You are the one who keeps pushing this, not me. I was talking about electricity outages, and you came in from left field with this psuedo-nationalistic "big cities in Texas pride", and random hatred for the South Plains. Why don't you think about why you did that?
Uhhh, a little butthurt there? All I said was that we didn't have power outages, while you claimed you did. I never said anything about "Real Texans" or any such BS.
And I don't know why you are bragging about where you live. You didn't fight in the War for Independence, and I lived more than half my life in southeast Texas, including some time in Houston.
And for the record, it is true that Lubbock and Amarillo are filled with capitalist heroes. This actually came as a major surprise to me, as it always seemed to me like they spent a lot of money on police, but their budget is really and truly bare bones, and they stay within their budgets, cutting as soon as there is an income shortfall. Also amazingly low property tax rates in the county. I pay maybe 1/10th of what the guys two blocks down in the city pay. But this area didn't get this way because I moved here, nor did I move here because it was that way. But I do respect them for it, more so than I do any other place I have ever lived.
Money touches everything. Abuse of money can make a nation feel rich, and encourage it to spend more than it has. You get lots of jobs, and everyone is happy, until theveil is pulled back, the currency falls apart, everyone finds out that it was all an illusion, and that now they are really and desperately poor, having spent all their money and more on things like burying cables, and more importantly, all manner of goodies which were nothing more than bribes to the people. If you were talking about the US, you would also include the ghastly amount we spend on our worldwide oppression machin--I mean spreading democracy. The US is in the same boat, with Texas being the Germany and Norway (combined, as we export oil) of the US. If we don't find some way to extricate ourselves, we will go down with the ship, I fear.
As I said, Germany is an exception, as they actually work there, and more importantly save and accumulate capital. But even with that, you will suffer due to your politician's bad choices. You will wish that you had the money you would have saved on those cables in a few months when the Euro breaks up and the Deutchmark is valued 20:1 (or 2000:1 for that matter) against the other European currencies, and you can't export anything, causing a rapid rise in unemployment. If you had saved that money, you could have bought up those other countries and retired. You still might, but it will be to a lesser extent than it would have been otherwise.
You either acknowledge the truth, or hide from it. Regardless of what this man did, he was sentenced to death by people who didn't think he deserved a chance to prove himself. That is a DEATH PANEL, and no amount of wordplay is going to change that fact. Whether you think death panels are legitimate or not is a separate issue.
Yes, people can figure out how to survive, but the French DIDN'T, and that is the POINT. They had 3000 people die in a heat wave because there was no AC there. That doesn't happen in the US because we have nearly universal AC. Only places like Chicago have people die due to heat waves, because they don't have a high penetration of AC.
And I never said the life expectancy was 25, I said it is easy for a 25 year old to tough out the heat, but it is hard for an 80 year old to do the same. Yes, there aren't a lot of old people, but the original point was that this douche thinks that AC is un-needed, when it clearly is by some, as people without it die during heat waves, and it makes everyone's life a lot nicer.
A. I was talking about times of peak demand during the heat wave last summer, and B. I live in North Texas (in the south plains), and haven't experienced any blackouts of any length of time in five years, where the last one I had was where the transformer on my street blew up, but maybe our power is more reliable here than it is in the big cities. I certainly haven't heard anything about repeated power outages from friends or family throughout the state. Power going out here is a big deal, due to the heat.
Back on topic, yes, Enron committed fraud and forced prices higher. But why were they able to do that? If they were pushing prices to artificial highs, and failing to deliver services, someone else should have come in and taken over their market share. Why didn't that happen? The cost of entry is too high in California! Enron was in, and had an oligopoly at best (I don't recall the details, whether there was more than one power production company involved or not), and had some nice government imposed barriers to entry protecting them, allowing them to do what they wanted. It is an example of idiotic deregulation. If you are going to deregulate, you have to remove the barriers to entry BEFORE you remove the rules forcing them to act a certain way. If you don't, you get rolling blackouts.
Yes, I'm sure that governments are very good at completing their boondoggles on time. Sort of like how they built the space shuttle so that it hung off the side of its fuel tank, in what is possibly the dumbest design ever. http://emotibot.net/pix/816.png
You can make all the assertions you want about government vs private sector, but until I see your methodology and data, it is nothing but conjecture.
So the problem was one of fraud caused by the power companies? How hard was it to get started as a power company providing power to SCE's lines? What regulatory burden was there to both startups and to expansion of other companies?
What was the relationship between Enron and the other power companies (if there were any), and their collective relationship with the state and local governments.
This is not a simple issue, clearly, but it sounds to me like a case of poorly planned deregulation, which allowed for insiders to behave badly without fear of competition from any new companies.
In my personal opinion, the producers of electricity and the owners of the lines should be different people. A person can contract with anyone they want in order to get their electricity, and all the suppliers pay the owners of the transmission lines for their use. In this way, people would be free to choose the source of their electricity, and since the grid owner has fewer customers, those customers would have more leverage to force them to upgrade their lines and do maintenance.
If competition had been allowed from the start, you would probably have a choice of getting your energy from far away via AC lines or nearby with DC lines. We might have seen more research into wireless transmission, residential scale natural gas plants, solar panel lease plans, and other neat things. Sadly, what we would up with was a set of monopolies that did nothing but try to maintain their business model. No innovation. No improvements. No new technologies. This is the nature of regulation.
If you apply more regulation to try to force a monopoly to do what you want, you will just find that your regulator is driving around in cars he can't afford, and taking vacations at his second home in some sunny paradise. If you crack down on the regulators, they will do the same to those in charge of the investigations. It is called regulatory capture, and it is an unstoppable force in systems run by humans (rather than angels). Better to utilize free market regulation by allowing competition. That is not only much more likely to actually work, it is free! You don't have to stretch your budget to hire more regulators, or try to pay more to prevent corruption. They just do what the market forces them to do, and if they can't make it, then those who are better able will take their place.
What if correlation is not causation, and the number of tech execs with degrees simply reflects the total population of people with the skills to be tech execs, ie, could many of those degreed tech execs have made it without the degrees they spent so much time and money getting?
It's funny, the things that degrees are required for these days. I would hire someone out of high school to be a entry level technician in my lab, and train them myself, if our hiring policies allowed me to do that. In that way, I could get people without a bunch of debt who would be happy with the salary they get here, and thus would stick around long enough to advance.
Yes, you had no regulations on a government granted monopoly. This is not what is meant by "free market". That is just a corporation becoming and arm of the government, or vice versa, and the thing that is formed from that giving itself the authority to do whatever it wants. They used that power to commit fraud on a massive scale.
You are comparing socialism with fascism, and finding that socialism works better than fascism, which is a perfectly fair observation. But capitalism works MUCH better than BOTH.
What you don't get is that when a company buys the government, YOU DON'T HAVE CAPITALISM ANYMORE. It's like saying that cleanliness is bad because clean things can become dirty. It's not like there are a bunch of different possible economic systems here. Either a person owns what he produces, or he doesn't, or something in between. If you are going to talk about how bad the pigsty that we are living in is, don't say that it is bad because it is clean, say it is bad because it is dirty! We need to go back to being clean! We need to break the ties that bind corporations to the government. The government needs to be removed from the economy beyond its original mandate (negotiation of treaties with foreign nations, and regulation of commerce between the states).
All monopoly utilities are socialist because they have been granted a monopoly by the government. This is by definition NOT CAPITALISM. There is no market, there is no competition, there is no threat, and there is a totally captive "customer" base. If you want electricity, you HAVE to buy it from these people. If you try to sell some yourself, men with guns will come and take you away and put you in a box. They will shoot you if you resist. Sure, they might start with letters telling you you aren't allowed to sell electricity, but if you continue, that is exactly what will happen.
When someone else gets to decide whether you live or die based on a whim, you have major, MAJOR problems as a society. Some try to hide from the truth. A brave person would confront it, even if it meant having to take an extreme step like changing your mind.
No, you can't. Not when it is 100F and 100% humidity. People could survive back then, SORT OF. Did you forget about what the life expectancy was back then versus today? We aren't talking about whether or not a 25 year old can survive, we are talking about 80 year olds.
And even if he meant capitalism, that is flat out wrong. You and he are twisting some very rigorously defined terms to try to force the facts to fit your world view. It would be funny if it weren't so destructive.
Uhh, because the maintenance would have cost more than a million dollars, and they have a monopoly. If there were another energy company that had well maintained/buried lines, you can bet everyone would be switching to them right now, and Pepco would be out of business. But they aren't, because the government won't let anyone else into their space.
The government requires that corporations act in the best interest of their shareholders lest they be vulnerable to shareholder lawsuits. It forces corporate boards to do anything and everything, including violating the law, to get the benefit for their shareholders. It is institutionalized sociopathy. Fascism incarnate.
Then you are just plain wrong, because utilities are socialist entities in the US. That is a fact. You can't blame capitalism for the failure of socialism, no matter what "behavioral phenomenon" you are "describing".
Capitalism is a great method of social organization. It's just that we haven't had it for a hundred years. Just mixed markets masquerading as free markets here in the US.
Ask the Greeks how that is working out for them. Note that all of Europe, perhaps absent Germany and the Nordic countries, is on the same track.
There is a big difference between FEELING wealthy due to spending borrowed money and BEING wealthy due to production and hard work.
Ask yourself how much higher your quality of life would be if you had above ground wires, and as a result had 5% lower tax rates and lower utility rates. That is holding all other variables constant. How often do you get windstorms in Europe? Do you really think you would lose a significant amount of uptime?
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That sounds disturbingly like aether theory.
You are the one who keeps pushing this, not me. I was talking about electricity outages, and you came in from left field with this psuedo-nationalistic "big cities in Texas pride", and random hatred for the South Plains. Why don't you think about why you did that?
Who doesn't?
Uhhh, a little butthurt there? All I said was that we didn't have power outages, while you claimed you did. I never said anything about "Real Texans" or any such BS.
And I don't know why you are bragging about where you live. You didn't fight in the War for Independence, and I lived more than half my life in southeast Texas, including some time in Houston.
And for the record, it is true that Lubbock and Amarillo are filled with capitalist heroes. This actually came as a major surprise to me, as it always seemed to me like they spent a lot of money on police, but their budget is really and truly bare bones, and they stay within their budgets, cutting as soon as there is an income shortfall. Also amazingly low property tax rates in the county. I pay maybe 1/10th of what the guys two blocks down in the city pay. But this area didn't get this way because I moved here, nor did I move here because it was that way. But I do respect them for it, more so than I do any other place I have ever lived.
Money touches everything. Abuse of money can make a nation feel rich, and encourage it to spend more than it has. You get lots of jobs, and everyone is happy, until theveil is pulled back, the currency falls apart, everyone finds out that it was all an illusion, and that now they are really and desperately poor, having spent all their money and more on things like burying cables, and more importantly, all manner of goodies which were nothing more than bribes to the people. If you were talking about the US, you would also include the ghastly amount we spend on our worldwide oppression machin--I mean spreading democracy. The US is in the same boat, with Texas being the Germany and Norway (combined, as we export oil) of the US. If we don't find some way to extricate ourselves, we will go down with the ship, I fear.
What part of "monopolies deliver an inferior product at an outrageous price" do you not understand.
As I said, Germany is an exception, as they actually work there, and more importantly save and accumulate capital. But even with that, you will suffer due to your politician's bad choices. You will wish that you had the money you would have saved on those cables in a few months when the Euro breaks up and the Deutchmark is valued 20:1 (or 2000:1 for that matter) against the other European currencies, and you can't export anything, causing a rapid rise in unemployment. If you had saved that money, you could have bought up those other countries and retired. You still might, but it will be to a lesser extent than it would have been otherwise.
So you DO want death panels, then.
You either acknowledge the truth, or hide from it. Regardless of what this man did, he was sentenced to death by people who didn't think he deserved a chance to prove himself. That is a DEATH PANEL, and no amount of wordplay is going to change that fact. Whether you think death panels are legitimate or not is a separate issue.
Yes, people can figure out how to survive, but the French DIDN'T, and that is the POINT. They had 3000 people die in a heat wave because there was no AC there. That doesn't happen in the US because we have nearly universal AC. Only places like Chicago have people die due to heat waves, because they don't have a high penetration of AC.
And I never said the life expectancy was 25, I said it is easy for a 25 year old to tough out the heat, but it is hard for an 80 year old to do the same. Yes, there aren't a lot of old people, but the original point was that this douche thinks that AC is un-needed, when it clearly is by some, as people without it die during heat waves, and it makes everyone's life a lot nicer.
A. I was talking about times of peak demand during the heat wave last summer, and B. I live in North Texas (in the south plains), and haven't experienced any blackouts of any length of time in five years, where the last one I had was where the transformer on my street blew up, but maybe our power is more reliable here than it is in the big cities. I certainly haven't heard anything about repeated power outages from friends or family throughout the state. Power going out here is a big deal, due to the heat.
If you are going to dismiss something as "not true", you could spend five seconds looking for yourself: http://pewresearch.org/pubs/859/what-brain-science-tells-us-about-religious-belief
Back on topic, yes, Enron committed fraud and forced prices higher. But why were they able to do that? If they were pushing prices to artificial highs, and failing to deliver services, someone else should have come in and taken over their market share. Why didn't that happen? The cost of entry is too high in California! Enron was in, and had an oligopoly at best (I don't recall the details, whether there was more than one power production company involved or not), and had some nice government imposed barriers to entry protecting them, allowing them to do what they wanted. It is an example of idiotic deregulation. If you are going to deregulate, you have to remove the barriers to entry BEFORE you remove the rules forcing them to act a certain way. If you don't, you get rolling blackouts.
Yes, I'm sure that governments are very good at completing their boondoggles on time. Sort of like how they built the space shuttle so that it hung off the side of its fuel tank, in what is possibly the dumbest design ever. http://emotibot.net/pix/816.png
You can make all the assertions you want about government vs private sector, but until I see your methodology and data, it is nothing but conjecture.
So the problem was one of fraud caused by the power companies? How hard was it to get started as a power company providing power to SCE's lines? What regulatory burden was there to both startups and to expansion of other companies?
What was the relationship between Enron and the other power companies (if there were any), and their collective relationship with the state and local governments.
This is not a simple issue, clearly, but it sounds to me like a case of poorly planned deregulation, which allowed for insiders to behave badly without fear of competition from any new companies.
Well, that was their excuse, in any event.
In my personal opinion, the producers of electricity and the owners of the lines should be different people. A person can contract with anyone they want in order to get their electricity, and all the suppliers pay the owners of the transmission lines for their use. In this way, people would be free to choose the source of their electricity, and since the grid owner has fewer customers, those customers would have more leverage to force them to upgrade their lines and do maintenance.
If competition had been allowed from the start, you would probably have a choice of getting your energy from far away via AC lines or nearby with DC lines. We might have seen more research into wireless transmission, residential scale natural gas plants, solar panel lease plans, and other neat things. Sadly, what we would up with was a set of monopolies that did nothing but try to maintain their business model. No innovation. No improvements. No new technologies. This is the nature of regulation.
If you apply more regulation to try to force a monopoly to do what you want, you will just find that your regulator is driving around in cars he can't afford, and taking vacations at his second home in some sunny paradise. If you crack down on the regulators, they will do the same to those in charge of the investigations. It is called regulatory capture, and it is an unstoppable force in systems run by humans (rather than angels). Better to utilize free market regulation by allowing competition. That is not only much more likely to actually work, it is free! You don't have to stretch your budget to hire more regulators, or try to pay more to prevent corruption. They just do what the market forces them to do, and if they can't make it, then those who are better able will take their place.
What if correlation is not causation, and the number of tech execs with degrees simply reflects the total population of people with the skills to be tech execs, ie, could many of those degreed tech execs have made it without the degrees they spent so much time and money getting?
It's funny, the things that degrees are required for these days. I would hire someone out of high school to be a entry level technician in my lab, and train them myself, if our hiring policies allowed me to do that. In that way, I could get people without a bunch of debt who would be happy with the salary they get here, and thus would stick around long enough to advance.
Yes, you had no regulations on a government granted monopoly. This is not what is meant by "free market". That is just a corporation becoming and arm of the government, or vice versa, and the thing that is formed from that giving itself the authority to do whatever it wants. They used that power to commit fraud on a massive scale.
You are comparing socialism with fascism, and finding that socialism works better than fascism, which is a perfectly fair observation. But capitalism works MUCH better than BOTH.
What you don't get is that when a company buys the government, YOU DON'T HAVE CAPITALISM ANYMORE. It's like saying that cleanliness is bad because clean things can become dirty. It's not like there are a bunch of different possible economic systems here. Either a person owns what he produces, or he doesn't, or something in between. If you are going to talk about how bad the pigsty that we are living in is, don't say that it is bad because it is clean, say it is bad because it is dirty! We need to go back to being clean! We need to break the ties that bind corporations to the government. The government needs to be removed from the economy beyond its original mandate (negotiation of treaties with foreign nations, and regulation of commerce between the states).
All monopoly utilities are socialist because they have been granted a monopoly by the government. This is by definition NOT CAPITALISM. There is no market, there is no competition, there is no threat, and there is a totally captive "customer" base. If you want electricity, you HAVE to buy it from these people. If you try to sell some yourself, men with guns will come and take you away and put you in a box. They will shoot you if you resist. Sure, they might start with letters telling you you aren't allowed to sell electricity, but if you continue, that is exactly what will happen.
Really? Then who was it that made this decision: http://news.sky.com/story/710266/man-22-dies-after-liver-transplant-refused
When someone else gets to decide whether you live or die based on a whim, you have major, MAJOR problems as a society. Some try to hide from the truth. A brave person would confront it, even if it meant having to take an extreme step like changing your mind.
No, you can't. Not when it is 100F and 100% humidity. People could survive back then, SORT OF. Did you forget about what the life expectancy was back then versus today? We aren't talking about whether or not a 25 year old can survive, we are talking about 80 year olds.
Eh? When and where?
Why not, worked out so well in this case.
And even if he meant capitalism, that is flat out wrong. You and he are twisting some very rigorously defined terms to try to force the facts to fit your world view. It would be funny if it weren't so destructive.
Uhh, because the maintenance would have cost more than a million dollars, and they have a monopoly. If there were another energy company that had well maintained/buried lines, you can bet everyone would be switching to them right now, and Pepco would be out of business. But they aren't, because the government won't let anyone else into their space.
The government requires that corporations act in the best interest of their shareholders lest they be vulnerable to shareholder lawsuits. It forces corporate boards to do anything and everything, including violating the law, to get the benefit for their shareholders. It is institutionalized sociopathy. Fascism incarnate.
Then you are just plain wrong, because utilities are socialist entities in the US. That is a fact. You can't blame capitalism for the failure of socialism, no matter what "behavioral phenomenon" you are "describing".
Capitalism is a great method of social organization. It's just that we haven't had it for a hundred years. Just mixed markets masquerading as free markets here in the US.
Dick Cheney, duh.
Ask the Greeks how that is working out for them. Note that all of Europe, perhaps absent Germany and the Nordic countries, is on the same track.
There is a big difference between FEELING wealthy due to spending borrowed money and BEING wealthy due to production and hard work.
Ask yourself how much higher your quality of life would be if you had above ground wires, and as a result had 5% lower tax rates and lower utility rates. That is holding all other variables constant. How often do you get windstorms in Europe? Do you really think you would lose a significant amount of uptime?
No, because my grandmother isn't dying because of a week of warm weather.