Anyone see the little part of the diagram that read "Load Shed"? That means "turn stuff off"; and the trigger of this happy ingenuity: 'when a lot is used'. While the underlying research may yet be worthwhile, the article and the Slashdot comments I read are not worthwhile. This article so blatantly sells black-box tech, that I'm curious as to whether or not this was posted just for something to insight submission traffic on the site.
For purposes of this discussion, in the industry there are two things: generators and high voltage lines.
Now, once upon a time in the good old US of A, an official of a steel plant woe'd the outrageous slings suffered at being forced to buy energy from a utility due to that fact that his plant was located in said utility's fiefdom. In the industry, this is urban-lore explanation of how deregulation started.
Guv'ment steps in. There'll be no Ma-Bell style bust-ups; rather, generators will be managed seperately from HV lines. Energy from generators could be sold and purchased by company employees. The high voltage lines, however, were supposed to be managed by a company that also managed serveral other neighboring utilities lines, wherein a reliability advantage would be gained (by the super-regional managing entity) from seeing confidential, real-time, system information from several utilities.
How does the guv'ment force this? It can't; want's to, but can't.
How can the guv'ment encourage this? Money. Promiss to deregulate (remove price caps on) the renting of hv lines: be in a regional transmission organization (RTO) for two years or so, and regulate prices yo dam sef after that. As a taste, generation side price caps were removed right away.
The other selling point was a feel-good tactic. The islands-of-monopolies system hasn't led to inftrastructure upgrades that match demand, as each company *optimizes* like crazy to compete with the neighbors. Structure a business environment wherein an entity can develope that is soley about transmission, and things will take care of themselves.
With deregulation, and the price-wars over energy that immediately followed (i.e.: the greed that lured marketers - who control the generators - to prevent key generators from running, in kalifornia, just because they could make the 10000% mark-up (no joke) they felt they deserved and thereby causing a cooperation-dependent system to crash under the strain of all the bickering.) spurred a tremendous about of generation to be built, in both the form of large coal-fire plants as well as strategically placed gas-turbin "peekers".
Should FERC's simple deregulation goal for transmission ever be realized, it stands that the transmission infrastructure will see the same boon. In fact, the only RTO to date, MISO, has already laid out plans for new lines, with strong numbers indicating improved reliability and improved energy market.
On Enron . . . hehehe . . . deregulation did not take it down. Enron took Enron down. Bonuses were paid in advaced for deals made. Very DUMB in the high-activity, deregulated market! Many deals ran for years totaly tens of millions. Bonuses should have been paid out on a cash flow basis, i.e.: pay the bonus monies out as the energy (in the contract) is actually used and paid for). Secondly, too many *managers* were able to arbitrarily up the value on a previous contract. Why would they do this? It increased their group's bonus.
The genius of deregulation lies not in the ethics or ethos of capatilism, nor in that it lies in direct opposition to monoplistic tendencies. Rather, like the Linux world, where a vast number of minds focussed on an issue and produced a superior product, deregulation will increase the number of greedy bastards trying to meddle with the infrastructure such that it will accomodate their business deals. It's the number of minds brought to the table, despite their market economy drive, that makes deregulation a positive thing.
Oh, something worth noting: utilities are, for the most part, fighting deregulation. Compliances are half-heated at best and down-right subversive at the norm.
"Believe everything you hear; nothing can be too impossibly bad." -Oscar Wilde
I've had the Time Warner DVR for a few months now. On my box, you CANNOT record two and watch a separate third program, from neither live feed nor prerecorded programming. When this is attempted, one of the programs will not record. I did not know this, and for a while blamed myself for not setting the recordings correctly. Time Warner has now upgraded the software such that a warning pops up for the user to: 1) tune to one of the two scheduled recordings, 2) choose one of the scheduled recordings to not be recorded. I use it quite a bit; it has had it's moments of down time. Mine was advertised with 45 hours of recording space. I find I get about 35. In my area, you have to be paying $16.95 for the digital service before you can pay $5.95 for the DVR service. All in all, you get what you pay for with this product.
Could not disagree more strongly
on
IT at the CIA
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
For DI, to be breeched is to fail. As a phrase in the article adeptly hints, managing risk indicates, at best, incompetence, and at worst, treason. A policy of excluding risk, however, is acceptable. Where Bruce Berkowitz suggests, " . . . a 35-year-old DI analyst with ten years of experience ought to be able--routinely-- to take calls directly... noting where there is important uncertainty or disagreement", I could not disagree more strongly. Never should the opportunity for treasons of subterfuge of misdirection lie within a single human being. The current bureaucracy of peer review represents an excellent example of risk exclusion policy.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone see the little part of the diagram that read "Load Shed"? That means "turn stuff off"; and the trigger of this happy ingenuity: 'when a lot is used'. While the underlying research may yet be worthwhile, the article and the Slashdot comments I read are not worthwhile. This article so blatantly sells black-box tech, that I'm curious as to whether or not this was posted just for something to insight submission traffic on the site.
For purposes of this discussion, in the industry there are two things: generators and high voltage lines.
Now, once upon a time in the good old US of A, an official of a steel plant woe'd the outrageous slings suffered at being forced to buy energy from a utility due to that fact that his plant was located in said utility's fiefdom. In the industry, this is urban-lore explanation of how deregulation started.
Guv'ment steps in. There'll be no Ma-Bell style bust-ups; rather, generators will be managed seperately from HV lines. Energy from generators could be sold and purchased by company employees. The high voltage lines, however, were supposed to be managed by a company that also managed serveral other neighboring utilities lines, wherein a reliability advantage would be gained (by the super-regional managing entity) from seeing confidential, real-time, system information from several utilities.
How does the guv'ment force this? It can't; want's to, but can't.
How can the guv'ment encourage this? Money. Promiss to deregulate (remove price caps on) the renting of hv lines: be in a regional transmission organization (RTO) for two years or so, and regulate prices yo dam sef after that. As a taste, generation side price caps were removed right away.
The other selling point was a feel-good tactic. The islands-of-monopolies system hasn't led to inftrastructure upgrades that match demand, as each company *optimizes* like crazy to compete with the neighbors. Structure a business environment wherein an entity can develope that is soley about transmission, and things will take care of themselves.
With deregulation, and the price-wars over energy that immediately followed (i.e.: the greed that lured marketers - who control the generators - to prevent key generators from running, in kalifornia, just because they could make the 10000% mark-up (no joke) they felt they deserved and thereby causing a cooperation-dependent system to crash under the strain of all the bickering.) spurred a tremendous about of generation to be built, in both the form of large coal-fire plants as well as strategically placed gas-turbin "peekers".
Should FERC's simple deregulation goal for transmission ever be realized, it stands that the transmission infrastructure will see the same boon. In fact, the only RTO to date, MISO, has already laid out plans for new lines, with strong numbers indicating improved reliability and improved energy market.
On Enron . . . hehehe . . . deregulation did not take it down. Enron took Enron down. Bonuses were paid in advaced for deals made. Very DUMB in the high-activity, deregulated market! Many deals ran for years totaly tens of millions. Bonuses should have been paid out on a cash flow basis, i.e.: pay the bonus monies out as the energy (in the contract) is actually used and paid for). Secondly, too many *managers* were able to arbitrarily up the value on a previous contract. Why would they do this? It increased their group's bonus.
The genius of deregulation lies not in the ethics or ethos of capatilism, nor in that it lies in direct opposition to monoplistic tendencies. Rather, like the Linux world, where a vast number of minds focussed on an issue and produced a superior product, deregulation will increase the number of greedy bastards trying to meddle with the infrastructure such that it will accomodate their business deals. It's the number of minds brought to the table, despite their market economy drive, that makes deregulation a positive thing.
Oh, something worth noting: utilities are, for the most part, fighting deregulation. Compliances are half-heated at best and down-right subversive at the norm. "Believe everything you hear; nothing can be too impossibly bad." -Oscar Wilde
I've had the Time Warner DVR for a few months now. On my box, you CANNOT record two and watch a separate third program, from neither live feed nor prerecorded programming. When this is attempted, one of the programs will not record. I did not know this, and for a while blamed myself for not setting the recordings correctly. Time Warner has now upgraded the software such that a warning pops up for the user to: 1) tune to one of the two scheduled recordings, 2) choose one of the scheduled recordings to not be recorded. I use it quite a bit; it has had it's moments of down time. Mine was advertised with 45 hours of recording space. I find I get about 35. In my area, you have to be paying $16.95 for the digital service before you can pay $5.95 for the DVR service. All in all, you get what you pay for with this product.
For DI, to be breeched is to fail. As a phrase in the article adeptly hints, managing risk indicates, at best, incompetence, and at worst, treason. A policy of excluding risk, however, is acceptable. Where Bruce Berkowitz suggests, " . . . a 35-year-old DI analyst with ten years of experience ought to be able--routinely-- to take calls directly... noting where there is important uncertainty or disagreement", I could not disagree more strongly. Never should the opportunity for treasons of subterfuge of misdirection lie within a single human being. The current bureaucracy of peer review represents an excellent example of risk exclusion policy.