Michael Giberson From Regulation 2.0: Frustrated by a federal appeals court ruling that the FCC had no authority to second-guess Comcast’s treatment of customers and under pressure from the Obama Administration to impose a net neutrality regime (whatever that truly means) on the broadband industry, FCC Chair Julius Genachowski is now asserting the commission’s right …
Michael Giberson From Aguanomics: I was talking to a friend, and he mentioned that he’d hired an extra guy under the stimulus program. “Yeah, they are paying 80 percent of his wages and overhead. It’s a win-win for him and me…” “…but then I fired another guy; he just cost too much compared to the …
Anecdotal Evidence on Employment Effects from Stimulus Spending Read More »
Michael Giberson I don’t know the answer, so someone let me know if you do, but has the President of the United States ever declared a state of emergency over a local water main break before? According the the announcement, “The President’s action authorizes … Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to coordinate all disaster relief …
Michael Giberson A significant water main break affecting over 2 million people in the suburban Boston area has lead the Massachusetts Governor Patrick Duval to declare a state of emergency. A boil water order is also in effect. Subsequently, the Governor directed the state’s Division of Standards “to closely monitor bottled water prices in areas affected …
Is Price Gouging on Bottled Water Against the Law in Massachusetts? Read More »
Michael Giberson The Los Angeles Times has the story: “A real-world battle over virtual-property rights.” Apparently virtual world developer/promoter/host Linden Labs has changed its terms of service for Second Life over time to diminish the central importance of user ownership of virtual property created within the Second Life service. The most recent user agreement reportedly …
The Struggle to Protect Property Claims in Virtual Worlds Read More »
Michael Giberson And while linking to the Master Resource blog (as I did in the prior post), check out Guillermo Yeatts’s excellent article posted this morning, “Subsoil Oil and Gas Privatization: Private Wealth for the Common Good.” Privatization, or at least partial privatization, has been tried and has failed in several Latin American countries, as Yeatts …
On the Development of Mineral Resources in Latin America Read More »
Michael Giberson In the course of making a point about current political actions pursued by some in the electric power industry, Rob Bradley points to the views of industry pioneer Samuel Insull: Where did the drive for automatic pass-through of “reasonable” costs begin? For the electric industry, it began in Chicago in June 1898 in …
Samuel Insull’s Argument for State Regulation of Monopoly Electric Utilities Read More »
Michael Giberson Phil Carson reports a few parting thoughts from last week’s IEEE Power and Energy Society’s Transmission and Distribution Conference in New Orleans. One of those thoughts centered on the last-mile link up of communications and energy systems: Marty Travers, president for telecommunications at Black & Veatch, reminded me that the “telecom” piece at …
Where Water Management Meets Electricity Consumption, and Other Notes from New Orleans Read More »
Michael Giberson In January we noted the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission’s questions concerning the integration of “variable energy resources” to the electric power grid. FERC asked for comments; over 120 comments have been submitted in reply (so far). Peter Behr, of ClimateWire, characterizes some of the positions submitted in the FERC inquiry in an article available …
Integrating Variable Energy Resources to the Electric Power Grid (cont.) Read More »
Michael Giberson Kate MacKenzie at the FT Energy Source blog asks, “Are policymakers, economists and peak oilists starting to speak the same language?” A rash of papers, comments and interviews have made us think this recently. It’s not as simple as ‘policymakers are waking up to peak oil’, but that all those groups — and …
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