June 2016

Gaming the Rankings on the Texas Power to Choose Website: Tpuc’s Simple Solution

The Texas Public Utility Commission has implemented a fix to the “gaming the rankings” problem. The fix itself can be gamed a bit – is already being gamed a bit – but the offers gaming the fix are less misleading than before. It is an improvement. Here is what is going on: Creative retail electric …

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How Cool is This? Accelerated Geologic Weathering by Creating Rocks from Carbon Dioxide

Geologic weathering is an important, but slow, part of the carbon cycle in which rocks essentially absorb carbon dioxide. A research team in Iceland has invented a method of creating rocks using carbon dioxide, water, and basalt rock. A chemical reaction among them enables the basalt to absorb the carbon dioxide. A Washington Post article …

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Pencil or Peach, Either Way, a Marvel of Decentralized Coordination

Many of you are probably already familiar with Leonard Read’s famous 1958 story I, Pencil. Told through the eyes of a pencil, it describes the process of producing a pencil and how many people are involved in doing so, but without ever having met or consciously, deliberately set out a plan under the control of …

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Texas Puc Continues Look at “Gaming the Rankings” Problem on State Website. Here’s My Solution.

Last week the commissioners of the Texas Public Utility Commission once again complained about retail power suppliers who gamed the ranking system on the state’s retail electric power shopping website www.powertochoose.org. This post summarizes the problem and then offers a simple solution. From the Houston Chronicle: Texas’ utility commissioners complained Thursday about confusing or misleading …

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