rolling blackouts

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Shorting the Grid: The Hidden Fragility of Our Electric Grid by Meredith. Angwin

airline deregulation, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, decarbonisation, demand response, distributed generation, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, green new deal, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jones Act, Just-in-time delivery, load shedding, market clearing, Michael Shellenberger, Negawatt, off-the-grid, performance metric, plutocrats, renewable energy credits, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the map is not the territory, Tragedy of the Commons, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, zero-sum game

The ISO-NE report concluded that Mystic’s possible closure would cause 20 to 50 hours of “load shedding” (meaning rolling blackouts) and hundreds of hours of grid operation under emergency protocols. When Exelon made its closure announcement, ISO-NE realized that the danger of rolling blackouts was suddenly more immediate than 2024. It now hopes to provide “out-of-market-cost recovery” — subsidies — to persuade Exelon to keep the Mystic plants operating. If ISO-NE gets permission for the subsidies from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, some of the threat of blackouts will retreat a few years into the future. Ominously, 19 of the 23 ISO-NE scenarios led to rolling blackouts. The one “no-problem” scenario (no load shedding, no emergency procedures) is one where everything goes right.

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The study, “Operational Fuel-Security Analysis,” was published on January 17, 2018.69 ISO-NE initially ran 23 scenarios for the future of the grid. In 19 of the scenarios, the grid would have rolling blackouts by the winter of 2026. There was only one scenario where the grid had a solid, no-emergency operation. That no-problem scenario had very optimistic assumptions and included increased deliveries of LNG (liquified natural gas). The future comes closer IN THE FUEL-SECURITY STUDY, ISO-NE modeled the temporary closure of a major gas-fired plant, Mystic Station. This temporary closure would lead to rolling blackouts. The time-frame that ISO-NE modeled was the winter of 2025–2026. In March 2018, Exelon, Mystic’s owner, announced it planned to close the plant permanently in 2022.70 I wrote about this, of course.

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In March 2018, Exelon, Mystic’s owner, announced it planned to close the plant permanently in 2022.70 I wrote about this, of course. On May 19, 2018, the Valley News printed my opinion piece “Rolling blackouts are probably coming to New England sooner than expected.”71 The section below is an edited version of my article. **** When there’s not enough supply of electricity to meet demand, a grid operator cuts power to one section of the grid to keep the rest of the grid from failing. After a while, the operator restores the power to the blacked-out area and moves the blackout to another section. That is a “rolling blackout.” The New England grid operator, known as ISO-NE, recently completed a major study of various scenarios for the near-term future (2024–2025) of the grid, including the possibilities of rolling blackouts.

The Great American Stickup: How Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats Enriched Wall Street While Mugging Main Street by Robert Scheer

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, business cycle, California energy crisis, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, do well by doing good, facts on the ground, financial deregulation, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, mega-rich, mortgage debt, new economy, old-boy network, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, too big to fail, trickle-down economics

That provision of the 2000 law contained the aforementioned Enron loophole that permitted the company to go hog wild in expanding its online electricity trading operation, ultimately leading to increasingly manipulative trading practices that would infamously lead to humiliating, life-threatening, and economically damaging rolling blackouts for California. Robertson left the administration just weeks prior to the passage of the CFMA to become the top Washington lobbyist for Enron—a position she kept until the company declared bankruptcy at the end of 2001, a victim of its greed. Despite this blatantly apparent conflict of interest, in early summer 2009, Federal Reserve chair Ben Bernanke hired Robertson as a lobbyist as he sought to protect the Fed from congressional efforts to increase oversight of the secretive and monolithic central bank.

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I knew I could count on you . . . Rich: No problem. I’m sure I’ll have a good time. All right, so I’ve got you covered for tomorrow. Bill: Thanks a lot Rich. Rich: All right. I won’t even put that in the book. The next day the power plant was taken offline, forcing California to employ rolling blackouts to manage the emergency, which affected up to a half million consumers, according to the western power grid’s daily logs. A Snohomish County PUD press release detailed more of the taped transcripts:Enron employees talked openly about “stealing” up to $2 million a day from California during the energy crisis.

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In one “ricochet” scheme, Enron illegally obtained $222,678 in a three-hour period by purchasing power in California, shipping it to Oregon where its original source was masked, and then reselling it into the California market for $750 per megawatt-hour. The scheme allowed Enron to avoid price caps. Before California deregulated the energy trading market, only one “Stage 3” rolling blackout had been declared from June through December 2000; after passage, the state would suffer thirty-eight such blackouts, before federal regulators reluctantly intervened in June 2001. Under massive public pressure, some senators, especially the two California Democrats, began demanding increased regulation, but the Bush administration would have none of it.

California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--And What It Means for America's Power Grid by Katherine Blunt

An Inconvenient Truth, benefit corporation, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, call centre, commoditize, confounding variable, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, electricity market, Elon Musk, forensic accounting, Google Earth, high-speed rail, junk bonds, lock screen, market clearing, market design, off-the-grid, price stability, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, vertical integration

The first outages occurred in June of that year as a heat wave swept the state. The grid operator faced the prospect of demand surging beyond available supply, straining the grid to the point of collapse. It ordered PG&E to cut power in phases to tens of thousands of customers throughout the Bay Area to help relieve the stress. PG&E rotated the outages, called rolling blackouts, throughout the region on an hourly basis in an effort to make sure no customer was in the dark for too long. Bob Glynn, who had by then become PG&E’s CEO and chairman, was angry and frustrated. The deregulation effort he had spoken in favor of was so broken that the company was forced to turn out the lights on its customers to keep demand in line with supply.

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He had spent years as an adviser to power companies looking to build plants in California and had been involved in shaping the deregulation bill. He knew most everyone in Sacramento. He made some calls, trying to set up a meeting with the governor. But Davis kept his distance as his advisers debated what he ought to do. In December, as the grid operator narrowly managed to avoid more rolling blackouts, Davis finally agreed to a meeting with the heads of the three utilities. Glynn and Richard arrived in Sacramento to sit down with Davis, the president of the CPUC, and the leaders of the senate and the assembly. PG&E and Southern California Edison dominated the discussion. The two utilities were together in an $8 billion hole.

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The outage had swept from New York to Canada, stranding travelers, cutting off emergency services and leaving millions sweltering in their homes. The cause was unknown at the time. But it was clear that the problem had disrupted the balance of supply and demand on the grid. The result was the sort of cascading failure that the California grid operator had narrowly avoided by resorting to rolling blackouts a few years earlier. “This is an operation that will take several days to get the system back to where it’s totally normal,” Earley said. “It’s a very complex process.” Earley worked almost around the clock for the next several days, subsisting on Fritos and yogurt until power was restored the morning of August 16.

American Made: Why Making Things Will Return Us to Greatness by Dan Dimicco

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, California high-speed rail, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, digital divide, driverless car, fear of failure, full employment, Google Glasses, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, invisible hand, job automation, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, manufacturing employment, Neil Armstrong, oil shale / tar sands, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, sovereign wealth fund, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

International business travelers have likely experienced how truly high-speed Internet works—it’s vastly superior to the Wi-Fi most Americans use. Superstorm Sandy, which pummeled New York and New Jersey in 2012, exposed exactly how frail the physical infrastructure of the nation’s largest metropolitan region is. In certain parts of the country, rolling blackouts and brownouts have become routine during the hot summer months. When asked, an overwhelming majority of Americans—more than seven in ten, in at least one poll—think state and federal governments should spend more on transportation and infrastructure upgrades.1 But most Americans don’t need to be asked.

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We’ll save as much as 7 billion gallons of water a day from being wasted due to rusty and leaky pipes.18 Better light rail and mass transit will save about $71 million in gasoline a year.19 A satellite-based air-traffic control system—dubbed “NextGen” by the FAA—would slash delays and allow for more direct flights, saving airlines and consumers an estimated $24 billion through 2020, 1.4 billion gallons in jet fuel, and 14 billion fewer tons of CO2.20 A smarter power grid will improve distribution, cutting outages and rolling blackouts and saving anywhere from $25 billion to $180 billion a year.21 The current conversation about twenty-first-century infrastructure often includes high-speed rail as well. China, Japan, Singapore, Germany, France, and Spain have extensive high-speed rail systems that many Americans would love to emulate in the United States.

The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by Leslie Berlin

Apple II, Bob Noyce, book value, business cycle, California energy crisis, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, computer age, data science, Fairchild Semiconductor, George Gilder, Henry Singleton, informal economy, John Markoff, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Gell-Mann, open economy, prudent man rule, Richard Feynman, rolling blackouts, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, Teledyne, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, vertical integration, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

Within weeks, the state of California had declared the need to ration electricity and announced plans to ask industrial customers to cut their power consumption to levels 10 percent below those of the corresponding month a year earlier. If the voluntary 10-percent plan did not work, then the utilities companies might resort to rolling blackouts to conserve power. The prospect of rolling blackouts alarmed Noyce, who readily admitted that the semiconductor industry had designed its processes and equipment “assum[ing] that petrochemicals were free and available and that power was free and available.” The average wafer fab used 30 times as much electricity as a commercial office building of the same size, and consumed large quantities of xylene, acetone, and disopropyl alcohol, all petrochemical derivatives.10 Immediately upon learning of the state’s plans, Noyce had Intel start conservation and recycling efforts in-house.

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See unions Lafferty, Jim, ix, 4, 228, 248, 279–80, 299, 387 Lamm, Donald, x Landsdale, Pennsylvania, 49–50, 52 Large Scale Integration (LSI), 160; startup activity around, 159 lasers, 192 Last, Jay, ix, 69–71, 122–24, 127, 146, 161, 387; at Fairchild, 88, 90, 94, 113, 120; in group of eight, 82–86, 96, 112, 124; and integrated circuit, 111–12; and planar process, 107–8; at Shockley, 61, 65, 67, 73, 78–79 layoffs, 188, 223–24, 231 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 306 Lécuyer, Christophe, ix Leggett, Glenn, 193–95, 387 Lehovec, Kurt, 104, 141 Lenoir, Tim, x Levine, Jerry, 116, 131, 387 licensing of patents, 55, 79, 117, 134– 35, 139–40, 269. See also patents Lifetime Achievement Medal, 302 Lindgren, Patricia, 387 Livermore, California, 207, 237 lobbying, 3; on capital gains, 262; against rolling blackouts, 209; SEMATECH, 283–84; on SIA, 262, 266, 268–70, 273 Los Altos Hills, 117 Los Angeles Times, 271 Lowood, Henry, x Lundgren, Dan, 265 McCain, John, 285 McDonalds restaurants, 227 McEnery, Tom, 287 McKenna, Regis, ix, 203–4, 245, 248, 251, 387 Mackay, Bruce, 387 MacLeod, Norman, 241 McMurry, Hamstra, 60 McMurray, Charles and Ann, 387 McNamara, Robert, 137 magnesium oxide, 42 Maine, 168–69, 201, 211, 214, 217, 234 Maness, Barbara, 200–202, 215–16, 232 Manly, Charles, 387 manufacturing.

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.: as actuary, 23, 106; angel (private) investing by, 192– 93, 218–20, 240, 275; April Fool’s joke, 148; arm fracture of, 41; attitude toward government contracting, 50, 130–31, 281; attitude toward management, 90, 106–7, 128, 154, 180; birth of, 10–11; book-printing analogy of, 138; camera (hobby), 278; camera (stepand-repeat design), 94; childhood of, 11–18; college years, 14 (See also Grinnel College; MIT); on computers, 212, 225–27, 252, 278; on confidence, 113, 133, 179, 246; on cooperative research, 281; creativity of, 97–98, 130–31; day declared in honor of, 3, 246, 304–5; death of, 303–5; decision to leave Fairchild, 149–54; decision to leave Shockley, 81; and dislike of confrontation, 35, 89–90, 145, 198, 260; dislike of hierarchy, 114–16, 128, 191; dissertation of, 38–42; and diving, 18, 19, 21; divorce of, 214–18, 234; draft concerns of, 24, 25, 51, 52; early physics studies of, 17–19; extramarital affair of, 146, 200–202, 215–16, 232; as Fairchild general manager, 105–7, 111–16, 119–23, 128–34, 142–43, 146–48, 153–54; as Fairchild R&D head, 90, 95, 106–7; family life of, 1, 47, 51–53, 65, 117–18, 134, 143–46, 178–79, 220, 228–29, 277, 300– 303; as father of Silicon Valley, 246; finances, early, 16, 20, 34–37, 45, 52, 86, 113, 203; and Fullbright award, 37; glider and model plane building by, 6–9, 37; graduate work of (MIT), 30–42; as Grinnell college student, 17, 19–22, 27–29, 33; as Grinnell college trustee, 144, 166, 193–94, 208; in group of eight, 82–86, 96, 112, 124; on group think, 172; high school, 14– 18; on information economy, 271; as Intel board chair, 238–39, 243– 46, 250, 255; as Intel director, 257– 58, 297; as Intel president, 157–59, 160–91, 195–210, 222–28; investment philosophy of, 240–41; jobs, early, 16, 20, 23, 28; as leader vs. manager, 153, 225–27; Lifetime Achievement Medal, 302; lobbying by (against rolling blackouts), 209; lobbying by (capital gains), 262; lobbying by (SEMATECH), 283– 84; lobbying by (SIA), 262, 266, 268–70, 273; love of California, 59, 82, 118–19; marriages of (See Bowers, Ann; Noyce, Betty Bottomley); mentoring young entrepreneurs, 2, 192–93, 241–43, 275–77, 278, 280, 299–300, 306, 307; on microprocessor, 182–83, 185, 186, 195–96, 203–6; move to California, 59–60, 62; on Murphy’s Law, 255; and music, 15, 35–36, 51, 144, 191; and Nobel Prize, 3, 66, 110, 246; obituaries for, 305; oil and gas investment, 300–301, 304; on optimism, 264; patents of, 48, 87, 97, Index 99, 100, 117, 389–90; philanthropy of, 210–12, 228–29, 274, 306; at Philco, 47–52; philosophy of, 240; physics studies of, 17–19; pig stealing by, 23; pilot hobby and personal airplanes of, 2, 117, 179–80, 201, 202, 208, 213, 228–29, 252, 278–80, 304–5; property owned by, 218, 277, 278, 302; public image of, 243–49; puffin airlift by, 211; on quick-and-dirty research approach, 175; as Rapid Robert, 1, 34, 37; relationship with Japanese, 117, 134, 184, 195, 260, 269; on religion, 16, 118, 235; as Renaissance man, 305; scuba diving of, 278; as SEMATECH CEO, 289– 304; sense of future, 2, 3, 206; and Shell Fellowship, 37; at Shockley Semiconductor Labs, 59–62, 64– 68, 71–78, 80–81; and skiing, 2, 38, 41, 191–92, 228, 248; and smoking, 16, 233–34; speaking schedule of, 297–98; as spokesman, 239; and stock options, 120, 150, 165, 179, 197–98, 246; support for education by, 274, 306; and tinkering, 7, 16, 36–37, 51, 144, 278, 298, 299–300; travel by (business), 117, 184, 195– 97; travel by (family vacation), 168–69; travel by (to China), 277; travel by (to Europe), 117, 121, 196–97, 228; travel by (to Japan), 117, 184, 185, 228; travel by (with Bowers), 277–78, 292; wealth, early discomfort with, 113, 117, 203; wealth of, 255, 275; and youth movement, 213 Noyce Chapel, 228–29 Noyce Foundation, 306 Oakmont, Pennsylvania, 230 obituaries, 305 oil and gas investment, 300–301, 304 Olivetti corporation, 121 Olson, Keith, 387 OmniPage, 276–77.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Their idea began to spread. “Other mods said, ‘We’ll go black in solidarity with you,’ ” recalls Brian. Soon, the major /r/science subreddit went dark. Next, /r/AskReddit, the most popular subreddit on the site, shut down. “Then after that it just kind of snowballed where it became the cool thing to do.” A rolling blackout of the site’s 300+ top subreddits ensued and a full-scale rebellion—what quickly become known as #RedditRevolt, then “AMAgeddon”—was on. Reddit’s traffic had been all but annihilated—by its own moderators. In the days that followed, the best and worst of Reddit was on display. Reddit’s relatively new CEO Ellen Pao quickly apologized, recognizing the ignored grievances of the site’s moderators: We screwed up.

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“When my wife got pregnant”: Brian Lynch, discussion with authors, November 19, 2015. On July 2, 2015: Sarah Burh, “Reddit: ‘We Screwed Up,’ ” TechCrunch, July 6, 2015. Other mods said, “ ‘We’ll go black’ ”: Brian Lynch, discussion with authors. “Then after that it just”: Ibid. A rolling blackout: Margaret Hartmann, “What Really Caused the Reddit Revolt?,” New York magazine, July 15, 2015. “We screwed up”: Burh, “Reddit: ‘We Screwed Up.’ ” “Reddit’s new age of censorship”: Billy Johnson, “Step Down as CEO of Reddit Inc.,” Change.org, July 2017. www.change.org. “We will ban subreddits”: Reddit, “Removing Harassing Subreddits,” June 10, 2015. www.reddit.com.

The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality by Richard Heinberg

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, business cycle, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, green transition, happiness index / gross national happiness, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Kenneth Rogoff, late fees, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, mega-rich, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, naked short selling, Naomi Klein, Negawatt, new economy, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, price stability, private military company, quantitative easing, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, short selling, special drawing rights, systems thinking, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, tulip mania, WikiLeaks, working poor, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Therefore natural disasters and industrial accidents, conservatively estimated, are already costing the equivalent of 8.6 percent of annual GDP growth. BOX 3.10 The Japan Earthquake As this book was in its final stages of preparation for printing, a massive earthquake and tsunami struck northern Japan. Thousands of lives were lost; entire towns were wiped out; nuclear reactors melted down; oil refineries were shuttered; rolling blackouts swept the nation; seaports were seriously damaged; and Toyota, Sony, and other major corporations ceased production. Only days after these horrific events it was already clear that Japan’s economy would be impacted for many months to come. Most oil traders at first assumed that so much destruction in the world’s third largest economy would lower world petroleum demand, but others soon argued that Japan would have to import more oil to make up for its lost electrical production capacity, and that refinery outages would put pressure on Asian diesel supplies.

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Beijing’s 2010 energy efficiency goal was stringently enforced so that the nation would reach its target to decrease energy consumption per unit of GDP by 20 percent compared to 2005. As 2010 was winding down, some Zhejiang provincial officials tried to make their final five-year plan energy efficiency goal by enforcing rolling blackouts, turning off power at various times for days on end. The new five-year plan prioritizes investments in renewable energy, information and communications technologies, advanced transportation and materials, water supply and treatment technologies (including using plants for bioremediation), and air and water quality.

The Oil Age Is Over: What to Expect as the World Runs Out of Cheap Oil, 2005-2050 by Matt Savinar

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, clean water, disinformation, Easter island, energy security, hydrogen economy, illegal immigration, invisible hand, military-industrial complex, new economy, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, post-oil, Ralph Nader, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Rosa Parks, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Y2K

We need to create over 250,000 new jobs per month just to keep up with population growth. Creating new jobs is essentially impossible now that oil production is peaking. Without an excess supply of energy, the economy cannot grow, and the necessary number of jobs cannot be consistently created. E. Blackouts The rolling blackouts experienced in California during fall of 2000, the massive East Coast blackout of August 2003 and the various other massive blackouts that occurred throughout the world during late summer of 2003 are simply a sign of things to come. F. Reduced Food and Chemical Production World grain production has dropped every year since 1996-1997.34 World wheat production has dropped every year since 1997-1998.

The Grid: The Fraying Wires Between Americans and Our Energy Future by Gretchen Bakke

addicted to oil, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, demand response, dematerialisation, distributed generation, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Internet of things, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Negawatt, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off grid, off-the-grid, post-oil, profit motive, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, the built environment, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, vertical integration, washing machines reduced drudgery, Whole Earth Catalog

In California these consequences included the near bankruptcy of its two largest investor-owned utilities, the consumption of an $8 billion state budget surplus, and almost nine months in 2000–2001 of uncertain electricity supply as power plants were taken offline for “repairs” or the lines necessary to carry essential current between the northern and southern halves of the state were “overbooked.” As rolling blackouts became the rule, many new economy businesses, like Apple and Cisco Systems, as well as other electricity-dependent undertakings such as military bases and prisons, began to think about ways they might detach themselves from grid-provided power. Institutional grid defection in the wake of 2000–2001 became a sign not of radicalism but the inverse: wise organizations engineered ways to use the grid as a backup power system rather than as something upon which they must rely regardless of how poorly it was managed or how sporadically its product was delivered.

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See also individual outages causes of, here computer-related, here consumers’ attitudes toward, here cost of, here on distribution systems, here duration of, here impact of, here, here increase in, here and movement of electricity, here non-storm-related, here and resiliency, here rolling blackouts, here storm-related, here, here in transmission systems, here tree-related, here and underfunded distribution networks, here power plants, here. See also specific plants and types of plants efficiency of, here, here, here environmental regulations and cost of building, here failures of, here first large-scale, here, here grow-and-build strategy, here, here money owed on, here for renewable sources, here reserved for peak demand, here, here virtual, here predictability of demand, here of electricity, here of generation from renewables, here price of electricity in 1970s, here and amount of electricity used, here and conservation of power, here and energy trading, here and environmental movement, here fixed, here in Germany, here in Hawaii, here for industry vs. residential/commercial customers, here and money made by company, here in monopsonies, here, here for off-peak vs. peak power, here and oil embargo of 1973, here promotional rates, here and rooftop solar systems, here surcharge for renewables, here tiered rate structures, here and use of smart meters, here and utility death spiral, here private grids, here, here.

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Liberals are right to fear this eventuality, but persist in willful obliviousness of their own complicity in the birth of the illiberal progeny of the liberal order itself. Conclusion: Liberty after Liberalism LIBERALISM has failed because liberalism has succeeded. As it becomes fully itself, it generates endemic pathologies more rapidly and pervasively than it is able to produce Band-aids and veils to cover them. The result is the systemic rolling blackouts in electoral politics, governance, and economics, the loss of confidence and even belief in legitimacy among the citizenry, that accumulate not as separable and discrete problems to be solved within the liberal frame but as deeply interconnected crises of legitimacy and a portent of liberalism’s end times.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

In December 2000, Senator Gramm helped push a bill through Congress that deregulated trading in energy. Enron's electricity trading business swelled, and some of the firm's only real profits were made. Without owning a single California power plant, Enron came to control the state's market. Rolling blackouts became the norm, prices skyrocketed, and the state racked up billions in debt. Phil Gramm blamed environmentalists for the crisis. Finally, price controls were imposed and the bubble burst. Deprived of its cash cow, Enron hit the rocks a few months later. But of course the biggest profiteers were the synergists themselves, the investment banks and venture capitaHsts (VCs).

Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, clean water, East Village, export processing zone, feminist movement, high-speed rail, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the sewing machine, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, megacity, messenger bag, Multi Fibre Arrangement, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Skype, special economic zone, trade liberalization, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, upwardly mobile, Veblen good

“I was going to have to give up my house and move back in with my mom because there was just no way I was going to be able to make ends meet,” Kuki recalls. “I owed too much money to the grocery store, so they weren’t going to give me food anymore.” Many of the workers at Alta Gracia had amassed debts like these before the factory reopened. Early in my visit with Kuki, a rolling blackout snuffed out the electricity in the neighborhood; we were talking by candlelight. Kuki’s two-year-old promptly crawled onto the table and stuck his finger into the candle. When everyone calmed back down, I asked Kuki, carefully, about the elephant in the room. Her livelihood depended on American consumers buying the clothes that Alta Gracia makes.

How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country, From the Pilgrims to the Present by Thomas J. Dilorenzo

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, British Empire, business cycle, California energy crisis, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, electricity market, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, medical malpractice, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, Norman Mailer, plutocrats, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Nader, rent control, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, working poor, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

Sure enough, in the late 1990s government officials created yet another energy crisis with their foolish regulatory policies. And once again they wrongly blamed the problem on deregulation. The electric power crisis that plagued California beginning in the late 1990s is commonly cited in calls for further government regulation. After all, the anticapitalists say, California began experiencing rolling blackouts because in 1996 the state government passed a law deregulating the electricity industry. But that 1996 law deregulated only the wholesale price of electricity purchased by electric power distributors within the state; it maintained price controls on retail prices and applied even more onerous regulations to the rest of the industry.

Infinite Detail by Tim Maughan

3D printing, augmented reality, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, driverless car, fake news, Free Software Foundation, friendly fire, gentrification, global supply chain, hydroponic farming, Internet of things, Mason jar, messenger bag, off grid, Panamax, post-Panamax, ransomware, RFID, rolling blackouts, security theater, self-driving car, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, surveillance capitalism, the built environment, urban decay, urban planning

There was talk of all-out war between Anon and a ’clave of patriotic Chinese hackers, both sides allegedly fighting proxy battles for corporate interests, the CIA, Google, or space aliens—take your pick. New viruses and DDoS strategies, bot armies a billion zombie web-cam units strong. Half of Chicago drowned in sewage when something disrupted the water systems there, reports of rolling blackouts across Beijing and Rio. The White House threatening to throw the kill switch. Then that footage was leaked, the clearing of the homeless camp near Google’s HQ in California. Next thing, their campus in Mountain View was swamped by thousands of protestors. The leaked video had brought them down, but it felt like most of them had some other reason to be there: that unshakable feeling that they’d been fucked over, that they’d been denied something, that they’d had too much control taken away from them and put into the hands of unseen algorithms.

The End of Growth by Jeff Rubin

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, deal flow, decarbonisation, deglobalization, Easter island, energy security, eurozone crisis, Exxon Valdez, Eyjafjallajökull, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, flex fuel, Ford Model T, full employment, ghettoisation, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Hans Island, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, illegal immigration, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jevons paradox, Kickstarter, low interest rates, McMansion, megaproject, Monroe Doctrine, moral hazard, new economy, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

At the same time, China’s industries and consumers are living under a subsidized umbrella of false power costs. Eventually, resource scarcity will assert itself. Both China and India will have to ration power, which will put the brakes on economic activity. That process has already started with the rolling blackouts that are now a permanent feature of the economic landscape in those countries. Few climate change experts take such economic considerations into account when making their big-picture forecasts. The IPCC, for example, released a series of models for the future of global carbon emissions in its benchmark 2007 report, presenting no fewer than forty different scenarios.

Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era by James Barrat

AI winter, air gap, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Automated Insights, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, Bletchley Park, brain emulation, California energy crisis, cellular automata, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, don't be evil, drone strike, dual-use technology, Extropian, finite state, Flash crash, friendly AI, friendly fire, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, lone genius, machine translation, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, prisoner's dilemma, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, rolling blackouts, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart grid, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

In 2000, by overloading the line with subscribers during a heat wave, they created “phantom” or fake congestion, and a bottleneck in energy delivery. Prices skyrocketed, and electricity became critically scarce. California officials supplied energy to some regions while darkening others, a practice called “rolling blackouts.” The blackouts caused no known deaths but plenty of fear, as families became trapped in elevators, and streets were lit only by headlights. Apple, Cisco, and other corporations were forced to shut down, at a loss of millions of dollars. But Enron made millions. During the blackouts one trader was recorded saying, “Just cut ’em off.

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

During the 2008 conventions, the 1.4 million people who were actively using Twitter sent more than 365,000 tweets from both the Republican and Democratic conventions. Such numbers showed that the elections were important, Ev agreed, but they weren’t more important than growing the tiny team of twenty-two employees and getting the site working properly. Like rolling blackouts in a country already starved of electricity, the site had continued to go off-line daily. The Fail Whale took over the site almost hourly. Some outages lasted a few minutes, others more than a day. The fire hose, the name given to the stream of all the tweets coming through the service for third-party applications, would often turn off.

American Marxism by Mark R. Levin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, American ideology, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, crony capitalism, data science, defund the police, degrowth, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Food sovereignty, George Floyd, green new deal, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, microaggression, New Journalism, open borders, Parler "social media", planned obsolescence, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, school choice, school vouchers, single-payer health, tech billionaire, the market place, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

America’s largest state, California, has been an incubator for far-left environmental experiments. During the summer of 2020, California’s climate policies resulted in a widespread blackout. Millions of its citizens had their electrical power cut off in the midst of a heat wave. Michael Shellenberger at Forbes explains: “[T]he underlying reasons that California… experience[ed] rolling black-outs for the second time in less than a year stem[s] from the state’s climate policies….”… “California saw its electricity prices rise six times more than the rest of the United States from 2011 to 2019, due to its huge expansion of renewables….”85 “Even though the cost of solar panels declined dramatically from 2011 and 2019,” writes Shellenberger, “their unreliable and weather-dependent nature meant that they imposed large new costs in the form of storage and transmissions to keep electricity reliable.

The New Harvest: Agricultural Innovation in Africa by Calestous Juma

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, business climate, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, double helix, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, export processing zone, global value chain, high-speed rail, impact investing, income per capita, industrial cluster, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, land tenure, M-Pesa, microcredit, mobile money, non-tariff barriers, off grid, out of africa, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, Recombinant DNA, rolling blackouts, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, total factor productivity, undersea cable

In Africa, governments can learn from the Chinese experience and ensure that their road programs give adequate priority to lower-quality and rural feeder roads. Energy To enhance agricultural development and to make progress in value-added agro-processing, Africa needs better and more consistent sources of energy. Rolling blackouts are routine in 124 THE NEW HARVEST much of western, central, and eastern Africa, and much of Africa’s power generation and transmission infrastructure needs repair or replacement. What Africa lacks in adequate deployment, however, it makes up for in potential. Africa is endowed with hydro, oil, natural gas, solar, geothermal, coal, and other resources vast enough to meet all its energy needs.

Understanding Asset Allocation: An Intuitive Approach to Maximizing Your Portfolio by Victor A. Canto

accounting loophole / creative accounting, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California energy crisis, capital asset pricing model, commodity trading advisor, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, financial engineering, fixed income, frictionless, global macro, high net worth, index fund, inflation targeting, invisible hand, John Meriwether, junk bonds, law of one price, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low cost airline, low interest rates, market bubble, merger arbitrage, money market fund, new economy, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Phillips curve, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, selection bias, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sharpe ratio, short selling, statistical arbitrage, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, the market place, transaction costs, Y2K, yield curve, zero-sum game

A few years back, temperatures unexpectedly rose in Southern California. As the heat intensified, people turned on their air conditioners. Combined with the extra energy needed to keep refrigerators cool, the added demand for power outpaced the suppliers’ ability to suppliers to deliver. The result was the first in what became a series of rolling blackouts in Southern California. 194 UNDERSTANDING ASSET ALLOCATION At the time, I asked: What will the impact of the energy crisis be? How will California companies be affected? I analyzed the situation from the viewpoint that California is an integrated economy and represents one of the largest world economies.

The Premonition: A Pandemic Story by Michael Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, double helix, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, gentleman farmer, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, out of africa, precautionary principle, QAnon, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, stem cell, tech bro, telemarketer, the new new thing, working poor, young professional

It also enabled him to answer the complicated questions that now routinely found him, most of which had to do with preventing some national disaster. The Federal Reserve Bank of New York just then was using him to help figure out how failure in one corner of the U.S. financial system might ripple into others. The Department of Energy wanted him to determine if a small glitch in the electric grid might trigger rolling blackouts across the country. Once you stopped talking about people and started talking about, say, money flows, the links between the little dots on the screen and the real world became harder for most people to follow. But not for him. “This is the crux of science,” he’d say with enthusiasm. “All science is modeling.

Nation-Building: Beyond Afghanistan and Iraq by Francis Fukuyama

Berlin Wall, business climate, colonial rule, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, Gunnar Myrdal, informal economy, land reform, managed futures, microcredit, open economy, operational security, rolling blackouts, Seymour Hersh, unemployed young men

Before the invasion in March 2003, Iraq produced 4,500 megawatts of electricity on demand.43 At the end of the occupation, Iraq’s electricity generation hovered at 4,000 megawatts, which equals less than 9 hours of power a day for most Baghdad homes.44 Nearly 2 years later, the situation has not improved, and Iraqis are only receiving roughly 3,600 megawatts of electricity.45 This electricity shortage had a particularly devastating political impact for the occupation. First, the absence of any proper means of national communication left the coalition incapable of letting citizens know when they had power. Even in the well-off neighborhoods, there were only 12 hours of electricity per day, with rolling black-outs.46 Second, Iraqi expectations for the coalition to restore such basic infrastructure as the power grid far exceeded the contractors’ capacity for repairs. Third, the power grids were highly susceptible to sabotage, and the paucity of security forces for this type of protection clearly took its toll as daily bombings of power lines were a major setback to the larger task of turning on the lights.

Choked: Life and Breath in the Age of Air Pollution by Beth Gardiner

barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, connected car, Crossrail, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, failed state, Hyperloop, index card, Indoor air pollution, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, white picket fence

Her adversary was the man many saw as the power behind Bush’s throne: Vice President Dick Cheney, whose many responsibilities included heading the White House’s Energy Task Force. In the administration’s first months, before 9/11 upended its agenda, a new national energy policy was a top White House priority. California was suffering through rolling blackouts and electricity price spikes, and Cheney’s team was crystal clear on why. While more neutral observers attributed the crisis to deregulation and market manipulation, the task force blamed the Clean Air Act. “I said to them, ‘Show me permits that are being held up’” by air quality rules, Whitman recalls.

The Key Man: The True Story of How the Global Elite Was Duped by a Capitalist Fairy Tale by Simon Clark, Will Louch

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, British Empire, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, fake news, forensic accounting, high net worth, impact investing, income inequality, Jeffrey Epstein, Kickstarter, load shedding, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, trade route, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, young professional

The disturbances would have scared away foreign investors unused to such hostilities, but Tabish was born and bred in Karachi and he knew that in Pakistan’s highly emotive and vocal public life politicians often exaggerated for effect, and he was determined that the violent threats wouldn’t stop him. The reputation of Abraaj was at stake, and walking away would have been too humiliating. Arif agreed to complete the takeover of Karachi Electric in May 2009. Now Tabish could really get to work. It still seemed like an impossible job. Rolling blackouts pushed people onto the streets once more. From the slums to the business district, rampaging gangs left a trail of carnage in their wake. They threw stones and chanted offensive slogans at the power company that had let them down. Protesters burned tires and blockaded busy streets. The rioting was worst in poorer areas like Orangi, a former slum, where the unbearable summer heat drove residents crazy.

Coastal California by Lonely Planet

1960s counterculture, airport security, Albert Einstein, Asilomar, back-to-the-land, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, Blue Bottle Coffee, buy and hold, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, company town, Day of the Dead, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, electricity market, Frank Gehry, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, illegal immigration, Joan Didion, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, low cost airline, machine readable, Mason jar, McMansion, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Wozniak, trade route, transcontinental railway, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, white picket fence, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional, Zipcar

Reacting against the banal complacency of post-WWII suburbia, 1950s beatniks and 1960s hippies flocked to California spreading poetry and free love, and in the ’70s, Gay Pride activists kept the social revolution going. The internet revolution, spurred by Silicon Valley near San Francisco, rewired the economy and led to a 1990s boom in overspeculated stocks. When the bubble burst in 2000, it plunged the state’s economy into chaos, especially when deregulation of the electricity market led to rolling blackouts and sky-high power bills. In the new millennium, meltdowns on Wall Street and the lingering US recession have caused a staggering financial crisis that California has yet to bounce back from. Ballistic population growth, pollution and traffic are other vexing issues. Meanwhile, the need for public education and prison reform builds, and the conundrum of illegal immigration from Mexico, which fills a critical labor shortage, remains unsolved.

…

Many reaped huge overnight profits from start-ups, fueled by misplaced optimism, only to crash with equal velocity at the turn of the millennium. No place in America was more affected by the demise of the dot-coms in 2000 than California. That same year also brought widespread power shortages and rolling blackouts to California, which were caused by Enron’s illegal manipulation of markets. But before the truth came out, Republican malcontents fingered then-Governor Gray Davis and called for a special recall election that ousted him. Enter Arnold Schwarzenegger – Californians will always forgive a movie star more easily than a politician.

The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World by Russell Gold

accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, activist lawyer, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, California energy crisis, Carl Icahn, clean water, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, electricity market, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), man camp, margin call, market fundamentalism, Mason jar, North Sea oil, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, peak oil, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, risk tolerance, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Upton Sinclair

In the meantime, El Paso traders began to do what the state feared: control gas supply and drive up market prices. The California energy meltdown of 2000 and 2001 is remembered largely as a crisis in the electricity market. Wholesale power prices spiked. There were more than one hundred electrical emergencies declared and a handful of rolling blackouts. But the power crisis was intertwined with problems in the natural gas market. In March 2000, when El Paso Merchant took control of the pipeline contracts, gas at the California border cost $2.84 per thousand cubic feet. By December, the price had risen nearly tenfold, to $25.08. Briefly, prices spiked as high as $60.When prices neared their peak, in November, El Paso Merchant turned up the flow of gas into the state.

Breakout Nations: In Pursuit of the Next Economic Miracles by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, eurozone crisis, financial engineering, Gini coefficient, global macro, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, informal economy, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, rolling blackouts, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population, zero-sum game

Botha are now owned by the ANC government, and are still poorly managed. The phone company, Telkom, is owned by the government—little surprise, then, that only 14 percent of South Africans have access to the Internet. The same goes for the electric utility, Eskom, which manages a grid plagued by rolling blackouts. The rail system is run by Transnet, which has been negotiating with private partners for five years to solve bottlenecks in the network that have prevented South Africa from raising iron ore exports even in the midst of a global boom in demand. State ownership explains why the national flagship, South African Airways, has so little competition, and why there are no cheap flights to South Africa, which dampens tourism and business opportunities.

Green Tyranny: Exposing the Totalitarian Roots of the Climate Industrial Complex by Rupert Darwall

1960s counterculture, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bakken shale, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, centre right, clean tech, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, gigafactory, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Elkington, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, market design, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mittelstand, Murray Bookchin, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, oil shale / tar sands, Paris climate accords, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, plutocrats, postindustrial economy, precautionary principle, pre–internet, recommendation engine, renewable energy transition, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Solyndra, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, tech baron, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, women in the workforce, young professional

In the late 1960s, California’s political and intellectual class became increasingly influenced by environmentalist thinkers such as the Norwegian Arne Næss, the German Fritz Schumacher, and the Frankfurt School’s Herbert Marcuse. From the mid-1970s, the Golden State led the U.S. in turning green ideology in a fight against reality, with disastrous consequences. Rising demand and falling generating capacity, exacerbated by retail price caps, led to grid instability and rolling blackouts in 2000 and 2001, contributing to the 2003 recall of Governor Gray Davis. Although the blackouts ended, non–weather dependent generating capacity continued to fall, electricity prices kept rising, as did the amount of wind and solar on the grid. By 2014, California was importing one-third of its electricity.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

Another exchange concerns ‘all the money you guys stole from those poor grand-mothers of California’. The results of such machinations were not only the higher prices Enron wanted, but also blackouts for consumers. In the space of just six months after the deregulation law came into effect, California experienced no fewer than thirty-eight rolling blackouts. (In another tape, traders watching television reports of Californian forest fires shout ‘Burn, baby, burn!’ as electricity pylons buckle and fall.) Even with such market-rigging, the company’s stated assets and profits were vastly inflated, while its debts and losses were concealed in so-called special-purpose entities (SPEs) which were not included in the company’s consolidated statements.

Extreme Economies: Survival, Failure, Future – Lessons From the World’s Limits by Richard Davies

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Anton Chekhov, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, big-box store, cashless society, clean water, complexity theory, deindustrialization, digital divide, eurozone crisis, failed state, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, gentleman farmer, Global Witness, government statistician, illegal immigration, income inequality, informal economy, it's over 9,000, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, large denomination, Livingstone, I presume, Malacca Straits, mandatory minimum, manufacturing employment, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, pension reform, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, rolling blackouts, school choice, school vouchers, Scramble for Africa, side project, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, spinning jenny, subscription business, The Chicago School, the payments system, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, uranium enrichment, urban planning, wealth creators, white picket fence, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

Home to 10 million people and located on the bank of the world’s most reliable river, it lacks clean water, irrigation and proper sewerage. In a city founded with a promise of lucrative free trade and with the potential for a manufacturing hub driven by cheap hydroelectric power, the failure of government means scant export revenue, punishingly expensive imports, a crumbling electricity grid and rolling blackouts. At the modern river port I meet Adolf Kitete and his friend Papy, a pair of sharply dressed traders who operate a clever scheme they call ‘parity’ when conditions are right. ‘When there are shortages or political unrest in Kinshasa, prices jump,’ explains Mr Kitete. He holds up a small bottle of water as an example: ‘This could cost 4,000 francs.’

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

It also provided indispensable international cover for the open warfare that was to come. Israel was able to exploit the deep division among Palestinians and Gaza’s isolation to launch three savage air and ground assaults on the strip that began in 2008 and continued in 2012 and 2014, leaving large swaths of its cities and refugee camps in rubble and struggling with rolling blackouts and contaminated water.26 Some neighborhoods, such as Shuja‘iyya and parts of Rafah, suffered extraordinary levels of destruction. The casualty figures tell only part of the story, although they are revealing. In these three major attacks, 3,804 Palestinians were killed, of them almost one thousand minors.

The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World by Daniel Yergin

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, book value, borderless world, BRICs, business climate, California energy crisis, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, clean tech, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, Exxon Valdez, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, financial innovation, flex fuel, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global village, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, index fund, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, John Deuss, John von Neumann, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, Malacca Straits, market design, means of production, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, mutually assured destruction, new economy, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, oil-for-food scandal, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Piper Alpha, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, technology bubble, the built environment, The Nature of the Firm, the new new thing, trade route, transaction costs, unemployed young men, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Yom Kippur War

In the days that followed, explosions damaged the plants, radiation was released, and severe meltdowns of nuclear rods occurred. The result was the worst nuclear accident since the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Soviet Ukraine a quarter century earlier. The Fukushima accident, compounded by damage to other electric generating plants in the area, led to power shortages, forcing rolling blackouts that demonstrated the vulnerability of modern society to a sudden shortage of energy supply. The effects were not limited to one country. The loss of industrial production in Japan disrupted global supply chains, halting automobile and electronics production in North America and Europe, and hitting the global economy.

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They were, he said, “pirate generators” out for “plunder.” 12 This was not an environment conducive to collaboration and solutions. The crisis worsened. Spot prices for electricity were, on average, ten times what they had been a year earlier. State regulators began to ration power physically, which meant rolling blackouts. Meanwhile, as wholesale power prices went up, the financial positions of the states’ utilities became even more dire. Because of that iron curtain between the deregulated wholesale market and the regulated retail side, utilities were buying wholesale power for as much as $600 per kilowatt hour but were able to sell it to retail customers at a regulated rate of only about $60 per kilowatt hour.

What Should I Do With My Life? by Po Bronson

back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, California energy crisis, clean water, cotton gin, deal flow, double entry bookkeeping, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, high net worth, imposter syndrome, job satisfaction, Menlo Park, microcredit, new economy, proprietary trading, rolling blackouts, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, telemarketer, traffic fines, work culture , young professional

Jumping into the solar energy business doesn’t make economic sense. Or, I should say, being in the solar business means counting on a supply of clients who willingly disregard the bottom line. Stephen knew that, and he was in no position to fight those economics. When the California energy crisis struck, he thought this was his chance. Rolling blackouts left neighborhoods without electricity, and gasoline prices shot up fifty cents a gallon. Independent service operators were asked to testify before Congress. News of the crisis dominated the front pages. The public was suddenly interested in alternative energy sources. The numbers tilted a little in his direction.

Taming the Sun: Innovations to Harness Solar Energy and Power the Planet by Varun Sivaram

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accelerated depreciation, addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, asset light, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, bitcoin, blockchain, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, currency risk, decarbonisation, deep learning, demand response, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, gigafactory, global supply chain, global village, Google Earth, hive mind, hydrogen economy, index fund, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, low interest rates, M-Pesa, market clearing, market design, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, mobile money, Negawatt, ocean acidification, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shock, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, renewable energy transition, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, Ted Nordhaus, Tesla Model S, time value of money, undersea cable, vertical integration, wikimedia commons

Others, including France, which does not share Germany’s obsession with shutting down nuclear plants, are not so sure. Many argue that, by paying reliable plants to sit around rather than actually producing power, capacity markets raise customer prices. Just as many others counter that this approach is a sort of insurance that is well worth the investment, lest rolling blackouts and surging prices cost customers even more dearly. Setting this stale debate aside, other, innovative options could modernize power markets, accommodate a rising share of renewable energy, and fund a strong foundation of flexible-base power. The first priority is minimizing the amount of expensive reserves needed to accommodate renewable energy unpredictability.

The Lion's Gate: On the Front Lines of the Six Day War by Steven Pressfield

defense in depth, facts on the ground, Mount Scopus, New Journalism, rolling blackouts, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, trade route, Yom Kippur War

Here is what we see: The sky, which had been lit up like daylight by the firing of the Egyptian artillery, now goes black, one section at a time. I’m standing on a rise with the other pilots, copilots, and aircrew. As we watch, the right side of the line goes dark; then the middle; then the whole line. It’s a rolling blackout, like a city when the power fails in one neighborhood after another. The only lights remaining on the battlefield are the searchlights of our IDF tanks, darting this way and that like the site of a movie premiere in Hollywood. Arik gives me a kiss. “Cheetah, I love you!” He needs no report from his commanders to know how the battle is going. 35.

Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

While it could be argued that performing no blanking at all wouldn’t be such a bad approach since it might help discourage users from doing online banking in random Internet cafés, in practice we probably need to provide at least some level of comfort blanking to overcome users’ deeply-ingrained conditioning that a visible password isn’t protected while a blanked one is (this fallacy was examined in a “Use of Visual Cues” on page 542). Figure 154: Rolling password blackout Apple usability guru Bruce Tognazzini has come up with a nice way to handle this using a rolling password blackout. With a rolling blackout the entered password characters are slowly faded out so that the last two or three characters are still visible to some degree, but after that point they’ve been faded/masked out to the usual illegible form as depicted in Figure 154. As reported in the user evaluation results for this design “users were able to comfortably and accurately detect errors, while eavesdropping failed” [172].

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This type of password handling, which only became possible with the more widespread use of graphical interfaces in the 1980s and 1990s, is a nice trade-off between user comfort and security functionality. 590 Passwords A somewhat simplified variant of this is used in Nokia cell-phones, Blackberries, and the iPhone (although in the latter case it may have been motivated mostly by the somewhat awkward touch-screen keyboard) which display the last digit or character entered in a password/PIN-entry field while blanking the remainder of the values. The rolling blackout design is somewhat nicer because it provides more surrounding context than just a single letter or digit. If you’re a mobile application developer, remember to explicitly disable auto-complete for fields where users enter sensitive data like passwords. Having an attacker enter a few random characters that your mobile device then helpfully corrects to your secret password isn’t a good thing.

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This is already done by many add-on password managers, and for people who don’t use these there are various browser plugins that will display typed passwords, both on web pages and for the web browser’s master password if it uses one (there has been a change request active for over eight years to add this to Firefox, but the response from the developers is that users who want this should type their passwords in somewhere else and then cut and paste them across [346]). See the discussion in “Password Manager Browser Plugins” on page 781 about the perceived lack of control created by password interfaces that hide the users own passwords from them. 616 Passwords If you do display the passwords to their owners, consider using a rolling blackout of the kind described in “Password Display” on page 587, or at least add a handler for the application losing focus so that you can blank the password (this is one case where blanking is justified, since if the user isn’t currently actively using the application then it’s unlikely that they need to deal with the password).

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day

The Mekong River with Thailand and the Annamite mountain range with Vietnam are natural boundaries, but as rail networks and power lines from giant foreign-financed hydroelectric stations crisscross this once isolated sliver of a nation, the country will be a crucial electricity supplier to Thailand, which is desperate to avoid the rolling blackouts of the past decade as it struggles to pump out nearly two million cars per year for almost all the major auto manufacturers. Once the Kunming railway crosses Laos and reaches Bangkok, it will smoothly connect to another high-speed linkage to Kuala Lumpur and Singapore, or toward Myanmar, to both Yangon and its port so that it can serve as the conduit for transit from the Andaman Sea back through Thailand to China.

Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon by Kim Zetter

air gap, Ayatollah Khomeini, Brian Krebs, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Doomsday Clock, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, false flag, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Earth, information retrieval, information security, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Loma Prieta earthquake, machine readable, Maui Hawaii, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, pre–internet, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, Stuxnet, Timothy McVeigh, two and twenty, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, Vladimir Vetrov: Farewell Dossier, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

The red-team hackers dropped marker files onto the systems to plant a virtual flag, proving they were there, and also created a number of simulated attacks showing how they could have seized control of power and communications networks in Oahu, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Washington, DC. Had they wanted to, they could have seized control of a system used to command hundreds of thousands of troops or set up “rolling blackouts and other activities that would cause social unrest,” according to Lt. Gen. John H. Campbell, a now-retired Air Force general who headed the Pentagon’s information operations at one time. The exercise “scared the hell out of a lot of folks,” Campbell later said, “because the implications of what this team had been able to do were pretty far-reaching.”7 Afterward, when military leaders were briefed about the exercise, they assumed the red team had used classified tools and techniques for the attack and were surprised to learn that the NSA had used the same techniques any teenage hacker would use.

The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations by Daniel Yergin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3D printing, 9 dash line, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bakken shale, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, British Empire, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, commodity super cycle, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, decarbonisation, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, energy transition, failed state, Ford Model T, geopolitical risk, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hydraulic fracturing, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, LNG terminal, Lyft, Malacca Straits, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Masayoshi Son, Masdar, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, new economy, off grid, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open economy, paypal mafia, peak oil, pension reform, power law, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, super pumped, supply-chain management, TED Talk, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Transport minister Nitin Gadkari declared that he would “bulldoze” automakers into making electric vehicles. He was, as he put it, “crystal clear” as to why—urban pollution and the economic strain of the country’s importing 85 percent of its oil.23 Others, however, asked how a country that is constantly short of electric power and suffers hours of rolling blackouts—and depends on coal for most of its power—can switch to EVs. Responding to the clamor in India for electric vehicles, India’s petroleum minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, described the enthusiasm about electric cars as a “fashion.” He compared it to the excitement generated by Alia Bhatt, an alluring young Bollywood film actress.

The War Came to Us: Life and Death in Ukraine by Christopher Miller

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Bellingcat, Boris Johnson, coronavirus, COVID-19, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake it until you make it, false flag, friendly fire, game design, global pandemic, military-industrial complex, Ponzi scheme, private military company, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, special economic zone, stakhanovite, wikimedia commons

Camping equipment became immediately popular. Gorgany, an outdoor store down the street from my Kyiv apartment, overflowed with people. Sleeping bags, camping stoves, and headlamps flew off the shelves. On the day I visited, the manager told me it was their biggest sales day ever. Authorities announced rolling blackouts to conserve energy. Everyone had at least two four-hour blocks of time each day without power. Some districts, though, were out of power for days. The streets of the capital were darker than I’d ever seen them. The authorities kept the street lights off after sundown to conserve energy but also so that Russian planes and drones wouldn’t be able to make out potential targets on the ground from overhead.

The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Fresh Water in the Twenty-First Century by Alex Prud'Homme

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, big-box store, bilateral investment treaty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, commoditize, company town, corporate raider, Deep Water Horizon, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Garrett Hardin, hydraulic fracturing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joan Didion, John Snow's cholera map, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, megacity, oil shale / tar sands, oil-for-food scandal, peak oil, remunicipalization, renewable energy credits, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, urban sprawl, William Langewiesche

But the rainy summers of 2003 and 2004 caused so many CSOs that New York waters were declared unhealthy, and beaches were repeatedly closed. The swimming leg of a triathlon was canceled due to the pollution from CSOs. Most notorious was the sultry afternoon of August 14, 2003, when a massive power outage—caused by surging electricity demand, computer malfunctions, and power lines snagged in trees in Ohio—led to a rolling blackout that knocked out electricity to roughly 45 million people in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States, and another 10 million in Canada. In New York, most of the city’s wastewater treatment plants used backup generators to keep functioning. But at two plants, the generators did not work, and 30 million gallons of untreated human waste was illegally discharged into the city’s waters.

Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on Earth? by Alan Weisman

air freight, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, David Attenborough, degrowth, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Jenner, El Camino Real, epigenetics, Filipino sailors, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, happiness index / gross national happiness, haute couture, housing crisis, ice-free Arctic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), land reform, liberation theology, load shedding, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mahbub ul Haq, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Money creation, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, unemployed young men, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Everyone is back: men in white kurtis and prayer caps; hijab’d women brilliant as tropical birdlife, wrapped in multihued loose pants and tunics called salwar kameez; other women in black chadors, even transvestites in chadors, all threading their way through the stalled traffic, buying provisions and tea. Since 10:00 a.m., that traffic has gone from mere paralysis to pandemonium, as Lyari’s stoplights are out for the next three hours. All but the most privileged parts of Karachi are subject to load-shedding—daily rolling blackouts—because the city can’t possibly keep up with demand. There were fewer than a half-million people here in 1947. Today’s 21 million is a forty-two-fold increase. No one could have prepared for this. Three days earlier, when the grenade attacks began, everyone stayed hidden until long after the explosions ended.

Baghdad at Sunrise: A Brigade Commander's War in Iraq by Peter R. Mansoor, Donald Kagan, Frederick Kagan

Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, central bank independence, disinformation, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, HESCO bastion, indoor plumbing, land reform, no-fly zone, open borders, operational security, RAND corporation, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, zero-sum game

Regrettably, this lull in insurgent activity proved illusory when cpa failed to bring the real leaders of the Sunni community into negotiations, ensuring their continuing resistance to the creation of an effective Iraqi government. Reconstruction of Iraqi power generation facilities progressed with agonizing slowness. Power output was still no better than prewar levels, which caused rolling blackouts throughout Baghdad and across Iraq. To improve the situation, the Army Corps of Engineers decided to import new electrical generators to augment the existing, antiquated capability. Each of these massive, three hundred–ton machines cost thirty million dollars and could produce 157 megawatts of power, enough to add thirty minutes of power daily to the entire city of Baghdad.⁹ The first one arrived in late January 2004.

What Went Wrong: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . And What Other Countries Got Right by George R. Tyler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Black Swan, blood diamond, blue-collar work, Bolshevik threat, bonus culture, British Empire, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate personhood, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, David Brooks, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, disruptive innovation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lake wobegon effect, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, pension reform, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, pirate software, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, reshoring, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It was a textbook consumer squeeze: power firms maliciously closed 13 gigawatts of generating capacity throughout the western United States that winter—decreasing production nearly three times more than typical winter-plant-maintenance shutdowns. Enron was introduced to Americans for the first time as contrived shutdowns by the company and its confederates caused a number of rolling blackouts in California—in a nation that rarely suffers blackouts unless weather-related. Niall Ferguson counted thirty-eight California blackouts in the span of just six months.23 Deregulated interstate prices and profits soared. Deregulation became widespread. Most consumers were directly harmed by deregulation of banking, for example, as explained by Senator and former Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren; she is an American bankruptcy expert who went on to establish the US Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: “Since the early 1980s, the credit industry has rewritten the rules of lending to families.

Backup & Recovery by W. Curtis Preston

Berlin Wall, business intelligence, business process, database schema, Debian, dumpster diving, failed state, fault tolerance, full text search, job automation, Kickstarter, operational security, rolling blackouts, side project, Silicon Valley, systems thinking, web application

However, what would happen if it stopped delivering electricity or gas for just a few minutes? It would be on the evening news, all its business customers would be angry at the impact to them, all the residential customers would have to reprogram their DVD players and microwaves, and the company could potentially cause a rolling blackout, similar to what happened in the U.S. Northeast in the early 2000s. (This happens in some parts of the world on a regular basis.) This means that the company’s ability to deliver power is the most critical business function it has—its core competency. Once you figure out what your IP and supporting systems are, and which ones are critical, you need to figure out where they reside and all of the resources required to use them.

Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White House by Peter Baker

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, buy low sell high, carbon tax, card file, clean water, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, desegregation, drone strike, energy security, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, friendly fire, Glass-Steagall Act, guest worker program, hiring and firing, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, information security, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, no-fly zone, operational security, Robert Bork, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, South China Sea, stem cell, Ted Sorensen, too big to fail, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working poor, Yom Kippur War

BY THE TIME Bush and Cheney took office, California was in the throes of a full-fledged energy crisis. Years of deregulation combined with a growing economy and market manipulation had caused prices to shoot up as demand increased. So in the first few months of the new administration, California utilities were forced to resort to rolling blackouts, turning out the lights in the nation’s largest and most important state. Against that backdrop, Cheney switched gears and agreed to head an energy policy task force. But he did not wait for its conclusions to undo what he saw as an ill-advised campaign pledge to fight climate change. Bush had promised to impose a cap on carbon emissions, but with the need for energy seemingly more pressing by the day, Cheney argued it was the wrong time to add to industry’s burden.

Caribbean Islands by Lonely Planet

Bartolomé de las Casas, big-box store, British Empire, buttonwood tree, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, clean water, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, discovery of the americas, Donald Trump, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, income inequality, intermodal, jitney, Kickstarter, machine readable, microcredit, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, place-making, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sustainable-tourism, urban planning, urban sprawl, white picket fence

Castro was excluded from the deal-making. The Wall Falls & the Special Period When the Eastern bloc collapsed in 1989, the equivalent of US$5 billion in annual trade and credits to Cuba vanished, forcing Castro to declare a five-year período especial (special period) austerity program, technically ongoing. Rationing and rolling blackouts were instituted and food was scarce. Cubans share their survivor stories of this time willingly. In August 1993 the US dollar was legalized to provide much-needed liquidity. Class differences reemerged as people with dollars gained access to goods and services not available in CUP (Cuban pesos); touts (known as jinteros , or jockeys) and prostitutes (jineteras) reappeared.

Frommer's California 2009 by Matthew Poole, Harry Basch, Mark Hiss, Erika Lenkert

airport security, Asilomar, Bay Area Rapid Transit, California gold rush, call centre, car-free, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Columbine, Donald Trump, Donner party, East Village, El Camino Real, European colonialism, Frank Gehry, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, high-speed rail, housing crisis, indoor plumbing, Joan Didion, machine readable, Mason jar, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, post-work, retail therapy, rolling blackouts, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Skype, South of Market, San Francisco, sustainable-tourism, transcontinental railway, urban sprawl, white picket fence, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

Then came thr ee out-of-the-blue sucker punches to California ’s r osy economy: (1) the rapid demise of many , if not most, of the dot-coms in the stock-mar ket slump (new websites, gleefully chr onicling the death throes of the fledgling enterprises, popped up to amuse the formerly envious); (2) an energy der egulation scheme gone awry, leaving irate r esidents with periodic rolling blackouts and escalating energy bills (never have so many taken such a sudden, CALIFORNIA IN DEPTH 28 C A L I F O R N I A I N P O P U L A R C U LT U R E : B O O K S , F I L M , T V & M U S I C 2 glorified “ the liv eliest, hear tiest community on our continent. ” I t was also the birthplace of J ack London, one of the best-known American writers, who wr ote several short stories of his y ounger days as an oyster pirate on the S an Francisco Bay, as w ell as Martin E den, Jack London ’s semiautobiographical account of his life along the Oakland shores.