Jeez, I'm surprised they didn't tack on voltage drop as a multiplier somewhere...

Dear Customer,
While delivering your power we encountered a voltage drop which adversely impacted our overall ampacity. There will of course be a surcharge for this.

We pay a flat rate for sewage based on living square feet (i. e. a non-dwelling like retail or a factory has a different calculation than a home or apt.) like bath + bed rooms. The city collects sewage fees but may or may not be the water supplier depending on an exact location... Also, some people may have a septic system, but they have to seal it and connect to city sewer to get any kind of building permit. I'm OK with that as the septic tank size was based on the original (read "very old") floor plan. As for potable water, the rate is not bad up to a certain point, but once you go beyond normal needs the overages are billed at a much higher rate. There is not a thousand square feet of lawn on my whole street combined. I have known people with new swimming pools to hire water trucks to bring in 20,000 gallons from outside city limits because they saved money by initially filling the pool that way.

Digressed a bit there... our sewage bill is on the trash bill if we have city trash service and comes separate if we do not... but not tied to water at all.

I fear I would then end up with two bills, one covering the cost of the energy I want and another to allow the delivery of that energy to the location I desire...

And because the lines are not owned by the power seller, when an ice storm takes them down I would probably get a bill for my portion of the repair! Yes, they already pass those costs on, but it is spread amongst many more customers. I don't want to see the bill for my exact share of the repair of the circuit that runs from the power source clear to my meter. I could end up paying for work done on a generation station, sub-stations, etc. that are not even in my state.

Utility companies buy and sell power to each other as demand and supply dictate, and their overhead (including normal line maintenance) is factored into the system. Having a third party control distribution would simply add another entity feeding off the revenue stream... that's OK, they can just pass that on to end users and it will be business as usual!

You give the impression of not having read more than the first sentence of the post you replied to.

US law should have absolutely no meaning for anyone outside the US. Why would an EU citizen expect US law to have any relevance at all?

Have you read Twitter's Terms of Service? Even the soon-to-come-into-effect version says that

You understand that through your use of the Services you consent to the collection and use (as set forth in the Privacy Policy) of this information, including the transfer of this information to the United States, Ireland, and/or other countries for storage, processing and use by Twitter.

Well, going down the list of signers http://www.vox.com/2015/4/16/8... I notice

GIlbert Ross, M.D.
President (Acting) and Executive Director
American Council on Science and Health

I am not completely for or against ACSH. Elizabeth Whelan, their founder, was an advocate for some issues I agreed with and some issues I disagreed with. I met Whelan a couple of times. I liked her. She was adding information about some controversial debates, and she was particularly useful in taking on some politically correct positions that had a weak science base. As I recall she was defending GM food, and also taking money from Monsanto.

Most admirably, she was taking on the cigarette industry when it was still a "controversy," especially in magazines that were getting a lot of cigarette advertising, notably almost all the major women's magazines.

But Whelan was also trying to round up "unrestricted" grants from industry to write supposedly unbiased or objective reports on major controversies. To her credit, they tried to give all the scientific evidence, although they seem to have run into problems with that.

The one I remember was their report on that fat substitute, Olestra https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... This was not a life-or-death issue, but olestra had a few side effects, the most noticeable of which was diarrhea. Procter & Gamble managed to get the FDA to allow them to refer to "diarrhea" by the euphemistic term, "loose stools," which I thought was misleading. At any rate, when I read that report I realized why you can't get an objective report sponsored by a corporation with a financial interest. Whelan couldn't even use straightforward language and arguments to defend olestra, because P&G's lawyers made them follow the FDA-approved wording.

Whelan's big disappointment was that the industry wouldn't support her (the way they do for the more partisan think tanks like the Manhattan Institute), so she gave up that economic model. I don't know where they get their money from now, but I assume they disclose it. In a way it's a shame, because Whelan failed because she was too honest (but not completely candid). Or to put it less flatteringly, you can't be a little bit of a prostitute.

But let's go to the signers at the top.

Henry I. Miller, M.D.
Robert Wesson Fellow in Scientific Philosophy
& Public Policy
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA

Scott W. Atlas, M.D.
David and Joan Traitel Senior Fellow
Hoover Institution
Stanford University
Stanford, CA

Hoover did not deign to include its funding sources in the "About Us" section of its web site, and I'm not going to track it down. But as I recall, when Hoover was first created, the Stanford faculty complained that they were an independent institution using Stanford's name but without academic accountability to Standford, and they were funded by corporations that had a financial stake in some of the areas of their research.

Miller was one of the founding members of The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition which was founded by Philip Morris to challenge the evidence of harm from tobacco http://www.sourcewatch.org/ind...

I remember reading Miller's defenses of GM food. I happen to think that GM food is (probably, mostly) pretty safe. But if Miller believes in the free market, he ought to let consumers know which foods are GM and which aren't, so they can make their own free-market decisions. I don't know if Miller takes any money directly from those corporations. But the organizations he works for, like the Hoover Institution, ACSH, and ASSC, do. So that's where his paycheck ultimately comes from. So in that sense the parent's accusation is true.

Oz has gone completely off the wall, and if I had to choose between Miller and Oz, I'd have to give my verdict to Miller on this one. Miller correctly calls Oz out for his financial conflicts of interest. So it's appropriate to apply the same test to Miller himself. But let them fight it out. This will inform the public debate.

Indeed. My phone's battery life seemed to double when I got a Pebble. I'd not say that's useless at all.

Where did I say "call everyone in"? I believe what I said was:

If you don't have time to interview your top two candidates, you're doing something wrong. Seriously.

Good strawman, though.

And in my case it's 10. Maybe I'm just lucky.

My mistake, I didn't look at who was posting and assumed you were the peron I had responded to previously. I take back what I said about your prior arguments, as those weren't your arguments. The complete and utter bullshit remark stays, though.

So you're saying I'd have been robbed at gunpoint 3 times instead of 2 if I was black? It's quite possible that my assailants were targeting white victims and I'd not have been robbed at all; the hardship would have been replaced with something else, though, for sure; I think we can both agree on that. In other words, your argument is so much complete and utter bullshit based on "what might have been", rather than anything concrete, that I can't bring myself to take you seriously. And your arguments before that have boiled down to "laugh when white people complain because they neve complain about anything real", which I was easily ablt to counter by, well, giving you something real.

You got anything real for me, buddy? If not, bugger off and let the adults have their debate.

Is there a school house rock video explaining in song the differences?

Petitioning the government for a redress of grievances and civil disobedience are two different things albeit similar.

I agree with you. Yet no need for the quotes around social 'scientists.' Psychologists, socialists, etc. employ the same experimental designs and mathematical techniques in experiments as doctors or others performing drug efficacy or medical outcome experiments, for example.

That sounds like an excellent reason to use scare quotes around "scientists". When only 25% of published biomedical results can be reproduced, that field needs to do work to justify the claim to be science as well.

One of the problems is that under the Faircloth Amendment, federal money can't be used to build new public housing, but it can be used to destroy public housing. http://alexisandjesse.tumblr.c...

So as a result we wind up spending $300 a night to put the poor in welfare hotels, when that same money could build ten times as much public housing.