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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 7th, 2023

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  • I’d be careful with this example. One of the key issues people take with the UN that they indeed can’t enforce things, like in Gaza. Security council approved a ceasefire, but the fighting goes on. Russia doing genocide in Ukraine, UN tells RU that they need to stop being bad.

    For the record they of course do stuff, but if you’d like to advocate for anarchism I’d use a more effective example. If even the UN can’t stand up to fascism, what shot does an anarchy have, ya know?


  • I gotta be honest, your replies are very wordy and I’m having trouble following.

    I would in fact say that you have only one (well, two) power providers. You have one mail delivery service, presumably random-online-shop.com isn’t providing you mail service right? That’s the same thing here. Your “provider” doesn’t produce the energy. They, like in the packages example you used, are simply handing off the “packages” to your power provider (the mail service) who then administers and provides you with your power (delivers your mail). They have the power at that point, it’s on their grid, and you want the power, so they give you the power. You’re still paying the other company, to pay Ennexis, to provide the power. These companies just make it.

    And again, if all the packages are the same, there’s no difference and it doesn’t matter, why would you sign a contract with any of these companies specifically? Why doesn’t the entire NL just buy from the cheapest company if it’s all the same to you as an end-user of the network?

    Anyway at this point I’m just happy to be able to push a new idea on other folks here. The concept of govermment-run programs is still scary for some reason, but we do public/private partnerships very well here. It could just be that we have different understandings of the word “provide”, which I’m fine with. Who am I to tell the Dutch what words mean lol. Feel free to redeem your Charity Coupon™️ if you’d like. Thanks for the chat.


  • So I’ve been thinking a lot about this. With a few exceptions you’re actually pretty close to describing what we have in the States. There is more than one power producer in my state, and all the producers feed into the same grid whose infrastructure is regulated by the government. If a producer fails to produce, I can still get access to the electricity on the grid, but the key difference is that most of the delivery infrastructure is fully owned and operated by the same companies that do the production. I think we’re getting hung up on the difference between provider and producer, which in America is mostly always the same thing.

    It sounds like the Netherlands does in fact have two power providers then in the form of Enexis and TenneT, at least as I understand the term “provider” as we use it here. Or do you also maintain contracts/payments with individual power production firms that you haven’t already described? What is the benefit of maintaining a contract with any of these companies if they already sold the power to Enexis/TenneT and they don’t do any other administration services?

    Our system is indeed fragile and I wish we could figure it out. I was a little off, DTE Energy services 2.3 million customers for power. We regularly experience outages affecting people into the hundreds of thousands. There’s no incentive for them to improve the infrastructure since they’re a monopoly. Most of the power here is delivered via free-standing poles instead of underground lines, which are obviously prone to issues related to wind/snow/trees. It fucking sucks. Even just separating the delivery system from private business would be a monumental shift.





  • I’m gonna commit to this. How does this work? I looked and according to the Internet TenneT is the sole operator of the national electrical grid in the Netherlands. Do you have 52 power lines running to your home? What do these companies do if they don’t actually produce the electricity or operate the grid?

    I have precisely one power company that services about 5 million residents here where I live. No other options. This is the case for almost all Americans as far as I’m aware, outside of a few specific municipality-run power organizations, but those are exceedingly rare.


  • DOZENS? Dozens. For real, dozens??? Please list for me every utility company that will actually provide electricity service to your home. If it’s actually more than two I will donate $25 to a charity of your choice right now. Not ones that operate in your state/county, but ones that will actually service your home. No cap, my Visa is ready. I’ll post the receipt.