Be Afraid: PCTs...

From the anti-market liberal minds that control the California Assembly comes this nanny-state gem of a proposal:

What should be controversial in the proposed revisions to Title 24 is the requirement for what is called a "programmable communicating thermostat" or PCT. Every new home and every change to existing homes' central heating and air conditioning systems will required to be fitted with a PCT beginning next year following the issuance of the revision. Each PCT will be fitted with a "non-removable " FM receiver that will allow the power authorities to increase your air conditioning temperature setpoint or decrease your heater temperature setpoint to any value they chose. During "price events" those changes are limited to +/- four degrees F and you would be able to manually override the changes. During "emergency events" the new setpoints can be whatever the power authority desires and you would not be able to alter them.

In other words, the temperature of your home will no longer be yours to control. Your desires and needs can and will be overridden by the state of California through its public and private utility organizations. All this is for the common good, of course.

Some further research I did shows that these proposed changes would apply even to homes running “off-grid” (on their own electricity, from solar or otherwise). If this actually makes it into the building codes, the part of California where I live (the chaparral of San Diego County) could be rendered practically uninhabitable in the summertime – temperatures here routinely cross 100°F, and we commonly exceed 105°F.

This proposal is the direct consequence of the anti-market politics in Sacremento. Our government insists on regulating the electrical market, and on impeding the construction of new generating capacity. The result is very predictable: artificially low electricity prices have encouraged greater consumption – and the lack of new generating capacity means that the demand now exceed the supply. The nanny-state solution: enforced restrictions, in the form of PCTs, rolling blackouts, and other such draconian “solutions”. The market, if they just left it alone, would take care of this very nicely: increased consumption would encourage new generating capacity, and if demand exceeded supply prices would rise until that stopped. That's how markets work – if they're left alone by the flippin' government.

I'm getting really, really tired of the government telling me how to live my life and how to spend my money…

Dumbing Down California...

Some wags would say it isn't possible to dumb down California any more than it already is. And others (including myself) would argue that the surest way to stop any useful neural activity in a young American is to send them off to college. Nonetheless, I find this quite disturbing (WSJ$):

The world gets more competitive every day, so why would California's education elites want to dumb down their public university admissions standards? The answer is to serve the modern liberal piety known as "diversity" while potentially thwarting the will of the voters.

The University of California Board of Admissions is proposing to lower to 2.8 from 3.0 the minimum grade point average for admission to a UC school. That 3.0 GPA standard has been in place for 40 years. Students would also no longer be required to take the SAT exams that test for knowledge of specific subjects, such as history and science.

UC Board of Admissions Chairman Mark Rashid says that, under this new system of "comprehensive review," the schools "can make a better and more fair determination of academic merit by looking at all the students' achievements." And it is true that test scores and grades do not take full account of the special talents of certain students. But the current system already leaves slots for students with specific skills, so if you think this change is about admitting more linebackers or piccolo players, you don't understand modern academic politics.

This is just one more example of how American liberals are chipping away at what has made America the world's greatest democracy. Personally I can't fathom it, but somehow merit and responsibility have become anathema to American liberals, and symbol is everything. In this case, the symbol of a college degree – even if rendered worthless by being dumbed down – is more important to them than any actual accomplishment.

And they don't mind defying American voters to impose their ideology. As the WSJ article later points out, this action is clearly an attempt to circumvent the voters of California, who overwhelmingly approved Proposition 209, restoring academic merit as the admission standard to the UC system.

Hillary is right: it's time for a change. But not the change she has in mind. We need to throw all the entrenched politicians out, and start over with a new bunch. It's hard to imagine how the new ones could be any worse than those we have now…

Technical Note...

As previously noted, my web server (which hosts the Lawson Valley Weather page and the Lyons Peak Camera sites, amongst many others) is down. I had a chance to troubleshoot it yesterday, and the prognosis is grim: the computer the web server runs on is as dead as the proverbial doornail.

So I have a choice: I can either buy and configure a new computer (a pain in the patoot and expensive), or I can use a hosting service (easier, but expensive and with limitations on capabilities), or I can use a new-fangled approach called “HaaS” (Hardware as a Service). I've been reading a lot recently about one particular Haas (Amazon Web Services), and I've decided to go that route. The cost will be about the same as my current DSL cost, and I won't have to purchase, maintain, or configure any hardware.

That's the good news. The bad news is that I have a lot of things to learn about, and some code to write, and all in my none-too-abundant spare time – so this project is going to take a while, probably a couple of months. And those web sites will be down in the meantime…