brit

210215 loonatheworld Twitter update

this guy talks insanely fast but this is solid info on electrical outrages in the US.

If you’re looking at Texas right now and thinking, “It seems pretty bad that a state’s electrical grid can fail overnight from a snowstorm,” I have news for you. It’s so much worse than you could ever imagine. Don’t be a heartless idiot and blame ‘red state voters;’ it’s red states, blue states, purple states, green states, everywhere is in crisis.

In 2017, the American Society of Civil Engineers gave our energy grid a D+, because almost all of it was built in the 1950s and 60s with a 50-year life expectancy, and we’re 10 to 20 years past that. Across the country, 640,000 miles of high voltage lines run at full capacity at almost all times, which is way more than the grid was designed to handle, and Texas in particular has one of the worst ratios between planned and real capacity.

It’s so bad that the US Government has said that if just nine of America’s 55,000 electrical substations are brought down, it could cause a coast-to-coast blackout lasting 18 months or more. And testimony from the executive director of Task Force on National and Homeland Security has said that a prolonged collapse of the electrical grid could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population. [screenshot in the video has highlighted text from this source, saying: “a prolonged collapse of this nation’s electrical grid—through starvation, disease, and societal collapse—could result in the death of up to 90% of the American population.”]

Today, the US has more power outages than any other developed country. And that’s because 68% of the electricity in the US is managed by investor-owned privatized utility companies [the source I found said it’s actually 72%], and updating their systems cuts into their profits, so they don’t do anything until something fails. And when things do fail, and, for example, start massive wildfires in California, guess who pays for it? Mostly taxpayers. 

After my teacher introduced us to this theory, she asked us, “is love a feeling? Or is it a choice?” We were all a bunch of teenagers. Naturally we said it was a feeling. She said that if we clung to that belief, we’d never have a lasting relationship of any sort.

She made us interview a dozen adults who were or had been married and we asked them about their marriages and why it lasted or why it failed. At the end, I asked every single person if love was an emotion or a choice.

Everybody said that it was a choice. It was a conscious commitment. It was something you choose to make work every day with a person who has chosen the same thing. They all said that at one point in their marriage, the “feeling of love” had vanished or faded and they weren’t happy. They said feelings are always changing and you cannot build something that will last on such a shaky foundation.

The married ones said that when things were bad, they chose to open the communication, chose to identify what broke and how to fix it, and chose to recreate something worth falling in love with.

The divorced ones said they chose to walk away.

Ever since that class, since that project, I never looked at relationships the same way. I understood why arranged marriages were successful. I discovered the difference in feelings and commitments. I’ve never gone for the person who makes my heart flutter or my head spin. I’ve chosen the people who were committed to choosing me, dedicated to finding something to adore even on the ugliest days.