California heat wave prompts power shutdowns, fire danger:
Pacific Gas & Electric began turning off power to more than 50,000 Northern California customers Wednesday evening as dry, windy conditions renewed the threat of fire in a season already marked by deadly, devastating blazes.
The utility announced that it had begun cutting power to up to 33,000 customers, with about another 20,000 to follow in a few hours.
The shutoffs will affect portions of nearly two dozen counties, mostly in the Sierras and San Francisco Bay Area, and could last 48 hours.
Time will tell if the subsequent headline reads, "Facing New Power Cut Threat, Tens of Thousands of PG&E Customers Install Solar and Become Former PG&E Customers..."
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Facing New Fire Threat, PG&E Cuts Power to Tens of Thousands
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Friday October 16 2020, @01:57AM (1 child)
Are they charging Teslas to escape from it? Just asking...
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @01:59AM
You envious? Just asking...
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @02:19AM (13 children)
Third world shithole.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @02:46AM (10 children)
You're welcome for subsidizing your state.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @02:56AM (7 children)
You still have power some days, you should probably subsidize even more stuff and get rid of that problem. Run all the people out of the state and your carbon emissions will drop to almost nothing! It won't be long before even the illegals are crossing back to TJ where they can at least keep the lights on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:50AM (4 children)
The problem California has with power started with deregulation in the 90's. This allowed the power operators to engage in what really amounted to fraud to drive power costs sky high, and directly led to the rolling blackouts.
The municipally (government) owned power systems never experienced the rate increases nor the blackouts (not a single one) during this period. It was just private, rich parasite, owned companies engaging in fraud to maximize profit.
The current blackouts are caused by concerns over aging infrastructure not being safe in high winds / unmaintained infrastructure not being safe in high winds due to being grown over. The hook holding a 100 year old insulator on a high tension line was responsible for the fire that burned the town of Paradise to the ground. Again, private utility companies mainly Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) are to blame, along with not enough regulation and enforcement. The Public Utilities Commission (PUC) allowed PG&E to collect additional funds from rate payers for repairs and upgrades to infrastructure, but the rich parasites that run PG&E gave themselves a pay raise with the money instead. PG&E was also paid to upgrade the natural gas lines that blew up taking out much of a city block-- the work wasn't done for years, but the CEO and other executives all received large pay increases during that period of the extra assessment on our utility bills.
Many of California's worst problems have been caused by policies of the right. Deregulation of power companies is a prime example. Some commentators on this site forget that California was a swing state until recently-- and, there is a lasting (negative) legacy of the periods when the solidly right to far-right was in control.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @04:09AM
The "deregulation" wasn't really a deregulation so much as a reregulation, and a cack-handed one at that. They drove perverse incentives into every level, from production, through trading, through distribution. The problem isn't a lack of regulation, it's malevolently bad regulation masquerading as deregulation.
California hasn't been a meaningful swing state for decades, and to try to hang all this on the, as you put it "solidly right to far-right" is to ignore the decades that anybody else could have fixed it. (Oh, and spare me the Ah-nuld vas a republican song-and-dance; he was about as republican as Feinstein, but with Hollywood behind his charade.)
(Score: 1, Troll) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @04:27AM (2 children)
Shame the hippies didn't have the foresight to understand how badly they'd fuck it up. Stoned college kids aren't known for their great wisdom though.
But go ahead and keep biting the hand that feeds you. You're the ones who'll have to type on your phones if you want to argue about how it's all the Republicans' fault, I'll have power.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @06:33PM (1 child)
So this one's a troll, its sibling is offtopic - both addressing on some level a post that is somehow +5.
OK.
And we have lefties bitching about how dreadfully they're being rating-oppressed on soylent?
Cheese and crackers.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday October 18 2020, @04:01AM
Did you forget they're always the victims?
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @04:00PM (1 child)
Someone is sure salty about living in one of the shittiest states.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @04:09PM
Your definition of shitty and mine obviously aren't remotely similar.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 17 2020, @04:02AM (1 child)
Some time ago, there was a fuss about California seceding. A couple of years now, but less than ten years ago.
I brought the topic up, as a conversation piece, to a few folks around me. The pretty much unanimous response could be summed up to:
"Really? OK. Bye then. Uh, don't forget to write. Mind the step on the way out."
The amount of money that California dispenses to the country at large is not, in my experience, regarded as sufficient recompense for putting up with California's bullshit.
But your mileage may vary.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Sunday October 18 2020, @04:04AM
Any other states but California and Texas I can get along with the people just fine. Expats from either of those two are just damned annoying to even be around though. Folks from Texas are really fucking annoying but only about a tenth as annoying as assholes from California.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:16AM (1 child)
You're just jealous because they're the fifth largest economy in the world and their women are way hotter than those in whatever flyover shithole you live in.
(Score: 3, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @03:50AM
Doesn't matter if you can't see them because it's too dark.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 16 2020, @02:23AM (7 children)
I rented an apartment in California for a year. Was supposed to pay for the electricity myself, and I did. Signed up right away. 6 months later, the landlord got an electricity bill for my apartment and was instantly suspicious I hadn't signed up. But I had kept all the bills, and we compared them. Same meter number on both. PG&E was double billing. Bastards.
No, I don't buy the notion that it was an innocent mistake on the part of PG&E. Had their billing system been of acceptable quality, it should never have allowed such double billing to happen in the first place. Amazing, or not, how often a billing error is in the favor of the payee.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 16 2020, @03:33AM (2 children)
1991 I started using a new bank, on my third statement they flat out made a $20 addition error in their favor. When I presented it to the manager he shrugged and acted as if it happened all the time, not even worthy of an apology. They didn't get to send me a 5th statement, and there is no way that their computer system didn't intentionally leave the door open for that error.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @05:08AM (1 child)
Things like that get me too. Even a 5-year-old knows to fake an apology.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @12:36PM
Unless you are the so called President Trump. He can't fake anything except his ego
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @04:46AM (3 children)
That reminded me of a story a friend of mine told me about one of his consults. He's done some billing code repair for utilities and they are the usual nightmares with easy fixes, but one takes the cake. Paid his consultancy firm over a quarter million to fix an error in their billing code in two weeks. They originally had some setup where the code would route all the bills for meters without accounts to a special account, whose identifier is probably easy to guess, where they were basically discarded. That account's address was where their office that wrote the code was, so they had a special case that said if this address gets a bill don't bother printing it or sending it.
Eventually, they decided to move out of their home office completely in a reorganization. A later company moved in and didn't get a bill for the first month, or the second. The power company sent someone out to disconnect them who would ask for some ridiculous amount. After this apparently happened more than once, they ended up filing a dispute with the utility regulator that then audited their billing practices and the problem was discovered.
He could not describe how large of a mess it was. No unique indexes, null values everywhere, RBARs, mixing NoSQL and SQL, constraint violations, duplicate billing, no billing, special cases everywhere, improper types, paradigm mixing, bad variable names, bad design, no version control or formal issue tracker, smells everywhere, no tests, you name it. Basically, if there was a problem they had it. It had been spitting out improper bills for years and he said it looked like every time there was a problem and they couldn't fix it in the database, they'd just add another conditional or script to special case it. His team basically had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and completely migrate their database after changing the schema.
He jokes that they should have asked for more money because the utility company's hosting costs were almost halved when they were done despite adding redundancy and improving performance. The system had been costing them money for decades in both costs and probably missed bills. But they never noticed until the utility regulators threatened to fine them in the seven figures and for every day of non-compliance in the future.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday October 16 2020, @04:37PM (2 children)
How is it even possible to "rewrite the whole thing from scratch and completely migrate their database" in just 2 weeks? I've done database migration work on a similarly awful code base, and it took a team of 6 the better part of a year. The code had such thrilling hacks as a utility that would create 7 subdirectories if they didn't already exist, but it crashed after creating a subdirectory. So they just wrapped the utility in a script that ran it 8 times. Another problem they worked around by disabling the system signals the problem was causing. Lead to a lot of weird problems far down the line where it wasn't at all obvious what the root problem could be. Even without such bad code, database migration is not a trivial task.
However, yes, all the time people ignore little problems, until they suddenly become big problems. Always too busy to work on fire prevention, when it's constant fire fighting, rushing to the next one before the previous is completely out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @11:00PM
I can ask, but I'm going off my memory of what he told me. He does work for a fairly large firm and he has more than 6 direct reports himself, so it could have been sheer manpower, overtime, and access to near bottomless funds. The probably have the benefit of having fixed up billing and other complicated systems before, so they don't really have to start from first principles.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 25 2020, @06:03AM
So I asked him for details and thought you'd like to know what he told me. The two week deadline was for 100% accuracy in customers getting overbilled and they had "a month or two" to accomplish the rest but he can't remember how long. The actual database migration was made easier because they have a team that "does it fairly often" and have dedicated DBAs to handle the normalization and transfer. The database also had the benefit of its warehouse architecture with a batch update system. That also allowed them to take it offline overnight to push changes, do the migration in set chunks of data that passed certain constraints, with a middleware running interference on the queries based on those constraints, and run the migration in batches. The programmers had the benefit of having worked on billing systems before, a properly designed database to work on, dedicated people doing non-programming tasks, the inputs being relatively limited (USPS approved addresses, most others were integers or unprocessed text, etc.), and the outputs basically set in stone by the print templates and PDF generation system. He also reiterated that it "was not cheap" due to the late nights the deadline required.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @02:28AM (7 children)
They failed to secure enough electricity supply for the late heat wave, so they conveniently cut the supply "to prevent wild fire."
No offense to Sierra Nevada mountains regions, but SF Bay area assholes deserve PG&E.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:24AM (2 children)
They keep on voting in the same democrat politicians that give them shit-covered streets, random power outages and lockdowns.
Strangely no Antifa riots there this summer. No parents of early-20 something kids can afford to live in SF?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @09:54PM (1 child)
Homeless people don't care about protests.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 18 2020, @06:36PM
Not true. They descended on the CHAZ/CHOP free stuff tables like seagulls on an abandoned picnic site.
But they worry about violent self-entitled hoodlums wrecking and ripping off what little they do have.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Magic Oddball on Friday October 16 2020, @03:32AM (3 children)
If that was the case, then a hell of a lot more of the Bay Area would have lost power; most of it hasn't.
It comes down to this: we're in the middle of heat wave, everything's dry & crispy because we don't get much rain anymore, and PG&E knows that if it causes another fire like the ones it did at this time during the last three years, the state is extremely likely to forcibly take over.
BTW, most of the assholes I've encountered in the Bay Area were transplants from other parts of the country (or other countries entirely). The people whose families have been here a while tend to be friendly.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:50AM (2 children)
"BTW, most of the assholes I've encountered in the Bay Area were transplants from other parts of the country (or other countries entirely). The people whose families have been here a while tend to be friendly."
That's relative. The old Italian immigrant families (e.g., the ones that founded the original Bank of America) and the old Mexican families down in Monterey/Salinas that lived there before California became part of the US, are long-established, genuine class people.
Just about all others are "new comers."
The snotty Marin county assholes, the wine country snobs, Oakland/East Bay thugs, Berkeley commies, all very lovely people indeed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @04:04PM (1 child)
I'll take snobs and thugs over racist fascists any day thanks!
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @04:11PM
Live in a blue city then, you get both in spades!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @02:51AM (8 children)
And you guys thought there wouldn't be any entertainment coming out of California what with coronaids and all. Fifth largest global economy and they're so fucking atrocious at managing it that they can't even keep the lights on. Now that's entertainment!
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:14AM (1 child)
"Fifth largest global economy and they're so fucking atrocious at managing it..."
Yeah, well, the US is THE biggest economy in the world, with the bestest technologies in the world, and got asswopped by some shit virus, when a third-world commie country like Vietnam has managed to contain it.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:29AM
When the definition of "asswopped" is "Panic everyone! You're going to die if you don't wear a rag and vote democrat! Free money for rich people to stay at home!"
When the definition of containing it is "Get the fuck back to work and don't dare to panic people".
(Score: 2) by Magic Oddball on Friday October 16 2020, @03:26AM (4 children)
It's not the state, it's PG&E — a non-state-owned corporation that owns and runs the power grid. They're shutting power down to specific areas where the combination of dry heat, wind, and electrical lines runs a serious risk of causing catastrophic fires. The state's main role in this is that it let individual cities decide whether to spend the money on burying lines for new developments, and didn't force PG&E to take better care of its equipment.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @03:38AM
Other states' Public Utilities Commission would pull their license to operate, if a power company cannot safely and reliably deliver power to their service area.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @03:52AM (2 children)
And you don't reckon it's regulated to within an inch of its life? In California? Come on, man.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @12:42PM (1 child)
If you want regulations, you come here to Germany. Shit like that happening in California would probably result in many, many lawsuits and government fines. And Germany definitely has much more regulations when it comes to the power grid. So maybe what you wanted to say is that California does not have proper regulations and enforcement in place?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @01:14PM
If by proper you mean "tons of", they absolutely do. If by proper you mean "effective", no they do not. Having actually sane and useful regulations is their problem not being insufficiently regulated. That and a state government that's more concerned about getting the illegal vote than doing their jobs and making wise laws for the citizens.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday October 16 2020, @03:33AM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 16 2020, @03:37AM (5 children)
Around here, when the mains power goes out the incidence of fires goes up - a lot - as people light candles, run generators, handle fuel more than usual, etc.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @03:54AM (2 children)
Around here most folks just wait around a few minutes and poke at our phones. I'm smarter than most folks though. I take a nap.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday October 16 2020, @12:29PM (1 child)
When a hurricane takes it out, it's usually at least 6 hours until it comes back up, sometimes 6 weeks.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday October 16 2020, @12:44PM
Price you pay for living on the east/gulf coast. You want the hurricane parties, you gotta put up with the hurricanes.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @12:37PM (1 child)
But those fires wouldn't make PG&E liable for damages. Not to mention that those fires would start in a place with more people and plumbing than the middle of an overly dense desiccated forest and so be easier to handle.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 16 2020, @08:47PM
Instead of out of control wildfire, we can have controlled domesticated fires.