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Comment by mlindner | Hacker News Reader

> The problem with nuclear is an example of why deregulation was stupid.

There was never a deregulation that happened. In fact deregulation is what's needed to revive nuclear power. Competition in the power market is illegal in most states.

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I can tell you in New York, utilities were compelled to divest from power production. Your state may vary.

Similar to the charter school scam, the scrappy upstarts bonded out lots of debt to buy up power plants and subsequently became a powerful lobby to keep their cartel tight.

Some of the remaining municipal energy co-op utilities were exempted from deregulation, and all of them have lower cost structures.

I know Massachusetts is a similar story, not sure about others.

What is the charter school scam? Kids actually learning to read and do math? Giving parents a choice?

Take the money from public education and fund vouchers. Those vouchers aren't going to get you into the good private school, you'll need money on top of the voucher for that. They get you in the school that prepares your for life in prison. https://time.com/101440/new-orleans-charter-schools-shouldnt...

This is in stark contrast to the charter schools in NYC which are far better than all but the best regular public schools.

If you look at the economic backgrounds and general location of students you will find that is the true predictor of educational outcomes (on average) rather than whether that child is at a charter or public school.

That doesn’t really hold for the success academies or the charters in Harlem. A lot of these charter schools mainly serve low income families.

Floating tax exempt bonds, skimming the cream with building construction/rehab and fees, and then using the different vehicles to monetize building deprecation. Then you hire young and dumb teachers as cheaply as possible and keep costs down with turnover.

Most of them are structured like real estate syndicates. It’s basically like building a strip mall or franchise hotel, except you have a captive customer and can leave the local taxpayer holding the bag. The educational mission is mostly a secondary concern. There are exceptions.

What do you mean by captive customer? My understanding was that they were all about “parent choice”, so parents can choose to send their kids to either charter schools or public schools, and the schools only get federal money proportionate to the number enrolled. Presumably parents would not tend to keep their kids in a school with high teacher turnover.

N.b. I don’t have kids, so this is mostly academic for me, no pun intended

Charter schools are private and per child offer no education advantages over public school. There are -plenty- public schools that achieve better results. The idea that there is something inherently wrong with public education is a myth pursued by the elite (read top 0.1%) to persuade the general public to do away with the public education system so that only private schools will exist and they can prevent the public from becoming too educated and questioning the status quo and with the added advantage of lowering their tax bills.

Charter schools aren't a scam. They improve the ability of children to learn.

I think the residents of texas that had no power for days, or $15k residential bills would disagree with you. In fact, my co-worker in MN had their natural gas rates go up a very noticable jump this year due to losses the company had in texas (and having to buy gas at super inflated peak rates when many texas pumping stations had to power down, since they weren't winterized to save some money.)

The parent you are responding to is talking about deregulation in a different context and with a different purpose. Regulation and deregulation are both broad terms and talking about one does not requisite jumping to a different topic. Doing so just means we'll fight all day because you can find examples on both sides where they had disastrous effects. We need to be more nuanced than this. I'll also argue that the parent should be more specific to avoid these types of responses too.

Can you elaborate on what nuclear regulations were lifted and how that contributed to the Texas power outage? This isn't rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious.

Nuclear regulations had nothing to do with it. Texas had very few regulations for oil/gas and for power plant winter weatherization hence the grid failed. Overall the grid is fine, but it can't handle a freak winter weather event like that, and it still can't. It has handled many summer heat events just fine (I know I've lived here for almost 15 years). Regulations are the obvious factor that lead to the failure, ERCOT has been warned (and in turn warned the politicians) about the dangers multiple times and the politicians will not pass legislation and money to fix the issue.

Nuclear power hasn't been deregulated, but grid generation and planning for the large part has.

As a result of that deregulation, the grid is often optimizing for cost, instead of reliability, which can lead to problems. Saving 5% on your power bill is great, but it's less great if the consequence is, say, not having any power one week of the year.

18 states isn't a majority but it's more than "never happened"

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