That's a problem.
Re-frame the problem in terms of rich vs. poor. Now it makes sense because power companies (which are privatized in Texas) will prioritize fixing infrastructure for their reliable, paying customers over fixing infrastructure for more unreliable customers (which poor people tend to be). And it happens that some minorities have a higher probability of being poor (because of inter-generational poverty, or just being an immigrant coming from a poor country).
Not that I necessarily disagree with this but do you have any data to back this claim up?
Edit: I am pretty sure that many poor homes wouldn't be able to pay a power bill of a few thousand dollars, which is what you'd pay if you have variable rate and ran as normal throughout the texas power crisis.
from the article
1 - Critical infrastructure (hospitals, etc);
2 - Interconnects on the T&D infrastructure;
3 - Population density.
This is actually heavily regulated.
I'd clarify this as "needed be attributed to intentional, malicious racism."
A system can be racist in terms of outcome without having been intentionally designed to be racist. That still might be a problem. A sibling comment posited low-income areas are both more likely to have monitory residents and older infrastructure. That seems possible. But doesn't make it a non-issue.
The problem with this line of thinking is it is so broad in its scope that it could literally be applied to anything where there isn't perfect uniformity of outcome. Just take out race:
> A system can be ___ist in terms of outcome without having been intentionally designed to be ___ist.
Consider these dubious outcome-based claims:
Classist: poor people don't own cargo ships, therefore the shipping industry is classist.
Sexist: spas attract more women than men, therefore the spa industry is sexist.
Racist: most Ethiopian universities have majority black student populations, therefore most Ethiopian universities are racist.
You get the idea. The question when assigning blame for ___ism shouldn't be What is the apparent outcome?, but What is the apparent intent? – and it's only fair to assume good intentions in others until proven otherwise.
But I think implicit in the parent comment is that there are some systems that have demographic variation and where that variation significantly impacts the power, agency, or well-being of one of the groups.
And for cases like that, real people are being harmed. They are unfairly not getting the same opportunity for success and liberty that other groups receive. That is a problem that anyone who cares about fairness should care to solve regardless of whether that's the intent of the system. It's not about blaming and shaming the architects of the system. It's simply a matter of something akin to good engineering to want systems that work well for all users.
The fact that men don't go to spas as much ultimately doesn't matter. But if black people in Houston disportionately lost power and froze to death that is an entirely different category of problem. We should not equate them.
Orthogonal to that issue is the one you raised, and that is whether some people (regardless of race, income level, etc.) need improved utility infrastructure. Manifestly, they do. But I care about that issue because they're human beings. I care because the government has a moral duty to provide the life-critical services it promised its citizens. Freezing in the winter is a serious problem regardless of how we draw the demographic boundaries around those freezing.
Edit: It's for this reason I was frustrated in previous decades when politicians constantly used to say "do it for the children." No matter the issue, it was always "for the children." They still say it, but it's largely been replaced with "do it for the minorities." Why not just do it for people if it's a good idea? If it's a bad idea, let's skip it.
I don't think that's an accurate representation of the parent comment. They said, "A system can be racist in terms of outcome without having been intentionally designed to be racist." So it's clear they aren't implying that unequal outcomes are a singular measure of intent.
Something I try to be more mindful of when commenting on social media is how my reply steers the conversation. I think we all fall into the trap of "Oh, I agree with 90% of this but I'm going to correct this 10% bit here." In practice, that often derails the conversation completely away from the 90% that actually matters.
I believe these online conversations can be a meaningful and important part of how we learn about and interact with the world, so I try to be mindful of the goal of the entire thread and not just whether my comment is technically correct or not.
In this case here, I think your point detracts from the very important general point that there are many systems in the US that are clearly, measurably racist against Black people. And quibbling about the intent of the current participants in that system takes attention and effort away from actually fixing anything.
Imagine you're standing in your bathroom and raw sewage is firehosing out of the toilet all over the ceiling and walls. There is an interesting discussion to be had with your roommate about the relative merits of plastic versus copper pipes, temperature-dependent material fatiguing effects in winter-time, etc. But maybe that should be tabled until the matter at hand is addressed.
Right now, Black people are jailed, assaulted, and killed at a significantly greater rate than other races in the US in large part because of persistent systems whose history stretches back to a time when its creators were deliberately, actively, intentionally racist.
> Why not just do it for people if it's a good idea? If it's a bad idea, let's skip it.
Let's say you have a classroom where half the students are failing because the teachers mumbles and speaks really quickly and those students don't speak English as their first language. You might rightly say that, "Well, we want to improve the test scores of all students, right?" So you do all sorts of study plans, etc. and raise the scores of the whole class by 10 points. Great. Everyone is better. But the scores of those ESL kids are still unfairly lower than the other kids because you deliberately ignored any relative inequities by choosing to only focus on things that improved scores for all kids.
When that storm hit, ability to pay meant absolutely nothing. Poor and rich alike all lost power. When the generating stations and lines all freeze, it becomes impossible to get energy out, whether anyone can pay or not. Money doesn't magically make capacity appear when the delivery network itself fails. That was really the downfall of the Texas approach. Naive economics assumes you can deal with shortages by just rationing using price, and higher prices will incentivize producers to produce more. But if the delivery infrastructure stops working, it makes no difference what the producers' incentives are. They can't deliver anything whether they want to or not, no matter what you're willing to pay them.
What was also interesting is that it correlated with altitude of the meter which indicates a preference for wealthier neighborhoods.
The problem is that the data Hash collected is incomplete and hard to draw conclusions from:
* It’s a war driving effort of a small strip of Dallas * The data becomes impossible to capture as normal interruptions happen and reset the uptime counter.
It’s also unclear to me if these uptime counters are affected by having a generator or other backup power supply. One of the examples he noted was a Chase Bank that hadn’t experienced an interruption at all.
I live in Dallas and can tell you there was no disparity during this last winter storm. Unless you were critical infrastructure, they blacked out everyone. I live within spitting distance of city hall and I was still losing power every few hours for two weeks.
Also “over [N] times higher” is usually a marker that you’re being misled. Four times 0.00001 is still an extremely small number, not even statistically significant.
Also, TFA: "Income status of areas did not appear to be a strong factor"