Gustav von Bunge was a chemist and he lived in the nineteenth century and he studied the minerals in green vegetables. He dried out a batch of spinach and he measured the iron and he wrote down a number. He moved a decimal point one space to the right by mistake and the world changed.

For seventy years every doctor and every mother told children to eat spinach because it had ten times the iron of any other leaf. The number lived in textbooks and it lived on posters and it lived in the minds of the public. Nobody checked the math and nobody went back to the original leaf and the error became a fact.

The error survived until a scientist in the 1930s finally looked at a fresh leaf and realized the world was eating a lie based on a typo.

2

The Pressure of the Clock

Jess looked at the screen and she felt the same weight of the chain. It was 4:50 PM on a Wednesday and she had started a diet exactly fifty minutes ago and her stomach was beginning to argue with her brain. She was a freelance journalist and she had a deadline at 5:30 PM and her editor was a man who liked facts but hated excuses.

Her draft was about the Texas power market and she had written that one specific provider was ranked among the most reliable in the state. Her editor had highlighted the sentence and he had asked who did the ranking and how they did it. Jess clicked the link in her own draft and it took her to a lifestyle blog and that blog linked to a news aggregator and the aggregator linked to a list.

The list had a shiny gold badge at the top and it said “Top Rated” and there were twenty logos of electricity companies. Jess looked for the methodology and she looked for the data but she only found a small line of text at the very bottom. The line said “Sponsored Content” and it was written in a grey font that was almost the same color as the background.

The Texas electricity market is a forest and the trees are made of fine print and the ground is covered in hidden fees. There are over a hundred retail electric providers and they all want to sell a plan and they all want to look like the best friend of the consumer.

Most people look at the price and they look at the name and they hope for the best. But the price is a ghost and it changes depending on how much air conditioning you use and how many lights you leave on at night.

The Invisible Cliff

If you use 999 kilowatt-hours you pay one price and if you use 1001 kilowatt-hours you pay another price and the difference can be a hundred dollars.

Journalism and personal finance writing rely on the idea that someone else did the work. A writer finds a list and the list looks professional and the writer assumes a researcher spent weeks looking at spreadsheets. But the reality of the internet is that most lists are just mirrors of other lists and nobody wants to look at the math.

The blowup has not happened yet and the fragility of these numbers is invisible to the person scrolling on a phone.

3

The Real Source of Regret

If you stack every formal electricity complaint from the last fiscal year in a single pile you will find a strange truth. Roughly 84 out of every 100 complaints filed with the state have nothing to do with the actual price of the power.

The people are not mad at the kilowatt; they are mad at the human on the other end of the phone. They are mad about a bill that arrived late or a contract that changed without a warning or a deposit that was never returned. The price is what gets people to sign the contract but the behavior of the company is what makes them regret it.

Most rankings ignore the behavior and they only focus on the headline price and that is like judging a car by its paint and ignoring the engine.

Jess deleted the sentence in her draft and she felt the hunger in her stomach and she felt the pressure of the clock. She needed a source that was not a circle and she needed a number that had a date and a name attached to it.

She found The Day Company and she began to read their methodology. It was not a lifestyle blog and it was not a sponsored list and it was a 100-point formula. The formula was built on public records and it was built on things that a person could actually verify if they had the time and the patience.

The research looked at six categories and the categories were simple but they were hard to fake. They looked at the complaint ratings from the Public Utility Commission of Texas and they looked at the fines and penalties that the state had issued. They looked at how long a company had been in business and they looked at the fairness of the contract language.

They looked at the price and they looked at the Better Business Bureau grade. Every one of these numbers came from a government document or a public filing and none of the companies could pay to change their score. It was a dataset that a researcher could audit and it was a source that an editor could not highlight with a question mark.

The diet was making Jess irritable and the lack of a snack made her want to fight the world. She liked the 100-point formula because it was honest about what it did not know. It did not promise the lowest price because the price in Texas changes with the zip code and the utility territory.

It only promised to show how the company behaved when the lights were on and the bills were being sent. She wrote a new sentence and she cited the 100-point score and she felt a small sense of victory. She was not passing on a decimal point error from the nineteenth century and she was not helping a sponsored list pretend to be news.

Most comparison sites are built to sell a plan and they are not built to inform a citizen. They hide the fact that they are paid by the providers they recommend and they blend the ads with the advice until the reader cannot tell them apart.

It is a theater of verification where the actors are all wearing the same costume and the audience is paying for the tickets without knowing it. A real ranking has to be able to stand up to a challenge and it has to be able to show its homework. If you cannot see the math then the math does not exist and if you cannot see the source then the source is a ghost.

A reader in Texas has a lot of choices and the choices are confusing on purpose. The retail electric provider sells the plan but the local utility delivers the power and the lines on the bill are often written in a language that requires a law degree to understand.

A company might offer a “free nights” plan but the price during the day is three times the market rate and the “free” power is the most expensive thing in the house. A ranking that only looks at the word “free” is a lie and a ranking that looks at the total cost of the contract is a service.

4

The Straight Line

Jess finished her draft and she sent it to her editor and she looked at the clock. It was 5:25 PM and she had survived the deadline and she had survived the first hour of her diet. She felt lightheaded but she felt clean. She had avoided the citation chain and she had found a source that had a bottom.

The information we consume is only as strong as the work that went into it and most of the work on the internet is just a copy of a copy. When we stop asking to see the arithmetic we start believing in the decimal point error and we start eating the spinach that has no iron.

“The Day Company provided the audit trail she needed and the editor did not leave any more comments in the margins.”

The research was a starting point for the readers and it was a shield for the writer and it was a documented reason to prefer one name over another. In a world of sponsored circles a straight line is a revolutionary thing and a 100-point formula is a heavy brick in a wall of truth.