Would you bet millions of dollars on the goodness of the typical person?

This is about business to business, not business to consumer. I suggest to talk to a financial/accounting person in a big company. Often enough there are mistakes in payments that are only noticed by the other business. This despite all the various layers that should've prevented the entire problem.

I don't mean small mistakes either, I mean where someone wanted to enter something like 1234.56 (two decimals), but it ended up as 1234560.00. Basically a mixup between the decimal and thousand separator; such mistakes happen way more often than you'd think. I've heard various stories of a vendor notifying the company that they've been overpaid, e.g. the 1000 times what it should've been, but also various other kinds of mistakes.

Some companies have been working together for various decades. Employees might've switched between the companies, people know each other. It really isn't uncommon to have quite a bit of trust between companies. Obviously, this does depend on the country. In some parts of the world there's more trust than other parts.

They are all literally trusting in the goodness of the typical person. And then doing some careful analysis and planning. And fraud detection for the rare misdeeds.

Yes, the system would fall apart if you disputed every single transaction and made them supply irrefutable evidence you did in fact authorise the transaction - but it doesn't revolve entirely on the trust that people will keep their own account of what they think they spent.

And before everything was networked, there was no way for a store to check with the credit card company that the card wasn't reported stolen. That's the trusting people part, it's the store that is trusting people without the ability to even verify that the card hasn't been reported stolen.

Yes, there is a paper trail, but the situation I'm talking about is analogous to a bad check or a counterfeit bill -- there's no recourse if the bad actor can't be found and the store is on the hook.

I am just about old enough to remember this time - it’s funny to think that security hinged on checking if the signature looked ‘right’. For cheques I remember here at least for yours to actually be accepted anywhere you needed a ‘cheque guarantee card’ which was basically just a debit card but with a fancy hologram - so a certificate of your ‘goodness’ - up to a certain limit per cheque. The shop would copy the details and this would supposedly guarantee they’ll be paid.

I was going to say that shops could have asked for ID - but at this time driving licences didn’t have a picture and weren’t cards - so no one carried them anyway. There was probably a lot of ‘subjective’ acceptance around the place (‘does this person look trustworthy, would they really be given a credit card or did they steal it?’) come to think of it…

Somewhere in that question is an answer to the Fermi paradox!

Spoken like someone who has never done business.

The only approach I see is perhaps to have written into contracts with all buyers some kind of compensation for the pipeline being unavailable per hour.

Then colonial will prefer to have the pipeline turned on handing out free fuel because it's cheaper than the compensation for turning off.

I'm not taking a position on the similarity or dissimilarity between shutting down a service because you can't bill accurately and shutting down a service because you refuse to interoperate with other providers.

All I'm saying is Texas customers did get their electricity cut off recently.

At any rate you are just looking for something to cry about. You asked for a hypothetical counter example not expecting to get one and now are splitting hairs to qualify big tears.

"As of Wednesday morning, when the power outages were at their most severe, the cold had snuffed out about 46 gigawatts, or about 40 percent, of power-generation capacity in the state."

Sounds a lot like the grid did in fact run out of "fuel" (as in the product that they deliver).

>You asked for a hypothetical counter example

Of an electricity provider cutting power of its own accord because their billing service was not functioning, not because the electricity production in Texas dropped due to freezing while demand shot up.