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Yeah, that's a good distillation of what's going on. I think people have severely looked over just how significant this weather was and why it was really reasonable for engineers to not anticipate this situation.

What we really need to be reminded of is that this was caused by global warming stifling the typical northern jetstream. As long as global warming stays a problem, we will need to anticipate these types of extremes across the entire US.

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I think it's more like the mainstream media downplayed just how significant and unusual this weather was for nakedly partisan reasons - specifically, to feed a bogus narrative that this happens every decade and Texas just doesn't fix the problem because they're a bunch of right-wing anti-government morons. It's hard to overstate just how awful and corrosive the current state of the US media is. I've seen people elsewhere insisting that their Texan acquaintances must've been brainwashed because they think this was a once in a lifetime occurrence. (Which it was.)

This might be once in a lifetime, but it isn't that far off from normal extreems

I think the median poster on HN was alive in 1989.

No-one should be surprised by a once-in-a-lifetime event. These are, by definition, not so rare that it is rational to ignore them.

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