Beck Blows a Fuse Over Design for Tamper-Proof Electrical Outlet Lock

I knew Beck had a vendetta against Smart Electrical Meters, which were developed decades ago as part of a Power Utility initiative to provide more accurate billing and enable real-time mapping of residential power consumption patterns in order to improve routine load balancing, peak-load planning and outage prevention/restoration.

But I can’t believe he’s wigged-out by a patent for an electrical outlet lock that strikes me as—duh—an ideal solution to discourage squatters from taking up residence in vacant/abandoned homes while they’re being shopped for resale. I guess it’s been so long since Glenn was a destitute drunk that he’s forgotten the Light Company doesn’t have to fuck with your plugs to shut off your service.

Hint to Beck: It’s not the outlets you should worry about, dude. It’s the Internet-wired refrigerators and hot tubs. That’s how they’ll get ya.

PS: Somebody needs to tell this douchefunnel that the US Export-Import Bank didn’t give Petrobras $2 billion so George Soros could drill for oil. The Ex-Im Bank guarantees loans by third-parties for the purchase of US-made equipment and products, in order to give foreign corporations/investors the confidence to move forward with big-ticket projects that benefit US manufacturers.

Posted by StrangeAppar8us on 06/18/10 at 07:43 PM • Permalink

Categories: Politics • Nutters •

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Umm… those power meters are under heavy fire here in California. Known as Smart Meters, lawsuits have been filed up and down the state. Seems people think an electrical bill that normally comes in at around $100 a month and then suddenly jumps to $250-300 a month has pissed off some customers.

Fuck Beck. Also.

Comment by HumboldtBlue on 06/18/10 at 07:48 PM

@Humboldt—Yeah, I understand they’ve been problematical in application, although not for the reasons Beck has floated.

Part of the problem is that remote digital reading eliminates both the sloppiness of older analog meters, and the fuzziness of “estimated usage” calculations based on intermittent meter-reads by actual human beings. The bigger issue, probably, is that utilities are using their improved hourly load profiles to impose variable “time-of-day” billing rates in order to offset the costs of onstreaming supplemental peak power.

Theoretically, Smart Meters were also supposed to provide customers with consumption/cost info so that they could become “active energy consumers” who would voluntarily shed non-essential loads at peak hours. But that may not be panning out in practice, either because the technology was oversold, or because human beings don’t work that way.

Comment by StrangeAppar8us on 06/18/10 at 08:09 PM

Chiming in here cause I can. My a/c heat pump thingy died in February. I weighed the cost of fixing it (usually upwards of $500.00) with the cost of buying a couple of space heaters at the time, and a couple of window a/c units once the heat arrived. DH and I live in the ground floor of a two story 3 bed 2 br house. I could not see the sense in heating and cooling the entire place. Anyhoo, our electric bills went from $400.00 a month to $96.00 a month. I am beginning to think that it is the best decision I ever made.