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Business

Natural gas sticker shock: Southern Californians seeing sharp increase in bills this month

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SYLMAR, LOS ANGELES (KABC) — A lot of natural gas bills in Southern California are suddenly getting more expensive.

SoCal Gas has already warned customers: “January bills are likely to be shockingly high,”

Lauren Davis is among those shocked customers.

When she opened her family’s gas bill this month, she found it was nearly 25% higher than expected.

“I opened the bill and it was $330 and the first thing was, ‘What’s the temperature in our house?'” Davis said.

After taking a closer look, Davis found out she actually used less gas this year compared to the same time period last year.

But the cost of natural gas supplies nearly doubled, leading to more money out of her pocket.

“For a colder house, less gas used and it’s insane,” Davis said.

When SoCal Gas warned customers of the expected increase on a website message in late December, the company said natural gas market prices in the West more than doubled between December and January.

According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, the reasons behind the price hike of natural gas included the following factors:

  • Widespread, below-normal temperatures
  • High natural gas consumption
  • Reduced natural gas flows
  • Pipeline constraints, including maintenance in West Texas
  • Low natural gas storage levels in the Pacific region

    • SoCalGas announced Friday that it contributed $1 million toward its gas assistance fund, which gives one-time, $100 grants to qualifying applicants.

    Davis said she didn’t meet the income requirements. Instead she had to pull from her family’s food budget. She worries for those with less flexibility, like her elderly neighbor.

    “I can live in 66 (degrees). She cannot. She’s on oxygen, like, she can’t live in 66 and they’re actually looking to get a roommate. That’s the answer,” Davis said, adding, “to have a 94-year-old get a roommate?”

    Among the tips SoCalGas gave to reduce natural gas use were not using it where not necessary, such as with a gas fireplace, bringing down your thermostat three to five degrees and washing clothes with cold water.

    Copyright © 2023 KABC Television, LLC. All rights reserved.

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    Technology

    Apple and Meta headsets could face a big challenge: Sticker shock

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    Apple and Facebook parent Meta are expected to release mixed reality headsets in the coming year that could finally fulfill the industry’s promise to turn head-worn devices into the next big shift in personal computing.

    But there’s one major potential snag: sticker shock.

    The best-selling virtual reality headset, the Meta Quest 2, retails for $400 and accounted for 78% of the nascent VR market in 2021, according to IDC. Consumers who want the next-generation technology are going to have to spend multiples of that.

    Meta’s forthcoming high-end headset, codenamed Cambria, is expected to cost at least $800, the company said earlier this year. Apple’s unannounced device could reportedly cost thousands of dollars. That’s a hefty load for products in a category that’s yet to go mainstream. Just 11.2 million VR units were shipped last year, IDC said. Apple sells that many iPhones every few weeks.

    To expand the market, Meta and Apple will have to convince consumers that more advanced systems will be worth the investment. Both companies are reportedly betting on a new technology called passthrough mixed reality, which requires better displays and more processing power.

    If passthrough mixed reality works as advertised, a VR headset would also function as a set of augmented reality glasses, enhancing the possibilities for applications and real-world use.

    With existing VR devices, the experience is limited to what’s on the headset’s display. In passthrough AR, powerful cameras on the outside of a VR headset take video of the outside world and send it to two or more displays, one each in front of the user’s eyes.

    This allows for developers to play with mixed reality, overlaying software or graphics on the video of the real world from just outside.

    Believers in mixed reality say that we’ll eventually be able to condense the technology into a lightweight pair of glasses with transparent lenses. But that’s for the future.

    The passthrough approach is emerging as the preferred near-term option because optical transparent displays are nowhere near ready for primetime. The problem for today is that passthrough mixed reality requires a lot of expensive parts and a powerful headset, limiting the size of the market.

    In addition to the advanced cameras, passthrough devices need depth sensors that can take detailed video and measurements of the user’s surroundings. They also have to track the user’s eyes so as not to waste power generating graphics that will go unseen. And they need powerful processing capabilities and software to reduce latency so that what the user sees inside the headset isn’t delayed or blurred.

    Most important is the high-resolution screen that needs to be much denser than a smartphone display because it’s so close to the user’s eyes. Smartphone screens average about 550 pixels per inch, but mixed reality devices require displays with about 3,500 PPI, according to CounterPoint Research.

    While Meta and Apple haven’t released their headsets, a few devices currently on the market support passthrough mixed reality. The experiences tend to be limited — black and white or low-quality video — because of a lack of processing power.

    A few weeks ago, I was able to test a headset from Varjo, a Finnish company co-founded by Urho Konttori, a former Microsoft and Nokia executive. Last year, Varjo released the XR-3, which offers full-color, low-latency passthrough mixed reality. It’s expensive, heavy, and aimed at businesses. It costs $6,495 to purchase or about $1,500 to rent it for a year.

    In playing around with the XR-3, I felt less isolated than with other VR headsets.

    Varjo’s XR-3 headset

    Varjo

    I could access a virtual world with the press of a single button, and I could pull up games that took over my entire field of view. I could use virtual computer monitors displaying Windows applications inside the virtual world.

    I was also able to interact with the world around me through Varjo’s passthrough view. In the demo, Varjo placed a life-size car model inside the space. I was able to walk around it and inspect its interior and discuss what I was seeing with someone who wasn’t wearing a VR headset.

    Most impressively, when passthrough was turned on, I could interact with the actual environment around me, carrying on a conversation with the person next to me or finding a chair and sitting in it. This isn’t possible with existing VR technology, which forces you to remove yourself from the physical world.

    Konttori told me that was one of his main goals. The company wants to almost mimic “human-eye” display quality, which he calls the “holy grail” of mixed reality.

    ‘A single coherent scene’

    The XR-3 has two 2880 by 2720 pixel displays, and the company uses eye tracking to focus its processing power to deliver better image quality where your eyes are looking.

    The key is “being able to merge the physical reality around you with the virtual reality objects and make it into a single coherent scene, where you cannot tell apart what is real and what is virtual anymore,” Konttori said. “Part of this evolution is that you can see that at some point, the fidelity of this experience is equal to what you would perceive by looking at it with just your own eyes.”

    However, to use the XR-3 you have to be tethered by a cable to a powerful gaming PC. Meta and Apple are focused on developing devices that don’t require attachment to a separate computer. Konttori knows it will be hard for his startup to compete with some of the biggest tech companies in the world, but he says Meta and Apple still face challenges.

    That’s because developing a consumer-friendly product with the right weight and power consumption is very tricky, especially when it comes to keeping costs down and shipping millions of them.

    “Companies are focusing on consumer-alike experiences, which means that they are still really driven by the size, weight, ergonomics point of view, as well as cost,” Konttori said.

    An attendee wears a HTC Corp. Vive virtual reality (VR) headset during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California, U.S., on Monday, June 5, 2017.

    David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images

    Apple is notoriously secretive about its product roadmap, especially when it comes to new categories. The company has invested heavily in virtual reality research and development in its Technology Development Group and has purchased several startups specializing in mixed reality technology.

    According to reports from Bloomberg and The Information, Apple is developing a mixed reality headset that resembles ski goggles with a powerful homegrown chip, similar to what powers its MacBook laptops, and higher-resolution displays than what’s currently on the market.

    The headset will reportedly support passthrough video and offer games and other applications. At one point, Apple was aiming for at least resolution similar to a 4K TV per eye for its first headset, because anything less could result in users seeing individual pixels, The Information reported.

    Apple hasn’t confirmed its plans to release a mixed reality headset, and the company didn’t respond to a request for comment on this story. In an interview with Chinese media earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook suggested that something is in the works.

    Meta has said Project Cambria, with support of color passthrough, is scheduled to be released later this year. Based on renderings of the device that have been made public, it also looks like a pair of ski goggles. It will include pancake optics, a type of lens that doesn’t need to be calibrated as finely as other VR lenses.

    Meta said in May that the price for Cambria would be “significantly higher” than $800.

    While passthrough technology has yet to hit the market in a real way and will be quite pricey once it does, metaverse developers are rallying behind it. The primary alternative, optically-based mixed reality, uses transparent displays built into lenses to integrate computer graphics with the real world. Microsoft’s Hololens and Magic Leap use optical waveguides, a type of transparent display.

    Transparent displays are also expensive, and they have their own sets of challenges. They’re not good when used in bright daylight, and the current offerings can suffer from poor image quality and blurry text.

    Varjo is making a bet on passthrough technology and Konttori says it’s the better approach in large part because it’s completely digital, putting more control in the hands of developers.

    “It becomes computable,” Konttori said. “It becomes a tool for artificial intelligence to be participating in your world, enhancing your view or your intellect, and you can distort the world in the tiniest ways or the biggest ways possible.”

    He expects passthrough to be “the winning approach for a very, very long time.”

    WATCH: The future of entertainment is mixed reality gaming experiences

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    Business

    Sticker shock: March inflation likely set new 40-year high

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    WASHINGTON (AP) — With ever-rising costs for food, gasoline, housing and other necessities squeezing consumers and threatening the economy, inflation in the United States likely set yet another four-decade high in March.

    The government’s consumer price index being released Tuesday is expected to show that prices shot up 8.4% from 12 months earlier, according to economists surveyed by the data firm FactSet. That would mark the fastest year-over-year inflation since December 1981. And it would surpass the 7.9% 12-month increase in February, which itself set a 40-year high.

    Economists have also forecast that from February to March, consumer prices jumped 1.1%. That would be the sharpest month-to-month jump since 2005.

    The March numbers will be the first the capture the full surge in gasoline prices that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24. Moscow’s brutal attacks have triggered far-reaching Western sanctions against the Russian economy and have disrupted global food and energy markets. According to AAA, the average price of a gallon of gasoline — $4.11 — is up 44% from a year ago, though it has fallen back in the past couple of weeks.

    The escalation of energy prices has led to higher transportation costs for the shipment of goods and components across the economy, which, in turn, has contributed to higher prices for consumers.

    “The war in Ukraine has complicated the inflation outlook,” noted Luke Tilley, chief economist at Wilmington Trust.

    Economists point out that since the economy emerged from the depths of the pandemic, consumers have been gradually broadening their spending beyond goods to include more services. A result is that high inflation, which at first had reflected mainly a shortage of goods — from cars and furniture to electronics and sports equipment — has been gradually emerging in services, too, like travel, health care and entertainment.

    If the March price figures come in as expected, they will solidify expectations that the Federal Reserve will raise rates aggressively in the coming months to try to slow borrowing and spending and tame high inflation. The financial markets, in fact, now foresee much steeper rate hikes this year than Fed officials had signaled as recently as last month.

    The central bank’s rate increases will make loans sharply more expensive for consumers and businesses. Mortgage rates, in particular, though not directly influenced by the Fed, have rocketed higher in recent weeks, making home buying more expensive. Many economists say they worry that the Fed has waited too long to begin raising rates and might end up acting so aggressively as to trigger a recession.

    For now, the economy as a whole remains solid, with unemployment near 50-year lows and job openings near record highs. Still, rocketing inflation, with its impact on Americans’ daily lives, is posing a political threat to President Joe Biden and his Democratic allies as they seek to keep control of Congress in November’s midterm elections.

    Economists generally express doubt that even the sharp rate hikes that are expected from the Fed will manage to reduce inflation anywhere near the central bank’s 2% annual target by the end of this year. Tilley, Wilmington Trust economist, said he expects year-over-year consumer inflation to still be 4.5% by the end of 2020. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, he had forecast a much lower 3% rate.

    In Tuesday’s government report, even excluding volatile food and energy prices, so-called core inflation for the past 12 months is expected to have hit 6.6%, according to the FactSet survey. That would be the biggest such year-over-year jump since August 1982.

    Inflation, which had been largely under control for four decades, began to accelerate last spring as the U.S. and global economies rebounded with unexpected speed and strength from the brief but devastating coronavirus recession that began in the spring of 2020.

    The recovery, fueled by huge infusions of government spending and super-low interest rates, caught businesses by surprise, forcing them to scramble to meet surging customer demand. Factories, ports and freight yards struggled to keep up, leading to chronic shipping delays and price spikes.

    Critics also blame, in part, the Biden administration’s $1.9 trillion March 2021 stimulus program, which included $1,400 relief checks for most households, for helping overheat an already sizzling economy.

    Many Americans have been receiving pay increases, but the pace of inflation has more than wiped out those gains for most people. In February, after accounting for inflation, average hourly wages fell 2.5% from a year earlier. It was the 11th straight monthly drop in inflation-adjusted wages.

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    Business

    Sticker shock: 80% of car buyers now paying above suggested retail price

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    Customers view a vehicle for sale at a Ford Motor Co. dealership in Richmond, California, on July 1, 2021. Eighty percent of new car buyers in January paid more than the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, according to data from Edmunds. (David Paul Morris, Bloomberg, Getty Images via CNN)

    Estimated read time: 5-6 minutes

    ATLANTA — Only a year ago almost no one paid the full sticker price when buying a new car. Now you’re lucky if you can.

    In perhaps the most striking sign of the change in new car pricing, 80% of new car buyers in January paid more than the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, according to data from Edmunds, the online site that tracks car rankings and prices. That’s what’s commonly known as sticker price.

    It’s the latest manifestation of the fact that a shortage of parts, especially computer chips, has caused automakers to temporarily halt production at various plants. That has left dealers with fewer vehicles than they need to meet customer demand.

    That has resulted the average transaction price hitting $45,717 in January, or $728 above MSRP.

    It’s up nearly $6,000, or 15%, from January a year ago, and about $7,500 higher than the average price paid in January 2020, just before the pandemic started roiling the auto industry.

    Only 2% of buyers paid above MSRP a year ago, with buyers paying on average about $2,150 less than sticker at that time.

    “Demand is through the roof, and supplies are historically tight,” said Ivan Drury, senior manager of insights for Edmunds. He said if a buyer isn’t willing to pay above the sticker price, the dealer can be confident there will soon be another buyer who will.

    “We’re talking only a 10- to 11-day average for the time vehicles are on the lot,” he said. “We’ve never seen that.”

    Part of the increase in pricing is because consumers are increasingly buying more SUVs and pickups and fewer sedans, which are typically less expensive. They’re also choosing more expensive options, such as automatic braking and lane departure warnings that are designed to make the cars safer.

    But the biggest factor behind the price increases is the shortage of cars.

    The only good news for car buyers is that used car prices are going up even faster than new car prices, due to an even tighter supply of vehicles in that market. The average value of a trade-in has increased $8,000 in the last year, according to Edmunds.

    Dealers are the big winners

    The biggest winners from the current prices: auto dealers, and not the automakers. Until Tesla came along with its company-owned stores and direct sales to consumers, all automakers used a network of independent businesses to sell cars to American buyers. Dealers would buy cars wholesale at set prices from automakers. The price paid by consumers were then negotiated with the dealer.

    So while automakers benefit from not having to offer some of the cash-back offers or other incentives to boost demand, the auto dealers are reporting booming profits that come from the higher prices.

    AutoNation, the nation’s largest car dealership, just reported record quarterly and annual profits Thursday, even though it sold only 2% of the new cars above the manufacturer’s suggested retail price in 2021. It did so by selling cars at or near sticker price far more often than in the past.

    But many car buyers are upset with the idea of paying over sticker price. And their worries are causing concern among some of the automakers themselves.

    Both General Motors and Ford have sent letters to their dealers telling them that they could have their allocation of new vehicles reduced and redirected to other dealers if it’s determined they’re engaged in what the automakers consider abusive practices.

    In particular, GM and Ford are concerned that customers who have put down a deposit for a reservation for upcoming models, particularly EV models like the Ford F-150 Lightning, are being told that they must pay thousands above the list price they expected to pay. Nearly 200,000 Ford customers made deposits for a Lightning, for example, and GM has similar reservation list for some of its recent and upcoming EVs, such as the GMC Hummer EV pickup and the Cadillac Lyriq.

    “It has come to our attention that in connection with some of these announcements and launches, a small number of dealers have engaged in practices that do not support a positive sales experience for our customers,” said a letter that Steve Carlisle, president of GM North America, sent to dealers. “Specifically, it has come to our attention that some dealerships have attempted to demand money above and beyond the reservation amounts set in GM’s program rules and/or have requested customers to pay sums far in excess of MSRP in order to purchase or lease a vehicle.”

    Ford spokesman Said Deep said that Ford has notified dealers about similar concerns surrounding the Lightning, which is due to start production in the spring. Customers with reservations could start completing their orders starting on Jan. 4. He added that the company also is looking at the large premiums for other hot models, including the Mustang Mach-E and the Bronco, a gasoline-powered car.

    But neither automaker said they are outright prohibiting the widespread use of charging over list price by dealers, only when the price is “far in excess” of that benchmark.

    AutoNation CEO Michael Manley, who was previously CEO of Fiat Chrysler before it merged with France’s PSA Group to form Stellantis, said he didn’t believe pricing over sticker is a problem for the industry’s reputation. He said prices should be close to the manufacturer’s suggested retail price, and he hoped and expected prices to be closer to that level even once the supply of vehicles is no longer constrained.

    “The levels of profitability for both (automaker) and dealers clearly show the benefits of selling vehicles at MSRP. And what a concept, right? Selling at MSRP,” he said to investors. “I think it’s equally clear that significant discounting and high incentives can also damage a brand, which is another reason for our industry to balance appropriately supply and demand.”

    If he’s right, that means the days of paying thousands below sticker are over.

    Paying over the manufacturer’s suggested retail price is not going away any time soon, according to Drury, of Edmunds. With projections that supply of vehicles could remain tight into the second half of this year, it could be 2023 before paying over sticker price becomes rare once again.

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    World

    Fact check: Flood image of BMW with anti-Greta Thunberg sticker is a fake

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    The image showed a BMW partially submerged in the floodwaters. A sticker on the back windshield reads, “F**K YOU GRETA.”(We’ve censored the profanity.)

    Greta is presumably Greta Thunberg, the famed teenage environmental activist. So the image created the impression that an aggressive opponent of climate activism had been harmed by the kind of extreme weather event that scientists say climate change is making more frequent.

    Numerous people who shared the image said it was “karma.”

    Facts First: The image is fake. The original photo, taken in Germany by photographer David Young and published online by the German tabloid Bild, shows the partially submerged BMW but no windshield sticker.
    Other fact-checkers have already debunked the fake image with articles in — at least — German, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, and English.

    Profane anti-Thunberg stickers do exist and have been spotted on vehicles in Europe. The German news website RND noted that before the fake image went viral, at least one person on Twitter had mused about the possibility of photos showing flooded SUVs bearing such stickers.

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