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Power Shuts Down in Northern California
I’m writing this early Wednesday morning, trying to post while I still can. The good news is that BART and the freeways going through tunnels will still be operable, and all of San Francisco will remain powered up. But parts of all of the surrounding areas will be affected.
The TV news is fun. They’re warning viewers that home alarm systems won’t be working, so report suspicious activity with your remaining charge on your phone … but the cell towers won’t be working either. The radio has been full of public service announcements.
Our governor feels our pain. He says we should be outraged. At something not specified. I’m outraged at him. He was Lt. Governor for the last eight years and in local government for 20. PG&E is a creature of government with its freedom of action controlled and constrained by government. He is and has been the face of government and this happened on his watch.
Although California has the most expensive electricity in the US, it is delivered with third-world safety and reliability.
Published in General
California has some big issues. It also produces some of the most important technology and culture in the world. To call it “ruined” is just myopic. If California is “ruined” because of the things you listed then so is the United States as a whole.
“And you guys did it to yourselves.” Can I chalk this phrasing up to laziness or trolling? You can find three or four present or past Californians on this thread who have not supported any of the bad policies.
Can I offer you guys an opinion about California? There is an actual economist term for the capture of taxation because of weather and quality of life found in California. People don’t move because they don’t want to give up certain things you can’t get anywhere else.
Then there are a few structural issues that favor the Democrats. Much of this was done strategically. Government graft. Effective union, lobby, and bureaucracy control of the government not the representative legislature as most idealize about.
Next you have the gated community socialist phenomenon. Crumbs for the poor to keep them at bay. So more poor move there. The productive move away. Part of this supposedly has to do with the guilt of people that work in technology. They know it’s deflationary and it destroys many jobs, so they vote leftist to compensate for it.
Joel Kotkin and Victor Davis Hanson is where I got most of that. I’m just throwing it out there and I’m not going to get into a big argument about it.
The size of California also plays to its advantage. New York started losing people to nearby states in the 1960s due to their tax policies, because the East Coast is full of small and medium-sized states. California owns 2/3s of the Pacific Coast, so if you are in any business involved with import/exports or other things that require being near the ocean, you’re just limited in where you can go (and I know the concern on the export side for natural gas due to California’s progressive politics is such that Energy Transfer Partners boss Kelsey Warren has paired with New York Times note-holder Carlos Slim to build a pipeline to the Pacific Coast of Mexico, where an LNG port to ship to Asia could be built far easier than trying to get an LNG port permitted in California).
Ah, yeah – you guys got hit hard. I’m in Charlotte, but I helped with Florence storm duty/restoration work in Asheboro (staging site was the Randolph Mall).
Need to be careful about the assumptions around regulated utilities, and their “guaranteed” profits. Not all costs incurred are recoverable, and are subject to regulatory approval. So you do have the very real scenario where utilities operate at a loss, or go under – but it’s rare.
Which does prompt the question, about regulatory agencies, which are often political: Do they know what they are doing? I’d suggest that they frequently don’t, or are less informed about risk, cost, and recovery than they need to be, considering how much hinges on what they do or don’t approve.
There are more conservatives in California than all the conservatives in most states put together. It’s just asinine to pontificate about how terrible all of California is because some part of California is doing something stupid. California is enormous. There are at least 10 different regions that alone could become states in their own right. There are multiple different economic engines and dozens of cultures. People not from here really have no idea what they are talking about.
Don’t include me in that part of the discussion. I’m not talking about California. I’m talking about how regulate utilities work. But thanks for lumping me in with the people who are not allowed to talk about California. Remember that if we talk about foreign policy in places you’ve never been to.
Sorry I included your comment Macho. I didn’t intend to
There was a report a man dependent on oxgen died shortly after power was shut off in his area. Medics responded but too late, apparently. WTF with the electric utilities in CA?
The usual suspects ridiculed ‘death panels’ when Palin mentioned them, but utilities having unaccountable life and death power seems just a bit too dystopian, even for me.