>That is not lack of competency at all. That is a deliberate choice by Texas to not spend extra money on a resilient system. They deliberately keep their grid disconnected from the rest of the USA so they do not need to comply with Federal standards. Texas is well aware of the issues. They just prefer the free market with cheap power.

As a Texan who has relatives all over the U.S., and has been paying a good deal of attention to the frequency of power outages when in Texas, vs out of state, I dare say, Texas is doing something right, that winter incident notwithstanding. When I compare outages I've experienced to what I experience when I travel out of state, in most cases, other states have more frequent outages, with longer resolution times. Texas, in particular, went the direction they did in isolating themselves from the National Grid in large part due to the gain in resilience of their resulting grid becoming loosely coupled to other State's grids/cascading problems.

From a Systems point of view as well, the Texas grid is smaller, and stands a much better chance of being reasoned through once the chips are down. Even during the winter crisis; the power company still managed to make sure that the service area (divided into 4ths) got at least a 1/4 hour uptime to allow people to maintain some semblance of heat. Most of the worst stories amongst my peer group, came from people working in the cities, Austin in particular being a nasty piece of work.

Austin Power apparently had their emergency (non-load shed) trunk shared by many of the skyscrapers and office buildings dowm town, meaning that when it came time to load shed, you'd have entire blocks of residential area dark, but at no point did the 15+ story office buildings that people were very pointedly told not to go to deprived of either power or heat. It didn't help there wasn't a native Texan on the Public Utility Commission (ERCOT regulator), one of those on it was caught on a hot mic assuring Wall Street that their gains in terms of spiked energy prices would not be clawed back in any way by the state, and any efforts to do so he'd obstruct.

Texas has it's slieu of issues, many self-inflicted, most knowingly; however that doesn't detract from the point posited by the headline. Systems of greater complexity by definition will have higher demands on the competency of those operating them. Less population growth means fewer cranks on the slot machine that in time produces competent system operators.

And no, immigration doesn't fix it if the working migrants are still primarily invested in funneling capital elsewhere. In fact, it may be arguably deleterious if there's a glut in the number of short-term "oh well, this is a bad idea, but I'm not gonna have to deal with the long term consequences" types that are willing to just say "yep, okay, fine."

It's an ugly problem to even think about, let alone talk about/come to terms with in any meaningful way. Hell, I've tried to phrase my ciew of it uncontroversially as I can, but even I can point to at least two or three things that would instantly be perceived as dog whistles/intellectual stop points in certain circles. ... And I'm not even sure we've covered the full problem space yet!

Totally with you on the 737 MAX and McDonnell Douglas angle though!