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Comment by stretchwithme | Hacker News Reader

That was more a failure of the artificially constructed electricity market. It didn't allow longterm contracts.

Weirdly enough, cities that had their own power companies could have such contracts and didn't get rolling blackouts. I worked in Santa Clara at the time and lived in Sunnyvale. We never lost power at work but frequently found all the clocks flashing when I got home.

Which sort of suggests that centralization is the problem, not public versus private. We had a private company failing and public power companies unperturbed.

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Yet some how the same regulated market didn’t experience the same problems after their bankruptcy? Come on, you’re really stretching here when there is an obvious answer.

You seem to be looking to blame centralization to fit a preconceived normative view of economics rather than just acknowledging maybe markets were not effective or efficient in this particular instance and in fact suffered a massive distortion specifically because a decentralized profit motive allowed one party to abuse market making mechanisms and hijack the price setting function so crucial to efficiency.

I think if you and I lived on the same street and everybody on our street decided to generate and distribute our own power, we would never create such dysfunctional rules.

And if we did, we would probably change it the day after it failed.

Centralization enables a lot of good thing but also some bad things. Lobbying thrives on centralization because it is easier for decision makers to scam people they don't know, more likely to happen with centralization.

Have you ever lived in a neighborhood with a home owners association? Any institution that is made up of more that a few people will come up with rules that seem stupid. Even in a small scale like that.

my knowledge comes entirely from the documentary, but iirc Enron both created the energy market, allowing energy futures to be daytraded for the first time, and manipulated the market with bidding.

the market itself was a massively cool idea, it's just that Enron had a massive conflict of interest and played both sides. they should have stuck to being a market maker and spun off their trading arm.

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