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by lurquer 1944 days ago
From the article:

“ The crisis could be traced to that other defining Texas trait: independence, both from big government and from the rest of the country.”

Funny. I thought it was traced to a freak statewide ice storm that caused less disruptions than the annual blizzard season in the Northeast [1] or the perpetual wildfires (or whatever cause) in California [2].

[1] one example affecting hundreds of thousands that wasn’t even newsworthy: https://www.msn.com/en-us/weather/topstories/new-england-sta...

[2] see eg, https://deadline.com/2020/08/california-the-largest-power-ou...

1 comments

> I thought it was traced to a freak statewide ice storm

Just off the top of my head, two things you should keep in mind in your future efforts to understand cause and effect:

  - any event/effect can have multiple causes
  - causes can be proximal, distal, or collocated
This is why we emphasize root cause analysis (RCA) when we analyze software failures. It turns out that this technique is broadly applicable to, well, almost anything else
Ah.

I see.

So, the regular power disruptions and blackouts in California and the Northeast are caused by these regions’ “independence, both from big government and from Texas.”

A third thing you should keep in mind in your future efforts to understand cause and effect is that the multiple causes behind two (or more) distinct events might only partially overlap. In some cases, they might not overlap at all!