And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt).
And your "save the world from fascism" happened at the same time most of the US was segregated.
My point was, the US is not falling apart. Or if it is, it’s always been falling apart.
The current situation is not unique.
I'm curious what this is supposed to tell you, then:
> And corruption is way down from say the early 1900's (don't even talk about the 1800's where it was odd for a politician to not be corrupt).
This isn’t a difference on the margins about whether you believe in supply side or demand side economics.
If you look back on Presidents or politicians on either side of the aisle. We have never seen anything like this during my lifetime (born in 74).
I didn’t agree with all of the policies or proposed policies of Republican or Democratic candidates on either side. But it was more like seeing your favorite sports team win or lose. I didn’t feel like they would or did do long term harm to the country (except for the deficit).
I would say the same about any of the other candidates in 2016. If they had won it wouldn’t have been the end of the world.
We will certainly destroy ourselves by other means before "the deficit" affects us in the least. It never stopped us from buying more weaponry; now that there is obviously something else on which to spend money suddenly we should worry about it?
Before Trump, a Republican administration supported both the Voting Rights Act - didn’t try to disenfranchise minorities - and the Americans with Disabilities Act.
Both Republicans and Democratic Presidents supported the EITC.
Bush didn’t demonize Muslims after 9/11 he went out of his way not to.
No I didn’t agree with all of their policies, but I didn’t feel that they went out of their way to target “others”. They showed a level of decency and poise that you don’t see now.
I still don’t see how this is coming off partisan.
To act as if any other President of either party in modern history has done the same things that he has said and done is a severe case of “whataboutism”.
This is by far the greatest era to be alive. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling you something.
As an American, you just need to worry about dying from incredibly common and treatable diseases like cancer, heart disease or diabetes due to lack of treatment. If you show up to an emergency room without insurance or ability to pay and expect chemo or a supply of insulin or blood pressure medication, you're out of luck.
My grandfather who fought in foxholes in South Pacific jungles didn't have to worry about dying from a scraped knee, either.
I mean he literally had to worry about dying of gangrene from a scraped knee in the tropics, but I get your drift.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/cancer-su...
That doesn't mean anything for someone with cancer and no health insurance. If they show up to a emergency room expecting top tier cancer treatment some people in the US can afford, they are not going to get it, while they would in other first world countries. This is what my post was addressing.
Ironically, cancer survival rates are almost the only metric[1] by which the US medical system outranks other nations. When it comes to quality of care, health outcomes, mortality rates, etc they are almost all universally worse in the US than other first world nations[1].
[1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...
Real median income is up: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
Tax revenues as a %age of GDP are mostly flat: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S
US median disposable income is about the 3rd highest on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_c...
Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value.
In the past 15 years, the largest growing population of homeless people are entire families, and the most common reasons for homelessness are lack of affordable housing, insufficient income, or loss of income.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2019/01/11/live-pa...
[2] https://abcnews.go.com/US/10-americans-struggle-cover-400-em...
The thing that blows my mind is that the COVID recession shows no sign of slowing down house price growth, though it has tempered rents in expensive markets.
If housing still rises even now, something is totally insane.
People often forget that mortgages are essentially bonds. When you get a mortgage you are essentially selling the bond. As interest rates fall the bond gets more expensive which means the price of homes rises since servicing the bond gets less expensive in terms of interest. But the principal goes up which means you’re building equity more quickly. So this is good - if you can get to the down payment part.
And interest rates can still get lower. However there are large parts of the country where homes are relatively inexpensive. But they’re cheap for a reason - not many people want to live there.
Per the US government, the median household in the US has $1000/month left over after all ordinary expenses. At the 78%, this is around $3500/month. As this strongly suggests, the statistics you are referring to do not actually assert what is often claimed of them. The underlying studies paint a more consistent, and less dire, picture.
This is an often cited statistic that's been essentially debunked for being flawed and misleading[1][2].
> And yet 78% of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck
Again, not a particularly useful statistic because 1. real consumption per capita has been increasing[3], and 2. the US has the 2nd highest household consumption[4] in the world.
"Living paycheck to paycheck" includes people that are destitute, but also people that just consume more than they should, and also people that are unable to save money due to increasing housing costs (not due to inequality, but due to zoning regulations). Of those who claim to be living "paycheck to paycheck", you don't know which are destitute.
> For our riches, we have the highest population of people without health insurance in the first world, and the number one cause of bankruptcy in the US is medical expenses.
Sure, this has nothing to do with inequality. If you gave everyone health insurance in America today, inequality would hardly change. And inequality is NOT the root cause of America's healthcare system, the root cause is a series of policies passed in the 20th century that resulted in 1) healthcare being tied to employment, 2) a lack of any form of price transparency, 3) supply constraints on medical professionals that have resulted in the highest PPP adjusted salaries for medical practitioners in the developed world.
> Inequality drives cost of living up. Normal people in the US are competing with the richest people domestically and internationally for housing. While normal people need housing to shelter themselves, the rich, especially the rich outside of the US, see housing as a means to store value.
We’ve always had mega-rich families. The new phenomenon we’re seeing now is not that "normal people" are competing with the super-rich, it's that they are competing with the upper-middle class. Where I live (Brooklyn), The rents aren’t driven up because I’m in a bidding war with Jeff Bezos; they’re driven up because I’m in a bidding war with other high earning millennial white collar workers. The “middle class” worker doesn’t stand a chance in our neighborhood.
Also the cost of living isn't up uniformly across the US, it's only up in most big cities where the root cause is attributable almost entirely to poor zoning regulations, not "inequality". You can see the salary one must earn to purchase the median house in every city[5] and outside SF/NY/Seattle, it's around the median household income.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-06-04/the-40...
[2] https://www.cato.org/blog/it-true-40-americans-cant-handle-4...
[3] https://alfred.stlouisfed.org/series?seid=A794RX0Q048SBEA
[4] https://datacatalog.worldbank.org/dataset/world-development-...
[5] https://www.hsh.com/finance/mortgage/salary-home-buying-25-c...
We’ve seen this play out time and time again.
Jeff Bezos’ own district in Washington State is represented by a socialist.
Hillary Clinton outspent Donald Trump by 2x in the 2016 election, and still lost. In fact, she had far more corporate backing than Donald Trump, and still lost.
In the 2020 Democratic Primaries, Michael Bloomberg spent $1 billion (!!) on his campaign, and won just 9.4% of the popular vote (1.38% of pledged delegates).
Tom Steyer (a no-name billionaire), spent $343 million on his election, and won a humiliating 0.38% of the popular vote (0% of pledged delegates). Interestingly, you would think he would have at least 1/3 of Bloomberg's vote, which suggests that the vast majority of the variance in Bloomberg's vote share can be attributed to his existing name recognition as a famous businessman/politician. No amount of money was enough to make their core message resonate with ordinary voters.
Bernie Sanders spent $195 million on his election, having spent less than Bloomberg + Steyer and while having handily beaten both.
Joe Biden spent $105 million on his campaign, less than Bernie, and still beat him by 3 million votes.
Elizabeth Warren spent $121.31 million on her campaign, and also handily beat Bloomberg + Steyer while having spent far less than them, while losing to Biden while having spent more than him.
Those are just the anecdotes (of which there are many more). Decades of research[1] suggest that money probably isn’t the deciding factor in who wins a general election, and especially not for incumbents. Most of the research in the last century found[2] that spending didn’t affect wins for incumbents and that the impact for challengers was unclear[3]. Even the studies[4] that showed spending having the biggest effect, like one that found a more than 6 percent increase in vote share for incumbents, didn’t demonstrate that money actually causes wins.
In fact, those gains from spending likely translate to less of an advantage today, in a time period where voters are more stridently partisan. There are probably fewer and fewer people who are going to change their vote because they liked your ad.
Yes, money helps you broadcast your message. If your message resonates, you can even win elections (what a concept). But money alone isn't persuasive.
[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2605401
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0002764203260415
[3] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2138764?seq=1#metadata_info_tab...
[4] http://www.sas.rochester.edu/psc/clarke/214/Gerber98.pdf
1. https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/news/investigations/2019/0...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_HQ2#Criticism_and_oppos...
Sure, but ultimately the legislators are accountable to the voters, not the lobbyists. Most voters elect the candidate they think is most likely to represent their interests. Sometimes lobbyists influence legislators in ways that align with the interests of the legislator’s constituents, which is a feature and not a bug. When lobbyists influence legislators in ways that contradict with the interests of the legislator’s constituents, the incumbent is unseated — this isn’t uncommon.
> Big businesses can demand larger tax breaks by playing cities off each other
1. Competition among cities is what allows us to get the lowest possible tax for the highest amount of benefit. This doesn’t just happen with businesses, this also happens with individual taxpayers. This is why cities and states hesitate to raise taxes lest their citizens flee to lower tax states. Switzerland operates in the same way, where Cantons compete with one another. The net result is that the Swiss enjoy some of the lowest tax rates in the developed world, while maintaining one of the highest standards of living. This downward pressure on tax increases is a feature, not a bug.
2. Your own example is a bit of a contradiction, because Amazon ultimately failed to receive the tax break it wanted, since Queens/NYC “prevailed”
In the case of Amazon, they failed to receive the tax break they wanted from one locality, after protests. They still got it from the Virginia location and they found out what other cities were willing to offer them. More importantly, because of their size they were able to make demands that smaller businesses could not - so it's not like all businesses benefit from these lower taxes. And dozens of stories like this play out nationwide every year, without much coverage. This is standard operating procedure when Walmart opens a new location.
Sure, nobody suggested that they were. Voters pay attention to the high-level policy platforms of their representatives.
> As you said, these are partisan times and voters mostly just vote for "their guy" (or gal).
Yes, and "their guy (or gal)" are not arbitrarily chosen. The average voter chooses their representatives based on whether they think the representative is advancing the causes they care most about, or fighting against the causes they most disagree with.
> They still got it from the Virginia location and they found out what other cities were willing to offer them.
Sure, and that's what the residents/voters of Virginia sought out — local economic surplus.
> More importantly, because of their size they were able to make demands that smaller businesses could not - so it's not like all businesses benefit from these lower taxes.
This isn't necessarily true. Amazon, utilizes its economies of scale just like any other comparable institution. Unions can make demands that individual employees cannot, large nations can make demands that smaller nations cannot, Medicare might be able to make demands that smaller insurers cannot, etc etc. Most relevantly, small businesses themselves form industry associations that exert political force. And unlike power consolidation in labor unions or state actors, corporate consolidation is typically earned — people voluntarily engage with Amazon because it provides goods & services cheaply and reliably.
> And dozens of stories like this play out nationwide every year, without much coverage. This is standard operating procedure when Walmart opens a new location.
No they don't, this isn't even a falsifiable argument.
I mean this is pretty common knowledge re: Walmart, I'm amazed you're even arguing about. But here you go:
"While it was not feasible to contact local officials in all 3,000-plus communities in which Wal-Mart’s U.S. stores are located to find other subsidy deals, we did take this approach for all of the company’s distribution centers that are in operation or are being developed. We found that 84 of the 91 centers have received subsidies totaling at least $624 million. The deals, most of which involved a variety of subsidies, ranged as high as $48 million, with an average of about $7.4 million. As with the stores, a considerable amount of information on the size of the subsidies is not available, so the real total is certainly much higher."[1]
https://www.goodjobsfirst.org/sites/default/files/docs/pdf/w...
Outside of that, you said:
> And dozens of stories like this play out nationwide every year, without much coverage
You’re arguing that there are “dozens of other stories like this” but that it’s apparently so commonplace, there’s no reporting on it. This is literally unfalsifiable, and more or less hogwash.
Chain stores aren't the only kinds of businesses that lobby for tax breaks and subsidies. Sports teams are another example. And these are just the industries that get coverage.
due to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
The time just after World War II was kind of an economic anomaly for the U.S. Our population of about 4% of the world generated something like 50% of the worlds GDP, most other industrial economies were still rebuilding.
It might not be accurate to consider that period as a baseline for purposes of economic comparison.
Not only that, eugenics and Darwanism were popular in the U.S. at the time. Hell, we still forcibly sterilize people in the U.S. to this day.
Americans have been saying this about their own country for decades. Many people see the worst in their own. And if anything I think the outlook was more pessimistic than now in the 80s, and even more than that in the 70s.
Realistically, for all its faults, the US is still where I'd aspire to live for best opportunity and quality of life if I couldn't live in my home country for some reason.
Which is why America is populated by extremes.
Almost everyone here was either kicked out of or lacked consensus with the prevailing, fairly benign version of whatever was practiced where they came from.
Here is how these conversations go:
Someone will make comparisons to the worst countries in the world to rationalize why America is number 1 in a race nobody even entered into. Instead of comparing it to 21st century developed nations. Rinse, repeat.
Follow by:
Could those developed countries have made those advances without the US subsidizing and helping de-risk the cost of their defense? Shrug
Does it makes sense for the US to allocate budget towards said defense while its domestic infrastructure flails? Shrug
Does the structure of the US contribute to this separation of foreign policy and domestic policy? With the broke states responsible for and failing at handling their own affairs, with the well funded Federal Government maintaining consensus by not getting into state affairs, forcing it to use its budget abroad on pet projects? Shrug
Does an actual budget really matter when the world has an infinite demand for dollars meaning that the US really could fund any domestic project and its external hegemony? Shrug
Are those developed countries' taxes really that high in comparison to what everyone in the US pays for anyway? Which country specifically? In many cases where high populations of Americans actually live, no it is very equivalent and Americans get the short end of the stick. Shrug.
Fixed.
"“Approximately two dozen other countries have found H.S.R. feasible, including Uzbekistan,” she said, referring to high-speed rail. “And there is no reason it can’t be done here.”"
The government collects and spends trillions of dollars, and most of that is wealth transfer to contractors, much less value reaches the ground, where much of the country is dotted with emptied out farm towns and improvised shelters. If you don't believe America looks the way some see it, take a cross country train, you go through everybody's back yard that way.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-07-28/californ...
I’m seeing this sentiment expressed more and more, and it seriously concerns me. If you look at the data, almost any data which compares the US to other countries, you’ll see that the US is at or near the top.
This isn’t blind patriotism. Seriously if you are feeling like the US is becoming a “3rd world country” see if you can quantify it in some way. What is deteriorating, and how does that compare to other places in the world?
I have traveled extensively throughout the world and my assessment was based on my personal experience. But...
> If you look at the data, almost any data which compares the US to other countries, you’ll see that the US is at or near the top.
Not so.
The U.S. is a peer to Serbia in infant mortality [1]. It is behind India and Lithuania in terms political freedom and civil liberties (as rated by freedomhouse [2] [3]) and a peer to Chile in terms of economic freedom [4] and government corruption [5]. The U.S. ranks 38th in math and 24th in science education.
And an anecdotal but IMHO significant data point: I have lived in the U.S. for fifty years. I have NEVER had a piece of U.S. mail go missing, until this year, when I have had THREE checks vanish into the cosmic void. (The fact that paper checks are even still a thing here is a testament to how far behind we have fallen.)
---
[1] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/infant-mo...
[2] https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores?sort...
[3] https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores?sort...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_...
[5] https://tradingeconomics.com/country-list/corruption-rank
[6] https://parentology.com/stem-education-statistics-2019-how-t...
Rankings that use a metric complicated enough to give the compiler heavy discretion on the order (like your 2-5) are compiled by people promoting certain ideals. Major powers rarely score at the top, regardless of whether they "deserve" to, because that defeats the political purpose--if you're trying to promote X, then telling the world's most powerful country that they're also the most X has little benefit, just encouragement for them to get complacent and backslide.
In objective rankings, the USA's health care system is indefensible, unless you're both wealthy and in genuine need of unusually high-tech care; but that infant mortality is still just 1.3x Canada's. The American education system seems to be well above average; per your link the USA ranked 8/48 and 11/48 for science and math respectively, out of 48 countries that themselves are mostly well above the global average.
It's reasonable to hold the USA to a higher standard than other countries, given its outsize influence and resources. Indeed, the impulse among both Americans and others to criticize America's real faults, sometimes in hyperbolic terms, is probably one of the major forces pushing to correct them. Anyone who net believes the American standard of living--especially for rich Americans, but for poor Americans too--isn't spectacularly above the global average is dangerously mistaken, though.
Maybe it's just ignorance then. Quality of life in Northern Europe is far better than it ever was in California, which in retrospect looks like a joke.
Probably the most objective way is to measure how people vote with their feet.
I don’t know, my siblings and I do better than our parents who put time in to raise us. We didn’t have much except each other. We weren’t without but we never had a vacation or went out to eat. Went to public schools, etc. But my parents respected each other and sacrificed a bit to raise us. I’d say my family has moved from working class into middle class and upper middle class for some of us.
Our quality of life seems pretty nice. It’s weird because when I moved to nyc many of the people that complained a lot were from well to do families and they clearly weren’t doing better. They were being recycled downwards and they seemed to resent successful people because of it. They make a lot of noise but my friends back home, many of which are doing better than their folks, don’t go on social media talking about.
Yeah, you have a “engineer” bias: people move to the US when they make top 10% income because it’s the only way your life is better than in a Western European country. You don’t see Europeans making median wage in the US because that would be quite stupid.
My parents combined make maybe 15-20% of my income in the US, they still go on more vacation than me, don’t have to worry about figuring out how healthcare work (yup gotta make sure you don’t go to a out of network hospital by accident otherwise hello 300000$ debt), and sent their kids to university for almost free.
If you want to go on vacation more, live in Western Europe.
What are the long term effects of this?
I guess it would sound like that if you don't know anything about it and don't bother to look into it and don't realize people, including the OECD, thoroughly study it. [1][2] Furthermore, it's pretty idiotic to ignore subjectivity since it's the only thing that really matters in the end. If people in Europe rate their life better then Americans do then clearly Europeans are better off.
Here is data from top sources referenced in the wiki:
Education: ranked 40 of 72 in mathematics, 25 of 72 in science, 24 of 72 in reading
Health: ranking 42nd among 224 nations
Standard of living: ranked 25 out of 151 countries for 2018
Politics: ranked 45 out of 180 countries
Peace: ranked 121 out of 162 countries
Economics: ranked 17 out of 178 economies
Reference: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_rankings_of_th...
(You might be able to pick slightly better ranking based on your choice of source, but yeah, we are no where near the top. If you filter for developed economies we are near the bottom or have already slipped through the floor)
Regardless if you lean left or right, there is an implicit bias to a lower ranking. Why? Because it means “we need to enact my policy”.
If you dare come out and say “everything is fine” nobody is going to vote for you.
also Maternity/Paternity Leave, Paid Sick Time, and Paid Vacation
In many of those areas (incarceration rate, rate of homicides) the US is doing vastly worse than other OECD countries.
Explore the data yourself - https://data.oecd.org/
Source: https://govdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/heb130a3c?countr...
1 rolling black out every 20 years isn't all that crazy. Would you rather we spend billions/trillions on infrastructure used for 3 days every 20 years?
Do you have some numbers for that? The only load shedding I remember in Europe was done through turning off large consumers and they would typically do this on their side.
Name one?
I've never experienced (or heard) of one in Germany, for example, during my lifetime.
And of course it's not "rolling blackout", but "rolling blackouts", plural.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_European_blackout
https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-blackout-raises-questions-over-...
- 2020, well, here you go
- 2018/2019 should also need no overview, CA is probably the worst power situation in OECD countries in the 21st century
- 2017, 88k without power https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/04/21/power-outage-sh...
- 2016, 23k https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/10/14/pge-power-outag...
- 2015, 45k https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/06/08/thousands-of-ba...
I'm only picking the first Google result for each year. I could keep going but I hope the point is made: Berlin got a blackout once in a decade like most American cities get multiple times a year. It reacted comparatively slowly because it's so infrequent there was no recovery plan. The political impact of the outage was huge, the country's attitude was that everything is collapsing - and by "collapsing", they mean "like America is all the time."
I'm comparing what the parent asked to compare, even though it's not load shedding.
> Such emergency outages happen every day
In America. Not Germany. Like, yes, literally some level of outage occurs daily, but it's an order of magnitude difference.
US: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37652
Germany: https://www.bundesnetzagentur.de/EN/Areas/Energy/Companies/S...
The Berlin power outage linked above was over thirty hours, and the SF outages you linked were a few hours. To bury that in "(not always duration)" seems misleading to me. That said, the 2019 power cuts were indeed approaching third-world duration and frequency, to the point that homeowners who could afford it applied the usual third-world workarounds (gas generators, etc.). That was mostly outside the biggest cities, but huge numbers of people were affected.
And how did we get from SF to "most American cities"? California's grid reliability is notoriously and distinctively bad, and a huge political topic here too (though with little progress after many years). The World Bank[1] puts the overall USA's quality of electricity supply solidly in the middle of high-income countries though, slightly ahead of Germany.
We also seem to be mixing load shedding (i.e., the utility realizes they can't safely supply all their customers and therefore deliberately cuts power to some) with accidental outages. They look the same to the customer, but perhaps imply different kinds of bad planning by the utility.
1. https://tcdata360.worldbank.org/indicators/ha7db856d?country...
2020
https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/08/07/blacko...
https://www.theblackoutreport.co.uk/2020/08/12/chicago-black...
https://www.nola.com/news/article_a64debc0-c3dc-11ea-8d5a-57...
https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/06/11/detroit...
https://eu.detroitnews.com/story/news/local/michigan/2020/07...
...
2019
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_blackout_of_July_201...
https://eu.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/07/22/dt...
https://www.rt.com/usa/385646-blackouts-hit-la-ny-sf/
etc.
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/detroit-hit-by-major-power-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_2003
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City_blackout_of_1977
Note that the Berlin blackout affected 30000 people and was caused by a construction company cutting through a cable. All of these affected many more (Chicago: 800K), occur rather frequently and seem to be caused by regular phenomena like weather.
One major reason is that so much of power-distribution is above-ground, on these poles you see everywhere. Storms will knock these over or have falling trees take them down.
>We also seem to be mixing load shedding ... with accidental outages.
Yes. The claim was that "most 1st world countries" experience rolling blackouts. That's not true.
morelisp's later comment linked to SAIDI numbers for the USA and Germany, and by that standard[1] Germany is indeed far better than the USA, about 4.5 nines to our 3.5. Singapore[2] is yet better, about 6 nines. The USA is far worse than the EU average, somewhere around Italian[3] standards. That's an undeniable difference, though I'm not sure all of that is attributable to incompetent American operators (though certainly some is, as PG&E has repeatedly shown).
The grid can't target perfect reliability, since the cost for that would exceed the benefit in almost all applications. It's cheaper to provide backup power for the few exceptions (data centers, medical, etc.). The cost per customer to achieve a certain reliability will be higher with lower population density. The cost for backup power is fixed. So the economically efficient grid reliability should be worse with lower population density, which seems to be what we see empirically--Australia is bad too, for example. I'd guess that much of the difference is simply because the USA has decided that Germany-level reliability isn't cost-effective, in the same way that Germany has decided that Singapore-level reliability isn't cost-effective. I'd guess the World Bank ranking I cited somehow tries to capture that fact and therefore ranks all three countries about the same, though I can't find any details of their methodology.
1. https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/the-smarter-grid...
2. https://www.ema.gov.sg/cmsmedia/Publications_and_Statistics/...
3. https://www.occto.or.jp/en/information_disclosure/miscellane... , Tables 45 and 46
2019:
"California’s largest utility is under severe scrutiny by state regulators and customers over its rolling blackouts that have left millions of people without power.
Just two weeks after a massive power shut-off that the company acknowledged it mishandled, Pacific Gas & Electric announced on Wednesday that it will cut electricity to 179,000 customers in California in the face of a new wildfire threat. Southern California Edison, the state’s second-largest investor-owned utility, also warned on Wednesday of power outages to 308,000 customers."
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/23/pge-rebuked-over-imposing-bl...
That's at least 1 and possibly 3 power cutoffs (not outages, deliberate cuts) just in 2019.
Several days so far in 2020, with millions affected.
https://www.vox.com/2020/8/15/21370128/california-blackouts-...
And the year is still young.
And of course the energy crisis in 2000-2001 caused many, many blackouts over the course of two years, it's not the single incident you are implying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
> far shorter than the Berlin outage
Shifting goal posts. This was a single outage affecting 30K people. Just the one Chicago outage affected 800K people, that's 26x more people. This isn't comparing Apples and Oranges, this is comparing Apples and Aircraft Carriers.
And most of the others are over 100K people. And there are multiple ones per city. Per year. And I stopped looking after it was clear that many cities were affected by much larger outages multiple times a year. My guess is that outages affecting only 30K people just didn't make the news.
> The grid can't target perfect reliability
Yes, being resilient against construction workers cutting the cable is difficult. However, being resilient against storms, storms that occur just about every year should be something you can expect, and in non-third-world countries is something that you actually can expect. That doesn't mean there never is storm damage, just that power isn't routinely cut when there's a storm as seems to be the case. Or when the weather is hot.
Austria has much worse snow storms and ice than what we saw that winter in Detroit, every year. And avalanches. Yet I've never seen or experienced anything like that power outage. And it doesn't look like anything substantial has changed. The US has been under-investing in infrastructure for many decades, and it shows.
If you don't believe it, visit other places.
> reliability will be higher with lower population density
New York has a low population density? Chicago? The Bay Area?
That distinction is a little subtle, since they're both deliberate cuts. But I chose to follow the author, and I believe the "rolling" reasonably conveys "just (a)", since outages due to (b) don't actually "roll" (despite your CNBC article using that phrase). The power there stays off permanently until the fire danger passes and the line is re-inspected. This is actually worse, since customers don't get brief opportunities to re-cool their freezers and such, but it's different.
I don't see why you think the duration of the outages is irrelevant. For better or for worse, the USA accepts occasional outages of a few hours as "normal". People are inconvenienced, but not hugely--your freezer doesn't melt, water tanks in (older, at least) tall buildings don't empty, cell sites and other infrastructure with backup power doesn't run out of battery or diesel, and so on. I thought the Berlin blackout was particularly significant because its long duration meant those stopgaps were exhausted; but perhaps the two countries' overall attitude to power outages is sufficiently different that I'm missing something.
I mentioned country-level population density because I was comparing country-level SAIDI numbers. American cities still do worse than Germany, but by less. For example, my Singapore report above put the SAIDI for NYC at 20.53 minutes, around Germany's overall average.
In any case, I've lived many places in the USA and other countries, and California's grid is uniquely terrible. The rest of the USA's grid seems fine to me though, just one that makes different tradeoffs from Germany's. If I understand correctly, Germany's electricity prices are roughly double[1] those of the USA. So it seems like Germany just chose a higher-quality, more expensive approach, and USA chose quick and dirty, all very much in line with national stereotypes.
1. https://energytransition.org/2015/05/german-power-bills-low-...
Not 'we'; I'm well-aware of the difference but the person I was responding to gave examples of accidental outages.
The US has considerably more of both than Europe, especially Germany (SAIDI measured in hours vs. 15-20 minutes), regardless of what investment-focused metrics the World Bank is giving.
Of course failures happen, for example when I was living in Mountain View we had a blackout because a squirrel committed suicide by chewing through a high voltage cable. Or when I was living in Detroit, we were without power and heating for 3 days due to an ice storm. It was a pretty large (and long) outage, and we had freezing temperatures inside the house. Generators were sold out for 500 miles.
Ahh found it: 1985, 370K customers affected
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_in_Michigan
Rolling blackouts are planned power outages because of insufficient capacity.
And note that these rolling blackouts are happening again and again.
I don't know, California, how about you start by spending the billions you need to make sure people just baseline don't burn to death, and then we'll see what delivery reliability looks like?
It was mainly Russia who did that. The US effort may well have saved Europe from Communism though.
Now who will save the world from the lawless international corporatist panopticon birthed from America? Aliens?
History seems like "she swallowed a spider to eat the fly..."
"Now they say that the allies never helped us, but it can't be denied that the Americans gave us so many goods without which we wouldn't have been able to form our reserves and continue the war," Soviet General Georgy Zhukov said after the end of WWII.
"We didn’t have explosives, gunpowder. We didn’t have anything to charge our rifle cartridges with. The Americans really saved us with their gunpowder and explosives. And how much sheet steel they gave us! How could we have produced our tanks without American steel? But now they make it seem as if we had an abundance of all that. Without American trucks we wouldn’t have had anything to pull our artillery with."
https://www.rbth.com/defence/2016/03/14/lend-lease-how-ameri...
The US is decentralized (especially as it relates to electricity). Most of the rest of the Union is doing just fine.
It has been great to see the support in recent months for equality among all races in the US. But I wish we would also see more explicit support for Native Americans, for their suffering and their genocide. They are a group that has been exploited, victimized, and stolen from as much as any other group in America.
Every country has their problems, but years of neglect and backwards thinking on social, civic, and cultural “brick work” has led to this.
The civil rights movement was never carried through. The Cold War mentality of military spending on the ever present “boggieman” wasted tens of trillions of dollars of GDP. The vilification of taxes, civic and social programs while also the decades long trend of funneling money to the top. The dirty politics of special interests, limited access, lobbying and un-checked money in politics. The widening wealth gap in both fiscal and quality of living. The gutting and simplification of the educational system to focus on math and sciences instead of raising well-rounded emotionally intelligent young humans. The belief that shoehorning everyone into a college education and the crippling debt that comes with it. The complete lack of national infrastructural investment since the 1950s.
All of this leads to disillusionment. Especially when generations have grown up being fed this believe of “not in america”. Disillusionment leads to desperation, leads to anger, and hate, and scapegoating, to fake “christian” mega churches were people are scamed out of not only their money but the last tatters of their divinity.
Technology like the internet mixed with stunted critical thinking skills, emotional intelligence, and compassion form into a deadly cocktail that breeds and spreads conspiracy theories and delusions fed to us by our enemies directly into our living rooms, on cable television, on our computers, and into our cellphones. Very little of it vetted or touched by anyone. To be shared and re-shared on Facebook in fear to our friends.
And all of this wasted human potential at the cost of the only thing we all share. The Earth.
Donald Trump isn’t the problem. He’s a symptom.
It's hardly conclusive for a "grand decline" narrative, of course, since this is just one anecdote for an entire society.
Also robust grid which enables selling back to the grid would have helped, such extreme hot weather goes in hand with solar generation
The load shedding occurred around 8-10pm after the sun has gone down (but while it's still quite hot) so more solar wouldn't help much.
[0] http://www.caiso.com/TodaysOutlook/Pages/supply.aspx and select 9/13/2019 [1] Same as above but select 8/14/2020.
I've read some predictions that suggest these heat waves becoming a regular thing could happen within the next five years, but I'm sticking with more conservative predictions.