Texas is planning to make a huge public investment in space

"Further investment will cement Texas as the preeminent location for innovation."

See full article...

 

[ranthog]

If only they could spend the money on the welfare of the people in the state. Sadly that just isn't possible. Instead large give giveaways to rich people is what we must do.

 

[ranthog]

Doesn't this come dangerously close to supporting science? I thought Republicans were against that (see the mRNA article).

You assume this isn't just a give away to a few rich people who probably politically support Abbot. The man has shown himself to be very shady and corrupt, and the legislature has no balls to reign him in.

 

[ranthog]

Yeah, I get that it's possible to multitask, and you can legislate a bunch of things at once. But having gone without power for 84 hours this winter, and having had to boil water for a week the year before, and having had to do both the year before that, it's a little galling to me that Abbott is happy to ask for more money to support corporate interests while leaving the broader constituency to suffer. And I say that as a lover of all things space.

The problem is we damn well know they have no intent to do anything about the problems on the ERCOT interconnect. If you live in Texas, better hope you are near the border and not in an ERCOT area.

 

[ranthog]

Well, it seems to have been working just fine for the Dems and their progressives also! GOP doesn't have the 'lock' on that "hypocrisy for a strategy" thing...

Try not to project your own political party's flaws onto everyone else.

 

[ranthog]

So a more serious talk. As a corporation I can't see why anyone would willingly invest capital in Florida, when you have a government that is willing to pass legislation to punish companies at the whim of a governor. While Texas hasn't started down this road it is certainly a risk with politicians like Abbot.

It is hard to leave once you're there, but are people really going to want to invest significant long term capital in a place where the government might try to personally punish your company.

Would incentives like these be worth the risk that operating in these states have to your workers and capital investments?

 

[ranthog]

Unless a business support the LBGTQ community, that is.

In Florida at this point I think disagreeing with the governor is enough to get your business targeted. I doubt this is limited to supporting LGBTQ folk.

 

[ranthog]

I often tell my daughter this to cheer her up. Even the red states like Texas are only slightly red (52.1% in 2020) and blue states are only slightly blue. I don't think it is fair to lump everyone into one color and dismiss the entire state regardless of your political persuasion. In 2020, approximately 5.9 million people out of a state of 29 million people voted for Trump and it is called a "red state".

Democrats are making slow progress in Texas. That can't be said for some other states.

 

[ranthog]

I wonder how many millions will be used to bus more people to Kamala Harris' residence from that surplus...

I'm sure that Abbot will transfer billions into the willful, unnecessary, and malicious cruelty fund, which he will personally control.

 

[ranthog]

So far Texas has had two "once in a century" storms in this century, in 2010 and 2021. Nearly three hundred people died for lack of power and heat for multiple days in the 2021 storm; the grid was, by ERCOT's own estimate, less than a half-hour from complete collapse. Texas power producers and its grid were and largely still are utterly unprepared for cold weather. It's absurd.

The power grid was about 4 minutes from collapse, not a half hour. They got through more than half the grace period to bring grid frequencies back into spec before every generator in the state would start tripping off the grid. They came really fucking close to it, if they had a few more plants trip off or if one of the utilities was delayed in load shedding ERCOT may have become the first interconnect to ever do a black start.

On top of that, they found out a bunch of the black start generators in the state were not actually functional because of the storm.

 

[ranthog]

There are plenty of examples of other state governments, blue ones included, that have legislation and regulations and state attorney generals targeting companies and entire industries. The federal government is at least as culpable.

Any large company invests in lobbyists in large part to try to (1) get warning of, and, if possible (2) block legislation that could hurt or kill their business. I would consider it irresponsible of the company owners not to do that, government risk has been a very real one since at least the Wickard vs. Filburn Supreme Court decision. Given the roughly 4000 new federal regulations approved every year, lobbyists obviously don't always win, nor should they.

Regarding Texas's poor infrastructure, which others have mentioned, I can tell you that NJ has some of the highest taxes in the country, and when hurricane Sandy hit, they were interviewing out of state utility workers helping fix the lines saying that NJ had the most obsolete electrical grid they had ever encountered. CA, of course, is famous for having electrical grid problems even during relatively normal summers. Less than a week separated legislation they passed to end sales of gas powered cars in favor of electric (speaking of targeting industries) and them issuing a notice that people shouldn't charge their electric cars during the day because they don't have enough electricity for even the small number on the road now. Nobody invests in infrastructure they way they should, unfortunately.

More on topic, I wonder if SpaceX can be considered somewhat like the Hewlett Packard of Silicon Valley? Certainly many people from SpaceX have moved on to high profile positions with other space companies, as happened with HP in the early days of Silicon Valley. That $350M investment may actually pay off long term.

Bullshit. It is not normal for a governor to decide he doesn't politically like a stance that a company is taking, and then to arbitrarily go after something completely unrelated the company does the way that DeSantis has done in Florida. I really fucking hate defending Disney, but what is happening to Disney isn't right.

I can't think of anything on par with what is going on in Florida today.

The government of course has a role in regulating industries. Creating regulations for industries and enforcing them is the job of the government. That isn't what is going on in Florida. Sometimes that means that you put in regulations that will kill off things, like coal power plants. But that is done for legitimate policy reasons and not because coal plants supported the state expanding the trade programs a the community colleges.

I don't think California has had a regular summer in a long time. They are heavily investing in new generation and fixing the grid to be safe in a climate it was never intended for. California screwed up pretty badly with deregulation, but it is far better off than Texas. It also is actively taking actions to fix those issues.

 

[ranthog]

Exactly. This is exactly what Obama was being accused of in "picking and choosing" which companies the government would subsidize with wind and solar power. Meanwhile, Trump went on a shit talking extravaganza on Twitter with various private companies and DeSantis has a personal vendetta against Disney and now it's crickets from the usual rightwing hypocrites.

There is also the fact that there was zero substance behind the accusations thrown at Obama. Not even a whiff of corruption. Unlike the stench, the smoke, and the burning dumpster fire around Trump's.

 

[ranthog]

3 minutes, 46 seconds to be exact. Just a handful of seconds really to having to endure a 19th century lifestyle for the several weeks or months it would have taken to repair everything.

It would have been a humanitarian disaster that would make Katrina look like a minor incident. The challenge of providing heat in a state where none of the infrastructure is functioning would have probably been impossible.

Heck, evacuating people would be a nightmare, but probably necessary to preserve life.

For as bad as things were in Texas, that was the good ending. And they've pretty much done nothing to fix the problem except raise prices in the long run on consumers.

 

[ranthog]

I hate DeSantis with a passion but Disney shouldn't have and doesn't need to be their own autonomous zone. Corporations already run the government through lobbying they don't need to literally be the governing body of a region.

Yes, but why you're doing something matters. DeSantis isn't doing this because he doesn't think Disney should have its own autonomous zone. DeSantis is doing this to punish Disney for standing up for LGBTQ people, in part because its own employees pushed it to.

On top of that, it looks like DeSantis isn't giving control and the tax base to the local government, which is what would a good government reform would do. They're taking it over at the state level. Where DeSantis can really fuck with Disney.

So please don't equate taking revenge using the power of the state against a political enemy is the same as good government reform. This act was only intended to not only intimidate and silence Disney, but also silence all other opposition in the state.

 

[ranthog]

You can go to Dallas, Ft. Worth, Houston, or any other large city in Texas and find homeless people shitting on the streets and all the other things the OP was parroting from conservative talk radio. It's hardly unique to San Francisco. Any city of sufficient size is going to have these problems because people like the OP would rather pretend those people don't exist so they have an extra $5/year in their pocket, to paying that in taxes to help these people.

Rural areas also have this, but the population is just less dense.

 

[ranthog]

Standard fascist dictator-wannabe playbook : dissenters have to be crushed to show power.
See Trump for more examples...

I can't believe people are equating political revenge with government reform.

 

[ranthog]

Yeah. This ice storm was different than the big snow storm in 2021: this one was much more localized, as the outages were caused by trees bringing down power lines. 2021 was a much more systemic failure of the grid. Both are issues that have been brewing for decades, and both were known issues that, for varying reasons—NIMBYism, politics, etc.—were not addressed.

One is a minor cut that you need proper wound care for so it doesn't get infected. The other is like having an agressive stage 4 cancer and the doctor tells you that your prognosis for living another year isn't good.

If I were running a business I'd consider this to be far too big of a liability if they had to black start the grid. That is the type of event that gets real expensive really quick.