It has to get worse before it gets better.
Our natural gas company (government monopoly) wanted to raise their rates 41% as a result of the drastic increase in their cost of actually purchasing the gas. This is a huge increase, but not really unfair, since their costs are going up by about the same amount, and they are already getting the gas at well below market rates due to various lock-in contracts and such that they have arranged.
Being a government run business in Saskatchewan, they have to pass their increases past a "rate review board", which makes a political decision on whether to allow the increase or not. That panel shrank the increase to 27%, thinking that would make the increase more palatable to the constituents. Well, bully for us, but we still have to pay for the gas somehow. It'll just come out of the back pocket instead of the front.
The premier, however, has rather generously decided to cap the increase at 10%. While the politics behind this is interesting in of itself, the real kicker was for him to be quoted saying that "clearly, the longer-term solution is to converve energy." How in the world can reducing an increase in energy costs have anything to do with conserving energy? If the oil crisis of 1973 should have taught us, there is no motivation to reduce consumption until it hurts us not to do so.
Of course, those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Bruce on 11.06.05 @ 12:40 AM CST [link] [No Comments]
Sony rootkit bumper sticker
I suppose it had to happen, but it's still funny. John Hardin pointed to this bumper sticker he created to lampoon Sony.
Bruce on 11.06.05 @ 12:14 AM CST [link] [No Comments]
The government will always get it wrong
No matter what the problem is, any solution provided exclusively by the government is going to be the wrong solution. Here's why.
A solution provided by a government must be a kind of cookie-cutter one-size-fits-all (otherwise the government is just playing favorites). Usually government will scale the solution so that the rich get less of a benefit than the poor do (or at least, they try to). However, none of this gives the government sufficient flexability to taylor programs to single individuals. It's all done on a formula or set of rules.
On the other hand, the individuals that make up a governed body are as varied as they are numerous. Ask any ten people what they want the government to do, and you'll get at least ten different answers. Worse yet, they will all be adamant that their answer is right. How can any government hope to possibly get it right? The best they can hope for is to be tolerably wrong. That is, where a few benefit, and those that don't benefit don't grumble too loudly.
The only way for a government to get it right is to let everybody have their own way. You want it? You get it. Of course, this is impossibly expensive to implement. Not just infeasably expensive or unimaginably expensive. Impossibly expensive.
Bruce on 11.06.05 @ 12:03 AM CST [link] [No Comments]
Wednesday, November 2nd
More on the Sony DRM issue (Updated)
The Sony DRM issue that I posted about yesterday has appeared in a lot of places:
The first Freedom to Tinker article listed is very important to understand -- by putting software onto a computer that hides its existance, Sony is making it vastly simpler for other malicious programs to also latch into the same mechanism for free and hide themselves under the same cloak. So far we know little about what Sony's DRM actually does (other than preventing raw digital data being read from CDs), but it is not hard to see how it allows for other uses, such as spying on your activites, setting up spam gateways, hooking into zombie networks, uploading private files, etc. None of these are far fetched scenarios, as there already exist viruses, worms, and trojans to do all of them.
Bruce on 11.02.05 @ 11:27 AM CST [
link] [
No Comments]
