Re: Too cheap. . .

[Neon John <johngd@bellsouth.net>]

"D. Kosloff" wrote:
> 
> Although Arnold Sommerfeld (1868-1951) may have predicted that "electricity
> would be too cheap to meter" that would not qualify as a promise from the
> "nuclear industry" since he was a theoritical physicist in Germany.  His
> school of theoretical physics was closed in 1940, when he was 71 years old,
> after Hitler came to power.  It does not appear that he had any involvement
> in industrial applilcations of nuclear physics.  Since Lewis Strauss was
> interested in physics, he may have heard of Dr. Sommerfeld's prediction and
> adapted it to his speech.  He also may have heard about it from someone else
> during his tenure as an AEC commissioner.

I think this remark is very widely misunderstood.  It didn't mean
that electricity would be cheap enough to give away.  It meant that
electricity would become inexpensive enough that it wasn't worth the
expense of metering and could be sold flat-rate, presumably to
residential customers, at least.  Cable TV and local telephone
service (in most US states) are other examples.  

One could certainly assert that electricity has indeed reached that
point.  Electricity is in many (most?) areas of the country cheaper
than it has ever been in real dollars, while the cost of the labor
to read meters, and the meters themselves are going up. Modern
building codes have houses spec'd down well enough that it might
make sense to set up a few brackets according to house size and type
and flat-rate bill within the bracket and get rid of the meters. 
Yes, I know it would remove one tool of the socialists to monkey
around with behavior modification but that would also be good and it
sure makes financial sense.

BTW, Don, I really appreciated your note about your 'conversion'. 
There are not many people out there who will admit to being wrong,
seeing the error of their ways and changing.  Fewer stil who
publicly admit it.

John
-- 
John De Armond
johngdSPAMNOT@bellsouth.net
http://personal.bellsouth.net/~johngd/
************************************************************************
The RADSAFE Frequently Asked Questions list, archives and subscription
information can be accessed at http://www.ehs.uiuc.edu/~rad/radsafe.html