Thread by @ireneista

We lived through the 2003 blackout. For younger people who don't know about it: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast…

That was an easier thing to survive than the stuff going on in Texas right now. We have no doubt that people did die from it, even ordinary small-scale blackouts have death tolls, but the weather wasn't so extreme as what's happening now.

We were in some personal danger from heat exhaustion, but we got through it and it's nowhere remotely near the worst we've been through, so we've mostly put it out of our mind. Except...

The thing is, we wanted to know how that could happen in the US. At the time, we bought into a lot of mythology about the country; in particular, we'd never really questioned that US infrastructure was more or less the best it could be.

So we followed the news coverage pretty closely for a couple years, and what we read disturbed us.

It disturbed us because it was a highly political blame game. For a long time it seemed like the whole thing was mostly going to be about trying to identify some specific, single factor that everyone could agree was the one thing that should not have happened.

Ask any engineer, in any field. That is not how accident investigations work. For something of that scale, there's never just one cause. That's because if there WERE just one cause, the fact that there weren't redundant protections in place would be, you know, a second cause.

We used to point people to the Wikipedia page and tell them to read it with their SRE hat on, and be disturbed by it. The description of events there is a lot more complete and well-rounded than it used to be, so that's good as far as it goes.

The thing is, though, you know what did not happen? No political will to invest in the electric grid ever materialized.

We lost an enormous amount of respect for the US from that single incident - mind, it was an enormous incident, we really can't under-state the practical or psychological impact it had on everyone affected.

We are not experts on energy policy. We do not follow the industry. However, even from our outsider's perspective, it's obvious that the US needs to put a lot more money into maintenance and reliability of its basic infrastructure.

We don't want to politicize an ongoing disaster, but if it's not politicized, these disasters will keep happening. The state of US politics is that everyone takes it as *axiomatic* that things in the US are the best anywhere, the best they could possibly be.

Because that's taken as an axiom, as an assumption that doesn't need to be checked, few people are in the habit of actually comparing it to reality.

Get your shit together, and demand better from your politicians. Infrastructure may not be exciting, but it's important and worth the money.

One more thing. The US has been on a multi-decade campaign to privatize and sell off as much infrastructure as possible. That's related to how things got so bad, though it's not the whole story.

When the investigation reports for this current disaster come out, pay close attention to whether any of it turns out to be that for-profit utility companies were incentivized to ignore safety concerns.

To whatever extent the profit motive of utilities is in conflict with human survival, you can either regulate those functions, or have them be state-owned. Those are the choices.

You can like it or hate it, but that's reality. Thank you for reading.