Physicist:

Now I am thinking about the fascinating process of phase or frequency-shifting the Texas grid to sync up with the national grid.

Engineer:

Phase issues lower efficiency and there is no way to pass through an electrical component without altering its phase. This was the traditional engineer's argument against graphic equalizers: each one of those bands of equalization is a filter, and each one of those filters alters the phase of the signal going through it. The more you use equalization, the more you smear the phase of your signal through 180 degrees and the more transients you lose. So... i think it's awesome that you're discussing electron orbitals as they relate to power? But I also think you need to realize that PG&E has isolators and cables that have been hanging in one place since the Gold Rush and their phase performance wasn't assessed when new and has not improved since.

AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT

Gelles makes the argument that the shift from "stakeholder capitalism" - whereby Ford builds a town for his workers and overpays them so they can afford to buy his cars, whereby Kodak promotes from within and preserves a flat hierarchy for 70 years, whereby GE was known as "generous electric" for their pensions and employee retention strategies - occurred because of the Friedman Doctrine, published in the NYT in 1970, because of Bork's "Antitrust Paradox", published in 1978, and the ascendancy of Jack Welch to chairmanship of General Electric in 1981. What followed was the financialization of industry such that earnings reports could always be synthesized to please shareholders and that shareholders were always pleased by "efficiency", IE firing workers and closing plants.

Gelles follows this thread through the destruction of GE and the destruction of GM to the Boeing 737MAX. He goes as far as tracing it to the dominance of AB-InBev. He does not go all the way to This Fucking Abomination

But the text is the subtext: "end-stage capitalism" basically refers to "end-stage shareholder capitalism" and it was a bad choice that fucked most of the world over and made an extremely limited group of individuals very wealthy and powerful.

The problem with the Texas grid, as you yourself outline, is perverse incentives. Those incentives make sense under shareholder capitalism. They are an obvious maladaptation under stakeholder capitalism. The point of the book, fundamentally, is that shareholder capitalism was a bad idea and the world is waking up to this fact. You're right - people gonna die first. SEE: Boeing. Livelihoods will be destroyed. SEE: NAFTA. And while Marc Andreesen is perfectly within his rights to give Adam Neumann $350m (TO GET INTO APARTMENT RENTALS! WHILE AIRBnB IS EATING SHIT! WHILE RENTS ARE COLLAPSING!), the broader story is that Andreesen is seen as a chump for doing it, not a visionary.

Ultimately, people like Marc Andreesen and Jack Welch spend other peoples' money. The market rewarded them for forty, fifty years. Game is changing, though. One of the arguments Wallerstein made towards the end of his life is the whole system is gonna collapse because there's no frontier anymore. Collapse? Or contract? Because ultimately? The solution to energy problems is to use less energy.

If I have an i3 and I commute 40 miles to work and back every day, working from home saves 400kWh per month.