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Schadenfreude Morning
Jun. 9th, 2010 11:00 amIt's certainly nice to wake up to a world where PG&E and Mercury Financials together sank $56M+ into our state's economy and didn't get crap for it. Of course the more important element is that future megacorps will think a little bit harder about trying to fund a self-serving proposition when the record is 0 for 2. And, that was against almost no opposition. I know one of those two props had just $100k money put in against it, and the other wasn't too far off.
When I was looking at maps last night, I found it very interesting that the PG&E prop seemed to have two different axes predicting voting patterns. First up, the more progressive an area was, the more likely it voted against it, but secondly much of the Central Valley voted against it too, even while they largely supported conservative issues (including Mercury's self-serving proposition). The reason? I suspect it's that PG&E has been installing SmartMeters like crazy, and the Central Valley has seen big bill increases in the wake, leading to the filing of lawsuits against PG&E.
Ah, if PG&E had just been able to manage the publicity about their SmartMeters better, they might have won their monopoly in perpetuity last night. Instead, like most crappy companies they were idiots, doing things like sending people out to install SmartMeters, then "warning" the customers weeks later. I'm sure I'm far, far from the only one who almost called the police on a SmartMeter installer.
The one disturbing element of the election last night is that it showed once again that vast numbers of people in this state are stupid sheep who follow the money. We still had 48% of the voters vote for each of the propositions that did almost nothing other than prop up corporations. We similarly saw Republican candidates who dumped absolutely gross amounts of their personal money into the election (making it one of the most expensive ever) win. That's a very sad reflection on these United States (and generally a sad reflection on direct democracy and why it fails).
But we got lucky last night, and 4% more of people were on the ball.
When I was looking at maps last night, I found it very interesting that the PG&E prop seemed to have two different axes predicting voting patterns. First up, the more progressive an area was, the more likely it voted against it, but secondly much of the Central Valley voted against it too, even while they largely supported conservative issues (including Mercury's self-serving proposition). The reason? I suspect it's that PG&E has been installing SmartMeters like crazy, and the Central Valley has seen big bill increases in the wake, leading to the filing of lawsuits against PG&E.
Ah, if PG&E had just been able to manage the publicity about their SmartMeters better, they might have won their monopoly in perpetuity last night. Instead, like most crappy companies they were idiots, doing things like sending people out to install SmartMeters, then "warning" the customers weeks later. I'm sure I'm far, far from the only one who almost called the police on a SmartMeter installer.
The one disturbing element of the election last night is that it showed once again that vast numbers of people in this state are stupid sheep who follow the money. We still had 48% of the voters vote for each of the propositions that did almost nothing other than prop up corporations. We similarly saw Republican candidates who dumped absolutely gross amounts of their personal money into the election (making it one of the most expensive ever) win. That's a very sad reflection on these United States (and generally a sad reflection on direct democracy and why it fails).
But we got lucky last night, and 4% more of people were on the ball.