Lynne Kiesling Last week the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ran an article discussing how our nearly century-old, analog wires network is not up to the challenge of being a modern, distributed system that includes renewable energy: The nation’s electric power transmission system, aka the grid, could be imagined as an overworked tangle of fraying household wires repeatedly …
Michael Giberson An update: Yesterday a federal judge refused the FTC’s request to temporarily block the Whole Foods-Wild Oats merger. The Associated Press reported that the judge’s reasoning “was detailed in a 93-page court document that was sealed because it contains corporate secrets.” Pretty obviously, as an attorney is quoted in the AP story as …
Judge Won’t Block Whole Foods – Wild Oats Merger Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The headline of this Forbes article reads “What Would You Pay To Stay Cool?” Using pending Congressional energy legislation as the springboard for the article, Ashlea Ebeling does a very good job of discussing the combination of digital technology and dynamic pricing that can transform the electric power network into a more resilient, …
Forbes Article on Smart Grid Technology and Dynamic Pricing Read More »
Lynne Kiesling The other day I read this Wall Street Journal article about the effect of small jets on air traffic delays ($$), and the more I thought about it, the more annoyed I got. Here’s the punchline: At La Guardia, half of all flights now involve smaller planes: regional jets and turboprops. It’s the …
Small Jets Worsen Airport Delays, and the Faa Cannot/will Not Adapt Read More »
Michael Giberson Attorneys for the FTC inadvertently revealed Whole Food company trade secrets when they filed documents in court that had been incorrectly redacted. (The background behind the material intended to be redacted was set to black, making it impossible to read the black text, but not hard at all to search or copy and …
Michael Giberson The Washington Post story is headlined, “O’Malley Encouraging Utilities Commission To Assert Its Powers“: The hearing on the 16th floor of the state government building in Baltimore was as charged as a cross-examination. Two Verizon officials were called to appear before Maryland’s utility regulators to explain a 50 percent increase in customer complaints …
Michael Giberson I’ve followed up the long post on the NYMEX v. IntercontinentalExchange decision here with a post on Midas Oracle in which I contemplate potential adverse consequences for some prediction markets (or, indeed, anyone publishing market data for which they assert copyright). An excerpt: While some caveats would emerge in a longer discussion, a …
Lynne Kiesling Anything Greg Clark writes is worth reading, even if you don’t agree with his hypotheses or his conclusions. His new book, A Farewell to Alms, explores industrialization in detail and offers some novel hypotheses for why industrialization happened when, where and how it did. I have not yet read it, but I certainly …
Michael Giberson A fact? An opinion? A creation? An idea? What kind of thing is a price? Perhaps too philosophical for you this morning. Try the question this way: Is the NYMEX’s report of daily futures contract prices like a phone book, like the census taker’s count of population in an area, or more like …
What is a Price? The Courts Think They Know; The Courts Are Wrong. Read More »
Lynne Kiesling SoundExchange is a nonprofit that is meant to collect royalties on behalf of artists and recording labels. As such, its legal activities are strongly legislatively circumscribed; this Wired article cites SoundExchange’s legal activities according to the relevant legislation: “(A) the administration of the collection, distribution, and calculation of the royalties; “(B) the settlement …
Soundexchange, Lobbying, and the Nature of Bureaucracy Read More »
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