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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacques Chitte who wrote (32324)	2/14/2011 1:34:49 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 36917

An apt description of the stack of financial obligations as exposed over the last few years, with each layer of turtle clicking the ticket. <I hope that earthquake insurers are themselves insured. Turtles all the way down.) > Thank goodness that great big turtle The Fed was sitting at the bottom, with taxpayers sitting below them to hold the whole stack up. Oh, actuarial mathematics: <Electricity to household customers in the USA is billed monthly, with the providers using actuarial-style math to provide a stable price for the billing period. The local energy company is a monopoly. > Well, if it's actuarial mathematicized like those risk-free CDO credit default swaps and mathematically brilliant derivatives, there are no worries then. We can't argue with maths, can we? How are those government guaranteed actuarially calculated sub-prime price-stabilized mortgages and the turtles stacked up on them coming along? Rolling blackouts? Even though they have done actuarial maths? Crikey. Looks like one of your turtles has gone walkabout. The local energy company is a monopoly. The long-suffering consumers should riot in the streets like Egyptians, demanding the right to install a Capstone turbine, some photo-voltaics and batteries, some insulation, some sweaters and ski jackets, some cellulose-ethanol lighting and heating. No longer should the government force everyone to use only the local energy company's electricity. For years I was lied to that the USA is free. Now I find the local energy company is holding everyone hostage. Why do Americans accept that? Be defiant - walk to Wal-Mart and buy a Made in China sweater and just to rub it in, get a big thick warm jacket too. To really rub salt in the wounds, get a load of insulation too to stop the heat escaping from the house and to keep it cool in summer. Heck, sell the house and move somewhere where you are legally allowed to use some other form of energy than what those actuarially incompetent monopolists insist that you buy from them against your will. How about tomatoes and corn? Can you get them to actuarially predict the weather and charge on fixed prices irrespective of whether there is weather or not? < For big customers, like factories or sports arenas, I can see a pay-as-you-go approach being more practical. For this it would make sense to me to give the big customers access to the larger wholesale providers. Let'm compete for the customer. But household electricity was built from the ground up to a different, more "socialist" model. With the assumption of a monopoly comes an obligation to the customers to provide advance notice of price fluctuations. > No tomato price increases without notification! Great idea. For little customers anyway. Big customers like Heinz can sing for it. You know the old saying - one day you socialists run out of opm to keep prices constant. Then you get blackouts, even if you have studied actuarial mathematics. You could throw in some linear regression analysis and 3rd order partial differential equations and the river will still run dry. Mqurice