Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by leesalminen 1947 days ago
Can you point me to a specific current federal regulation that would’ve prevented this issue? TFA posits that there aren’t. So, you’ll take money to enforce a non-existent regulation?
2 comments

The trivial proof of the GP's statement is that there are regions of the world and the US that regularly drop below 20F and have a functioning electrical grid (say, for instance, Alaska).
That's not proof at all. Building grid infrastructure that can function below 20F in regions that reach that temperature regularly is easier in important ways - in particular, if a new piece of infrastructure gets built that can't cope, the problem will happen early on and either get fixed or worked around, whereas somewhere like Texas can build up decades of new infrastructure that can't cope with the cold before anything happens to demonstrate that.
Thats probably a result of superior management of infrastructure rather than “application of enough force.”
It is clearly stated as a hypothetical application of political will, not a reference to a particular regulation.
Then this is the indicated response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Canute_and_the_tide
Huh? The various law making entities in the US are not always making maximal use of their power, it doesn't make any sense to wave your hands in the air and say that they can only do the things they've already made laws for.
Was King Canute making maximal use of his power when he ordered back the waves, or could he have deployed his army to the beach to reinforce his edicts?
I don't know, I wasn't there.
It probably doesn’t matter because neither halting the tide nor producing heat in the winter are problems that are solved by authoritarian measures.