you side with the dominant ideology.
As before, you compare similar handling of centre-left and far right politics. Good luck with that.
We stopped using the word civility many years ago already, because it doesn't communicate the values we care about here.
> If you ban polemics, you side with the dominant ideology.
There's a strong version and a weak version of that argument. Using it to justify garden-variety internet swipes like "only Americans and children could believe such an absurd statement" is the weak version, and not very persuasive.
Thoughtful critique is welcome here, and curious conversation between people who respect each other and listen to each other is hardly a 'dominant ideology'. The problem is that a lot of us (all of us, most likely) use noble concepts to justify treating others badly.
Doesn’t really matter what you call it, the end result is about the same: polite thoughtful conversation on whether Chinese Americans should be interned or whether Eastern Europe should be invaded by NATO or even just whether exploiting workers is acceptable. It used to be about whether my Serbian neighbours should be bombed, but on previous forums.
Swipes at Americans are useful, it can make them wonder why their country is so hated across the world. It can also be useful as part of a wider polemic to re-focus on the real contradiction: imperialists versus the rest of us.
Your rules as enforced absolutely reinforce imperialism, regardless of your intentions. Again, it’s your website. I’m not going to convince you, just trying to explain to you what you’re doing.
Being reasonable is often not effective. It’s like asking workers to communicate in a way that works for the capitalists’ police, as they get shot. Most Americans will choose fascism anyway, the only point is to get the rest to see it. Aggression is far more effective at that.
It’s not surprising you’d side with the empire, your material interests align with it. Y combinator is after all part of the export of capital at usury rates. It’s ok, when our turn comes we will make no excuses either.
The overwhelming majority of ethical and moral progression in human history coincided with the extension of private property rights to more and more of the general population, and retracted when those rights were rescinded.
This occurred both because of the recognition of humanity that goes along with granting these rights, and the technological progressions enabled by allowing opportunity and innovation to occur in larger swaths of the population rather than an aristocratic hyperminority.
You're just describing class struggle and industry, not capitalism specifically.
Capitalism was once revolutionary against feudalism, as the bourgeoisie replaced the nobility as the ruling class. But that hasn't been the case for centuries.
No I'm not. I'm very specifically describing the economic, ethical, and moral foundations upon which capitalism is built and the effects it has on economic and social progression. Effects that have been observed and consistent across numerous nations transitioning from numerous economic and social systems to and from capitalism.
Regurgitating Marx isn't going to be effective against someone who has a more holistic understanding of capitalism and its roots. Funny given your accusations of "Americans and children" considering Marx was a literal man child.
You're conflating the ideology capitalism uses to justify and maintain itself with its actual material reality. It's not a surprise, considering this ideology (liberalism) is fundamentally idealist and not materialist.
Have you actually read Marx or Engels? You'll find a holistic understanding of capitalism and its roots, its upsides and its downsides.
> The overwhelming majority of ethical and moral progression in human history coincided with the extension of private property rights to more and more of the general population, and retracted when those rights were rescinded.
Why is it always the "objective facts" brand of capitalist activists that can immediately after do an extraordinary subjective - and biased - interpretation of a weak historical correlation?
That's just blatant historical revisionism, with clearly no attempt made whatsoever to try to disprove your own claim. You'll have to surgically remove at least 80% of Capitalism's history for it to be even close to true. Even then, you have many societies in "human history" that certainly would argue that their "ethical and moral" progression was significantly better than today's.
>Why is it always the "objective facts" brand of capitalist activists that can immediately after do an extraordinary subjective - and biased - interpretation of a weak historical correlation?
It's consistent across time and the globe for the overwhelming majority of nations transitioning to and from capitalism to any other system. It's not just some singular event that happened once in the 18th century, it's observable right now. I provided examples in another comment.
>You'll have to surgically remove at least 80% of Capitalism's history for it to be even close to true.
Prove it. What is this 80%?
>Even then, you have many societies in "human history" that certainly would argue that their "ethical and moral" progression was significantly better than today's.
Name them and describe how and why.
Why is it always those that insist on ignoring objective historical facts can never substantiate their assertions and rather make axiomatic statements?
I provided explicit examples and illustrated consistency across time and geography. Hand wavy dismissals aren't doing your argument any favors.
> It's consistent across time and the globe for the overwhelming majority of nations transitioning to and from capitalism to any other system. It's not just some singular event that happened once in the 18th century, it's observable right now. I provided examples in another comment.
Not really, Capitalism have also been observed to do its thing without democracy as well. And just moving forward is a pretty low bar, the USSR had lots of progress as well, but it doesn't make Stalinism a good system. It's also fundamentally a correlation, not causation. Would another historical path had a better outcome for the average citizen? Maybe, maybe not.
> Prove it. What is this 80%?
Slavery? Racism? Colonialism? Property requirements to vote? Women suffrage? Supporting brutal regimes in the name of corporate profit? Famine while still exporting? Exploitation fueled by Capitalism's profit and growth motive? Climate and ecological disaster? People dying in the US due to lack of healthcare access? etc...
> Name them and describe how and why.
Come on, you're the one preaching, it's your duty to prove your extraordinary claim against history. Capitalism is like 400 years old. A mere blip. Native American's societies for example thought of people being forced to wage labour their entire life for someones else's enrichment to be not much better than being a slave. Certainly not "freedom" in any case. Not to even mention their thoughts about the concept of private ownership of the commons, as in private property.
> I provided explicit examples and illustrated consistency across time and geography. Hand wavy dismissals aren't doing your argument any favors.
>Not really, Capitalism have also been observed to do its thing without democracy as well
Prove it
> the USSR had lots of progress as well, but it doesn't make Stalinism a good system
Not morally or ethically, which I'll remind you, yet again is what we're talking about. Stay on topic
>Slavery? Racism? Colonialism? Property requirements to vote? Women suffrage? Supporting brutal regimes in the name of corporate profit? Famine while still exporting? Exploitation fueled by Capitalism's profit and growth motive? Climate and ecological disaster? People dying in the US due to lack of healthcare access?
Prove the causative relationship between these things and capitalism, and that they make up 80% of capitalism's history, your original assertion. Why did they exist before capitalism?
Why did many of these good things fail to happen before capitalism? Why do they happen virtually everywhere afterwards?
Capitalist countries are the most ecologically and climate efficient per capita and quality of life.
Exploitative compared to what and where?
Examine severe illness outcomes, pharmaceutical research, medical innovation, and general health of the US (meaning, US citizens have bad health habits) vs elsewhere before you make such ignorant comments.
>Come on, you're the one preaching, it's your duty to prove your extraordinary claim against history. Capitalism is like 400 years old.
Which is why it's remarkable how much progress has occurred under it in such a short period of time, literally my point
>Native American's societies for example thought of people being forced to wage labour their entire life for someones else's enrichment to be not much better than being a slave. Certainly not "freedom" in any case. Not to even mention their thoughts about the concept of private ownership of the commons, as in private property.
You continually speak authoritatively about subjects you clearly do not have any insight into. Native Americans practiced slavery & conquest. Native Americans had private property. They also hadn't invented the wheel and sacrificed hundreds of thousands of people a year on top of pyramids. You're regurgitating well known popular myths. Stop deviating off topic
>What explicit examples?
China under Pooh's new crackdown on private property and capitalist tendencies vs it when it opened and extended private property rights. Estonia post-USSR. Zimbabwe vs Botswana. Just a few, modern ones, if we want to go back to the 18th and 19th century the trend was nearly universal in the west.
Which modern, high quality of life, non capitalist countries are less harmful to the environment?
>You have no scruples at all do you? "No insight into" then you go on avoiding the point and just falsely suggesting that I said something I didn't say (treating all historical North American societies as one, which is ridiculous), what a deeply dishonest thing to write, shame on you.
What was your point then? You were leveraging some native American sentiments and factually incorrect popular myths on their beliefs about property ownership to contend falsely that they had better economic systems devoid of profit motive or property.
>I won't be wasting energy on replies that have zero prospect of breaking through that dogma. I can see others have tried with no success.
The irony coming from someone with entirely unsourced, repeatedly demonstrably false assertions, while I have provided endless examples and sources.
Sorry, not sorry for sticking to my well researched and verbosely sources principles and reasoning because random strangers on the internet regurgitate easily countered dogma from ideologues and propagandists.
I can tell you exactly what evidence would look like that would change my mind about any topic I hold strong beliefs about. Meanwhile you can't even stick to one topic.
Your account has been using HN primarily for ideological battle. That's against the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and we ban such accounts regardless of what they're battling for or against. I've therefore banned this one. If you or anyone want further explanation, see these links:
What a sad state of affairs when pushing back against the bullshit spread by the very prolific reactionaries, albeit polite (which is all that matters here), of this site sooner or later gets one banned. To add insult to injury most of them have been posting on HN for many years.
I don't know what you're referring to, but if there are accounts breaking the HN guidelines the way you were doing, which we haven't banned yet, I'd like to know which ones they are.
Everyone thinks that we're secretly siding with their opponents when we do this kind of moderation (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), but that feeling is not based in fact. It's just an inversion of your own sympathies. The other side thinks we're ruining the site by secretly siding with you.
You alone can't do anything about the demographics and their biases here. Buy if you honestly believe that HN is somehow politically neutral you're deluded.
It does't require a sociologist to realise that when certain topics degenerates into 500-1000 comments of bullshit and others doesn't even register that this user base has a certain bias.
Finally, what is seen as ideological warfare naturally follows the overton window. I could directly translate liberal/conservative folks posts here into a equivalent socialist narrative instead and it would be seen as ideological warfare because it's simply out of the ordinary.
You can just look through my comment history and the users I've replied to if you're genuinely interested.
Actually I'm not making any argument or claim about political neutrality, and I don't think I've ever made such a claim. That would be a difficult thing to study, if it's even possible.
I'm making an empirical observation about how people with strong political passions react when they get moderated, and the rather obvious root of those reactions. The fact that people of all ideologies and political types react with exactly the same reflex is relevant because it clarifies that root so vividly.
I suppose we've come full circle and stopped trusting in free markets to fully solve all problems.
Does anyone know of hybrid central planning / market approaches? Maybe a central planner with a market trying to predict whether the planner is making good decisions?
If something is required to survive, it is by definition not a free market. Texas either needs to go all the way and let people freeze to death without getting bailed out or they need to re-regulate. This middle ground where the market is free until there's a market failure is simply moral hazard.
Even not quite so extreme, going without power for an extended period of time basically forces you to throw all your refrigerated and frozen food away. It takes months each times this happens for the supply chain to catch up with the new and unexpected demand.
How are you so sure that regulators would have required protection against a once in a hundred year storm? What doesnt the Democratic republic of the Congo regulate the poverty out of existence? Hindsight is 20/20
ERCOT/TX explicitly creating their own grid so they're not regulated by FERC (which covers literally the entire rest of the country) suggests that perhaps they don't have ratepayer's best interests at heart.
I'd love to know if anyone's written anything about say, FERC vs ERCOT's gas pipeline winterization requirements.
I'd advise looking into some Texas history first. Part of the isolated grid was in response to the unreliability of other actors on the National grid.
Yeah. When you go independent it sucks when you set yourself up to not be helped by anyone else; but in general you at least know squarely where to place blame when it blows up in your face.
As someone who grew up in Texas, Texas history (not just of their electric grid) is crazy.
The Alamo was about illegal immigrants from the USA fighting for the right to keep cotton-picking slaves in Mexican territory, then revolting when the Mexican military came to enforce the law. And it was a tactical loss for the revolution. It’s crazy that it managed to become a rallying cry.
You have over-simplified to the point of being incorrect.
The Alamo is one of many battles during the Texas revolution which primarily occurred due to the move of Mexico to a centralized power instead of a federalized one. Texas had already endured a constitutional change, increased taxes, immigration being made illegal and changes in the legality of slavery.
While Santa Anna blamed "illegal immigrants" heavily, he also was basically conscripting anyone and everyone to form his army which likely tied into his continual set of losses.
The Alamo is the first to fall when the Mexican army, coming from the heart of Mexico, re-enters Texas. During the fighting, Texas formally declared independence from Mexico. The Alamo falls. A few days later the Texan army catches up with the Mexican army and crushes them, with claims the men are shouting "Remember the Alamo".
And yet this revolution was still started by American settlers and other Americans that the settlers convinced to cross into Mexico.
I agree that Santa Ana was authoritarian, but the Alamo was not a symbol of freedom from authoritarianism. It was a rebellion which was only a relevant point because American settlers chose to live in Mexico and failed to uphold the contract with their new government: to limit slavery to their own properties and not to spread their Protestantism. Your interpretation of the situation was missing more relevant info than mine was.
Well really the revolution was due to Mexico betraying Spain and failing as a centralized government as Spain said they would.
I think you are missing that Texas had always been distinct - not just part of Mexico/Spain - and that those immigrants didn't suddenly pop there right before to pick up Texas but had been living there since it was Spanish territory.
Even France wanted to buy Texas as a distinct entity at one point.
I think this should be discussed more. The frequency of outlier storms is higher than the actuarial tables were designed for. The line that delineates “hundred year storm” seems to be mislocated in the actuarial tables.
This seems to happen with hurricanes, floods, fires, and these polar vortex storms bringing extreme cold down into the lower continental US.
The Texas grid had similar issues in 1989 and very little was done to fix the issues. If the rumors I have heard are true then Texas lost the new Intel fab in large part because of the unreliable power grid.
Is your first paragraph about Texas specifically or something?
Utilities in most places are pretty heavily regulated. In like that last 20 years we have had ~0 gas outages and probably less than 10 days of power outages here.
The weather event in Texas had the problem of being rather extreme, but it sure wasn't unimaginable or anything like that.
10 days worth of power outages in 20 years is not something to brag about. I lived in Toronto where we had maybe 1 hour of power outages in 5 years (my Linux box had >485 days of uptime on wall power with no UPS until I had to move). Well, that was until the 2003 blackout hit and took out power for 24+ hours.
Even grids designed around winter can fail, hard. Quebec's grid is extremely important to the province, and it's actually a source of pride here yet it also failed in a catastrophic way in 1998. And I've had 3 outages this year in Montréal too.
I don't know why everyone seems to be judging the soundness of the Texas grid based on single event that happened last year. Yes it was catastrophic, but so was what happened in 1998 here in quebec or the outages that occured in 2004 in Ontario or even the perpetual mess that's California's grid.
The 1998 ice storm was something that had not happened before. Montreal was in particularly bad shape because numerous towers for something like 2 of the 3 transmission lines going into the city collapsed under the weight of the ice (please forgive my foggy memory for the exact numbers and details).
My family in eastern Ontario was without power for 8 days in 1998, and another friend was without power for 17 days. Ontario had failed to enforce proper engineering standards for pole lines, and as a direct result of the review of standards after the '98 ice storm, ESA regulation 22/04 significantly improved standards for these systems. Regulation 22/04 wasn't fully implemented by Hydro One and Bell until 2007-2008, and one consequence of 22/04 is that the cost of installing new fibre on old pole lines increased massively at that time as permitting process went from being handshake deals to requiring detailed engineering work.
Those of us trying to deploy broadband in some areas simply cannot afford to replace every single pole in some areas as is required by modern engineering standards. I have personally encountered quite a number of class 5 - 35 foot poles with 3 phases of power on them that were installed in 1948! Survey work in the past month even found a couple of poles from 1929!!! Those poles are effectively toothpicks at this point in their lifecycle. Granted, the older poles that were treated with creosote last a heck of a lot longer than the more modern "environmentally friendly" CCA-PEG treated poles, but they're pretty small and often have glass insulators that you really don't want to be anywhere near when that pole starts swaying due to the movement of a cable lasher.
Learning about all of this telecom and electrical domain knowlegde has been kinda fun in its own way. =-)
Wow!That is very interesting, it's amazing that a pole can even survive almost 100 years of frost/defrost like that and still hold any lines. I guess considering the incredible distances involved here in Canada, keeping track of the poles and actually inspecting them is a huge challenge though. I wouldn't have thought broadband added any significant weight on the poles though!
And you are right, that storm was pretty unique because of how much ice (instead of snow) it ended up creating. But honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if we see another big grid failure soon. The network has been noticeably less reliable the past 2-3 years, and not just in my location. I've had to build a DIY UPS for my home server this year because of that (the outages have been around 7-8h each so an off the shelf UPS was not really an option if I wanted 100% uptime). Hopefully I'm wrong because electric heating is massive here.
The biggest risk when adding new fibre to existing pole lines is actually during the installation process. When new cables are lashed to communications strand, the 45 pound cable lasher causes the strand to swing back and forth quite significantly, making the tops of nearby poles swing several feet or more. As a result, insulators that are old and of certain types that may develop cracks can break off during lashing. Direct or even indirect contact with a 7.2kV or 16.8kV primary by communications workers can be deadly, and is a real risk of this kind of work.
It's not a brag, it's a data free guess intended to not be wrong low.
A transformer at a substation that serves much of the town blew up a few years ago causing a several day outage, so it definitely isn't a few hours. They had rolling black outs in place in less than a day and had power back in less than 3 days (there was not a spare on site).
Markets have never been free. Policy has always dictated the winners and losers, even in cases of state deregulated markets (who gets federal subsidies, who makes out better given lack of state regulation, who paid for that regulation, etc.)
The ideal of a free market is simply not compatible with reality.
You could give The People's Republic of Walmart a read. Full disclosure, I haven't read it, I've just read/listened to media talking about it.
> For the left and the right, major multinational companies are held up as the ultimate expressions of free-market capitalism. Their remarkable success appears to vindicate the old idea that modern society is too complex to be subjected to a plan. And yet, as Leigh Phillips and Michal Rozworski argue, much of the economy of the West is centrally planned at present. Not only is planning on vast scales possible, we already have it and it works. The real question is whether planning can be democratic. Can it be transformed to work for us?
I've on occasion idly wondered whether modern information processing technology would enable a centrally-planned economy that worked better than the failed 20th century examples.
Better enough that in the long term the people in charge of it don't have to resort to authoritarian measures to avoid getting shot in the hole they just dug? I'm not gonna pretend to have a good answer for that one.
Disclaimer, I've only skimmed through the first and not read the second. I'm not personally super-convinced as I think markets are in many ways a pretty good decentralized economical information sharing mechanism (in the sense of prices conveying information about scarcity etc.). That being said, there are of course numerous examples of market failure where some kind of state intervention is needed. And in some cases the market failures in question might be so severe and so hard and expensive to work around that a socialist model might in fact work better. Like health care or much of public infrastructure. But that doesn't IMHO mean that market mechanisms must be entirely abolished everywhere.
To get back on the topic of electrical grids, yes I think a mechanism of dispatching based on marginal costs is a good idea, as that means the lowest cost producers to meet the required demand are used. But also note that this is a pretty "synthetic" market, with a central planner deciding on which generators are dispatched, and customers are buying from that market rather than some kind of "natural" market where they'd go directly to the producers. And of course few end customers have their rates tied to the spot price, which sort of destroys the idea of demand response where the end users would react to high prices.
And the variability of the electricity price is only going to get more dramatic as more zero-marginal cost variable producers like wind, solar come online. In a simplified model with zero marginal cost producers and inelastic demand you'd either have a cost of zero when production is higher than demand and the administratively decided ceiling price (or infinity if such a ceiling hasn't been set) when demand is higher than production. Which doesn't really sound like a functioning market. So maybe we'll over time go towards a model where some kind of capacity market is responsible for the majority of generator income (and customer cost) and the wholesale spot market reduces in importance, mostly deciding the merit order for dispatching generators.
Energy in Texas, like everywhere else in the US, is heavily regulated.
They can't just raise rates or borrow money whenever they want. These decisions are regulated and political. So there is a set amount of income coming in to improve things and repair things and to pay off debt.
They were required to build out wind power. Probably a good thing in the big scheme of things, but that takes money away from other priorities. They have to fund the capital improvements of putting the windmills out there and expanding the transmission capacity to get the electricity to where it will be used (a long ways away). And they have to make other improvements and alterations to account for the intermittent nature of wind.
While they're paying for that, it puts pressure on maintaining and improving the other parts of their infrastructure.
What we're seeing in Texas and other places is that the stable system that existed for decades is being disrupted by many things, and it will be a while before we reach a new point of stability. It's an enormous engineering, economic, and political challenge.
> They can't just raise rates or borrow money whenever they want.
Uhh, yes they can, and yes they do. Wholesale rates of electricity change every 15min in ERCOT. During the deep freeze weather event you could sign up for electricity plans which exposed you to the wholesale rate of electricity.
The retail rates you pay in the open market are determined by the contract you signed. Lots of REPs offer all kinds of pricing structures on their contracts, the contracts offered change every several days and can all kind of term lengths or even allowed variability.
The amount generators are getting changes constantly in this market. As mentioned earlier, spot prices change every 15 minutes. Bids take place in day-ahead markets as well, which change based on tons of different factors. The only people getting somewhat fixed rates are the distribution companies but even then their rates are allowed to change every now and then, and their prices are based on usage.
Eastern Ontario seems to do fine handling winter temperatures of -28C to -35C every year. Cold isn't the issue driving reliability problems here, wind and ice are.
Exactly. Eastern Ontario gets wind and ice and cold EVERY SINGLE YEAR. Every one. If you don't winterize, you don't work. It is a cost.
In Texas, basically up until last year with that blackout, there was no downside to not winterizing. Why? Most of our pipes aren't even deep enough to handle a hard freeze - because we don't usually get hard freezes.
Those are interesting mental gymnastics you just did.
Rolling “black outs” in California in recent years were due to two reasons. When we approached maximum capacity, the California ISO requested large electrical users voluntarily reduce usage. In times and places where that wasn’t enough, some areas saw black outs. This is because demand on the hottest parts of the hottest days of the year breached supply/capacity by the western electrical grid.
Further, PG&E (one energy provider in. Ali for us) did create blackouts during weather that was most likely to cause fires with their equipment. These had nothing to do with electrical load/capacity, but with environmental factors.
PG&E has struggled to prune foliage from their equipment, which is one of the causes of recent fires. They claim environmental regulations are onerous, but this is the same company that went into bankruptcy after poisoning multiple towns (causing cancer cluster) and allowing a neighborhood in San Bruno to explode due to lack of proper maintenance on their natural gas lines. They were also found guilty of deaths (murder?) in some more recent fires.
I do not recall any issues in WA. OR had a bunch of people out of power due to downed power lines due to ice forming on trees and then trees or tree branches falling down and taking the power line down.
There was never any problem with supply of power though, since there is plenty here due to hydro.
I live in central oregon, so I can only speak for where I live. But the power outages we did have, or that I know about, were mostly from wildfire season. However, I just know about my general area and that is not necessarily that same for all of Oregon.
In systems engineering if we want this to not happen we usually intentionally add volatility, things like putting chaos monkey into your infra so that long-tail failures become common and thus the necessary hardening can’t be missed.
I’m not quite sure what this would look like for an electricity market. Maybe something like huge fines for having your capacity go off-line, which require insurance, and the insurers thus require winterization or they charge way higher rates which make your plant uneconomical. Or a regulation that says all plants must be winterized to a certain degree thus the cost of electricity will just be higher for everyone to pay for mitigation of long tail risk. The fines approach is more indirect but - assuming it works - it leaves room for edge cases and innovation that the “orderly but dumb” regulation does not.