TexasCHLforum.com

California saw Texas deregulate its energy markets and tried to follow suit. Being idiots, they stipulated that if a power company needed to buy from the open market, it could do so exactly one day in advance. This parody of hedging with energy contracts rapidly bankrupted PG&E as buyers who weren't bound to insane rules bought up contracts and then sold to the Californian electric companies at obscene rates. PG&E sells assets, including a massive new natural gas plant. Jeff Skilling buys it and promptly shutters it, worsening California's self inflicted energy crisis. He then continues to prey upon the entire Californian energy market for years. Jeff Skilling unilaterally defeated the government of California.

That may seem underhanded and wrong, but the guy went to work every day in Texas, and he never made much by messing with ERCOT. Instead, he saw the complete lack of foresight displayed by Democrat lawmakers and then generated outlandish profits by trading on that.

There are a lot of highly educated Democrats. But when they stand up and cry when people react to their policies in service of their own rational self interest, I can't call them intelligent.

Hopefully Only In California.

I collect old chips. The only working example is actually the earliest. In 1971, the four real microprocessors on earth were the microcontroller for the wing sweep on the f14, a small chip designed but not built by a company in San Antonio, the Intel 4004 and the TI TMS-1000. I have a working Datamath that I play with but mainly keep as a display piece. My goal is to mount my cpu collection on a board with die shots for each one. I have every major Intel, IBM, Sun, Motorola, AMD and VIA architecture except for the IBM POWER2, which i can only find in 30 year old whole Computers that sell out of china for $4000 each. I actually tried offering $100 for one and they just rejected the offer out of hand. I guess someone must still need them pretty bad.

I have the Russian AM2901 and Intel 8080 clones, as well as old Intel RAM from before they made CPUs and an old AMD ROM chip. I also have the AMD 9080, which was an illegal copy of the Intel 8080. Intel sued AMD, but IBM told Intel that without a second source, the PC would not continue using Intel chips (this was just before the advent of the legendary "x86" with the Intel 8086).