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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (23889)	10/23/1997 9:40:00 PM
From: Thomas M.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

But aren't they goosing it now? Money supply is growing pretty rapidly, isn't it? Tom

To: Knighty Tin who wrote (23889)	10/24/1997 9:26:00 AM
From: yard_man	Respond to of 132070

I concur with your assessment of the electric utility industry from my own experience as a regulator. I've seen the "coming competition" used time after time by the electric utilities filing for rate cases in our state as an excuse to raise prices now. These folks just don't get it. I've also heard warnings from the electric utilities that the "coming competition" has the industry spooked and the proper investments in baseload capacity are not being made due to the fears -- I take that as a contrary indicator. Right now there is much excess capacity or there wouldn't be such a broad-based push for "competition" or re-regulation in the first place. If state commissions had taken their jobs seriously and really regulated these companies right in the first place -- there wouldn't be so much fat to be had! Here's hoping that the new situation really produces competition and doesn't plunge us into the situation we now have with providers of telco service --- How many more years will it take us to get to the point where we can truly compare the offerings of the companies on an "apples to apples" basis. Shame on the FCC. Shame on the state regulators. I recently went through a 6 month ordeal trying to get my long distance provider to simply bill me according to the tariff of the plan that I signed up for. Finally I gave up and had them switch me to another plan they could bill correctly (I hope). (I got hundreds of dollars of credits, but who knows whether I came out ahead with all the time I spent talking to these people -- their first response is usually, "what is it you don't understand?") This $%^# should be easy with computers, right? You want to talk about net negative return on IT, let's talk about public utilities.