#Utility Company

[sunmoonbay]

Finding the Cheapest Small Business Utility Company

When it comes to running a small business, every penny counts. From managing expenses to finding cost-effective solutions, small business owners are constantly on the lookout for ways to save money. One area where businesses can potentially cut costs is by finding the cheapest small business utility company. In this article, we will explore some tips and tricks to help you find the most…

[slightlyspooky]

Becoming an adult is learning that the website sucks and that you should just call instead.

[purasvagancias]

The Niagara Hudson Building por National Register of Historic Places Por Flickr: Highlighted New Listing – June 25, 2010 Other name: Niagara Mohawk Building Syracuse, Onondaga County, NY detail of lobby mural The Niagara Hudson Building in Syracuse is an outstanding example of Art Deco architecture and a symbol of the Age of Electricity. Completed in 1932, the building became the headquarters for the nation’s largest electric utility company and expressed the technology of electricity through its modernistic design, material, and extraordinary program of exterior lighting. The design elements applied by architects Melvin L. King and Bley & Lyman transformed a corporate office tower into a widely admired beacon of light and belief in the future. With its central tower and figurative winged sculpture personifying electric lighting, the powerfully sculpted and decorated building offered a symbol of optimism and progress in the context of the Great Depression. Weekly Highlights National Register of Historic Places

[afrotumble]

[mostlysignssomeportents]

SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules

Today (19 Aug), I'm appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I'm on a 2:30PM panel called "Return From Retirement," followed by a signing:

https://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/festivalofbooks

It's a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:

https://www.sacbee.com/news/politics-government/capitol-alert/article277266828.html

The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.

Here's the situation: SoCal Gas is California's private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.

The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state's very survival.

The bill topped $36 million – and it was illegally charged to its customers, the Californians whose immediate health and long-term survival these efforts opposed. SoCal Gas refuses to disclose the full extent of the spending, as do its lawyer-procurers, who cite legal confidentiality and a First Amendment right to secretly seek to influence policy in their refusal to disclose their profits from this illegal conduct.

The law firms involved are a who's-who of California's most prominent corporate fixers, including Reichman Jorgensen and Holland & Knight. The partners involved have a long rap sheet for anti-climate dirty tricking, most notably Jennifer Hernandez, notorious in climate justice history for an incident where activists claim she posed as one of them, infiltrating a campaign to force corporate despoilers to clean up their pollution in order to sabotage it, while secretly on a wealthy, prominent landowner's payroll.

Hernandez claims to care about the environment and says that her longstanding, corporate-funded, extensive campaigns and lawsuits against state environmental regulations are motivated by concern over their impact on working people. Her firm, Holland & Knight, denies serving SoCal Gas in opposing gas regulations, but it received $594k in ratepayer dollars, and submitted comments opposing the rules on its own behalf. Those comments were nearly identical to the comments submitted by SoCal Gas.

Hernandez also represents an obscure organization called The Two Hundred for Home Ownership in "a flurry of lawsuits" over California Air Resources Board rules on pollution, seeking to overturn the state's landmark climate change regulations.

Two Hundred for Home Ownership was founded by Robert Apodaca, who told the Bee that Hernandez's work for him is pro bono and not funded by SoCal Gas, but his entry into the fray occurred just as SoCalGas was founding an astroturf group called Californians for Fair and Balanced Energy (C4BES), which pretended to be an independent organization, disguising its relationship with SoCal Gas.

Apodaca is also founder of United Latinos Vote, an organization that had been largely dormant for seven years, not receiving any donations, until 2018, when the California Building Industry Association gave it $99k. The CBIA is a large-dollar recipient of donations from SoCal Gas, and its CEO insists that it was not acting on SoCal Gas's behalf when it made its unpredented donation to Apodaca.

The CBIA donation to United Latinos Vote was forerunner to a flood of corporate donations from the likes of Chevron, Marathon and Phillips 66. Shortly after receiving this cash, United Latinos Vote ran a full page ad in the LA Times, accusing the Sierra Club of pushing for anti-gas appliance rules that would harm working class Latino families.

This ad, in turn, featured prominently in advocacy by the SoCal Gas front group C4BES, funded with $29.1m in ratepayer money, which it then spent seeking to link clean appliance rules with anti-Latino racism. A quarter of California's carbon emissions come from home gas use.

SoCal Gas is regulated by the California Public Utility Commission (CPUC), which tolerated this mounting illegal conduct for many years, even as the company circulated internal memos as early as 2015 discussing its plans to oppose electrification in the state on the basis that it constituted "a significant risk to our business."

But last year, CPUC fined SoCal Gas $10m. Now, CPUC's Public Advocate office has filed a damning, extensive report on SoCal Gas's unlawful conduct, seeking $80m in rate cuts to compensate Californians for the funds misappropriated to protect the company's shareholder interests:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Efile/G000/M517/K407/517407314.PDF

Additionally, the Public Advocate is demanding $233m in fines for the company's refusal to allow investigators to audit its books and discover the full extent of the fraud.

SoCal Gas is the nation's largest utility, but (incredibly), it's not the dirtiest. That prize goes to Ohio's FirstEnergy, which handed $60m in ratepayer dollars to state politicians in illegal bribes in exchange for coal and nuclear subsidies and cancellation of state climate rules. That scandal led to GOP speaker of the Ohio House Larry Householder being sentenced to 20 years in prison:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

There is something extraordinarily sleazy about using ratepayers' own money to lobby against their interests. SoCal Gas and its Big Law enablers have funneled millions in Californian's money into campaigns to poison us and boil us alive, and they did it while using workers and racialized people as human shields.

I'm kickstarting the audiobook for "The Internet Con: How To Seize the Means of Computation," a Big Tech disassembly manual to disenshittify the web and make a new, good internet to succeed the old, good internet. It's a DRM-free book, which means Audible won't carry it, so this crowdfunder is essential. Back now to get the audio, Verso hardcover and ebook:

http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/19/cooking-the-books-with-gas/#reichman-jorgensen

Image: Maryland GovPics (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/mdgovpics/6635539089/

Jackie (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/79874304@N00/197532792

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

[yes-no-maybe-soo]

[x]

God bless the CN kittens 🫶🏻 It means so much to me that Sylus is finally getting what he's been denied for so long [bombastic side eye at Paperfold]. If only he could know how beloved he is... such a powerful contrast to the hateful way society has treated him in-universe since childhood ❤️‍🩹 (and also to the way certain people at Paperfold treat him 😒🫠 to seemingly have beef with their own character... very odd)

[yuzukimist]

I feel like more people should be talking about utility companies implementing repeated and exorbitant price hikes for the sake of increasing shareholder profits

[yeyinde]

thinking about common law husband simon

(is that a thing in England idk)

(it's no longer a thing in Wales but i haven't lived there in years; it is, however, a thing in Canada)

but what i love the most about common law status is that all it takes is 1-3 years (provincial weirdness notwithstanding). and so many people don't know this. i didn't even know this until i started working in my previous job/industry and they said had i had to treat partners living together for 3 or more years like a legal entity. it was such a shock lmao because what??? though, they don't have certain rights to assets that married couples have so there's that, i guess!

but still. Ghost knowing this and just slyly declaring himself your common law spouse is just so perfect and now i can't stop thinking about it either. manipulating the system to score a spouse. incredible.

[javert]

man no wonder there are so many horror stories about people fucking up their lives by putting solar panels on their house. everything about this process is designed to be as opaque as physically possible for the end user

[an-ruraiocht]

doing something this weekend that's really stressful and anxiety-inducing for me (it's an important part of trauma recovery!!! I tell myself through gritted teeth) and the first part of it starts in half an hour so I probs need to head over there in about 15 mins and unfortunately I am physically and mentally at my limit from several hours of low-grade (and occasionally high-grade) sensory overload so. good. that'll be fun 🙃

[vagueiish]

we need another term than "artist" (even in mock quotes) to refer to people who use ai to make art. like. it's more akin to commissioning someone else than it is making art yourself, lmao, you're not an artist if you're asking someone else to make your art for you???

[godblessthesickos]

Washington Gas is owned by Canada 😂😂😂😂

[hypodermicfroggy]

Since LobCorp and Ruina just went on sale and I know not everyone can afford them (even on sale), I thought I'd reach out and post my community guide in more places to help.

So I decided to try and look in on the PM Community Hub discord. That was a mistake. Five minutes in there, and I don't know how anyone can genuinely tolerate it. Those people are absolute fucking animals.

[itshomobirb]

only a few more days. trying to like. not entirely freak out. things are gonna work fine. but im still a little 🥴

[notmoreflippingelves]

🔥Hot take: Anna is the true heroine of Frozen and was done dirty by the creators and is still mistreated by the fanbase too. She deserved more screentime and to be her own person instead of always running after Elsa, she also should have been the 5th element (ice makes no sense!!). Elsa is more selfish/self-centered and co-dependant of the two

Strongly agree | Agree | Neutral | Disagree | Strongly disagree

So I agree in part with this, but I also disagree significantly so it makes sense to split my answer down the middle. I agree that Anna is significantly underrated and underutilized by both the fandom and the creators. I would also agree that Anna is more of the actual protagonist than Elsa, though I'm not sure I would go so far as say one of them is a "true" heroine while the other isn't. (Elsa was narratively an antihero/antivillain in the first movie but her intentions were heroic (if misguided) enough that I don't feel comfortable saying only Anna is "truly" a heroic character).

I also agree that "Elsa (ice) as the fifth element" was monumentally stupid, and it would've been more interesting if Anna had turned out to have powers of her own. (Though not necessarily in the "elements" plot as is). But then again, I think pretty much everything about Frozen 2 is monumentally stupid (though not irredeemably stupid in the way Toy Story 4 is. Frozen 3, you can fix this mess. I believe in you!)

The thing that drives me absolutely off the wall is that the thesis that orients Frozen 2 is the antithesis of that of Frozen 1. (Frozen 1 is oriented around Elsa and Anna learning that they can rely on each other and not be afraid to be part of each other's lives. They don't have to be alone and in fact, can never be alone because they have each other. Frozen 2 is like... "um actually... Elsa is just 'too different' to stay in Anna's life permanently, even if that's what they both want. It's more important for her to be special and magical in isolation. She doesn't have a choice; it's her destiny even though Elsa feeling different and alone for so long is what has historically caused pretty much every problem for both her and Anna in the past. Support systems are for wusses; real peeps embrace rugged individualism." Thanks I hate it.)

Where I disagree with you is that I think you are being a bit unfair in your characterization of Elsa. (Although I will admit to being far more of an Elsa fan than an Anna one...but I do love both, I promise). Elsa is a character that I would describe as being "selfless to the point of selfishness." She has been conditioned into believing that her emotions--and by extension, herself--is always the problem. It's her fault; it's her responsibility. She's trained to see herself as the "most important" but only in the sense that she's the most "dangerous to herself and others."

And while she categorically does not want that, she inevitably ends up centering herself in everything so that she can protect everyone around her. She's probably aware that keeping away from Anna during their childhood hurt them both, but she's been raised to believe that Anna's safety is THE most important thing and therefore, she'll have to do whatever she has to do to maintain it.

I think it's important to remember that Anna's initial accident happened, while she and Elsa were playing and were happy. It's not just anger or sorrow or fear that impacts her powers. It's any and every strong emotion. Elsa believes that the only way to avoid hurting anyone is to keep her emotions as small, concealed and mild as possible. Is it unfair that Anna did not get a say in any of this? Absolutely. She is the one who should've gotten to decide whether staying close to Elsa was "worth the risk." But again, that is the parents' fault just as much as it is Elsa's.

Send me your fandom hot take and I will say what I think about it!

[yawpyawp]

the jacket i got as free swag from my job is literally better quality than the last 3 coats i’ve bought with my own money