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The highest price that the city owned electric utility in Alameda, CA charges on the standard rate schedule is $0.29453 / kWh https://www.alamedamp.com/Documen

by jf 2y ago

The highest price that the city owned electric utility in Alameda, CA charges on the standard rate schedule is $0.29453 / kWh https://www.alamedamp.com/DocumentCenter/View/1268/FY25-Rate-Summary-Final https://www.alamedamp.com/DocumentCenter/View/1268/FY25-Rate... Edit: Oh, this utility runs at a profit and has for decades. The profits have been going into undergrounding transmission lines

abathur 2y ago
Not trying to neg how you phrased it, but I wonder if the whole damn system would be a smidge better if we had strong well-worn widely-used terms to discriminate between profit-taken and surplus-reinvested (and maybe to further discriminate between unrelated r&d, related r&d, and direct performance/capacity/resiliency/etc. investments)
- vlovich123 2y ago
  Can you distinguish effective investment from ineffective? For example, paying competitively to attract and retain talent can be seen as an investment as well. And before you restrict it to just physical infrastructure investment, a non-trivial part of the cost of that infrastructure is in salaries and also how you manage everything at scale and I would think you’d want to incentivize more efficiency there too. This is why the tax code gets so insanely complicated.
  - abathur 2y ago
    I'm a little unsure how to take you here, because I avoided dragging the efficacy of an investment into frame on purpose. Maybe you just mean to tack on the idea that we could benefit from having better language to separate shrewd and incompetent investments, in which case I'm ~fine with some language to retcon the difference between merely lighting investments on fire and using them to drive an engine back on to those investments once we know the difference. But if you mean to suggest that it's pointless for us to bother discriminating between profit-taken and investment-(effective|ineffective) just because we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive yet, then I suspect I disagree to the death. (Edit: In case I'm being obtuse, I at least think I agree that "investing" surplus in hiring and retaining great employees is a surplus-invested, and not a profit-taken.)
    - vlovich123 2y ago
      > (Edit: In case I'm being obtuse, I at least think I agree that "investing" surplus in hiring and retaining great employees is a surplus-invested, and not a profit-taken.) So the executive compensation packages that many people hate on then are just a mechanism to reduce the profits of the company. And it’s not clear to me that Apple saving up profits so they can make larger investments without taking out loans is a strategy we want to disincentivize either. My point is that designing top-down incentives at market scale are very difficult and while attractive are basically the central failure of central planning. Even setting aside the challenge of figuring out how to word the incentives correctly in a way that maximizes gain and minimizes gaming of the system (basically impossible) in a political system you also have to get buy in from people who don’t see it your way which muddles your ideal solution regardless of you being right or wrong. I’m highlighting that’s how and why we have the current tax system - it’s many many people trying to tweak and optimize incentives and curtail problems over a long period of time.
      - abathur 2y ago
        (It feels like you are talking like you're gotcha-ing me, but I don't feel like I am trying to address any of these problem at the level you are focused on.) I wouldn't say surplus held to be invested, even for many years to support a large capital project, is profit-taken. The surplus isn't being taken. (But, as before, I do still think it may be worth discriminating between related/unrelated, because this is somewhat relative. A large for-profit utility could extract surplus from most of its regional markets and plow it all into supreme resiliency for the city its headquarters is in...) Designing good incentives or tax policy are very different problems than having slightly better vernacular for average people to use to distinguish between patterns of organizational behavior that throw surplus in a bin for a truck to take away and those that toss it in a compost pile for on-site use. Accountants and auditors can classify inflows and outflows however they like--but I think specific problems like good incentives are more tractable when common people can leverage simple language to build the understanding and support that policy wonks will need to dial in incentives or tax policy.
        2y ago
- johngladtj 2y ago
  Those terms exist. The payout ratio is the percentage of net income actually paid out to equity investors. For utilities it's around 50% of net income, though it obviously depends
xethos 2y ago
> Oh, this utility runs at a profit and has for decades And yet somehow Americans will never see this and think "If only it were government-owned so the profit could be returned to the people"

by jf 2y ago

abathur 2y ago

Not trying to neg how you phrased it, but I wonder if the whole damn system would be a smidge better if we had strong well-worn widely-used terms to discriminate between profit-taken and surplus-reinvested (and maybe to further discriminate between unrelated r&d, related r&d, and direct performance/capacity/resiliency/etc. investments)

vlovich123 2y ago
Can you distinguish effective investment from ineffective? For example, paying competitively to attract and retain talent can be seen as an investment as well. And before you restrict it to just physical infrastructure investment, a non-trivial part of the cost of that infrastructure is in salaries and also how you manage everything at scale and I would think you’d want to incentivize more efficiency there too. This is why the tax code gets so insanely complicated.
- abathur 2y ago
  I'm a little unsure how to take you here, because I avoided dragging the efficacy of an investment into frame on purpose. Maybe you just mean to tack on the idea that we could benefit from having better language to separate shrewd and incompetent investments, in which case I'm ~fine with some language to retcon the difference between merely lighting investments on fire and using them to drive an engine back on to those investments once we know the difference. But if you mean to suggest that it's pointless for us to bother discriminating between profit-taken and investment-(effective|ineffective) just because we don't know whether the cat is dead or alive yet, then I suspect I disagree to the death. (Edit: In case I'm being obtuse, I at least think I agree that "investing" surplus in hiring and retaining great employees is a surplus-invested, and not a profit-taken.)
  - vlovich123 2y ago
    > (Edit: In case I'm being obtuse, I at least think I agree that "investing" surplus in hiring and retaining great employees is a surplus-invested, and not a profit-taken.) So the executive compensation packages that many people hate on then are just a mechanism to reduce the profits of the company. And it’s not clear to me that Apple saving up profits so they can make larger investments without taking out loans is a strategy we want to disincentivize either. My point is that designing top-down incentives at market scale are very difficult and while attractive are basically the central failure of central planning. Even setting aside the challenge of figuring out how to word the incentives correctly in a way that maximizes gain and minimizes gaming of the system (basically impossible) in a political system you also have to get buy in from people who don’t see it your way which muddles your ideal solution regardless of you being right or wrong. I’m highlighting that’s how and why we have the current tax system - it’s many many people trying to tweak and optimize incentives and curtail problems over a long period of time.
    - abathur 2y ago
      (It feels like you are talking like you're gotcha-ing me, but I don't feel like I am trying to address any of these problem at the level you are focused on.) I wouldn't say surplus held to be invested, even for many years to support a large capital project, is profit-taken. The surplus isn't being taken. (But, as before, I do still think it may be worth discriminating between related/unrelated, because this is somewhat relative. A large for-profit utility could extract surplus from most of its regional markets and plow it all into supreme resiliency for the city its headquarters is in...) Designing good incentives or tax policy are very different problems than having slightly better vernacular for average people to use to distinguish between patterns of organizational behavior that throw surplus in a bin for a truck to take away and those that toss it in a compost pile for on-site use. Accountants and auditors can classify inflows and outflows however they like--but I think specific problems like good incentives are more tractable when common people can leverage simple language to build the understanding and support that policy wonks will need to dial in incentives or tax policy.
      - 2y ago
johngladtj 2y ago
Those terms exist. The payout ratio is the percentage of net income actually paid out to equity investors. For utilities it's around 50% of net income, though it obviously depends

xethos 2y ago

> Oh, this utility runs at a profit and has for decades And yet somehow Americans will never see this and think "If only it were government-owned so the profit could be returned to the people"