Stupid utilities: National Grid

My wife just berated me for not paying the electricity bill: Evidence of which was a call from a company asking to talk to me about the electricity bill. So I check the online payment and find they were paid. It turns out that the call about my bill was not about arrears at all, it was a company cold calling to ask me to 'switch' to them as a supplier.

Now there are many reasons why I would not switch to the company in question, not least the fact that I never ever do business with companies that use a robot dialer to cold call me. It may be the same company that has been sending people door to door to ask if they can see people's electricity bills so that they can demonstrate the savings they offer. That might be the reason they are asking or it might be (as my neighbors report) because they want to see the account number needed to authorize a switch.

I am not going to switch to that particular company but I must admit to being tempted to switch because National Grid won't let me pay electronically. Or to be exact, they will let me pay electronically if I give them the ability to deduct arbitrary amounts from my bank account on the day of their choosing. What they refuse to do is to co-operate with the automatic payment scheme offered by my bank, a scheme that gives me control.

Even though the bank I use is small, the Web bill payment system they offer is run by a division of Quicken. It is one of the largest payment processing houses in the business. National Grid refuse to work with them because they want to try to force me to use their system to make electronic payments. All that National Grid need do is to send the electricity bill to the payment center where it will be scanned and entered into the payment system. The gas division of National Grid does this but the electricity division ignores the requests.

Of course there are much better ways of doing electronic payments than sending paper bills to a payment center that mails out checks. But National Grid does not seem interested in supporting those either. This might because their antiquated billing system would be costly to modify to produce anything other than paper mails or it might be because the management of an old style utility have never had to consider customer service in the past.

Now of course they will and it is going to be very interesting to see the results.

Update: Yes, I know I can send a check using the Internet, that is exactly what I want to do. The problem is that National Grid will only mail the invoice to my home address where it gets lost in the junk mail. All my other bills go to Quicken where they are processed automatically. Read the rest of this post...

Video: Demon pendulum

This is just too cool.

Odd update: I've just arrived in Stockholm for the Netroots Nation Sweden conference, and flew in via Amsterdam this morning.  What do I run into in the Amsterdam airport, but an exhibit demonstrating the very pendulum wave thing that I posted about the night before. (Bad iPhone photo at left.)  Bizarre coincidence.

Read the rest of this post...

Dems on Hill have "buyer's remorse" about health care reform

Not anything close to the buyer's remorse a lot of us have about them. First this excerpt from The Hill:

“I think we would all have been better off — President Obama politically, Democrats in Congress politically, and the nation would have been better off — if we had dealt first with the financial system and the other related economic issues and then come back to healthcare,” said Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), who is retiring at the end of this Congress.

Well, we did deal with the economic crisis first. That's what the stimulus was about. And had the administration sold the stimulus harder, and more wisely, to the public, both before and after it was passed, people would, in retrospective, have perceived the stimulus as worthy and effective, and thus would have perceived that the Congress DID in fact deal with economic issues first.

The second problem was the way they handled health care reform. The administration did a lousy job selling the legislation to the public, and an equally lousy job demonizing Republicans and insurance companies (and Big Pharma et. al.), both during and after the legislative battle. So we ended up with legislation that no one understands, that the administration has, at times, seemed almost embarrassed of mentioning, and that the Republicans have outright lied about, continually, and about which the public now believes many of the lies.

The fault, dear congressman, is not in our legislation, but in ourselves.

A lot of us predicted exactly how the health care reform battle, and every other battle, was going to go down if the Democrats continued to refuse to fight.  Yet refuse a lot of them did, especially the administration (and then when the administration backed away, Dems on the Hill were left hanging out to dry, making them less willing and able to fight).

Then there's Barney. Always ripe for an annoyingly certain opinion:

The most recent wave of misgivings from Democrats began with Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), who told New York magazine that Democrats “paid a terrible price for healthcare.”

Frank said Obama had erred in pushing the legislation after GOP Sen. Scott Brown’s January 2010 victory in Massachusetts, which took away the Senate Democrats’ 60th vote.

Yes, how crazy of President Obama to actually push for something after one guy won an election against a really bad Democratic candidate, and a race in which the White House refused to help until the last week or two, when all was already lost.

Again, post hoc ergo propter hoc reasoning has its flaws. Maybe we didn't lose because we attempted to pass a particular piece of legislation. May we lost because we did it poorly. Read the rest of this post...

Romney's slogan isn't working

As you might have heard, Romney's latest campaign slogan is 'Obama isn't working'. This appears to be both a reference to the famous 'Labour isn't Working' slogan created by the brothers Saatchi for the 1979 Conservative campaign in the UK, and a none-too-subtle dog whistle to remind voters of a common racist stereotype (i.e., the black man doesn't work).

The Saatchi slogan was also a double entendre. It pointed to the fact that UK unemployment had reached over a million under Labour, and the country had been crippled by strikes for months, the so-called 'winter of discontent'. It was a powerful slogan because it reminded voters of the two facts that were central to the Tory campaign.

While the Romney campaign is also attempting a double entendre, neither meaning is likely to resonate outside the Conservative base. Most voters remember that the recession started under the Bush administration (that didn't stop Romney from trying to blame President Obama for a factor that was closed under Bush). Claiming that Obama has not done enough to clean up the mess made by the last Republican President does not have quite the same punch as pointing to the collapse of British manufacturing under Labour.

There is also the fact that voters don't (at least not yet) seem to think Romney has any better economic expertise than Obama. A recent MSNBC poll found that there was essentially no difference between voters assessment of Romney and Obama on the economy. The Romney slogan might even backfire if people consider the Thatcher government as precedent: 18 months after the 1979 election, UK unemployment hit three million as the country's manufacturing base was destroyed and Britain became a net importer of manufactured goods for the first time since the industrial revolution.

The dog whistle aspect of the slogan might also backfire. Does it really make sense for a man who left business in 1999 and hasn't had a real job since 2007, because he's so rich he doesn't need to work, to accuse the President of being lazy? Read the rest of this post...

The Band - The Weight

A fantastic performance by The Band at Woodstock.

It's election day in France. It's likely the first step in voting current president Sarkozy out of office after only one term. If this happens, he will be the first president of France since the early 1980's to be a one and done. Read the rest of this post...