PG&E is no innocent snowflake of a company, from my own experience with them. Tried to double bill me and my landlord. Fortunately, I'd kept all my utility bills. When the landlord got billed for my electricity, and came accusing me of having failed to transfer the electricity bills to an account of my own, as required in the lease, I had all the documentation I needed to show him that I had done the right thing and it was the scumbag utility company that'd messed things up. Funny that the error was in their favor. Same meter number on his and my bills.

Also, figures that the landlord rushed to blame the renter. Renters are 2nd class citizens. He didn't apologize, of course.

The rules are not clear. Texas is using excessive complexity to hide price gouging from electricity customers. Ought to see how complicated some of the electricity plans are on their Power To Choose website. Need to bust out the calculus and probability theory to accurately estimate the real costs. However, they do follow a fairly simple pattern of offering a narrow sweet spot or two in which you get a great rate. Like, if you use between 950 and 999 kWh in a month. Stray outside that, and you get shafted. They do that to game the rules of the Power To Choose program.

For example, I signed up with Frontier Energy, for just 3 months. All communication was electronically, except for the notice of just when my contract would expire and I'd be automatically moved to a "month to month" plan at more than 3x the rate. That notice, those scumbags sent via snail mail. Technically within the law, but meant, of course, to be missed. Electricity providers in Texas pull every shabby trick there is to fool customers into overpaying.

Is it? But first, what do you mean by the "underlying philosophical idea"? If you mean "People who create good new things deserve to be rewarded", yes, with that, I agree.

The idea of copyright is that the right to copy, which is a Natural Right, should be taken from the public by government fiat, so that a system of compensation can be hung on handing that right back out in a very limited and controlled way. I very much disagree with that. It worked somewhat when copying wasn't so easy, when the printing press was the state of the art for disseminating news, info, and entertainment. The advent of AM radio, which was bitterly fought by the entertainment industry, forced a number of changes, culminating in the business model of making money through advertising revenue, and passing some of that on to the artists in the form of licensing fees and royalties and so forth. FM radio and TV followed that model.

Disruptive though radio was, it pales in comparison to current tech. Radio did not upend many other kinds of media, such as print. That is happening right now, with the advent of the Internet, and mass digital storage, and the means to read and copy that storage at unprecedented speed and quality.

Think how much better our handle on the accumulated knowledge of civilization, housed in libraries public and private, could be, if not for copyright. Vastly larger selection. Far, far greater storage density, with an entire wall of books that might weigh a ton, replaced by one flash drive that weighs a few ounces and can fit in a hip pocket with room to spare. Searchability to put the old card catalogs to shame. No need to physically transport media, traveling to and from the library. No more book return hassles. Far greater data safety, far fewer losses from damage or destruction of media. Errors more easily corrected.

That we are expected to not use those fruits of our new technology, solely to prop up a traditional business model that never was all that great to begin with, is hugely costly and unfair. Every second that we could have had high fidelity scans of famous works of art, such as the Mona Lisa, The Night Watch, Starry Starry Night, and The Scream, but didn't, because rights, is a second in which we risk the permanent loss of another piece of our history. Yes, those paintings are long out of copyright, yet somehow, private collectors believe that if they wish, they can assert that the public still doesn't have permission to photograph their "property". Every time a museum collection catches on fire, or burglars steal the only copy, we lose a little more. We have the means to make such losses a relic of the past. But, "rights". It's nuts.

What I envision is a future in which downloading is good. Yes, please download the latest Disney animated movie, from anywhere you like. We shall have new systems in place to ensure that Disney is fairly compensated. For these systems, I am thinking that patronage, especially in the form of crowdfunding, is the way to go. This is what the entertainment industry should be doing, building up crowdfunding and patronage systems, not idiotically fighting rearguard actions to cling to copyright.

One thing that is not much appreciated or recognized now, but which I think in the future will be, is just how much ownership thinking infests and warps our art. Examples abound, from the blatant as seen in the Star Trek episode "I, Mudd", in which the writers have the characters engage in a little dialogue in which the penalty for violating intelllctual property rights on the planet Deneb IV is revealed to be Death (yeah, they wish!), to the much more subtle in which copying is inexplicably hard to do, and therefore every loss is the more poignant, dramatic, and damaging.

Fantasy is particularly bad that way. Magic items are often imbued with a magically perfect sense of property rights, so that they only work with the "proper" owner. For instance, the Elder Wand in the Harry Potter books won't function fully for anyone except the one person who "won" it properly from the previous owner, because, why? Because it is somehow sentient and has this enormous respect for property rights? And in Lord of the Rings, what enables Gandalf to resist the temptation to take the One Ring? His respect for ... property rights?? When he is freely offered the One Ring, he begs the Ring Bearer not to tempt him that way, seeming to fear that avenue to corruption more than any other. Weird. I hope you begin to see what I mean about so much of our art being warped by this kind of ownership thinking.

However it is SF that is the worst at clinging to ownership of the immaterial. There are many SF stories that delight us with a future full of incredible technological advances, yet somehow intellectual property law has not changed a whit since the 20th century. Star Trek again, posits this future in which we can go zipping around the galaxy with faster than light travel, and our society might not even use money any more (but then, for what stakes are they playing, when they play poker?), yet, somehow, Mudd got in big, big trouble for copying a few ideas. Another bad one on that front is the SF novel Hyperion, in which one of the characters is a famous author, but was screwed out of all kinds of royalties because the AI community bought just one copy, and shared it amongst themselves, with the publisher commenting that "copyright doesn't mean s*** with silicon".

You still are befuddled, but it's by ownership propaganda. "Piracy solved"??? By which, you mean what exactly? Search results omit all pirated content? And how do they do that, check the evil bit? But see, even if that could work, it wouldn't stop piracy. Tell me how you stop a kid from copying a flash drive full of songs to several kids' tablets? Lock the tablets down so tight that they really aren't the property of the kids any more?

In your sarcastic mention of "right" and "wrong", you are running with a very loaded argument that presumes the copying of copyrighted works is obviously morally wrong. It's not. It may be illegal, but morally wrong? No. Did you think to question whether the system of copyright even makes sense? You should. But I suspect that you do realize this, and therefore your invocation of moral philosophy is not merely riddled with innocent errors, but deliberate ones. Meaning, you were trolling. Copyright is a very broken idea.

One of the arguments typically advanced in favor of copyright is this notion of harm, as if every little miss should be considered harm, and all harm is bad. As an example of harm that is good is competition. If you have a choice of where to buy a meal, establishment A or establishment B, whichever one you choose harms the other. The other missed out on a sale. You could harm yourself, buy from both and throw away the excess food, but it's unreasonable to expect customers to do so.

The Internet and mass data storage tech have upended the old business models. What's going on with YouTube is actually one of the directions things need to go. About time entertainers started accepting the new reality.

There are laws, and there are laws. They could have taken me to court, yes. They might even have won. But they didn't try. Just sold the debt to debt collectors. I do not know why. The amount wasn't enough? Or could it be that like every bully ever, they were afraid I might be the sort to fight back, and maybe even land a few blows? They are guilty of all kinds of violations, and they know it. Suppose that as a result of fighting me, they win but a state law that allows for some of their crap is struck down? Oopsie. I found errors in their billing (reportedly, upwards of 80% of their bills have errors), and I was ready to fight if it came to that.

We're never going to end high health care costs if we keep accepting it without fighting. We must press them. Too many people run and hide from the big scary complicated medical bill. Or they feel tired, and lacking in time to dig into the matter. I totally understand how very fatiguing it is to wade into the details of meaningless bull. One of their most successful tactics to deal with energetic patients who ask too many questions is to inundate them with boring trivia, while still leaving out the essentials. It sucks. I did it anyway. Took me a year to get to the bottom of the reason-- rationale really-- for the prices.

Repeated calls to the health insurer to get an explanation why the same item 3 times was a different price each time, got me a different answer every time. They didn't know either. They guessed, wrongly, that it was more expensive on weekends, or that it reflected the addition of drugs or services. One even told me that the price was meaningless, and the actual price was set in a secret agreement neither I nor he could view. Wrong again. It's their job to be able to answer a simple question like that, and they couldn't do it. So why should I pay, when no one can tell me why the prices are not completely wrong? Some urged me to stop being a pest and just pay up, please. Some thought it was an error and tried to correct the price to the lowest amount, which seemed to work, but then a month later, I found the prices had been reverted. I finally got the explanation I think is correct, from a friend of mine who sells health insurance, not my health insurer, and even he needed a week to figure it out. And then, I decided that I did not agree with the system, did not accept the charges, and refused to pay, furious that I'd wasted so much time on the matter. They can damn well pay me, for the time it took to get that question answered. In any case, by then, they'd already thrown me to the debt collectors months before.

Even if you think you won, watch out that they don't sneak the "unpaid" bill back onto another invoice at a later date, if ever you go back to that medical provider.

Yes, many of us understand that other, more socialist nations have plain better health care, for half the cost.

The reasons why the US does not have it are many, First, employers use healthcare as another hold over employees. Lose your job, and you and your whole family also lose healthcare. So you're not going to complain about bad working conditions, are you? Or join a union?!?

Second is bigotry, especially racism. Lot of white bigots don't want brown people to receive medical care, and will forgo it themselves to keep it from brown people. Classism is involved too. If they can price medicine so it is out of reach of the poor, but the middle class can afford it, so much the better. It's not a coincidence that the poor are disproportionately brown.

Finally, the myth persists that American healthcare is the best in the world. People don't want to wreck that, even though it's an illusion and a lie.

Yes, though the prices are a load of dung, they mean a whole lot when your insurance rejects the services over some technicality. Instead of you paying your portion of the insured rate, which may amount to 2% of their fantasy list price, in such cases the hospital will come after you for the full 100%, with an offer to accept 80% if you hurry up and pay Right Now. That's right, they aren't stopping at the insured rate which may be 40% of that fantasy list price, they go for it all. In such cases, medical providers shouldn't even bill the patient, they should go after the health insurer, but they have entirely too much success at bullying and tricking patients into thinking they owe all that, so they keep doing it. If you ask, they may inform you that had you not been insured, they would give you a discount of 85% to 90% off, but as it is, too bad. What they aren't saying is that their prices are so extreme that even 90% off is still outrageously high. $300 for a $2 bag of saline solution is an all too typical markup. That's right, while most businesses go for a 10% profit, these medical bandits aren't stopping at a wimpy 200%, no, they want 15,000%! 90% off, knocking that bag of saline solution down to $30, is still an obscene profit of 1500%.

Don't fall for their crap about having to bill that much to make up for expenses in other areas, like all those supposed deadbeats who don't pay their bills. Not fair, and not properly part of your business, that you should be overcharged because of the actions of other patients. Another favorite excuse is that medicine is just expensive, you know? Still another lie is that they have to pay the doctors and nurses out of the monies collected for supplies, when the medical personnel often bill separately and specifically for seeing the patients. If you want a fair price for medical services received, Medicare has a pretty good list. Last time I got a huge bill, that's what I eventually waved back at them. I got the list of services received, looked up the Medicare rates, and offered to pay that amount. They angrily refused, so I gave them even less. The lying idiot administrator responsible for the pricing tried to play stupid with me, claiming that he'd never heard of a chargemaster. I find it beyond belief that anyone could work in hospital billing and not have ever heard of a chargemaster. That's like a musician trying to claim he'd never heard of a piano. Paid the smallest bill, and ignored the rest. When the debt collectors called, I told them that I did not agree with the amounts, and would not pay. Never heard from them again. The thing about debt collectors is they neither know nor care about the story, the only thing they have is an amount, and if they listen to your story, it's only because they're giving you rope to hang yourself with. There's no point talking to debt collectors. If you talk at all, talk to the medical provider's billing department, not the debt collectors.

For good reason! Charging takes a long time. Even if we can get charging times down to 30 minutes, it's still too long. Most people don't want to hang out at a gas station for half an hour or more, they want to dash in and out in a few minutes. Electric charging stations at dedicated sites, in the style of gas stations, are not going to work. The simplistic idea of merely turning gas stations into electrical charging stations (or adding them side by side) is a bad one. The charging stations need to be at locations where a car will stay for a while. They can be put in a lot more places than a gas pump can, and we need to use that fact to our advantage. Home is, of course, the #1 such location. Work that for whatever reason can't be done via telecommuting, is #2. Motels are a good place to recharge.

Any place where people will stay for several hours is potentially a good place to recharge, but these days, what places are those? Not most restaurants. I suspect shopping is no longer an activity that most people find pleasurable in itself, or mega malls would not be in decline even before the pandemic struck. We may also be about to see a revolution in urban planning. "Peak car" may have been the 1950s, in which we experimented with drive-in everything. The drive-in diner and movie theater didn't work out all that well, leaving us with just Sonic for the former. As for the drive-in theaters, a major metropolitan area with a population of at least 1 million may have less than 5. Meanwhile, the more traditional theaters' future is looking shaky.

A major issue with cars is their use for the anti-social purpose of keeping things exclusive. After homes, cars are the most expensive thing most people purchase. Much of our society is made to exclude people who are such "losers" that they can't afford a car. Making cities more friendly to walking and bicycling spoils that. The electric car will impact that too, because their total cost of ownership is lower. In addition to being cheaper to drive, they need way less maintenance.

I often wonder if mortality is a good thing, as that seems to be the main mechanism by which change, especially necessary change, is not forever stymied.

There's something seriously wrong with us or our culture that this kind of crap happens all the time, and people mostly react with weary cynicism. Until several hundred people lose their lives in a plane crash caused by the seepage of toxic fumes, it will remain a minor footnote in the long list of corporate malfeasance.

From the Radium Girls to Exxon Knew, Big Tobacco's "doubt is our product", and most recently President Trump, I sure hope the nation has had such a surfeit of bull and an unwilling remedial education in demagoguery, that there will be a huge backlash which lasts for at least a generation.

Checked the comments on this story, hoping for some recommendations on FB replacements. Maybe there isn't one?

Plain old email isn't broadcast enough. Another problem I have with emails these days is that my accounts are flooded with spam. Some of that is FB spam, about joining groups FB thinks I might be interested in. Inside FB there is anniversary spam: "You have been connected to Joe for 4 years now!!!"

One could maintain one's own website, as many of us used to do way back in the 1990s. But, lot of problems with that idea, starting with the fact that most people don't have the expertise that takes. If you run a comment section, then you have the massive problem of stopping the spam flood yourself. Another problem is the loss of services the setup depends upon. I had a free dyndns setup, until dyndns tried to monetize it. They forced me to either pay up, annual subscription, or lose the setup. So I lost it. Switched to a similar service,

Then my ISP pulled the rug out from under me. Suddenly, port 80 and port 443 weren't working any more. My "friendly" ISP was blocking those ports for me, to protect me, you know. Wasn't that nice of them? When I called to inquire about it, their low level flunkies denied that they were doing any such thing, and couldn't explain why I wasn't seeing any traffic on those ports. I don't feel confident that they even understood the questions. Yet it turned out that maybe that was a good thing. It wouldn't do to have a web server telling the world I am associated with a particular IP address, with the MAFIAA on the watch with their piracy accusations. That damned Copyright Alert System caught me a few times. I was going to purposely try to get detected more than 6 times, but they ended CAS before I could. Now, my friendly ISP forwards notices that someone complained that they could download some copyrighted movie or song from the IP address assigned to me, and tells me how many times in the past year I've been accused. Wow, keep a dossier on me, eh? So, running my own web site on my own Internet service doesn't seem a good idea anymore. Which leaves, hosting. Which is right back to the problem of, what do you do when the commercial hosting provider messes things up?

Defending Trump is nigh impossible. Trump was impeached. For good reason.

Reason is, however, a big problem for Trump supporters. I can understand voting for him in 2016, to shake things up. It was sort of a joke, really. Stick it to all the hypocritical people who profess to take everything so seriously, while continuing to turn blind eyes to some very bad problems. Like, who do you vote for if you want Law and Order on Wall Street? No more Too Big To Fail bull? The very large, monopolistic companies should have all been broken up. A whole bunch of Wall Street criminals should have gone to prison, but only 1, Madoff, actually did. The Democrats were soft on all that crime.

The joke isn't funny any more. Stopped being funny before Trump's first year was finished. If you don't want to support Biden, fine, but please, vote 3rd party. Wish "not Trump" was a voting option. Trump is going down, and the Republican Party just might go down with him. I don't want America reduced to a one party state. Maybe Republican Voters Against Trump can save the party.

It's crazy that such a group as RVAT not only exists, but is as strong as they are. To my knowledge, never been anything quite like that before. No DVAObama, RVABush, or DVAClinton movements. A bunch of Republicans, including T. Roosevelt, split to create the Progressive Party, which soon fizzled. That's the closest thing I can think of to RVAT.

It's the big money that brings out all the cheaters and assholes. Doesn't matter what the game is. Chess, poker, bridge, Magic the Gathering, you name it. Much rarer to see any cheating in a small tournament with a prize of only $100. Those so inclined no doubt figure it's not worth risking discovery and consequences for such small prizes. Still, I've seen it a little there too.

One little bit of advice that older, more experiences players emphasized to me was that castling had to be done by moving the king first. Always move the king first. If you don't, if you move the rook first, you will soon encounter the sort of jerk who will insist that wrinkle in the touch move rules be followed to the letter and force you to move only your rook. I'm fine with touch move rules, except that one. Been one of the worst rules, and I hear some time ago it was amended so that you could move both pieces simultaneously. In my opinion, still not good enough. What's the point, really? How the heck is allowing the touching of the rook first opening the door to cheating of some sort? I don't know how many newcomers refused to ever play again after being screwed by that rule, but I would think it's not zero.

I find it interesting, if expected, that children who attend private schools were pointed out as more likely to cheat. Yes, I agree, they would. They are under a great deal of parental pressure to excel. They can even rationalize the cheating to the point they don't feel the least guilty about it either, think it's normal and everyone does it. Well, everyone except the suckers and losers who are too stupid and naive to get it.

One time, it was the tournament organizers who were the cheating thieves. They collected the money the players all paid to enter the tournament, charging a very standard rate of $20, paid out the prizes as it would have been impossible not to do so without their con being exposed immediately, and did not submit the results to the USCF, thereby avoiding the fees the organization charges. Was some weeks before anyone realized that, hey, no one's rating got updated. In hindsight, there was grounds for suspicion, like that the organizers were not well known in the community, not known at all. They conned us with talk of this being a new start, bringing chess to a small city that had never hosted a chess tournament before, come out everyone and support our efforts to grow chess, etc.

Never played in a big money tournament, have you? I have, and I assure you, it was dirty. I played in the under 2000 section in a large tournament with a prize of $10,000 for the winner of that section, and my first opponent was a sandbagger. Had a rating of 1998. Before we started, he told me that he'd purposely thrown his last 20 or so games to get his rating under 2000. Even seemed proud of that. He was of course also trying to psyche me out by informing me that he was much stronger. I made him sweat, but I lost.

The next guy had the inaccurate chess clock, which he of course made sure I had the side that ran too fast. This was in the days when mechanical clocks were still the most common kind, and they were notorious for inaccuracy. Electronic clocks have eliminated that particular angle. That cheat could still be done, but now, the player would have to deliberately hack the clock to rig it to do that. Then there was the guy who was constantly calling the judge with a complaint about something I'd supposedly done. His complaints were baseless, and the judge shut him down every time. Getting me with some rules technicality wasn't really his goal, though he would certainly take it if the judge handed him one. His more realistic goal was to distract and rattle his opponent with constant harassment.

These days, I spend more time on SoylentNews. Not as technical, but as I have learned from hard experience, we can't focus solely on technology and science, can't expect the technical merits, facts, and rationality to carry the day.

Perhaps it is that kind of Asperger attitude that opened the door for the trolls taking over the government. Anti-intellectualism has been rampant. We were not prepared for it. I understand it better now, maybe well enough to deal with it and shut down the bull. Still don't know how to persuade those who wallow in it to stop. Maybe no one knows that, maybe it's not possible.

Back to the subject at hand, I have some photos from the time I visited Ayer's Rock, as it was called for a while. Here's one.