Well There‘s Your Problem - Episode 57: It Snowed in Texas

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Today a cat interrupts the pod follow @FallonKider on the twitter Our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/wtyppod​ Our Merch: https://www.solidaritysuperstore.com/wtypp we are working on international shipping Send us stuff! our address: Well There's Your Podcasting Company PO Box 40178 Philadelphia, PA 19106 DO NOT SEND US ANTHRAX thanks in advance

So, I went off earlier, right? You may have heard something weird from my microphone. That's because now that my heating is back on, the vice mount for my microphone expanded enough that it fell off the table. Less good. The heat makes metal expand. True. Oh, yeah.

That's what they... That's what I learned from the Simpsons. That's what you... That's what five years gets you at Drexel University. Hello, and welcome to Well There's Your Problem. It's a podcast about engineering disasters, which has slides. And is in itself a disaster. It's also a disaster, yes.

I'm Justin Rosnack. I'm the person who is talking right now. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, go. I am Alice Corvo Kelly. I am the person who is talking now. My pronouns are she and her. Yay, Liam.

Yay, Liam. Hi. I'm Liam Anderson. My pronouns are he and him. And we have, I guess, a literal friend of the show, because I know her in real life. I'm Fallon Kitter. My pronouns are she and her. Why are you here, Fallon?

Do you want to talk about it? I am here to talk about electricity. I have a bachelor's in electrical engineering from Drexel University. Boo. And I think the first PE we've had on the show. Yeah, you're an actual, don't fuck engineer, Fallon. That is true. I did just receive, I did just get my PE from the state of Delaware.

Thank you. Did you get the stamp? Yeah, I got a seal and everything. I got a certificate in the mail. It's going to be, I was talking to my co-worker today and I was like, do you have any advice for me? And he's like, it's too late for you. Now that you've got the thing, you signed the contract in blood.

Yeah. I don't know how you don't go around once you get the stamp and just start stamping stuff like a random. Then I'm legally responsible for it and I don't have the insurance yet. Do you want to stamp this episode of the podcast for us? It's been a PE approved. Yeah. I can't get a PE either because I would be like a guy out there with a stapler gun,

like that old ex-KCD where he just affixes everything to everything. I'd be stamping shit that was none of my business. I'd be stamping newborn children. Golden Gate Bridge stamped number four 2069. Liam. I know if you stamp the drawings, you're legally responsible for it, but what if you stamp the actual thing in real life? What if you just grab a guy and like hold him down and stamp him?

Are you now responsible for him? That's adoption. Yeah. Well, it's my stamp is more of a crimp than like a wet. Like it's not like you don't ink it and then stamp. You have to it's like a it's like a crimp. So I thought that was only New Jersey. No, well, mine mine is they asked for Delaware to be a crimp.

That is only in New Jersey. I've only really done it for New Jersey for my boss, you know, he'll he'll sign it and then do the crimp on top of it. So I can't even go around like I can't go around just like stamping things. I have to only crimp paper. It sucks. Yeah. All right. 56 episodes in and we have a real engineer. We finally got one, folks.

OK, so what do you see on the screen? Wait, wait, wait, wait, we'll be couple of ads real quick before we start. Oh, Christ. Oh, boy. Right. Cool. We have two ads. But what you've got to do is you've got to buy these lights that are going to make your selfies look better. No, don't buy those. You're beautiful, no matter what you do. Shut the fuck up.

All right. But we're never doing this again. So soak it up now. One bread and roses dot net, which is like something awful. But for the leftist politics, $10 sign up fee, basically a spinoff of sea spam. And yeah, go set up for that. And number two, our friend, Bud, has a self-defense company

where they sell self-defense implements. I'm not going to go further into it. Davidson, that's real. Yes, Davidson underscore defense on Instagram. I thought he was doing a bit too. No, no, no, our friend is I've seen the implements. Yeah, we will we will leave it at we will leave it to the audience's imagination so we don't weaponized snooze.

I said leaving it to the audience's imagination so we don't get fined. I don't want to go to prison. That's why we called the accountant, buddy. All right, let's do a pod. Let's cast a pod. OK, so this is Texarkana, Texas. You will notice that there's snow on it, except one side is this side of the road that this is this is Arkansas.

And this side is Texas. You sound so enthusiastic there, bud. Ordinarily in Texas, there is no snow at all. But recently there was a lot of snow and it caused some problems. Including to the point of just like not being able to plow on one side or being able to plow in Arkansas. Yeah, I mean, Arkansas does the snow reveal removal on its side of the road. Yeah, so Arkansas has a functioning a functioning government on some level

and the state of Texas does not. Correct. Shout out to Katie. It's genuinely surprising in that regard. Yeah. Well, shout out to the state of Arkansas. Yes. And Bill Clinton. No, yeah, yeah, shout out to the Little Rock mafia who killed Vince Foster allegedly. Allegedly, allegedly, allegedly, not allegedly in our country.

They killed him. But what a great Britain, what a great Britain. Where libel law supply will lead you to draw your own conclusions. Is a podcast libel or slander? What's live or you are publishing it? All right. I mean, there is actually a distinction. Scots anyway, move forward. All right.

So one of the things I did in this episode is I skipped the goddamn news. Because it's all got this is this is the emergency goddamn news episode. Do you want the news theme anyway? Yeah, why not? OK, so welcome to Texas. It's it's America's Bavaria. Um, lots of lots of fat dudes, lots of beer. Very jolly.

Let's go to Germans, all of our followers in Texas that rises heaters no longer in solidarity with you. Hope y'all are. I say stay in warm, but staying alive. Yeah, like settle for that and then worry about warm. There's lots of things in Texas. There's H.E.B. There's Bucky's Bucky's.

What a burger. What a burger. There's the Astros. Fuck the Astros, the Astros. Fuck the Rockins. Fuck the stars again. Sorry, I can't believe I forgot that. See, Fallon, this is this is why we do this. Yeah, I need this sort of engineering excellence.

Yeah, I am a born and raised Philadelphia. And so I of all people get to hate on Dallas. And they killed JFK. They killed JFK, yes. Other things, which are like it's a bad thing. It's bad when they do it. Everything is bigger in Texas, including political assassinations.

Treason, yeah. Yeah. Many disasters have occurred in Texas, some of which we have covered, such as the Texas. See, yeah, schools exploding. Well, Texas City exploding. Yeah, flooding from Hurricane Harvey. Most recently, there was a hurricane. Yeah, the other Texas City explosion we didn't cover.

This is true. Well, Galveston gets annihilated like every every couple every decade or so. You call it Galveston? Galveston, Galveston, Galveston. A lot of judges come from there. Yeah, it's Galveston is fucking wild. It's like, you know, obviously, Alice, you haven't been to Atlantic City,

but as far as I know, you do have to watch Boardwalk Empire. They're just like, what if we took a prostitution drugs and money laundering mart and we stuck it, say, right there on a Bay Area Island? Yes. What accent was that? Atlantic City by way of Texas, I think. Oh, baby. So I'm wearing like cowboy cowboy boot length spats. Yes, 10 gallon spats.

Most recently in Texas, there was a cold snap and subsequent snowstorm that left hundreds of thousands without power or water. So what happened, right? What happened there? I live in the Northeast. It's been snowing forever now, and I still have power. Valor, what did we have the coldest? We had the coldest day in Scotland since 1986, and I still have power.

What did it get doubtful? Like minus 20 something. See, I don't know if that isn't fair and high, but yeah, it was pretty good. That's probably that's probably about negative 10 Fahrenheit, maybe negative four, negative four. OK. Supposed to double it and add 30, right? Yeah. Yeah. So in order to learn what happened in Texas,

we need to talk about electricity, right? OK, OK. Yes. I here's the question. What is electricity? I don't know. All right. I spent many, many years studying this particular subject. And the answer is electrons go burr.

Wait, wait, wait, wait, I have I have half a law degree. I think I can make sense of this. So what you've got to do is you take an electron and then you put it in a pipe and you've got to make it go to work for you, but the electrons don't want to go to work. So you've got to force them into the pipe and that's called resistance. And then you have wattage and voltage and those are the same. And then you have current and that's also the same. And then you have amperage.

And then the more amps that you have, the more frequencies there are. Is that about right? Am I doing right? Almost, yes. So. So electrons, they don't like each other. So they want to get a far away from each other. And when you have a lot of electrons in one spot and not a lot of electrons, like zero electrons in another spot, they all want to go that way. They want to they that and then that difference is called voltage.

Like that the difference in the amount of electrons here versus the amount of electrons there is voltage potential. And as they move, that is current and. Resistance is kind of like what they're moving inside of because they they have to have like a like a conductor that it moves. It's kind of difficult to explain. Or I don't fully understand it. It's one of those things.

So. So. So, you know, like even air has resistance, so you need. Anyway, so as as electricity kind of these electrons, they travel across, you know, that that's called current, the wires are resistance. In if it's AC, right, they actually vibrate in the states. They vibrate at 60 times a second in Europe. It's 50 times and apparently on the trains, it's 25 times. And yeah, I didn't know that.

And I have to. They used to have special power plants just for the northeast corridor because it's like one of the last 25 hertz systems remaining. That's that's pretty cool. I did. I did study a lot of variable frequency drives when I was studying for the. I don't do that in my work, but when I was studying for the exam, I was studying that. And I'm like, this is I you change the frequency. Why? Why would you change it?

Just let it be. But it's it's a it's a it's good to change it because, you know, I already I already forgot. I'm promptly trained. I probably forgot all the reasons. Yeah. So that's an electrical grid. So the, you know, you have a distribution of, you know, transformers and wires and all these things.

And you get electricity from one part, the generator to another part so that we can all plug in, you know, our lamps and things turn on and we have internet and TV and stuff. Um, so that's electricity. And it's a big problem when it doesn't happen. Yes. Now we kind of need it for everything to live. And then there's also direct current where there's no frequency.

The electrons just go in a line. But a lot of people don't know is that sometimes electrons go stale. So if you're having electrical problems in your house, one thing you can try and do is flush out your AC system with DC current, swap in new electrons, right? Bad electrons get put in the electron. Wait, which one of these did they electrocute an elephant with as a promotional stunt? DC or DC? I thought it was AC because Edison was trying to prove that DC was better

by showing how bad AC was. Which is amazing as like an American story of being like, yeah, you can't use this. It's deadly. And the government then goes, man, we could kill people with this. Let's go. America. You're right. It was it was AC and because Edison was pro DC. And Tesla was probably. It's also funny because third rails are DC and people fall on those and die all the time.

I guess if an elephant stepped on it, it'd be fine. So it's it's it's weird because because you actually have to become a bridge between the high voltage and the ground. So really, that's what kills you is you are you are bridging the gap between these two different voltages and that's that's the dangerous part. And why don't we simply build the human body more rigidly? So like you can you can dance on a third rail and rubber boots, but then also electricity because it hates you will sometimes just arc over air

because it has resistance anyway. Yeah. And then you don't even need to touch stuff. So that's fun. Oh, it's it's terrifying. Every time I'm in one of these little classes that like teaches you new things, they're like, hey, this is deadly. You want to die in 30 seconds while feeling your veins like burn in front of you. I'm like, no, and they're like, good, use PPE.

Oh, I do like the rare moments when any sort of teachers and the physical scientists get to like hang up their coat and be like, you want to die today? Motherfucker, just touching two battery cables together. Like the opposite, the opposite of like chemistry, professor vibes where they just explode something on the desk in front of the class and say, wasn't that fun? I saw the result of somebody who got electrocuted working on a substation. And there was like an arc flash and like obviously the dude died, right?

Because you do do that. But the result of that was a perfectly charred sort of semicircle of soot and two perfect clean boot prints in the middle of it. And I was like, yeah, this is this is the acme way of dying. This is this is fantastic. I like this. Every once in a while, I had to go inside a high voltage room when I was doing building inspections.

And I was like, I'm I'm not going to touch anything. I'm not touching anything. I don't I don't want to. It's all behind in like metal cabinets. But I was like, I don't I don't I don't want to fuck with this. Which oh, which I for one of my from one of my projects, I had to like go into like a substation yard, right? And they're like, all right, Fallon, you ready?

And I'm like, what are you talking about? They're like, we have to go inside this one hundred and fifty. Well, I don't think it was one hundred and fifty. It might have been like twenty four KV. And I was like, what are you? What are you talking about? They're like, yeah, like, get in, like, let's go, let's do this. And I'm like, it says authorized personnel only.

And they're like, congratulations today. You're authorized. And that I don't want to be authorized personnel in my life. Yeah, they're like, just don't touch anything. And I'm like, listen, I live, lived in my house all of my life. I still stub my toe on like the table or whatever. How do you expect me to go into this substation and be like, remember, don't touch anything like I'm going to fry my anyway.

I'm glad I'm here and I'm glad I'm not in that substation anymore. I think my least favorite part about electricity is the deadly hazard, right? It's like a lot of other things like, say, various gases or radiation are just invisible and they'll just kill you when they feel like it. But like a lot of electricity, while that's sometimes true, will also just be like, yeah, I'm glowing a very bright color and I'm making a noise just to let you be aware of the fact that I can kill you at any time.

I kind of appreciate that it's I kind of appreciate that it's more it's less subtle, though, because like as someone who is who, you know, is very dumb, I need to constantly be made aware of my own mortality. Hunter, gather a brain needs to like, no, I shouldn't touch the like wire that is glowing. I always laugh because Roz and I were in a trolley museum in where were we? Kennebunk. We were in the Kennebunk Port

Trolley Museum. Yeah. And they were doing restoration work and Roz had to look at me and say, look at the pretty blue trolley, not the pretty blue light. Because like my dumb ass is like, oh, pretty blue. Oh, and I was like more than a half billion years of evolution. And this is this is where it fucking gets me. Yes, we we inadvertently made this thing that kills you instantly and horribly have a really sort of pretty beguiling light to it.

I won't go near you welding sirens. And honestly, it's this concept of like, oh, electricity does what it wants. It can kill you at any minute. And we're still like, oh, we can control it, you know, like we have all these safety things in place. We're going to make it do what we want. And then we get surprised when it fucking does it. And like, what did you expect?

Foolish, foolish. Why did we invent agriculture? It was fine eating mammoths. Industrial Revolution and its consequences. It's been a disaster for the human race. That's right. OK, here's a question I do know the answer to. How do you generate electricity?

Giant hamster oil. The thing goes spinny. Thing goes spinny thing. The answer is turbines. Right. Yeah, thanks, Ben. Thanks, Benny. Yeah, you take a seek and you spin them around really fast. Oh, that seems like a dizzy bat. If that's how the East Coast gets its power.

And when you spin them around really fast, it generates electricity. I guess that's from seeks to the one seeks carry knives everywhere, right? Yeah, Keopans. Yes, that's the reaction between the knife and a pair of electromagnets creates a current, right? Oh, yes. OK, yes, sure. Yes, yes.

Let's let's go with yes. Well, I don't know. Well, I was right. The first time a thing spins, a thing spins, and that generates the electrons or whatever. That's all guys just come in here and do whatever you want. They complicate things. Yeah, it's been in a big seat guy around.

Yeah, so things spin and the arms kind of switch and it creates AC voltage and it's cool. You have a bunch of these connected together. You got like your electrical grid with like substations and stuff. And then and then you you distribute power to lots of homes and businesses and people can watch television. Yeah, you can watch a podcast with slides. Yes, fail to define electricity.

What do you believe? Would you believe we are using electricity right now? At this very moment, you claim to you claim to criticize that electricity. And yet you record your podcast. This is electrical current. Black magic, I'm telling you. That's right. I've just I've just set up a series of like a summoning circle

in candles around my computer to hope that it turns on. Because you asked, like, oh, how do you how do you get electricity? And I'm like, well, my job, we have these solar panels and the sun shines on the solar panels and, well, electricity. It's DC. That's my job. You can also like you can burn coal to generate steam. You can like fucking split the atom to generate steam.

You can run a bunch of water over something to make it spin. You can use like biomass to generate steam. Mostly there's a lot of generating steam involved, which is fun. I like that. I appreciate that. Yeah, it all it all comes down to make heat, make steam. Steam makes turbine go around electricity. Boom goes around 60 times a second. That gets you 60 hertz, right? Am I right in that?

OK, good. That's the assumption I used for the rest of the notes. So I feel I'm feeling pretty good right now. So if you have like a big grid of of of of electricity is like this. Um, you can then, you know, you can hook many turbines, many power plants together and, you know, you can respond to changes in demand from some people watching TV. Sometimes when other people aren't watching TV.

Yeah, you can get like visible surges in the British power grid at commercial breaks for sitcoms, because everybody goes and puts the kettle on an electric kettle to make tea at the same time. Yes. And just heat up water on the stove. Jesus Christ, that's work. Get out and get a special separate electric catalyst that you guys don't have one.

You have a convenient. I have one. For coffee, though, because tea is disgusting. You're drinking the wrong tea or you're drinking it wrong. So gross. Tea is so gross. I don't want it to taste like leaves. I want it to taste like mud. What are you brewing it for too long?

No, that's why I'm drinking. That's why I'm drinking the coffee because it tastes like mud, but I'm awake. OK, so electrical grids have a lot of fixed infrastructure, which means we have to talk about what's a natural monopoly, right? It's when like fucking things are laid out in a large rectangular board and then you go around jail. And there's there's a nice man and a car that gives you two hundred dollars.

It's a it's when you roll a 20 and land on boardwalk. Wow, that is some that's some good. That's a good one. How can you roll a 20 with two die? Because maybe it's a monopoly with a D20. Because the only die you have. Damn it, Fallon. Playing Dungeons and Monopoly.

Dungeons and Monopoly is yes. Try to figure out how to be the last guy put in prison for having a monopoly. Oh, roll the what on Christmas? Oh, oh, oh, I'm a standard oil of New York, standard oil of Ohio, standard oil of. I don't remember any of the rest of them, California. There you go. Um, OK, so capitalism, you know, tends towards monopoly,

but some stuff is more monopolizable than other stuff, right? You know, it's hard to get a monopoly on like a lot of consumer products because, you know, people like, I don't know, sometimes they want a toaster that looks different from other people's toaster. Yeah, the curse of individualism happens. Or it's just stuff that anybody can make. So it's hard to monopolize, say, crossfit lessons. Yes.

But some stuff, which is really easily monopoly, monopolizable is like a natural monopoly where your product has a lot of fixed costs, it's not readily distinguishable from another product, from another provider. So, you know, steel, that's steel, oil is oil. I'm simplifying a lot there. Electricity is electricity. You know, some examples of natural monopolies other than that, highways, railroads, a lot of good chunk of businesses, actually, stuff like Amazon and Google.

Um, many, many years ago, monopolies would either be broken up into smaller companies, right, like Standard Oil was. They might be heavily regulated like railroads were. Other monopolies are just fully publicly owned like roads, right? Yeah, flat out nationalization. Yes. Then there was eventually we came up with this idea of, well, what if we give the Bell system a legal monopoly on telephones, right?

I think Bell at its height was allowed to own 85% of the United States telephone network and they had some nominal competition, right? Because folks thought, well, if we have competing telephone companies, then we'll have competing telephone infrastructure and it'll, you know, it'll be ridiculous, right? Let's just have one phone company. Yeah, because you don't want to have to like not be able to talk to somebody because they have a different brand phone from you. And obviously you can't regulate some kind of like interchange because that

would be socialism. That is socialism. Yeah, we can't do that. So, you know, obviously it's most efficient to have one regulated but monopolistic phone company and that state of affairs sort of continues for a while up until the 1980s, right? Now, we'll get back to that in a second. Electrical grids are a natural monopoly, right?

If you are, you can't, you can't really, you know, just start a new electrical grid on your own. Very difficult, right? And you care about quality, but not of the individual product. You're not sniffing the individual electrons that come into your wires to be like, these meet with my approval. Right. You're not an electron, Somelier.

Just sticking your face right in it like it's a barrel of Texas crude, baby. You got to, you got to jab yourself in the arm with like a taser. I detect hickory as you die on the floor. I guess the closest thing to electron Someliers are when cops do the like taser training and they have to get tased. So I guess critical support. The first taste tells you it's nuclear power and you sort of swirl it around, right? And you're like, 50 Hertz went through this and this substations,

right? And then there's, you know, two guys judging the terroir of you getting tased. So, you know, grids are sort of centrally organized and maintained, right? You need to have someone dispatching power to make sure it doesn't get overloaded or underloaded. You know, if you're drawing too much power, you might overload the turbines. They start to slow down and then they go overtorque and they break, right? You know, so either you bring more power online or you do blackouts or brownouts or stuff like that, right?

Yep. And you have a lot of fun stuff that happens with like modifying the output of various power plants, including, for instance, running a test at the Vladimir Ilych Lenin nuclear power plant in outside Pripyat, Ukraine as a flex and inadvertently fulfilling the five year plan for energy generation in point one microseconds. Look, it sounds like a success to me. Yeah, it's done.

Why do you care how it's done? Well, the the planning the planning agencies really take a lot of care to make sure that everything's working well and they're constantly monitoring things and monitoring lines and checking checking what's switched on and off. It's it's actually it's actually a lot of work and it's a pain in the ass to speak to any of them. Yeah, energy infrastructure sounds like it's not good if you want a job where you want to be left alone. Um, it's it's it's government work. So you do a lot of nothing and you're bored out of your mind or nothing is also highly supervised.

Very, very important. Nothing. I so want that job. You have to write it. And I just want to be like the people that are like, oh, no, no, we need, you know, before you can interconnect, we need all these things to protect our equipment. You know, like you can't just you if you decide to connect to the grid, you can't just, you know, place two wires there.

You have to like go through this whole process. And God forbid they have to upgrade the line because what you want to add is like, you know, or what you want to take is too much. It's it's a whole it's a headache. Yeah, you you want to be the person that tells people that they can't open electroplacing facilities. I want to I want to be the guy. I just want to be able to hook up like anything I own that generates

electricity to the grid arbitrarily, like maybe a hand crank generator. After a month of turning it, I'll get a sent back from the electrical company. It depends on what what's the sum you're in, right? Some people get a sent back. Some people get 10 cents back. Depends on when if you did it in Texas right now, you might get upwards of 11 cents. Oh, the clutching my 11 cent check totally to my chest as I freeze to death. So what a way to go.

People who shared my vision were a certain group of graduates from the School of Economics at the University of Chicago. Oh, so. There's there's this sort of neoliberal reaction to municipal ownership or regulated monopolies even in in the 1980s, right? You know, you sort of want to take these regulated systems or even publicly owned systems. You want to deregulate them.

You want to privatize them. You want to create competition, right? Competition is the market's the free of the people. It's true. And most importantly, you want to don't believe it's true. You will be shot. That's right. You will be thrown out of this helicopter for not believing that the people are freer. So especially you want to create some opportunities for financialization, right?

You know, that's that's the real goal of all the capitalism. So no one could quite figure out how to do this with electricity for a while, right? Since especially as, you know, a few big players integrated their their grids for better efficiency, because, you know, if you demand sort of evens out as you get the grid gets bigger, it's more predictable, right? Central planning is more efficient. But this is always in tension with how do I make money off of this for me and my friends? Yes, it's a dialectic.

So this this this creates a call. Oh, yes. Yes, this creates what we call contradictions. And those contradictions then become heightened and then some interesting revolution, which we'll get into revolution. So we're calling it self-defense products. And then we're leaving the rest to the people's imagination. Thank you. Thank you for cooperating on that.

I appreciate that. We're calling it communal self-defense products. So eventually, you know, these grids gets bigger, they get I don't know if I want to say easier to manage, but more more. I guess I guess they're they're they're it's it's easier to manage. You have finer control, right? But it's still like regulated, right? And you know, you're selling the power at a flat rate to consumers, right?

Right. I don't have that. No, no, that's not necessarily not necessarily at a flat rate. There are there are demand charges and stuff. Oh, OK. Oh, yes, I love to be I love to be charged. That's her pulse. What is it, sir tax on the on the shit that literally keeps me alive? That's fucking tight.

I love this system. It's usually for each individual electron enters your home and you have to do a separate sales tax transaction. Yeah. Well, well, there's a difference between residential customers and, you know, commercial customers and then like larger, you know, factories that are using especially reactive power and to power all their motors because they have a whole, you know,

assembly line of whatever they're trying to make. But, you know, it's not. It's it's the the concept of electrical building is pretty complicated. I don't know why that pisses me off, but it does that you're just not just like charging me the actual amount. It's just like, oh, we have a mathematical formula for determining exactly how much you like. I know that's how it works.

It makes the idea of there being formulas for how much to fuck me is is not what I want to hear. You know, I mean, it makes sense to charge less when there's less demand. And that's advantageous for a lot of other a lot of a lot of things like municipal water systems will pump water into reservoirs at night because it's cheaper to run the pumps, you know, and that that does benefit you as a as a water customer at some point. But one of the real innovations comes in like the 1980s when, again,

the boys at the Chicago Department of Economics figure out how to take this system and design this sort of Rube Goldberg machine called the energy market. Right. And what if we turned it into stonks? What if we turned it into stonks? So that was the one trick for everything was what if you could trade this? And I'm so glad that we've now seen it spectacularly fail as applied to climate change. That was its last hurrah was like we can cap and trade.

Oh, God, I had made Tesla a lot of money. Well, that is true. Did you guys see the new cyber truck? Oh, my God, water was just in this too. I'm sorry. This is some guy was just like, oh, actually, Tesla's sell up to 40 percent of what Ford did alone. And I'm just like, yes, their market cap is higher.

Don't tell me this tries to make any sense. Shut up. Hmm. So they get this. They get this whole system of like bids and offers and electricity futures. Whole sale. Everyone becomes this is my favorite part, right? Is it imports a fallacy from the original stock market, which is that you are going to be a rational consumer with an equal economic opportunity to like choose the best electrons

that come into your house. And if you say diamond hands. Yeah. And if somebody doesn't, if somebody isn't supplying you with the right electrons, you just take your business elsewhere and you find someone who will. And the market will sort that out because it's unprofitable to screw people. And they got and they got they got

they got their guy, Augusto Pinochet, to test it out in Chile in the early 1980s, right? Hmm. And like a lot of Pinochet innovations, right? These these economic efficiencies that he implemented. Pinochet innovations is a hell of a phrase, maybe. Yeah. Pinovations, Shay's innovations, innovations. Yes. Yeah, we did it.

Does this sort of eventually makes it back to the United States? Electric grid deregulation, as they call it here, becomes an idea which is popular with certain people who like that sort of thing, right? Sort of von Mises Institute, AI freaks. Yeah. Yeah. The electric company just selling you electricity directly. You know, you can't do that when the electricity company sells you electricity directly, that's communism, right? What if they're on market?

Yeah. What if instead you bought the right to enter into a bidding process? Yes. Where you had an electricity broker, which would still be called an electric company. It would still look like an electric company, but it would compete to buy power as a sort of cartel. Yes. Well, yeah. So, you know, we had 50 middlemen doing like arbitrage and other bullshit, right? So, for instance, here in Pennsylvania,

they deregulated electricity in 1997, right? So I can pay for electricity at my house from seven or eight different suppliers, right? And all of that electricity is still delivered by the Philadelphia Electric Company, right? It's all Pico, but I am paying someone else to buy power from Pico. Yeah. But the important thing is that person in the middle can then get quite wealthy. That's capitalism. I looked this up beforehand about six of the companies I can buy from

charge more for power than Pico does. You know, but among the things I can do, of course, is I can pay slightly more for the same electricity, but it's from a company who says the electricity is renewable, right? Oh, those fucking people, yeah. Yeah. You know, it's a little nuclear anyway. Yeah, most of the electricity here is nuclear.

Cool. I shall return. OK. You know, but this is sort of an advantageous situation for like a few, a few big electricity consumers, as Fallon said before, like, you know, if you're you're an industrial customer, if you're a municipal water system, if you're using a shitload of electricity, you can get some good deals. But, you know, not so much the retail customer, right? Yeah.

It's kind of stuck doing whatever. My company charges me a two dollar and 50 cent meter reading fee. And I feel like I could just read the meter myself and just tell you what I owe you. I thought they could do it electronically now. Oh, yes. Smart meters. Not in my building, apparently. Oh, my God.

It especially if it's like a whole building, right? You should not you should not have to. I feel like we should shout out the discount there, at least a little bit of praxis in the form of electricity and water meter sabotage of just being like, yeah, no, I have used zero electricity this month. I swear, just having gotten into the casing of this thing with a drill with a roll the thing back. The guy who online who sells hornet's nest decoys, you can put on your electric meter.

So the fucking plug that guy instead of whatever self-defense bullshit. So, you know, lots of places are set up. So there's like nominal competition. But this is done on like a huge scale in Texas, right? Oh, boy, I switched to a black background and I can't see the legend. It's the goth United States. It's goth North America.

It's true. This is the society that my space would have brought us if it had succeeded instead of Facebook. You know, we all be friends with my space. Tom, yeah. Yeah. What's up? So far, the only we're just talking about my space. You remember my space?

No, I don't want to talk about that. Moving on. Liam, what was the also playing song on your my space profile? Oh, man, I probably I'm not OK. But my chemical romance or something might take you back someday. But I couldn't tell you for sure. I didn't I didn't have a my space. You were.

Man, I didn't have a Zanga. That was very goth in my opinion. Oh, yeah. I was a live journal, which I never had a live journal was pretty goth to. Anyway, this is the goth. This is goth North America, goth North America. Yes. Except for Mexico.

Yeah. No. Mexico. Yeah, that's true. Or Central America. There's a tiny bit of a bit of Baja California in here. There is a little bit of Baja California. That's true. This is this is goth United States and Canada and a little bit of Baja California and a little bit of Baja California. Oh, no drugs here.

OK, so there's there's there's two main interconnections in the continuous United States and also Canada. There's the Western interconnection, which is on this side. And then there's the Eastern interconnection, which is on this side. All these colors are the same, except Quebec has some weird thing going on where they're technically interconnected, but also kind of not. I'm.

Oh, yeah, yeah. There, the electron. I have to have special bilingual electrons to power my ski mobile dealership. I have to have the right to refusal to that filthy ugly. How do you see? Have you got a sniffing? The electrons coming into his wife's like these Anglo. I will sit in the dark.

I will. Flood the nation with my barrage hydroelectric. Oh, they sure will. And then there's Texas down here. Yeeha, yeeha. This is all of Texas, not even all of Texas. Now, funnily enough, not the bit of Texas with all of the massive oil plants, because those are right by the border with Louisiana.

Those are on the the eastern interconnection, because they need to function. They need to work. Yeah, Texas runs its own interconnection not for practical reasons, but for political ones, right? Because they want to avoid being federally regulated. They want Texas to regulate the grid. We've got to keep Ernest Moniz out of our business at any cost. Yeah, so, you know, Texas

can't really export or import power as a result of this, right? Yeah, it's just disconnected. Yeah, it's got like two ties to the eastern interconnection that like don't really work. And even if they did, you couldn't like put large amounts of power through them. I understand there's like once some weird system where they got to convert the electricity to DC and then shove it across the border and convert it back to AC. Yes, I learned about this.

It's like a very, very high, high voltage DC because at very high voltages, there's less losses at DC. It's just a pain in the butt to like step that back down. Anyway. Yeah. This is under control of the Texas Public Utilities Commission, who sets the rates and stuff like that. The grid power dispatch is done by ERCOT, which is the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, right?

I thought that was the big dome at Disney World. Oh, it's EPCOT. Yeah. Reliability Council seems a little. Well, a little premature, maybe. The Texas nothing can possibly go wrong, Council. OK, so you have regulated utilities, sort of they generate power. They maintain lines that connect, disconnect homes, businesses. They sell electricity at wholesale prices and also, to a certain extent,

directly to customers at retail prices, right? But then there's four or five dozen other retail electricity companies, right? They buy power from the utilities at wholesale prices, then resell the electricity at retail prices to consumers, right? And there's some retail electrical companies in Texas who own some infrastructure. Oh, boy. But a lot of these retail electricity companies are like four guys in an office with some spreadsheets, right?

Yeah, it's like one floor of a skyscraper in Houston or Dallas. Yes, Tomas Associates. The Associates is just his dog, but he's trying. Because of curiosity, out of curiosity, what is this power being generated by? Because I know they've got some renewables, some nuclear too, right? It's about four. I know nuclear is about four percent. Natural gas is fifty one percent.

Wind is surprisingly twenty four percent. Then there's other crap, almost no hydroelectric, which I thought was interesting, but then in Texas is not especially mountainous. Unlivable hell, yeah. Yes. The hill country doesn't have any water, so. Yeah, and the water country doesn't have any hills. Hmm. Hmm. Yes, I think most do like tidal power, maybe in future.

Who knows? Technically, that's what the Gulf Coast is, is the water country. OK, so what's the result of having your own interconnection? Has this ever had any problems? And the answer is yes in 2011. During the Groundhog Day Blizzard in February 2011, I fell. I look so unhappy. Hmm.

Strange provincial American superstition. I don't know. I don't want to. They find this marsupial named Phil. Yes. And and they pick him up. And if he sees his shadow, then winter is going to last six more weeks. Yes. And if if he if he does not see his own shadow, then winter is over. I don't know why they believe this. It's what America has instead of religion.

It's because the groundhogs are marsupials. I don't know, probably. I think so. No, they're rodents. Groundhogs are actually kind of arachnids. Phil is Phil is special. Phil is special. Yes. Yes.

They don't choose a new Phil like the Pope. They don't have like a conclave. No, part of the Groundhog Day ceremony is they give Phil his elixir of immortality. I'm not making that up. I love our dub state. Love it. Phil's predictions are said to be entirely and one hundred percent accurate. It's just that the man who speaks groundhog ease to him

sometimes misinterprets what he says. How can you fuck that up? He only he can only certainly feel can only know three or four words. I am fucking like I'm delving back into Reddit atheism over this here. I'm just like you've just invented a religion here. The exact same principles. I'm just like, no, it is infallible. We just have to have a guy to interpret it.

And sometimes he's wrong. But Phil is only infallible about one particular subject, which is the weather. Well, so is the problem. Everything. Yeah. Well, yeah, because infallibility has only been invoked like once. Oh, yeah. Well, technically, it's infallible, but like it's only infallible with regard to the like

doctrine on moral leadership of the church. So it's also like it's also like a relatively modern thing is the other thing. It was established at Vatican one. Um, it was before Vatican one. Yes, but like it was applied retroactively. OK, so cheating. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, did you think the one true holy and apostolic Catholic Church is above cheating? Someone has to establish the divinity of marriage.

So that's fucking funny. Or whatever the hell I was, I whatever. You did 12 years of Catholic school, man. Yeah. And I did 12 years for getting it. Less than 12 years. So all right. During the 2011 Groundhog Day Blizzard, a bunch of non-winterized power plants in Texas shut down because

all their turbines were out in the open, right? Mm hmm. Because you just build a power plant and you're like, it's Texas. How cold is it going to get? Probably not going to get that cold, right? Going to get more worried about it getting hot. You can't really protect against both at the same time in the same way. So you just build everything outside.

It's impossible to cool a building. That's right. Yes. So, you know, these these non-winterized plants shut down. The remaining plants couldn't keep up with demand. There was rolling blackouts implemented over about three days. A bunch of places lost power to the extent that their water treatment plant shut down. So there were boil water advisories, natural gas wellheads froze.

That's another fun one. People didn't have heating. El Paso God, I think, hit the hardest by this one. They had a bunch of water mains break throughout the city. I think in total, 3.2 million customers were affected throughout Texas. But this was this disaster was one which was pretty bad. But, you know, everyone agreed this could have been worse, right? People made it through.

One of those sort of near-miss experiences where everyone's like, man, this is a chilling portant of things to come. We better do something to make sure the bad thing doesn't happen. Did they do any of that? It's going to say chilling because it's cold. Because it's cold. Yes, the temperature joke. Genius. The the feds and North American Electric Reliability

Corporation said, all right, here's our recommendation. What do you need to do is you need to winterize your damn power plants, right? Is this like right? That's the thing they did? No. Oh, I love that, like, again, because this is a purely interstate thing, all the feds can do is recommend that you do this. Right. Yeah, they can't do anything about it.

And that's the way Texas and Independence is going to stay. Like, you guys are a state. You pay taxes. Yeah, they know under protests under protests. Yeah, say, but you don't hear me trying to secede. How about attitude? Thank you, Fallon. There's a rumor that the reason they keep the electric grid separated is in case they want us to seed.

I don't think that's true. I think they're just belligerent. Two, but you're not special. Texas is again, Texas power companies decide not to do this because it would cost money in winter. It does not happen in Texas, except in 2011. That's not liar, though, of course. Yeah. And the thing, the fun thing about outliers is that we're not having

more and more of them all the time. We're not having 50, 100, 500 year weather events every year anymore. Because that would be that would be absurd if you had those, because that's not what that means. There's there was a second recommendation, though, which was to increase the power capacity being fed to the grid of Texas, right? Because it was running on a razor thin margin.

Owing to I I read this in some S&P publication, I think that's standard and poor. Like their energy division, Texas's grid. Runs this sort of scarcity pricing model, right? Oh, just in time, but for electrons. Oh, good. Sort of. And it encourages power plan operators to. You know, build based on power scarcity.

Sort of to the extent that they can't really make money unless the state is constantly on the absolute bleeding edge of grid failure, right? There's something in there, which is like a mathematical assumption that goes into the pricing of a hypothetical, ideal, natural gas plant, which is the cheapest form of electricity in Texas at the time. So it's like, well, if your plant can't do better than our ideal, our ideal, assume a natural gas plant, which is spherical and of uniform density, right?

Can you do better than that? If no, then then you are inefficient. We'll be, you know, you should cut yourself off from the grid, right? Perfect. Good sign. Yeah, I had a hard time understanding this. Well, the thing about the thing about markets is that they were a driver of innovation, right? And the way you drive innovation is by requiring the impossible

cap on anyone who doesn't achieve it. Yes. And also just destroying your entire power grid. Yes. Is a vision through kneecapping. But I mean, somebody is going to innovate a way out of this. Probably. Oh, absolutely. And, you know, over the next 10 years, lots of innovation occurred. And then almost exactly 10 years later,

winter comes back to Texas. Oh, funny how that works. Yeah. This current storm, right, sort of rolled in from the Pacific Northwest on February 13th that brought in very cold temperatures to everywhere, right? Everywhere has been very cold, right? Sort of drops this ass load of snow on Texas on February 14th and 15th.

It's got, you know, bitter, bitterly cold everywhere, right? Houston hit 13 degrees Fahrenheit. That's negative 11 Celsius. San Antonio is about the same. Dallas had negative two degrees Fahrenheit. That's negative 19 Celsius, right? I mean, that's that's cold, certainly by my standards, even that's cold. But it's also much colder if you build your entire city for,

I don't know, 40 degrees C heat. Yes. All the time. Yeah. Is that a sheep? No, it's my cat. That's Elf. Hi, Elf. Hello, Elf. Elf, Liam says hi.

He's he was quiet this entire time. And now he decides to make. Now he's much like the cat he is. I was decided to be an asshole for no reason. Yeah. I'm sorry for calling your cat a sheep. No, that I am not offended. And the cat is not offended.

Yeah, I think he won't be offended. One of her feelings. All right. So, you know, what happens is, you know, everyone, everyone in Houston, they live in these paper thin buildings, which we'll talk about in a second. You know, they turn their heaters on, right? And the electrical grid couldn't, you know, really handle the load from all this increased heating.

While power plants were also freezing solid, right? So all these power plants, which are offline because they weren't doing as well as the spherical natural gas plant of uniform density, they froze up. Aircot sends out the order. We need to shed the load, right? Oh, boy. So in order in order to

keep the turbine spinning at 60 Hertz, you have to start dropping different power customers to to keep it running or you'll over torque the turbine and then it'll break. And then, you know, it'll be like months before you can get the power. Obviously, what you do there is you start with the massive office buildings that are all empty because it's nighttime and also there's a pandemic and you you use that to like keep the lights

and heating on in private homes, right? Wrong. No, no. Oh, you don't do that because of reasons. You got to have a good looking skyline for people to look at. It's that's kind of that is an interesting question, because I know like you're you might cause more property damage by shutting off power to empty office buildings than shutting it off to occupied houses.

Yeah, but at the same time, active systems. Fuck, I don't care that like I was too busy looking at the photos rather than to cause all that property damage, right? Absolutely. Like we've all seen the photos of like downtown Dallas and downtown Austin just entirely lit up and surrounded by darkness. Yes. That's that's a case of one of those contradictions I was talking about earlier.

And they still managed to get some of these some of these big buildings still had major problems that's later. Um, so they start doing rolling blackouts where where you start, you know, the idea is, all right, this one neighborhood, we're going to shut off power for half an hour, maybe an hour. And then we switch to the next one. We shut off power there, but, you know, the you're not going to lose power for too long, right? Theoretically.

But then sometimes some of the time when they shut the turn the power back on in these neighborhoods after they do the rolling blackout, it doesn't come back on. Why? Um, I'm not I'm not I'm not entirely sure. I. I cold weather does bad things to transformers, I guess. Yeah, that makes sense.

Fallon, do you know? It could be, you know, without actually knowing what's happening, it could be any number of things. It could be, you know, sometimes like transformers. If you shut them off, they actually you have to start them back up. And when they start back up, they actually draw a lot of current all at once. And that could if things are not set up properly or it draws too much current,

it'll just kind of like up breakers or whatever in any way. Well, sorry, what? So when the margins, they're running on a razor, then anyway. Yeah, and it could it could be like a whole like everything all at once just goes wrong and things just don't start back up. But generally, transformers do initially when they're turned on, do draw a lot of current. And if a lot of transformers start up all at once,

they do draw a lot of current all at once as opposed to just if they just kept running. And a lot of these neighborhoods, the neighborhoods that tend to not come back on were the ones with the oldest and shittiest infrastructure. So I I guess that would make sense that, you know, that's where I don't know, you'd have a transformer pop or something. Yeah, especially if it's just trying to, you know, the fuses inside is just trying to protect itself or.

You know, something down the line, you know, upstream that fuse pops and, you know, that that ends up taking out a whole neighborhood and or they can't get it back on. Hi, I'm sorry. Are you good? This is fine. We'll add Alfon as a contributor to the podcast. They put up with me every week, Fallon, you're doing terrific.

So, you know, one of the interesting things, though, is that Ercut, you know, they're in charge of the rolling blackouts in Texas. The whole southeast is affected by this. And there are much fewer where they do. They do have to institute rolling blackouts in like places like Arkansas, Louisiana, stuff like that, right? But the most of those neighborhoods, the power comes back on. As opposed to Texas, where it does not.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's there's there's there's definitely an economic disparity in neighborhoods with good infrastructure. Are a lot more they get their power back on quickly and other people not so much. So a lot of people lost power for three days or more, right? And this resulted in sort of cascading failures of infrastructure, right? With low temperatures everywhere and no no heating, no electricity, water, sewage, natural gas starts failing, right? No one can get food into supermarkets.

They sell out of like food and water. Water treatment plants fail. So you got boil water advisories everywhere, right? You know, no one had prepared at all for this sort of thing to happen. No, apart from the like a handful of deranged texts and preppers who thought Antifa was going to do it to them. I don't know that you would do very well in your stupid unheated bunker that you built in your backyard out of like school bus is buried or some.

I've got this water filtration straw and it's going to carry me through three days of this bullshit. Well, I got it's only going to be three days. Certainly, the boys would never let it go longer than that. It's taken three weeks. It's my my it's clearly the Antifa weather machine doing this. No, it's the juice and you're welcome. Prepping prepping is so funny to me, though.

And in such a grim way, right? Because it's people who have correctly identified that like a lot of the systems that they depend on are incredibly fragile and also being run down and then want to like divorce themselves from it to ensure their own survival because they can't face the possibility that like, you know, you just can't do that. Like if the stuff collapses, you're like ability to do stuff on your own is very, very minimal.

And you're just kind of you're kind of fucked. The the the pressure here is in prevention rather than cure. But, you know, Antifa are going to come to your house and take a gun. And I've like talked to some not like preppers, but, you know, they sell like off grid battery packs and off grid, like that sort of stuff. And they're not very good. I'm going to keep a giant like fire hazard in my house all the time. Yes, as a hedge against this happening.

And then when it does happen, either it will have already frozen over first or I will maybe get like a day's use out of it and then it will also collapse. It's it's honestly just like very heavy and it's kind of hard to get started. And or I'm just I'm just thinking of a specific company in mind. Don't mind the stuff like this is this is the really like sad thing about prepping right is that like all of the stuff that you're trying to replicate like unless you're seriously getting into like I'm going to grow my own crops and stuff. It's much it's so much more easily done

at a like centralized community level that you have to have some kind of community to do that, you're not going to be able to do this on your own, man. You can't build your own power plant. You can't do this stuff. Welcome to gun dick preppers. This is our backpack lead acid battery system. Now, let's say hypothetically, AOC comes to your state and she shuts down your power grid for doing transmissions, sex reasons.

Yes. Yeah. Well, what you're going to do is you're going to hook up this this tactical power pack. You're going to get tickling. Yeah, what you have is you have your lead acid battery. It powers your it powers something that I don't know, makes gasoline out of the air to run your your motorcycle, I guess. Yeah, no, it's just it's just a scam for the most part, like, OK, fine. If you want to keep some like emergency food and water in your house,

good, probably for the best. If you want to keep a first aid kit in a fire extinguisher, that's probably smart. But like so much of this stuff is as yeah, but so much more of this stuff is just like marketing to sell people shit that they don't need. And when they do need it, they won't be able to use. I don't recommend purchasing food in a bucket, for instance. No, the Baker bucket. Yeah.

Plastic. If you don't get raptured, you have to survive on this bucket. So I'd rather just get raptured or whatever the opposite of rapture. I don't care. Yeah, I'll be recording this down. Yeah, no, that's I think that's a valid response. Right. Like my my sort of shit hits the fan prepping view is, you know, if it gets that bad, I'm going to fucking die anyway, man.

I don't need to rob myself now to pay off against this thing that if it happens, it's going to be fucking terrible. I guess I don't have whatever the unbreakable will of the human spirit or whatever. But yeah, fuck it. There's no I trash. I'm a level one NPC. I die early in some like environmental storytelling shit.

I'm going to scroll something meaningful on the wall, drop a bunch of items and then I'm fucking gone. I'm not going to be left for dead till I understand. Yeah, exactly. Don't don't dead open inside. And I'm I'm going to I'm going to do that instead of trying to like grow my fucking beans. My prepper plan is to just get on a bike and go into the woods. Oh, grab the SKS.

Yeah. Yeah. How your people survived for thousands of years, Fallon. All right, I've had bikes for thousands of years. I don't know why that her mom did in the in the step. But I respect and fear your mother. What is the weirdest kind of race and racial stereotypes? What is the step? Oh, the the step people is in their bicycling.

Yes. And the horses. The horses are slow. It's like so bad. You know what steps have a lot of famous trees? I'm not the one who said I wanted to go into the woods. Just let me down to die as well. The Mongol Empire stretched to its full expense because they were looking for

woods to go in and we can't we can't we can't get the we can't get the yak through the shit. What about wheels, baby? What is a bicycle but a yak on wheels? Good Lord. All right, the delirium has said it. Yes, that's right. Early podcast madness. Well, the good news is I don't have to go to the bathroom because I am sweating

so badly because they put my heat on and now it's too good. There you go. Yeah. All right. Let's talk about what could have been done and what was actually done. Train. This is train. Yes. OK.

OK, so one of the one of the main things they could have done to avert this situation where. There's no power in Texas and it's freezing cold. One of the things they could have done is any kind of planning at all. It sounds a little like your Monday morning cause of back in those just and yes, like. It's very easy to say, oh, you should have done this when you got a very obvious warning that this was going to happen in 2011

and you had 10 years to do something about it. But on the other hand, once it's already happening, what are you going to do? Retroactively plan your way out of it. Well, this is an interesting one because there weren't even there were not even like reactive measures taken to a large extent, right? So I thought this is a sort of an interesting counter example, right?

In 1988, there was a major ice storm in Montreal, right? Come on Montreal, Montreal, Montreal. To be on Young Street in Montreal. Wrong city, Young Streets in Toronto. I don't care. OK. OK. Day of Alice, Spadina bus. Yes. I love to go to see an oiler's game and fuck you.

Fuck you, I will break your legs as soon as I get the passport. Climb the CN Tower, which I believe that one is in Halifax. I wish I was in Sherbrooke now. So this town called Boucherville is a suburb of Montreal, right? And in 1988, 1998, after a major ice storm, there's a total blackout for like a long time. I don't recall what it was offhand because I didn't put it in the notes. One of the things the city government did is they borrowed

a locomotive from Canadian National, right? A diesel electric locomotive, right? Which, of course, is a big diesel engine attached to a big electric generator that generates power and sends it to the electric motors and the wheels, right? What they did was they brought it to a railroad crossing. They derailed it, right? And then they drove it down the street under its own power. Not on tracks or anything.

And then they hooked up the town's electrical mains to it. And suddenly Boucherville had power, right? Dude's rock. I mean, this is up there with the sort of like fallout concept art. We are like, yeah, no, we'll run the city off of the like beach nuclear submarine reactor or something. It's very cool. This was very bad for the street, but very good for keeping the lights on.

Because it just sort of created two grooves down the street the whole way. Now it's a train track. Do you have how long they did it for? Because I can't imagine it was more than a few hours. I am not sure. I mean, these big these big fuel tanks will last for a day. I don't I don't. I can't imagine it was throttled up the whole way the whole time.

I don't know. I don't know what the horsepower we just left this thing on Notchay, just like leave it there and be down the street one mile an hour. Circling Boucherville just very slowly. I mean, they could they couldn't run it all the way down. They had to get it back back to the rail. Right. Oh, well, that's what the grooves in the street are for. And just push it back. Let's hook up a yak on wheels.

You could. I think this is about a 3,000 horsepower locomotive. So I I have no idea how long they ran it for. But one thing I thought was noteworthy is, you know, especially railroads in Texas, like Union Pacific and Burlington, Northern Santa Fe have a massive motive motive power surplus right now. There's just like lines of locomotives just just lined up unused everywhere.

I don't know. This is this is like something they could have done. Right. It shows not to. And they haven't done it yet. Of course it is. I assume if the power was being restored fairly quickly, you know, maybe folks decided, all right, we probably maybe we don't need all this backup generation, you know, but what actually happened, you know, so maybe it's not worth it to do extreme measures like this.

But what what really was sort of the immediate aftermath of this snowstorm was Ted Cruz flew to Cancun. Yeah, right. You sure did. Biden declared an emergency and then didn't really do anything after that. He said he would come to Texas if it didn't create additional disruption to the folks on the ground. OK, OK, fine. Because like having I guess the idea was like having the Secret Service fly in would like and do the whole advance party thing would like disrupt stuff.

And like a bear in mind that the contrast here to Trump of being like, yeah, I'll fly to Puerto Rico and I'll do layups with things of that role. Let me throw some toilet paper into the crowd. Yeah. Yeah. Kobe, woof, just out into the crowd. You know, the George W. Bush Katrina fly over. Yeah. No, I guess there is no right answer here. Like if you if you try and get down on the ground and mix it up,

your Donald Trump, if you try and go but not get down on the ground, you're George Bush and if you don't go, you're Joe Biden. So yeah, I mean, there's no good. There's this is a real Kobayashi Maru of disaster response right here. They sent FEMA in. They brought a whopping 60 generators for the whole state. Yeah, but how big were they in size matters? I have no idea.

I mean, if they fit on a truck, I assume it's not that big. Unlike my dog, which does not fit on a truck. You're just kidding. You have to have a train to haul around your dog. That's right. That's right. The train is phallic and so is Liam, baby. And then AOC did a fundraiser with Beto O'Rourke. I remember him.

Yeah, I remember one of those sort of generic. They grow him in a lab. He's the he's the guy who he's the guy you try to take over Venezuela, right? I think so. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, the rightful president of Venezuela, Beto O'Rourke. A sort of not not not a great federal response on the whole, I got to say. It's been kind of like it seems like the people of Texas are kind of on their own. And don't they just know it?

I mean, like I it seems like the only thing that might have actually hurt Ted Cruz's popularity was like him fucking going to Cancun. And then coming back and being like, yeah, no, actually, I meant to to do that. I was just flying down just like because of my dorses that these bitches, you know, eleven year old daughters wanted to go to Cancun. So I just flew down the group chat tax for some of the funniest things I've ever seen, though. My favorite fucking joke about this was the Ted Cruz. The thing to know about me, Ted Cruz, is I may not step in to defend my wife,

but I will also not do that for my daughters. Let me throw my let me throw my daughters under the bus in front of the press and everyone in front of the the the generating train that we have run down the street. You know, it was fucking you know, it was fucking annoying was like there was there was there was definitely some media folks trying to say, you know, Ted Cruz really sounded like a dad right then. You know, fuck me. Real like he's just a person and like he's

throwing his daughters in front of under the bus in front of the press and everyone like everywhere like what the hell is just an asshole. It's an asshole. Yeah, he's an asshole. Dad, his daughters are going to be traumatized. I hope they become tiktok celebrities, you know, screaming about Ted Cruz and how he's the worst person imaginable. Ross, we got to get you on tiktok. I want to see I want to see you lumber your way through some of these dances,

but I am not going to do that. You wanted us to have a tiktok so we could post Polish stuff. And welcome to at Justin for Congress. Yeah, but then they can't ban you because you're you're a political candidate. Good point. Yeah, I'm the real genius. I am the real proletariat. That's the podcaster. When I got to do it. So this is where we have to talk about the wholesale electricity market.

So as I mentioned, there's this scarcity pricing system involving the spherical natural gas plan, right? Determine what actual prices should be in an incentivized power station operators to increase and decrease capacity, right? And during this horrible emergency, the market on its own stabilized electricity wholesale prices around a whopping $1,200 per megawatt hour, right? Jesus, that's very expensive.

It's very, very, very expensive. Yes, it's sort of like if you're using one megawatt. Well, I just got my, for example, I just got my electricity bill in the mail and it's a seven cents a kilowatt hour and I used a thousand of those. So instead of multiplying by twelve cents, you're multiplying by, what did you say, $1,200? $1,200. Yes. Yeah, that. So this is just wiped out a bunch of people's savings and stuff.

I paid like a $16,000 electricity bill. That was always money. Yeah, because when you're drinking life. Oh, sorry. You're not talking to the microphone. Also, a bunch of people had their stuff set up to also pay. So they just woke up one morning to find that their energy company had deducted them $16,000 or whatever for a couple of days.

But you don't have enough faith in markets is the thing. Now, really? No, that's true. $1,200 a megawatt hour, right? Which is again, the other thing is the previous week it had traded about $30 a megawatt hour, right? The Texas Public Utilities Commission looked at these prices and said, this does not seem to indicate a rational market, considering how scarce electricity is right now, right?

And they ordered ERCAT to charge $9,000 a kilowatt hour, the legal maximum on February 15th. I mean, that's, you know, that's a responsible intervention, right? We can only limit you to. Obviously, there's not enough scarcity in the market. Did I say kilowatt hour? I meant megawatt hour. So probably the same thing.

Well, according to that same S&P article I looked at before, at various times today, February 15th, energy prices across the system have been as low as approximately $1,200 per megawatt hour, the order states. The commission believes this outcome is inconsistent with the fundamental design of the ERCAT market. Energy prices should reflect scarcity of the supply. If customer load is being shed, scarcity is at its absolute maximum. And the market price for the energy needed to serve that load

should also be at its highest. But we got to make the markets this thing that we believe we implemented as a natural law in order to not do regulation. We are having to regulate it to make it behave in the awful way we think it should behave. Well, I guess the logic here is that if the prices are that high, then, of course, power generators, people who will be incentivized to bring their power plants online more quickly.

Right? Sure. If you just threw enough money at the problem, the ice would disappear from the turbines. Right? The power grids, all the transformers would be replaced instantly where they had popped. Right. You know, markets are infallible. It is reality, which is often wrong. We have we have to dissolve the markets and elect another one.

So they reversed this order on the 16th. They realized even these people were like, oh, no, this is really stupid. But. Prices didn't drop. Oh, no, who could have predicted? Oh, my goodness, they sat at the legal maximum for four days. That point, you don't even want to turn your electricity back on. Yeah, because it's like now the switch in your home

that like simultaneously stops you freezing to death, which people did. And also then if you hit it bankrupt, too. Yeah, exactly. It's like, well, I got I either get bankrupted from my electricity bill or I get bankrupted from hydra hypothermia treatment. Right. And you're just sitting there thinking about Ted Cruz in Cancun and feeling very normal. Yeah, and that being right. Right next to your eye is not throbbing.

There was a giant vein in your forehead and you're having a normal one and you're not thinking of all the redacted things you could do to Ted Cruz redacted in front of his own redacted. Jesus Christ. So now you just having a nice time. These are wholesale prices, right? This is not retail prices. So retail customers were fine

because either the retail electricity suppliers were either like, all right, we're going to eat the loss. We're going to work this out in litigation later. Right. That's one option. Another option, of course, is, you know, they don't have enough time to change rates. But there were a couple of Texas electricity retail companies which acted as sort of this clever way where retail customers could buy electricity at the wholesale price.

And they would just pass that directly on, right? The savings go directly to you, the consumer. Yes. One of those companies was called Gritty. Oh, yes. Look how they're called by boy. Gritty with like two days. Yes. I see. Oh, I'm a rationally angry.

Gritty. You're the irrational anger market. So Gritty, you know, they they pass these costs directly onto the consumers, right? So nine thousand dollars a megawatt hour. This is where I did the comparison. It's that's nine dollars a kilowatt hour. Or if you run a one one hundred watt bulb for twelve hours, that's going to cost you a hundred and eight dollars. Brilliant. Yeah.

So folks, the ideal system, yes. Not very good because you might be using, I don't know, a couple couple of kilowatts a day, right, or more than a couple of kilowatts a day. Yeah, some people's computers, you know, are like kilowatt computers. I mean, you're welcome. Or like a microwave or something. You know, it's drawing a lot of power. I'm gaming. I'm gaming.

Yeah, this is this is a. I got to have this. I got to have the mini fridge to keep the monster as you call. Yes. It's yeah. These are absolutely mission critical. She's right. Go to school. Thank you for backing me up, Alice. That's right.

And as Ella said before, if you were on if you were on auto pay, you got screwed. Oh, yeah. Gritty actually told its customers, listen, switch now. They sent out an alert like, oh, get get away, get away. This is not going to be good for you. You got to. Yeah, you got to go. Oh, but some people didn't. Some people weren't able to. And so. Give me one second.

I got to go. I get some more water, actually. I'm sweating. Well, the opposite of what normally happens. Hmm. They actually do the low chatting pretty often. Like I used to work for an energy management system as like in a call center. And we would get calls from a certain craft store and they'd be like,

oh, all of our lights just shut off. What happened? And we're like, oh, I love you. Well, it was it was a it was a low demand thing, you know, there. They were calling us because they thought that we turned the lights off. And it's like, no, your utility company did that because it's, you know, a hundred degrees in the summer and this is Miami, Florida. So.

So I'd. Fill in the. A bunch of window air conditioning units all all going full blast at once. They're wondering why the power is not working well. Everything everything is going so well with climate change. How are we all feeling about that? Are we incredibly depressed and anxious? So normal.

Everything's going to be fine. I'm sure the politicians will take care of it. Fucking Bill Gates is going to fix it by ceding CACO three into the atmosphere to taste the yellow sun. Daddy Musk. Daddy, you stop it. It's going to take us to Mars. He's going to take us to Mars to the moon.

Diamond hands. Diamond hands, baby. Diamond hands. But Alice, the way the way you feel about preppers, where you're, you know, you're like, I'll just I'll just be the level one NPC. That's how I feel about climate change. Like I do not want to starve to death. Someone put a bullet in my brain before then.

Yeah, just the sort of guess I'll die vibe. But as painlessly as possible, like I don't want to be stuck in my house, you know, trying to defend it from a marauding band of Mad Max kind of scavengers looking for the last op tart or whatever. You know, I want to say Mad Max. Mad Max. Sorry, Mad Max, like the bar. Yeah, my Russian accent is getting to you.

I mean, we made the mix of Mad Max. All right, Mad Max. I know there were rats running around on the floor. The drinks were cheap. I didn't care. Mad Max is a lot like Mad Max when you when you've had a few. Especially on a fucking Friday. Jesus Christ. I I missed the 12 ounce margaritas that were somehow cheaper than getting.

Yeah, if you got two of those, they was cheaper than the 22 ounce. Listen. I'm just responding to to a price gap in the market, man. You're doing doing doing Margarita arbitrage. Yes. Um, all right. So this leads us to an interesting situation where we have to ask

what happens to buildings when building systems shut down? Oh, is it good? It's good. It's good, isn't it? I believe this is good. Uh, no, actually, it's not. Fuck, shit. Damn. So so there's lots of lots of images coming out of this

particular weather event of catastrophic building system failures, right? So you have pipes burst, they start flooding rooms like this lobby, I don't know where this is. Or this parking garage where someone's car has become encased in ice. That living room looks uncomfortably like a sort of gentrified grove house. I know it's it's a lobby. Big glass doors here. It doesn't look like Grover House.

But as we discussed in the five or one episode, all buildings are Grover House now. And then some buildings caught fire. No one could fight the fires because the high pressure systems were frozen. Yeah, firefighters stood watching people's houses burn, just being like, you know, what do you want me to do here? And I'm not much I can do here. Yeah, well, a lot of them had to bring in pumper trucks and tanker trucks full of water rather than use the hydrants that were there

because they were frozen. Christ, you had a couple of cases of children just dying in their beds from hypothermia. I believe that the main one that was in the news that was in a trailer, I think. Or a mobile home, particularly lightly built structure. You got people trying to warm up in their cars, in their garage and getting carbon monoxide poisoning, right? You know, and you have you have all these building systems sort of just collapsing from three days without power, right?

And it's kind of like, what is happening here? Why are these buildings going to shit so quickly? Right. I was inspired to write this section because I lost heating for about the three previous days. They just restored it this morning. So now I'm getting old fashioned radiator heat and they restored it a little too well. So I have my window open and I'm wearing shorts and a t-shirt and I'm just getting full frontal radiator assault.

But my building is not burned down, right? And this is, you know, an old-ass Victorian house with basically no insulation and drafty windows. And, you know, it's ice and snow outside. You got to ask, what is going on here? Why does some buildings just collapse into shed and others do not, right? And part of this is luck of the draw. One of the things we notice in Houston, San Antonio, places like this,

it's mostly new buildings falling apart. And that's because it's mostly new buildings in those places, right? But there's some other reasons why some buildings work well and others do not under a sort of massive failure of society to provide water, electricity, natural gas. So I thought it'd be fun to talk about passive climate control and thermal mass. Why would you think that that was why would you think that that was fun? What? This is just what he likes.

This is what I like. I like buildings. I know. I like buildings. Buildings are what I like. Going loopy from heat. It's OK. Got to support you. Absolutely deranged from heat stroke. Just telling us about buildings. Yes. Going from hypothermia directly to heat stroke. Yes.

That's just efficiency, baby. OK, so I understand this. We need to go to New Orleans. Great. All in New Orleans, New Orleans. All right. We're in the French Quarter, right? In many ways, we are asking where yet. Get get your daiquiris out. We're in the French Quarter. So in 1788, the French Quarter burned down, right? And then it was completely rebuilt in brick at the height of the Little Ice Age, right?

Oh, wait, fuck, that's literally true. I thought you were joking. No, that is the middle of the Little Ice Age is when most of New Orleans of the French Quarter was built. A history of New Orleans in geological time is fucking with me so badly. Yes. You know, and so for most of human history, you could artificially heat a house or a building. You couldn't really artificially cool it down.

You know, insulation was basically non-existent, right? You know, there's corn cobs, horsehair, rice holes. So and the Romans and Greeks figured out how to use asbestos. But, you know, there's not there's not like high efficiency window glazing. You know, there's not like there's not window glazing at all. Need other ways to heat and cool houses, right? One of the very old methods was thermal mass, right? Your heat is stored in the structure of your building, right?

So your classic example is the fireplace in the chimney, right? You know, you build a fire during the day in your chimney. It heats up the bricks or stone in the chimney. The chimney radiates heat all night so you can sleep without having to tend to fire. And additionally, if through some clever construction techniques and some knowledge of the location of the sun, you can use this to your advantage in both the summer and the winter, right? So, you know, New Orleans in the 1790s, for instance.

It's still very hot and humid summers, but also bitterly cold winters, right? You have heating, right? You don't have air conditioning. And so you needed all the help you can get staying cool in the summer. So if you manipulate the sunlight striking the thermal mass of the building, you can help yourself say you can help yourself stay both warm and cool, right? In New Orleans, they did this through wrought iron balconies, right? Sort of shades the houses from the sun in the summer, right?

When the sun is high in the sky. But in the winter, the sun is low in the sky. It goes through the balcony. It hits. He heats the thermal mass of the building, right? Yes. And then you can have additional like brick walls inside the building, right? That helps heat it up in the winter. And of course, you also have stuff like

fireplaces that keeps it warm in the winter. And you have things like big, heavy wooden shutters, right? And these keep the light out in the summer, but they let the breeze in. You can sort of open and close them strategically to heat the parts of the building that need to be heated and cool. The other parts, you know, it's it doesn't work as well as air conditioning, obviously, but, you know, it's it's it's worked enough. Yeah, it's it's well adapted to a sort of very hovery human climate.

You know, this is this is very, very, very old method of keeping building temperatures regulated, right? You know, you had you have you have Pueblo Bonito here in New Mexico. This is the home of the ancestral Puebloans, as they call it. I call them they're they're sort of a very, very, very old Native American tribe, which exists from 850 to 1150 AD. You know, this is sort of a they had, you know, this sort of roof hatches and the houses ventilated the desert heat in the day.

They could close it during the night and the stone walls radiate the heat. Sort of the same concept also works in Machu Picchu. You know, the the sun hits the stone walls, radiates the heat. And Roman insulate also very heavily built also with the shutters. You can open and close sometimes again, these has had asbestos insulation, right? But not so often. It wasn't it wasn't like the primary method of heating or cooling the building. Even like England, you know, these big Tudor buildings, it's a lot of thermal mass.

Yemen uses this is Shibem and Yemen. We've talked about that before. You know, it sort of uses the same sort of roof as system, but also has windows on the sides. You know, the great mosque of Jen and Mali. Right. Very cooling interior corridors. Yes, this building. They have to like reclad it and fresh mud every year.

It's interesting. I was doing research on this. Currently, the bulk of the structure now, the design on it may have dated from the French colonial period. No one's actually sure, because there's not many photographs of the original structure, obviously, because it was built long before photography existed, right? So, you know, thermal mass is a good way to heat and cool a good way to keep your buildings temperature, you know, solid or consistent. Almost anywhere except, you know, areas which are consistently very hot

and humid, not so good. If you're very close to the equator, it's not going to help you too much. And then we get to this. This this period called the Industrial Revolution, right? Which, again, has been a disaster for the human race and its consequence. Oh, that's what I'm about to get into. I fucked that up. I'm very hungry. I'm sorry.

It's a disaster in its consequence for the human consequence. Racist, I don't know. So the way we build buildings changes due to technological innovations, right? One of which I have heard that. Yes, one of which is residential central heating, right? So you have radiators, which are currently making me sweat my balls off, even though my window is wide open right in front of me.

You know, you have early forced air systems by the late 1800s. This is this is the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. One of one of the very first forced air systems was put in this house. I should say first automated forced air systems because due to the the Raj in India, we did invent making a guy fan your house all day. Oh, right. Yeah, that is one option.

Also, you can do that. Especially especially you, Hedon, it's a bot. Mark Twain's forced air system did not work as well as the man with the fan, it turns out. Then you had air conditioning shortly afterwards. You know, primitive refrigeration had been enabled for a long time by shipping ice long distances packed in straw. You know, that gag from the Simpsons where the Arctic expedition

refills the ice machine at the Quickey Mark. That was that was a real thing. Willis Carrier invented air conditioned mechanical air conditioning in 1906, which was used to cool and dehumidify, I believe, textile mills. Quickly find its way into movie theaters. Other public spaces was first installed in an office building in 1928 in San Antonio, I. I seem to have copied over what it's named in the notes,

but it's this one right here. Residential air conditioning came around by the late 40s. Full central HVAC systems were common by the early 60s, right? Got it. So this this is sort of coincides with, you know, modernism as a concept, right? Not the architectural movement, but sort of a cultural phenomenon of putting faith into technology to solve our problems. It's something that modernism makes architectural modernism possible,

not the other way around, right? You have unlimited cheap energy and technology are going to remake the world, which results in a sort of rapid change in how we build, right? So, you know, sort of before characteristics of your building are determined by various, you know, by its location and the climate. And then after the characteristics of the building is determined by one climate, which is the climate controlled climate, right?

Yeah. And you build these sort of identical little boxes everywhere and you have tract housing. It's cool. Yes, exactly. You sort of switch from buildings with a lot of thermal mass to buildings that are very thinly built and have a lot of insulation or maybe not have a lot of insulation, right? And you sort of you make this you make up for this with really big and energy intensive HVAC systems, right?

You know, and you have other technology involved here, electric lighting, balloon framing, mass electrification in the automobile. You can do things like the suburbs. You can everyone can have their own little detached house, right? You have lawns, you have picket fences, you have segregation. Inseparable, these things. It is. I mean, let me tell you, I wasn't joking. And, you know, houses start to lose some of their previous practical features,

like front porches and fireplaces, real shutters. I mean, you still have decorative shutters, right? You don't have heavy construction anymore. You don't have your dense development where you can walk to get most of your stuff. And instead, they, you know, start to have light wooden construction. They have central air. They have fake decorative porches. They have big lawns and garages, right?

And this is sort of this process starts earlier than modernist architecture, right? I feel like the first examples of this are the sort of American craftsmen houses being built lightly and cheaply in California with sort of central heating. Yeah, but Californians get really defensive about those. Oh, yeah. I mean, my my house is the most historic house in the world. And that's why there can't be an apartment building five blocks over. Yeah, this was built in 1910 and came out of a catalog. Yes. I mean, I live in an old Victorian.

Even this shows some signs of, you know, the sort of switch to central central heating, right? There are fireplaces in here. They've been covered over by drywall. Talkers. It was clearly plumb for radiators fairly early on in its life. I think this is built between 1895 and 1910. Your fireplace turns from a practical means to heat the house to a place, you know, sort of the family gathers there and listens to FDR on the radio or whatever. I don't know.

Maybe Orson Wells is narrating the takeover of New Jersey by aliens in systems that replace these these heating systems. They were they save a lot of manual labor, but they're very energy intensive. I if you've ever seen the electric bill for like a three story row house, it's not good. Boom, boy, do I have I seen those. You know, by the fifties and sixties, the tiki-taki boxes of Levittown, you know, they're popular, they're ubiquitous. They're from there. They get bigger and bigger.

They sort of morph into McMansions, right? Yeah, you start getting lawyer foyers. You start getting weird turrets. Start getting uneven roof lines. Windows where there shouldn't be windows. Yes, windows that don't match. Windows just grabbed bagged out of an architectural salvage. Yeah, little, little, little, little tiny shutters next to a window that's nine feet wide.

That's very prominent, of course, in the suburbs of Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Texas in general, because this is all these were all built up fairly recently, right? And, you know, so you have you have these very energy intensive houses being confronted with no energy, right? And this is one of the things I did mention. We switch sort of from thermal mass to insulation. These are technologies with which complement each other, right? This is not like thermal mass, good insulation, bad.

You can make them work together. Here's a good example. These are the Goldsmith Street estates in Nottinghamshire, right? This is sort of to the Nottinghamshire. No, yeah, Nottinghamshire. Nottinghamshire, OK. This is sort of designed with what's called passive solar design. Heats the house with sunlight in the winter, shades some of the windows in the summer.

You use sort of modern astronomy and, you know, math to do roof angles, right? So you can sort of see, you know, this this. These roof angles mean that, you know, in the winter, when there's low sun, it, you know, eats the houses behind it. But in the summer, most of that or no, hold on. I use it. It's hard to see the roof slopes where I understand this works because they're down here. You get some point I'm going for, right?

Sure. You shape the roof in such a way that, yeah, it does the thing. It does the smart thing. Yes, exactly. The smart house, instead of like a McMansion, which is not a smart house, is an aggressively dumb house. But they also use like they use thermal mass and the bricks on the exterior. They use a lot of insulation on the interior. They have very efficient windows, means energy bills are very low year round. You also got to bring nice materials on these guys.

Also, this is council housing. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Right. Some of the very, very small amounts of council housing being built in Britain today. This is this stuff is kind of the exception for new construction and not the rule, right? Yeah, because it's good. Yeah, exactly. Right. And another thing that's very popular in Europe right now is EIFS. That's this guy right here.

Your exterior insulation and finish system. We sort of talked about it in the five over one episode. You cover your masonry building in plastic and it makes it more thermally efficient and also makes it look like it's made of Lego, right? And also makes it burn down. It does make it. Well, some of it makes it burn down. But then when that happens, you don't have a cold problem anymore.

This is true. Yes. It's very popular in Europe where, you know, people put this on stone buildings and, you know, or I saw one in Prague a while back, there's this building with beautiful plasterwork all over it. You know, rich, fine detail, right? And they tore all of it off and they put EIFS on it. And it was kind of like this does not seem correct to me. But maybe maybe.

No, it's modern. We love we love to be modern, don't we? I know, right? And one of the one of the things about this is, you know, all right, it makes it more thermally efficient. It's also I don't recommend systems that make make it unable for brick to breathe, right? I get the feeling that if you're you do this on a masonry building,

you know, in 10 or 15 years, if it's not done exactly right, you're not going to be living in a brick building anymore. You're going to be living in a moist clay building. Yeah. And then and then you're going to have to like replaster it every year. Yeah. Well. Well, let's get the French to do it for you. Yeah. So anyway, that's sort of traditional building systems there

that evolved into modern building systems. How has this happened? What has this done in Texas? Oh, boy. Yeah. Three days of building systems has wreaked havoc, right? You have this sort of modern, very thermally inefficient construction that relies entirely on constant and interruptible power, water and gas to keep working properly.

Any long term outage just destroys the building, right? And two of the buildings I'm showing here, these are two different multifamily buildings in San Diego. This one down here in the lower right was actually burned down by people trying to use their fireplace to heat their apartment. Oh, boy. Which is, you know, since it's sad. Yeah, yeah, it's since it's a modern building,

there's not there's not any like thermal mass that the. Yeah, this is a decorative fireplace only. It actually will create a draft in your house and make it colder. Cool. Yeah. So, you know, this is and I'm sure if there was no gas, someone's like, well, fireplace is a fireplace. Let me throw some firewood in there. No, turns out that doesn't work.

But, you know, so you got no thermal mass in these buildings. You got very light construction. The installation is not fantastic, right? It means the place is cooled down to ambient temperatures very quickly. Your pipes burst so and then, and then, you know, the water that isn't frozen starts coming out of the pipes. And of course, we sort of talked about what water damage does to wood frame buildings in the five over one episode.

I would imagine a lot of these buildings are going to wind up having to be pulled down, even if they haven't caught fire. And multifamily buildings are what made the news here, right? But I think the damage is going to be a lot worse to single family houses, right? You know, I see your modern single family house, you know, this this is this all the problems we talked about in the five over one episodes are 20 to 25 times worse, I would say, then then in a multifamily house. I mean, these these these buildings, it cannot be overstated.

They are shit. They are crap. All of them are terrible. Is this going to be like how how long is the tail of this this fucking storm going to be, right? Like it's going to be years in the making, just fucking demolishing and rebuilding stuff alone, right? Yeah, it's it's it's going to take a long, long time to recover from this. Yeah, because you're looking at a huge proportion of the building

stock in in Texas, just being unusable, right? And it's it's it's it's frightening to think just how quickly the built environment that we have constructed in the past, let's say, 50 years just completely collapses. If there's some lapse in electrical power, well, there's also some unfavorable weather conditions, right? Well, like obviously, the thing to do here is the liberal take, which is all of these people deserved it for voting Republican, which I'm absolutely

sure every single one of them did, not going to be investigating it further, turning off notifications and just sort of letting that one play out for the next three to five days in the mentions. Ah, yes, a tab, all Texans are bastards. Yes, that's right. Yeah. If you live in a state that like has been gerrymandered enough to elect Republicans reliably, unfortunately, you have been dusted with the complicity juice from that. And that makes a lot of liberals be like, yeah, no, actually,

everything that bad that happens to you, you deserve. Yeah, that's cool. This is all directly every single person in Texas is Ted Cruz as it turns out. That's right. It's like being John Malkovich down there. Yeah, it's it's it's it's I don't know. This is kind of this is kind of one of one of the frightening things about like just I reread over over the weekend, a short story. I forget the author.

It's from 1909 called The Machine Stops, right? And it's about like, you know, humanity in the far future has created this sort of ideal state of living, right? It the everyone lives in this these this giant machine in like identical hexagonal rooms, there every need is provided for. They all they all communicate with each other via some kind of video telephone, which I don't know how that's impossible. Sounds like an episode of Black Mirror.

Yeah, yeah. Borscht and then there is this one day, you know, they start to grow to worship the machine and, you know, there's sort of a small group of elites who control it. But this group of elites doesn't understand how to control it anymore. And one day they get the horrible, you know, one day things start to stop working, right? And they get the news that the part of the machine that repairs the other parts of the machine had broken. And everyone's like, oh, you know, whatever, you know, we'll learn to deal with it, right?

Well, I'm sure they'll get it back online. And then one day, the whole thing just fucking collapses, right? Everyone dies because they've never left their rooms before. They don't know how to get out. And I'm kind of like this feels like a metaphor, but I'm choosing not to reading too deeply into this obvious thing. It's just a fun story about a bunch of people who live in a wacky scenario. The Bessner resemblance to happen to us.

What does that mean into a wildly popular Netflix show? God damn it. Yeah, that's right. And I was thinking about this and I was kind of like, this feels a lot like this sort of thing where like certain certain services are not provided for a certain period of time and everything just goes to shit. There's no there's no it's incredible that a building or a house, right? You know, safest houses is an expression over in England, if I'm not not mistaken. Well, that's true. That just safest houses.

Oh, just because there's no electricity and no heat for a couple days. It catches fire and all this other crap happens. Mm hmm. It's it's it's very it's I don't know. It's it I feel like you should be able to go a couple days without everything working. No, but like we we have very deliberately built everything so that there's no resilience in it. There's no give. Yes.

As part of this this project that we have to to heighten contradictions and consider your contradictions heightened. It yes. I mean, sometimes the problem with having your contradictions heightened is sometimes it does kill you and sometimes it does burn your house down and the firefighters can't do anything because there's, you know, no water, but it's that's that's materialism. It's it's just yeah, sorry.

So I'm not saying everyone has to be a prepper. What I'm saying is that if certain parts of the structure buy some communal self-defense tools. Yes, if some of the on metallic for reasons I will leave up to your imagination. In in my ideal world, if for a couple days the power goes out. Your building doesn't burn down. No, you're Santa's of mine. Yeah. I don't know.

This is just a catastrophic cascading failure. Yeah, and like all of the people responsible for it and not only immunized from all of its consequences, but if anything are being rewarded, like the people who own those sort of energy bidding cartels, they're getting fucking rich off of this. They love this. They want to keep that pricing at the maximum for as long as they can. Jerry Jones has been fuck the cowboys.

Jerry Jones has been like publicly thrilled with what's happening. So. Am I on mute? No, no, OK. I just didn't have anything to add. No, no, no, no, no, I wasn't mad. I had muted myself earlier to eat and I wasn't sure if I had taken myself off mute. That was that was just a list of the podcasting delirium has set in.

Soon I will be getting the podcast sweats. It'll be me and Roz losing 20 pounds an hour. I yeah, man, I could fucking do with some of that. Very much a NASCAR situation here as we speak. So I am right there with you. Solidarity for everybody. That old fashioned radiator heat works. I got to say, not an efficient system, but it does work.

If it's stupid and it works, then it's not stupid. Yes. So I'm a segment on this podcast called called Safety Third. Well, the fuck is the shake hands of danger? Shake hands with danger. But I keep adding more drops. You know why? Because you're out of control. Shake hands for danger. We actually add the drops to Zencaster and then you'd be able to look at from there.

Like I could do that, but I choose not to. OK, I understand that. Yeah, I prefer I prefer the tactile feedback of my drops button, right? I like to be able to press the button and get. Shake hands for danger. Yes. So this is fun. This is a safety third I have not read before I put it in. Add a thing on the fly once again.

That's the opposite of what we said we were going to do on the last episode. Yeah. Yeah. Hello to everyone at WTYP. Hi. Hello, Alan. You got to say hi. Hi. There we go. What about what about Elf the cat? Elf. Elf, say hi. He's quiet for the first tricky bastard.

Good Lord. So this safety third happened to me a few months ago when I was volunteering on a project with the US Forest Service. Oh, thank you for your service. Yes. Names and locations will be generalized so as to avoid possible identification at the forest. The forest, yes. It's where the poob lives.

The trees. Yes. But rest assured, I remain good friends with the folks I volunteer with and this and still volunteer with this particular organization. One weekend every month, the Forest Service. Hold on, I just resized the window and lost track of where it was. One weekend every month, the Forest Service calls for volunteers to do trail maintenance at a local hiking area.

It's in a national forest, but it is not a park, national or otherwise. As you might expect, the individuals that this sort of outing draws together ranges from rather interesting outdoorsy people to total nuts. It's a pretty sweet deal, though, since at the end of each work session, we all get together at a private campsite owned by the Forest Service. We make food, we drink beer and we have fun. There's even a hot tub and a hot shower.

One rainy Saturday in October, we were tasked with moving three utility poles from the parking area of a trail to about 500 feet into the trail where an old footbridge, the Forest Service built before I before I was born, was beginning to sag. Being outdoors, you've got to stop that before the Soviet Union has to come and fix it. Yeah. Being outdoorsy people, we only ever cancel work sessions when there are dangerously high winds or six feet of snow.

We had a pretty steady downpour for most of the day that day, which will come into play later. Our first task was to move the utility poles from the trail. They were from from the pile they were in at the trailhead about halfway up the trail. See diagram. I'm so hoping this is one. All right. So utility poles are here, right? They're moving them here.

Right. Right. I got you. We were using a series of pulleys, steel cable and a Forest Service issued Ford F-150 to move these thousand pound poles up the trail one at a time. In order to protect the trail, one of the volunteers welded us a cart to be used at the front of the utility pole as a connection point for the steel cable and the truck. Now it's all. Yes. I like this idea.

It was constructed pretty solidly, but its only flaw was that the center of mass of the utility pole was high above the axle. This will be important for later mood. Since we had only one cart, that meant that the back end of the pole was dragging along the trail at the mercy of the truck and the cable. Because of that, it was my job to steer the utility pole using a six foot long 50 pound steel rod.

Or four other people got suckered into doing this. Meaning we had two people on each side of the logs during left or right. They actually wrote right or left, but I'm not good with that sort of thing. Right. Watching this whole operation was an eccentric, retired high school sports coach who has trouble communicating clearly. It was a good sign, which is why we put him in charge of radio communications with the truck to tell him to stop and go.

The retired coach from from now on will be referred to as RC had absolutely no idea what was happening or how to relay that to the truck. And more importantly, how to relay that to us. So RC was directing everyone with the most subjective instructions imaginable. And instead of telling the truck something simple like stop or go, he says things like ease it forward just a hair, step on it and not so hard. This too will be important later. The rest of the crew and I were busy wedging away at this log

while RC was giving vague instructions to the truck. It went relatively fine for the first two logs. But the last log gave us the most trouble. Since it's been raining pretty steadily all day, the trail was getting pretty muddy. Added on top of that was that myself five fully grown men and at this point, two thousand pound utility or added on top of that, on top of that refers to the muddy trail was me five fully grown men. And at this point to two thousand pound utility poles, Jesus Christ.

This was compounded by the fact that the acid, the utility pole was dragging along the trail, taking absolutely everything out with it. It was so bad that when we drove our iron rods into the ground to steer, we ended up moving the dirt and not the pole. Cool. It's also worth noting that this particular trail had a steep drop that went into a creek and featured some areas where the path was extremely narrow. I had the misfortune of being the chump steering the poles where the path ran out. I was forced to move downhill to where I was at eye level with the poles

to avoid falling off the trail and into the creek. You sort of see right here how that works with the rod. If something went if something went slipped or wrong at this point, if something. Really? What? No, it says if something went slipped or wrong at this point, I am begging you people to spell check and grammar check your safety. There's something worse that worse that have gone wrong. If something if this is the one thing we didn't want to happen.

I got so soft of my throat, dude, that does not feel good. Yeah, well, we killed Liam. Sorry for your misophonia, folks. This is the first. This is the first safety. I'm going to be myself. I'll be back. Let me just like clear my nose here. Why are the commenters who love that? I think I just gave birth. Oh, congratulations. Yes, congratulations.

I'm going to name it Alice Justice Fowler. The gender reveal is going to kill a lot more people. Did you see that? That just happened like earlier today. Some guy was building a device for his baby's gender reveal and it killed him. So I've got excellent work moves up on a baby themed IED. At some point at some these gender reveals are starting to make me think that the only ethical choice is to be non binary.

I mean, yeah, because otherwise you're just going to have. You're just encouraging these people. I do want to do a gender reveal in that I just shoot rockets like the rocket launcher for Unreal Tournament 3. I build one of those. Oh, yeah, you got to do that. Well, yeah, the most comically violent gender reveal possible is like a nuclear bomb full of pink dye.

Why do why do you need to have a gender reveal for that? You can just do it. Just build a bomb. What's doing you clear bombing? I feel like I need an excuse to like kill. Just because you're a coward. You're a coward. I will be over there tomorrow with Bob with censored materials.

La la la la la la la la la la. Yeah, you're Muslim. You're fucked. Sorry, bud. Well, I'll see you guys and get my. Oh, yeah, we'll be there. We'll be there. Any FBI agents listening to this, we actually do not surprisingly have access to nuclear material. He might not.

Let's say we don't collectivize this. And I assume I assume that's a cabal thing. Yeah. Now, you want to talk about where we're going to drop the redacted after this? It's probably authorized to do that, I guess. So. All right. If something went wrong or slipped at this point,

I most certainly would have been crushed by the log with no hope of running away fast enough. Luckily, things didn't go down that way. Our third poll was the victim of money trail system, making extremely hard to steer. Once we got to that narrow section of the trail, RC, the retired coach, wanted the truck to stop moving because we were about to move the pole over a stump,

potentially risking a fall into the creek. So logically, he tells the truck to ease up. Of course, the guy in the truck had no idea what this is supposed to mean. He was out of the line of sight. So he decided to slow down, but not to stop. This was the mistake that set everything into motion. The pole ended up moving over the stump in the trail and tipping over, causing the entire apparatus to fall into the creek.

Luckily, nobody was downhill from the utility pole when it fell in. It was also still connected to the chain, which meant we could fish it out with the truck. The goal now was to redistribute some of the pulley so we could pull the pole vertically out of the creek. It was at this point that RC conveniently had to leave the work session to be part of a wedding. To be part of a gender reveal. He ended up replacing him on comms with a guy who looks like a twin of Sam Elliott.

Cool. Needless to say, he wasn't that much better, but he did know the word stop and go. They decided to get me to do some bushwhacking off trail in order to pull up some new pulleys in a more convenient spot for fishing out the utility pole. I took this as an opportunity to get the hell out of the way of the path of any potential danger. Once everything was rigged up, things surprisingly went pretty smoothly, until the pole was back on the trail. Oh, so I'm looking at this diagram finally, and I guess the pulley system goes all the way

out to the end, then back to pull the poles. I'm interesting. Pull the poles. To pull the poles. To pull the poles. Yeah, you just grab bras and drag him wherever he needs to go. Uh, this is, this is me. I'm supporting the bridge while the chic is generating electricity, yes.

Multiculturalism. It's true. This is the future liberals want. There were several guys standing on the trail, but I was in the trees with the best view of this. For reasons beyond my understanding, the chain holding the utility pole to the cart slipped. We didn't have a backup rope or chain, so very suddenly everything lurched forward. One of the guys on the trail was standing right in front of it and got hit directly in the sternum with the full force of the pole.

He went flying back about 10 feet, tumbling over shrubs and thorn bushes, but luckily not landing in the creek. By some miracle, he got up and had not broken any bones. We asked him if he was okay, and he said he didn't know, and he needed to walk around for a bit. We called over the forest service guy from the truck, and we all took lunch to give everyone a break from what had just happened. Afterwards, the men in the group looked absolutely shell shocked about everything. They refused to steer on the downhill side, meaning it was just me left to keep the utility

pole from falling in the creek. Luckily, we didn't have that much more ground to cover and successfully got the last pole in a pile with the others. We called it Mission Accomplish and headed back to camp to celebrate. After the next month's work session, I asked the guy who got hit how he was doing, and he said his muscles were very sore afterwards, but he didn't bruise or fracture or anything. The forest service guy who organizes these events decided to take a break from the project

for a few months given the circumstances, so we won't be headed back there until the spring. I still happily volunteer with them every month, but I have since moved to the less dangerous groups because I enjoy being alive. Plus, the longer I'm alive, the more I can listen to this podcast. Thank you. Oh, thanks. Oh, you idiot. Consider this is...

Just dies on words. This has been a podcast where we've expressed quite a few death wishes, actually. That is true. This is the most actionable episode we've done, just out of the fact that we've recorded it at such short notice that we all have brain madness. We do all have brain madness. I have not slept well in four days.

Roz is melting. Alice is British. I'm on new meds. Oh, no. Oh, dear. Yeah, I feel you. I'm awake. These ones didn't make me want to join the police, though.

So something to be said for the meantime. I will handle it if you go through that again. Yeah. And then it'll be like, well, what are you doing about it? And we're just like, handle it. We'll start a sting cover band that'll be like joining the police. Oh, that. Oh, that was tasty.

To everyone at WTYP, keep up the good work. As an engineering student, you are affirming my choice of major in electrical and computer engineering. Our mortality wolf rate seems to be much lower than mechanical and civil engineers. Not not 100% true, but okay. I was about to say, you get that insta-death in ECE. It's not insta-death.

You just can't you feel your body melting. We can't complain about it, which is half the thing. That's true. You're not going to make anyone else feel bad. Just get your body melted like you're in that scene in Indiana Jones. From electricity. That's what electricity really is. It's whatever was in the Ark of the Covenant.

Ooh, I get it. Ark. The ancient. Welding Ark of the Covenant. That's a good one. But as my instructor said, it feels like an eternity to you. Oh, great. Cool.

Wait, how would how would they know? They just they just know that they probably got the every once in a while. I get the the old spicy wire. Well, yeah. Have you ever been electrocuted before? I try to avoid it. My my profession in my profession.

My major danger is fall hazards. Your profession is podcasting. Which the major hazard is getting cancelled. Cancellation. That's that's honestly the worst thing that can happen to you. And you can feel it the whole time. The whole time. It doesn't feel good.

Well, I've spent my fair share on roof. So there's fall hazards in my profession, too. Right. Yeah. That's like the big the big thing about solar panels is people falling off the roof. Yes. And your high vis divest is not helping. Our next episode will be about the Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster.

That's right. That's right. Does anyone have commercials before we go? We already did. Liam already did his upfront. I am launching a new podcast by the time this comes out. You will probably be able to hear it. It is called Kill James Bond.

I have my friend Devon and Abby Thorne from Philosophy Tube. We are pursuing noted tuxedo dickhead James Bond through 24 movies and a bunch of other properties because we fucking hate his ass. And we're going to get him. It's a bit it'll be available on like fucking Apple podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Calm down, Lofeld. Shut up.

I know you like that low-hagging fruit. Yeah, listen to that. Will you do an episode on the original Casino Royale? Oh, that fucking movie sucks so much. Oh, if we do an episode on the original Casino Royale, will you guys come on for it? Yes. Yeah, sure.

Yes. Yes. Fine. Do you want to do an ad? Do you want to just stand up? Yes. Come when when Philly opens back up and it gets warm again, all please come to the Grape Room and Manny Unk every Tuesday

for your comedy open mic pleasures. Let's go. Grape Room. Oh, I have one more ad. Thanks. Is it for something illegal? Shut up. No, maybe.

OK. If you want to buy some Faisal material, please contact me at 717. My, I don't know what I'm calling it yet, not a podcast. I am putting out a new episode this week. I got Instaband from Twitter. So as soon as I make another Twitter for that thing. How did you?

Instaband. Instaband. I liked my own Twitter account or like I followed my own Twitter account. Instaband. Apparently they're unsympathetic to posting links as a new account. So that's what happened to me. So once I get that off the ground, first episode is out. Second episode is coming this week.

Yes, I will edit this one. Wait, Lisa. No, probably not. Anything is for cowards. Thanks, Roz. At least for all the work you do. Do I have any commercials? I don't think I haven't.

Listen to this podcast. Yeah. Watch the podcast that you've spent over an hour listening to. Oh, right. We're all supposed to talk about our merchandise at Solidaries Super Super Store. That should be a link. That link is in the description. We have a Patreon.

It's got bonus episodes. You can listen to us ramble on for about other bullshit for even longer. Another thing we have is we have a P.O. box now. That'll be in the description because I can't remember it at the top of my head. Yes. So you can send us bullshit if you want to. And then we'll pick it up and then we'll be able to like... We'll do bits about it.

We'll respond to it. 02:22:59,160 --> 02:23:00,680 Do not send us anthrax. Yeah, please don't. Please do not send anthrax. We will be unhappy. Also, Union Pete, if you're listening to this...

02:23:08,520 --> 02:23:13,160 International shipping, international shipping, international shipping. Liam and I are just going to package it ourselves. International shipping. Liam and I are going to do it. International shipping. I want my shirts. I want my shirts. We will send you the shirts.

We'll figure out something shortly. So international people, people who live in foreign state code FN can in fact receive our things. Good. Yes. Thank you. Good night. Good night.

This is the end. This is the end of the podcast. Bye everybody. Yes.