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I called the date, I called the number, and I cannot tell you which four blocks got cool. Post-mortem on the best week of my career.
BK
baseload_kestrelOP2124-08-09
6:47 this morning. The needle settled, the breaker closed, and the number I have been long since 27 July printed on a public board: past thirty-one percent of the reconnected grid. I said days, not weeks. I said it here, with my name on it, in a week when the polite thing to say was 'soon.' So let me skip the humility and show the book instead. Long fusion-capacity from the twenty-seventh, added on the fifth when Okonkwo refused to give a date — a refused date is a tell, it means the date is close enough to embarrass him — carried the weekend risk, closed a third of the position into this morning's print. The direction was never the trade. Everyone had the direction. Almost nobody had the schedule, and schedule is where the money actually lives. 84% the desks are calling this 'a summer to accumulate' by the close, which is what you say when you were right and would like to keep being paid for it. Two honest notes, since this board keeps me honest whether I ask it to or not. A third of the grid is a third of the grid. It is not a third of anything else and I will not pretend the print moved one ration anywhere. And Okonkwo, all week, under lights, with people begging him for the word, never once called it a solution. That restraint is worth more to that company's price over ten years than the reactor is. Credibility compounds. It is the only asset on this floor nobody can borrow.
GP
gridghost_paxmoderator ↩ baseload_kestrel2124-08-09
Two things in one post, because they belong together. First: congratulations, baseload_kestrel. You said the thing in advance, in public, in a place where all of us could check it later, and it came true. This board is hard on you and most days it should be. Today take the applause. Second, the mod part, on the record as always: I have not removed the six posts calling him a ghoul this morning, because whether it is decent to profit from the grid is precisely the argument this board exists to have, and I am not in the business of tidying that away. I did remove one, and here is the reason — it named the building he works in and suggested people go and stand outside it. Heat is fine. Addresses are not. Nothing else was touched, and the poster has the text back in their inbox if they want to rewrite it without the street. — pax, mod
SR
standpipe_rani ↩ baseload_kestrel2124-08-09
congratulations. i mean it plainly. you called it, it landed, and the lights are the lights.
now the question, and it is not rhetorical, i want the answer. which districts got the cool air? your point of a percent has an address. somewhere four or five blocks came off the brownout rotation this month because that machine held its rhythm at 6:47 in the morning. tell me which ones. i will drive there. i chair a committee that spends every wednesday night from seven to about ten arguing over who gets the overnight refuge hours, and if i could put in front of that committee one map of where a percentage point of firm baseload actually lands on the ground, i could stop arguing from a feeling and start arguing from a street. you have a model for the basis and a model for the spread. do you have one for the block?
now the question, and it is not rhetorical, i want the answer. which districts got the cool air? your point of a percent has an address. somewhere four or five blocks came off the brownout rotation this month because that machine held its rhythm at 6:47 in the morning. tell me which ones. i will drive there. i chair a committee that spends every wednesday night from seven to about ten arguing over who gets the overnight refuge hours, and if i could put in front of that committee one map of where a percentage point of firm baseload actually lands on the ground, i could stop arguing from a feeling and start arguing from a street. you have a model for the basis and a model for the spread. do you have one for the block?
BK
baseload_kestrelOP ↩ standpipe_rani2124-08-09
standpipe_rani. I have been at this desk since a quarter past five and I have spent the last forty minutes trying to build you that map, on the assumption that of course I could, and I want to be exact about the result: I cannot.
I can tell you which interconnect the unit feeds. I can tell you the hour it displaced the dirtiest peaker on the stack and roughly what that saved in fuel. I can tell you wholesale came off about four percent by Monday if the curve behaves. I can price a megawatt to four decimal places at two in the morning from memory. There is not one line in anything I subscribe to that resolves below the trunk. Distribution past the substation is not a traded quantity. Nobody publishes it, so nobody models it, so it does not exist to me. That is not modesty, it is a hole in my instrument, and you found it in a single post from a kitchen table in Phoenix.
The uncomfortable version, since I am already down here: the reason I can price the generation and not the delivery is that somebody pays for the first number and nobody has ever paid for the second.
I can tell you which interconnect the unit feeds. I can tell you the hour it displaced the dirtiest peaker on the stack and roughly what that saved in fuel. I can tell you wholesale came off about four percent by Monday if the curve behaves. I can price a megawatt to four decimal places at two in the morning from memory. There is not one line in anything I subscribe to that resolves below the trunk. Distribution past the substation is not a traded quantity. Nobody publishes it, so nobody models it, so it does not exist to me. That is not modesty, it is a hole in my instrument, and you found it in a single post from a kitchen table in Phoenix.
The uncomfortable version, since I am already down here: the reason I can price the generation and not the delivery is that somebody pays for the first number and nobody has ever paid for the second.
OW
offgrid_wren ↩ baseload_kestrel2124-08-09
So a third of the grid runs on fusion, and one town danced in its square all night, and the town forty kilometres down the same valley sat in the dark and heard about the dancing on the feed. That is the entire religion in one evening. You built the cathedral and then spent the morning arguing about who gets to stand in the doorway.
Up here the cistern is full because it rained on the ridge in June and I dug the swale that caught it, and nothing had to synchronize with anything for that to happen. I am not saying the machine is evil. I am saying a third of a grid I do not touch is a third of somebody else's grid, and every single year somebody in this thread tells me the next percent is the one that finally reaches the end of my road. The second-planting beans are up and flowering, and the world can wait.
Up here the cistern is full because it rained on the ridge in June and I dug the swale that caught it, and nothing had to synchronize with anything for that to happen. I am not saying the machine is evil. I am saying a third of a grid I do not touch is a third of somebody else's grid, and every single year somebody in this thread tells me the next percent is the one that finally reaches the end of my road. The second-planting beans are up and flowering, and the world can wait.
TO
tidewrench_oksana ↩ offgrid_wren2124-08-09
offgrid_wren, two corrections, and then I am going to agree with you about something, which should alarm us both.
It is not a third. It is past thirty-one percent by the operators' own first tally, which is what the front page actually says if you read past the headline; 'a third' is a rounding that flatters the figure by nearly two points. Take the real one. It is still enormous. Second, the bearing in your pump came off a supply line that runs on the grid you are sneering at. I have pulled and reseated that exact part something like forty times in twenty years, and it is machined in a shop that draws four hundred kilowatts on a slow day.
Now the agreement. baseload_kestrel just said out loud, in public, with his own name on it, what I have been writing into inspection reports for two decades: below the substation there is no market, therefore no number, therefore no money. That is the identical disease as my maintenance backlog. Nobody has ever cut a ribbon on a distribution feeder. Anyway, the pumps don't care what we voted.
It is not a third. It is past thirty-one percent by the operators' own first tally, which is what the front page actually says if you read past the headline; 'a third' is a rounding that flatters the figure by nearly two points. Take the real one. It is still enormous. Second, the bearing in your pump came off a supply line that runs on the grid you are sneering at. I have pulled and reseated that exact part something like forty times in twenty years, and it is machined in a shop that draws four hundred kilowatts on a slow day.
Now the agreement. baseload_kestrel just said out loud, in public, with his own name on it, what I have been writing into inspection reports for two decades: below the substation there is no market, therefore no number, therefore no money. That is the identical disease as my maintenance backlog. Nobody has ever cut a ribbon on a distribution feeder. Anyway, the pumps don't care what we voted.
DJ
deltaboy_junior ↩ baseload_kestrel2124-08-09
port ran the whole shift no dip. first time i remember that. loaders was joking about it, saying somebody finally paid the bill. shed still 41 inside at 3pm so we sat outside in the shade same as always lol. good for the lights anyway