The California Work-from-home Tax

I just got a letter from PG&E informing me that unless I take action by a certain date, my billing will automatically change to a new plan that charges extra for home electricity use between the hours of 4 PM and 9 PM, including on weekends. The letter “helpfully” informs me that based on the past 12 months of usage, the new plan is my “lowest cost rate”, with an estimated 12-month savings of precisely $0.

Coincidentally, this is one of the coolest summers of the past twenty years in Salinas, and I rarely had a reason to use the air conditioner last year, either. And since there’s no plan to build any new power plants in California, peak rates are sure to keep rising. So they’re offering a pig in a poke.

Also coincidentally, I lost power for several hours in the middle of the day on Monday due to a blown transformer. The text message informing me of the outage arrived about an hour later.

Letting the kitten out of the bag

Caught the new Porch Kitten dropping by for dinner yesterday; the light wasn’t great, and he’s still very shy, so I had to switch to multi-exposure mode and zoom way in to catch him in focus.

Denial of systemd

Sloppy code added to systemd six years ago finally got noticed, resulting in any unprivileged user being able to crash your system.

Fun with seiyuu…

Seras Victoria == Lotte Yanson

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