You don't understand. The claim was that yellow was used for "identification". The fact that your meter is yellow is nice, but it doesn't mean that yellow stands for "multimeter". You don't identify an object as a multimeter by seeing yellow. In my immediate line of sight at this moment I see a yellow screwdriver, a yellow highlighter, several yellow books, a yellow pad of paper, some yellow wire, yellow feet on my penguin, and yellow printing on a calendar. The closest multimeter is orange. "Yellow" is not an identifying color for meters.
What possible safety function does coloring a multimeter yellow serve?
Being easy to find.
A meter "being easy to find" is not a safety function.
There are only 6 colors on the color wheel, not infinite like positive integers.
What a drab and dreary planet you must live on. Here on Earth we've got a veritable plethora of colors in all kinds of hues and saturations and values. Heck, we even have a dozen standard colors just for labeling resistors, and schoolkids learn the rainbow has 7 (while actually seeing all the variations in between.)
I think that's why Fluke has the trademark. Yellow identifies "Fluke". I certainly don't know why I would associate "yellow" with "multimeter".
safety.
Ok. I'll ask. What possible safety function does coloring a multimeter yellow serve? Do you need to see multimeters coming at you so you can defend yourself? Don't pick up a multimeter because it might bite you? "Red touch yellow, friend of fellow..."?
If you can just buy it straight from the company, why is the government spending tax money making websites to sell it? The companies who are profiting from this should make the websites, then. Yes, I'm sure you can still get private plans, but are they at the same allegedly low rates as the ACA plans? Isn't the problem the ACA tries to solve the lack of affordable private plans to start with?
If you just offer one-time exceptions whenever anybody whines, they'll have no incentive to not obey trademarks in the future.
If you look at TFA, it says that this is just the latest shipment of these meters. They've been selling them for some time, apparently, and this shipment got tagged.
I doubt that Fluke complained. It's not like the target markets are the same. People who buy cheap Chinese meters from Sparkfun aren't going to decide to buy pricey well-built meters from Fluke when the Chinese supply goes away. However, people who are used to seeing cheap crap meters that look like Flukes will think the Flukes are just another cheap crap meter and buy Keithley or something else if they do move up...
The claim that CBP doesn't act unless someone complains isn't quite true, either. I had a shipment from overseas impounded by CBP and I know there was no manufacturer complaint.
I dream of starting a company that can innovate with new products.
Copying someone else's design for a standard piece of test equipment is not "innovating", it's copying. Now, if your yellow, Fluke-shaped multimeters also picked the dirty clothes up off the floor, did the laundry, folded/ironed as appropriate, and provided the parent's-basement dwellers with the correct form of oral sex, THAT would be innovation you could be proud of.
We suffered through several months prior to the 1 Oct turn-on date of really banal advertising for Cover Oregon with really happy warm-fuzzy music and feel-good slogans about "long live Oregonians", in ads that didn't really ever say what Cover Oregon was. They were just spending development money pre-loading good feelings and kind thoughts into the public consciousness.
The Cover Oregon management created an expectation that they knew couldn't be met -- it was announced ahead of time that the "buy insurance" button wasn't going to work. But you could download forms to apply for another set of forms to fill out that you could mail back... And when I looked on the site for a local "community partner", I was shown an insurance agent in Kenniwick Washington.
Of course, this is in a state where one of the insurance companies is now running an ad campaign with the slogan "Think Well... Be Well" (Trillium). Yes, as long as you think good thoughts to keep the icky sickness away our insurance will be perfect for you. I sometimes think that the spotted owl is not the true reason some Oregonians protest timber sales, I think they've found the secret hiding place of the last of the unicorns and want to protect their secret pixie dust mines. And we have this.
Would that include "attacks" that allow OSs other than the officially state-approved and certificate-signed ones to be booted. Like that hacker-prone and highly illegal "Linux" thing I've been hearing about? I'm glad that researchers are protecting us against such flim-flammery and obviously dangerous stuff.
A website where people who either have no health insurance to start with, or have lost their coverage because the government has regulated the plans they can afford and/or like out of existence, go to meet the government deadline for getting insurance so they can cover their families and themselves and avoid paying a tax on top of hefty co-pays, which has no way of signing up for said insurance, is a pretty major issue for many people.
It was a major enough issue that the laws creating the system had to be passed before anyone could actually read what the proposed laws said, and important enough that the President has been modifying the laws unilaterally to prevent any changes from being slowed by a deliberative legislative process.
It was an important enough issue that the federal government for the first time demanded that people buy insurance that they actually can't buy using the Cover Oregon website that was created to be a place to buy insurance.
The only people who don't think this is a major issue are those who want a huge part of the GDP and US economy under the direct control of the federal government, and want to use the health care system as a bludgeon for social engineering purposes.
Galaxy Tab. Sony PRS-505(?)*, Sony PRS-600, Motorola Xoom, Dell Streak. You asked about phones, but the new law applies to electronic devices in general.
* This Sony device is SO stupid that if you try charging it with a standard wall-wart microUSB (maybe it was mini) supply, it will think it is connected to an active USB host, repeatedly attempt to negotiate the power, refuse to use the power it is being given, and eventually stop negotiating because the battery is dead. Absolutely brain damaged piece of kit.
I had to search for something generic like "toothpaste" to see this new "little yellow square" format for the first time, and it is indeed more visible than that stealth background color.
Thanks for an example that produces this result. I tried non-obvious things like "franklin delano roosevelt" and "golfball handstand" and got no ads. I did notice that the former query gave me a half page (right side) summary of FDR, and the latter had no summary (but left the entire right half of the page blank just in case there might have been one. What a waste.) I think it would be much better to put the "sponsored results" back on the right side since it will be empty otherwise, and it removes the ads from the inline search results.
Yahoo groups with "neo" now puts the ads inline with the messages with just a very light color box -- easy to miss. So many times I've been in a group and wondering why the moderator has allowed a discussion of auto parts in a group that has nothing to do with cars.
Isn't it Google that gets unhappy when people game their system to get prominent search rankings, and yet they're now taking money from people to return prominent, sometimes irrelevant search rankings? Is hypocrite spelled with a 'y' or an 'i'?
If they pass a law its unavoidable. They don't need single payer to tie it to your insurance coverage to make a law binding..
You're right. They've proven that the government can meddle in private contracts now, so it's just another law. I think it might be harder for the social engineers to get a federal law telling insurance companies that they must charge more (or provide less coverage) for people who do certain things, than if the social engineers were in charge of the system to start with, though. Why should we make turning the health care system into the largest social engineering experiment in the world any easier for those who want to social engineer?
Single payer system or not really has no bearing on the situation.
Those who pay the bills get to say what bills they'll pay for. I.e., of course "single payer" will change things. The people who will actually be paying for all your healthcare when taxpayers take over the funding (i.e. the people who pay taxes) are going to realize that there isn't an endless pot of money for the endless stream of people who expect free healthcare, so someone is going to have to decide what is and isn't covered. And they will be waiting lines for services, just like your favorite country Canada. And there will be grey-market doctors to take care of the people who can afford to pay them, just like the UK.
If you think we have budget problems now, just wait until the entitlement programs expand to provide the healthcare that people are beginning to think they're entitled to for free. De Toqueville rules.
And again, Canada's had socialized healthcare for 50+ years.
Good for Canada. And we haven't. We left the British Empire behind for a reason. We're a different country. Maybe we can have different rules?
and these horrifying single-payer health directives you are spouting off about
Which taxpayer-funded directives have I mentioned? Predicted what will happen, yes, and if you notice, they're already happening on a smaller scale. It's foolish to see something already going on on a limited scale and pretend it won't continue when the social experiment becomes larger.
... so where is your mountain of evidence?
Our state government run health insurance system already penalizes people whose waists are bigger than they like, or who do other things that they don't like. You get a pittance of a discount if you participate in "health engagement"*, which is a nice euphemism for behavior modification programs. If you think that this won't happen on a much larger, less escapable scale if the FEDERAL government takes over the system, you're delusional.
* Here's an example of the "health engagement" process. I get a few dollars off my premiums because I took an online course on depression management. What did the course tell me? "Think happier thoughts". Why, of course, if I'm depressed it must just be that I'm not thinking happy enough thoughts. Thanks for the tip.
All you've got is silly FUD.
That's quite a mountain of sand you've stuck your head in.
Because one day you will want them and show up in the emergency room demanding them
And if I want to self-insure for those things you know I will want, but somehow I know I will never need, I should be allowed to do so. No, I will NEVER show up in an emergency room demanding coverage for maternity benefits.
Your attempt at painting everyone else with the same brush you apply to yourself is exactly what is wrong with the system.
Yes, i know, you are indestructible and will never get cancer.
You must have had very sad life where the only disease you've ever seen is cancer. "In many cases". All the words have meaning.
If you are lucky, then you turn 40 and you realize that is just a load of crap and you will need them.
Fascinating. You think at 40 I'm going to grow a pair of ovaries and a womb and start having babies, so I'll need maternity and pre-natal care?
If you are unlucky, you get run hit by a bus tomorrow and you realize, again, that you actually do need them.
Why yes, getting hit by a bus does, in so many cases, cause full grown men to develop ovaries...
Yeah, we're doing that now. Single payer clearly didn't create that particular slippery slope... since its been happening even in the absense of single payer.
It's happening in individual plans now. Won't it be wonderful when we go to a national taxpayer-payer system so those fines for improper behavior can become unavoidable, and there will be a huge number of people pushing for cost cutting measures, which means even more ideas of what "bad behavior" should be fined?
Won't it be great when the entire US healthcare system can be managed by one central authority so the social engineering can be better managed? Social engineering you can escape from by simply not buying that health insurance plan is too lax. Your life will be much better if we can manage it from Washington DC.
Single payer would be nice. I think we will get there. Sadly there are a lot of people who don't understand economies.
And sadly, there are people who don't understand what "single payer" actually means, or they do and hope that they can confuse the rest of the people by calling it "single" payer. And sadly, they either don't undertand that turning a huge part of the economy directly over to government control removes it from economic theory and turns it into the most powerful system for social engineering, or they hope to hide that fact while they try to use the healthcare system to engineer their vision of utopia.
Government is either the most incompetent system ever invented for everything, or it is able to conceive of and hide global-scale conspiracies on a daily basis, depending on the latest news and who you listen to. Either way, I'd rather they not be in control of my medical care. I'd rather my doctor do that.
They compared to other states where costs are going up because those states allowed health care plans that covered nothing but hangnails and scraped knees.
And if all the coverage you wanted was for hangnails and scraped knees, then why should you be forced to buy coverage for things you don't want, and in many cases will never need? Why can't you keep your existing plan if you were happy with it?
Shouldn't what a plan covers be driven by what the consumer wants, not on what the state tells the consumer he must buy?
I'm in Oregon, we've had progressive health insurance stuff for a long time. Costs are still going up, if you can actually get through the process of signing up. People have lost their insurance and their co-pays are much higher. This is a good thing. Right?
An electric blanket that uses 200W costs only 19 cents to run for 8 hours if your electricity costs 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.
If someone cannot afford to have electricity because the cost has risen high enough to force demand down by a full 1/3 of existing use, then they won't be paying 19 cents to run an electric blanket, they'll be paying nothing to run it -- because it won't have any power. It also won't generate heat.
Even if the price of electricity doubles, it will still be very affordable to sleep warmly, provided you aren't trying to keep a drafty house toasty warm.
Very affordable -- replace the pipes when they freeze, get pneumonia from the cold. You didn't say to turn the temperature down, you said not to heat the rest of the house and make do with an electric blanket. This sudden use of the term "toasty warm" (and sudden limitation of your suggestion to only "drafty houses") is disingenuous at best.
The only time if the year I ever get sick is when the temps dive and I delay turning on the heat. I've learned my lesson from that. If I don't want to get sick I don't rely on that electric blanket by not heating the rest of the house. I turn on the heat. I don't think 67 is what anyone would call "toasty warm", but maybe you would. That's the kind of argument you seem to want to make.
By the way, your idea of a heated toilet seat solves nothing. It doesn't warm up the bathroom. It's flipped up out of the way so it doesn't get drips on it. I'd never notice it was on, in fact, unless I touched it to put it back down for some reason. How it would help is a complete mystery, but it is how you'd solve the coal-produced energy problem.
Therefore, 67% of supply will easily fill the whole demand,
And people will be freezing to death because they won't be able to afford to heat their homes at all, much less just an electric blanket. A very nice economy.
Whenever you walk into a building, you've just added a source of heat.
Ahh, yes, poor people will be able to heat their homes with their shivering bodies. A veritable utopia.
Demand for electricity isn't perfectly inelastic, so absent any price ceilings, eliminating coal as an energy source won't cause a shortage of electricity.
You keep saying that, but I don't think you know what it means. Not being inelastic means that the remaining 67% of the supply could somehow stretch to fill the whole demand, which it clearly won't.
You can be sure that a rise in electricity prices will improve the economics of improving your home's insulation
You are aware that insulation does not create heat, it only tries to keep what is there from diffusing away, aren't you? Pipes can freeze in a well-insulated house if there is no heat.
or replacing resistive heating with a heat pump which is multiple times more energy efficient.
Not heating '"he rest of the house" means you're not heating the rest of the house, whether you're not heating it with resistive heating or not heating it with a heat pump. The output of the highest efficiency heat pump is still 0 BTU if it isn't turned on.
So you see, wonderful things happen when market failures,
Buying up 100% of the coal and shutting off 37% of the electrical supply isn't a "market failure", it's sabotage and willfully anti-social behavior. Claiming that there will be no shortages of electricity when doing so is just ignorance.
We already have the solution: build more nuclear plants or buy them from france.
We could just invade France and take over their energy. They're pretty well known for surrendering whenever someone knocks on the door, so the casualties would be minor and the benefits great. And we could teach them how to make cheese the better, American way and save the world from all their runny, stinky cheeses that are nothing more than moldy milk.
Powered by unicorns on treadmills eating organic oats and hay.
It seems wasteful to heat the whole house while you sleep.
Spoken by someone who apparently has never had to get up to do anything (pee, e.g.) in the middle of the night, or who has never seen the damage from frozen water pipes.
Slashdot Mirror
You wouldn't ask the next generation about using GSM or CDMA as a tool when referring to use of Twitter, would you? Ok, maybe you would.
Isn't yellow meant to be a color designating a warning or safety issue?
Today's safety training: "how to defend yourself against a man holding a banana."
That would seem to make it a more generic coloration used for meters to make them easily recognized.
"Hey, Hank, is that 240 mains line energized?"
"Well, my banana says no..."
"You dummy, you've got your banana set on DC ..."
Mine is yellow,
You don't understand. The claim was that yellow was used for "identification". The fact that your meter is yellow is nice, but it doesn't mean that yellow stands for "multimeter". You don't identify an object as a multimeter by seeing yellow. In my immediate line of sight at this moment I see a yellow screwdriver, a yellow highlighter, several yellow books, a yellow pad of paper, some yellow wire, yellow feet on my penguin, and yellow printing on a calendar. The closest multimeter is orange. "Yellow" is not an identifying color for meters.
What possible safety function does coloring a multimeter yellow serve?
Being easy to find.
A meter "being easy to find" is not a safety function.
There are only 6 colors on the color wheel, not infinite like positive integers.
What a drab and dreary planet you must live on. Here on Earth we've got a veritable plethora of colors in all kinds of hues and saturations and values. Heck, we even have a dozen standard colors just for labeling resistors, and schoolkids learn the rainbow has 7 (while actually seeing all the variations in between.)
The yellow coloring helps with identification
I think that's why Fluke has the trademark. Yellow identifies "Fluke". I certainly don't know why I would associate "yellow" with "multimeter".
safety.
Ok. I'll ask. What possible safety function does coloring a multimeter yellow serve? Do you need to see multimeters coming at you so you can defend yourself? Don't pick up a multimeter because it might bite you? "Red touch yellow, friend of fellow..."?
If you can just buy it straight from the company, why is the government spending tax money making websites to sell it? The companies who are profiting from this should make the websites, then. Yes, I'm sure you can still get private plans, but are they at the same allegedly low rates as the ACA plans? Isn't the problem the ACA tries to solve the lack of affordable private plans to start with?
If you just offer one-time exceptions whenever anybody whines, they'll have no incentive to not obey trademarks in the future.
If you look at TFA, it says that this is just the latest shipment of these meters. They've been selling them for some time, apparently, and this shipment got tagged.
I doubt that Fluke complained. It's not like the target markets are the same. People who buy cheap Chinese meters from Sparkfun aren't going to decide to buy pricey well-built meters from Fluke when the Chinese supply goes away. However, people who are used to seeing cheap crap meters that look like Flukes will think the Flukes are just another cheap crap meter and buy Keithley or something else if they do move up...
The claim that CBP doesn't act unless someone complains isn't quite true, either. I had a shipment from overseas impounded by CBP and I know there was no manufacturer complaint.
I dream of starting a company that can innovate with new products.
Copying someone else's design for a standard piece of test equipment is not "innovating", it's copying. Now, if your yellow, Fluke-shaped multimeters also picked the dirty clothes up off the floor, did the laundry, folded/ironed as appropriate, and provided the parent's-basement dwellers with the correct form of oral sex, THAT would be innovation you could be proud of.
It also did it in the most public possible way,
We suffered through several months prior to the 1 Oct turn-on date of really banal advertising for Cover Oregon with really happy warm-fuzzy music and feel-good slogans about "long live Oregonians", in ads that didn't really ever say what Cover Oregon was. They were just spending development money pre-loading good feelings and kind thoughts into the public consciousness.
The Cover Oregon management created an expectation that they knew couldn't be met -- it was announced ahead of time that the "buy insurance" button wasn't going to work. But you could download forms to apply for another set of forms to fill out that you could mail back ... And when I looked on the site for a local "community partner", I was shown an insurance agent in Kenniwick Washington.
Of course, this is in a state where one of the insurance companies is now running an ad campaign with the slogan "Think Well ... Be Well" (Trillium). Yes, as long as you think good thoughts to keep the icky sickness away our insurance will be perfect for you. I sometimes think that the spotted owl is not the true reason some Oregonians protest timber sales, I think they've found the secret hiding place of the last of the unicorns and want to protect their secret pixie dust mines. And we have this.
Would that include "attacks" that allow OSs other than the officially state-approved and certificate-signed ones to be booted. Like that hacker-prone and highly illegal "Linux" thing I've been hearing about? I'm glad that researchers are protecting us against such flim-flammery and obviously dangerous stuff.
A website is a single relatively minor issue.
A website where people who either have no health insurance to start with, or have lost their coverage because the government has regulated the plans they can afford and/or like out of existence, go to meet the government deadline for getting insurance so they can cover their families and themselves and avoid paying a tax on top of hefty co-pays, which has no way of signing up for said insurance, is a pretty major issue for many people.
It was a major enough issue that the laws creating the system had to be passed before anyone could actually read what the proposed laws said, and important enough that the President has been modifying the laws unilaterally to prevent any changes from being slowed by a deliberative legislative process.
It was an important enough issue that the federal government for the first time demanded that people buy insurance that they actually can't buy using the Cover Oregon website that was created to be a place to buy insurance.
The only people who don't think this is a major issue are those who want a huge part of the GDP and US economy under the direct control of the federal government, and want to use the health care system as a bludgeon for social engineering purposes.
* This Sony device is SO stupid that if you try charging it with a standard wall-wart microUSB (maybe it was mini) supply, it will think it is connected to an active USB host, repeatedly attempt to negotiate the power, refuse to use the power it is being given, and eventually stop negotiating because the battery is dead. Absolutely brain damaged piece of kit.
I had to search for something generic like "toothpaste" to see this new "little yellow square" format for the first time, and it is indeed more visible than that stealth background color.
Thanks for an example that produces this result. I tried non-obvious things like "franklin delano roosevelt" and "golfball handstand" and got no ads. I did notice that the former query gave me a half page (right side) summary of FDR, and the latter had no summary (but left the entire right half of the page blank just in case there might have been one. What a waste.) I think it would be much better to put the "sponsored results" back on the right side since it will be empty otherwise, and it removes the ads from the inline search results.
Yahoo groups with "neo" now puts the ads inline with the messages with just a very light color box -- easy to miss. So many times I've been in a group and wondering why the moderator has allowed a discussion of auto parts in a group that has nothing to do with cars.
Isn't it Google that gets unhappy when people game their system to get prominent search rankings, and yet they're now taking money from people to return prominent, sometimes irrelevant search rankings? Is hypocrite spelled with a 'y' or an 'i'?
If they pass a law its unavoidable. They don't need single payer to tie it to your insurance coverage to make a law binding..
You're right. They've proven that the government can meddle in private contracts now, so it's just another law. I think it might be harder for the social engineers to get a federal law telling insurance companies that they must charge more (or provide less coverage) for people who do certain things, than if the social engineers were in charge of the system to start with, though. Why should we make turning the health care system into the largest social engineering experiment in the world any easier for those who want to social engineer?
Single payer system or not really has no bearing on the situation.
Those who pay the bills get to say what bills they'll pay for. I.e., of course "single payer" will change things. The people who will actually be paying for all your healthcare when taxpayers take over the funding (i.e. the people who pay taxes) are going to realize that there isn't an endless pot of money for the endless stream of people who expect free healthcare, so someone is going to have to decide what is and isn't covered. And they will be waiting lines for services, just like your favorite country Canada. And there will be grey-market doctors to take care of the people who can afford to pay them, just like the UK.
If you think we have budget problems now, just wait until the entitlement programs expand to provide the healthcare that people are beginning to think they're entitled to for free. De Toqueville rules.
And again, Canada's had socialized healthcare for 50+ years.
Good for Canada. And we haven't. We left the British Empire behind for a reason. We're a different country. Maybe we can have different rules?
and these horrifying single-payer health directives you are spouting off about
Which taxpayer-funded directives have I mentioned? Predicted what will happen, yes, and if you notice, they're already happening on a smaller scale. It's foolish to see something already going on on a limited scale and pretend it won't continue when the social experiment becomes larger.
... so where is your mountain of evidence?
Our state government run health insurance system already penalizes people whose waists are bigger than they like, or who do other things that they don't like. You get a pittance of a discount if you participate in "health engagement"*, which is a nice euphemism for behavior modification programs. If you think that this won't happen on a much larger, less escapable scale if the FEDERAL government takes over the system, you're delusional.
* Here's an example of the "health engagement" process. I get a few dollars off my premiums because I took an online course on depression management. What did the course tell me? "Think happier thoughts". Why, of course, if I'm depressed it must just be that I'm not thinking happy enough thoughts. Thanks for the tip.
All you've got is silly FUD.
That's quite a mountain of sand you've stuck your head in.
Because one day you will want them and show up in the emergency room demanding them
And if I want to self-insure for those things you know I will want, but somehow I know I will never need, I should be allowed to do so. No, I will NEVER show up in an emergency room demanding coverage for maternity benefits.
Your attempt at painting everyone else with the same brush you apply to yourself is exactly what is wrong with the system.
Yes, i know, you are indestructible and will never get cancer.
You must have had very sad life where the only disease you've ever seen is cancer. "In many cases". All the words have meaning.
If you are lucky, then you turn 40 and you realize that is just a load of crap and you will need them.
Fascinating. You think at 40 I'm going to grow a pair of ovaries and a womb and start having babies, so I'll need maternity and pre-natal care?
If you are unlucky, you get run hit by a bus tomorrow and you realize, again, that you actually do need them.
Why yes, getting hit by a bus does, in so many cases, cause full grown men to develop ovaries ...
Yeah, we're doing that now. Single payer clearly didn't create that particular slippery slope... since its been happening even in the absense of single payer.
It's happening in individual plans now. Won't it be wonderful when we go to a national taxpayer-payer system so those fines for improper behavior can become unavoidable, and there will be a huge number of people pushing for cost cutting measures, which means even more ideas of what "bad behavior" should be fined?
Won't it be great when the entire US healthcare system can be managed by one central authority so the social engineering can be better managed? Social engineering you can escape from by simply not buying that health insurance plan is too lax. Your life will be much better if we can manage it from Washington DC.
Single payer would be nice. I think we will get there. Sadly there are a lot of people who don't understand economies.
And sadly, there are people who don't understand what "single payer" actually means, or they do and hope that they can confuse the rest of the people by calling it "single" payer. And sadly, they either don't undertand that turning a huge part of the economy directly over to government control removes it from economic theory and turns it into the most powerful system for social engineering, or they hope to hide that fact while they try to use the healthcare system to engineer their vision of utopia.
Government is either the most incompetent system ever invented for everything, or it is able to conceive of and hide global-scale conspiracies on a daily basis, depending on the latest news and who you listen to. Either way, I'd rather they not be in control of my medical care. I'd rather my doctor do that.
They compared to other states where costs are going up because those states allowed health care plans that covered nothing but hangnails and scraped knees.
And if all the coverage you wanted was for hangnails and scraped knees, then why should you be forced to buy coverage for things you don't want, and in many cases will never need? Why can't you keep your existing plan if you were happy with it?
Shouldn't what a plan covers be driven by what the consumer wants, not on what the state tells the consumer he must buy?
I'm in Oregon, we've had progressive health insurance stuff for a long time. Costs are still going up, if you can actually get through the process of signing up. People have lost their insurance and their co-pays are much higher. This is a good thing. Right?
An electric blanket that uses 200W costs only 19 cents to run for 8 hours if your electricity costs 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.
If someone cannot afford to have electricity because the cost has risen high enough to force demand down by a full 1/3 of existing use, then they won't be paying 19 cents to run an electric blanket, they'll be paying nothing to run it -- because it won't have any power. It also won't generate heat.
Even if the price of electricity doubles, it will still be very affordable to sleep warmly, provided you aren't trying to keep a drafty house toasty warm.
Very affordable -- replace the pipes when they freeze, get pneumonia from the cold. You didn't say to turn the temperature down, you said not to heat the rest of the house and make do with an electric blanket. This sudden use of the term "toasty warm" (and sudden limitation of your suggestion to only "drafty houses") is disingenuous at best.
The only time if the year I ever get sick is when the temps dive and I delay turning on the heat. I've learned my lesson from that. If I don't want to get sick I don't rely on that electric blanket by not heating the rest of the house. I turn on the heat. I don't think 67 is what anyone would call "toasty warm", but maybe you would. That's the kind of argument you seem to want to make.
By the way, your idea of a heated toilet seat solves nothing. It doesn't warm up the bathroom. It's flipped up out of the way so it doesn't get drips on it. I'd never notice it was on, in fact, unless I touched it to put it back down for some reason. How it would help is a complete mystery, but it is how you'd solve the coal-produced energy problem.
Therefore, 67% of supply will easily fill the whole demand,
And people will be freezing to death because they won't be able to afford to heat their homes at all, much less just an electric blanket. A very nice economy.
Whenever you walk into a building, you've just added a source of heat.
Ahh, yes, poor people will be able to heat their homes with their shivering bodies. A veritable utopia.
You are an complete idiot with your france/frensh analogy.
Didn't mention creme frensh. Just runny stinky cheese.
and stayin in your kitschen and living room
I keep all my kitsch in my living room, so I suppose you could say my kitschen is my living room.
and puttin a gun at your daughters and wifes head?
"Puttin" has nothing to do with France or the USA, he's busy putting a gun to the heads of Crimea and Ukraine.
But well, considering your cheese comment you perhaps only try to make a very very sarcastic comment ... who knows.
I think most people can hear that wooshing sound you've missed out on.
It flows through me, surrounds us, and is a source of great division.
Mine can do square and sometimes cube roots, and I'm teaching them calculus next.
Demand for electricity isn't perfectly inelastic, so absent any price ceilings, eliminating coal as an energy source won't cause a shortage of electricity.
You keep saying that, but I don't think you know what it means. Not being inelastic means that the remaining 67% of the supply could somehow stretch to fill the whole demand, which it clearly won't.
You can be sure that a rise in electricity prices will improve the economics of improving your home's insulation
You are aware that insulation does not create heat, it only tries to keep what is there from diffusing away, aren't you? Pipes can freeze in a well-insulated house if there is no heat.
or replacing resistive heating with a heat pump which is multiple times more energy efficient.
Not heating '"he rest of the house" means you're not heating the rest of the house, whether you're not heating it with resistive heating or not heating it with a heat pump. The output of the highest efficiency heat pump is still 0 BTU if it isn't turned on.
So you see, wonderful things happen when market failures,
Buying up 100% of the coal and shutting off 37% of the electrical supply isn't a "market failure", it's sabotage and willfully anti-social behavior. Claiming that there will be no shortages of electricity when doing so is just ignorance.
We already have the solution: build more nuclear plants or buy them from france.
We could just invade France and take over their energy. They're pretty well known for surrendering whenever someone knocks on the door, so the casualties would be minor and the benefits great. And we could teach them how to make cheese the better, American way and save the world from all their runny, stinky cheeses that are nothing more than moldy milk.
Electric blankets?
Powered by unicorns on treadmills eating organic oats and hay.
It seems wasteful to heat the whole house while you sleep.
Spoken by someone who apparently has never had to get up to do anything (pee, e.g.) in the middle of the night, or who has never seen the damage from frozen water pipes.