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A Subscriber Wonders What Exactly Constitutes a “Dumb” Utility?
PG&E HONORED AS ONE OF THE NATION’S SMARTEST UTILITIES
UtiliQ Ranking Focuses on Use of Technology and Innovation to Better Serve Customers
SAN FRANCISCO, Calif.—Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) has just been named one of the nation’s most “intelligent utilities” in the third annual “UtiliQ” ranking by Intelligent Utilitymagazine, which focuses on the smart grid and information-enabled energy, and IDC Energy Insights, a worldwide research and consulting firm. Read more »
Pat Brown on Jerry Brown — 1974
This clip comes from an October 19, 1974 KPIX Eyewitness News broadcast.
A New Study Examines the Effect of Ballot Placement
Ballot order affects candidate success, a recently released study of 7,846 California city council, community college and school district elections shows.
“In between four and five percent of the elections we examined, the candidate listed first won office as a result of her or his ballot position,” report Marc Meredith and Yuval Salant in their 41-page study, On the Causes and Consequences of Ballot Order Effects. Read more »
Legislative Analyst: New Greenhouse Gas Fees Don’t Help the Budget as Much as Governor Says
The $500 million budget savings Gov. Jerry Brown says will occur from the fees California’s heavy industries will start paying this year to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is overstated by some $400 million, according to a report issued February 16 by the Legislative Analyst.
Lawmakers shouldn’t accept the Democratic governor’s claims without seeing specifics, the analyst recommends. Read more »
And Speaking of Social Media…
This from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor:
“It was on this day in 1978 that social networking got its start when the first public, dial-up Computerized Bulletin Board System (CBBS) went online in Chicago, Illinois. The Internet was in its infancy, not available to most computer users. Two computer hobbyists, Ward Christiansen and Randy Seuss, got the idea to create a virtual message board where CBBS members could dial into the system using a telephone modem and post notes to each other in the same way a family might communicate by sticking messages to a corkboard using pushpins. Read more »
Getting More Social All the Time
These statistics come from the February 13, 2012 edition of Newsweek:
In 2009, there were more than 2 million tweets daily. Today, it’s more than 250 million.
The number of Facebook users has grown from 100 million in 2009 to 800 million.
In 2009, blogs on Tumblr hit 1 million. Now they exceed 42 million. Read more »
Whey There Are More Dead Skunks on the Road this Time of Year
(Editor’s Note: Recently, several subscribers mentioned that they had seen a surprisingly large number of dead skunks littering California highways. Because California’s Capitol always puts its readers first, here is the following explanation.)
The reason so many skunks – most of them males — are accidentally finding their way to Skunk Heaven in February is because they are in lust. Read more »
A Capitol Valentine’s Day Story
Over the years, members of the Legislature have engaged in any number of trysts, affairs and relationships, licit and illicit. Some were discovered, some weren’t.
But few resulted in anything remotely permanent.
One of the few was Jean Moorhead, formerly Macpherson, and Gordon Duffy.
A Stanford grad with a masters in public health, Moorhead, a nurse, met Duffy, an optometrist who had been a Republican lawmaker from Hanford since 1964, in the mid 1970s when she was a Sacramento State nursing professor. Read more »
Ninth Circuit Reinstates Same-Sex Marriage in California
The 89-page opinion is written by Justice Steven Reinhardt, one of the court’s most liberal members and one of its most reversed by the Supreme Court.
He summarizes the three-judge panel’s two-to-one ruling as follows:
“Although the Constitution permits communities to enact most laws they believe to be desirable, it requires that there be at least a legitimate reason for the passage of a law that treats different classes of people differently. Read more »
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