Regulatory Matters

In fact, Tuesday I was healthy enough to go play ultimate for a couple of hours. In fact, as we were shorthanded that night, I played most points of the evening, which made for an exhausted Michael by the end of the night.

The team I was on for most of the evening wasn't very good; a couple of people were still getting some of the fundamentals (e.g., running) down, and overall we weren't very good at stacking and making cuts. (Er, if this makes no sense to you because you've never played ultimate, it's basically one strategy for moving the disc up the field.) So we mostly got crushed, although we ran around a lot. I felt like I was making a lot of good cuts but not getting many throws, which was frustrating. I also dropped several throws I did get.

I ended up switching to a different team late in the evening, though, and we ended the evening by playing a game to 2 points, and I made a pretty good leaping catch and the game-winning throw, which did a lot to make the evening worthwhile.

So, exercise at last. I've gained back a couple of pounds I lost when I was sick, but overall I'm still at a lower weight than I was before Christmas. Now I just need to get back to the gym, hopefully tomorrow...

I've been taping Ken Burns' Jazz documentary series, but haven't yet watched it. I'm not very enthusiastic about it, because it hasn't gotten very good reviews, and because the vast majority of the series covers territory from before 1950, and most of the jazz I like was recorded after 1950. I wish he'd spaced it out more. (I had the same problem with his Baseball series, which glossed over a bunch of good stuff in the 80s and 90s.)

I watched this week's West Wing and it looks like they're building to a reelection story arc for President Bartlet. I also caught re-runs of the Batman Beyond two-parter with the Justice League, which was pretty good, although it was really annoying that they had to get someone different to do Superman's voice.

I've mostly been a couch potato this week when I've been home, watching TV, reading, and working on a new project in my Web, which I'll unveil at some point (but which will mainly only be of interest to my comic book reading fans). I've also spent some quality time with the cats, including taking them each out on the porch tonight to let them look around, which they both loved. It's been raining almost non-stop for the last two days (which I love), which gives them a lot of stuff to watch.

Jen Wade writes about the California electricity crunch, which is slowly escalating, especially as the US Energy Secretary decided not to extend the order to out-of-state power suppliers to continue to sell energy to California. Apparently some California plants will soon come back on-line which will help things, but overall everything's in pretty dire straits.

Deregulation proponents have been trying to publicize the notion that deregulation isn't to blame for California's situation because the state isn't really deregulated, but they overlook some of the fundamental problems with deregulation (it only works if there's a substantial surplus of supply, which is hugely wasteful in the energy market), and the fact that the power utilities chose the route which left them most open to exactly this sort of catastrophe, so that they could maximize their short-term profits. It's short-sightedness on the part of both the companies and the previous state government which put the deregulation plan in place.

Both regulation and deregulation should always only be done if it benefits the consumers. The government should work for the benefit of the public, not the companies, and kow-towing to corporate interests is almost always a bad idea. The deregulation plan seems to have been a little too calculated to enrich corporate coffers, with only a token nod to the concept that competition (of whom? for what?) would lower prices (for whom? how much?).

You'd think that deregulation of the airlines and savings and loan industries would have taught us a lesson about how bad it can be to deregulate critical industries (you end up with one or more of higher prices, lousier service, corporate collusion, and/or government bailouts of bankrupt companies), but apparently the deregulation proponents never learn this lesson.

I'm contemplating throwing a party for my birthday (which is next week), like I did last year. I haven't gotten off my butt and done any real planning, but if I'm going to, I probably should tomorrow. I don't feel like I'm very good at throwing parties, but people seemed to enjoy themselves last year.