More Wind Power Industry Stuff & Nonsense from East County Magazine

[hunter]

60. I love my smart meter... (sarcasm) They can turn my electricity on and off by remote control.

Used to be the electric company would have to send a guy to my house when I couldn't pay the bill. Then they'd have to send a guy out again to turn it back on. The local office directed the entire process and they could adapt to the customer's circumstances. I'm sure their were some abuses and irregularities in the process, maybe local office tyrants granting favors to their friends and shutting down others, but it was a very human process.

Now a computer turns off my power by remote control, no humans are involved, it's automatic according to some formula. Then I'm forced to scrounge up the money from people who are paying me later, and later, and later, take it to the electric company office in our town, where they have no authority to turn my power back on themselves. A reconnect has to be authorized by someone in a distant city, who then types in the code that turns my power back on by remote control.

My dad had an average working class job with excellent health benefits and a good retirement plan that still supports him and my mom comfortably.

My wife and I have a greater income than our parents did, even inflation adjusted, the same size houses, but our standard of living is lower in most ways because our health insurance is crappy and horribly expensive, we always have medical bills and college expenses we can't pay, and we have no unions representing us, demanding, at the very least, that we are paid on time.

The giant electric companies or health insurance companies are assured their revenue streams because their computers can cut off customers who are behind in their payments instantly, in effect shedding all the irritations of an unstable, sputtering economy onto their smaller customers who pass those irritations onto their customers.

The giant corporate borg is a machine that feels nothing, and the directors of these corporations paying themselves unconscionable multi-million dollar salaries and bonuses are sociopaths.

Call me a conspiracy theorist, I think a lot of "woo" is generated and encouraged by the very same large corporations it is directed against. The "woo" about smart meters obscures the actual reasons the power companies are installing them, reasons that do not benefit the customer or ordinary worker in any way. The rich get richer, and everyone else gets poorer.