Sometimes the media echoes my sentiment, kinda.
Spot on here. Further to that, preventing this scenario is exactly why we need reserve capacity at 15%. These clever pillocks eroded that because they pilfered all the money to keep the 15%, gawd knows how stupid one can be. On top of this all, the required maintenance is not done.
There is no appreciation for unplanned breakdowns at all, it unplanned ffs! You do not know where and how many will fail when, next. Philistines…
Groetnis ( philistine describes a person who is narrow-minded and hostile to the life of the mind whose [materialistic] worldview and tastes indicate an indifference to cultural and aesthetic values)
Another one … forget the “stage 8” clickbait (blah blah blah) … core point in bold we, Sarel and I, are saying.
I don’t. I employ Hanlon’s Razor: Never allege malice when incompetence will do.
The minister is not deliberately doing this. The minister is doing what he must do: Putting the best possible version of the story out there. The minister is not an engineer, he asks other people for the stats, then puts the best possible spin on it, and that is what you get.
Then when reality bites, and things go down, he has egg on his face.
This was one of the things that really really irritated me during the “covid wars”, if I can call it that. The more negative people were accusing the powers that be of deliberately lying. And I was there on the side, thinking… guys… where were you during that time when we didn’t know what was what and were kinda making the best guess we could… asleep? 
Bamboozle.
The “best version” (in my very bare bones non-PC way): SA, we fooked up. De Ruyter was right. We will step down now, and allow others to fix the mess we allowed to happen the last 2 decades.
There are no more eggs left to throw at them Plonk. None.
“Covid wars” … We will not go there.
… as it has no bearing on Eskom and what has been done, with impunity, and no consequences.
SA needs to get really “angry”.
Oh, there are other examples. Any good religious debate can devolve into accusing the opposing side of lying, to which my answer is: I’m not lying. I may be deluded, but I really believe this sh*t!
Now those are words one can truly grasp and not misinterpret in anyway. 
And my point. With Eskom, no one after 2 decades can even try and tell me, anyone with 2 brain cells, they “truly believe what they are saying”.
This is 100% politics, about voters, the 40k+ employees at Eskom, the “infrastructure” in and around Eskom … all fighting for “survival”.
They are lying every which way to Sunday to keep the voters (SA) happy.
And it is working … case point, we don’t agree. 
Divide and conquer.
Electioneering…
K@kpraatGroetnis
Yup, and that is precisely what one would expect. The ANC… really believes this. Amen: It is so, or it will be.
For that reason, if people are bamboozled, it is really their own fault. You need to consider these matters with a healthy amount of skepticism. And then, to counter yourself, you have to approach your own thinking with some skepticism, “Is there another way of looking at this?”.
Well there is, but I actually think the average person’s main problem is that it just takes too long to formulate a coherent view. I certainly find that to be the case lately. I’m a little tired of coming up with alternate answers, even if today I’m doing some of that.
And it is easier to read on MyBB how angry I ought to be.
Let me help … from NotMyBB … picture this headline: I feel so “blessed” … LS is back!
If you cannot fight it … make fun of it.
Blessed my man, blessed … for a while I was worried that it was all over, that it was fake news all these years.
My problem I really one of expectation management. No really, I cannot manage to curtail my expectation that there be honesty. Philistines, hence me using that. I am just built that way. The lying and thievery and corruption is amazing. Dunning Kruger comes to mind, nothing stopped moronic people thinking they know everything, and excepting the mediocrity of answers from the “so called engineers”. Precisely because they don’t know what they don’t know and cannot think outside that realm.
One thing absent from a number of World languages is a native word for maintenance, the concept is absent.
EkweetekisnidiootGroetnis
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Adding to that …
This part …
Try this (my actual times without electricity):
11 July:
06:00 - 08:08
08:16 - 12:53
14:04 - 16:13
22:03 - 00:10
Total: 11h 1m (7h 30m planned)
12 July:
06:04 - 08:19
14:01 - 18:14
18:18 - 00:27
Total: 11h 37m (9h 30m planned)
They keep doing this all over, seen like numbers in Boksburg Benoni, here in Centurion and other places. This to me, appears to hide a level or 2.
LevelXXXGroetnis
The thing is, if you look at a dictionary, it is there. Maybe it wasn’t always there, but as cultures influence each other, it has certainly been added. There really isn’t an excuse anymore.
Let me dig up another example. When you ask the question of why Africa is less developed (in so many ways), there is actually a surprisingly good answer that has nothing to do with her people: Horses.
Africa is affected rather deeply by tropical diseases that meant horses don’t work so well. So they simply didn’t have the opportunities Europe had to develop their economies. That is a good explanation, but is it a good excuse in 2023? No, I don’t think so.
Adding a word or 2 to a piece of paper, don’t change anything. But we already knew that, ne. The concept is the problem. Take migrant workers, migrant farmers (well not farming mostly, just cattle grazing) there is nothing to maintain. Water dries up or veldt is grazed barren, you move to the next river or piece of land. No roof leaks to repair, no heaters to repair, and almost no horses as you pointed out, so no hoof maintenance either.
The outlook is to replace when used up, and used up means nothing is left, eat everything. Look at the roads, Post Office, Hospitals and on and on.
Like for me, expectation management is impossible, as a fellow human, I expect the same as for myself…
CloudcucoolandGroetnis
That is, has been, my other B&M … just change the LS levels so fast that no one can make sense of it.
I think what turns on the red lights for me, is what we do with that information. When we end up in a 1800s “scientific racism” scenario where we quite accurately and scientifically prove that therefore some cultures are simply incapable of doing these things, I think we’re in very dangerous waters.
(Yes, that was actually a thing!).
I think what was enlightening to me, through my kids actually, is learning just how much was going on in Africa. You’ve got people trading all along the coast starting in the 1500s. The Portuguese was all over this place, and the locals knew exactly how to benefit from it. Arabic ships were in the harbours, soon those people intermarried with the locals (giving rise to the people generically known as the Swahili, a word that means “coasts”). We’ve been at it 500 years or more, in which time entire languages were invented.
I travel, and have in the past, all over Africa, DRC, Angola, Namibia, Moz, Zim, Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and the USA and various EU countries like France, Portugal, Germany, Holland etc etc. Been to Mozambique and Lesotho a week ago, again still.
The differences are stark, to say the least. And not only in what you see, or get, but in attitude and outlook as well. Do not even look any further than our own country folk, and the incumbent government. But enough of that, suffice to say, in Eskom the lack of maintenance and planning for maintenance is clear for all to see. Almost 10 years ago when I left my consulting at Eskom behind, it was clear to see when I visited every single one of the coal plants, with a single exception.
WereldGroetnis
Let’s say that sometimes I hope that David Hume’s observation was correct. Well, he was, but only in as much as inductive reasoning isn’t absolute:
Matters of fact, which are the second objects of human reason, are not ascertained in the same manner; nor is our evidence of their truth, however great, of a like nature with the foregoing. The contrary of every matter of fact is still possible; because it can never imply a contradiction, and is conceived by the mind with the same facility and distinctness, as if ever so conformable to reality. That the sun will not rise tomorrow is no less intelligible a proposition, and implies no more contradiction than the affirmation, that it will rise. We should in vain, therefore, attempt to demonstrate its falsehood. Were it demonstratively false, it would imply a contradiction, and could never be distinctly conceived by the mind.
Just because the sun has risen a million times, is no reason to expect that it will do so tomorrow. Maybe we’re the Christmas pig, and today is Christmas eve.
And perhaps like you, I continue to hope that tomorrow the sun (of corruption) won’t rise. But sometimes I also think this is like that thing that Huxley said, that most ignorance is vincible: We don’t know because we don’t want to. Maybe, some people don’t know what maintenance is, because they don’t want to.