AE's Journal Round 4

Where are you and where are you going?
theanimal
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by theanimal »

Good to have you back. Congrats on the new job!

Hristo Botev
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by Hristo Botev »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Wed Feb 10, 2021 1:54 pm
The biggest risk here is getting sucked into lifestyle lock in with that high of a salary, so I'm going to need to remain mindful about ERE principles.
Indeed it is. And once you get locked in, it's hard to go backwards.

Tip from someone who is still trying to go backwards: once you get to Austin try and surround yourself with folks for whom "keeping up with the Joneses" means occasionally upgrading from a Coors Light or a PBR to a Shiner Bock (it's Texas, after all), as opposed to the $16 4-pack of hand-crafted, artisanal, organic, and gluten-free microbrew. Writers, musicians, artists, and other creative types and do-ers (as opposed to consume-ers) tend to be good for that kind of mindset.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Austin Hell Trip
I went to Austin last week to check it out, and it was pretty much like stepping into a hurricane zone. I ended up trapped in the city for four days with no way out and eventually got kicked out of the hotel and had to stay at a friend's house. That winter storm brought the city to its knees. I don't know the details exactly, but apparently Texas is on its own power grid and the storm nearly brought down the entire state's grid to the point of no repair. There were massive power outages and the city basically did nothing about anything. There were people trapped at the airport for days without any food and without any way to leave because all the flights were canceled and all the businesses were shut. Every hotel in the city got completely full because so many people lost power to their homes and went to the hotels instead. People also lost running water due to the frozen conditions or were put on boil water orders without any access to electricity.

Needless to say, being trapped there for four days and getting kicked to the bottom tier of the hierarchy of needs has quite drastically changed my perspective on a lot of this collapse stuff. It can happen very quickly and you need a plan. It's very easy to end up in situations where money can't save you. There were no hotels to stay in and the FEMA warming stations were a joke, so we would have ended up literally homeless in the snow where it not for the fact we had friends who lived in the city.

So I'm reevaluating the choice to move to Austin now after seeing how utterly unprepared the city/state is to handle anything. It's not a huge deal since this job is probably going to be remote for a long time anyway due to covid, but this has been fantastic motivation for me to take ERE seriously again. I will be updating you all as I come up with a plan of how to do this.

Getting things done
I'm implementing the GTD method finally due to the sheer overwhelming number of tasks I projects I have. I'll be posting my weekly reviews here in this journal to keep me honest.

Hobbies
I've decided to focus on screenwriting as my main hobby for now. My current plan is to read a few movie scripts then watch the movie to get a better idea of how this works. I'm familiar with the process already, but there's a lot about screenwriting that's different than book writing. I'm working on an independent little project right now that's basically the script for a television series. I doubt it will go anywhere longterm, but it's a fun project that builds some good skills.

Smashter
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by Smashter »

Whoa, what terrible timing for an Austin visit. Glad you're okay. My sister moved from the midwest to Austin right around when you arrived. Luckily she was able to catch a flight out. I didn't realize the situations at the airport were that dire. Crazy.

AxelHeyst
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AxelHeyst »

Whoa indeed. Although, perhaps the *perfect* timing for a trip there as it sounds like it’s triggered some valuable re-evaluations! Looking forward to the WRs and renewed ERE focus plan.

AnalyticalEngine
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

It was some crazy stuff! I don't the rest of the country realizes just how bad it was. I don't quite understand why, but apparently the Texas power grid came extremely close to breaking to the point it would have gone out for months. They basically had to do rolling blackouts where they just shut off the power to everyone in order to save the grid. It's making me realize I have a lot of knowledge gaps in how infrastructure works, so definitely room for research there. But I do agree, I think it's a good opportunity to force me to get serious about this again. I got lazy for a few months there and picked up some bad habits that I now need to undo.

jacob
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Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by jacob »

AnalyticalEngine wrote:
Mon Feb 22, 2021 9:18 am
... the Texas power grid came extremely close to breaking to the point it would have gone out for months. They basically had to do rolling blackouts where they just shut off the power to everyone in order to save the grid. ...
Possibly Dunning-Krugering myself, but here goes ...

The power grid is a structure with a bunch of generators (turbines, gas wind, ... with some alternator to turn rotation into voltage) on one "side", a bunch of consumers on the other "side" and a bunch of transformers (step-up, step-down) and transmission lines in the middle.

The job of the power system is to match the energy going in to the energy taken out at all times because there's no/little storage. Load-balancing in crucial. This is why electrical companies get pissy when TV hosts tell mass amounts of people to blink their lights on/off during a show for shits'n'giggles.

If demand is increasing (people connecting their heaters on the demand side as it gets colder outside), the power plants have to stoke their turbines harder (put more coal in the burner, blow harder on the windmills) to maintain rotation at 60Hz. At some point they will max out capacity. If, nevertheless, demand keeps increasing, two things can happen.

1) The grid is switched off (connection is cut) on PARTS of the demand-side. This allows the generators to keep up. This is a blackout. In order to be nice to customers, these are usually rolling so it's not the same people going without all the time.
2) The grid is not switched off. The electric demand now acts as a brake on the turbines which struggle to keep up. The turbine gets overloaded, heats up, and switches itself off either after it burns out or before. This in turn transfers the grid demand to the remaining generators. This creates cascading failure as transformers and turbines get damaged and destroyed or switch out to save themselves.

Since these [turbines and transformers] are specialty equipment, they can take months to replace.

So likely what happened was the Texan consumers kept switching on their heaters until capacity was maxed out. At this point the grid operators had to make a COORDINATED decision to switch off the generators WITHOUT tripping each other. When they said they had minutes, I'm guessing that's about how long it takes to burn out the coil if you functionally short the output.

AnalyticalEngine
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Joined: Sun Sep 02, 2018 11:57 am

Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

Thanks Jacob, that makes a lot more sense. Apparently, Texas is on its own grid and this contributed to the problem. The continental US basically has three power grids: the western grid, the eastern grid, and Texas. Since Texas was on its own isolated grid, other places couldn't send them any power, and their own electricity sources couldn't keep up with the demand, thus triggering the disaster.

AnalyticalEngine
Posts: 949
Joined: Sun Sep 02, 2018 11:57 am

Re: AE's Journal Round 4

Post by AnalyticalEngine »

More Updates

I keep not posting anything here because it feels like nothing is happening, but that isn't really true. What is true is that covid and working from home all the time lead me into a total lack of structure which lead to some bad habits that I keep trying to undo. It's like learned helplessness, although it's not exactly learned helplessness. I would called it learned bad-time-management-skills-leading-to-doing-nothing-ness.

A lot of my very basic routines, such as going to bed at a reasonable time and remembering to eat dinner, got extremely out of wack through the winter. I think seasonal depression might also be a component there. Nonetheless, I've been trying to undo all of that and get back on track. I think it's hard to describe how this feels unless it's happened to you, but I think it's basically a combination of decision fatigue and depression. When you're depressed, making any decision is harder, and when your schedule is out of wack, you have to more actively make the decision to go to bed or eat dinner. That turns them from being normal life activities into what feels like some insurmountable obstacle, which makes them harder to do, which makes you feel worse because you're not taking care of yourself, and the spiral continues.

Anyway, that was a big problem for awhile, but I've finally started to make progress getting things back to normal. I signed up to run a 10K in a month, and while I'm really out of shape and probably won't do an amazing job at it, the sheer fact the goal exists has made it way easier to finally do all this stuff I need to do, which has made me feel better and given me more energy. I'm trying really hard to put things on autopilot when I do feel good so that if the depression ever comes back, the routine is there and it's much easier.

Covid has also left me fairly socially isolated, and undoing that has also been something of a challenge. It's surprisingly hard to go talk to people again when you've turned into a weird hermit. Working from home has definitely not helped here.

Financially, I'm doing well. I just turned 31, and my NW is $520k. It's honestly gotten to the point where money doesn't even feel real any more. It's all just numbers on a screen at this point.

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