

1·
1 day agodeleted by creator
deleted by creator
It will likely take awhile for this to have any effect. I know at least in my state (ME) the utility needs to give a 30 day notice of rate hike and then that needs to then go to committee within public utility commission, who will basically arbitrate the request for increase.
Consequently, my supplier of electricity is a wholly owned Canadian company…so they’d actually be paying the increase until a rate hike was approved. Also, would a punitive rate hike even be approved?
They have enough trouble getting a 1% rate hike though for building infrastructure.
Edit: Although I’m not up to speed on if the affected states have set rates or variable rates.
I worked tech support for a software company. In the summers things were slow and they allowed a little leeway for working on personal enrichment projects.
I was aware of a room near IT that was filled with outdated computers and hardware. I asked if I could play with them. A few 100 hour weeks later and a coworker and I held a demonstration for IT and management. We proposed using all the old hardware as PXE boot thin clients (1GB RAM + Small HD + PXE NIC) using a modified Debian that would run all the tech support agent software via Citrix. It went off without a hitch in the demo setup.
Management loved it as they could see the cost savings. IT loved it as they’d get another ProLiant Server to house the Citrix and VMWare tooling. It also meant significantly less time dealing with Windows issues on all the agent machines. Ended up rolling it out to 50 agents that year and it was a success. They eventually moved to HP Thin clients, which built on the original idea.
For a lowly tier 2 tech support agent with a passing knowledge of linux, it was a proud achievement and got me noticed in the company.
Project 2.0 was an Asterix box. We were spending a ridiculous amount of money on international calls. Was able to route all the international calls in the office with logic routing on the primary Tadiran PBX (which ran OS2/Warp…lol) to a little Dell workstation with a Digium telephony card and FreePBX. Costing actual pennies on the dollar. It was like magic!
Linux was the wild west back then.