Captain Obvious

My worst subject in high school and college was history.  Perhaps it was the way it was taught … lots of dates and details that just seemed to be disjointed in my mind.  Well, there was one that I did and still do remember … 1492 … the date given to Columbus discovering America, even though he really didn’t do that.

It was years later that I was informed that he was probably not the first to discover America.  He was just the first to get credit for discovering it.  Then, I was to learn that what he did was not so honorable to keep him in the book of great sailors like Magellan and others.

Now, the balance of the story has shifted so significantly that there is a serious movement to remove him from the history books with any degree of greatness.  In fact, the mood right now is to condemn him for all the wrongs done, even though they were not wrong in that day and time.

View the story on USA Today.

It took a long time for the Catholic Church to apologize about how they treated Galileo.  It took a long time for us to abolish slavery, or at least make it unlawful.  What we seem to fail to do is to learn from history, so we are doomed to repeat it.

Happy Indigenous Peoples Day!

Well, as my wife Susan has always reminded us … there is a fine line between customer engagement between caring and creepy … we are all super sensitive to our invasion of privacy.

The latest add on to the Amazon Echo may have just crossed that line. In case you missed it reviews are in and they are not good:

Watch the review here.

It always strikes me how blatantly commercial people can be when they forget Susan’s warning.  If you go on the Amazon website for the Show device and watch the video you will see the caring part.  But, they forget that in the actual use cases as customers live with the device.

I am sure you will see the news media stomp on Amazon for the potential invasion of privacy … it will not be pretty to watch.

 

As many of you know, I am the proud owner of a Tesla Model S and do appreciate all that Elon Musk did to promote the use of EVs.  I have almost 40,000 miles on mine and it has gone from Boston to Miami several times.

As I watch the news and hear of all the other car companies getting on board with their EV strategies I am impressed at the impact Elon and others has made … until I got my monthly newsletter from them which unveils the sham that most of these companies have portrayed with their claims.

Here is a telling video that exposes them, watch here.

Claims of innovation around renewables over the past few years come to mind in like manner.  The average American still has no idea how all these new energy sources are reshaping the power industry and what it is going to really cost to implement.

I do understand the reason utilities are now looking seriously and planning for demand charges in residential rates … I get it … but customers will not.  And, unless we transform the customer’s understanding, this is likely to blow up in our faces as they start to realize that this is more about a cost recovery game than embracing energy technology.

Haven’t we learned anything from the challenges with demand charges in commercial and industrial rates?  Do we think this kind of rate structure is going to fly with the low-income groups that are growing at staggering rates in our service territories across the country?

 

Insurance has a wonderful history in society.  Those who can sustain financial loss take a payment from those who cannot in exchange for some level of coverage.  The value creation here is substantial, especially when the likelihood of a claim is low.  So, life insurance for young people tends to be inexpensive and the person or company writing the agreement will tend to make a lot of money.  All this is of course a matter of how the dice rolls!

No wise person would want to sell insurance knowing full well that the claims will bankrupt them.  That would be considered stupid, wouldn’t you think?  In fact, can you imagine working for a company that did this repeatedly?  You would certainly know that the day was coming when the roof would cave in.

Well, the recent situation in the Gulf is a case in point.  We all heard that Houston floods routinely.  That was no surprise.  Yes, the amount of rain was more than we have seen in the past, but flood losses are almost routine there.  So, what happens when flood insurance is subsidized based on making home ownership more affordable?

Well, the article shown here indicates it may have gone too far: “Harvey Proves Flood Subsidies Must End.”

It seems we all have a lot to learn about public policy and how risks are priced into the markets … or not.

We are in a huge transition within the electricity pricing discussion.  We are beginning to see risks in natural gas time based pricing as well.  It seems we should be having a dialogue now before the storms hit.

 

I am sure most of you were taught about Machiavelli … the most famous quip I remember was “might makes right.”  That always made me cringe.  The idea that might could be used to perpetuate a wrong was too fresh in my mind with the antics of Hitler and other dictators.

Well, you may have missed this in the recent news.  After all, it is not about Trump, Russia, North Korea.  Nor is it about Houston.  But, it is a terrible commentary about what is happening in the world.  Read about it for yourself: Anti-Whaling Activists Prove No Match for the Japanese Military Leviathan

We in this country relish the freedom of speech, the right to object, etc.  We also tend to root for the underdog and relish the opportunity to right some wrongs we see, even if they are ultimately futile.  I love the story of the little girl on the beach where thousands of starfish had washed up.  She was carefully picking them up and throwing them back out to sea.  When confronted by a realist asking, “Why are you doing that?  You can’t make a difference.  It doesn’t matter,” referring to the futility of the situation, we celebrate the child’s reply as she hurled the starfish back into the water: “Well, it mattered to this one!”.

But, now we face stark realities.  Where are we on the protection of species if this can happen?  I am not going to criticize the Japanese for their actions, but I would like an answer to the bigger question.  If we are going to protect anything, we can’t have a large group of people ignoring it because they can make so much money subverting the right thing to do.

We have an opioid epidemic in this country because there is too much money to be made contributing to it.  We have a food industry using harmful ingredients because of the same, even though the agency we all support to protect us turns a blind eye … see above for the reasons.  We have Medicare and Medicaid fraud that raises health care costs for all of us.  Why aren’t we working on these issues?  Why don’t they appear in the news?

Oh, I guess I just proved my point.