Maybe on point: as someone living in a country with relative big government and reaping the huge quality of life reward from it, I just can’t understand why people would want to create a society where you risk losing basic facilities such as electricity.
What happened in Texas is such a string of failures to actually govern and force companies to adhere to regulations, it’s crazy to me.
The temperature in Texas reliably doesn't go below freezing, except in freak weather events such as these. That's why they had water pipes exploding everywhere.
So I think this is analogous to the Netherlands having a week of >40°C weather (>105°F).
Sure, you could blame the government for some of the resulting chaos, but it's also partly the freak event itself.
Most of the people that died in that event in Texas would be alive if they had sufficiently warm clothing. Is that entirely the fault of the government?
“If they had sufficiently warm clothes”… sufficient is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Besides, if freezing is such a freak event, why do you expect people to prepare and not the government to prepare.
The temperatures in many homes were below freezing for several days. There are normal citizens who cannot survive such an event.
In The Netherlands the worst you’ll typically see is some delays with trains, perhaps a couple of trains (of the many per hour) being cancelled.
In my 30+ years in the Netherlands I’ve never experienced a brownout, much less a blackout. Hell I haven’t even experienced a modest outage. Only once have I heard of a blackout, and that was when a helicopter flew into power lines.
And that’s not even touching on how ridiculous it is that you’re trying to equate being able to stay warm and alive at home with being able to travel, while at the same time trying to blame people for not being prepared for something you claim is rare.