You don't 'need the lights on.' I have lived in multiple third world countries where outages happen regularly if you have electricity at all. This is a failure of customers to adequately prepare and instead playing the victim because of their failures. People knew for years Texas grid was vulnerable, and it's an exquisite display of Darwin Award for those who didn't prepare for it.
Only a moron doesn't keep some sort of off-grid combustibles and cold weather gear on hand, even if you live in the most southern edge of our nation. The customer is to blame for paying, not capitalism.
Hospitals do. Street lights do. Network operators do. Just think back to the beginning of the pandemic and how many industries were suddenly discovered to be "essential". You're thinking from the perspective of "can I, personally, suffer a power outage in my own home[1]" and imaginging that "running a civilization" works like that. There are many entities who simply can't stop buying power.
> Only a moron [...]
Please think harder here. It's not remotely as simple as you think it is.
[1] Knowing that you can use your phone to reach effective emergency services in the event of need, of course.
Hospitals are 60.1% of capacity? Hospitals have generators, also. Lets not make hypocritical statements about think harder.
>imaginging that "running a civilization" works like tha
And yet many rich civilizations do run just fine 'like that' and many may consider those civilizations just as good as yours. Your statement is simply ethnocentric arrogant elitism.
>Just think back to the beginning of the pandemic and how many industries were suddenly discovered to be "essential".
You're describing tyrants trying to shut down business. Being 'essential' was simply a chosen word of propaganda as part of a tyrannical process to destroy some people's line of work while favoring others. We are discussing free-market pricing and their interconnection with power disruptions and acts of god.
Only a moron doesn't keep some sort of off-grid combustibles and cold weather gear on hand, even if you live in the most southern edge of our nation. The customer is to blame for paying, not capitalism.