This would be "economic rents."

Just as each FEP has an associated license, so should east SocialWeb post.

"Acknowledgement" is problematic. A more useful goal would be to ensure that grants must be seen by those who consume content.

It is unlikely that mechanisms could be found to "prevent access to posts" as long as posts are presented on the web via publicly accessible URLs.

A more useful line would be to include copyright restrictions within posts. This would ensure that those who did access the posts were made aware of what grants had been made by their authors.

Because the server can change the rules, it is essential that we limit the scope of rules that can be changed by any one server.

This definition of "collective intelligence" seems very much in line with Lincoln's 1854 statement that:

“The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”

See: https://housedivided.dickinson.edu/sites/lincoln/fragment-on-government-july-1-1854/

I think it would be great if people could use Hypothes.is to comment on bill texts as well as link to other pages that discuss each bill. For instance:

For some analysis of this bill, see Timothy Karr's December 5, 2022 article: The JCPA: Myths and Realities of a Bad Journalism Bill

Jeff Jarvis discussed this bill in a Medium post on 15 September: Publishers’ Political Blackmail: What’s wrong with Sen. Klobuchar’s JCPA

Rick Edmonds, of Poynter, wrote Opposition mounts as JCPA’s sponsors target year-end approval

Fight for the Future issued: Red Alert: Tell Congress not to destroy access to credible news, fund hate, & harm indie journalism.

Ideally, whenever a journalist, think tank, or whatever wrote a public analysis of a bill, they would annotate that bill to include a link to their work.

This sentence appears to be have been lifted, without attribution, from a 2004 article by Steven E. Landsburg of the University of Rochester. Here is the early instance of the sentence.

The "decentralized approach" is not essential to liberalism, rather, the important aspect is the empowerment of the individual. Decentralization is simply an inevitable result of empowering individuals, it is not the essential characteristic of liberalism.

Given that the US has fiat money, there is actually no need for a Social Security Fund. What matters is the difference between taxes received and payments made during the current period. The US does not need to collect money before it can spend it. The only real constraint on spending is its impact on inflation. That is driven by the difference between taxes and payments in the current period. Taxes collected previously are irrelevant.

The absence of politics is dictatorship. Thiel is wrong.

Quote from Plato's Republic.

Twitter Sidebar extension

For workers to benefit, It is only necessary that some of the gain from future surpluses goes to workers. It is not necessary that those surpluses grow as a result of allocating the employee shares.

In theory, Global Trade should allow us to purchase non-essential products from low-cost suppliers and thus free up capital for domestic investment in those products which are our own competency. Such new domestic investments should create new jobs to replace those which are exported. But, if capital is exported, we lose domestic jobs without replacing them.

The problem is Global Capital, not Global Trade.

RMI seems to assume that Hydrogen has no global warming impact. In fact, it does. The Global Warming Potential (GWP-20) for Hydrogen is "33, with an uncertainty range of 20 to 44." according to the UK Government Report Atmospheric implications of increased hydrogen use . Also, when Hydrogen is burned in a nitrogen-rich environment, like our atmosphere, it produces NOx and a variety of other pollutants and global warming emissions.

Is this the first time that DPA authority has been used for heat pumps? I think it may be.

If properly regulated, "capitalism" need not be full-body contact.

Today, it is primarily IOU's who are piloting and exploring the deployment of heat-pump based shared thermal networks. In many cases, they are gas utilities that are trying to find a "business continuation plan" that will allow them to maintain and grow revenues even as gas sales decline. It would be unfortunate to leave these non-coop utilities without support.

Limiting the definition to heat pumps "owned or operated" may mean that the bulk of heat-pump-based "GeoGrids" or geothermal district heating systems, is ineligible for support since, in such systems, the investment in shared infrastructure is usually much greater than the investment in customer-specific heat pumps.

If candidates are identified by party, it is likely that more people would vote for them and that they would tend to vote based on party identification rather than knowledge of the candidate's qualifications. This would not be a good thing.

See: https://www.njleg.state.nj.us/bills/BillView.asp?BillNumber=S4133

One's "right to choose" should be limited to decisions that do not impact others. There can be no right to choose to pollute and thus damage the health and welfare of others.

This is poorly stated. The reason we need to "raise revenue" is to prevent inflation. Also, "redistributing income" is overly general. The primary focus of income redistribution should be intended to recover excessive economic rents. One way to address the excessive rent issue would be to peg tax rates to profit margins rather than to just income.

This denies the reality of the mixed economy that we actually have: Free market where markets work and state "socialism" where they don't (i.e. with natural monopolies such as utilities.)

All school voucher programs descend from this racist response to Brown v Board of Ed.

See his speech at: https://miltonfriedman.hoover.org/internal/media/dispatcher/215217/full

The bonus credit is available to individual projects with less than 1 MW thermal capacity and to larger projects if they meet prevailing wage, apprenticeship, etc. requirements. The 30% ITC is three times as generous as the old 10% ITC for geothermal heat pumps. This is a significant improvement.

Sierra Club has provided a spreadsheet identifying "Climate and Environmental Justice Investments" in this version of the Build Back Better Act.

See their announcement on Twitter.

This is a significant improvement over the 10% ITC that is available to geothermal heat pumps in current law.

I think it is important to recognize that the original article that motivated much of the early research into Hypertext, including that of Ted Nelson, who coined the term "Hypertext," assumed that "associative links" would, in fact, exist "outside" the document. That article was, of course, Vannevar Bush's "As We May Think," published in the July 1945 Atlantic Monthly.

Given that Bush assumed that documents were stored primarily as immutable microfilm images, he had no choice but to assume that links would stored be external to the documents which were their subjects. It simply wasn't possible to embed links in documents as we do today with HTML and with other formats that support embedded links.

Thus, it can be said that the idea of external associative links, or annotations, was actually the original idea for how Hypertext would be implemented. It was only later, long after 1945, that we found that it was convenient to support links embedded in content.

It is also important to note the external links allow us to more easily do things that can't be done with the more common internal links. For instance, if you're reading a document with internal links, you can easily answer the question "What does this document link to?" However, it is much harder to answer the question: "What documents link to this one?" This is because internal links are only "one-way links. However, external links, which are "two-way links," establish a relationship between documents can exist independent of the documents themselves. Thus, if you have a collection of external links, you can answer the question: "What links to this document?" That question can't be easily answered in today's web unless you've got a web-crawling system like Google's that is capable of reading all documents on the web and then deducing all the back-links.

In fact, one of the key elements of a Web annotation system is the ability to pass the URL/URI for some web resource to the annotation system and say: "Show me what links (annotations) exist for this resource!" Of course, each of the annotations which contains the external links would itself have a unique identifier and should thus be something that can be annotated or linked to. In this way, we can have annotations of annotations as well as the same kind of forking "associative trails" that present alternative paths through the document space that Vannevar Bush imagined in his 1945 Atlantic Monthly article. In other words, when we allow for external links, we elevate the "link" or "annotation" to something which is a first-class object on the Web instead of leaving it as a mere attribute of some web resource.

To a great extent, raising links to the status of first class objects "completes" a large part of the journey from idea to implementation that began with Vannevar Bush's 1945 vision. We should understand that supporting annotations doesn't just provide a "nice new feature." It provides the foundation for what is today a very unfamiliar method for interacting with the web as a record of human experience and knowledge. The idea is very old. Nonetheless, we have yet to begin to have much experience with its use and implications.

Progress Report: 100 Days of the Biden Administration’s Industrial Control Systems (ICS) Cybersecurity Initiative and Electricity Subsector Action Plan (https://www.energy.gov/articles/progress-report-100-days-biden-administrations-industrial-control-systems-ics ).

https://www.archives.gov/isoo/policy-documents/eo-13549.html

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/USCODE-2014-title6/html/USCODE-2014-title6-chap1-subchapII-partC-sec143.htm

9002(a)(7):

"Sector risk management agency.--The term "sector risk management agency'' has the meaning given the term ``Sector-Specific Agency'' in section 2201(5) of the Homeland Security Act of 2002 (6 U.S.C. 651(5))."

6 U.S.C. 651(5):

(5)Sector Risk Management Agency The term “Sector Risk Management Agency” means a Federal department or agency, designated by law or presidential directive, with responsibility for providing institutional knowledge and specialized expertise of a sector, as well as leading, facilitating, or supporting programs and associated activities of its designated critical infrastructure sector in the all hazards environment in coordination with the Department."

https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2013/02/12/executive-order-improving-critical-infrastructure-cybersecurity

See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/40/98.6#:~:text=Global%20warming%20potential%20or,GHG%20is%20a%20member.

By defining "Greenhouse gas" through an enumeration of specific gases, the bill leaves unregulated the many non-enumerated gases which have Global Warming Impact. Sometimes folk are surprised to hear, for instance, that Hydrogen has a GWP-100 of about 5 and a GWP-20- of between 10 and 13.

It would be much more useful to define greenhouse gases by their impact on global warming rather than as an enumerated list. I suggest the following definition:

"The term "greenhouse gas" means a gas having a Global Warming Potential (GWP) greater than 0."

If forced pre-dispute arbitration is generally a bad thing, then why is this bill limited to address only an enumerated set of disputes? What kinds of dispute are not included in this list? (The same question applies to the identical text in S.505)

See also: S.505 - Forced Arbitration Injustice Repeal Act

See: Eugene Volokh, Cheap Speech and What It Will Do, 104 Yale L.J. (1995). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ylj/vol104/iss7/10 Also, see: Hasen, Richard L. “Cheap Speech and What It Has Done (to American Democracy).” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, August 11, 2017. https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=3017598.

The idea that we need to tax in order to redistribute wealth relies on "Household Budget" thinking. To redistribute, you must take from one person to give to another. But, as MMT folk constantly point out, that's not how taxes work. The redistributive view of taxes on high incomes or wealth also obscures the more equitable purpose for such taxes, which is not to offset inflation, but rather to discourage and offset the rent-seeking which produces high levels of unearned income.

The very rich are different from normal folk not only in that they spend much less of their wealth on consumption, but also in that a much higher portion of their income and wealth is derived from economic rent. Thus, while the offsetting of inflation may be the primary motivation for taxing normal people, the grounds for taxing the rich are two-fold: 1) Inflation offset, and 2) rent-recovery.

As Andrew Carnegie once wrote: "Where wealth accrues honorably, the people are always silent partners." Some taxes on great wealth or income should be intended to discourage the already wealthy from using their positions of advantage to take too much of the people's share. Such taxes should be motivated by equity, not either redistribution or inflation.

But, inflation offset isn't the only reason to tax. We must also consider the positive effects of using taxes to recover unearned income which is the result of rent-seeking.

This is a good general statement, but it ignores the fact that taxes on the "rich" also serve the function of recapturing wealth that has been acquired through rent-seeking behaviors. The bulk of income to those with the highest "earning" is actually unearned income resulting from rents.

Gas utilities have been unsuccessful in demonstrating that their product is superior to that provided by heat pumps. Thus, they have been forced to obtain special protections from legislatures that protect them from market forces. Such activity is best described as "corrupt."

The gas utility's contribution to solving the problem should be in establishing and executing a managed process for the decapitalization and decommissioning of its existing gas assets.

A growing body of research has been providing definitive proof that hydrogen, bio-gas, etc. all lead to significant climate impact -- even though utilities often claim that these are "zero emissions" alternatives. Once one gets past the marketing and self-serving statements, it should be clear that there are not viable solutions to any societal problem. These "solutions" only address the needs of gas utility and fossil fuel company shareholders, not society.

States like Maine, Vermont, New York, etc. show that retrofit programs can work if designed well. Given the great deal of electric resistance heating in Quebec, the province should work hard to retrofit electric resistance users to heat pumps.

The primary cause of "rate hikes" for the gas utility would be the need to recover the largely fixed costs of gas delivery from a smaller quantity of commodity sales. The only way to reduce gas consumption, without increasing gas bills, is to shift the costs of gas either to non-gas ratepayers or to taxpayers. The article should have stated this more clearly.

Also, any suggestion that increased use of heat pumps would cause winter-peak to increase probably assume that the province's high use of electric resistance heating will continue. In fact, Quebec should aggressively work to convert electric resistance heating users to heat pumps and, by doing so, provide a great deal of investment-free winter capacity for use by heat pumps.

Quebec should start an aggressive program to replace electric resistance heating with vastly more efficient heat pumps. For every electric resistance home that is converted to geothermal heat pumps, at least three homes can be served without increasing the winter peak demand.

In fact, because there is so much use of electric resistance heating in Quebec, it is likely that converting those homes to heat pumps would provide sufficient spare capacity to allow heating the remainder of the service territory with heat pumps and eliminating gas use entirely.

No pension fund or other fiduciary should be permitted to invest in securities which are as speculative as those provided by fossil fuel companies. Rarely in the history of the world has so much effort been put into ending the sale of product. These companies, if they don't shift away from fossil fuels, will eventually fail and destroy the value of any of their securities. When the question is "When will they fail?" no fiduciary should be permitted to invest in them. There are many better and more secure ways for fiduciaries to invest their money.

By building a new business focused on providing heat, rather than gas, Énergir has the opportunity not only to continue to earn revenue but to grow -- rather than be forced to shutdown. Many of the assets required for sustainable heating/cooling are very much like those that are currently Énergir's source of revenue -- i.e. pipes in the ground. Rather than investing in new gas pipes that will soon become stranded assets, Énergir should be investing in long-lived, sustainable infrastructure to support the provision of clean heat to their customers.

Pump Heat, Not Gas!

Énergir can, and should, meet their customers' needs by helping them to end their use of gas and by accelerating a managed decapitalization of their existing gas assets. Énergir should "Pump Heat, Not Gas." By this I mean, they should refocus as a "thermal-utility," rather than as a gas-supplier and build a new business focused on the installation of heat pumps and the provision of geothermal district heating for their customers.

The goal should be to address the "climate, economic, and social issues" in the most effective way. Allowing Énergir to "remain a key player" in doing so has value to no one other than Énergir shareholders and should not be considered useful to anyone else.

Renewable Natural Gas is a hoax. See: "The Futility of RNG" at: https://wyman.us/2021/02/09/the-futility-of-rng/

Unless interval (AMI) meters are installed to explicitly measure gas consumption by gas heaters, it will be impossible to accurately determine the "peak value" provided by gas used during peak periods. In the absence of heating-only AMI meters, any estimates of "peak value" are likely to be questionable, negotiated estimates that are subject as much to concerns about gas utility profitability as they are to any actual "benefits" provided to the electric grid.

In any case, having the electric grid pay for gas assets will tend to reduce gas prices and thus encourage continued use of gas. It will also convert capacity costs to an electric utility expense, rather than a capital expense. Thus, the charges will be paid for as they are incurred rather than amortized over the life of the electric assets that might have provided the needed capacity. It should also be recognized that this plan will require that the gas network be maintained, expanded, etc. in order to ensure safe and reliable delivery in the future. As gas consumption is reduced to "peak-only" use, the electric ratepayers will end up paying a continuously growing share of the costs of maintaining the gas infrastructure. Frankly, a long term solution which is focused on only one very large infrastructure (electric), instead of two (electric + gas) will end up costing ratepayers less over time.

As noted later in the article, the plan would be for electric customers to share the cost of paying for gas assets, whether or not they directly use those assets. Thus, any "savings" to Hydro-Quebec should be offset by electric ratepayers obligation to provides of gas capacity.

Quebec's plan to encourage hybrid heating (electric + gas) will cause a dramatic increase in gas bills:

Reducing the quantity of gas commodity consumed does not reduce the largely fixed costs of gas delivery. Thus, in order to ensure revenue neutrality and adequate utility cost recovery, a 70% reduction in the quantity of gas delivered will require a 333% increase in the per-unit cost of gas delivery. This increased cost will, of course, be offset by reduced expenditure on the gas commodity. However, If we make the reasonable assumption that today's costs are evenly split between commodity and delivery, a 70% reduction in gas consumption will require a new per-unit price of delivered gas which is at least 182% of the current price with a reduction to 8.25% of the commodity's share of costs. Gas consumers will be paying for pipes, not gas... (I'm not sure what todays cost split is in Quebec. If it's 60% delivery, the price will rise to 212% of today's cost. If it is only 40%, the price will rise to 151% of today's. )

However, it is likely that if the per unit cost of gas increases by the amounts calculated above, a great many gas users will realize that the cost/kWh or BTU of heating with electric heat pumps is lower than that for gas. Thus, it is likely that gas abandonment will increase over the current rates. While environmentalists will welcome increased gas abandonment, it should be recognized that it will create additional pressure to increase the per-unit cost of gas delivery which will, of course, encourage even more abandonment. The result will be a gas death-spiral.

The Quebec approach is unlikely to lead to good outcomes.

What if the device is virtual and there are copies?

This bill begins the process of establishing parity between the ITC provided for solar, wind, etc. and that provided for geothermal heat pumps. However, there remains work to be done:

• Need to expand qualified equipment to include those that do heating of water, not just "structures." (Note: In the current law, solar systems that provide "hot water" are qualified. So, why not geothermal?)
• Expand beyond "ground and groundwater" as thermal source/sink to include any aqueous liquid in addition to groundwater. This would support Waste Water and Sewer Heat Recovery Systems as well as potable water.

Because these amendments don't apply to anything whose construction begins before Dec 31, 2020 and because the Phasedown applies to anything whose construction begins after that date, geothermal properties would never be eligible for the 30% tax credit.

Makes the ETC for geothermal permanent, after 2022, at the 10% phased down level.

Adds geothermal to the list of properties to receive the 30% ETC before phasedown.

This adds in the Phasedown for Geothermal Heat Pump Properties defined later.

Yes, pages should have access to annotations and may find useful things to do with them. (e.g. I might show "1,245 annotations indicate support for the claim in this sentence.") However, page access to annotations should have no impact on the visibility of annotations outside the page. (i.e. in browser-based annotation viewers.)

No. The ability to make annotations that are not looked upon kindly by authors is one of the most important reasons for allowing annotations. If a webpage makes some derogatory comment about me, I should be able to exercise a "Right of Reply" and post an annotation contesting the statement without being concerned that the author would be able to block my statement. It may be that users' filtering of annotations prevents them from seeing my reply, but the author of the statement should have no influence over the visibility of my reply.

I am concerned that what you might do to prevent this "centralized 'comments section'" will tend to limit useful applications of annotations. It seems to me that anyone should be able to create an annotation, and those who wish to see all public annotations should be able to do so, however, in most cases users will find it useful to "subscribe" to annotations from those they know or trust or who have been designated as trustworthy or useful by some trusted process or system.

We should explore ways to encourage the necessary bootstrapping.

Today, many web based systems provide built-in, custom systems for "Commenting." However, comments are really just one kind of annotation. Given that, it would make sense to encourage website developers to use Web Annotations as the basis for their Comment support.

Rather than building and maintaining an ability to create, edit and manage comments, we would encourage them simply to display listings of annotations that apply to the particular web resource for which they wish to display comments. For users that didn't have or use Web Annotation browser extensions, a standard web site add-on could be provided to allow the generation of an annotation/comment.

Those web sites that only wished to directly display comments submitted by "registered" or known users would be provided with a means to filter available annotations. The on-site embedded annotation display tool would also be able to block specific annotations/comments that were considered to violate site content policies. Of course, all comments would be available to someone using general annotation viewing tools.

At Digital (DEC), in Valbonne, FR during the mid-1980's, we experimented with "annotation" links in our "Memex Prototype 1" VAX-based hyperinformation system. The need for such links became apparent when dealing with data sources, such as database records, program code, telephone directory data, etc. that couldn't be modified to include explicit embedded links. The result of this work was to produce annotations as an accidental side effect. I have always regretted that the Web, as we've come to know it, didn't include this ability.

There has always been "link rot." In ancient texts, there are many mentions of books that no longer exist. We even have thousand year-old lists of library holdings filled with now long lost books. Interestingly, annotation tools like Hypothes.is may one day be seen as a partial defense against link rot. Even if this Atlantic article is deleted or moved to another location, the text that I have annotated and my comments will persist as long as Hypothes.is maintains its database. Thus, we may one day find "information archaeologists" searching through old annotations to try to recover at least those parts of a lost document which had sparked the most attention.

A variety of "Link-Back" standards have been defined and are in use. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback These systems have been broadly used by Blogs.

As districts become smaller, it is harder to gerrymander.

The transition risks include those of accumulating gas stranded assets.

This EO should be considered by gas utilities, and their capital sources, who continue to invest in gas infrastructure with cost recovery periods that go far beyond 2050. Such investments will largely end up producing stranded assets.

Whenever a third-party is able impose non-optional restraints on the information available to an individual, we have an authoritarian regime.

An acceptance of a "freedom of association," as a compliment to freedom of speech, would support the idea that individuals should have individual control over the content moderation or filtering tools that influence what they see, hear, etc.

NYU's Institute for Policy Integrity publish a report which

"provides background on Executive Order 12,898 and explains how renewed national attention to environmental justice presents an opportunity to improve agency compliance with the Order." See: "Improving Environmental Justice Analysis: Executive Order 12,898 and Climate Change," By Iliana Paul, Christine Pries, and Max Sarinsky, January 28, 2021

Hopefully, the focus on "decarbonization" will include all greenhouse gases, even those that contain no Carbon. It is important to recognize that carbon-free gases, including nitrogen oxides, hydrogen, and others, also have a significant Global Warming Potential (GWP) -- often much greater than that of carbon dioxide. According the EPA, nitrous oxide (N2O) has a GWP 265–298 times greater than CO2, which has a GWP of 1. Researchers report a GWP of 5.8 for hydrogen.

One would expect such a report to say much about reducing emissions from electricity generation, however, in many states, particularly those in the Northeast and North, electricity generation and use only produces a small portion of GHG emissions. In New York State, electricity generation is responsible for less than 20% of emissions while heating and transportation each produce between 35% and 40% of emissions. Thus, in New York, emissions from electricity are a third-level priority. In New York, a focus on adoption of heat pumps and electric vehicles will contribute more to cleaning our air and water than a focus on electricity.

It is important that this report identify strategies and technologies which are appropriate for the various regions of the country.

From Archives.gov: Presidential Memorandum -- Climate Change and National Security, September 21, 2016

This memorandum establishes a framework and directs Federal departments and agencies (agencies) to perform certain functions to ensure that climate change-related impacts are fully considered in the development of national security doctrine, policies, and plans.

On January 26, 2021, writers at the Urban Institute praised this memorandum and observed that:

Such an acknowledgment is both historic and consequential. No president has so explicitly recognized the federal government’s culpability or taken official action to redress the consequences of its actions. See: Facing the Facts About Housing Injustice Will Help Pave the Way to Racial Equity

42 U.S.C. § 3608 - U.S. Code - Unannotated Title 42. The Public Health and Welfare § 3608. Administration

Implementation of the Fair Housing Act's Discriminatory Effects Standard, A Rule by the Housing and Urban Development Department on 02/15/2013

HUD's Implementation of the Fair Housing Act's Disparate Impact Standard, A Rule by the Housing and Urban Development Department on 09/24/2020

Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing. A Rule by the Housing and Urban Development Department on 07/16/2015

The Preserving Community and Neighborhood Choice rule has been broadly criticized as a step backwards in addressing housing fairness. See, for instance: Nixon Peabody's analysis: New HUD rule repeals Obama-era Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing rule.

Ta-Nehisi Coates drew widespread attention to the impact of discriminatory government housing policies in his famous Atlantic Monthly article, The Case for Reparations, and in a 2019 followup in the New Yorker, Ta-Nehisi Coates Revisits the Case for Reparations.

I support President Biden's EO ending the use of prisons-for-profit by the Federal government.

The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 (TCJA) provided very large tax cuts for the very wealthy without providing significant benefit to the country.

A simple overview of the TCJA can be found on Wikipedia.

Undoubtedly the worst President in our nation's history.

Congratulations Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on your election!

In addition to setting standard "social costs" for greenhouse gases, it would be useful to set social costs for non-greenhouse gas co-pollutants such as PM2.5. While focusing on GHG emissions is useful, it results in an underestimation of the true social cost of fuel combustion.

Video of Bob Wyman's presentation: "Beneficial Electrification and Geothermal Heat Pumps" at NY-GEO 2018 Conference in Albany, NY.