Slashback: Solidarity, Friction, Dreams

More on power woes in California; a ray of light to all the would-be Delux DVD players in the audience; snappy comebacks from Sega; and some updates on the ever-intriguing Project Pengachu. Mmmmmm. All below, so use that mouse finger.

Good reason to stay on the 3rd coast, Bruce. Steven Johnson of Feed writes: "hey man, here's an excellent one for you: Bruce Sterling on the thirteen causes behind the California power crisis. All about how it's the result of treating energy networks like information networks. Classic Sterling. Enjoy!"

No accounting for taste, but on a length / goodness ratio basis, this is perhaps my new favorite Sterling article ever, too. Bam.

I'll believe it when that inventory is replenished. Patrick writes: "It's off the front page so no one will see an update or comment, but [this site] has the official statement from Sega. FYI"

The points made in this statement still don't say that Sega will continue to produce Dreamcast consoles past March (or any other time), but do emphasize that Sega has no intention of stopping the supply of games for their console, and are "currently in negotiations" to provide games for Game Boy Advance and PlayStation 2. Also, the affirm previous reports that Sega is promoting the Dreamcast's architecture for use in PCs and other places.

aztektum points somewhat more directly to the Sega statement (in Japanese, that is), with a link he claims was found on IGN.

The Wailing Walls have ears. Adam Alexander, webmaster of Dulux Consumer Support, writes to assure Slashdot readers that despite his site's name,"My site is not an advertisement for the company; in fact many parts of it are very critical of the company. The purpose is to help people who have already ordered the product in getting the product or getting a refund. My site discourages new orders at this time, at least until the old orders are taken care of."

As the introduction to that site puts it, the page "has been created to serve as a central location for interaction between people who placed orders for a Dulux DVD/MP3/Karaoke/Game Player and would like to share customer service or product information."

That sounds pretty smart. Any class-action lawyers around?

I would not name a daughter this. PSUdaemon writes "Back in November there was a post about Pengachu. A project to provide cheap wireless internet in a handheld. The handhelds are designed with the Linux coder in mind. With ports for an external keyboard and mouse, you can take your projects anywhere. There is a Web Page now with lots of details and pictures. Unfortunately I couldn't find a link to buy one..."

I'd like to suggest a slogan for the wildly successful spin-off this project deserves to spawn: "It's from MIT, so it's got to be good!" Certainly a good step toward ubiquity.

Comments

Re:Sega never made moeny on the dreamcast unit

[Urban Existentialist]

Yes, they didn't make any money off the hardware directly. However, every game released by a games company for the Sega platform had to have liscense money payed to Sega, even if the develepors were not related to Sega at all. This made up a fairly large chunk of Sega's cashflow. In addition, they made money from their own games that they wrote for their platform. The situation is similar for Sony.

Now that Sega will be developing games for the PSX2, this is very good news for Sony, as they will make money off every Sega game released for the PSX2, and it will give their product better games (imagine what Sonic the Hedgehog on the PSX2 would do for sales). I don't know if they will release thier major games characters for other platforms, or if they will restrict themselves to consoles only, but I wouldn't be surprised if they did. Their brands are their strong suit..

You know exactly what to do-
Your kiss, your fingers on my thigh-

A different view of the California power problems.

[Spamuel]

"California's utilities have lost billions and billions. They owe it to people who (a) aren't Californian and (b) aren't kidding about collecting that debt."

I happen to live in Canada, and our local utility company is owed a fair amount of money for providing power to California. Unfortunatly the Californian utility we sold power to is now declaring bankruptcy, leaving our utility company screwed out of millions of millions of dollars (guess who's going to pay for that loss). So Californians and their utility companies aren't the only ones getting screwed over...

Re:Public Utilities owned by the people

[nels_tomlinson]

The short answer is: "if Marxism-Leninism was a good idea, the USSR would be the richest nation on the planet, at least in the sense of the standard of living for the average guy." The long answer to "could a utility be held in the public domain?" is no. If utilities are publically owned, the decisions about how much to produce, how, and who gets it are made politically. Trust me, that's bad. (Trust me, I'm an economist...)

The problems in CA stem from political action. California chose to deregulate the wholesale market, without deregulating the retail market. Thus, consumers had no incentive to conserve when supplies got tight, while the utilities had to keep buying power to meet demand, however high the prices got. That was only the second mistake. They didn't understand the economics of these markets yet, and did some rather stupid things with zonal pricing which aggravated the problem. William Hogan has an interesting paper on his website, in particular this one.

Those links don't seem to be working in the preview, so here they are in cut-and-paste form:
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~.whogan.cbg.ksg/
and
http://ksghome.harvard.edu/~.whogan.cbg.ksg/zonal_ Feb11.pdf

What was the first mistake? Their stupid, infeasible environmental laws, which are really about social and technological ignorance and NIMBY rather than any realistic concern for the human environment. It would be irresponsible to invest any money in power generation or transmission facilities in the People's Republic of California, and the fact that there hasn't been much such investment in recent decades shows that most gereration company CEO's have good sense.

You mention that it's silly to assume that the multinationals would act in the best interests of the Californians. That's sort of right, except that what they are doing is really in the long term best interests of the Californians. By driving up the prices of power, they give incentives to build more generation and transmission facilities in California. The State Government is of course trying to counteract these incentives, with talk of "nationalization" and price caps.

Amusing when they live with their mistakes

[WillSeattle]

It's incredibly ironic that:

A. Californians elected GOP legislators who, fed by fat cat Texan-owned firm campaign contributions, pushed through deregulation.

B. The world's largest wind energy power facility is being built in Oregon and Washington state, while California refuses to build any power plants.

C. The first company I ever worked for (as a Power Engineer, actually), Cominco, is selling the power generation from their private dam to save California's butt, since they can make more money selling them hydro power than smelting non-ferrous minerals (yes, that includes gold and silver, but is mostly lead and other alloys).

D. Washington State dams are running flat out shipping power to California to the point that many of the lakes behind are drying out - this during our worst snowfall year in a decade when we have cold temperatures that force us to use energy.

and, last, but not least

E. The feds still try to get you to believe that the answer is to build coal plants, when anyone worth their salt could show you 4.5 cents per KW hour costs to build wind energy plants that have close to zero apian kill ratios and allow the land to be used for farming and other purposes. And even at current pricing, natural gas is still cheaper to use, if you would just build it, than coal. Especially sulfur coal - and I've seen what happens if you're crazy enough to use that -the Trilateral Commission forced Cominco to install scrubbers on all its stacks due to sulfur and lead outputs.