I'm a hack historian -- at best -- but my recollection is that the federal government had to begin stretching its enumerated powers pretty much from day one. The Postal Clause was an early source of conflict; the Constitution says that the federal government can establish post offices and postal roads. There were considerable arguments over whether "establish" in the case of roads meant actually building them, or simply designating them. There was considerable argument over whether establishing post offices included any sort of delivery service. And whether transport by ship was covered.
In hindsight, the federal government was too weak to deal with the issues of that day, far too weak to deal with the issues in a country with increasing mobility, and the amendment hurdle was too high. I firmly believe that the Constitution will never be amended again short of a convention that lays out the terms for a partition of the country.
I didn't dare mention it until the project was done, for fear of jinxing it, but now... replace the 15-20 year old garbage disposal in the kitchen. Getting the old one out was actually the more difficult half of the job. The new one is amazingly quiet.
It's not a vest, it's a Hawaiian shirt worn unbuttoned over a dark t-shirt (I admit that it somehow gives a vest-like impression).
I have fond memories of Hawaiian shirts. Years ago, the marketing department began calling their casual Fridays "dress like an engineer day," which meant jeans and rolled-up sleeves. We lab rats escalated by making Fridays "Hawaiian shirt day", the louder the shirt the better.
Pricing for cable TV is... interesting. Insane. Possibly illegal. Sometimes the cable operator pays the content company (eg, ESPN). Sometimes the content company pays the cable operator (eg, those obscure channels a hundred slots up from the things you recognize that hope to become popular enough that the cable operator will start paying them). Sometimes the cable operator pays the content company a large fee, but gets it back in the form of payments on loans or "for services rendered", with the net result that money is moved from one tax/regulatory category to another. Sometimes there are side deals to split advertising revenues. Historically, there were so many cross-ownership arrangements that sometimes the deals were structured to provide particular individuals with what amounted to money-laundering services on their cash flow.
John Malone (who earned assorted degrees including a PhD in an applied math field before he got into the cable business) was notorious for structuring deals that no one could understand but that eventually made him a billionaire. Conventional wisdom became "If John offers you a deal, demand cash and nothing bigger than a twenty."
I don't disagree with you, and PJM has had a demand response program for quite some time in states that allow it. That arrangement is generally limited to large individual customers who can lower or raise* their demand on a day-ahead or hour-ahead basis, rather than aggregations of small customers. There are inefficiencies to that arrangement: the PJM ISO may be paying more than they need to for load shedding (since the incentives are fixed well in advance), and sometimes the best place to shed load for reliability purposes is in a state that doesn't have a program. Order 745's purpose was to address those.
I found out today that since the Appeals Court ruling, EPSA has filed suit challenging the entire concept of an ISO using demand management. PJM's initial analysis -- done because it may be important to shareholders of various sorts -- says that that's a possibly plausible interpretation of the ruling.
* The amicus brief I mentioned in a comment above points out that sometimes a large customer can increase demand more quickly than a generator can decrease supply, which may be important in grid reliability.
This amicus brief from a batch of grid reliability engineers was accepted by the Court in the "in support of neither party" category. It provides a very good, concise explanation of the role of demand management in maintaining reliability in the grid from an engineering -- rather than legal -- perspective. When I read it with my legislative analyst hat on, though, it seems to me to have a pronounced "demand management is a critical resource for the grid operators, who function in the wholesale side of things, and it would be a good idea if you didn't take the tool away from them" flavor.
More anecdata about the subsequent generations... Some years back, the large telecom/cable company I worked for did field studies in East LA with respect to whether the Spanish-language channel bundle met the needs of the subscribers. Essentially all parents wanted more Spanish-language news channels so that there was one from whatever "old country" they had come from: Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, whatever. They also all wanted music and cartoon channels in English rather than Spanish so the kids would be forced to know English.
As it turned out, the subscribers didn't get what they asked for. There was too much money to be made by, for example, putting Spanish-language MTV into the bundle -- MTV would cut deals on the per-sub fees for the English-language content in exchange for the bundling so they could sell more Spanish-language advertising.
Boehner's announcement yesterday that he will stay on until a replacement is selected is interesting. Josh Marshall at TPM, among others, has suggested a conspiracy in which Boehner will now trot out all of the bills that the Freedom Caucus hates and pass them with the more moderate Republicans, plus Democrats as needed. Josh is clearly tongue in cheek about it; not clear that all of the others are.
As Speaker under the current rules, Boehner is required to provide a list of members that would serve as Speaker pro tempore so that business can proceed if the office becomes vacant. Boehner has provided such a list to the House Clerk, who does not divulge its contents. I admit to being curious about whose names are on it.
When Boehner announced his resignation more than a month in advance, I said that I thought it was so the inevitable ugly fight over a successor could proceed largely behind closed doors over the course of October. As compared to having the ugly fight out in the open, which would happen if a "vacate the chair" motion passed. Then he turned around and scheduled a caucus vote for the 8th, before enough of the dissidents could be bought off compromises could be made, so the fight has spilled out into the open anyway. Shades of Casey Stengel's "Can't anyone here play this game?" lament.
At some point, if things are bad enough, anonymous users will be excluded from "civilized" forums. Note that "anonymous" doesn't mean that your real identity is necessarily known. Despicable people may be able to create a civil online persona; so long as they conform to that, well, "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog." Unless you break your cover. Maintaining a facade is hard, and most people won't bother for long.
Reputation will, of course, be a relative thing. My reputation (karma) at Slashdot is excellent; here, people at least put up with me; at Red State, I'm probably regarded as one of the crazies. Real life is much the same -- in Denver, CO I'm probably somewhat right of center; in Omaha, NE somewhat left; for most of the region between the two, I'm a left-wing bomb-thrower.
It took practically forever, but the FERC did eventually find in California's interest. Unfortunately, by that time most of the bad guys had declared bankruptcy and so California got nothing. A moderately interesting theoretical outcome is that post California, and the constant tweaking that PJM has to do, Cato has actually published papers arguing that the overhead costs of ensuring that the wholesale market works properly are at least as large as the inefficiencies of vertically-integrated utilities.
I am blessed by living in an electricity "market" that is so geographically isolated that one company is the market on the utility side, so they have an exemption from many of the rules. As a consequence, my utility can make deals to buy all of the (highly variable) output from a wind farm at a fixed price for 20 years, and under that condition the wind farm can price its electricity below the cost of new natural gas-fired generation. But it's an unusual situation that doesn't occur in very many places.
The generators' argument -- and this is the way the Appeals Court went -- is that payments for demand reduction is a retail transaction, so FERC has no authority over it and Order 745 that explicitly blesses demand reduction as a commodity in the wholesale markets is improper. Not addressed, as I read it, is whether the PJM ISO can create a demand reduction market on its own. That's presumably a matter for another day -- with the argument that if FERC can't regulate it, then there can't be a wholesale market in it.
My reasoning for CJ Roberts is that the generators are being stupid. They will eventually lose this issue and look really bad doing it, so better in his mind to smack them now.
If I may... the internet was created as an experiment that included "Rules should be implemented by the end users if they want them; the network won't implement more than the bare minimum." From the perspective of connecting things, and generating new applications, this has turned out to be an immensely powerful concept. From a content perspective, perhaps not so much. In the early 1990s, it was far from clear that TCP/IP would be the commercial winner; certainly the big telecom companies were opposed to the idea. As were the Compuserves and AOLs, who were dead set on the walled garden approach. And yet, in effect, the anarchists won. There must be reasons for that. Despite the bomb-throwers running loose, I regard it as preferable to the alternative. Of course, I'm not the managing editor :^)
I suspect that at some point, "reputation" will become a common concept. Tod Kelly gets a thumbs-up from me, assuming others trust my judgement. Crazies will be excluded. There are a number of precursors that have to come first, though. Perhaps the toughest one will be that enough people have to decide to give up anonymity.
Almost all of the time that I've lived in the Front Range Colorado urban corridor, it has been a twisted bit of humor to refer to "the official bird of the Front Range, the construction crane." These days they are back in full force, not just in Denver but in all of the surrounding suburbs. Even in the worst of the last recession, when the total number of jobs was declining, on the order of 50K people per year were moving in.
Although I admit, coming from a tech background that included lots of real-time software, the mental adjustment that made it easiest for me was to simply say, "Oh, spaghetti code. I can deal with that."
People are very found of objecting to things because it’s “X pages” where X is, presumably, too many.
People don't understand that statute, either federal or state, is a very large integrated whole. As a non-attorney joining the legislative staff in Colorado, this was a lesson I had to learn quickly. Something that sounds simple -- people of the same sex can get married -- affects that body of statute in a large number of places. So what started out as a simple concept -- people of the same sex can get married -- requires that the bill change statutory language regarding inheritance, tax privileges, automatic power of attorney, immunity from testimony, relationships to children, and on and on and on. All of the existing statute on the subject contains language that assumes one man, one woman, and has to be fixed.
Before reading the comments, I chose #1 as the fake (and still do). #1 doesn't seem to be a conspiracy per se -- it doesn't have any specific group that spoke Modern English in historical times and has concealed that for nefarious reasons down through the centuries.
It's no harder than the judgement calls the officials already make on holding and pass interference all the time.
This is not an original thought. The NCAA makes the point in all of its explanatory material about the targeting foul that the intent is get coaches to insist their players use wrap-up tackling.
Require tacklers to make an honest effort to wrap up the ball carrier (I believe this is the rule in rugby). No more just running into the guy at full speed. Since this disadvantages the defense (again), make up for it some by getting rid of the stiff-arm.
If you take the 5-yard "chuck" rule and apply it to the length of the field...
Can I push the receiver out of bounds, making him ineligible? When does it become pass interference? This would pretty much take "timing routes" out of the playbook. As people other than me have written, Pete Carroll at Seattle has made a standard practice out of extending the five-yard contact to 7-10 yards on every play, daring the officials to call it, and it's made their pass defense very effective.
Somehow, today is the first time that I've seen Chrysler's Miami Vice commercials for their muscle cars. While I have fond memories* of the period when Vice was new, I have to admit that I have two reactions to a commercial that seems targeted at my demographic: (a) 700 hp and a six-speed manual, combined with my present-day reflexes, seems like a bad combination, and (b) my penis still does all of the things that it's supposed to, thank you.
* Infant/toddler son, suffering from the respiratory-disease-of-the-month, seemed inclined to go to sleep snuggled into my neck as we walked/danced to the Jan Hammer and Phil Collins music.
During the three sessions that I was on the legislative staff in Colorado, I set aside 30 minutes to read in bed strictly for entertainment before I rolled over and went to sleep. I credit that with maintaining my sanity (okay, my wife may dispute whether I actually maintained it). The only exceptions were the occasional night when I got home at 12:30 AM and had to be back at the Capitol to staff a committee meeting at 7:30 AM.
On “Really Professor George, et al.?”
I'm a hack historian -- at best -- but my recollection is that the federal government had to begin stretching its enumerated powers pretty much from day one. The Postal Clause was an early source of conflict; the Constitution says that the federal government can establish post offices and postal roads. There were considerable arguments over whether "establish" in the case of roads meant actually building them, or simply designating them. There was considerable argument over whether establishing post offices included any sort of delivery service. And whether transport by ship was covered.
In hindsight, the federal government was too weak to deal with the issues of that day, far too weak to deal with the issues in a country with increasing mobility, and the amendment hurdle was too high. I firmly believe that the Constitution will never be amended again short of a convention that lays out the terms for a partition of the country.
On “Weekend!”
I didn't dare mention it until the project was done, for fear of jinxing it, but now... replace the 15-20 year old garbage disposal in the kitchen. Getting the old one out was actually the more difficult half of the job. The new one is amazingly quiet.
On “Linky Friday #134: Shoot The Skunk”
It's not a vest, it's a Hawaiian shirt worn unbuttoned over a dark t-shirt (I admit that it somehow gives a vest-like impression).
I have fond memories of Hawaiian shirts. Years ago, the marketing department began calling their casual Fridays "dress like an engineer day," which meant jeans and rolled-up sleeves. We lab rats escalated by making Fridays "Hawaiian shirt day", the louder the shirt the better.
"
Pricing for cable TV is... interesting. Insane. Possibly illegal. Sometimes the cable operator pays the content company (eg, ESPN). Sometimes the content company pays the cable operator (eg, those obscure channels a hundred slots up from the things you recognize that hope to become popular enough that the cable operator will start paying them). Sometimes the cable operator pays the content company a large fee, but gets it back in the form of payments on loans or "for services rendered", with the net result that money is moved from one tax/regulatory category to another. Sometimes there are side deals to split advertising revenues. Historically, there were so many cross-ownership arrangements that sometimes the deals were structured to provide particular individuals with what amounted to money-laundering services on their cash flow.
John Malone (who earned assorted degrees including a PhD in an applied math field before he got into the cable business) was notorious for structuring deals that no one could understand but that eventually made him a billionaire. Conventional wisdom became "If John offers you a deal, demand cash and nothing bigger than a twenty."
On “Electricity in the New SCOTUS Season”
I don't disagree with you, and PJM has had a demand response program for quite some time in states that allow it. That arrangement is generally limited to large individual customers who can lower or raise* their demand on a day-ahead or hour-ahead basis, rather than aggregations of small customers. There are inefficiencies to that arrangement: the PJM ISO may be paying more than they need to for load shedding (since the incentives are fixed well in advance), and sometimes the best place to shed load for reliability purposes is in a state that doesn't have a program. Order 745's purpose was to address those.
I found out today that since the Appeals Court ruling, EPSA has filed suit challenging the entire concept of an ISO using demand management. PJM's initial analysis -- done because it may be important to shareholders of various sorts -- says that that's a possibly plausible interpretation of the ruling.
* The amicus brief I mentioned in a comment above points out that sometimes a large customer can increase demand more quickly than a generator can decrease supply, which may be important in grid reliability.
"
This amicus brief from a batch of grid reliability engineers was accepted by the Court in the "in support of neither party" category. It provides a very good, concise explanation of the role of demand management in maintaining reliability in the grid from an engineering -- rather than legal -- perspective. When I read it with my legislative analyst hat on, though, it seems to me to have a pronounced "demand management is a critical resource for the grid operators, who function in the wholesale side of things, and it would be a good idea if you didn't take the tool away from them" flavor.
On “Linky Friday #134: Shoot The Skunk”
More anecdata about the subsequent generations... Some years back, the large telecom/cable company I worked for did field studies in East LA with respect to whether the Spanish-language channel bundle met the needs of the subscribers. Essentially all parents wanted more Spanish-language news channels so that there was one from whatever "old country" they had come from: Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, whatever. They also all wanted music and cartoon channels in English rather than Spanish so the kids would be forced to know English.
As it turned out, the subscribers didn't get what they asked for. There was too much money to be made by, for example, putting Spanish-language MTV into the bundle -- MTV would cut deals on the per-sub fees for the English-language content in exchange for the bundling so they could sell more Spanish-language advertising.
"
Boehner's announcement yesterday that he will stay on until a replacement is selected is interesting. Josh Marshall at TPM, among others, has suggested a conspiracy in which Boehner will now trot out all of the bills that the Freedom Caucus hates and pass them with the more moderate Republicans, plus Democrats as needed. Josh is clearly tongue in cheek about it; not clear that all of the others are.
As Speaker under the current rules, Boehner is required to provide a list of members that would serve as Speaker pro tempore so that business can proceed if the office becomes vacant. Boehner has provided such a list to the House Clerk, who does not divulge its contents. I admit to being curious about whose names are on it.
"
When Boehner announced his resignation more than a month in advance, I said that I thought it was so the inevitable ugly fight over a successor could proceed largely behind closed doors over the course of October. As compared to having the ugly fight out in the open, which would happen if a "vacate the chair" motion passed. Then he turned around and scheduled a caucus vote for the 8th, before
enough of the dissidents could be bought offcompromises could be made, so the fight has spilled out into the open anyway. Shades of Casey Stengel's "Can't anyone here play this game?" lament.On “Stop Making Excuses for the Internet”
At some point, if things are bad enough, anonymous users will be excluded from "civilized" forums. Note that "anonymous" doesn't mean that your real identity is necessarily known. Despicable people may be able to create a civil online persona; so long as they conform to that, well, "on the internet nobody knows you're a dog." Unless you break your cover. Maintaining a facade is hard, and most people won't bother for long.
Reputation will, of course, be a relative thing. My reputation (karma) at Slashdot is excellent; here, people at least put up with me; at Red State, I'm probably regarded as one of the crazies. Real life is much the same -- in Denver, CO I'm probably somewhat right of center; in Omaha, NE somewhat left; for most of the region between the two, I'm a left-wing bomb-thrower.
On “Electricity in the New SCOTUS Season”
It took practically forever, but the FERC did eventually find in California's interest. Unfortunately, by that time most of the bad guys had declared bankruptcy and so California got nothing. A moderately interesting theoretical outcome is that post California, and the constant tweaking that PJM has to do, Cato has actually published papers arguing that the overhead costs of ensuring that the wholesale market works properly are at least as large as the inefficiencies of vertically-integrated utilities.
I am blessed by living in an electricity "market" that is so geographically isolated that one company is the market on the utility side, so they have an exemption from many of the rules. As a consequence, my utility can make deals to buy all of the (highly variable) output from a wind farm at a fixed price for 20 years, and under that condition the wind farm can price its electricity below the cost of new natural gas-fired generation. But it's an unusual situation that doesn't occur in very many places.
"
The generators' argument -- and this is the way the Appeals Court went -- is that payments for demand reduction is a retail transaction, so FERC has no authority over it and Order 745 that explicitly blesses demand reduction as a commodity in the wholesale markets is improper. Not addressed, as I read it, is whether the PJM ISO can create a demand reduction market on its own. That's presumably a matter for another day -- with the argument that if FERC can't regulate it, then there can't be a wholesale market in it.
My reasoning for CJ Roberts is that the generators are being stupid. They will eventually lose this issue and look really bad doing it, so better in his mind to smack them now.
On “Stop Making Excuses for the Internet”
If I may... the internet was created as an experiment that included "Rules should be implemented by the end users if they want them; the network won't implement more than the bare minimum." From the perspective of connecting things, and generating new applications, this has turned out to be an immensely powerful concept. From a content perspective, perhaps not so much. In the early 1990s, it was far from clear that TCP/IP would be the commercial winner; certainly the big telecom companies were opposed to the idea. As were the Compuserves and AOLs, who were dead set on the walled garden approach. And yet, in effect, the anarchists won. There must be reasons for that. Despite the bomb-throwers running loose, I regard it as preferable to the alternative. Of course, I'm not the managing editor :^)
I suspect that at some point, "reputation" will become a common concept. Tod Kelly gets a thumbs-up from me, assuming others trust my judgement. Crazies will be excluded. There are a number of precursors that have to come first, though. Perhaps the toughest one will be that enough people have to decide to give up anonymity.
On “My Friend with the Midlife Crisis”
Really, really good, Rufus.
On “Housing and its Discontents.”
Almost all of the time that I've lived in the Front Range Colorado urban corridor, it has been a twisted bit of humor to refer to "the official bird of the Front Range, the construction crane." These days they are back in full force, not just in Denver but in all of the surrounding suburbs. Even in the worst of the last recession, when the total number of jobs was declining, on the order of 50K people per year were moving in.
On “Jerry Brown: Priorities”
Although I admit, coming from a tech background that included lots of real-time software, the mental adjustment that made it easiest for me was to simply say, "Oh, spaghetti code. I can deal with that."
"
People are very found of objecting to things because it’s “X pages” where X is, presumably, too many.
People don't understand that statute, either federal or state, is a very large integrated whole. As a non-attorney joining the legislative staff in Colorado, this was a lesson I had to learn quickly. Something that sounds simple -- people of the same sex can get married -- affects that body of statute in a large number of places. So what started out as a simple concept -- people of the same sex can get married -- requires that the bill change statutory language regarding inheritance, tax privileges, automatic power of attorney, immunity from testimony, relationships to children, and on and on and on. All of the existing statute on the subject contains language that assumes one man, one woman, and has to be fixed.
On “A Crank Theory Challenge”
Before reading the comments, I chose #1 as the fake (and still do). #1 doesn't seem to be a conspiracy per se -- it doesn't have any specific group that spoke Modern English in historical times and has concealed that for nefarious reasons down through the centuries.
On “Linky Friday #133: Body, Mind, & Spirit”
It's no harder than the judgement calls the officials already make on holding and pass interference all the time.
This is not an original thought. The NCAA makes the point in all of its explanatory material about the targeting foul that the intent is get coaches to insist their players use wrap-up tackling.
"
Require tacklers to make an honest effort to wrap up the ball carrier (I believe this is the rule in rugby). No more just running into the guy at full speed. Since this disadvantages the defense (again), make up for it some by getting rid of the stiff-arm.
"
If you take the 5-yard "chuck" rule and apply it to the length of the field...
Can I push the receiver out of bounds, making him ineligible? When does it become pass interference? This would pretty much take "timing routes" out of the playbook. As people other than me have written, Pete Carroll at Seattle has made a standard practice out of extending the five-yard contact to 7-10 yards on every play, daring the officials to call it, and it's made their pass defense very effective.
On “Sunday!”
Somehow, today is the first time that I've seen Chrysler's Miami Vice commercials for their muscle cars. While I have fond memories* of the period when Vice was new, I have to admit that I have two reactions to a commercial that seems targeted at my demographic: (a) 700 hp and a six-speed manual, combined with my present-day reflexes, seems like a bad combination, and (b) my penis still does all of the things that it's supposed to, thank you.
* Infant/toddler son, suffering from the respiratory-disease-of-the-month, seemed inclined to go to sleep snuggled into my neck as we walked/danced to the Jan Hammer and Phil Collins music.
On “UFOs: The Atlantis Hypothetical”
Obligatory xkcd.
On “Shakespeare in American Politics”
During the three sessions that I was on the legislative staff in Colorado, I set aside 30 minutes to read in bed strictly for entertainment before I rolled over and went to sleep. I credit that with maintaining my sanity (okay, my wife may dispute whether I actually maintained it). The only exceptions were the occasional night when I got home at 12:30 AM and had to be back at the Capitol to staff a committee meeting at 7:30 AM.
On “Maybe most people don’t care about Trigger Warnings?”
Well, one of my goals early in my tech career was to write a Bell Labs Technical Memorandum in verse. Never got that done.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.