Notices by Zane Selvans (zaneselvans@social.coop), page 2

@gleemie Well *here* we have an edit button! 😉

@ntnsndr If they really wanted to be notified they would have included a tracking pixel.

@ntnsndr (but I also just refuse to use Chrome at all so maybe I don't know what I'm missing)

@ntnsndr @mozilla Do you feel like this is an unpopular opinion just because Firefox is unpopular and so people have no opinion on it? Or because they actively don't like it? (I absolutely love it.)

Having just read "The Price is Wrong: Why Capitalism Won't Save the Planet" and @akshatrathi's "Climate Capitalism" back to back I feel like one clear takeaway is "Capitalism" means too many different things to different people for it to be useful in discussion without a lot more context.

We're awash in capitalisms, mostly piled up in one little corner of the possibility space.

Thatcher's "There is no alternative" isn't just wrong in the simple way, it's also wrong because even within capitalism writ large there are a bunch of alternatives!

Does your capitalism concentrate or distribute wealth? Does it encourage or discourage monopolies? How does it account for the preexisting wealth of the natural world? How does it account for negative externalities? How does it treat material throughput vs. informational goods?

@luis_in_brief @ntnsndr Ehhh, they had some pretty big "autonomy and independence" violations, locking their members into multi-decade contracts that prohibited them from doing more than 5% self (distributed) generation, to the point where members were suing to defect and do their own renewable development -- which was at that point lower cost. TSGT needed financing to get out from under their big past fossil capital investments.

@luis_in_brief @ntnsndr But the trick of securitizing existing assets with very low cost (state backed) debt to get them off the balance sheet doesn't work for co-ops, because they're already ~100% debt financed, sometimes with below market rates from the USDA, which means there's much less in the way of savings to be had from refinancing.

@luis_in_brief @ntnsndr They also did this thing where the CO PUC was going to maybe let the member co-ops exit without paying the termination tariffs, so Tri-State begged FERC to be their regulator instead, and FERC agreed, and came to a different conclusion than the CO PUC:

https://tristate.coop/dc-circuit-court-appeals-affirms-fercs-exclusive-jurisdiction-over-tri-state-exit-charges

@luis_in_brief @ntnsndr

In addition to the direct-pay tax-credits, the IRA provided a refinancing mechanism through the USDA that I think also played a big role in facilitating the early retirements:

https://www.rd.usda.gov/programs-services/electric-programs/empowering-rural-america-new-era-program

@luis_in_brief @ntnsndr It looks like they've applied for USDA New ERA funding in conjunction with their 2023 resource plan, but haven't heard back from the feds about it yet. They did get a $75M 0% interest loan from USDA though.

https://tristate.coop/tri-state-advances-ERP-with-unopposed-settlement-filing

@ntnsndr @coloradosun I think the direct-pay option for tax credits in the IRA was a big part of it. And also getting new leadership:

https://bigpivots.com/duane-highley-talks-tri-states-journey-from-coal/

@ntnsndr @openvibe Is there a web interface or is it mobile only?

@ntnsndr Sharing Governable Spaces and Community Rule with the NSF POSE I-Corps cohort. They're trying to get these public interest open source projects to figure out governance, but don't seem to have a whole lot of background resources. The program is adapted from NSF's technology commercialization process which is very startuppy. It's been a weird adaptation / translation process.

@ntnsndr But I think they could use your help on the POSE side of things specifically.

Are there good participatory budgeting processes that allow stakeholders with different amounts of money to allocate among several budget categories of fixed but different sizes, reflecting different priorities? Like in a ranked-choice kind of way? @ntnsndr

The application I have in mind is a group of organizations that are contributing money to support the development of a common pool resource (which happens to be open data).

Depending on how much money they contribute to the cause they get, say, 10, 20, or 30 points to allocate across a number of possible projects to improve the resource in the current quarter.

Each project has already been scoped, and has a particular number of points required for it to be prioritized and completed.

If everybody puts points into the same obviously high-priority project, it will have more resources than it needs. Allowing the excess to overflow into their next-highest priority project (a la Single Transferrable Vote) would allow everyone to allocate points by priority w/o needing an endless manual iterative negotiation.

At the end of the process, any project (budget category) which has accumulated enough points to be fully funded would go into the quarterly plan, and at most one project would be left partially funded.

So if the "next" project was big, but there were a couple of smaller but lower priority projects still un-funded, the points would overflow into those smaller buckets which would then be completely funded.

Part of the goal here is to somewhat decouple the quantity of resources available (pledged support) from the voting points, to limit the dispersion in how much voting power any individual org has. Just 3 simple tiers in which voting power maxes out, rather than one-dollar one-vote.