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Date: Mon, 22 Jul 2024 19:55:56 -0400
From: WolfFan <akwolffan@zoho.com>
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Subject: Re: (ReacTor) Five SFF Books Featuring Frigid, Icy Worlds
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On Jul 22, 2024, William Hyde wrote
(in article <v7miio$qqb5$1@dont-email.me>):

> WolfFan wrote:
> > On Jul 17, 2024, William Hyde wrote
> > (in article <v7987i$2088o$1@dont-email.me>):
> >
> > > Paul S Person wrote:
> > > > On Tue, 16 Jul 2024 19:47:12 -0600, John Savard
> > > > <quadibloc@servername.invalid>  wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > On Mon, 15 Jul 2024 14:15:08 -0000 (UTC), jdnicoll@panix.com (James
> > > > > Nicoll) wrote:
> > > > >
> > > > > > Five SFF Books Featuring Frigid, Icy Worlds
> > > > > >
> > > > > > Celebrate the coldest summer of the rest of your life with some
> > > > > > frosty SF and fantasy novels!
> > > > > >
> > > > > > https://reactormag.com/five-sff-books-featuring-frigid-icy-worlds/
> > > > >
> > > > > I could comment that your posting is itself a dystopian SF story,
> > > > > about a world where giant oil companies have managed to control the
> > > > > political system and hypnotize the populace so as to prevent any
> > > > > effective response to global warming...
> > > > >
> > > > > if it weren't for the fact that it seems like calling that scenario
> > > > > "fiction" has already proven to be over-optimistic.
> > > >
> > > > One of the two theories I have seen on why the Texas electrical system
> > > > died again (if that actually happened;
> > >
> > > According to news stories I have seen, some parts of Texas are not
> > > scheduled to regain power until July 19.
> > >
> > > When I lived in College Station, TX, I experienced more power outages
> > > per unit time than I have anywhere else (the situation here is
> > > deteriorating, though) but it was never gone for more than a few hours.
> > >
> > > William Hyde
> >
> > Here in Deepest South Florida, we have record-setting high temps every few
> > days. FPL lives up to its name (Frequent Power Loss) or its nickname
> > (Florida
> > Flicker and Flash). My first job was for an electric utility in Jamaica.
> > Heads would have rolled if we had even half as many power outages as FPL.
> > After Hurricane Gilbert, crews from various utilities came to help restore
> > power. We found that we had to follow around behind the FPL crews and, if
> > necessary, fix their fixes. The guys from Puerto Rico and Georgia and the
> > Carolinas were pretty good. And we had some Royal Navy and Royal Engineers
> > who were superb. FPL ranged from competent to somewhat less than competent.
>
> I don't know if your problem is like ours, which seems to be simple
> nepotism.

it’s just incompetence on a vast scale. FPL isn’t even the worst utility 
in Florida; that would be Lake Worth Power. LWP is where nepotism went to be 
born again. Part of FPL’s problem is that Florida is a big, flat, state, 
which has lots of thunderstorms. Thunderstorms and high-tension transmission 
lines don’t go well together. Florida is also home to Florida Man. Florida 
Man loves his beer. Beer plus Florida Man plus a pickup truck plus a utility 
pole equals a power outage. FPL is putting up concrete poles in certain areas 
because they are tired of replacing the wooden ones. Of course if FPL would 
design its grid properly in the first place the outages would not hit so many 
customers...

>
>
> When the current provincial government was elected, the premier tried to
> put an elderly family friend in as head of the Ontario Provincial
> Police. He was a policeman of some rank, but it would be the
> equivalent of promoting a colonel to full general. At age 72.
>
> He then tried to hire two children of close friends and advisors to
> trade posts in NY and London at 140,000 and 160,000 k per year. They
> were, of course, without any reasonable qualification for these
> lucrative posts.
>
> And these were the cases prominent enough to make the news. Who knows
> what is going on in less public jobs?

that sounds awfully like Dade County, or as the Miami Herald, the 
Sun-Sentinel, and the Pam Beach Post call it, ‘Corruption County’. At one 
point three of five Miami mayors were guests of the Federal government at one 
of the Feds’ fine gray bar hotels, and another was a guest of the state at 
a state establishment. A Metro-Dade, later Miami-Dade, police chief and a 
Broward County Sheriff were also guests of the Feds.
>
>
> In the Walkerton fiasco a competent drunk hired a couple of incompetent
> drunks to work with him (presumably so his co-workers wouldn't object to
> his drinking on the job). When he died, one of them was hired in his
> place by someone who didn't bother to examine the drunk's utter lack of
> credentials.

that’s Dade. Dade County changed its name to Miami-Dade County. (Everyone 
still calls it Dade; when Dwayne Wade and the Miami Heat were riding high, 
there was a big sign on I-95 welcoming you to Wade County. Embarassed the 
hell out of Wade.) Which meant that every single official vehicle had to be 
repainted in the new colors with the new logo. Guess who had a friend in the 
auto painting business... Every single official county form had to be redone. 
Guess who had a friend in the printing business... And yes, he got to be a 
guest of the Feds.
>
>
> The media have not reported on any incompetence as a cause for the
> explosion of downtown Wheatley a couple of years ago. I wonder, though.
> It's not like small towns in Ontario blow up all that often.

The closest we had to that was an apartment building blow up. There were code 
violations all over, for years, but it was in Dade. Money talks. Until the 
thing broke, killing dozens. 
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57690165
>
>
> I've always thought that "The Inspector General" is an amusing but
> unrealistic story. People won't just forget how to maintain their
> technology, will then?
>
> William Hyde