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You have to wonder with these types of costs, if the hyper elite controlled 'open market', was the actual cause of the blackouts. Did someone get the grease gun out and pay guys to down some lines? Pay operators to just pretend a rolling blackout was occurring? I was in it. We never had power. We still don't have power. I had to exfil for a hotel and had to leave plenty of my suffering neighbors behind.

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While there is some speculation obviously on the actual lengths of nefarious actions that big players can get away with in unregulated markets, it is also worth keeping Occam's Razor in mind. "What if" is good for bar room debates but can very easily turn into magical thinking. In this case, I am pretty sure everyone is just desperately trying to not be the party incurring the true cost of power right now - and all the energy providers and ERCOT were caught with their pants down. I have a hard time really treating any sort of conspiracy as more than an edge case scenario here

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