Texas electric firm files for bankruptcy citing $1.8B in claims

as an intuition, a solar panel farm in some isolated arizona desert doesn't help folks in maine. conversely, as neither region has that many local suppliers, a few private businesses making rational personal $ decisions to not supply in critical scenarios will put all citizens at risk when those scenarios happebs.

(written as someone living through periodic wildfires allowed through similar market optimism.)

Same thing in many other places - in Kyoto there is big and nicely build station by JR and, Transport Tycon style 200 meters from it another big station by IIRC Kintetsu.

Or in the middle of Tokyo, the Minami Senju station is effectively three station - One on the JR Joban line, one on Tokyo Metro and deep bellow another one on the Tsukuba express line.

So its definitelydoable, even in the most densely populated of places, at least with rail.

Also when you compare with places that have little to no competitionon the rail network you can clearly see the lack of service quality resulting from that. Well, if you get any service at all. :P

The second avenue subway was the most expensive subway in the world on a per mile basis. Considerably more expensive than Paris or Tokyo

> The estimated cost of the Long Island Rail Road project, known as “East Side Access,” has ballooned to $12 billion, or nearly $3.5 billion for each new mile of track — seven times the average elsewhere in the world

Similarly, the fare only covers around 50% of the operating costs which hardly seems fair for NY state taxpayers that pick up the expense despite receiving no benefit.

The competing services for infra in NYC are cabs, car pools, private buses, bike rentals, scooters, subways. For getting into/out of the city, you have a number of bridges. For instance, I can take Lincoln tunnel, Holland Tunnel or ferry. It would be great to have more options and obviously its not easy to build tunnels, but private ferry and water cab services could be expanded

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-14/what-s-a-...

Oh no. Construction, operation and maintenance of electricity and other vital networks (water, gas, sewage, telecommunication) should be done by the government as a government agency with a quality of service mandate and not in form of a profit-oriented company no matter if government owned or private owned / publicly traded - because "competition" and/or a focus on costs is always going to end in price and wage dumping, cutting corners and sometimes in deathly disasters (California fires caused by cutting costs on maintenance, Flint water scandal, Texas infrastructure collaps due to un-hardened systems, ...).

This really applies to the power grid itself. Even the power plants aren't covered by the argument, since if you have a reasonable grid, you can build another power plant of any kind you feel viable in some reasonably suitable place.

[Ed. add.: the grid is actually the market. It facilitates the transactions between power plants and consumers.]

There is this mindset that capitalism is always wrong when the mindset should be capitalism is not always right, which is a completely different perspective. However, I am really disappointed that people don't think about how to make the system work for themselves. Corporate abuse doesn't necessarily have to be the rule. The political environment could be shifted to favor workers instead and to a certain degree this would benefit everyone, not just one side.

Fortunately, we can see that 40 years later there were no unpleasant side effects from introducing markets into almost every business and service /s.

Where I live, there is no formal equivalent to Chapter 11, and liquidation is colloquially known as Bankruptcy.

While the terms may vary, the accounting and the general laws are reasonably constant world-wide.

The other aspect to liquidation is cashflow. Sometimes companies have plenty of assets on the book to cover their liabilities, but these can't feasibly be sold in a timely manner to pay the creditors who want their money now.

If the company is healthy, a bank will be willing to offer a bridging loan. But if the company is less-than-healthy, the only option might be liquidation.

I didn't cover this about, because in these cases, the creditors are almost guaranteed to eventually get 100% of their money back.

A tax-funded electric firm would surely not share its profits with anyone, and even if it did it would still be at a net loss to the tax payers. (Since _all_ the funding would come from the tax bill - so its entire turnover is socialised.)

A private firm would actually contribute _more_ to our common because it would be a net tax payer.

[0] https://gameofmates.com/

Whether they had enough money paid out through dividends in the run-up to that point or not is situation dependent - the company could not pay dividends at all.

FWIW I also believe that creditors should take more responsibility on the credit they give. We saw in the financial bubble of 2008 that there are many incentives for creditors to provide credit to persons and companies that _they know_ won't be able to pay.

> Am I just transferring money from my 401k to someone else’s and then they transfer it back since we both own shares in index funds?

Putting your 401k into stocks and index funds is a choice you make. Nobody forces you to do that, and you, e.g., put them in bonds instead for lower returns and lower risks, or if you are willing to take more risks, there are Index funds and ETF for pretty much any criteria you can imagine. I personally think that using a 401k with index funds on stock is a great choice given how the market has grown the last 100 years, but many countries actually don't have 401ks (e.g. most of Europe doesn't have them) and they do jut fine.

> What you’re proposing here could use some work.

That's a really positive and kind way to put it, thanks. It was just a thought.

The system of "a company is only liable with its assets" is what we have had for a very long time. There are many scams that exploit this, and a continuous stream of gross negliglence or malice that shows up every now and then when those at fault are able to just walk away and do it again.

If not the shareholders, someone in control of the company should be held accountable to avoid a "company in trouble? oh well, just shut it down, debt go poof, start again elsewhere, pocket the profits" situation or a situation where the company does something like damaging the environment. Too often do companies also get gutted to avoid paying out in lawsuits. There should always be people to go after. Probably it should be the board and executive team, rather than "I bought a single share" people. Ideally someone with skin in the game (so either being a shareholder, or maybe high salaries are sufficient too).

Sure, one could limit this to voting rights, but most big Index funds have voting right on many companies because they own collectively many shares.

One could also limit this to "outside 401k / pension programs", etc.

But if you have a say in what a company does (or can sue them for damages as an investor), you also have a responsibility for what that company is doing.

I don't know what the right solution to this problem is, but in many companies, the shareholders tell the CEO what to do and have no liability. This encourages them to optimize for maximum profits, making smaller "Company sized" damages part of the operating expenses, but without regard for huge damages like in this case.

Which isn't fair either, since it means the damages to these people won't be payed by those who profited from them.

In one case I know well the old couple living there used to just chase the flood water out of the house with a running hose to clean it out. They sold the house to a young couple who redecorated the whole house and put carpets and stuffed furnishings on the ground floor. A few years later the whole lot was ruined, they sold and moved out. Apparently their neighbours tried to warn them.

Surely just unmortgageable?

Otherwise you can have a command-and-control economy, like the Soviet Union had (I'm not being sarcastic). Then a person/group in charge would decide who gets the remaining supply, rather than the price-driven market.

Energy has always been a very delicate piece of engineering, sensitive to short term disruptions. Whether or not that energy is distributed via capitalist markets or not, whether it's electrical energy, gas or oil or whatever else.

[citation very much needed]

The stadium is owned by the same city owned holding company that owns Aurora(as well as a couple of other companies) - they effectively balance off the money made from Aurora with losses from the stadium - this allows them to avoid taxes on the profits from Aurora (a perfectly legal process).

However - and here's the real problem - Aurora (and the other companies) were not making enough money to cover the loan servicing - the holding company put immense pressure on the various companies to produce more income (profit) Aurora seems to have done it by reducing the amount of money it spent on maintenance .... now they're dealing with the results from years of missed maintenance and are trying to get the people living around Dunedin (and in it) to pay more to effectively cover that money taken out for the stadium.

Really they need to raise ticket prices at the stadium to cover these losses and make the stadium self funding - at the moment we subsidise every rugby ticket from our power bills and from our rates (property taxes)

Nobody wants to pay for things like preventative maintenance. So unless you have a regulator that is going to force you to do so, paying for things like winterizing equipment in TX isn’t going to happen. This is especially true when you can just change providers to whomever is going to give you the absolute lowest rate. So instead of being prepared for a once in a decade storm, a provider is more likely to not be ready and just fold of things get bad. You never see the results of what happens when you are successfully prepared for that rare event, only what happens when things go horribly wrong. So people (consumers included) don’t want to pay for things like maintenance. And regulators (who often answer to the public in some way) don’t want to be seen as being the cause of raising peoples’ bills.

A supermarket or a farm are not part of our infrastructure. They may be "vital" but they are not infrastructure.

You (as an individual) can't really comparison shop for infrastructure, unless you want to move.

You're talking about on of the most subsidised matkets on Earth. It's hardly market-driven.

Have you seen the amount of subsidies that exist for Ag? It's Market based in name only, futures contracts for pork bellies or bushels of wheat is so far removed from the day to day of farming that they might as well be pixie dust to a horticulturalist or a rancher, seldom does that morass of speculation enter into the equation of how and what to bring to Market.

To this day I will never understand what it is they are trying to establish other than a convoluted and hypothetical settlement prices for something that most countries deal with on the international level for international commerce not domestic consumption.

I did horticulture with some livestock during my apprenticeship and neither I nor the people I studied under ever made an effort to watch the FTSE when we began a growing season, what mattered more was following food trends like cultivating kale, brussels sprouts, kohlrabi, cauliflower etc... to meet the CSAs or that would command a price premium at the farmer's markets in a B2C business model.

> I think the issues around power utilities are more to do with a lack of competition, and legislation that creates perverse incentives.

Agreed, Texas may tout a deregulated energy market but I wonder when it is all tallied for how many people are actually allowed to offer their energy surplus, because unless Cletus from San Antonio with his 45kW array can tie into the system and sell his energy to interested parties I doubt you can call it a free market, let alone deregulated when only a few vetted and selected participants are allowed to do so.

I think this underscores the need to have your own power source, and I can tell you these storms are not uncommon in Texas: I was there this time last year making my way down to Boca Chica for my SpaceX interview and everything was frozen until about San Antonio, and Texans like Californians, suck at driving in anything but pristine weather.

I drove in from Colorado and snow and ice are typical that time of the year so my car was already weather capable (all seasons, de-icer, good windshield wipers etc...) since November and I had no problem driving in inclines with a manual transmission in completely frozen roads where all the locals had summer compounds on there massive SUVs and their lifted pickups and rolled over or crashed on the side of the road.

I was let go when the local cops realized I could drive in the ice/snow and they saw my Colorado plates.

I foresee this to be the new norm now in Texas now, 2 years in a row is not an isolated incident, it's a trend. And I'm sure I can already see Tesla making moves to bring Buffalo back online to supply Texans with residential solar alongside the Giga in Austin as people were posting on Social Media about sleeping in their Tesla in camp mode to stay warm.

And also I want to say that for all this tough talk about Texas being capable burly people, it's sad to realize that they can be out done by a Southern Californian from the coast with no camping experience and only several years of living in Germany, Switzerland and Colorado. I was embarrassed to see how incapable these guys were proving themselves to be under such a situation and made me realize that the adage of: all hat, no cattle apply to these supposed 'rugged people' for 2 years in a row.

If you can't start a fire in your environment to keep you or family alive you have no business of looking down on anyone and no amount of big talk and posing with guns is going to change that fact that you'd be the first to die if things got really bad.

I lived in the base of Bernese Alps in a cabin well over 300 years old with no running water, electricity or insulation for 2 seasons (Winter and Spring) at ~7k feet elevation where on the warmest days it barely went above freezing most days.

I managed to keep myself alive and take care of 40 grazing cows just fine--the cabin was attached to a barn. The hardest part for was manually pumping the water from the well in the morning and at night until it got warm enough to use the pipes again. And the smell, I can still smell them in my dreams to this day.

It very rarely refers to a removal of laws. Deregulation can mean a change of laws, change of regulator, establishing a regulating consortium... etc. One deregulation doesn't necessarily have anything in common with another.

We've reached a meta stage where "deregulation" means the types of policies favoured by the deregulation camp.

It's not like Texas' grid is actually unregulated. They have their own regulatory structure. It's just kinda sorta supposed to behave like a unregulated grid would... if that sort of thing was actually possible.

Extreme results in extreme conditions are more or less intentional. It's never going to be economical to prepare for 10 year events to avoid a few days of lost revenue. That, in deregulation-camp terms, means that it is a bad investment and wasteful.

The whole pricing debacle is a great case in point: "ERCOT triggered the squeeze when it pushed up spot-market rates to $9,000 per megawatt hour"

On one hand, the heart of the "deregulation" idea here is that "regulation" destroys pricing systems. On the other hand, what kind of a laissez faire market has a body that sets prices? In this case, it seems like there is a price regulator that is trying to replicate a failure in pricing systems... when demand and supply curves don't intersect and price goes to infinity.

Vital infrastructure, practically by definition, is unprofitable. That's not a good match to profit driven markets.

Of course, the idea of amending the Constitution to remove that requirement to clear the path for a particular candidate (not that long ago, Arnold Schwarzenegger was mentioned) has come up before; current restrictions won't necessarily apply indefinitely into the future.