🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <B67CEE11.2FFAA%no-spam@RadioMonopoly.com>, John Higdon 
<no-spam@RadioMonopoly.com> wrote:

> in article 3A5650E2.B70919E7@genek_hates_spammers.com, GeneK  wrote:
> 
> > Simpler to weight the rates on higher consumption users.  Let the 
> > people
> > who insist on keeping floodlights and AC on all the time pay 10x the 
> > rate
> > for their excess usage.  This is already done with the "lifeline" 
> > system,
> > but additional tiers could be added.
> 
> Additional tiers tend to penalize large families, multiple families 
> living
> in single-family quarters, those who work at home, and others with 
> special
> circumstances and considerations more than they do wastrels. The fact is
> that "high-end" users typically conserve much more than "low-end" users 
> out
> of sheer self-interest. As a "high-end" user (who has worked out of his 
> home
> for decades), I was using high-tech fluorescents, motion-sensing light
> control and other techniques years before they became popular.

Not only these points, but there is generally no reliable method of 
determining who is "wasting" energy (or water, or milk, or any other 
commodity allegedly in short supply). 

As with the "water narcs" of the last drought period, where neighborhood 
busybodies were "narcing out" alleged water wasters without any 
knowledge of how much water was being saved in other ways, power narcs 
will focus on whatever they perceive to be "waste."

(The water narcs were especially irksome. A person who chose to skip on 
showers was fined in some areas for the "sin" of washing his car. If a 
person chooses to use water on expensive landscaping, let him use his 
money (metered water) as he wishes.)

The recent tenor of these newsgroups, with all the nattering about 
energy wasters and energy hogs is reminiscent of what we saw during the 
last drought.

Ironically, the issues are deeply similar. California doesn't have an 
undistorted market in water, just as its electricity market is hardly 
"unregulated." Water is provided so cheaply to farmers in the Central 
and Imperial Valleys that artificial rice paddies are formed in the 
blistering sun of the near-desert. 

The water narcs throw a fit because some rich home owner is saving his 
expensive landscaping even as "too cheap to meter" farmers are flooding 
their fields in some Kafkaesque emulation of Southeast Asia.

--Tim May

-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay@got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns