I think you are missing the main point of the original comment, using it as an opportunity to virtue signal about systemic racism.

A six-figure salary to study whether the electric grid is racist is absolutely excessive, but it’s just a small detail of the overall fraud, waste, and abuse that drives the exorbitant utility prices in Seattle.

The original comment seemed to imply that a tiny portion of the budget apparently spent on investigating systemic racism is a larger systemic problem than, well, any other systemic problems the city might have (including actual systemic racism).

Private companies orders of magnitude smaller than the public utilities for a major metro area hire such six figure consultants all the time, and investors don’t seem to mind at all. In my experience those types of things always seem ridiculous until you actually know the context, so I’ve learned to assume some measure of competance. This has generally served me quite well, and I also don’t walk around the world outraged constantly by things I don’t understand.

i'm sure the salary was paid according to the employer's desire for the labor to be done, and the available supply of that kind of labor in the market

Why are you so sure of that?

> A six-figure salary to study whether the electric grid is racist is absolutely excessive, but it’s just a small detail of the overall fraud, waste, and abuse that drives the exorbitant utility prices in Seattle.

Yikes. If the market demand for the role is six figures (because the financial rewards more-than-justify the spend; see my previous citation), then the cost is absolutely a good value for the grid, for the employee, and for the customers who get better service out of the utility.

And to tshaddox's point, nostromo's comment picked this specific spend as an (implied) example of fraud and waste... over all the other inefficiencies in the system. Utilities are wasteful in so, so many more ways, largely around maintaining manual and error-prone processes that are both slow and costly as a result. These inefficiencies are leagues worse tha studying "how the utility grid was systemically racist" in wastefulness.

I'm not really sure this conversation makes any more sense to pursue.

In defense of the original commenter, they mentioned they had a personal connection to the person paid to do that work. It seems plausible enough that that was the reason it was picked as an example, over other things they might have no personal connection to. I would be inclined to chalk it up to that, rather than anything else.

That may be one defense, but the counter to that is that personal stories do a better job of winning people to pick a side versus facts and stats.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S07495...

It's also why anecdotes are often used as a technique of persuasion, because so many people eat them up and it eliminates the need for a citation.

As opposed to six-figure salaries paid to software engineers?

>A six-figure salary to study whether the electric grid is racist is absolutely excessive

How so? Doesn't seem any more ridiculous than any other six-figure job.