The most recent issues for which the Texas electrical grid was in the news for, the near-blackouts earlier this month, were specifically because of unpredictably low wind speeds in west Texas which reduced Texas's expected wind generation from ~20 GW to under 2 GW during the periods of peak demand. For context, peak demand in Texas is around 80 GW. Taking 18+ GW off the table is a huge blow. 18 GW is more than the entire electrical demand of most US states.
Fox news has nothing to do with it. Generation capacity being reduced by nearly 25% due to unpredictably low wind speeds is physics. It's a huge problem being faced, and sticking your head in the sand and crying "fake news" isn't helpful.
https://www.ercot.com/ gives you some idea of what's going on in TX at any given time. One neat thing about summer is that peak demand also tends to be because of AC use which also correlates with sunshine. Works for the summer at least.
It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican smear campaign doesn't help.
Texas has more wind power generation than any other state in the US by far. Texas is all aboard the wind train. It's a huge part of the economy. Texas wants wind to win. But that doesn't change reality.
In the last month, Texas has gotten close to electricity demand exceeding supply. A significant factor behind this is that Texas gets nearly 20% of its electricity from wind generation. On your average summer day, wind generates between 15 and 25 GW. However, during the recent heat wave, wind speeds dropped in west Texas (where the bulk of the wind farms are) and wind was only generating less than 2 GW during the hottest part of the day.
Similarly, Texas usually gets about 10 GW of power from solar. However, solar drops off to 0 GW very rapidly around 7 or 8 PM. However, in the summer in Texas, the temperature is still at its peak around 7 PM, so there is still significant demand while solar generation is dropping.
Wind and solar are unlike thermal generation in that we (humans) can choose to burn more oil and create thermal generation when needed. But with solar and wind, we cannot choose to suddenly create more wind or sun. We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal. Pretending otherwise is not helpful.
> We are at the whims of nature, and until we figure out better solutions for these problems (battery storage, maybe), wind and solar have their disadvantages compared to thermal.
Pumped storage hydro works very well in many places. You can store as much energy as you can store water, and you can bring a lot of generation capacity online fast. Those facilities are pretty cool engineering projects. Texas hasn't got onboard yet AFAIK, but they've got enough land that they could maybe (water's a big factor, too) make it work to offset downtime of their wind and solar.
edit: I think Texas's largely go-it-alone strategy with their power grid might be pretty strategically misguided, but making it work could at least be an interesting problem
> It was, and is, a hugely meaningful factor. Sticking your head in the sand and pretending that it's a republican smear campaign doesn't help.
This could have been a really good comment if you hadn't started it out this way. Wind was one factor, but it did not suffer the largest outages of Texas's various electricity sources - someone in another comment shared a pretty good youtube video by Practical Engineering on this topic. And there really was a republican smear campaign against wind power following the event.
>Wind was one factor, but it did not suffer the largest outages of Texas's various electricity sources - someone in another comment shared a pretty good youtube video by Practical Engineering on this topic. And there really was a republican smear campaign against wind power following the event.
We're talking about different events. The Practical Engineers video is talking about the 2021 winter storm, and in the midst of that storm there were republican talking points about wind failure. That's a different event than the one I am talking about in my comment, which is the general unreliability of renewable energy as witnessed in the current summer where lacking wind generation _really is_ a huge factor in the threatened blackouts, but posters like the one I was responding to are still pretending like any decrying of renewable energy is fake news. Sometimes it is fake news, and sometimes its reality. It's important to recognize the difference.
I'll agree with you that there's greed and incompetence all over Texas's politicians and state management. But it isn't unique to Texas. We have a widespread societal problem with our electrical grid that transcends state lines.
The big 4 accounting firms are also the big 4 consulting firms. Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG all have both large accounting arms as well as massive consulting arms.
There's also the "Big 3" or "MBB" which refers to the big 3 prestigious strategy consulting firms, Mckinsey, Bain, and BCG.
And then on the other end of the spectrum there's "WITCH" which is the consulting firms generally known as "body shops" that hire for quantity over quality. That's companies like Wipro, Infosys, TCS, Cognizant.
Accenture usually isn't included in any of the acronyms, it's just kinda an outlier despite how big it is. It's very much the same as how technically Microsoft isn't part of "FAANG", but whenever someone does say "FAANG" they typically just mean "the big tech companies" and you subconsciously think of MS as included in that.
I always hated that acronym, mainly because it classifies Netflix under the same umbrella as Microsoft (while I'll acknowledge that they're tech-savvy, Netflix has been (and still is) mainly a media company).
I know that some consulting shops are sweat shops like you describe, but not all are. I worked for one of the major consulting Big4s and my experience couldn't be more different (except for spending most weeks out of town).
I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it.
It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that.
The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.
The large scale consulting firms collectively pull in hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue per year and they're mostly _okay_, you just don't hear about them because nobody writes a front page HN article about "that one time I paid Deloitte $300k to implement an internal dashboard and it turned out mediocre".
I've been part of a handful of these projects. You have to understand that these types of projects are, from the start, never intended to be smashing successes. Nobody says "everything is going great and we have a ton of smart, capable people working here, we should also hire some consultants". No, once your company or project is at the phase where you're hiring consultants, 9 times out of 10 its because shit has hit the fan and you need someone to pull you out of the mud, and quick. Consulting engagements are almost always band-aid fixes just trying to achieve a level of mediocrity.
And as much as people shit on the "24 year olds who don't know anything", the sad truth is that 24 year olds (aka people with 2-3 years experience in consulting that are now on their 8th project doing this exact same type of implementation) may not have much experience, but they still are probably more productive than the vast majority of knuckle dragging drones that work in corporate america. When I was one of those 24 year old consultants, most of my projects were roles where I was supporting "IT admins" who literally had trouble remembering how to open Excel. The people that these consultants are meant to supplement aren't your "average HN commenter", they're not even "average redditor". They're "average facebook poster".
The point of this technology is that the 20 people behind cannot see the same thing you do. This isn't just "Jane is walking past, let's display Jane's information on the TV now". The point is that this technology has pixels that selectively beam Jane's information to Jane and only Jane, while simultaneously beaming OtherPerson's information to OtherPerson and only OtherPerson.
It's very cool technology. The one thing I don't see any information on is how precise it can be (like if I'm standing directly next to Jane rather than 15 feet away, will I see Jane's info?).
Since we don’t see any details on the precision, it’s hard to make the statement that others can’t see your information. If this is a lenticular display, then anyone standing in your line of sight will see what you see.
I’m more concerned about protecting my privacy from organizations, but I think privacy concerns regarding other viewers can be addressed by not displaying anything personally tied to you. The name is cute for a demo, but I don’t need to see my name, just my flight. I’ll know it’s mine.
This is me just completely guessing, but I would assume it's probably pretty close to how close someone would need to be standing next to you to see the same information on the phone.
"Staying healthy" can be done with zero equipment and no gym membership. If you think otherwise, then your goal isn't to "stay healthy", your goal is to show off at gym bunnies. And no, your showing off and vanity is not a choice you get to make during a pandemic. Tough.
>I also don’t want them to shut down gyms, or voting, or churches, or any other peaceful reason (dumb) people wish to assemble.
You are attempting to equate assembly for the purpose of fighting racism or exercising vitally important activities like voting, with "assembly" for the purpose of "sick gainz bruh". This is such a false equivalency that it's laughable, and honestly also a little insulting.
It's equally insulting to posit the straw-men arguments like this. The degree to which BLM protests do any good is debatable. The degree to which they need to be public displays, mid-pandemic is also debatable, unless you are worried that the US is going to run out of seething hate and police brutality incidents by the time the pandemic is over.
The right to peaceful assembly is not conditional on legitimate purpose; same as the right to free expression.
Free speech means freedom to shitpost, not just write literature.
Correspondingly, freedom of assembly is for stupid and pointless things like church, moderately important things like gym, and not just critically important things like insurrection.
The proliferation of “illegal” gyms suggests that many people feel similarly.
>The right to peaceful assembly is not conditional on legitimate purpose; same as the right to free expression.
Yes it absolutely is. I have no idea why you think otherwise. The right to "free expression" is conditional as well. We prohibit certain "peaceful assembly" and "free expression" every single day and have done so for centuries. The classical example: you do not have the "right to free expression" to go into a crowded place and falsely yell "fire", because that would be a public danger. Similarly, going to a gym during a pandemic causes a public danger. "Right to peaceful assembly" doesn't apply.
"Peaceful assembly to work out" is in no way similar to "peaceful assembly for protesting". It's ridiculous of you to claim otherwise. It's so ridiculous that I can only believe you're trolling or trying to make an argument in bad faith.
I've worked for both a Big 4 as a tech consultant, as well as a FAANG. They both have their pros and cons.
The first thing is that they really have two completely different cultures that appeal to completely different people. The way I describe it is that the consulting companies are basically an extension of Business School, while FAANG is an extension of Engineering School. The culture at a consultancy is generally a lot more social, with huge, alcohol-filled parties being the norm (if you think FAANG parties are big, B4 parties are twice as big and happen 10x as often). They also put a lot more emphasis on "group work" where the main way of getting tasks done is to get together in a room and work side-by-side while having continuous review and conversation.
If you're a person that likes to often go out to bars, have fancy team dinners at chic restaurants, work in groups, and spend a lot of time building relationships with your coworkers, you probably would like B4. What I just described might sound absolutely horrible to many HNers, but there are many people that really dig that lifestyle.
On the other hand, if you are a stereotypical computer engineer that would rather go home and recharge rather than go to a bar, maybe have a nice company-provided dinner every now and then but not every night, do your best work heads-down without any interruption or talking, and think "work is for work, not for making friends", then you certainly wouldn't like B4 and would probably like FAANG.
As for pay, B4 starts out a bit lower than FAANG but salary at consultancies grows much, much faster. Getting a promotion every 2-3 years is expected, with large salary bumps and large bonuses even in non-promo years. When I left B4 to FAANG, my pay almost doubled, but due to the way B4 pay scales, if I went back to B4 now I would likely make more at B4.
Career progression is also very different at B4 vs FAANG. There is no "Individual Contributor vs Management" track at B4. Everyone starts as an IC, and then slowly starts taking on more management responsibilities. For me personally, I really prefer this because it means I get to be a manager that makes strategic decisions and mentor a team, but also still do "hands on" work as much as I want. FAANG, on the other hand, I have to make a decision whether I want to be an IC (where I will only have some mentorship/manager responsibilities, if any) or Manager (where I will be doing considerably less hands-on work, if any).
And last, tech consulting at the big consultancies can genuinely be fun. You get to hop around to new clients/projects every couple months, working on and learning new types of work. If you do find a type of work you really like, you can specialize in it and stick with it as you please. For some people, switching clients and meeting new teams to work with, being "the expert" in the room, and always running into new problems is fun.
Fox news has nothing to do with it. Generation capacity being reduced by nearly 25% due to unpredictably low wind speeds is physics. It's a huge problem being faced, and sticking your head in the sand and crying "fake news" isn't helpful.