edbob

I'm very familiar with this as I spent 10 years in prison. The term "Uncle Tom" is not used by black men in prison. They say "house n-word" (except not n-word of course). It's about the most offensive term possible.

It basically means a "house slave" that was well-treated and is therefore sympathetic to or on the side of the white man. The anytonym is "field n-word", a slave that worked in the fields, which I probably heard more often as people sometimes identify as that term. E.g., if a guy is talking to his buddy who has a nice ("cadillac") job situation, he might say "I'm just a field n-word."

I'm not a leftist at all, but I'd also love to be rolling out UBI.

> I can understand why an umbrella term such as "colored people" could be problematic. However, if that is the case, I don't understand why "people of color" should be any more socially acceptable

Scott Alexander explains this as a way for upper-class people to maintain their privileges: "The whole point is to make sure the working-class white guy whose best friends are black and who marries a black woman and has beautiful black children feels immeasurably inferior to the college-educated white guy who knows that saying "colored people" is horrendously offensive but saying "people of color" is the only way to dismantle white supremacy."[0]

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/a-modest-proposal-for-...

Installed capacity is installed capacity. It does not "fluctuate" throughout the year.

I'm going to be polite and just bow out. Your constant accusations of bad faith are not helpful.

> I couldn't say if Occupy or BLM are Marxist, Socialist, or whatever.

You can say, at least regarding the founders of BLM: https://therealnews.com/pcullors0722blacklives

"BALL: ...he was concerned or is concerned that there’s a lack of perhaps ideological direction in Black Lives Matter that would allow it to be, to fizzle out in, as he said, in comparison to Occupy Wall Street. As you advance in your own organization, as you all are headed to Cleveland to participate in this Black Lives Movement conference, how do you respond to that particular critique?... CULLORS: Um, I think that the criticism is helpful. I also think that it might–. I think of a lot of things. The first thing, I think, is that we actually do have an ideological frame. Myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers. We are trained Marxists. We are super-versed on, sort of, ideological theories. And I think that what we really tried to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many black folk. We don’t necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement. I think we’ve tried to put out a political frame that’s about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the black community, to really fight for all of our lives. And I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don’t believe it’s going to fizzle out. It just gets stronger, and we see it, right. We’ve seen after Sandra Bland. We’re seeing it now with the interruption of the Netroots Nation presidential forum. What I do think, though, is folks–especially folks who have been trained in a particular way want to hear certain things from us, that we’re not sort of framing it in the same ways that maybe another generation have, has. But I think it’s important that people know that we are, the Black Lives Matter movement doesn’t just live online, although there’s many people who utilize it online. We’re in a different set of circumstances, a different generation that–social media may feel like it’s diluting the larger ideological frame. But I argue that it’s not. "

Correcting myself here. Wind output dropped to a low of 2% of capacity, not 0.

> Are you cherry-picking yearly average figures and inappropriately applying them here to push a narrative?

I am neither cherry-picking nor using yearly average figures. The one yearly figure of "over 25000 GW" is for ERCOT's installed wind capacity, which is consistent year-round apart from a small growth as new capacity comes online. My other figures are for specific dates or months, the dates being when black outs were happening.

As for why wind's low output compared to capacity matters so much, I am dealing with the inescapable facts of the Texas climate and how it relates to the energy market. The capacity in Texas is driven by summer-time demand. Yet, very rarely, there are winters in which the demand can briefly exceed summer-time capacity. It's obvious that the current market is unable to consistently meet the demand in these rare winter events.

The root problem is having capacity which can perform in summer but not in winter, whether due to not being winterized, being down for maintenance, or any other reason. Focusing solely on winterization is being used as a diversion from the problem that Texans actually care about, which is simply having power in their homes during extreme winters.

By refusing to look at the data, you are missing the fact that wind actually does produce quite a lot of power on many winter days. In fact, ERCOT's all-time record for wind production was set in February 2018. But on some winter days, wind produces very little. It should be obvious that wind significantly reduces the average profits for other generation sources in winter, and thus has a negative effect on the market for more reliable generation capacity. Wind's high variability does contribute to a lack of output during extreme weather.

The "wind performed excellently" side is just ignoring all of this, but it's all highly relevant and should be part of the discussion. I am not saying that it should lead to a "wind is bad" conclusion in the final analysis. I am saying that there are significant problems with wind generation that should be part of the analysis, not swept under the rug. Saying "just winterize" is extremely hand-wavey, as it does not account for how the high costs of winterization can result in less installed capacity, and it completely fails to consider other issues like certain generation sources being highly inconsistent even when there is no freezing. Saying "all sources had problems" is a way to avoid recognizing that nuclear dramatically outperformed every other generation source even without winterizing. Performing at 75% of capacity is completely different from performing at 12.5%.

There are some more detailed analyses in the articles at [0] and [1]. [0] deals with the claim that deregulation was the culprit, showing that the relevant Texan regulations are actually more strict and better-enforced than the national regulations (due to previous freezing issues), while other national regulations do apply to Texas (like some dealing with gas). [1] goes into detail on how capacity planning fell short, by someone who was actually responsible for capacity planning in a region of ERCOT. The main point is that Texas has no capacity market, and this is what has allowed it to become a world leader in wind generation but has led to failures in having enough capacity available. "When capacity value is rewarded, this makes the economics of renewables much less competitive. Texas has stacked the deck to make wind and solar more competitive than they could be in a system that better recognizes the value of dependable resources which can supply capacity benefits. An energy only market helps accomplish the goal of making wind and solar more competitive. Except capacity value is a real value. Ignoring that, as Texas did, comes with real perils." "Incentives and responsibility need to be paired. Doing a post-mortem on the Texas situation ignoring incentives and responsibility is inappropriate and incomplete."

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26186645 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26195050

With all this taken into account, I think that I favor a system of primarily nuclear power providing baseload needs (with some basic winterization please), and a mixture of other sources that can economically and consistently meet variable demand. This leaves wind a solid place where it is economically efficient, as in some windy regions of Texas. I haven't completely made up my mind though.

I think you have your terms mixed up. Capacity refers to the maximum output. "Normal capacity" isn't a thing. You could say "normal output" or "expected output".

> I haven't stared at the ERCOT numbers, and am disinclined to do so -- the fact that much of the state was without power for several days, and early reports suggested the grid was some minutes away from catastrophic cascading failure, suggests to me that concise numbers aren't the important thing here.

I gave references to the exact locations which would take at most a minute or two to find. If we're just going off journalists' opinion pieces, then we're not ever going to get any further than the cherry-picked stats that they choose to provide. If you don't think my numbers are worth taking into account because they come from the source data and not someone's propaganda, then I don't know what to tell you. You're happy enough to cite numbers when they fit into your argument.

> This is factored into the overall grid provisioning and maintenance of power to consumers. It's why I asked about the effect of this variability outside of major cold events. Evidently not so much?

The recent events indicate precisely that this planning had some serious flaws. We cannot make that assumption. Although you have pointed out that wind power normally varies between 10% and 25% of the supply, so the normal variability is apparently very large.

> Were they not so intentionally disconnected, power could have easily been sourced from elsewhere in the country.

The adjacent regions also suffered rolling blackouts. There was a little power to source, but not much. This argument is not supported by the "concise numbers".

Re my personal opinion on wind use: My original position was that wind can be very good despite some issues, but as I've gotten into these discussions and dug through the data, I see significant reasons that wind might be a bad fit for Texas without some major improvements beyond just winterization. I'm open to those improvements but I don't know what they could be, so my opinions here are not really made up yet.

I'm not really interested in advancing any particular policy prescription. I'm mostly pushing back against the widespread misinformation (especially avoidance of actual numbers in favor of vague terms) around this topic, in order to give some space for a real discussion. I'm not trying to show that so much wind generation is a problem, I'm trying to show that it could be a problem and that possibility needs to be accounted for. Wind shouldn't be assumed to have "exceeded projections" because some partisan "fact-checker" said so without specifying how absurdly low those 24-hour projections were. That's why I've repeatedly said that winterization could improve the situation, but I also point out the flaws in thinking that winterization will magically solve all the issues, since wind is so variable even without any freezing.

You're reading a lot into my comments. You seem to think that I'm against using wind power, which is absolutely not true, as I've commented in the past. I'm against the current narrative's misinformation which cherry-picks stats to push a political agenda. I would like ERCOT to continue to "use wind turbines as part of an overall power generation strategy", but in order to do this intelligently it is necessary to understand the strengths and weaknesses of different generation sources. The fashionable anti-nuclear, pro-wind propaganda is not helping anyone to understand reality.

All of my information about the output of different sources comes from personally digging through ERCOT's minutely detailed reports[0]. I haven't seen a nice, neat fact-checking propaganda piece that deals with the relevant data, but I haven't really searched that hard because all the data is right there, straight from the source.

The "Fuel Mix Report" lists the output of each generation type in 15 minute intervals[1]. There are over 25000 GW of wind capacity, so we would expect to see a maximum of a bit less than 6250 GWh of wind output in the best 15 minute periods ("a bit less" is taking into account that we don't expect 100% output even in the best circumstances). The data matches this, as we see peaks reaching about 5600 GWh. The values are conveniently totaled for each day, and with a theoretical ceiling of 600,000 GWh capacity per day we see that the most actually produced on any day in Jan or Feb 2021 was 458,000 GWh on January 6th, 76% of capacity.

If we look at February 15, 16, and 17, wind output was 225,000 GWh for all three days combined, or a whopping 12.5% of capacity. This matches the pitiful performance that I was seeing in real time in ERCOT's feed.

None of the 15 minute periods report 0 GWh, the lowest being 149 GWh on Feb 15th. So either the granularity is not fine enough or I was just wrong to say that wind dropped to zero, and I would like to revise my position to say that wind output dropped to 2% of capacity.

Hopefully you can understand how I can both support intelligent use of wind power while being dismayed by fact-checking pieces that turn "only 25%" of our capacity being 87.5% offline into vague terms like "exceeded projections" and "wind wasn't a problem", as if 15,000-20,000 GW of capacity being offline was not a significant factor. (87.5% of 25,000 GW is 21,875 GW, but again I am not expecting wind to be able to produce at 100%).

> indeed why you seem to be surprised that if ECOT prepared wind turbines, as well as gas & nuclear (which both lost a fair chunk of capacity) then the outcome wouldn't have been so appalling.

This comes off like you're just making things up to troll me. I've specifically mentioned winterization many times. It's also very telling that, like the fact-checkers, you have to stick to vague terms like "lost a fair chunk of capacity" without getting into the actual numbers which would show how massive that disparity really is.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/gridinfo/generation [1] http://www.ercot.com/content/wcm/lists/181766/IntGenbyFuel20...

> Wind ran at about 50% of capacity and that was because it wasn't winterized.

That's bullshit. I was watching the ERCOT feed [0] during the blackouts, and I never saw it exceed 30%. I posted about it here extensively during the event, and no one reported seeing higher numbers. Right now wind is 5727 MW (23% of installed wind capacity), which is actually a little higher than the average generation I was seeing during the blackouts. PolitiFact very suspiciously doesn't want to say which sources are supposed to support which claims, but I can't find any support for their figures in their ERCOT links, which are the only actual sources provided.

Edit: I did a little more digging, and found that it's your claim that "wind ran at about 50% of capacity" that is completely false. The truth is that only half of the capacity was frozen, but that does not mean that the other half was producing. About half of the unfrozen capacity was not producing for other reasons. The truth is that wind output was 15-30% of capacity due to a combination of factors, including turbines freezing, batteries losing capacity and plain lack of wind. PolitiFact is not outright lying, they're just being as misleading as they possibly can be by cherry-picking stats like "50% was unfrozen" but omitting highly relevant data like "70-85% was offline". That's propaganda, not fact-checking.

[0] http://www.ercot.com/content/cdr/html/real_time_system_condi...

All sources were notoriously un-winterized, but wind generation had the additional problem of not working when there wasn't enough wind, which is why it dropped to 0 at one point. Suggesting that wind would perform adequately if it were only winterized is simply inaccurate. It's common knowledge among non-zealots that wind and solar are far too unreliable to supply baseload generation needs, and that unreliability led to a missing 15-20 GW of generation when we needed it. Base load must be supplied by something else, like perhaps nuclear which performed pretty well despite not being winterized.

Every power source had some failures, but the only power sources that dropped all the way to 0 were solar and wind. Nuclear operated at 75% of capacity, while fossil generation seems to have been around 60%. Wind recovered slightly and "exceeded projections" by producing in the 15-30% range, but closer to 15% at night when it's coldest.

I wouldn't frame the blackouts as a "windmill problem" as they're primarily a "winterization problem", but having so much capacity invested in unreliable wind generation was a very significant contributor to the blackouts that should not be ignored. ERCOT is a world leader in wind production, and that was pretty punishing when its 25GW of wind capacity was producing 0. We invested billions into a generation source that at one point produced 0 and eventually "exceeded projections" by producing slightly more than 0. We could have invested those billions in basically any other source and had significantly more electricity available. Winterization would have helped somewhat with less turbines freezing, but it doesn't help at all when the wind stops blowing.

> There are tons of ways to support reform of police (or otherwise vindication of the fact that government/police overreach is a problem) that don’t involve “defunding” the police

While this is technically true, in practice support for BLM is virtually synonymous with support for defunding the police. That's why your implication: "don't support BLM -> totally discredited" is so divisive, because in the real world it means "don't support defunding police -> totally discredited". It should also be noted that the BLM corporation funnels hundreds of millions of dollars in donations to the Democratic Party through ActBlue [0], so you are actually requiring conservatives to support the Democratic Party in order not to be discredited.

Progressive politicians always frame their specific policy goals as a righteous moral crusade, and always manipulate the narrative to make it seem like the the only people who could possibly think differently are "some of the worst people in the world". It's tribal bullshit designed to shut down any real discussion about whether the policies actually address the needs they are claimed to address, or whether they do more harm than good overall. People have different opinions on policy for many reasons, some good, some bad. They shouldn't have to constantly fall in line behind the latest partisan movement to be seen as having legitimate opinions.

To clarify: I'm using the word "discredited" because the question you proposed "So the question is, is an ideology like conservativism what it claims to outsiders or to what its adherents actually do and say to one another? Professed vs revealed preferences." taken with your arguments seem to amount to seeing conservativism as basically bullshit. You've framed your comment as responding to a question, but akarma's comment doesn't actually ask any questions, and you kind of took over the framing with your response. I'm responding to your comment, not the line of questioning that you have been talking about (since I don't see any question for you to respond to, was the comment edited?)

[1] https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ms_blm_homepage_2019

Because it's tribal propaganda that adds nothing to the discussion. There are a myriad of plausible reasons not to want to defund the police, but Robotbeat is parroting the party line that there are no possible legitimate reasons and that only racists can hold that opinion.

> Implicit here is the claim that giant companies do hilariously dumb things a greater fraction of times than small companies, but I have seen absolutely zero evidence of that.

I don't think that's necessarily what is implied. Small companies make decisions with many orders of magnitude less resources applied to making those decisions, so we expect the outcomes to be significantly worse on average. If Google spends 100,000 times the resources on its decisions but the outcome is only 10x better than the output of a random small company, that is notable.

I don't know all the stats, but I know Waco, TX has a large homeless population since I helped out a bit there when I was younger. A quick search shows that Waco spends $39,000/yr per homeless individual[0], and the famous Church Under the Bridge[1] (an open-air gathering under the I-35 overpass) has been unable to meet normally but is making sure that people still get fed [2]. (They are mention feeding 80 people--there were hundreds when I attended, but there are a number of kitchens around so it sounds like most attendees are getting their food elsewhere).

I don't know why anyone would assume that homeless people are starving in Texas. What do you think all the shelters and kitchens are for?

[0] https://www.waco-texas.com/housing-homelessness.asp#gsc.tab=... [1] https://www.churchunderthebridge.org/ [2] https://www.kwtx.com/content/news/Waco-Church-Under-the-Brid...

> I don’t think the issue is that kids don’t want to go to school at all.

This is an incredible assumption. There are probably millions of people (Paul Graham, for one) who would agree with Scott Alexander's "description of experiencing school as tortuous": one such example, "Scott, your description of school-as-hell deeply resonated with me. I can say without exaggeration that my time in the public school system was more miserable to me, and left me with deeper scars and issues, than my time in Iraq."[0]. Most of these complaints about child-prison hell-schools are from people who went to far better schools than the one in the article. I spent ten years in prison, and I have far more hatred for the public school system than I do for the prison system.

I agree that counseling could help in many cases, perhaps most, but it's deeply mistaken to say that the vast majority of kids are willing to go to school. There will always be a significant number of kids who simply don't want to go, or would rather spend their days involved in drugs or gangs. Plenty of people think that going to school is "acting white".

[0] https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/highlights-from-the-co...

It is usually the parents that are penalized, but that's still pretty devastating to the kids. As for what kind of fucked up system does that, I was surprised to learn that it's something that some progressives have been pushing for[0][1], so I gather that it's a bipartisan thing. But it's fortunately fairly rare for someone to actually be jailed. In my personal experience, it was the threat of jail time that dramatically escalated the stress of the situation.

[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/10/17/924766186... [1] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/kamala-harris-truancy-arrests...

That class was for guys with 3rd-5th grade level test scores. Most were forced to attend school and didn't really try to progress. I don't know the exact progression rates, but they were quite pitiful. You'd see a guy who last tested at 4.0 grade level take the next EA test and score 3.4. I suspect that quite a few had some degree of brain damage whether from drugs or violence, and covered up an inability to learn with a front of not caring. I helped one older guy for months, and he would constantly forget things that he previously had down no problem. It seemed like he would forget as much as he had learned. The higher-level classes had more students who were actually trying to graduate.

I later took college classes, and that was a different story. One teacher said that his prison students were much better than his free-world students, as they generally weren't partying all weekend etc. and were motivated to be in school.

I worked as a tutor in prison, helping out in class. The teacher I worked with longest said that she felt safer working in prison than she did in public school, because there were guards right down the hall. Discipline is apparently a lot easier to enforce in prison than it is in public schools.

I felt like I was pretty successful providing individual instruction. For instance, I found a way to teach basic algebra that worked for guys with 3rd and 4th-grade level test scores. It didn't teach them the principles they would need for greater math education, but none of these guys were ever going to study college-level Calculus. They just needed enough math to pass the GED. Unfortunately, teaching that way involved a lot of moving around the classroom, and I didn't really want predators staring at my ass behind my back. So I didn't stick with it.

It says a hell of a lot that teachers find that kind of environment safer than public school. That suggests to me that discipline & safety have to be comprehensively addressed before any other changes will have a chance to work.

That's a good point. If this school is as terrible as it sounds, the students probably wouldn't be learning much even if they were in school every day. We need serious reform on multiple axes; reforming one in isolation probably won't help much.

Truancy does make teaching effectively much harder. You're forced to either go over the beginning material over and over for the people who missed it, or you just abandon them and teach the handful of people who have attended consistently. No matter what you teach, you're teaching the wrong thing for half or more of the class. Then people get bored, and they skip school...

Even the most intelligent person in the world will consistently make false deductions if she starts with false premises.

Ideally there is a process of incorporating real-world results and revising one's beliefs, but that process seems to have pretty much shut down in favor of strict political orthodoxy.

Sure, but they are mostly seen as superficial differences that people don't much care about in practice. One might not want to go to Mass because they prefer the style of a modern evangelical service, but they couldn't care less if you go to Mass and have no interest in converting you to their style. As an example, Catholics who move to a new area might start attending a Methodist church because of the similarities in services. I'm sure many of the leaders are aware of the deeper differences, but among the people not many care.

That varies by jurisdiction. But it doesn't matter much in this case, as pressing charges against hundreds of minority parents is just as unacceptable.

We've had years of Obama administration policies specifically designed to prevent enforcement actions against minority students on the grounds of such enforcement being racist. The system is in perfect alignment with the incentives given to it. The problem is that those incentives sometimes lead to outcomes like the case we are discussing.

A new administator or new system with the same incentives is likely going to give the same results.

Fines and jail time are the "actual outcomes" of truancy charges, and are much more immediate than proficiency tests and graduation rates. You simply can't force people to go to school without also punishing some of the parents and students, who are disproportionately in disadvantaged groups.

Religion affects political beliefs, but pornography is still a political matter. Marxists and feminists also commonly oppose pornography. Pornography is illegal in China, North Korea, and Vietnam, which are all atheistic communist states.

What about the political fallout from pressing truancy charges against hundreds of minority students? Truancy, at least in my experience, involves fines and/or jail time.