so my eldest brother, who is a moron, has been playing soldier with his moron friends in the deserts of texas for the last year preparing for the collapse of civilization if biden won (lol). they were burying food and ammo stashes out in the desert, running drills, crazy stuff
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) February 16, 2021
It would be wrong to mock Texans-as-a-whole, but there are particular individuals who invite it…
anyways, you would assume given that they've been prepping for the end of the world for at least a year they're well situated to ride out the rolling blackouts right?
wellll
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) February 16, 2021
they can get into the pull top cans just fine, but the ones that require an opener? their only can opener is electric. so a good 3/4 of his canned food store is inaccessible to him unless he goes after it with a knife, which i sincerely hope he does.
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) February 16, 2021
he told my mom that the blackout is due to texas switching everything to "wind power" but that he didn't discount that the government was doing this on purpose. if you can figure out why they'd arbitrarily freeze out a giant state hey points to you.
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) February 16, 2021
presumably he's sitting there shivering, ranting about libs while he sucks down cold beefaroni. what a life.
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) February 16, 2021
… Continued at the link. One hell of a kicker at the end, too.
SWMBO
First?
Dumbasses gotta dumbass.
patrick II
The Texas Republican government? Because the Texas electrical grid is cut off from the rest of the country by design, the state equivalent of his brother’s go-it-alone tough guy survivalislm.
The Pale Scot
Here is the most perfect Far Side cartoon for this story
Bomb shelters and canned goods
Achrachno
Wow, I just realized I could be a survivalist too. All my can openers are the old fashioned manual kind, and I have several cans of compressed gas out in the tool shed that I can fuel the Coleman stove with. I’m ready!
Kent
That is just dumbassery.
During the decade that I lived in Alaska I knew plenty of people who lived off the grid, especially on various islands in SE Alaska. It’s a rough life but quite possible. But you really have to devote yourself to it and you end up spending tons more time and money making it work up to civilized standards than if you just live on the grid. I have a brother who takes it even a step further and lives year-round on a boat in Alaska. He’s still single, not surprisingly.
For me the state was already remote and rough enough. I didn’t see the point in deliberately making it more so.
RaflW
I talked with my brother in Houston this evening. He and his wife are alright, staying at a friend’s house that has power (friends are away on an unfortunate family matter).
But my bro manages a large team of people, and a lot of his workers are facing things like collapsed ceilings (the house we lived in during h.s. brilliantly had the plumbing for our parents bathroom run above the insulation in the attic over the family room – yes we had a flood when we had a prolonged freeze), two or more days with zero home heat or hot water, etc.
Yes, Texas is ‘red’ but cities like Houston have elected Dem mayors for decades. Sort of like living in MN under Tr*** as Potus, there’s a finer-grain level of living that isn’t easy to sum up as: elect fuckups, get what you deserve.
All that said, Texas is sure showing us (once again!) how unregulated capitalism has massive blind spots and screwed up incentives. Abbot, Cruz etc are spinning like mad to blame the folks not responsible. We cannot let them get away with it.
Kent
@RaflW: I have good friends who live in the Houston area. Katy actually. Shot him an email. A couple of years ago he spent a few thousand dollars to install a whole-house natural gas generator after Harvey came through. Didn’t want to be without power during August heat. But now it has come through in spades for them as they are the only one on their block with power.
This isn’t your ordinary Honda generator. It’s a big custom installed natural gas generator tied into the house power that runs off natural gas and it kicks on automatically when the power goes out. Gives them enough power to run everything since their heat is also natural gas. I think he probably spent nearly $10 grand for the entire setup and installation. But he is also a software engineer married to a doctor so they can afford it.
He never thought he’d need it in the winter. It was for hurricane preparedness.
eclare
That is a great thread, thanks for the link!
Rjm
I can’t figure out why so many stories are simultaneously talking about how darn cold it is in TX, and how many fridges full of food are spoiling because there’s no power. Just put the food someplace cold! A cooler outside, car trunk, or just open the fridge door if you’re unlucky enough to be stuck in a house that’s 40 degrees or colder.
ETA horrible situation, hitting those least able to afford mitigation or escape the hardest, as usual
Geoduck
@RaflW: Actually, it’s been so blatantly bad that after Cruz started getting absolutely hammered on his California power comments from a while back, his first tweet on the subject was almost literally “I got nothing”. The others as you say immediately jumped to the “AOC caused this by forcing the New Green Deal on Texas patriots” strategy.
Kelly
So much of the country suffering from winter storms. On the bright side xc skiing was great today! Skis smoothly swooshing thru just enough fresh snow on a firm base, sunshine, no wind.
Kent
@Rjm: Yeah, that is just stupid. Pack everything in coolers or totes and set it on your patio. Or in your garage if you don’t want it frozen.
cain
@Achrachno:
I don’t have anything but a manual. I don’t think we’ve ever owned an electric one. There are probably people right now who don’t have a manual and they are probably all sold out.
Kristine
The line about hitting the can of baked beans repeatedly with a screwdriver cracks me up every time I read it.
PJ
@Rjm: you with your fancy book smarts!
What I don’t understand is why they don’t just cook the thawing food. Doesn’t everyone in Texas have a barbecue?
Must be those darn propane salesmen who ruined everything.
cain
@Geoduck:
Yeah, he got nothing – that’s why there are pics of him fleeing to Cancun. Not only does he got nuthin, he ain’t gonna do nuthin – cuz he is a nuthin.
Kristine
I got rid of my electric can opener years ago. Manual only. Faster and easier to clean.
John Revolta
I spoke to a friend of mine near San Antonio a little while ago and I asked her about if there were gonna be repercussions . People are pissed off, right? Heads are gonna roll? She sounded very doubtful…. ’cause, “It’s TEXas!”
Roger Moore
What’s so hard about opening cans with a knife? I remember when I first started living on my own, I had to buy everything, and yes, I bought canned food with no can opener. I just whipped out my trusty pocket knife and cut the can open. No, not one of those fancy Swiss Army knives with a zillion functions, just a trusty old buck knife. Anything made of decent steel will open a can just fine. Of course it’s more awkward than using a can opener, but you have to be pretty lame if you can’t even do that. Of course my current emergency kit includes a real hand-cranked can opener and a propane stove with pots and pans.
RaflW
@Kent: After whichever bad hurricane hit Houston (maybe a decade ago) my SIL really wanted to get one of those. I’m not sure what the reason was that they didn’t, but ever since, if a hurricane is headed to Houston, she make them evacuate as punishment for not forking over the 10 Gs.
On a less marriage/comedic note, he did say that two of the five main Houston water purification plants are down right now. They have generators for power, but apparently the generators were designed to survive hurricanes, but not deep freezes with snow/rain/ice. Huh.
eta: @PJ during said hurricane aftermath, when bro and SIL were without power for days, he learned to BBQ breakfast as well as all the dinners. Apparently by like day five it didn’t seem that charming any more.
Kent
Wasn’t there some shitstorm about some twitter Dad who made his 9 year old daughter go hungry trying to figure out how to open a can of beans a few weeks ago? These Texas dudebros are even worse than that. They are doing it to themselves!
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Seriously, they make MREs for situations like this, they even self cook. Also, no can opener? How in the hell does he camp?
Kent
Former Texan here. There won’t be repercussions because Texas is so gerrymandered up the ass. And the only folks who vote in the party primaries are the true hard core GOPers.
lurker
… starts making list of camping supplies … where was that coleman stove hidden away in the garage … do we have any white gas for that … thank providence we are not in tx
(kinda surprised how prepared we might be by accident)
RaflW
@Kent: I could hear the eyeroll from my brother over the phone this evening, saying “yeah, within a very short time, people will again be thrilled with the cheaper electricity here, and will just think ‘it’s gonna be 30 years before this happens again'” (1989 was the last really hard freeze. I remember, my water supply in the crawl space of my 1948 crackerbox in Austin burst).
burnspbesq
Some of this stuff isn’t funny. The two biggest hospitals in South Austin are without running water.
Kent
If you have a propane grill on the patio, just pick up a couple of extra propane cylinders as spares. You can cook damn near anything on a good Weber gas grill. Even do things like boil pasta and cook rice. All your regular indoor cookware will work on the gas grill too.
lurker
had an odd situation about a month ago…
there were a few nights where we dipped below freezing (happens in this part of california every winter, but not a lot)
found water on the floor of the garage in an area where there was no reason to have water, and a trail leading to where some stuff is stored. there could have been a further path from where the laundry facilities are to that stored material. Checked, no water between laundry and the stored material … (very thankful it was neither a pipe leak or a broken washer) … but that just made the whole situation more confusing.
Finally realized we had a part of the emergency store of water we bought some months ago in a cardboard box on the floor as part of the overall block of stored material. A couple of plastic gallon bottles of water had leaked, likely after freezing and bursting overnight. They still had some water in them, and the cardboard box (something that previously held berries or the like and was used to bring things home from costco) had soaked up a lot of the escaping water. We got lucky with what could have been a more annoying situation, as we put the water there during a pretty warm part of the year. Have since relocated the emergency water that was left. Weird, but thankful it was not worse.
cain
It’s a damn tragedy – and they have people waiting in line to get water from a park because they don’t have any water. Reminded me of village life in India where villagers would get their water from the village spigot.
I think though the state needs serious reform to its infrastructure. I hope they don’t think that this is some one off thing – because with the climate crises it could happen again.
At least people can understand this danger vs the pandemic – it’s right there in front of their faces.
Rjm
@PJ: We use the garage for overflow thanksgiving leftovers when it’s cold enough in SE Michigan. I might not think of it in the stress of a crisis.
We’d have a tough time with a long outage in winter here too. I have one small heater and a two 20 lb tanks (that we use for the grill) that I hope could keep the pipes from freezing for a couple days, but we’d be miserable cold.
Parfigliano
@PJ: I blame Hank Hill
df
@cain: It’s funny. The only electric can opener I’ve ever used was at my grandparents’ house, and it was a fun one mounted underneath one of the upper cabinets. Otherwise, my parents always had manual can openers, and I do too. Opening a can is such a simple task. Unless you have mobility or dexterity issues, why complicate it with Yet Another Kitchen Gadget that takes up more space and requires electricity?
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
@RaflW:
@John Revolta:
But I mean, that’s not going to last forever. Gerrymandering can backfire too and these extreme weather events are only going to become more frequent. On top of that Texas and much of the South and Southwest are getting huge influxes of blue voters from other states
Will Texas ever turn blue? Here is what the experts are saying.
lurker
@Kent: have actually done that on the occasion of a power outage.
this whole situation along with the weird water leakage has me thinking seriously about emergency supplies in a way that varies from my previously haphazard approach.
we had go-bags packed at one point due to fires – had not really worried to that degree about anything previously, even when we had other things like the fires, rolling blackouts, King riots
confusing to me what events in life reorient our focus
ETA: getting a gas grill was a concession – I had used charcoal my whole life, finally gave in a few years back. we are not huge on bbq, but it is handy to be able to just fire it up, and we use it more than the weber satellite receiver now.
lurker
@df: we had an electric can opener when I was a kid. That was what I first learned how to use. My parents taught me to use the manual can opener at a fairly young age as well. Once that electric died, well before the age of 10, they never replaced it, just used the manual ones. To this day, I cannot point to an electric can opener in the house of any part of the extended family that I visit.
Doc Sardonic
@Kent: Yep…My Weber can and has done cookies. Long as you watch the temperature fairly closely it bakes as well as it does bbq, not that I would try fancy baking with it.
Pappenheimer
The whole can opener thing makes me want to find a copy of Jerome’s “3 Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). Except that those guys were upper class twits rowing up the Thames on an outing. It takes a true He-Man of the Soil to to make a lifestyle of it.
Hoppie
@Achrachno: Live in California now. We are survivalists (the attentive ones anyway) by nature. Lotsa canned stuff, dried food, containers of water, utensils. Duh.
(Seventh floor in a condo in fairly-far from the bad faults San Diego.)
Kent
I think the only thing that would make politician’s head’s roll in TX is if gas prices tripled or something like that. All those dudes driving monster F350 trucks on 30-40 mile long suburban commutes every day. That is only sustainable with cheap gas.
Connor
@Pappenheimer:
Ah, yes. The scene with the unopenable tin of pineapple…
Brilliant!
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
By the way, just heard on CNN people’s electric bills in TX are going to go up as a result of this mess
cain
@df:
Right? Also it’s a lot faster to open a can than with an electric one. Of course, if you have a jackknife usually they have a can opener there – you’d think these survivalists would have that tool there?
piratedan
I understand its only a side note to all of the suffering and stress that is going on right now (and not only in Texas) but I really find it galling as hell that these guys are showing up on a national network completely misrepresenting what is going on and their grasping at any liberal to toss under the bus in blame is getting to be fucking infuriating… Really, liberals are to blame?… who is the Governor of Taxes? Who is Lt. Governor? Who controls the state house? who is the attorney general? who’s party holds all of the offices of state?
This failure of lack of preparedness and infrastructure is on AOC and the Green New Deal? Really?
How can this shit pass muster with any OTHER network? Next thing you’ll tell me is that Rush Limbaugh was a prominent proponent of Conservative principals and helped shaped the GOP into what it is today… without any context noting that the vast majority of them now appear to be conspiracy driven racist lunatics that believe that the natural order of things means that overweight white guys get to be in charge for perpetuity.
cain
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Why do these people not just visit Mexico?! ::sarcasm:: I mean Ted Cruz is!
lurker
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): saw something the day after this hit (yesterday?) that the powers that be were seeking an emergency rate hike for power in texas. that seemed like kicking someone when they are down, but given what I understand about their infrastructure, it is likely long overdue.
Kent
Follow the money. Every damn one of those Texas GOP politicians is completely in the pockets of the fossil fuel industry. That is who funds their campaigns. They are just paying some of it back right now.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Kent:
This reminds me of a question I’ve been meaning to ask for awhile. Is there ever going to be a point for these corporations where enough is enough and Republicans are simply too radical for them to support any longer?
Kent
Some maybe. Texas is weird. We lived there for 13 years. You enter into contracts with whatever electrical company you want. I usually had rates locked in for 2-years. Of course I never read all the fine print. But they were long-term contracts at fixed prices. Of course a lot of people are just lazy and let their electrical contracts run out and go month to month. Some of them will no doubt pay big rate increases. But no one pays the same rate for power, even in the same neighborhood. Everyone on your block can be paying a different electrical rate to a different supplier.
Kent
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Only when it costs them money. Retail companies with a consumer image to uphold, probably. But other industries like big oil? private prisons? stuff like that? Not so much.
tokyokie
I never got the hang of working one of those manual can openers. But I carry a vintage church key on my key ring, and in a pinch, I can use the triangular part intended for opening beer cans without pop tops to get the can half open, which is usually sufficient to access the can’s contents.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@cain:
LOL, or be a millionaire like Cruz!
Chetan Murthy
@Kent: From what I’ve been reading, the power companies have been given a special dispensation to pass-thru spot gas market prices to their ratepayers. So not governed by any longer-term contracts. People with gas to sell on the spot market are gonna make a mint. Ratepayers gonna pay thru the nose.
Deregulation! It’s what’s for dinner!
Roger Moore
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
It depends completely on the corporation. Some of them either never supported Republicans or have abandoned them. Others will continue to support them even if, or maybe especially if, they explicitly commit to ending democracy. Fascists have always courted big companies, and it has worked.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@lurker:
Probably. It seems they need to improve a lot of infrastructure down there. And I thought where I lived sucked where we still have power lines above ground on telephone poles
Mary G
We have four different manual can openers, but I cannot work any of them work with my arthritic hands, so we also have the electric one. It amused and entertained the teen. I bought the battery operated one that takes the lid off that was advertised on TV a lot. They work, but not for long, so there is one in everybody’s go back, with batteries. If I see a new improved manual can opener endorsed by the Arthritis Foundation, I’ll probably increase my collection to five. The funny thing is that I eat hardly anything out of cans. The housemates make beans from scratch.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Roger Moore:
What if they faced widespread boycotts? Again, I suppose it depends on the business.
Like Kent says above:
It should be noted that a few car manufacturers have committed to ceasing production of internal combustion engine vehicles by 2035. This will diminish oil’s power somewhat, I would imagine
Subsole
@Kent: It doesn’t help that our government is almost soviet in how absurdly it’s laid out.
Forex, everybody wants Beto for governor. I don’t. I want him for Lt. Gov, because that’s who actually has some frigging power in our system.
It’s like the deputy director of the KGB being the actual guy in charge because who cares about a deputy director.
We really, really, REALLY need some federal intervention -voting rights, redistricting commission, something. New census. Firing squads. Whatever. The electoral districts here are broken. The voting restrictions aren’t exactly jim crow, but give ’em another year.
It’s just a heavy lift, all the way round. And as you said, the pervasive apathy does not help. Though that seems to be getting a bit better.
Still, we do what we can.
LeftCoastYankee
If you don’t know how anything works, it’s never your fault that everything is broken in your life.
tokyokie
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Most of Texas’ reserve electrical generation capacity is gas-fueled, and when those plants are brought online, they have to buy gas on the spot market, where the prices Enron-like. So ERCOT, the Texas power grid regulator, approved a measure allowing electricity providers to pass along those exorbitant rates to consumers as a way of addressing those problems. Requiring power-generation plants to keep several days’ fuel supply on hand apparently was never a consideration because of the upfront cost.
scav
Texas is a different planet.
source
So, those tend to wealthier areas that still have power are getting even sweeter deals. Interesting moral universe.
smike
While in the military in Germany and living off-base much of the time, one place was top-floor (cheaper) with small cabinet doors to the attic. In winter, we could store food in the attic and we could enjoy cold beer, too!
In the summer, we enjoyed the beer room temp, but not so much the food.
SectionH
@Roger Moore:
It’s amazing how benign SDGE has been since their contract with San Diego is up and not necessarily gonna be renewed…
Subsole
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Take all the demographics stuff with a grain of salt. Minority communities here can be very liberal, if you massage it right. They can also break Trumpish with alarming speed. Like, if the cons ever figure out how to stop being racist, we are gonna have to FIGHT for the Latino vote.
I am a bit hopeful that people are talking about organizing, though. People don’t seem quite as demoralized as they have the last decade or so.
One of our big problems is that the party is carved up into personal fiefdoms. There is no TX democratic party. There’s a San Antonio democratic party, and a Ft. Worth Democratic party, and a McAllen party. And each of those parties comes in at least two subflavors: chocolate and vanilla. They will not talk to each other.
Steeplejack
** DVR Alert **
Original Super Fly (1972) coming up on TCM on the hour (2:00 a.m. EST). Ron O’Neal, Sheila Frazier; directed by Gordon Parks Jr. Soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield. A blaxploitation classic.
NotMax
Lurve the manual can opener that slices the can around the rim rather than down through the lid. Less strain on elderly fingers and wrists, too. Worth the few extra $$ to get a sturdy one.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Roger Moore: Fun fact: canned food was invented, and produced, 48 years before the invention of the can opener.
Subsole
@Kent: That really was an underrated part of what broke Dubbya’s mojo, at least ’round here. Sounds trivial, but man, people. were. pissed.
I got almost 28 mpg, and I still hated that bastard every time I pulled up to the pump.
Have I mentioned Texas is BIG? You need a lot of gas, and you burn a lot of gas, just going back and forth to work. So you get a lot of reminders of how that incompetent shafted you.
Subsole
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Yep. Reaganism at its finest: pocketing the savings and passing the costs along.
Heads really should roll over this.
Roger Moore
@SectionH:
I am so glad Pasadena has a municipal water and power utility. We’re stuck with SoCal Gas, but I don’t have to deal with them directly. My condo is electric only, but some of the shared equipment in our building uses gas.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
We can’t get natural gas for a gas cook stove where we live, so my husband set up a propane line to power it. We originally lived off the grid when we bought it, so had it converted from regular gas to propane. Whenever the power goes out I am so thankful we can at least use the burners (lighted with a match) to cook. We’ve never tried the oven during an outage; I think the thermostat is electric.
Kineslaw
I don’t know how this will affect Texas politics, though I can’t imagine it will help the Rs. One thing that might make this different is the level of FEAR. Not having power for 30 hours when it was freezing and not knowing when the power would come back was scary. Not having electricity, water, running out of food and having no way to protect your family is quite the powerless feeling.
Another aspect is the entire state has been affected. Rarely are Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio all slammed with the same disaster. Maybe this accelerates the suburban shift that was already happening.
Seeing reports that Sen. Cruz flew to Cancun to go on vacation today made me have thoughts I don’t want to put in writing.
Misterpuff
PSA : Where is Kyle Rittenhouse?
No word since it was reported that Kyle is no longer housed at the address on his bail Defense claims needed a safe house due to notoriety. Do the Wisconsin authorities 100 % know where little Kyle Rittenhouse is right now?
SectionH
@Roger Moore: There are cities in Kentucky which had socialist utilities in the late 20th century, ffs. And actual free internet. Obviously not that long ago.
I’m just pleased that our veryvery blue city of San Diego can has a lot of power* right now. I hope Todd’s up for it
I’d never lived without some gas before. Here, nope. It does freak me out.
*I mean negotiating power, tbc
HumboldtBlue
@The Pale Scot:
So apt.
Amir Khalid
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): So, for that first half-century, people bought canned food, took it home, and … just stared at it helplessly?
SWMBO
Did anyone see the implosion of Tim Boyd? The former mayor of Colorado City, Texas apparently resigned and managed to get his wife fired from her job over his controversial posts on Facebook. He told the folks in his town that the mayor or the utility companies owed them nothing. They should get off their lazy asses and fend for themselves.
https://ktxs.com/news/local/colorado-city-mayor-resigns-after-controversial-facebook-post
karen marie
That’s some delusional thinking right there.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Amir Khalid: Nope, they used knives to open the cans. Really, anything sharp will do the trick. I read somewhere Civil War soldiers would use bayonets.
Ruckus
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
A lot of Europe is really, really going electric car. Many places have time limits of selling new internal combustion engine cars, like the 2035 you mention and some even 2030. They have a lot of solar and wind, England has gone months with out one coal fired generating plant on line. Not sure if they are staying off from now on. And none of the European countries outside of Russia has oil to speak of, which is one of the reasons electric works there. Many have really good train systems, far better than most of ours and mostly electric. Now we do not have a lot of oil left either, which is why fracking has been used. But that is a horrible way to get not all that much oil to begin with, is expensive and very dirty.
Calouste
@Amir Khalid:
IIRC canned food was originally invented for armies, and those guys had bayonets. The invention of the can opener probably coincided with increased civilian purchase of cans.
NotMax
@Amir Khalid
James Burke’s Connections episode 8 includes fun info about canned food.
Amir Khalid
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
I know, I ws just describing what quite a few 21st century people would do.
mrmoshpotato
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
The thermostat and stovetop igniters would be electric.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Have SoCal Gas and SCE. SoCal Gas has always been good in my experience, on top of service, no problems billing, etc. SCE on the other hand has not always been stellar. Not horrible mind you but not stellar. And both better than the shitforbrains post office dipshit. Bills payments before last both arrived late, mailed on the first, office addresses way less than 20 miles from my place, they didn’t get there for 10 days. I do get all the insurance offers, credit card offers, spectrum internet offers, requests for donations, in record time.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@mrmoshpotato: Yes, which is why we have to light the burners with a match when we are without power. I can remember gas stoves when I was younger which did not have an ignition and lighting them with a match was routine. Hence, “kitchen matches”. I grew up with a gas stove which had a pilot light, which heated the kitchen up in the summer. I love cooking with gas; cooking on an electric stove sucks.
A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan)
@Amir Khalid: You’re right :-)
HumboldtBlue
The can opener sounds makes me wince.
mrmoshpotato
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): Yup. Nice to be able to still use the stovetop if the electricity is out.
ETA – never cooked with a non-gas range.
And I can make my kitchen quite spicy in the summer. :)
mrmoshpotato
Hehe
Also, Generalissimo Francisco Franco and Rush Limbaugh are still dead.
SectionH
@Ruckus: As a San Diegan who was trying to make do with (electric} Car-to-Go for a couple of years – and they gave up because all Kevin Faulkner’s promises were LIES, I finally got fed up enough (with Hertz too) I just bought a (used! Carmax) Volt, because my condo doesn’t have any plug-ins. At all. So we’re not dependent on being able to plug in, but we can has plug-in places too.
And the next thing in our condo traffic I knew was “Are you the other guys with a Volt?” Yeah, made me smile. Going electric? Fucking hey most of us.
Srsly, I can has a sweet car. Maneuverable, acceleration, acceleration, acceleration. No, I generally don’t, but I like knowing I can.
I find it totally imaginable that electric cars will be the norm in 10 years, at least around here.
patrick II
Ontario finance minister Rod Phillips got caught out when he changed his Zoom visual background, but didn’t change his audio background to match.. He was pretending to be at Queen’s Park, Ontario, helping with the pandemic crisis, but was actually standing on a beach in Cancun. The sound of waves gave him away. He has since resigned.
mrmoshpotato
@patrick II: I would’ve figured no one moving behind him would’ve given it away. :)
“The nurses are vaccinating people by telekinesis. Yeah! Vaccikinesis they call it!”
Geoduck
@patrick II: Wow. At least Cruz isn’t stupid enough to try and hide it, just to say “screw you plebes” and go.
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
“Climate change is a Chinese hoax” ~ teeth chattering resident of rural Texas
John Revolta
@patrick II: Hilarious
MomSense
@Rjm:
Thank you. I’ve been wondering the same thing. I’ve got some orange juice and a few other things in my garage right now because there’s no room for them in the refrigerator.
JWR
Left coast TV heads-up: Del. Stacey Plaskett will be on Amanpour & Co shortly. (PBS World channel, which is broadcast channel 50.4.)
Central Planning
@df: same here – my grandparents had an electric can opener under the cabinet. I thought that was the coolest thing ever. I think they had arthritis so that’s why they had it, but that didn’t really register when I was 10
raven
P-38
Soprano2
We were without power for 13 days during the ice storm we had in 2007. We barely lost any food because it stayed under freezing the whole time. The problem in Texas is that they are unfamiliar with how to cope when something like this happens. Oh, and their state government sucks.
Martin
Reports that Cruz was on a plane to Cancun tonight. Quite the leader he is.
Soprano2
Adding, to be fair we had natural gas, a wood furnace (build fire, open the bottom and heat rises), and never lost water. I was able to get ready for work at work, because they had power after a couple of days. We borrowed a generator from my boss after a week because he got power back. We have a huge generator on the building at work now; in 2007 they ran the emergency response on backup generators for 2 days.
Geminid
How red is Texas? Well, last November, Joe Biden lost Texas to trump 46.5% to 52.1%. One could say this margin of 5.6% was not especially close. Another way of looking at the question, though, is that for every 9 trump voters, there were 8 Biden voters. Flipping one out of 15 Republican voters would have given Biden a narrow win.
One interesting aspect of political demographics is education level. Fifty years ago, a majority of the college educated voted Republican. Now this group increasingly trends Democratic. So the daughter of a Republican voting high school educated voters in Lubbock,Texas or Dalton, Georgia might become a college educated Democrat in the suburbs of Houston or Atlanta. This is partly why Libby Fletcher and Lucy McBath flipped formerly solid Republican districts in the Houston and Atlanta suburbs in 2018.
Political scientists are examining the reasons why college educated voters are now trending increasingly Democratic. Some, like Rachel Bitecofer, suggest that exposure to ethnically diverse classmates may play a role. Whatever the reasons, this political demographic trend now seems to be a real factor. Bitecofer made it a major part of the model she used to predict a 42 seat Democratic pickup in the 2018 midterms. (She made this prediction five months before the election, and it was much scoffed at). In the event, the Democrats flipped 41 seats. Bitecofer argued that some more seats were left on the table, for want of campaign resources.
HeartlandLiberal
@Kelly:
@Kelly:
We live directly on city golf course, house / yard wrapped on two sides, south central Indiana. We now have 10 plus inches of snow on top of snow from past two weeks. We have been amazed at how many of our neighbors have skis. We have seen whole families out trek skiing together. Not what normally sees in this neck of the woods.
SFAW
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
I know you’re trying to be hopeful, but being a cynical SOB, I put those “Texas is turning blue” pipe dreams into the same bin as “changing demographics will wipe out Republican power any day now” pipe dreams.
I would love to see both of those things happen, but I don’t expect it’ll happen while I’m still on this side of the grass.
satby
@Soprano2: Yeah, we learn that as kids, but it probably wouldn’t occur to most Texans. When I used my back deck table as a supplemental freezer while my students from Indonesia and Bahrain were with me they were astonished.
SFAW
@satby:
We have a “walk-in refrigerator” — an unheated three-season porch off of the kitchen, the porch’s temp is usually closer to the outside than the inside.
lowtechcyclist
@PJ:
That was my thought too! I’ve got an inexpensive propane grill on the back deck. If it was warm weather and we lost power (e.g. hurricane), I’d be cooking everything in the fridge before it went bad. I’d hold off on the chest freezer as long as possible, since it’s well insulated, but after a few days, I’d be cooking all of that stuff too.
And if it’s a winter storm like now, just like a ton of other people have said, you put your food in a cooler and stick it outside, or hell, put it in a cardboard box in the trunk of your car, safe from any varmints.
And we’ve only got manual can openers. Never saw the advantage of electric.
Funny how all of us folks who never really considered prepping for a natural disaster are more ready than this guy who built his life around it.
Geminid
@SFAW: An unaddressed low voltage problem in the cottage I live in means the refrigerator struggles to get cool, so I don’t use it. But one of my customers had their oversized mailbox smacked by vandals. I replaced it and took it home, so now I have possum proof cold storage on my porch.
Booger
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan): A lot of gas ovens have an electrical igniter, usually in the form of a glowing resistance element. They’ll also have a thermocouple to sense the heat of the ignitor before releasing the gas, to prevent explosions. So burners yes, oven no, for good reasons. I suppose you could try heating the ignitor area with a match to try and fool it, but that would only work for the first go-round.
lowtechcyclist
@Geminid:
Unless one went to an evangelical, Mormon, or conservative Catholic college, diversity of all sorts would be part of one’s college experience – not just racial and ethnic, but with respect to gender orientation and identity, cultural and religious backgrounds, and so forth. You’d have a hard time living in GQPworld after that.
But I think the right’s increasing rejection, not just of science, but of knowledge and rational thought in all of its forms is something that really doesn’t work for you anymore after college.
Booger
@lowtechcyclist: LOL, hence the exemption from military service that the ultraorthodox community in Israel enjoys. How ya gonna keep ’em down on the shtetl once they’ve seen Paree?
Jackie Ogburn
There are manual can openers. They have them at the Dollar Store. Much better choice when going off the grid. Didn’t they teach that at Preppers 101?
Quiltingfool
@Soprano2: Oh, man, 2007 freeze was bad! My school was out for 2 weeks, and my friends living in the Buffalo area had a hard time. I had survivor guilt; we never lost power in our neck of the woods. The worst thing for us, if we lost electricity is that we wouldn’t be able to get water from our well.
I do remember lots of electric cooperative workers coming to Missouri to help set new poles, etc. And our cooperatives return the favor by traveling to other states helping out when they have problems. Maybe Texas ought to think about that.
Just James
I gave up on electric can openers a long time ago.
For camping I keep around a few p-38 can openers. A p-38 can opener is a nasty piece of work if you every try to use one, but it’s small and convenient enough for camping/survival.
I’m always fearful of losing power to the deep freeze. I have an inside/outside temperature gauge set up with the sensor inside the deep freeze and the monitor mounted on the wall for easy viewing. So if the power goes out I can easily check the inside temperature in the deep freeze without opening it and losing efficiency. I also have a cheap sound based alarm that goes off if the deep freeze loses power.
The difference between being sensible and being prepared versus being crazy and being “prepared” always amuses me.
Miss Bianca
@Achrachno: Yeah, I’m still just trying to wrap my head around the notion that somehow I manage to have a hand-crank can opener *and* a camp stove, and I know how to build a fire, so I’m apparently *way* more”prepped” than your average prepper.
The Pale Scot
@A woman from anywhere (formerly Mohagan):
Absolutely. I cannot properly pan roast fish without using two burners on the electric stove, It’s needs an instantaneous temp drop after the outside is seared. Can’t do that on an electric burner, there is always thermal lag
Geminid
@Booger: The ostensible reason for draft exemptions granted to ultra-orthodox Israeli men is their religious duty to study the Torah full time. But I read an interview on the topic with an Israeli rabbi, who let the cat out of the bag when he said: and we don’t like the way our young men come back [from military service] with strange new ideas.
Rand Careaga
@Kent:
I’m getting a Monsters Are Due on Maple Street vibe here.
J R in WV
@Kent:
We have one of those, not that expensive here in WV. I saw my next door neighbor getting one installed, and stopped to ask his installer to visit us and tell me about it. Has been years now, and since we’re up a hollow with just a few families on the grid, we’re the last neighborhood to come back up after a storm.
Not perfect, but way better than a portable gen set and a bunch of extension cords!! 12 seconds after the power grid drops the load, it cuts off the APCO power and starts the generator up. We stay warm and dry, and the stove and lights work fine. Not big enough for the A/C unit, and the well is too far away for power from the house, but everything else works great.
I’m listening to the NG generator right now as I type this comment… not too noisy, just a background hum.
kmax
@Mary G: I am reading this late but you need one of these.. we used one of these for over 50 years in my parents’ house
https://www.amazon.com/Swing-Way-609WH-Magnetic-Opener/dp/B000NA47YM