How about PUC do its damn job and watch over the utilities that it regulates, rather than take millions in campaign donations and illegal activities?
I'm all for cleaning up the CA PUC, but I'm also all for cleaning up PG&E. They are not mutually exclusive. However, the people who made the decision to not do the maintenance are the executives. It was their responsibility to make sure that the maintenance was done, and they instead increased their compensation and increased PG&E's profits 18% from the prior year... right up until the fires that they started. So yeah, I want house cleaning at the PUC, but I want it at PGE even more. They've been up to this kind of thing for decades.
The state is already running PG&E. Fixing prices on energy, denying the building of profitable power plants, extreme regulation of labor, supply and demand. Now they're bankrupt while across the country energy companies are some of the most profitable businesses.
Nope. "PG&E said its 2017 net profit was up 18 percent from a year earlier at $1.65 billion, but its 2017 revenue of $17.14 billion was down 3 percent over the same period." The simple truth is that if they weren't starting fires, PGE would be immensely profitable. But they didn't do what they were required to do, and now they're being held accountable. And they had the money to do it, but they instead gave the top executives big raises, and paid a substantial profit to shareholders (mostly blackrock, vanguard, and state street.)
The simplest explanation for the numbers is that they have more than enough money to do this maintenance, but they are choosing not to.
How about the California politicians? Either for not allowing PGE to run their operation, or for not enforcing laws/contracts that PGE breaks? Or both?
That's a start, but we also need to go after the executives at PGE that are in charge of funneling the money that is supposed to go to maintenance towards executive compensation, and returns to shareholders. This is not an either-or. More important than incarceration is remuneration. We must seize the profits taken by these crooks. Also, of course, they should all be prohibited from serving as any executive of any corporation for ever, or from holding any elected office, forever and ever amen.
Why do they have to ask for a rate hike? They HAVE to make a profit,
No, they HAVE to break even. Making a profit is optional.
so they HAVE to raise their rates to meet that demand.
No, they don't. They made a 1.6 billion dollar profit in 2017, which was up 18% from 2016. They could spend literally another billion dollars on maintenance and still be making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. And perhaps someone should inform you, since you don't seem to know, that there is no right to make a profit. HTH, HAND!
PG&E is the scapegoat for California's insane utility regulations and forest mismanagement
PGE has killed people before with willful negligence and then covered it up, and that's what's happened here as well. And with the gas line fires in the bay area, for that matter; they were the result of lines bursting that they knew were in need of maintenance already. But they made 1.6 billion in profit in 2017, so clearly they could have done more to be safe.
PG&E is exactly what an economist would tell you will happen when government sets a price ceiling and supply isn't allowed to be reduced to compensate.
So just to be clear, even after paying millions of dollars to executives who weren't doing their jobs, PGE was able to turn a profit of $1.65 billion up 18% from the prior year even though their revenues had fallen! How do you think they managed that? As long as they are failing to maintain infrastructure as they are legally obligated to do, every single dollar of that profit represents an effective theft from The People, let alone their customers.
In exchange for their various right-of-way monopolies, maintenance vehicle access and the like, they are obligated to maintain the infrastructure in safe condition, and do business in a fair manner. They are doing neither. PGE is a criminal conspiracy to defraud the people who reside or even simply have financial interests in the area which they "serve". And beyond that: it has killed in the past, it has killed recently, and it will kill again. And those responsible will almost certainly not only face no punishment, but get to retain the majority of their ill-gotten gains.
a requirement to provide power into dangerous places - uneconomically
PGE has a monopoly on the poles. In exchange, they have to carry power into places that are expensive to serve. How they achieve that is their business as far as I'm concerned, but they're certainly not doing it very well. They've made massive profits by skipping maintenance of infrastructure. Now their entire business is infeasible because they skipped maintenance of infrastructure. But the top executives still got to walk away with millions of dollars per year, and the shareholders still made a profit. PGE has a long history of willful negligence that kills people, and attempted coverups, and all the available evidence suggests that their culture has not changed one whit.
Climate change is clearly a factor, as is PG&E's mismanagement. Combined the two made the likelyhood of major fires a certainty.
Climate change is not making the trees grow faster. Climate change made the fires more severe, but it's not responsible for starting them. That's caused by PGE doing insufficient maintenance. There was no need to combine anything with PGE's mismanagement to have major fires except California's general mismanagement of forest land.
We simply don't do enough controlled burns, and have in fact permitted structures to be built in places which we need to be burning. The natives up here in northern California set fires every year, which worked for them because they moved around an area. We build flammable structures amidst the trees, and expect them to stay there for decades. It's just not sustainable.
PGE, however, is still fully responsible for skipping this maintenance that they're obligated to be doing. They made a profit by not doing their job.
The real flaw was letting any for-profit corporation provide power service in the first place.
Actually, the real flaw was letting them be in charge of infrastructure, which is the part that caused the fires. Make counties responsible for clearing trees around wires, and let the state operate and maintain the grid equipment itself. Let for-profit corporations generate power and put it on the grid, but subject them to a carbon tax that puts some muscle into the invisible hand (as well as the other usual environmental controls.) If PGE goes bankrupt, this is precisely the remedy we should use. Break PGE up into the grid (which is kept by the state) and a whole bunch of individual power generating companies (possibly even one for each facility!) and run the system that way. And then we can move on to the HFC network (cable's hybrid fiber/coax now) when the cable companies inevitably fail, and turn it into a pure IP network that actually serves the public interest...
The main users of all google products are advertisers and most of those want a clean and family friendly platform for whatever puritan reasons. People complaining about spam are just part of the product and not the group that Google wants to keep happy.
While that's essentially true, Google used the complainers as proxies for the advertisers, so they were trying to keep them happy as a means to keep the advertisers happy. That empowered the complainers, of course, because they felt like Google cared about them. That in turn led to them doing more complaining, which itself in turn led users to create more exclusive private groups for sharing such content. And that makes them less likely to engage with the general public.
Every gas pipeline that has caused a fire in PGE country has been known to be in need of replacement. Every. Single. One.
What are CEOs for if not to be locked up when the corporation they helm (helm was not in my dictionary, wtf Google, nobody at the helm?) kills people through willful negligence. The PGE CEO takes home over $8M. Let's seize literally all of that, and give it to fire victims. And then let's put the CEO in prison for life, like any mass murderer.
"I don't think it's Google's hatred of anonymity so much as a poor seed for the autocomplete engine (you spelled/typed it wrong)."
You're wrong. I typed it correctly, letter by letter, and it didn't show up until I had typed the whole thing. I don't really think it's Google's hatred of anonymity either, I actually just think it's their incompetence. Autocomplete and gesture typing both work a lot less well (which was autocorrected will even though I swiped it and the e and the I are on different sides of the layout) than they used to. Google is going backwards now.
The UK is the size of a postage stamp compared to the USA. Literally the only part of the UK with population density as low as the US is the Pitcairn islands. California is a large state (e.g. England is 57% as large as California alone) and the regions that have just burned are hilly to mountainous. In fact, the round of fires before this last one occured mostly within the Mendocino national Forest. And all of them have been in severe earthquake country, which is pretty much all of California except the Klamath knot. That means frequent service, which means burial of cables becomes a bigger problem.
We bury lines where it is convenient. This problem was caused by pge skipping routine maintenance (cutting back trees which encroach on power lines) because doing so would encroach upon executive compensation. These people aren't doing their jobs, they don't deserve pay let alone bonuses. And since not doing their jobs has killed people and destroyed towns, they should really be prosecuted for manslaughter, destruction of property, and willful negligence all at once.
No, you're just paraphrasing now. That is in effect what the gp said. They paid that money out in executive compensation. It's like how we paid the telcos billions to build out the last mile, and they gave it away in bonuses to the execs, except that didn't kill anyone. Pge execs should be done for multiple manslaughter.
"It was clear 12 months after launch the service was more or less DOA - it was a ghost town."
You know what I blame this on most? Their real names policy. The web already had a social network which required real names, called Facebook. It didn't require another. Google users were used to going by a psuedonym (Google hates anonymity so much it refused to even autocomplete that word...) and G+ didn't allow that.
It's way dumber than that. It's not about illegal, just porn. Just like Facebook, one female nipple is enough to make an image fail to meet "community standards" which are actually "Google standards", because the community overwhelmingly did not ask Google to censor such content. What we asked them to do was to crack down on spam, at which they failed miserably. So Google provided what the users didn't want, and is now acting surprised that they didn't use the service. And one nipple will get your post killed, but a soggy camel toe is totally legit. What?
"Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?"
By definition, if you discover something, it is surprising. This is seriously how low slashdot has fallen? Accepting questions that make it obvious that the poster doesn't understand the language? So sad, so fucking sad.
No, it isn't debatable. It's smaller and more efficient, both of which are better, period, the end. All the experts agree that Tesla has a better electric motor.
The only excessively under optimized part of the model 3 is the unibody. And there is literally software that will do that, and they may well fix it for the Chinese plant, then bring the changes home once they work out the new assembly line. People aren't lining up to buy leafs and Konas.
And also there's an Android Grindfest hero battle game which is severely pay to win, at least if you want to reach upper ranks in a determinate time frame. And AFAICT the new WB game is also based on its engine, but uses much more RAM so it runs like poop in 2GB. SW Heroes lags pretty bad on my satellite connection, too. I got paid (eventually, in steam credits) for playing it for a while, and now I use it to fill in extra time...
Not the live action B&TB movie, but merely a live action B&TB movie. There are several, the most noteworthy being Jean Cocteau's 1946 version.
Are any of them based on an animated feature? The one we're discussing has the distinction of there being absolutely no reason for it to exist save to make money. I understand that films are commercial ventures, but honestly, just put the animated one back in the theaters. It was charming, and the Gaston number was hilarious.
Slashdot Mirror
How about PUC do its damn job and watch over the utilities that it regulates, rather than take millions in campaign donations and illegal activities?
I'm all for cleaning up the CA PUC, but I'm also all for cleaning up PG&E. They are not mutually exclusive. However, the people who made the decision to not do the maintenance are the executives. It was their responsibility to make sure that the maintenance was done, and they instead increased their compensation and increased PG&E's profits 18% from the prior year... right up until the fires that they started. So yeah, I want house cleaning at the PUC, but I want it at PGE even more. They've been up to this kind of thing for decades.
The state is already running PG&E. Fixing prices on energy, denying the building of profitable power plants, extreme regulation of labor, supply and demand. Now they're bankrupt while across the country energy companies are some of the most profitable businesses.
Nope. "PG&E said its 2017 net profit was up 18 percent from a year earlier at $1.65 billion, but its 2017 revenue of $17.14 billion was down 3 percent over the same period." The simple truth is that if they weren't starting fires, PGE would be immensely profitable. But they didn't do what they were required to do, and now they're being held accountable. And they had the money to do it, but they instead gave the top executives big raises, and paid a substantial profit to shareholders (mostly blackrock, vanguard, and state street.)
The simplest explanation for the numbers is that they have more than enough money to do this maintenance, but they are choosing not to.
How about the California politicians? Either for not allowing PGE to run their operation, or for not enforcing laws/contracts that PGE breaks? Or both?
That's a start, but we also need to go after the executives at PGE that are in charge of funneling the money that is supposed to go to maintenance towards executive compensation, and returns to shareholders. This is not an either-or. More important than incarceration is remuneration. We must seize the profits taken by these crooks. Also, of course, they should all be prohibited from serving as any executive of any corporation for ever, or from holding any elected office, forever and ever amen.
Why do they have to ask for a rate hike? They HAVE to make a profit,
No, they HAVE to break even. Making a profit is optional.
so they HAVE to raise their rates to meet that demand.
No, they don't. They made a 1.6 billion dollar profit in 2017, which was up 18% from 2016. They could spend literally another billion dollars on maintenance and still be making hundreds of millions of dollars in profit. And perhaps someone should inform you, since you don't seem to know, that there is no right to make a profit. HTH, HAND!
PG&E is the scapegoat for California's insane utility regulations and forest mismanagement
PGE has killed people before with willful negligence and then covered it up, and that's what's happened here as well. And with the gas line fires in the bay area, for that matter; they were the result of lines bursting that they knew were in need of maintenance already. But they made 1.6 billion in profit in 2017, so clearly they could have done more to be safe.
TL;DR: Bullshit.
PG&E is exactly what an economist would tell you will happen when government sets a price ceiling and supply isn't allowed to be reduced to compensate.
That, sir, is a load of hot cockery.
So just to be clear, even after paying millions of dollars to executives who weren't doing their jobs, PGE was able to turn a profit of $1.65 billion up 18% from the prior year even though their revenues had fallen! How do you think they managed that? As long as they are failing to maintain infrastructure as they are legally obligated to do, every single dollar of that profit represents an effective theft from The People, let alone their customers.
In exchange for their various right-of-way monopolies, maintenance vehicle access and the like, they are obligated to maintain the infrastructure in safe condition, and do business in a fair manner. They are doing neither. PGE is a criminal conspiracy to defraud the people who reside or even simply have financial interests in the area which they "serve". And beyond that: it has killed in the past, it has killed recently, and it will kill again. And those responsible will almost certainly not only face no punishment, but get to retain the majority of their ill-gotten gains.
a requirement to provide power into dangerous places - uneconomically
PGE has a monopoly on the poles. In exchange, they have to carry power into places that are expensive to serve. How they achieve that is their business as far as I'm concerned, but they're certainly not doing it very well. They've made massive profits by skipping maintenance of infrastructure. Now their entire business is infeasible because they skipped maintenance of infrastructure. But the top executives still got to walk away with millions of dollars per year, and the shareholders still made a profit. PGE has a long history of willful negligence that kills people, and attempted coverups, and all the available evidence suggests that their culture has not changed one whit.
Climate change is clearly a factor, as is PG&E's mismanagement. Combined the two made the likelyhood of major fires a certainty.
Climate change is not making the trees grow faster. Climate change made the fires more severe, but it's not responsible for starting them. That's caused by PGE doing insufficient maintenance. There was no need to combine anything with PGE's mismanagement to have major fires except California's general mismanagement of forest land.
We simply don't do enough controlled burns, and have in fact permitted structures to be built in places which we need to be burning. The natives up here in northern California set fires every year, which worked for them because they moved around an area. We build flammable structures amidst the trees, and expect them to stay there for decades. It's just not sustainable.
PGE, however, is still fully responsible for skipping this maintenance that they're obligated to be doing. They made a profit by not doing their job.
Next time you might like to read to the end.
You must be new here.
The real flaw was letting any for-profit corporation provide power service in the first place.
Actually, the real flaw was letting them be in charge of infrastructure, which is the part that caused the fires. Make counties responsible for clearing trees around wires, and let the state operate and maintain the grid equipment itself. Let for-profit corporations generate power and put it on the grid, but subject them to a carbon tax that puts some muscle into the invisible hand (as well as the other usual environmental controls.) If PGE goes bankrupt, this is precisely the remedy we should use. Break PGE up into the grid (which is kept by the state) and a whole bunch of individual power generating companies (possibly even one for each facility!) and run the system that way. And then we can move on to the HFC network (cable's hybrid fiber/coax now) when the cable companies inevitably fail, and turn it into a pure IP network that actually serves the public interest...
The main users of all google products are advertisers and most of those want a clean and family friendly platform for whatever puritan reasons. People complaining about spam are just part of the product and not the group that Google wants to keep happy.
While that's essentially true, Google used the complainers as proxies for the advertisers, so they were trying to keep them happy as a means to keep the advertisers happy. That empowered the complainers, of course, because they felt like Google cared about them. That in turn led to them doing more complaining, which itself in turn led users to create more exclusive private groups for sharing such content. And that makes them less likely to engage with the general public.
If you just wait for the diseased pines to fall over, you can rake them up.
Every gas pipeline that has caused a fire in PGE country has been known to be in need of replacement. Every. Single. One.
What are CEOs for if not to be locked up when the corporation they helm (helm was not in my dictionary, wtf Google, nobody at the helm?) kills people through willful negligence. The PGE CEO takes home over $8M. Let's seize literally all of that, and give it to fire victims. And then let's put the CEO in prison for life, like any mass murderer.
That's a big door
"I don't think it's Google's hatred of anonymity so much as a poor seed for the autocomplete engine (you spelled/typed it wrong)."
You're wrong. I typed it correctly, letter by letter, and it didn't show up until I had typed the whole thing. I don't really think it's Google's hatred of anonymity either, I actually just think it's their incompetence. Autocomplete and gesture typing both work a lot less well (which was autocorrected will even though I swiped it and the e and the I are on different sides of the layout) than they used to. Google is going backwards now.
The UK is the size of a postage stamp compared to the USA. Literally the only part of the UK with population density as low as the US is the Pitcairn islands. California is a large state (e.g. England is 57% as large as California alone) and the regions that have just burned are hilly to mountainous. In fact, the round of fires before this last one occured mostly within the Mendocino national Forest. And all of them have been in severe earthquake country, which is pretty much all of California except the Klamath knot. That means frequent service, which means burial of cables becomes a bigger problem.
We bury lines where it is convenient. This problem was caused by pge skipping routine maintenance (cutting back trees which encroach on power lines) because doing so would encroach upon executive compensation. These people aren't doing their jobs, they don't deserve pay let alone bonuses. And since not doing their jobs has killed people and destroyed towns, they should really be prosecuted for manslaughter, destruction of property, and willful negligence all at once.
No, you're just paraphrasing now. That is in effect what the gp said. They paid that money out in executive compensation. It's like how we paid the telcos billions to build out the last mile, and they gave it away in bonuses to the execs, except that didn't kill anyone. Pge execs should be done for multiple manslaughter.
"It was clear 12 months after launch the service was more or less DOA - it was a ghost town."
You know what I blame this on most? Their real names policy. The web already had a social network which required real names, called Facebook. It didn't require another. Google users were used to going by a psuedonym (Google hates anonymity so much it refused to even autocomplete that word...) and G+ didn't allow that.
It's way dumber than that. It's not about illegal, just porn. Just like Facebook, one female nipple is enough to make an image fail to meet "community standards" which are actually "Google standards", because the community overwhelmingly did not ask Google to censor such content. What we asked them to do was to crack down on spam, at which they failed miserably. So Google provided what the users didn't want, and is now acting surprised that they didn't use the service. And one nipple will get your post killed, but a soggy camel toe is totally legit. What?
"Why are scientists constantly surprised by what they discover?"
By definition, if you discover something, it is surprising. This is seriously how low slashdot has fallen? Accepting questions that make it obvious that the poster doesn't understand the language? So sad, so fucking sad.
"Better? That's debatable. More expensive? Yes."
No, it isn't debatable. It's smaller and more efficient, both of which are better, period, the end. All the experts agree that Tesla has a better electric motor.
The only excessively under optimized part of the model 3 is the unibody. And there is literally software that will do that, and they may well fix it for the Chinese plant, then bring the changes home once they work out the new assembly line. People aren't lining up to buy leafs and Konas.
Even my tablet only has 2GB. Until now it's never been a problem.
And also there's an Android Grindfest hero battle game which is severely pay to win, at least if you want to reach upper ranks in a determinate time frame. And AFAICT the new WB game is also based on its engine, but uses much more RAM so it runs like poop in 2GB. SW Heroes lags pretty bad on my satellite connection, too. I got paid (eventually, in steam credits) for playing it for a while, and now I use it to fill in extra time...
Not the live action B&TB movie, but merely a live action B&TB movie. There are several, the most noteworthy being Jean Cocteau's 1946 version.
Are any of them based on an animated feature? The one we're discussing has the distinction of there being absolutely no reason for it to exist save to make money. I understand that films are commercial ventures, but honestly, just put the animated one back in the theaters. It was charming, and the Gaston number was hilarious.