The Daily Feather — Pulling the Switch

Most major blackouts are the result of cascading failures, storms or even equipment meltdowns, but there have been instances where human error caused a massive collapse – like what happened in Taiwan in March 2022. A failure at the Hsinta coal-fired power plant in Kaohsiung led to blackouts across multiple regions, including the capital Taipei and parts of the chip-making hub. A maintenance team at the power company had removed insulating gas from a circuit breaker at the plant and warned operators not to route electricity through the equipment. Despite a yellow and red warning notice that read “Do Not Operate” attached to a control panel, a worker pulled the switch. That shut down the plant and the main transformer for southern Taiwan, triggering outages in that part of the island. Apparently, this wasn’t the first time the power was disconnected at this same location. In Bloomberg’s reporting of the story, it noted, “A technician’s error previously shut down the same plant in Kaohsiung last year, resulting in outages across Taiwan’s industrial parks.”

The latest weekly narrative from jobless claims was the farthest thing from cascading failures, storms or equipment meltdowns – it was a giant nothing burger. The effective unchanged, from 214,000 to 213,000, kept claims in an upward channel. Continuing claims remained range-bound at 1.85 million, neither improving nor deteriorating from recent levels; the current number was seen as far back as the middle of 2024. But as Thursday’s Feather explained, continuing claims now cover just 25% of the total unemployed population. As it skirts a record low, continuing claims’ efficacy as a labor gauge is increasingly challenged as an indication for the jobless narrative.