lol who doesn’t hate this bot

Haha same - clarifying that an asshole sarcastic comment is sarcastic doesn’t make it not an asshole comment.

Many people (hopefully most) knew it was sarcasm.

I’ve done lots of tech projects within the retail energy industry in Texas - this is the right answer.

To expand a little bit:

Retail energy providers (REPs), like NRG, ClearSky, Just Energy, etc. make their money by forecasting the amount of energy that will be needed as far in advance as possible and purchasing that amount from power generators like CenterPoint and marking it up a few cents. The farther out, the cheaper they can get it. I’ve helped build forecasting engines for a few that ingest historical usage data from meters (all meters in Texas are smart meters), weather data, and others to use machine learning to forecast how much individuals will need and aggregate it together to help the energy traders make better informed trade decisions farther out.

If they mess up or an unforeseen event happens and they don’t have enough energy bought for that time segment (forgot the term for a window of time they use), they have to go to the spot market which is where the prices fluctuate and can be many many multitudes higher than the rate the customers are contracted to pay.

In a storm scenario or a freeze, it can be thousands of times more expensive because demand is so high and supply is so limited. This is when REPs go bankrupt if they don’t have the cash on hand.

There are also insurance plans that the REPs pay for that cover very specific conditions for different types of events or outages that can kick in to cover the huge costs they would otherwise incur on their own buying electricity at that spot rate. I’ve known a few that were only able to stay operating because someone a few years prior had bought an insurance policy that covered said weather event.

Griddy died because of the ice storm in Texas a few years ago and the huge costs people incurred. I actually met with their CIO the year prior as part of a technology assessment of their stack. Nice guy.

Edit: also you can largely thank Enron and Rick Perry for deregulating Texas’ energy - which directly led to the terrible “performance” of the Texas grid during the winter storm Uri in 2021. Same for Enron in the constant blackouts in California in the early 2000’s.

Lmfao - the guy looks like Coach and this judge looks incompetent all around, needing procedures and the impact of ignoring things explained to her.

I’ll take Coach over a clown.

Oh. Oh shit it hurts that reading this made me self-aware of this behavior. It’s one thing to be in this mindset and not be aware of it and it’s another to have it written out in front of you. 🤢

To be fair, it’s probably more about the IT contractors and consulting firms that didn’t implement security policies or configurations correctly on the S3 buckets for the governments they’re working for. The AWS products aren’t opening up things to the public internet without auth. Which I bet most of you knew.

Example: Accenture left a trove of highly sensitive data on public servers (2017)

Okay yeah that’s true. I should have been cognizant that not being economically viable / efficient enough does not mean it’s impossible/I don’t believe it’s real. Definitely works.

Carbon capture 🥀

I feel seen.

The amount of people in here that are familiar with the wilderness and survival saying a week or “not long” is sobering… 😐

Utopia (AU) - similar vein to Parks & Rec but more bureaucracy. I love it.

I don’t know who that is but fuck that guy.