Just my thoughts on AI creeping into this Site, I pay good money to read good stories on this Site stories written by YOU the Author not an effing computer. Take Note Lazeez, AI is a deal breaker, don't let it destroy the site. As an afterthought AI pictures can be excused, AI stories are fake, nothing more or less than sacrificing your humanity as an Author. Cheers to the real Authors.
IMO we have become too dependent on technology in our daily lives. It will be interesting to see how people handle life when there is no more electricity. Something we only had for less than 200 years.
Given the degree to which civilization would have to crumble for there to be no more electricity, I certainly hope no one alive today is in a position to see how people handle life without it. But I also suspect that, to get to that point, the vast majority of people alive today would be dead anyway. By the time electricity is out of the picture for most people, a lack of food, water, sanitation, and medical care will have done in vast swaths of the population.
I don't agree. Unless you have a personal way to make your own electricity via solar or wind. it wouldn't take much to take out enough power plants that would take time to rebuild.
And that there are those people that want to sue the power companies out of biz. I find it funny that there are people who while bitching about how high their bills are ($2000-3000 a month) they also want to sue the companies hundreds of billions of dollars for the fires.
I find it funny that there are people who while bitching about how high their bills are ($2000-3000 a month) they also want to sue the companies hundreds of billions of dollars for the fires.
What's funny about that? Consumers didn't cause the problem, why shouldn't they be upset about having to pay for it?
I find it funny as in they don't think it through. If they feel their rates are high now, what do they think the rates will be after the suit? Do they think the power companies will just eat the 200 billion or pass it on to the consumers?
I still can't understand how they can have bills in the thousands a month in the first place. I rarely pay more than 200 a month for my 600 sqft mobile home running either 2 electric heaters or window AC's.
I find it funny as in they don't think it through. If they feel their rates are high now, what do they think the rates will be after the suit? Do they think the power companies will just eat the 200 billion or pass it on to the consumers?
They can't just pass it on to the consumers. Electric rates are highly regulated in most states. They can't raise rates without permission from state regulators. In CA they aren't likely to get it.
CA utilities are already in a rough position.
They have been forced to divest almost all of their generation capacity to independent operators.
At one time they were prohibited from entering long term contracts with power suppliers (I'm not sure if they still are). They had to purchase all of their power on the spot markets.
CA regulates electric rates more tightly than most other states.
The combination of these things can easily put the CA utilities in a position where they are forced to sell electricity for less than what they are paying for it.
If the utilities income is insufficient to meet its needs, then it should be no surprise that maintenance gets pushed off. More deferred maintenance will lead to equipment failures, such as live wires breaking and potentially starting fires, or brown outs, or...
If the utilities income is insufficient to meet its needs, then it should be no surprise that maintenance gets pushed off. More maintenance leads to equipment failures, such as live wires breaking and potentially starting fires, or brown outs, or...
True. But is that the utility's fault or is it the regulator's fault because the regulator wouldn't allow them to fully recover their costs?
If the utilities income is insufficient to meet its needs, then it should be no surprise that maintenance gets pushed off.
You're begging the question of income being insufficient. PG&E has a documented [1] history of diverting funds meant for safety and maintenance into bonuses and profit.
[1]: https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/PG-E-diverted-safety-money-for-profit-bonuses-2500175.php
The combination of these things can easily put the CA utilities in a position where they are forced to sell electricity for less than what they are paying for it.
That won't happen. They'll file bankruptcy first and the state will likely take over the power companies which is the goal behind the regulators' and government's actions.
It is already happening. They are already selling below their overall cost in CA. That is why Pacific Gas & Electric stock is down 15% in the last year, and Edison Electric is down 25%. CA is requiring them to spend more money, and blocking all attempts to raise rates.
So more equipment failures will arrive shortly, thus no electricity to operate your multitude of gadgets. Thus it will be a return to horses, carriages, and cooking over a fire. It will be interesting to see how that works in a high rise.
Thus it will be a return to horses, carriages, and cooking over a fire. It will be interesting to see how that works in a high rise.
It's worse than that — there is no infrastructure to support horses/carriages and open-spit cooking. All of that would have to be created more or less from scratch.
Draft horses are pretty rare in the West. Thoroughbreds are not going to cut it.
Yes, the inhabitants of high rises are f-cked, but only slightly more than the average suburbanite.
I happen to know how to ride and care for a horse, and how to tack them. Most people do not. My problem would be finding a farrier who had access to the necessary raw materials to keep my horses properly shod and a vet to handle things I couldn't.
Again, massive infrastructure that simply does not exist.
I spent 3 1/2 years homeless and considered myself one of the lucky ones as I had a small 20-foot RV to live in with 50 watts solar panels to charge my battery (not enough for laptop or TV but enough for a tablet or phone) so I know I could survive. The main downside is finding somewhere to empty the black tank.
I did have a generator, but it was to load to use. The trick to being homeless is not to draw attention to yourself. I didn't cause any problems and kept my spot clean.
There are grid collapses (could be accomplished by taking out power plants, of course), but those are generally localized to an area (barring, again, something like deliberate attacks, in which case we're again either in a serious war or civilization collapse). Ukraine has been in a war in which one side has been deliberately attacking the power infrastructure for years and still generally has electrical service, so it's not as easy as all that.
But that remains a localized outcome. If one postulates the majority (everywhere within a wide area or worldwide) in a first-world country living without electricity, that also means little to no water delivery or processing, refining (and thus gasoline), and so forth, which would catastrophically affect the food supply in the area. Most first-world people wouldn't 'handle life' without electricity in a widespread outage, they would die from lack of food and (reasonably safe) water, which was my point.
Obviously, there are partial solutions: prioritize power to refining, food production, water purification and delivery, etc, and let the people go without. That's possible, but it presumes there's enough of a grid to get power where it's wanted, which is conjecture at this point depending on exactly what destroyed enough generating capacity to require most of the populace to live under blackout conditions.
There are people who want to sue all sorts of things out of business. That doesn't mean it's a practical possibility. At some point, the state would intervene, either (partially or completely) protecting the power company from liability or socializing it (with protection from liability). They would have to, because the alternative is being voted out of office (best case) or lynched (worst case).
In the case of electically-triggered wildfires, the question is: was there preventable gross negligence that caused the wildfire? If so, why shouldn't there be significant liability? Should any business (including necessary ones) be able to do hundreds of billions of dollars worth of damage due to gross negligence and not have to compensate those they harm? Why would that make sense?
Note: I'm not saying there was gross negligence, nor that it could have reasonably been prevented given current policies, nor that the wildfires were even necessarily caused by electrical distribution. But, if there was, that seems like something we should strongly discourage.
Mind you, there is no reasonable way that a power company could possibly pay off fines at that level. They would declare bankruptcy and someone else would take over their operations (as mentioned above, likely either with some form of state protection or as a state agency). But 'Oops, sorry, I did so much damage that I can't pay for it, so I guess I'm off the hook' is a really bad standard for society, too.
Remember a few years back when there was a prairie fire, IIRC, in Kansas. It was started when a high tension line came down. people sued the electric company for the fire damage and lack of electricity, even after it was pointed out that the wire was down because people were shooting at the insulators. It was argued that the company shouldn't have used porcelain insulators that could be damaged that easily.
On the one hand: maybe they probably shouldn't have used those insulators. That's an industry-expert question, and I don't have the expertise to judge.
On the other hand: Hitting things with bullets will damage them. Given intentional firing, those people get 99%+ of the blame. Even firing randomly into the air leaves one responsible for what that bullet eventually does, but an intentional act leaves no doubt.
Which makes it a 'idiot jury' question - do they get a jury that, for whatever reason, decides the power company has an 'unreasonably' high share of the blame? Quite possibly, and that's where laws limiting liability help (assuming the power company is in a position to appeal under those laws, anyway).
All of which is fascinating, but also misses the point I was making: no matter how many power companies are sued, the state will not allow them to be shut down in the end. They'll either limit liability or make them state agencies. The voters may have limited sympathy for power companies and may wish to treat them as piggy banks, but they would have far less sympathy with government if that government causes them to be left in the dark any longer than absolutely necessary.
Which is where we started. I don't see 'lawsuits' as a plausible way to wind up with a large number of people in a sustained blackout. Brownout / rotating blackout, maybe, since we could get into a situation where limited resources lead to power availability dropping below some threshold. But there would be intense pressure to fix that quickly, and we're talking about repairs, not bringing new plants online.
My point was more of a "What if" because my first point was that we have become too dependent on technology and if we lose it, we wouldn't know what to do.
Yes, I have a smart phone, but to me that is all it is besides playing music on it. It stays in my pocket, not my hand. We have allowed technology to control so much of our lives.
We have smart cars that drive themselves, smart doors that need a thumb or eye to open, a smart refrigerator that calls in an order for you. Not to mention all the stuff that can be hacked. I refuse to have a bank app on my phone for that very reason. I remember when none of this was an issue because it didn't exist then. I still remember a time when a home computer was still a dream.
Saw this today:
https://www.dailydot.com/culture/kc-crowne-rania-faris-lena-mcdonald-chatgpt
Guess SOL isn't the only place with an AI problem.
This is a fail at multiple levels. Anything dead-tree published should have a professional editor and/or proofreader, as far as I'm concerned. Yes, mistakes still get through, occasionally, but this is more than just a 'mistake', and anyone worthy of doing either job should have caught this.
This is definitely a 'heads will roll' situation. How many? Who knows?
Cheers to the real Authors.
I've just encountered another author padding out their story with AI-generated scenes. The author doesn't write in that style so it jars. I wish they'd provided some sort of warning.
AJ