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tokamak

Burnt Ends
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Everything posted by tokamak

  1. Freddie’s in my top 5 for sure
  2. You may have a point, but my wife works in the corporate world (a major public company that you've all heard of), and short-termism has begun to infect everything they do. Stategic thinking is completely out the window in the holy name of This Quarter. It's driving her so crazy that she's started looking for an exit.
  3. Ours sits pretty close to our house, but we don't have any windows that open on that side and we minimize the use of the door on that side of the house when it's running. My feeling has always been that as long as you're being somewhat sensible and not running the generator in a closed area (e.g., garage), you'll be fine.
  4. Centerpoint was woefully unprepared and disorganized, and trying to claim otherwise is absurd. They spend way less on tree trimming than neighboring utilities. Their infrastructure is visibly decrepit. If there have been any significant efforts to trim trees and harden infrastructure over the last few years, I certainly haven't witnessed it. The utility pole in my back yard (which caused an outage last week) looks like it is about 200 fucking years old. It's rotting and falling apart. The crew that came to fix it told me they had to go get a part, because they didn't have a replacement on their truck, because the original was so old and outdated. Centerpoint communicated virtually nothing for the first few days after the storm, and only after outcry and pressure began publishing any sort of outage map and restoration timeline estimates. Problem: the map and the timelines were utterly wrong and useless, even to this day. At no point did they provide widespread, accurate information. The map was even various shades of green, instead of red, to make it look better at a glance. People on Reddit had to manually edit it to even make it readable. They hid behind "safety" as an excuse for the first two days of slow response, when everyone with a brain knows that these are trained out of town linemen, and a 15 minute tailgate safety meeting is probable the norm. Social media is chock full of anecdotes, anonymous reports, and rumors about trucks sitting idle for lack of any direction on where to go, untrained CNP office staff on the ground trying to coordinate repair crews, and inefficient paper-based ticketing systems. I'm flabbergasted that anyone thinks CNP did fine here. All that said, I have a way different take on this that I've realized makes me an outlier here in Houston, in talking to my friends and neighbors. I'm not hardly mad at Centerpoint at all. It's a for-profit corporation, and a monopoly to boot. Its responsibility is maximizing returns for shareholders, not maximizing electricity uptime for Houstonians. Expecting otherwise is like expecting a snake not to bite. It's just what they do, that's their nature. Cutting down trees and upgrading infrastructure increases their costs. I'm sure they've done the math that it would cost more than the lost revenue from occasional outages. Are we really expecting that they would make improvements that benefit customers (who can't leave them) over shareholders, just out of the goodness of their hearts? The only remedies for a private company with a monopoly are competition, nationalization, or a ball-busting regulator that is immune to capture. None of those things is going to happen, either for practical or political reasons. Centerpoint has a PR disaster every few years, customers and politicians get Very, Very Mad and then....life moves on. I think a big part of Centerpoint's usefulness is as a PR shield for the people that actually have the power to change the situation. If you're mad at Centerpoint, I think you're mad at the wrong people.
  5. Didn't see a thread. Opening ceremony live at 12:30 central on July 26. Rebroadcast that night at 6:30. FYI, NBC is raising the price of Peacock by a couple bucks a month as of tomorrow. If you sign up today, one month at the old price will get you through the entire games.
  6. “Hi” is better than a string of random numbers lol my friends
  7. Finally got power around 7:00 tonight. Seven and a half days almost on the dot. I got an automated call from Centerpoint saying they’d get to me by Friday. Good job, good effort Ms. Robovoice. My poor neighbor’s A/C won’t kick on. The gift that keeps on giving.
  8. Why would Centerpoint care about PR? Are you going to cancel your account with them?
  9. Supposedly the top of our TE board was Townsend, Armstrong, Winston. The staff loves Townsend.
  10. Rich people all have Generacs. It's business as usual for them.
  11. Same exact situation here. Literally my block has nothing, and we're staring at people with power in all four directions. Around 30ish homes. We got power for a few seconds yesterday at 5:45 pm, immediately heard a loud boom, and lost it again. I'm sure we're back down at the bottom of the queue again.
  12. This is unwatchable. Every 2 minutes is a different Argentinian rolling around like he’s been shot.
  13. They got my whole neighborhood back up and running…. Except my street. I kept getting a bunch of celebratory texts all day. I guess we’re a dreaded nested outage. Back of the queue we go.
  14. Kelshaun Johnson on Tuesday I think
  15. I’m starting to think these Centerpoint guys might be full of shit.
  16. Wiping your ass while sweaty has got to be one of life’s worst feelings.
  17. Just watched Cruella with my kids. It’s much better than a Disney villain spinoff cash grab has any right to be.
  18. My brothers in Christ, it’s fucking 89 degrees inside my house and I’ve got at least another 48 hours of this to go. Could you kindly shut the fuck up about your churches?
  19. At this point I don't give a fuck if it's Landon Donovan or Billy Donovan or Tate Donovan. Change is good.
  20. Crowd sourced outage map, since Centerpoint is useless: https://digital-client.com/?mibextid=UyTHkb
  21. Last official update from Centerpoint is 80% of everyone restored by end of day Sunday. They promised that most people would have concrete estimates by today, but haven't updated their map since last night and it's all sorts of wrong anyway. I assume the rain yesterday and today is fucking things up.
  22. I’ve been thinking about this. I’m sure all the linemen know what they’re doing, but I also assume the focus right now is on getting people back online quickly. Temporary solutions have a tendency to become permanent fixes though. After every outage, there’s a mad rush to get the grid back up, but does Centerpoint have the resources or even the willingness to go back over everything and “do it right” after all of the out of town resources have left? I wonder how much that cycle contributes to the fragility of the grid.
  23. That’s insane to me. So much shareholder value just being left on the table like that.
  24. Are you in the business of selling useless tracking websites?
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