No Stupid Questions
No such thing. Ask away!
!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.
The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:
Rules (interactive)
Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.
All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.
Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.
Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.
Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.
Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.
Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.
That's it.
Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.
Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.
Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.
Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.
On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.
If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.
Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.
If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.
Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.
Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.
Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.
Let everyone have their own content.
Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.
Credits
Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!
The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!
view the rest of the comments
Because the law is there to protect big business. There are not big business utilities, but there are big business restaurants.
No big business utilities? PG&E is worth $35 billion. Duke Energy is close to $70 billion. The list goes on. These are fortune 500 companies that employ small towns worth of people.
Utilities are damn near as big as it gets.
Utilities are regulated and provided by the local government. They're not a business like McDonalds is.
You're right that most utility markets are regulated, but it is typically handled at a state level, not local. In most of the US, municipal governments are not the provider of electric and gas utilities, although there are certainly many exceptions. Additionally, when those small local utilities are given a service territory they are often just reselling energy purchased from a large utility.
I've worked for a large utility for the last decade. We're a business just like McDonalds. We take in raw materials and convert them to a product that our customers want to buy. We try to attract new customers through advertising and good service. We lobby the politicians that regulate our market. We do all those business things, and we do it in the name of profit.
There are a lot of small co-op utilities that don't work quite the same way. If large utilities were banks, those little co-ops would be credit unions. That type of utility is awesome because they are able to be more customer focused. Unfortunately most of them lose out on economies of scale, so their customers may not actually see any savings in comparison to the big guys.
If you still don't believe utilities are big business, look at NextEra Energy. They're worth about $150 billion, give or take a couple billion. That means they have a higher valuation than the combined worth of Darden Restaurants (Olive Garden, Longhorn, etc), Dominos, Wendy's, Papa John's, Chipotle, Burger King, and the Yum Brands (KFC, Pizza Hut, etc).
These large utilities aren't just bigger business than most restaurants. They're an order of magnitude larger.