[S2E3] Talk About The Weather
[S2E3] Talk About The Weather ::: https://blltly.com/2tl1Rk
I really liked how, often with corporate social media, it can be hard to know what to talk about. But Kelsey covered thinking about, is your business sustainable Is it responsible Is it overall kind of a good business And this can be a really good place to start with your corporate social media.
And I know earlier as well, we were talking about the social listening tool, but are there any other tools that you use, particularly when it comes to scheduling or creating content itself that you would recommend
Back in Mount Weather, Jasper is taken to a warehouse full of art and antiquities by Maya. There the two talk about art and are about to share a kiss when they're interrupted by lights and voices. Maya grabs Jasper's hand and the two run away. Monty approaches them and Maya leaves for breakfast. Monty asks Jasper if he has seen Clarke. Jasper replies that he would love to talk to Monty about Clarke any other time except now. Monty expresses that he is worried about her and Jasper replies that whatever Clarke is up to, she can handle it.
\"I also talked to Randall about this, and he said this was totally on purpose,\" Fischer said. \"He planted a guy standing at reception in the same way that Jim would always stand at reception and talk to Pam. He even has his sleeves rolled up the way Jim used to roll up his sleeves... And Randall said that was on purpose, to keep that Pam/Jim thing sort of in our orbit.\"
Bruce Holsinger: I was really asking them very detailed questions about exactly what the biggest hurricane they could imagine would do in the moment. I wanted them to talk to me about what, you know, what would happen if a hurricane did to South Florida what Hurricane Dorian did to the Bahamas in 2019, and just sat over Miami Beach for 24 to 48 hours.
Bruce Holsinger: Yeah, yeah. And I wanted that to be, I wanted that to be really clear, I wanted the novel to be a little bit meta about that. I wanted to find a way of talking about that and of representing the effects of climate change on an affluent family. I wanted to think about themes of precarity and downward mobility. But I wanted to do it in a way that was self conscious, and that readers would understand that this was done intentionally.
Ella is a writer originally from Gettysburg, PA and yes, her parents are Civil War reenactors (no really, they are!). She's worked on a few TV shows (Gotham, Hightown, Debris) and when she's not procrastinating writing the next great American novel, enjoys riding horses, attempting to go hiking instead of just talking about going hiking, and playing with her adorable dog, Finnegan.
It's Friday, February 19. And today we're going to be talking about the freak winter storm in Texas, the failure of the power grid and the misinformation event that's been swirling around this entire thing. Shawn, what's going on in Texas
Definitely. And there's a whole series of cascading failures. So we have cascading failures within the grid, because these are complex systems that are interacting, you know, different power companies, different power generation, things like that. But then the power grid interacts with hospitals, water processing and filtration systems, heating systems, 911 systems, and those interact together, as well as like public in systems for public announcements, other things. So it's really complex system, where the power grid underlies many of these systems, it's kind of like these, this little enmeshed web. So sort of natural disaster that's happening, you know, in a way in Texas, is far from over, even though power is being restored, we still then have to deal with the second and third and fourth order effects like, you know, all these water systems that are having issues around boiling water, all those other things like how are you supposed to boil water when you don't have power So like, people are scared, people are uncomfortable, some people have passed away as a result of this. So there's also, as we've talked about before, there's a lot of emotion involved here. And so we also want something or someone to blame as a potential solution at this moment in time so we can make sure you know, when this is over, that it will never happen again.
Right, you know, you get back to your question. What is the incentive for anyone to offer an overly simplistic explanation And I feel like at this point, it might be helpful to break down kind of a cast of characters or list of components, if you will, for an infrastructure failure that we typically observe. So for instance, we spent some time talking about the Oroville Dam.
Well, I think that's a great point that, that this becomes part of the next phase of things right, which is, what do we learn from all this And what do we what do we want to take away from this event Or as you said, How do we make sure that this doesn't happen to us again, and I think that is not an obvious extension of the first part. Right So there's, there's always some kind of inciting event. There's always some exploration of what could have been done. And then there's some kind of conversation about what there is to learn from this event. There's a recovery effort. And then there's a kind of long term set of policy decisions or policy conversations that might spring out of it as well. To your question, I think when we try to figure out what we observe as typical across these kinds of misinformation events, across infrastructure failures, one thing that we see is that that misinformation can really interfere with that process of trying to understand what really happened, and what we should do about it in the future, so that it doesn't happen again. And so to me, that's where misinformation can really be harmful. Yes, it can be harmful if you're interfering with people's ability to know where resources are and where supplies are. I think that in the most immediate response, you can see misinformation happen there. But the misinformation we observed around this event, didn't have anything to do with, you know, bot accounts telling people, you know, clandestinely or under the radar that how to respond to something in a way that was directly harmful to them. Instead, we have stuff that's being spoken by prominent officials on cable news. That's where the misinformation is coming from. And this misinformation about that we're talking about, I think, specifically interferes with people's collective ability to understand what happened.
Misinformation often oversimplifies problems, right If we have a bunch of forest fires, and they're the result of a complex intersection of federal policy, climate change, and, you know, other kinds of behaviors of the people moving through the forest in the first place, if we get a bunch of forest fires, we don't want to deal with it's much easier, right. And when we talked with Steve Korman about this, this is one of the things that came up, it's much easier to just blame antifa. When we have complex political controversies at all, it's just much easier to polarize the other side, or to polarize the conversation and, you know, demonize the other side. Misinformation loves simple explanations for complex scenarios, and complex dynamics. So I think, to some extent, the complexity of this situation, lends itself to misinformation.
Right, And that leads to the simple answer is lead to the perception that there's simple solutions that are like 100% effective. Liike, we need to do this one thing, we can do this one thing tomorrow, that'll be solved next winter, this is not going to happen. I think the public also wants to know, this is not going to happen again next week, this is not going to happen again next year, or the year after. Do what you have to do, boom, we're done. Versus you're talking about sort of restructuring, potentially the grid, looking at what roles like all of these players have understanding the many, many governmental organizations and commercial organizations that are involved in getting power to your house. Like that's, that's just not what we want to talk about right now. In the midst of this, we don't want to have hours long conversations. You know, the five minute soundbite provides a lot of comfort, actually.
We may look back historically, and say, Oh, the year 2020 through 2022. That's when we learned that in general, people don't like conversations about risk. And that really put a point, an exclamation point on decades of data indicate that people struggle with conversations about risk. Right, all throughout the covid 19 pandemic, actually getting a bead on what people's real risk is. Right communicating that out getting everybody on the same page. That's been a really hard thing to do. But risk surrounds us everywhere. And it's also kind of intertwined with our, with our power generation, right if you want to take some examples of say, how people perceive risks surrounding nuclear power, all the way to what is the total risk we face based on how vulnerable our grid is. Our grid could be vulnerable to a cyber attack, our grid could be vulnerable to any number of perturbations that could come from the outside like weather, or could come from the inside, like equipment failure. So we face all these different kinds of risks. But it seems like, you know, having conversations about risk is another one of those areas where you know that, as you mentioned, that certainty or that misinforming explanations can often provide sounds a whole lot better than, well, it looks like I need to just have a better comprehensive understanding of the collective risk of all this systems in my power grid. Right That's a lot of work, blaming it on wind energy, that's a little bit more ergonomic.
So here we are, we kind of traced the timeline, we talked about some of the components that we've observed in this story, that seem really familiar to us. Let's talk a little bit about the impact of the misinformation that we see circulating around this event. I think one thing to take away from this is how framing from say a journalistic point of view, had a big impact on this wind turbine story. So, you know, we go back to that Texas grid operator, who was maybe cited and, you know, at least half a dozen different news stories, who reported that, yeah, the frozen turbines are interfering with our ability to generate power. And that one fact, what was it report were reported some like a 12,000 megawatt shortfall, in any event. That shortfall, you know, depending on where you tune in for your news is either a minor part of the energy portfolio and a bit player in a bigger systemic failure. Or if you're getting news from another place, it is the reason that we're losing power. And it is the reason that people are suffering right now. 59ce067264