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[Iduno]

Also someone mentioned people with $5k to $10k in back utility bills - how is that even possible!? We only spend $2k/year in my house for all energy utilities... were these people trying to mine bitcoin or something?

I wanted to ask that question myself to these people, but I'm obviously not allowed to pry into my customers' lives. Even for a whole year I can only really think of couple possibilities:

1. They have a large, poorly insulated home, and were taking this grace period to mean they could BLAST, JUST FUCKING BLAST the AC and Heating all the time. You might not think people this shortsighted and irresponsible exist, by my own Mom is one of them, so more must surely exist. This might be compounded by people who already had significant energy bills at the start of the moratorium, and the moratorium just let them go crazy.

2. They really do just have intense energy needs. Dehumidifiers, water pumps, oxygen machines for the infirm, things that use a lot of electricity but can't be turned off without some other hassle coming up. That last one is especially pertinent, I do get calls from people that are just crippled and have medical devices that need to be on all the time.

3.They were using this opportunity to escape future debt by designating one person in the family as a 'pariah' who has multiple homes' utilities under their name, and all the expenses from these homes get conglomerated under one person, who becomes horribly burdened by debt, but this debt is largely uncollectable and so everyone else in the family gets to cheat the system until the grace period is over. I don't have evidence for this but it seems possible. I'm only basing this idea on a poor Grandma I had spoken to, who had her grandson's utility bills under her name, and she got saddled with $3,000 dollars of his debt. What the hell was he doing to accrue all that energy usage? Beats me.

During the winter in Texas (yes, there was one last year), people managed bills into the 5-figure range for a month. Part of that is because Texas removed itself from the national grid to remove consumer protections unnecessarily burdensome regulation that prevented the energy industry from charging insane amounts of money for electricity.

Is it possible that some landlords are overcharging for utilities? Or is that strictly regulated?

(That also evoked the possibility of people stealing electricity and water from their neighbors)

I assume they are. They've got the rules written that they can divide all utility costs however they want, and it's pretty much impossible to check their calculations. Not that it would matter, minor things like "air conditioning doesn't work", "obviously racist housing practices, with evidence", and "there is literally wastewater running down my wall" can be ignored by landlords with no penalty many places. Your only options are to go to the city, whose duty it is to tell you why you don't get to have rights, or hire a lawyer and sue. Assuming you can find out who to sue, which is protected information from the business, and can't be shared with you.

How the fuck do you steal city water from neighbors :[]

That sounds like some james bond shit, I'm interested.

The times I've seen have been someone "accidentally" hooking up to the wrong meter, or just connecting to the pipes somewhere.

[LordBaal]

Currently in Venezuela both water and electricity aren't being charged, at least not officially, to large parts of the population.

No, is not a socialist redistribution of richness or whatever, it's simply they lack the personnel to deliver the bills (most of them emigrated) and our digital infrastructure is a joke, plus as a side effect of emigration lots of customers are elderly people who's son's and daughters flee from here and have no access to internet, even if they do there's not an easy or express way to pay most services, requiring to have accounts on specific banks, pages not working but a few minutes per day...

Yet still, some people have had this exact treatment, it seems whenever they please and can actually find a worker, some random streets get the bills for astronomical sums, charged in dollars and with interests for late payment.

Best way to prevent all this is to pester the utility companies and keep calling until someone gives you a darn figure and then go pay it and keep a copy of the payment just in case. At the end it won't mean anything if they decide to buttfuck you but at least it can help you keep the figures down.

In my current place they keep saying we own nothing on water... so anyday I expect a large bill, but we'll cross that bridge once/if we get there.

People need to be responsible and know that NOTHING is free, and that in these cases prevention wins over confidence. Specially if it's just a "not charging it right now", people should have know the bills will just add up and they would be obliged to pay latter, setting aside some money for that future bills is what I should have done (and currently try to do sometimes).

[JoshuaFH]

Is it possible that some landlords are overcharging for utilities? Or is that strictly regulated?

(That also evoked the possibility of people stealing electricity and water from their neighbors)

To my knowledge, landlords don't get to set the prices for electricity or gas. That's always regulated... except for 'third party gas choice', which are literally legal scams where you can purchase your gas through a third party which isn't state regulated, so they can jack up the price. Lots of old people that fall for whatever "bargain" they start with, before they raise the price on them. They can even sign people up without their consent if they managed to get their info somehow (i.e., trashpicking)... Not illegal though, I'm literally not even allowed to dissuade people from Third Party Gas Choice. Those scammers had to purchase that gas from a first party company in the first place, so we already got our money, it's just the customers that are getting the raw end of the deal with no real benefit.

[Frumple]

The times I've seen have been someone "accidentally" hooking up to the wrong meter, or just connecting to the pipes somewhere.

This, yeah. It's actually fairly easy to tap into someone else's water line if you're living close enough to them. Not trivial, but not something it'd take a huge effort or fancy tools and knowhow to manage. Just within the last year or so one of my neighbors was having yelling matches you could occasionally hear across the street with one of their neighbors that was doing exactly that, to them.

[Iduno]

Is it possible that some landlords are overcharging for utilities? Or is that strictly regulated?

(That also evoked the possibility of people stealing electricity and water from their neighbors)

To my knowledge, landlords don't get to set the prices for electricity or gas. That's always regulated... except for 'third party gas choice', which are literally legal scams where you can purchase your gas through a third party which isn't state regulated, so they can jack up the price. Lots of old people that fall for whatever "bargain" they start with, before they raise the price on them. They can even sign people up without their consent if they managed to get their info somehow (i.e., trashpicking)... Not illegal though, I'm literally not even allowed to dissuade people from Third Party Gas Choice. Those scammers had to purchase that gas from a first party company in the first place, so we already got our money, it's just the customers that are getting the raw end of the deal with no real benefit.

Landlords in the US anyway, frequently get billed, and then charge all of the residents some amount of money that is supposed to cover the bill with no additional profit, but they've also lobbied to make it difficult/impossible to find out how much they paid, so...

[Starver]

I don't think landlord-mediated billing (of a dishinestly inflationary manner) could be explaining Joshua's utility-end conversations with people about bills that (without additional slight-of-hand[1]) Joshua's computer should be saying are nowhere as large as the poor unfortunate at the end of the phone is imagining.

But it sounds far beyond my experience. And I can't check my own utility bills at this moment but I'm fairly sure that I personally pay (in GBP) far far less than anything suggested here. (That includes no medical devices or air-con, but I have an ancient computer or three permanently on, for various reasons.) Different economies, of course.


[1] Like making one person the sole bill-payer for a whole building, in a version of the 'sacrificial goat'/pariah thing, but forced upon them in a non-familial way?

[martinuzz]

... oxygen machines for the infirm, things that use a lot of electricity but can't be turned off without some other hassle coming up. That last one is especially pertinent, I do get calls from people that are just crippled and have medical devices that need to be on all the time.

Would cutting those people off from their power supply, especially after they have informed you that they rely on the power for life-sustaining equipment count as premeditated murder?

[ShinQuickMan]

So, just to be clear, are those thousands in utility bills before or after penalty charges? Not that it'd make things any less ridiculous.

[JoshuaFH]

... oxygen machines for the infirm, things that use a lot of electricity but can't be turned off without some other hassle coming up. That last one is especially pertinent, I do get calls from people that are just crippled and have medical devices that need to be on all the time.

Would cutting those people off from their power supply, especially after they have informed you that they rely on the power for life-sustaining equipment count as premeditated murder?

The worst thing is that there really isn't a status that any person can have to protect them from shutoff, even if their life depends on it. To my knowledge, if a person is late on their payments, and there isn't a temporary lock already in the system to prevent it, then the order to shutoff gets automatically generated and carried out. Turning back ON is another story, that has to be done by a person, and my system literally won't let me do it unless I have either money or permission from a supervisor... and getting a supervisor in a hurry is not easy or guaranteed, considering I have to manually type out an email, which has to follow a specific syntax and formula, send it out, and wait for them to reply.

So to alter your analogy, it'd be more like: if you're late on your bill payments, a robot will visit your house and kill you without remorse. That's just capitalism at work.

So, just to be clear, are those thousands in utility bills before or after penalty charges? Not that it'd make things any less ridiculous.

Being late on your bill incurs a 2% fee on the amount charged for that month. That's pretty insignificant compared to the deposit that people have to pay to get their power turned back on, which equal 15% of a customer's yearly usage. This WILDLY varies and punishes longtime customers with larger average bills much more than customers who just started and refuse to pay their tiny bills for some reason. Let me tell you, when someone calls for a bill that they were only maybe 100 dollars late on, and they call to restore their service, and I have to tell them that there's a 500+ dollar deposit ontop of paying their balance... they get downright apoplectic. That's a lot more money than most people can drum up out of nowhere; and it's required. Granted, that deposit gets returned to them after 12 months of bills paid on time, and returned with 5% yearly interest on top, but people rightfully don't give a fuck about that they need that money now and I'm holding their electricity hostage until they pay the ransom.

[Duuvian]

Link from a Television show I watched

I heard of this link thanks to the episode pertaining to the ruining of the internet by a man named Adam. It is likely out of date in some ways.

I have held off from shouting from the rooftops on this one because I'd sure like the Bipartisan Infrastructure plan to pass for political solidarity even though I would guess the cable laying part is going to end up as a fund drainer scheme at least the following way.

Firstly,

https://www.makeuseof.com/who-owns-the-internet/

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

The larger Internet Service Providers (ISPs) own and provide the largest portions of internet infrastructure.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Net neutrality has advocates and critics, and various legal battles are still ongoing worldwide. Advocates argue that smaller content providers could be eliminated entirely without net neutrality, leading to massive monopolies over internet content. Many countries operate antitrust authorities set up to ensure that no single internet provider can monopolize the market.

Unfortunately unless something changed dramatically in the cable laying process recently, the US is not one of the countries that operate antitrust authorities to ensure that no single internet provider can monopolize the market (in a region).

So, I will point out that other countries are doing better than US at this by far simply by having the physical cable the government pays to be laid down be owned by the government or better to just be "neutral" wire maintained by government expense that any company can access in order to foster competition rather than regional monopolies.

Instead of attempting a scuppering of the first US bipartisan infrastructure deal in a generation, I instead fixed my computer for a month so I wouldn't be tempted to offer a timely complaint to give people good ideas how to derail an important bill about trains and such.

However, I do note that some interesting things have been happening in the entertainment industry as of late. Fox Sports spun off many of it's regional sports coverage networks into this network, which if you do visit that link note does actually require a cable television subscription to watch the actual sporting events through the internet. This is likely (and I am assuming here, to be fair I am ignorant of the details) due to contractual obligations placed on the sportsball leagues with large cable companies in order to prevent any recordings of the sporting events in question going online in a way that does not generate profit for the established industry.

Why is this important at an industry level you may ask? There are a significant portion of customers who will refuse to switch if their sports are not available.

So, instead of trying to scupper this here infranstructure bill I encourage you all, like me, to tell any person willing to listen that they can get free TV now, and in the year 2022 there will be a regional sports streaming service that they could get along with the free stuff, if sports is the holdout.

Bally Sports Streaming Service News Article

So, I would encourage you to tell your cable watching pals about this and tell them that hope is not completely lost in the fight to have just the channels you want and not pay 100$ and more a month for packaging, but to be ready to break out that wallet in '22 cause the cable companies aren't going to make it cheap for them to break free

I'll also note I haven't read the bill and maybe hopefully one of the Senators fixed this but I'd doubt it since the industry isn't throwing up mad ads complaining about how it ruins our freedom or something.

Completely not internet related but:
for the trains bit, is any money going towards this?:

https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/20/tech/hyperloop-pneumatic-tube/index.html

I am no expert; however it appears that technology could be useful in hilly or mountanous terrain as it makes it's own gradient (if I am using the correct term and I suspect I am not as I am neither a mountaineer nor train guy) and thus could make a curved line over elevation rather than twist and turns along the ground. It would be like tunneling over the mountain rather than through it, which maybe would be cheaper if a factory was stamping out connecto tubing in quantitiy.

EDIT: Removed some instances of "baby boomer" and replaced with "person" as it isn't completely fair to label it as only old people who are less likely to hear about streaming.

EDIT2: Taking out more references to age, I think I wrote this while thinking about an argument over the cost of a single sportsball channel which caused me to research this post a little. I apologize for the tone in hindsight.

EDIT?: Had to rewrite portions as it came off as a rant at points rather than the hopefully slightly informative post I intended. Also I googled OG Millennial and found out that's not only just a funny joke I made up on my own but is actually a real brand name oops so I took out that particular weak joke.

[MrRoboto75]

Hyperloops are stupid, just build a normal goddamn train.

[Duuvian]

They probably are, I haven't read anything much about them since 2013. However I read about the money for trains and I was like

Hyperloops

Are normal trains really better? Or do factories just build normal trains now and that's easy?

[MrRoboto75]

Are normal trains really better?

In almost every way really.  More reliable, better throughput, honestly cheaper most of the time.

[Duuvian]

Makes sense. Is it due to being new old sidelined technology primarily? It seems like pressurized tubes would be useful for New Atlantis or something, or SpaceStation13. I could tolerate the cost of a big dumb rollercoaster tube between two cities if it advanced technology useful for that.

[Rolan7]

There are a lot of reasons.  There's the proposed rapid boring (by the "Boring Corp", because this is the dumbest timeline).  There are the issues with operating combustion engines in small tunnels at rapid throughput when *literally anything* goes wrong.  And a mistake is much more likely when it's a collection of individually manufactured vehicles with different aspects.  When anything goes wrong, what happens: everyone else backs out?

It's... arguably optimal when EVERYTHING goes right, but not even then.

Here's a fun sarcastic video about it

But don't worry, Musk is going to launch telecomm sattellites that bring internet to every rural area in the US and wherever else /s

Edit: Also here is the above engineer discussing the same issue as a podcast with friends.  With slides.  (It goes into detail about how the Las Vegas attempt was a complete disaster.)

Edit2: Also woooow their openings are always a disaster, but this one's particularly tricky... the (most confusing) intro bits are done at 2:15