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Do we want them to know?
Howard_Casto:
--- Quote from: SavannahLion on July 14, 2011, 01:36:40 am ---One of these days I should gather up the George Carlin list and compare it to the TSA list and see how true it holds today. I'm too lazy to do it right now though. Maybe I'll do it while I'm at work. :P
--- End quote ---
Now that was a wise man. There are very few people on this planet I've ever been able to agree with 99% of the time. I miss him.
You know what he would say:
"Freedom, we don't have any Freedom. What we have is the ILLUSION of Freedom and they are very smart to give us that. It makes all us sheep complacent."
Vigo:
The thing is, this sort of thing does get abused. Agencies will scrape whatever information they can get and use it against you if it serves their purposes.
A few years back, my house was condemned on me while I was inside it watching tv. Apparently some branch of the city gov't forgot to file some random form with the county gov't which caused my property tax information to not be uploaded to some city database. Therefore since the house I bought was a foreclosure, they had in their records an unoccupied house that went uninspected for a lapse of 6 months, violating requirements. So an inspecor came over and rather that wondering why an "unoccupied" house had lights on and cars parked in the driveway, he just went up to the door and posted the condemnation signs up. I noticed them as he was driving away. :dizzy:
Needless to say, I had to provide a ton of very private information to them in order to get my house uncondemned. Tax information, pay stubs, electric bills, birth certificates, you name it. Balls to the wall, i grumbled and just did what they asked. Big mistake.
A few months later, some other city department was inspecting our bill and determined that we had too high of an electric bill, this prompted a city investigator to go to our property and check to see if I was running a commercial business (or weed, I guess) out of my home. At least this is what the city inspector told me when I called her up after getting a nasty letter from her saying I was to be under inspection for property tax evasion. The inspector found an old sign lying out on my garage that said "tenant parking only" The house I bought was a rental before it was foreclosed, and when I bought it, I just never threw the sign out because people would try to park in my driveway.
Well, we tried to fight that one, and thankfully we avoided depositing another lump of private information on the city's lap, but they still demanded an inspection to prove I was not renting out my property without paying rental taxes on it. I tried to fight that as well, but then it got to the point where the city threatened to report that we were harboring illegal immigrants. The city jumped to the conclusion that the only reason why I didn't want an inspector in my house was because I was hiding illegals in my attic. ::) Well, since my wife was working on getting her citizenship at the time, my balls were now in a blender, so I just agreed to the inspection.
The inspection was pretty much as I thought it would end up, the inspector said that I had too many power tools, so clearly I was building without a permit, and I had an old mailbox sitting inside my locked porch, so that must be the second mailbox for the illegal family in my attic. Oh, and she didn't believe me when I told her that my guest bedroom was a guest bedroom. I just got pissed and laid it out flat the whole stupid story for her of everything that happened since day 1. Well, I guess she sort of got the point of how idiotic the whole thing was and finally backed off. Of course she threw out a number of smarmy comments about how I may have won this time, but they will be watching me.
Well, long story short, don't give any form of gov't even an inch when it comes to your private information. When they need to, they will take a mile.
Kevin Mullins:
--- Quote from: AtomSmasher on July 14, 2011, 01:30:48 am ---A coworker recently had one of these meters installed and he said that he got a login for the electric companies website so he could see his hourly usage. Sounded kind of cool to me.
--- End quote ---
I'll have to ask about that..... we've had a smart meter for some time now.
We had a water well pipe crack on us before and it went un-noticed until we got that month's bill. (not cracked enough to lose water, but enough to keep the pump running 24/7) Would be nice to monitor stuff like that once in a while to be able to catch abnormalities of electricity use. Ya know... wtf is using so much power when everyone is sleeping type thing.
We live fairly rural, so it only makes sense for them to look for ways to not have to go meter to meter.
But honestly I could give a rat's ass what all it can do as long as they quit jacking the rates up due to their "innovated technology ideas". (saves them man-power costs, but ends up costing us for the new equipment)
Vigo:
You can check how much power you are using, just pop on out to your meter and watch the dial. You can also get those watt usage meters.
Malenko:
If you agree with the guy in the video, you're ---smurfing--- stupid. Whether or not you were home of the night of the murder? I can wrap a rubber band around a drill and go kill someone, and the smart meter is my alibi? They can see how many watts my electric tooth brush pulls? Who the hell has a corded toothbrush? Sounds dangerous. :dizzy:
I'm all about privacy, and my right to it.I just cant understand why this is a big deal. My electric company uses smart meters, they provide us with power usage statistics like when we use the most power and how to better conserve energy.
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