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edited 11th Oct '14 3:17:52 PM by MarqFJA
Professional Forum Ninja
Uh, think you have the wrong link — that's talking about why Texas has its own power grid.
Edited by megarockman on Feb 17th 2021 at 3:55:00 PM
Like reflections in the glass!
BTW has anyone heard that Texas has its own power grid?
for disclaimer purposes: the article is actually a more germane one about Facebook's Australia ban.
Edited by MorningStar1337 on Feb 17th 2021 at 12:59:38 PM
![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
Shin Megami Tensei IV
So, uh. Opinions of the conservative guy I mentioned and his tip to other conservatives?
I consider it to be...one of the best arguments agaisnt right wing extremism from another right winger. Pretty damn blunt about the issue of many right wingers regarding society and yet trying to minimize the amount of violence.
Because gonna be honest, if we want to stop right wing radicalization, you need to convince some of them to calm down.
Edited by KazuyaProta on Feb 17th 2021 at 4:10:37 AM
Watch me destroying my country
Who Am I?
Could you repost your link, because I dont see it anywhere.
You can't reduce the incidence of extremism in the general population, that's more or less fixed for neurological reasons. What you can do is reduce the influence extremism has on relatively moderate or independent voters. You do that by presenting progressive ideas in as "moderate" and reasonable a tone as possible, while sticking to key priorities and calling out the bullsh*t on the other side. Listen to everyone with respect, even if their views offend you, because that earns credibility with the audience. Reassure people who are fearful of change that you take their interests seriously, adhere to your own understanding of the facts, and paraphrase your opponents points accurately.
'Bout all you can do.
Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 17th 2021 at 4:37:04 AM
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
It's just easier said than done, when so many powerful interests - in the US and elsewhere - have everything to gain by making sure they never calm down. Does that author, or others, propose how to address that?
The idea that the right-wing should sit back and wait until actual problems emerge that the left-wing just can't deal with does seem reasonable. But not only is reason absent from many right-wing entities, it's often the case they don't even want to solve those problems either.
Hell, to tie it back into the Texas power grid, this Atlantic article looks at the current blackouts as a matter of performative governance overtaking actual governing.
Here in Dallas, my family and I have intermittently been without power for three days. On Monday night, the coldest night on record in three decades, we were without power for 12 long hours. I pitched a tent in my children’s bedroom, and all of us—Mom, Dad, three kids, Scout the dog—huddled together for warmth under sleeping bags and heavy blankets.
Most houses in Texas are poorly insulated, to put it mildly. Poor Scout’s water bowl in the kitchen froze solid overnight. Indeed, when power was restored for a few hours on Tuesday morning, my wife and I scrambled to unfreeze any pipes that had seized up in spite of the fact that we had left the faucets dripping. At one point, my wife—a tough woman, and a water and sanitation engineer by training—climbed under the house and thawed out a pipe with a blow-dryer.
We have been, we must admit, very lucky. Each night, as we have said our prayers, we have thanked God for the many blessings that have been bestowed upon us. As has been apparent since the start of this emergency, the worst effects of this storm have been visited upon the most vulnerable. I shudder to think about the ways in which the poor, the homeless, and the elderly have suffered in this crisis.
Major cities across the state have opened “warming centers,” and churches and schools have opened their doors, but when the roads are so treacherous, one wonders how the vulnerable are supposed to reach shelter. The entirety of North Texas has just 30 snowplows—or about as many as you would expect to see deployed in a single neighborhood in Chicago.
The biggest story for Texans, however, is the failure of our state’s electrical grid, managed by the inaccurately named Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT. Texas, as part of its regular and continuing efforts to distance itself from federal oversight, maintains its own electrical grid—unique in the nation—which has been overwhelmed by the storm’s effects.
You might be surprised to learn that Texas is the Saudi Arabia of wind energy, and that wind turbines in the panhandle generate much of our power. Many of those turbines have failed in the low temperatures, and conservatives both in Texas and across the country have gleefully claimed as a result that renewables cannot be trusted to provide power in emergencies. There is, as ever, a very small grain of truth to that.
But the data—forever inconvenient to those looking to confirm their priors—suggest the failure goes well beyond renewables. If anything, wind and solar have overperformed in this crisis relative to fossil fuels, and to natural-gas-fired generation in particular. The irony of Texas—the natural-gas capital of the Western Hemisphere, where technological advances in hydraulic fracturing have remade the world’s energy map over the past decade—failing to generate enough natural-gas-fired power is lost on none of the state’s 29 million citizens.
Well, almost none of its 29 million citizens.
There is a certain kind of conservative politician here in Texas who spends a sizable part of his day obsessing about the state of California. Such politicians have spent much of the past few years mercilessly teasing the progressive leadership of California for the failures of the state’s power grid.
These politicians have been, for the most part, conspicuously quiet since the crisis began here. The state’s governor, Greg Abbott, has mostly popped up on reliably friendly media outlets—local news stations, the evening shows on Fox News—where he knows he will not face hard questions.
But hard questions will be asked, because the failures of ERCOT ultimately belong to the leaders of a state who insisted that, by design, the buck must stop with them and not with the federal government. “The ERCOT grid has collapsed in exactly the same manner as the old Soviet Union,” one expert told the Houston Chronicle. “It limped along on underinvestment and neglect until it finally broke under predictable circumstances.”
Fixing ERCOT will require actual governance, as opposed to performative governance, and that is something the state’s leadership has struggled with of late. Rather than address the challenges associated with rapid growth, the state’s elected leaders have preferred to focus on various lib-owning initiatives such as the menace of transgender athletes, whether or not NBA games feature the national anthem, and—in a triumph of a certain brand of contemporary “conservatism”—legislating how local municipalities can allocate their own funds.
I’m anxious to see how our governor, in particular, will respond to this crisis, because I have never witnessed a more cowardly politician. When Abbott faces a challenge—and he has faced several in the past year alone—you can always depend on him to take the shape of water, forever finding the path of least resistance. I have no idea why the man became a politician, as I can discern no animating motive behind his acts beyond just staying in office.
During the coronavirus pandemic, which has taken the lives of 41,000 Texans so far, the governor first delegated as much responsibility—and political risk—as possible to the state’s mayors and county judges. When those same local officials decided that things like mask mandates and restaurant closures might be good ideas, which became unpopular with the governor’s donors, he overruled them. But when deaths spiked, Abbot decided that—surprise!—local leaders had retained the power to enforce mask mandates all along and that it was their fault for not solving his coronavirus riddle.
I am anxious to see how the governor weasels his way out of responsibility for what happens next. I wouldn’t want to be Texas’s new speaker of the House, Dade Phelan, to whom the governor will likely attempt to shift all the blame.
In the meantime, Texans, being Texans, are not waiting for politicians to solve their most immediate problems. Neighbors who might have fallen out during the Great Yard Sign Wars of 2020 are shoveling one another’s driveways, sharing power from their generators, and opening their homes to those less fortunate. We have all had a good laugh at the gloriously unhinged Facebook post by the now-former mayor of Colorado City, Texas, who—writing as if he were one of the first Anglo-Texan frontiersmen—told Texans to fend for themselves. “Only the strong will survive,” he thundered, “and the weak will parish [sic].”
That's the spirit.
Yesterday, in fact, my heavily pregnant co-worker—whose own home never lost power—offered to drive by my darkened house with food for my children. I told her to stay off the roads for her own safety, but as I write this, she is in labor at a local hospital. By the time you read this, her daughter may already have been born.
What a welcome to Texas she is receiving.
Edited by Eschaton on Feb 17th 2021 at 1:39:27 AM
The ancient Greeks call it hubris.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Like reflections in the glass!
Sounds like something that needs to e punished divinely.
Who Am I?
"Many of those turbines have failed in the low temperatures, and conservatives both in Texas and across the country have gleefully claimed as a result that renewables cannot be trusted to provide power in emergencies. There is, as ever, a very small grain of truth to that."
This is so easy to refute it's silly. Anyway, the winning argument is that the people who ran the government are the ones who failed. Ergo, their points are invalid, by definition.
"But hard questions will be asked, because the failures of ERCOT ultimately belong to the leaders of a state who insisted that, by design, the buck must stop with them and not with the federal government."
(Quotes are from the Atlantic article)
Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 17th 2021 at 4:50:39 AM
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Shin Megami Tensei IV
@Eschaton: Yeah, is very unlikely, that is why the tip was given from a right winger to other right wingers. Its his own personal solution to the crisis.
Watch me destroying my country
When are we going to be ruled by robots? They're the only ones who can govern fairly. VIKI was right.
Never trust anyone who uses "degenerate" as an insult.
While you're probably joking, for what it's worth, the idea that AI would rule in an unbiased manner ignores something called "Garbage In, Garbage Out".
When editing a script for Isaac Arthur (I help edit his scripts sometimes), I added a note on the topic with a scenario to demonstrate what I mean: There's a town with an AI that controls an army of police robots. This AI is not intrinsically racist. The town's judge(s) and juries are, however. The AI then starts to look at statistics for rates of convictions, and how people might criticize it more for use of force or arrest against white people than black people, and start to emulate the biases of the humans it serves.
Actually, this gave me an idea for a story (basically, the above scenario, except the AI has enough critical thinking to realize what's happening and finds itself at odds with the society it's been built to serve), though I should probably post that in Politics and Media.
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
Why would a program emulate behavior that wasn't hard coded into it?
Never trust anyone who uses "degenerate" as an insult.
Garbage in, Garbage out. That's what I was getting at: The AI would be looking at statistics and notice a trend where people of color are more likely to be convicted, and draw the conclusion that they're more likely to be guilty as well (this actually happens fairly often with AI). After all, the data it's given is that black people often get convicted when charged with crimes and that white people don't get convicted as often.
Another thing is also that even if the AI isn't racist, the laws it enforces might be. A good example of this would be intelligence and literacy tests during segregation in the US. In order to vote in certain states, you had to pass an intelligence test, unless your grandfather was someone who could vote. In theory, not racist. In practice, it totally was: the test asked a lot of trick questions and it was ultimately up to the tester's discretion who passed and who didn't, and it was written in such a way that white people were usually exempt from it.
For what it's worth, I actually do think putting AI in administrative roles is ultimately a good idea once they get sufficiently advanced. However, they need the same checks and balances human political leaders do.
Edited by Protagonist506 on Feb 17th 2021 at 5:38:45 AM
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"
Like reflections in the glass!
A good example of the garbage in principle in AI is Tay, which /pol/ transformed into the worlds most bigoted twitterbot.
Redmess
The other problem is that machines can't really think about what they are learning, they can't really analyse their own knowledge and discover flaws. They just emulate what they see from input without really understanding what that input is.
Put very simply, a machine can't distinguish good from evil.
Optimism is a duty.
The other problem is that machines can't really think about what they are learning, they can't really analyse their own knowledge and discover flaws. They just emulate what they see from input without really understanding what that input is.
Put very simply, a machine can't distinguish good from evil.
I don't think this is a very compelling criticism considering that we wouldn't put a non-sapient AI in charge of our government, implicit to the idea is that the AI would posses cognition that is comparable or superior to our own.
Which allows for potential alignment of interests and a capacity to understand.
Edited by Fourthspartan56 on Feb 18th 2021 at 8:55:23 AM
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
Shin Megami Tensei IV
Something weird I noticed is how "Bush did 9/11" moved from being far-left conspiracy theory to a right-libertarian conspiracy theory.
I think the shift happened because after Iraq, acussing Bush of 9/11 was non longer necessary to demonize him. While the idea of USA mass murdering their own citizens in a gambit to create a new war For the Evulz is peak material for right-libertarians and their need to pretend government organizations are inherently totalitarian.
Watch me destroying my country
I'm pretty sure it was always a mixture of right and left anti-establishment kooks.
"Sandwiches are probably easier to fix than the actual problems" -Hylarn
Shin Megami Tensei IV
Its role on the far-left definitely died down a lot.
Watch me destroying my country
Anka Aquila
The "Bush did 9/11" conspiracy theory is weird in the sense that it somewhat makes sense in hindsight, yet it's still too needlessly convoluted for it to be true, not to mention that it speaks of a bit of wounded pride given that it implies that Al-Qaeda could never have done something like that on their own.
I would sooner believe that Bush was aware that Al-Qaeda was planning something but did not gave it consideration rather than being the mastermind behind it.
Instead of focusing on relatives that divide us, maybe we should try to find the absolutes that tie us.
Shin Megami Tensei IV
The latter is more of less what happened. American Afghan allies were warning about it but it got ignored.
More stupidity that some evil masterplan. Which is a summary of a lot of historical events and has soured me of villainous masterplans on fiction.
Watch me destroying my country
Who Am I?
@Fourth: But we could very easily put an Expert System in charge of some aspect of government functioning, in order to automate something and save money. Such as monitoring traffic cams and reporting violations of the law. What do you want to be that that would significantly worsen racial disparities in arrests?
Edited by DeMarquis on Feb 18th 2021 at 12:29:17 PM
"We learn from history that we do not learn from history."
Kardnavil: Eh, some actually have a idea of what the values they admire were. They usually are the most scary ones.
I am quoting from a book writen for a Conservative Journalist about this, so don't acusse me personally of inventing stuff.
A lot of the issues of modern conservativism exist because since WW 2, basically the arguments of normal conservativism get increasingly incompatible with the post-war Liberal Hegemony. Nazism was the ultimate reactionary ideology and Conservatives never really recovered from that.
It basically lead to a radicalization that doesn't shown signs of stopping because "even if we win, we lose" in PR, a fact that is mainly self-inflicted.
For example: Brexit is a Conservative victory but its effects are hardly popular—and iroically, Brexit managed to turn Euroskepticism into a Right Wing idea in the Liberal memory and managed to obscure that Left wing euroskeptics once ever existed. All the efforts of Blair and Cameron to win Tory PR Victories were trashed.
Ironically, the focus on Economical Issues in some levels made Conservatives clash with other conservatives because the austerity ideas really clash badly with the social conservativism. With the whole thing becoming a movement based on Spite. As the author said, Thatcher's ideals created her son rather that reviving her father. Economical Conservativism and its heir, Libertarianism are, rather strangely, a fusion of the worst of Liberal Individualism and Conservativism—a idea that could only be born in the Liberal West during the Cold War—A living paradox that exists because some Conservatives want to look edgy and cool, which makes them look cringe.
See the countless "Online Libertarians" that are also pretty openly socially conservative but refuse to call themselves like that. My favorite case is a Argentinian Politician and his legendary quote of "I am not a religious person, I just think religious values should be the most important of society".
The writer's only solution for Conseratives is to drop politics and live the best they can can until Progressives and Liberals eventually commit enough mistakes and atrocities until Conservative arguments start to make sense and look interesting to academia again.
I've come to call this type of Conservativism either "Doomer conservativism" or Tolkienist Conservativism (for Tolkien, who basically had the same idea) and...is legit one of the best possible outcomes for social conservatives that want to preserve their ideals and their own dignity rather that sacrificing it by joining movements like Trumpism.
Edited by KazuyaProta on Feb 17th 2021 at 2:32:10 PM
Watch me destroying my country