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Apparatchik Magnet posted:A profit middle man reduces costs by having an incentive to do things efficiently and earn big bonuses rather than just putting in some Soviet style effort. lmao check out the bootlicker for capitalism Don’t worry, friend, capitalism cannot fail, it can only be failed. Now, if we assume a perfect frictionless market with perfect knowledge for all actors at all times...
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Oct 29, 2019 18:37
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I think PG&E understands capitalism just fine and is operating under it as intended. https://twitter.com/dkos07/status/1187875836789084161
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Oct 29, 2019 18:41
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PG&E applied for money to do maintenance, and then put intense pressure on lower-level management and employees to under-spend that money so they could keep the rest as bonuses. This is the behavior you are actually asking for, but couching in words like "efficiency" instead of "theft." The company may be decades old but the executives and upper management in a company have much shorter-term interests, they can earn bonuses and improve stock performance by allowing as little amount of money as possible to actually go to maintenance and if they get away with not killing people form poor maintenance for five or ten years, they can move on to the next corporation having earned fat bonuses and cashed in stock options and otherwise made themselves wealthy and happy. The key here isn't just that there's no competition to force the company to be "more efficient," it's that "efficiency" in market terms is not desirable for a utility. Yes, we want our utilities to be provided to us for low costs, but investments in safety and reliability and longevity that extend beyond the attention span of the market cycle are "inefficient." And even when the CPUC, which as others have mentioned has been awful, actually does what they're supposed to and forces PG&E to charge ratepayers some more and use that money to fix some problem, if the company has the ability to do so "more efficiently" and keep the change, they will do so to our detriment. The more down the role of micromanaging every project you go to try to stop that stuff, the more you're basically just using government to run a utility anyway. It's absolutely true that climate change is a huge problem too. The design of our statewide electric grid mostly does not anticipate what the state is facing in terms of climate shift over the next century. But that's also a disengenuous point, because what climate change actually does is make certain kinds of weather events more common - droughts, wet springs, high wind events, etc. But all of those events have been occurring in California forever. In 1950 they knew that we had droughts sometimes and floods sometimes and high wind events sometimes. Every mile of infrastructure already has to be (or ought to be) built to withstand those events. What has to change is things like maintenance schedules (need to cut brush and new tree growth more aggressively after a late wet spring, for example) and that's not some kind of vast $100B/year expense, it's just an adjustment. Longer term it would be smarter to bury a lot of lines, if doing so is cost-effective (in many cases it isn't) but this isn't some kind of completely unforseen/unforseeable situation. I'm certain that at some point in the last century we've had combinations of high winds and dry conditions along power lines. The change is that the power lines weren't ancient, and the brush and trees around those lines had been maintained. So what we have here is not a situation "created" by climate change: it's a bad situation created by precisely the "efficiency" that a publicly traded company predictably tries to do, with the inevitable results being amplified by the climate change.
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Oct 29, 2019 18:46
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https://www.salon.com/2019/10/09/after-choosing-profits-over-maintenance-california-utility-giant-forces-blackouts-on-customers/quote:In 1994, the company's failure to trim trees near its power lines led to the Trauner Fire in Nevada County, California. In 1997, a jury found the company guilty on 739 counts of criminal negligence for causing this fire. Thanks to a subsequent California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) investigation, the public learned that between 1987 and 1994 PG&E diverted $495 million from its budgets to maintain its systems to boost corporate profits. This is "corporate efficiency" and while you can argue that the CPUC should have pushed them harder to not do this, the CPUC also performed the investigation that revealed they had done this. Repeatedly. For at least 20 years they've been doing this. At some point you have to say "ok a private company can't be trusted to spend maintenance money instead of keeping it for profits and bonuses." This isn't behavior caused by climate change. This is the behavior of a publicly-traded company with executives paid the going rates for corporate executives of large companies, doing what stockholders want them to do.
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Oct 29, 2019 18:51
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Absolutely, let's say the annual cost over ten years would have been teh same, which is surely a low ball but hey. So $7.5B a year spread over 5.4M customer accounts is $1389 per account per year, or $115 per month. Less for residential accounts and more for big commercial/industrial accounts, of course, but then again this is a low estimate. Surprising that no one wanted to pay, I'm sure PG&E would have been happy to increase their revenues and profits to have made it happen.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:00
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Apparatchik Magnet posted:Because you keep what you save after the PUC sets your rates. Do what was approved more efficiently and you make more money. Do it inefficiently and the PUC doesn't approve your expenditure and you eat it out of expected profits. (A problem a publicly owned utility doesn't face, as the government has to pay for every investment regardless.) The PUC is not really in a position to determine efficiency, and certainly not in a position to determine overall stability of the power network or if the rate increases went to actual improvements or were siphoned off. If the utility is giving bonuses for rewarding a return when the return is based on slashing maintenance then the criticism of the bonuses is warranted.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:08
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Cup Runneth Over posted:Is this a Dead Reckoning rereg? Oh gently caress, probably.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:16
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Jaxyon posted:Or you could raise the revenues and profits and....not spend the money. It's Dead Reckoning back under a rereg to concern troll some more. It has to be.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:29
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In better news, California had to try it a few times, but it finally worked: https://twitter.com/axios/status/1189240115845042176  Eat poo poo, NCAA. Edit: vvv 
CPColin fucked around with this message at 19:43 on Oct 29, 2019 |
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Oct 29, 2019 19:35
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Significantly less important, but remember when CA passed the law saying NCAA athletes are allowed to get endorsements and profit off of their names, and bunch of people freaked out and said the NCAA was gonna kick out all of teh California schools? Yeah, well the NCAA gave in and is going to allow athletes to get endorsements https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/27957981/ncaa-votes-allow-athletes-profit-likeness EDIT: 
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Oct 29, 2019 19:37
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CPColin posted:In better news, California had to try it a few times, but it finally worked: Wow! Thanks California
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Oct 29, 2019 19:40
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FINALLY the NCAAs built in slavery is going to end (Somewhat)
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Oct 29, 2019 19:45
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Yeah, they're, of course, not going as far as the California law says, probably so they can convince a judge that the law is no longer required, but still, the door has creaked open.
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Oct 29, 2019 19:56
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Leperflesh posted:PG&E applied for money to do maintenance, and then put intense pressure on lower-level management and employees to under-spend that money so they could keep the rest as bonuses. This is the behavior you are actually asking for, but couching in words like "efficiency" instead of "theft." The company may be decades old but the executives and upper management in a company have much shorter-term interests, they can earn bonuses and improve stock performance by allowing as little amount of money as possible to actually go to maintenance and if they get away with not killing people form poor maintenance for five or ten years, they can move on to the next corporation having earned fat bonuses and cashed in stock options and otherwise made themselves wealthy and happy. This is an excellent response.
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Oct 29, 2019 22:08
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https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/1188541919485399040?s=19
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Oct 29, 2019 22:18
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That's worth ten bux kicked Bernie's way, wouldn't you say?
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Oct 29, 2019 22:43
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Oct 29, 2019 23:29
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gavin newsom guillotine urself, make bernie the governorpresident
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Oct 30, 2019 01:48
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Bernie Sanders becomes president, tells Newsom to eat poo poo and removes his supply of fundraising. Newsom retires after one term to spend time with his best friend's wife, and John Chiang runs again, becoming the next Governor of California.
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Oct 30, 2019 03:36
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Bernie is amazing. Is he the only one willing to take on those executive murderers?
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Oct 30, 2019 03:44
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Buckwheat Sings posted:Bernie is amazing. Is he the only one willing to take on those executive murderers? the only one what, presidential candidate? i hear gloria la riva talks a pretty good game
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Oct 30, 2019 04:12
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Doc Hawkins posted:i hear gloria la riva talks a pretty good game
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Oct 30, 2019 04:15
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Doc Hawkins posted:the only one what, presidential candidate? Is the PSL running her again? Kinda wish she'd try for governor or something.
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Oct 30, 2019 04:38
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Great Atlantic Article: Technical Debt Article The Atlantic posted:The Toxic Bubble of Technical Debt Threatening America Fossil Fuels aren't cheaper: they are debt ridden as the cost of climate change is astronomically high.
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Oct 30, 2019 05:14
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My friend posted something recently and her relative went all "THE 1% ARE LEAVING IN DROVES TOO MUCH TAXATION LOSING PEOPLE LEFT AND RIGHT" so I post a graph that shows a slowing of growth but no net loss, along with the source. "WELL YOU BRING UP A GOOD POINT BUT POPULATION GROWTH AND MIGRATION ARE DIFFERENT ALSO BIRTHRATE AND" just.... ugh.
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Oct 30, 2019 05:33
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FilthyImp posted:My friend posted something recently and her relative went all "THE 1% ARE LEAVING IN DROVES TOO MUCH TAXATION LOSING PEOPLE LEFT AND RIGHT"
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Oct 30, 2019 05:55
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i have a question: are we totally hosed on the high speed rail project?
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Oct 30, 2019 06:22
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Mr Interweb posted:i have a question: are we totally hosed on the high speed rail project? We basically need LA and SF to pony up the cash for all of it. And the route they picked was bulllllllllshit. Oh and if by some miracle the feds actually give us the cash, lawsuits lawsuits lawsuits to stall it! FilthyImp fucked around with this message at 06:37 on Oct 30, 2019 |
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Oct 30, 2019 06:34
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Basically they hosed up by not going big and doing 2 routes, a coastal route between LA and SF and a second route between between LA and Sacramento that follows the current route. The coastal one would make progress since there is an existing right of way and be good PR, while the inland one would be slow as poo poo, but get built eventually
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Oct 30, 2019 06:44
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Hell just make a single five-stop line that runs through Sacramento, SF, SJ, LA, and SD. Then build out feeder lines from that as needed. The original HSR route proposal made no goddamn sense.
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Oct 30, 2019 07:34
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Sydin posted:Hell just make a single five-stop line that runs through Sacramento, SF, SJ, LA, and SD. Then build out feeder lines from that as needed. I'm trying to imagine the topography of a single, non-branching line that runs from Sactown to SF and then SJ that doesn't involve building a bridge over the widest part of the bay or going through SJ twice.
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Oct 30, 2019 07:37
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Big wide curves and another Bay Bridge-scale infrastructure project. With how quickly and efficiently they managed to do the Bay Bridge renovation, I'm sure nothing would go wrong.
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Oct 30, 2019 07:42
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Ardeem posted:I'm trying to imagine the topography of a single, non-branching line that runs from Sactown to SF and then SJ that doesn't involve building a bridge over the widest part of the bay or going through SJ twice. It hits stops in Napa/Petaluma, then comes over via the Golden Gate Bridge
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Oct 30, 2019 07:43
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The Glumslinger posted:Basically they hosed up by not going big and doing 2 routes, a coastal route between LA and SF and a second route between between LA and Sacramento that follows the current route. The existing right-of-way is very narrow, goes through environmentally sensitive areas (and an Air Force base), and has a speed limit of like 20 mph in places, due to tight curves. I'm not sure it would've made more progress.
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Oct 30, 2019 14:32
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California is filled with Republicns who think trains are Communist and Liberals who refuse to beleve people live east of I-5. HSR was doomed from the start.
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Oct 30, 2019 14:50
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Weembles posted:California is filled with Republicns who think trains are Communist and Liberals who refuse to beleve people live east of I-5. HSR was doomed from the start. Only republicans live east of 5 so that logic checks.
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Oct 30, 2019 14:53
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Apparently Uber, Lyft & Doordash are passing a ballot initiative for 2020 to exempt them from AB5 https://twitter.com/sfchronicle/status/1189262172980944896 Working title: the Protect App-Based Drivers & Services Act
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Oct 30, 2019 15:31
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The main obstacles on the coastal line are the hills between Santa Barbara and the Cuesta Grade north of San Luis Obispo. On the current timetable it takes the Surfliner ~5.5 hours to get from San Diego to Santa Barbara and then another 3 whole hours to do the SB to SLO leg. TBH I wish we had invested more in the conventional and light rail networks because there's a lot of slack in the system and a lot of opportunities to improve service and ridership without nearly as much risk as a new HSR system. Take over the LOSSAN Corridor and the Coast Line to ensure passenger priority, double track where the Class 1s refuse to and run more trains more frequently . Bring back the Desert Wind to Las Vegas and re-institute the Coast Daylight as an express train between LA and SF. Connect the end and midpoint stations with convenient transit so people can get around at their destination without a car. Upzone around stations so more people can live near them. This is all simple unsexy stuff but it works.
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Oct 30, 2019 16:39
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Oh man a fire is threatening the Reagan Library 
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Oct 30, 2019 16:47
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CPColin posted:Oh man a fire is threatening the Reagan Library
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Oct 30, 2019 17:02
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