For the purposes of this discussion, they represent a democracy

If your baseline of a democracy is North Korea, the discussion you're having is imaginary.

Or, you are the supreme leader of North Korea.

It should be noted that the City of London is a tiny part of London, like a square mile. Its the financial district, the Wall Street of London.

It isn't suprising they are taking a pro big business stance.

Remember when Gilmore said, 'the internet routes around damage'?

Remember when it was commonly accepted that censorship on an open network was virtually impossible?

Remember then?

All that idealism crushed with buyouts and consolidation, money thrown at the problem of uppity citizens using disruptive new technology to assert their pesky rights. And it worked. The Internet is nothing like what I remember twenty years ago. A free thought and open platform for exchange of ideas and technology. Now it's a marketing platform at best, global surveillance mechanism at worst.

My parents generation from the 60s had their idealism crushed too. What with the assassination of a president, a civil rights leader, and that president's brother murdered on the campaign trail while running for President. No wonder in the '70s people turned their backs on civics danced away their troubles.

And if you look back to the Wobblie generation - my great grandparents - at the beginning of the nineteenth century, so too did it happen then as well. Utterly crushed under the boot of money and violence. People danced during the roaring twenties too.

At least not too many 'net idealists have been killed this time 'round. Though it doesn't seem like it's time to dance either. The mood has gotten too ugly to party the bad news off.

Really, this notion of "commercially reasonable" scares me the most. I'm guessing you could cover a lot of very very bad behavior by companies if the regulatory standard is "commercially reasonable".

Remember, this is the FCC head and former cable executive who was appointed by someone who people on the Right call a "Marxist". Tom Wheeler should be shown the door immediately. In fact, he never should have been allowed anywhere near a regulatory agency. Whenever tells me they want people in government who have real-world business experience, I think how that's the last thing we want. Government and regulatory agencies should under no circumstances be run like a business world and experience as a business executive is the last thing we should look for in political leaders. It's like hiring a bank teller based on his experience as a former embezzler. Which reminds me, this is every bit as big a scandal as the recent story of the banking regulators who had the cozy relationship with Goldman Sachs.

If you don't know about the recent Goldman Sachs story, you really ought to take a look:

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/26/6...

Meet Carmen Segarra, whose 46 hours of damning audio tape make her sort of the Edward Snowden of the financial world. And she's every bit as heroic as Snowden. I'm sure the lawbreaking at Goldman could be said to have been "commercially reasonable" too.

Living in an oligarchy sucks balls. Godspeed to any future whistleblowers who decide to make the personal sacrifice to give us these glimpses into the lives of our not-so-benevolent overlords.

I actually received one of those as a Christmas present back in 1966!

I had one of those, too. Right around the same year. I seem to recall blowing it up with M-80s because it wouldn't help me with my homework. I mean, what good is a computer if it can't help you with your homework? I did like the first three experiments in the booklet that came with the Digicomp and then thought, "I wonder how this thing would blow up?" And by the way, it didn't blow up nearly as well as my Revell model of a 1966 Pontiac Tempest.

I did better with Estes model rockets and small creatures. We had a space race to win, after all, and I wanted to do my small part. I never did learn to code. Soon after, I learned how to masturbate and that turned out to be more engaging than the Digicomp and that was that.

If your baseline is North Korea...

I'm curious. Why would anyone use the baseline of North Korea? Are they in any way representative? They are probably the nation in the world least like other nations in the world.

I'm not exactly certain of the point you were trying to make, but suggesting that North Korea should be some sort of representative for the state of the developed world is a little bit loony.

Wouldn't it be more reasonable to use other countries that are similar to the US as a metric to measure how well we're doing, as you say, "democracy-wise"?

We could start by looking at voter turnouts in other developed nations. Yeah, we're in negative territory there. How about income equality? Well... not so good there. How about social mobility? Education? Health of the population? Mental health of the population? Violent crime? Incarceration levels?

Maybe you're right. Maybe comparing ourselves to North Korea is the only way we can look good, because we sure as hell don't look so good compared to the other developed nations of the world.

So what the Senate does is protect the minority.

Yes. They protect the minority all right. We refer to them as "the 1%". And they'e doing a bang up job, too, representing that minority.

I've got the playing video games and gambling all day part down. Looking forward to the billions pouring in.

As a result, whenever you add wind or solar to the network, you have to have a reliable burner based power plant with turbine running at operational speed and in phase with network ready to pick up the slack the moment wind blows too hard and it gets hit with more load from the network.

You make a very good case for more investment in the infrastructure so we're not saddled with an energy source from the 18th century and an energy infrastructure from the 19th.

That solar is a failure, not so much.

So these people who claim they are being disenfranchised are imaginary, that's what I thought.

And they all told me you wouldn't understand...

I was struck by lightning in April of 2004. After that, all I wanted to do was smoke weed and play computer games.

Of course, that's all I wanted to do before I was struck by lightning, so clearly the effects were very subtle. I no longer wanted to play JRPGs, text based adventures or 2D platformers. Plus, there is a strange blue glow emanating from my scrotal sack. It's kind of like superpowers, except not really useful, except at Halloween parties where I go dressed as a partially bioluminescent Michelangelo's David.

http://youtu.be/LyRqdzF8swY

As far as us being a democracy, our founding fathers had a healthy fear of it.

That was my point. The notion that our Founding Fathers wanted anything like Democracy is simply a myth.

but in a horrible proportion unlike the house.

If the House of Representatives is an example of a proper proportion in terms of representing the will of the people, how come there is a large Republican majority even though a half-million more votes were cast for Democrat candidates than for Republicans?

And why would a state need representation other than for the benefit of the governed. Are states, like corporations, people, my friend?

Is there any count of how many people do not pay taxes, receive no government assistance, have no permanent mailing address, are completely off the grid yet somehow qualify as a registered voter and manage to get to the polls every two years yet seem to disappear after that. Who are these people?

In fact, there is a count. There have been investigations into voting fraud in every state and at the Federal level by both Republican and Democratic administrations. The number has never been more than a handful.

So to answer your question, "Who are these people"? They are the people who live in your imagination and the imagination of AM radio talk show hosts.

The Voter Fraud Myth:

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Hi Ken,

If I understand your comment correctly, you argue that all renewable subsidies ought to end. And in particular, argue that Net Metering laws are an especially pernicious subsidy that forces utility companies to buy energy from homeowners at inflated rates. You use the common 'buggy whip' metaphor for disruptive economic shifts due to technological advancement to explain this rationale, presenting the hypothetical: what would happen if government had subsidized buggy whips?

So I'll counter, there are two kinds of renewable subsidies at play here.

The first are manufacturing subsidies. China subsidized manufacturing buildout of solar assembly lines with the hope they would take a dominant position in the world market. They're betting solar will be a high growth high-tech market and these subsidies will have long term benefit to the Chinese economy. This is no different from the US betting big by subsidizing pharmaceuticals through medical research grants. Or the initial funding of computer science and packet switched networking (ARPANET), what we now enjoy as the Internet. Those subsidies funneled wealth toward industries each nation expected would show long term economic benefit.

From that perspective, fossil fuels receive significant subsidies today, even as solar manufacturing subsidies decline. See this BBC article:

http://www.bbc.com/news/busine...

But there's a second kind of solar subsidy. The one you argue is especially pernicious. That of Net Metering, whereby utilities buy back electric generation by rooftop solar. This subsidizes not the manufacture of panels but their purchase, deployment, and use. As utility companies complain, Net Metering essentially is forcing those companies to diminish the value of their investments in gas and coal fired power plants. Since they've put billions - half a trillion wordlwide - into these investments, a general popular shift to rooftop solar means that as local solar ownership increases so too does the value of central production decrease.

Why should laws force them to buy the knife that's slitting their own throats?

I argue because increased energy production - in aggregate - is a net good across the board. The solution is not to limit deployment of renewables, particularly since they're already cost effective, but to find alternative use for those gas and coal burning plants during this transition period. You won't get buy-in from utility investors unless they see some kind of ROI on prior investment. Otherwise, they'll fight this to the bitter end, which would delay renewable deployment longer than planning to maximizing use of current fossil fuel infrastructure anyway.

But let's get to your buggy whip argument. Because I think this is particularly flawed. Here, you conflate a manufactured good - the buggy whip - with an energy resource. It takes net energy to make buggy whips. If they're useless, regardless of subsidy, that's a net loss to the economy and society in general. The whip will sit unused until it decays and is thrown away. Energy production is different. This can be stored for use another day. Whether that's direct use in smelting and manufacturing, as I proposed, or in storage - say mass hydro by pumping water uphill, hydrogen gas production and storage, whatever - energy production can be converted and saved in ways that a useless manufactured object cannot.

The analogy fails because the two (subsidized energy production vs subsidized manufacturing) are not comparable at fundamental levels.

At least, that's the perspective I take. I look forward to your counter-argument. Best. -M

There's a law of supply and demand to everything including energy.

It's a law the same way "unintended consequences" is a law. Or Godwin's Law is a law. It's truth until it's not.

Economic "laws" are not like the laws of physics. Economics isn't even a science, being so soft as to be less rigorous than parapsychology. Economics is dogma, always with an agenda.

Coincidentally, here's something interesting I read today about this very subject:

https://fixingtheeconomists.wo...