How much money should the government spend to extend the life of an 80 year old sickly person?

I did such a calculation days ago, but I did it for a five hour flight.

What about the likelihood of those freezing in Texas.  Best I can tell, 5 in Texas died from hyperthermia during the recent storm, and one of those died while outside.  I'd be shocked if Texas averages more than 0.25 such deaths per year due to power outages.  I believe there are 28,000,000 people in Texas.  Once again, do we spend billions and billions of dollars to save one person every 4 years?  Sorry, but anyone saying yes is a dummy.

My airliner example was simply another example of potential spending money to make things "safer".  Should we can spend every penny that we have to make things "safer", and don't forget, every plane holds a granny.  BTW, I don't really believe that we should spend unlimited money on jet planes to make them a tiny bit "safer".  After all, if we are really all about safty, let's put a speed limit of 20 mph on the interstate highways and a 10 mph limit on surface roads.  Just think how many grannies we could save!

OK, deaths is one thing.  But other consequences of a week of power outage are nothing to sneeze at (no pun intended).  Are there not economic losses?  Crops destroyed?  Homes and businesses (at least the buildings/land) destroyed?   Can they rebound from all that, the whole state?  Maybe I've watched too much TV coverage.  I see every board member having oversight of the grid system has resigned.  What does that say?

Candy

Many Texas homes and businesses did experienced water leaks.  Had they simply let the water trickle in a gentle stream into each sink during the coldest stretches................problem solved.  My buddy did, and his house is fine.  His in-laws and brother-in-law seemed to think that was a crazy concept, and instead shut their water off.  We'll, all that did was keep the water from leaking after their pipes did burst.  My buddy grew up in northern Indiana, and the in-law family has always lived in Texas.  I grew up 35 miles NW of Chicago.  Pete and I learned growing up that one simply runs the water to keep pipes from freezing.

Maybe they will listen my northern buddy Pete next time.

I didn't say that ALL jets with three engines were more fuel-efficient than ALL jets with two engines. I said that for a given payload and gross weight, it was more fuel-efficient to divide the thrust generated among three engines rather than two. If you have any commercial aviation knowledge, you know that the reason for the current lack of use of the three-engine configuration was accidents suffered by the DC-10 and L-1011, which had nothing to do with the engine placement as such. You're half correct about the DC-10; they're no longer in passenger service, but there are plenty of them still in use as cargo planes (FedEx and UPS, among others) and air tankers.

The latest estimate I heard of the economic damage was fifty billion dollars. That is not even considering the misery and death that occured. It's ironic that the problem could have been anticipated and dealt with long ago for a fraction of that cost. Penny wise, pound foolish, as they say. Irresponsiblity brought on by greed.

What happened in Texas starkly highlights the fatal flaw in having vital services provided on a for-profit basis. It also shows that running a state as a corrupt oligarchy leads to bigly profits for the oligarchs, right up until something goes wrong.

And you know what's really disgusting? The head of Texas's power company (ERCOT) capering and dancing while reporting that the recent freeze generated more profit in two days than had been produced in all of 2020. If massive power outages are actually big revenue generators for the power company, why on earth would they do anything to prevent those outages?

This is why in more advanced and modern states, public utilities are heavily regulated. But not in independent-minded Tayucksass. Yee-haw!

The problem wasn't water pipes freezing. It was failure of the state power grid. Pete couldn't have done diddly squat to restore his power if it had been shut off. Living in an area that was less affected doesn't make him some kind of noble ultra-prepared warrior. It means he was lucky.

Why did some folks suddenly get utility bills in the thousands?  

Candy

It's something called "variable market pricing." The unregulated Texas power companies (five of them) had pushed for a way to ensure they had a reliable revenue stream even when power consumption dropped, as might happen, for example, during the three nice days that Texas gets every year.

So the Texas public utilities commission gave them the ability to charge customers up to 100 times the normal rate--which means it tops out at $9,000/megawatt-hour. During a very cold week like the one Texas just experienced, an average household would have consumed 0.5 mwh and its bill would have been $30. The "peak pricing" model was meant to be applied only during times of very high demand, meaning that for customers who bought their electricity through one of the five retailers, their bills might spike dramatically due to a rise in wholesale prices. But this was never intended to be for more than a few hours.

However, during the storm and cold snap, the Texas PUC gave the power companies (and ERCOT) carte blanche to apply this "peak pricing" in unlimited manner. So the $9000/mwh rate was applied for the duration of the storm and subsequent outages--over a week, 24/7.

Here's what's rich. The power companies and ERCOT said that the reason they needed to keep the rates sky-high was because of all the outages, they weren't selling as much electricity as they normally would and demand was driving up prices. So people in Texas were billed thousands of dollars for a few days' worth of power.

I already mentioned how gleeful the CEO of ERCOT was in reporting that the company had made more profit in two days of the storm than it had the entire preceding year! Massive power outages are actually extremely profitable for Texas power companies! Small wonder that they do nothing to prevent them.

Another triumph for conservative capitalism!

I waited for someone to kindly (LOL) contradict this, Kevin.  Amazing, nothing so far.  If this is indeed the case, the reason folks got four figure utility bills secondary to The Storm, all I can say is...highway robbery!  I hope their next bills are in the $20 range.  Yeah, right.

Candy

Yeah, this isn't something I just made up, though like you, I was expecting one of our local talking heads to say just that. I've spent several hours reading news articles (from all sides of the spectrum) because I also couldn't fathom how the Texas power system had gotten so, what's the technical term, massively fucked up. Then as I dug deeper--I mean, I already knew that Texas is owned and run by fossil fuel companies, but I had no idea of the depths of their incompetence and indifference--I wanted to know just how on earth any utility company could get away with increasing customers' bills by 10,000 percent. The answer: deregulation! Glorious, unfettered capitalism!

Conservatives bitch and moan about business regulation (in all its forms) and whine about how it TAKES AWAYS ARE JOBZ. But the Texas disaster highlights exactly why public utilities in the rest of the country (and the world) are heavily regulated. I'm sure, though, that after these folks pay their $10,000 electrical bills, they'll go back and vote for the same crooks who put that system in place, because Governor Abbott will continue to say it was all the fault of them liburruls and thar wind farms, and they'll believe him.

This reminded me of nothing so much as the Arnold Schwarzenpoofer movie "Total Recall," where the evil corporation that runs the Mars colony keeps upping the price of air. Whaddya gonna do, not pay it? Or maybe a scenario wherein the Titanic charged $10,000 for a seat in a lifeboat.