Power company money flows to news sites that attack their critics
npr.org
npr.org
[0] https://calssa.org/blog/2021/6/5/debunking-the-cost-shift-de...
I wish we'd just charge/pay people the instantaneous market rate of power. And at noon on a sunny summer day in California, the market rate should be pretty close to zero. Nowadays, the grid needs more storage and peaking generation than it does more solar panels, so we should stop artificially incentivizing rooftop solar panels.
Edit - link to the dashboard
https://aemo.com.au/energy-systems/electricity/national-elec...
(I was thinking there must be a way to get the maximum number of kwh out of a day)
He said "You don't orient the panels for the sun, you orient them for PG&E!"
in other words, dump kwh and face them where the sun is at 3 pm onwards
(guess they used regulatory-capture to soak everyone again so even that doesn't matter)
Are you sure it's just that as more solar comes online, less natural gas gets burned and so profits for the investor-owned utility drop, while the price for electricity remains the same?
Homeowners should be paid lots of money if they can produce power at peak demand times, incentivizing the installation of storage. This is what it will take if we really want to turn down the natural gas generators.
https://theconversation.com/amp/whats-behind-15-000-electric...
Shielding people from the realities of supply and demand is what leads to overconsumption. Give them tools to control their consumption based on true market rates and everything will sort itself out.
Instead you have to look at the power disparity between sides, and whether you trust the values of each group.
How do brands establish trust? A ground-breaking new study from NPR and Neuro-Insight explores how a platform can transfer its trustworthiness to sponsors, what the subconscious can tell us about purchase intent and the effectiveness of NPR radio sponsorship vs. commercial TV news.
https://www.openculture.com/2014/09/conspiracy-theory-rock.h...
Media bias is a big problem.
Wait, what do you mean every major news organization in the US is owned by billionaires or media conglomerates, dang, we didn't free market hard enough.
Either way what we really have is capture of the government by a wealthy elite, and what they try to use the government for is to socialize risks and privatize profits. Whatever pure theories there are out there and no matter how much sense they make, the practical effects of private wealth concentration is elite control of the government.
not 'free of all restrictions'
The most "free" markets are not the ones with the least regulation, as some might presume, but the ones with just right amount of regulation.
Free market ≠ corporate capitalism. At least it didn’t use to be. Free market rhetoric is almost always using small businesses in their story telling, in which there is a lot of competition and an implicit level field. How to handle the vast concentration of power and wealth is basically outside the scope of most of these theorizers, which is unfortunate because it’s our biggest practical issue, imo.
The last time I pointed out the above in DC, I was called a communist and literally hounded out of the bar. (What is it with people who don't understand economics often also wanting to abuse the label of "service animal"? Someone should commission a study IMHO.)
I don’t deny that we’re either experiencing or about to experience late stage capitalism, but socialism tends to hit the late stage much faster as we’ve seen in the 20th century.
What makes you think that? I'm pretty sure socialism is an economic system not a political one
Just gotta fingers cross that kings and billionaires keep being low key foolish and somehow destroying their monopolization on power so we don't live in a hell world
I would also argue that democracy is inherently incompatible with socialism due to this extreme centralization of power. The proof lies with multiple failed experiments in the 20th century. Socialism isn’t some new, radical idea anymore. We know what late stage socialism looks like.
socialism is all about how you organize a business by giving workers control, rather than organizing with the employer/employee relationship in capitalism. the workers can vote for a CEO to make the big decisions if they want, or a creative director to design or whatever, but they can also have the power to fire that individual if they don't think they're doing a good job.
and to your point about centralized control — we already have that with a ton of industries in america. we already have it for the US military, etc. seeing capitalism as the free market and socialism as a planned economy is a false dichotomy.
”socialism, in its best form, is more democratic than capitalism. socialism != a CEO that controls everything… you put strong democratic systems in place to prevent the CEO or dictator.”
No, it is not more democratic than capitalism. You have one entity controlling all manufacturing and distribution. There is no competition. There are no other competing entities with competing powers. A free press doesn’t exist in a socialist state because there’s only a state press. There’s no independent press to check on the government and report back to the masses.
”your insurance company is controlled by all the workers rather than a CEO”
That’s called a small co-op, and that can exist in a capitalist system. That cannot exist in socialism because there’s only one entity, the state. Not even large co-ops that span more than one building can function like this
“the 20th century failures were more like dictatorships than socialism.”
This is a bad argument. Using your logic, I can say what we have now isn’t capitalism because we have lots of regulatory capture and corruption. “It’s more like cronyism.”
If we’re being honest. It’s still capitalism, just like all the failed experiments in the 20th century are still socialism. The reason why socialism devolves into communism is because of the extreme centralization of power.
“socialism is all about how you organize a business by giving workers control, rather than organizing with the employer/employee relationship in capitalism. the workers can vote for a CEO to make the big decisions if they want, or a creative director to design or whatever, but they can also have the power to fire that individual if they don't think they're doing a good job.”
No, it isn’t. That is idealist fantasy. It’s like saying in a democracy, the citizens vote on everything. We do not. The masses elect representatives to act as proxies. Similarly, in socialism the masses also have representatives or leaders. Why? Efficiency. Of course, this is a vector for corruption. Also, unlike in a capitalist system, there’s no competition to the state (no checks or balances from competing powers: private vs public), which greatly magnifies the effects of corruption.
“and to your point about centralized control — we already have that with a ton of industries in america. we already have it for the US military, etc. seeing capitalism as the free market and socialism as a planned economy is a false dichotomy.”
And to your point, I can come right back and say that capitalism can fix our current mess because what we have right now is not ideologically pure, theoretical capitalism /s
…just as you refuse to acknowledge the pile of failed 20th century collectivist experiments as socialist.
Your accusation is really comical since your arguments are way more cherry picked than mine. I at least acknowledge that what we have right now is indeed capitalism despite the lack of ideological purity.
> you missed a big point that there are tons of variations of how socialism can work.
We've literally had over a hundred years of political experiments with socialism. I've gone over all the variations that have existed in real life, with the longest running experiments being North Korea and Cuba.
> i define socialism as a way to organize a business where the workers control the business
The reason why this doesn't work is logistics. It's already incredibly hard just to get that co-op concept working in small company. (I believe it barely worked with a packaging company.) It's near impossible to even get that working for a co-op with locations nationwide. Our so-called national co-ops run more as a public benefit corporations than your strict view of a co-op.
> i define capitalism where an owner (or owners) control the business and they employee workers who have little or no control over the business.
In a system where even workers can own pieces of a corporation, that black and white view doesn't survive; especially when workers can strike, just leave for another company, or better yet start their own business. It is much harder for proletariats to influence the socialist state, than it is for employees to influence their bosses because capitalist systems have competing powers
> if we can't agree on those definitions then there's really no point in nitpicking each other's arguments.
When your entire argument falls apart from “nitpicking”, it means that it’s weak. Your argument is weak because it completely ignores history. We've done the socialism experiment for over a 100 years now. Ideas don’t live in an ivory vacuum. They need to survive reality. What we’ve seen in the 20th century is socialism in reality. If you ever get a chance to read the founding declarations of communist states, they are very similar to your co-op idealism.
What Confucius, Marx, Paine, Plato, and even Smith all failed to realize is that humans will always find a way to cheat the system and subvert it for their own gain. In HN speak, "individual nodes will always seek to optimize their own efficiency, at the cost of the system as a whole". Corruption doesn't disappear when you switch to socialism. Every known system regardless of whether it's capitalism or socialism will always eventually fail ie hit late stage, unless you can completely neutralize the human propensity to hack everything. Capitalism and socialism are both poor, temporary bandaids. Capitalism is only slightly better because it offers more flexibility.
All you have to read is Animal Farm
"We've literally had over a hundred years of political experiments with socialism." again, you're cherry picking failure to fit your bias and you are also ignoring history (aka, in your own words, you have a weak argument). we've had almost a hundred years of success of socialism in finnish countries, particularly norway. i already know that you're gonna argue that BuT nOrWaY iS cAPiTaLIsM!!, but that's not true. go look at norway's nearly 80% of wealth that is held in public ownership when you don't count housing...that is a very clear success in history. so, you're right, "What we’ve seen in the 20th century is socialism in reality." we've seen it work in reality and we've seen it fail in reality. in the same way that we've seen capitalism work in reality, and we've seen it fail in reality.
and again, cherry picking with the "i believe it barely worked with a packaging company" ignores the many, many countless examples where that organization model has worked and has proven to be more resilient than a capitalist enterprise. very weak argument, especially because you say "i believe" but you aren't sure because that it is a fact, you just offhandedly heard that or something? i would share more examples with you but you clearly have no desire to learn and just want to win an argument.
"Corruption doesn't disappear when you switch to socialism." you're right, but you're ignoring the fact that socialism, in it's right form, is a democratic system. maybe i'm too optimistic, but that knowledge is a lousy reason to not setup a system of democratic to safeguard against this truth. the ability to hack democracy is one of those questions that keep me up at night, and i see it as a challenge and problem to solve rather than something to cede to (which should get the HN crowd excited). clearly this truth of corruption is abused in capitalism and it's exacerbated since we don't have the safeguard of a democratic process to prevent these abuses. at least with socialism, there's democracy.
EDIT: also, based on your argument style, i think that you might say, "but you said that socialism is a cooperative model and not norway. GOTCHA!" if that's the case, then LOL because you're missing the point and proving that you're only trying to win an argument.
No, you didn’t say that, but you keep using similar logic to ignore all of the socialist messes in the 20th century ie “No, that’s not socialism. That’s a dictatorship.” I’m just showing you how ridiculous that argument is.
> “again, you're cherry picking failure to fit your bias and you are also ignoring history (aka, in your own words, you have a weak argument). we've had almost a hundred years of success of socialism in finnish countries, particularly norway. i already know that you're gonna argue that BuT nOrWaY iS cAPiTaLIsM!!, but that's not true.”
I love how you keep accusing me of “cherry picking”, when you’re the one primarily doing it. For the record, there are only three Scandinavian countries (or four if you count Finland) while there are over 40 countries that were or are still socialist.
> “ we've had almost a hundred years of success of socialism in finnish countries, particularly norway.”
Now you’re cherry picking one out of three countries, with a ridiculous point that is completely untrue.
Norway might have a well funded socialist program, but that’s different from having a socialist economic system.
“According to a 2018-report from Statistics Norway, ten per cent of the population in the country owned 60 per cent of the wealth. The one per cent richest in the country owned nearly 21 per cent of all the wealth.”
https://sciencenorway.no/economics-equality-finans/is-econom...
Countries with socialist economic systems also don’t have stock markets.
> ”go look at norway's nearly 80% of wealth that is held in public ownership when you don't count housing...that is a very clear success in history. so, you're right”
You’re proving my point for me that it’s ridiculous to call Norway socialist, and you’re being hypocritical for cherry picking.
Yes, it's totally reasonable to overlook an important fact to make your argument work /s
Real estate is a huge asset, and has been considered wealth for thousands of years.
> ”EDIT: also, based on your argument style, i think that you might say, "but you said that socialism is a cooperative model and not norway. GOTCHA!" if that's the case, then LOL because you're missing the point and proving that you're only trying to win an argument.”
I’m not missing any point. You're just ignoring facts. I also find it funny that you’re self aware of just how flawed your argument is. Yet you still can’t admit to being wrong. Co-operatives barely work in a single location, let alone scale up nationally. Also it’s really ironic how you can comfortably loosen your definition of socialism to cherry pick.
> ”we’ve seen it work in reality and we've seen it fail in reality.”
No, we haven’t. The Scandinavian countries are all capitalist systems.
> ”ignores the many, many countless examples where that organization model has worked and has proven to be more resilient than a capitalist enterprise.”
There are so few of them across several continents. Moreover, most if not all of them are tiny.
> ”I would share more examples with you but you clearly have no desire to learn and just want to win an argument.”
You mean that you’re going to cherry pick yet again, while continually accusing me of the same thing? There’s barely a thousand of them compared to millions of private businesses.
> “you’re right, but you're ignoring the fact that socialism, in it's right form, is a democratic system.”
That may be its “right” form in your mind, but that’s not how it evolves in reality due to the extreme centralization of power. Virtually all of them didn’t even incorporate voting for the masses into their governments.
> ”maybe i'm too optimistic, but that knowledge is a lousy reason to not setup a system of democratic to safeguard against this truth”
That knowledge is called studying history to avoid repeating the dozens of failures in the 20th century. Like I said, socialism is no longer a new experiment. We know what late stage socialism looks like, and how fast it takes to get there. For many countries, these systems couldn’t even last a 100 years.
> “the ability to hack democracy is one of those questions that keep me up at night, and i see it as a challenge and problem to solve rather than something to cede to (which should get the HN crowd excited).”
I am not ceding anything. You’re just ignoring a fundamental truth. Capitalism is flawed, but it’s still better than socialism because it handles corruption better due to its focus on decentralization by design.
> ”clearly this truth of corruption is abused in capitalism and it's exacerbated since we don't have the safeguard of a democratic process to prevent these abuses.”
You still haven’t countered my argument as to why corruption spreads much faster and is more pervasive in a socialist system as opposed to a capitalist one. If you need reminding why, it’s because socialist systems centralize power much more than capitalist systems. Essentially saying that it will just magically work is not a good argument.
> ”at least with socialism, there's democracy.”
Out of close to 50 socialist systems in the 20th century, only one of them was a democracy, and I don’t even think it lasted a year. What you wrote is baseless and untrue.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/mobile/000/034/711/Scree...
If you can’t properly explain your position within HN comments, it means that you don’t really understand what you believe in or that it’s really flawed. No, I’m not emailing you. If there’s anyone who’s ignorant of anything in this discussion, it’s you. You have no knowledge of the history of socialism despite your claims. I’m confident that you don’t even fully understand what socialism is based on your comments.
You should probably re-read Animal Farm which is notable work from a notable socialist
...about how Leninism and related systems, despite superficial rhetoric borrowed from socialism, were not socialism, and looped back around to be equivalent to the capitalism that socialists oppose. (And, more broadly, about how people in practice could continue to maintain faith in those and other systems in which the nominal ideals of a revolution were utterly betrayed by revolutionary leadership.)
It’s a flawed argument that you guys keep parroting. Leninism is another word for late stage socialism.
Your comment also shows that you failed to read my previous comments. Why bother replying if you’re just going to ignore what I wrote?
because we need to tell you that you don't know what you're talking about
it's clear that you're the one who doesn't know what socialism is. this is a pointless discussion and you have no idea what you're talking about and didn't really respond to any of my arguments in good faith. i'll say it again because it went over your head in my very first comment: state dictatorships with nationalized industries are not socialism.
i've been properly explaining my beliefs but you've just been misinterpreting my claims and ignoring what i say because you're bad at debating. it's impossible to argue with somebody who says that everything you say is wrong (despite the claims being true). it's beating somebody at an argument through gaslighting.
this is a waste of my time. i'm not putting in the effort to write my arguments better — this is like arguing with a racist about why the confederate flag is a hateful symbol.
You already lost the argument multiple times already since you’ve relied on personal attacks as opposed to attacking terrible arguments like yours
Every media is biased. The free market solution is to allow anyone to be a media company, so the various viewpoints are available.
> we didn't free market hard enough
You being free to post your views here is evidence the free market is working.
I also think that implicit in what you state, is a request for greater governance to manage the free market.
If you ask me, what you really want is less government oversight.
You may respond to say that we will be run by robber barons, if we have even less oversight, or free information.
To which I would respond that we are already run by (the worst) robber barons who currently maintain their control via their control of the governance apparatus, and the illusion many hold that we have anything like a free market. It's just that we are suffering under our illusion so much, that we don't even recognise the problem!
If you ask me, we actually live under a form of disguised fascism, where governments and corporations work together and pretend we have democracy and a free market. They use their mouth pieces (media, education) to misinform us.
* Ex-Florida senator charged in fake candidate scheme (https://apnews.com/article/miami-senate-elections-florida-el...)
* Florida’s dark money playbook: How ‘ghost’ candidate scheme revealed secretive political tactics (https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/os-ne-dark-money-ghost-...)
* Firm working for FPL took control of news site, let execs influence coverage, records show (https://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/florida/os-ne-fpl-matrix-c...)
* Nonprofit funded with FPL cash backed DeSantis’ 2018 campaign (https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/09/06/no...)
* Joel Greenberg alleged far-reaching public corruption in Florida jailhouse interview (https://www.tampabay.com/news/florida-politics/2022/09/07/jo...)
* Leaked: US power companies secretly spending millions to protect profits and fight clean energy (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jul/27/leaked-u...)
* Tom Fanning Southern Company Matrix Scandal: What don’t we know? (https://www.energyandpolicy.org/tom-fanning-southern-company...)
* FPL’s extreme winter plan would create 'unnecessary' costs to consumers, critics say (https://www.palmbeachpost.com/story/business/2022/06/28/flor...)
* $10B+ wasted on completely failed SC nuclear plant, which basically led to its collapse and subsequent buyout by out-of-state (Dominion) utility https://apnews.com/article/sc-state-wire-south-carolina-busi...
* GA version is still lurching to completion... at cost now approaching $30B https://www.ajc.com/news/as-vogtles-nuclear-units-move-towar...
https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/local/2022/06/24/fpl...
Entirely unsurprising who the top private bidder was[2].
[1] https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/local/2022/03/07/for...
[2] https://www.jacksonville.com/story/news/local/2020/08/26/nex...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tennessee_Valley_Authority
The coal/rail/electric supply chain is a breeding ground for all sorts of shenanigans for all sorts of people. Plenty of drunken uncles have bullshit jobs in the utility and rail space. That culture permeates into new projects as well.
In the Federal space, that kind of crap doesn't fly for long.
This is just scratching the surface. To any normal person this sounds like a massive scandal on its own but this is just what they've allowed to get out. The corruption in state and local government in the states served by Southern Company's electric utilities would make Putin blush
For example, Alabama Power's former CEO is on the board of directors of Regions Financial Corporation, based in Alabama, and a top 25 bank in the US
Fill in the blank, tautology.
It appears that a significant chunk of the local online news market in these regions is only financially viable based on pay-for-coverage arrangements with moneyed interests.
So, I agree, lobbyists gonna lobby. And some of the lines in the article are pearl clutching. (GASP a utility company donated to a SuperPAC that opposed a ballot initiative? Yeah, that's normal. You might not like Citizens United, but that's just something they did, not something they're "accused" of.)
But to the extent that you have a crop of local-interest news and politics websites that present as objective but, based on the quotes in the articles, wouldn't be able to exist without opaque financial arrangements that slant coverage... yeah, it's a genuine media story. Less about the power company, and more about journalism. (Which, indeed, Folkenflik is NPR's media reporter.)
Alabama has high electric rates, an unusually profitable utility company, and this arrangement has proven durable. For me, that's a good enough "so what" for a New York based media reporter to condescend to the journalistic ethics of these Southern publications. It's not just academic; it's harming people.
Newspapers also have ethical limits. Ethical limits aren't legally enforceable, but for the most part major newspapers don't allow pharma, hospitals, defense, etc. to cross those lines. There are always exceptions, I'm sure, but the newspapers still cling to the hope that they'll be seen as accurate rather than simply shilling for whoever pays them. It undercuts their entire mission.
So this isn't the same as the usual round of lobbying. Lobbying is a legal and regulated activity, a way for groups to coordinate access to politicians and plan their public relations. That always has the risk of being shady, but it's more above-board than most people imagine.
Except when the rules are broken, and in that case it might be a crime. That's newsworthy.
Your framing is way worse. It shows nihilism and fits downright criminal/corrupt behavior under the much more neutral term "lobbying".
Even though it's strange to call people who bribe news outlets rather than politicians "lobbyists," because that sort of begs the question.
May as well be in Canada.