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...

 

[lukipedia]

$30 billion could go a long way toward fixing the electrical grid. Might require a little legislation, too, though.

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.

 

[lukipedia]

While there are several states that elicit a collective sigh of disappointment, Texas & Florida are the anchors that prevent the US from being a modern country with a positive future. Texas could secede as it is want to constantly warn, and very little would be lost in the long term.

You realize there are a lot of us here who have no desire to secede, who hate the current state of affairs in Texas, and who are actively trying to foment change here (even though most of the time it feels totally futile)?

 

[lukipedia]

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.

The legislature is, by and large, getting their pockets lined by the same interests. They're mostly complicit.

 

[lukipedia]

Stay strong. Remember that California was a conservative Republican stronghold, until it wasn't.

I'm trying, but I'm tired. My wife and I are expecting a baby, and I'm losing my stomach for this fight. But I appreciate the support!

 

[lukipedia]

Holy hell. 84 hours!? The hell is wrong with Texas infrastructure.

As a California resident, we most certainly do have our own outages. In general it lasts a couple hours. The longest one in recent mind, lasted all of one night when I was reading Jurassic Park by candle light.

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.

 

[lukipedia]

I'm still here, but I'm just... tired.

Right there with you, partner. I'm glad you're here!

 

[lukipedia]

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.

Samsung and NXP lost hundreds of millions of dollars in ruined semiconductors due to power losses during the 2021 snowstorm:

https://archive.md/SF6yu
And yet high-tech companies—including more Samsung wafer fabs—keep pouring into Central Texas because the million-dollar (or even billion-dollar) tax breaks they get from the state and local governments outweigh the potential losses in production they may occasionally experience:

https://archive.md/3i7MH

 

[lukipedia]

Your state is dragging us all back to April 12, 1861 and we really have had enough. Move. The sooner the break up the sooner we can get to treating it like Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, Russia, N.Korea, etc...

Well, shoot, if I had known it was that easy to just move and help accelerate a civil war I would have done it ages ago.