Fast forward to today. They're housewives. I'm a Software Engineer. It's sad and disheartening. I wish there were more women in my field.
Chances are good that if they had a Y chromosome, they'd be software engineers now, and chances are they'd still be better than you are. Being wired the way they are (i.e. to want to raise families post-puberty if they are girls) ensures that the genes encoding for brilliance at programming get passed on more than 50% of the time. To me that's neither sad nor disheartening.
The move to lossless codecs (audio and video) will slow that down somewhat, since the sizes of the files will be inherently larger than 5MB for a song and 700MB for a movie. So will a move to higher definition video. I suspect that games will be the last holdout, since an experience that is different each time according to a player's input can be recorded but is not interesting to watch. If all calculations are done server side and kept secure, you can't crack it.
Colonizing the moon, mars etc. has little to do with learning things, and less to do with romance. It's an off-site backup for humanity. Irrespective of whether you personally care about any subset of humanity to want to preserve it, there are enough people who do.
BTW I don't see why places like the Gobi Desert won't be settled eventually. It has space, and very regular (although not particularly powerful) sunlight. It's just that as far as places to colonize on earth go, there happens to be lower hanging fruit... for now. Look into the future a few decades, perhaps a century or two. Humankind will start noticing some real limits. Limits of energy. Limits of space. Limits of rainfall. Limits of materials.
At exactly the same time as these limits kick in, humankind will also start discovering efficiency. We (or at least, an intelligent subset of us) will learn how to survive in inhospitable areas by building environments that require only a solar energy input. A ready supply of air, earth gravity, shielding from cosmic radiation and probably abundance of some materials as opposed to others is the only difference between there and the moon.
If it's a choice between raising a family in the Gobi Desert or not at all, it will be done by someone, especially with billions of people desiring a solution (a sizeable fraction of those with a clue), the open source movement and the internet allowing for the gaps in knowledge to be filled by experts in independent fields. For the same reasons, the moon will be colonized after the Gobi Desert is filled to capacity. Neither will happen in 2008 though.
However, from the original perspective of a backup plan for humanity, I think it's worth working on fleshing out the framework now instead of in a century's time, so that at least we know what gaps are missing. An ounce of prevention, a stitch in time, etc.
And maybe Google Auction can carry over feedback scores from eBay. I hope this is possible/legal?
I suspect that verifying who you are would be the difficult part. Ebay wouldn't help.
What they could do would be to make an improved trustworthiness metric, taking into account the major way fraudsters manipulate ebay user ratings. I'm sure there are people at google (or ebay) who are savvy enough to calculate the odds of a particular seller ripping off a buyer (or vice versa, I suppose) as a function of item price and terms of sale for the item to be sold, and previous transaction history: (both number, feedback, item prices, types of items, type of sale terms, and also the trustworthiness rank of the person giving the feedback) etc.
So instead of merely a trustworthiness rank for a person, which is all very well, what buyers want is to know to what extent they can trust a particular transaction. So, generate some data by developing an auction site on the ebay model (if you are google, if you are the monopolist in question aka ebay, I guess you could always innovate, cue horse laugh), mine the data, fit the data to a statistical model, and figure out the likelihood of a particular transaction going resulting in negative feedback. Once you have a good model, you can also sell insurance for a transaction. It's easy - just (transaction price) * (probability of negative feedback) * (1 + some markup for profit). Adjust the model or increase the margin over time as people attempt to scam the insurance.
If you like that idea and you are google, it's probably within your capabilities to figure out who I am, what my email is and email me a job offer if you so desire.;) If you are ebay I guess you can reply to this thread.
....they need: 1) A good actor as they had in Harrison Ford.
They can probably get 1). Whether they can get a performance as good as Rutger Hauer's is another question.
It will be a lot more profitable for the studios to make your average summer blockbuster and hire a bunch of shills to rate the bejeezus out of the movie on imdb, making it rank with the best for as long as it plays in the theaters. It seems to have been standard operating procedure for several years now, unfortunately.
SSDs will probably take over in the consumer market... For two reasons. First and foremost, low power consumption.
I don't think there's that much difference. Laptop HDD are pretty efficient already - I have one for my NSLU2 and it uses approximately 2W at idle, tested. When writing or reading, it uses another 2W, but that's momentarily. Compare that with 0.4 Watts or so for SSD. And for something like the EEEPC, that uses 17Watts. So we are talking about 9% here. Of course, the more you can shrink the rest of the components, the more important this factor becomes.
The most attractive features to my mind are the fast application/OS loading times, and shock survivability, at least for the portable market segment.
At a human level, might makes right, always has, always will. If there is a proviso, it is within the realms of what might can detect and punish. Intellectual property may not be an illusion, but if the concept ceases to be enforceable then it may as well be an illusion.
Small problem with your theory on gas consumption. Truckers are more often than not paid based on getting the cargo to a destination at a specific time.
That's true at $3/gallon. I'm not sure whether Walmart will have the same policy at $10 or $20/gallon. All business models rely on assumptions and when those assumptions change, superior business models will emerge.
I've had good results with pfsense. Nice GUI, not too hard to set up, shapes traffic well enough that web browsing does not slow down appreciably. Games are tougher though, but I'm not in the same boat as you - if I want to game I just ensure that I'm not downloading anything at the time. I suspect I could have my cake and eat it too, but currently it's too much effort.
I tried smoothwall, m0n0wall, IPCop, and pfsense before settling on pfsense. YMMV.
From memory, I did a google search of slashdot and "traffic shaping" to uncover those options.:)
Re:fuel costs still not high enough priority
on
Big Rigs Go High Tech
·
· Score: 0, Redundant
Probably the biggest bang for buck is driver education, training and incentives. Truck drivers are better than the average person, but they still are pathetic as far as driving to save fuel. The biggest things truck drivers can do to save fuel are: 1. Slow down - go minimum legal speed on the highway. (This lowers air resistance, and the energy expended to combat air resistance is proportional to speed squared. 2. Anticipate to avoid braking at all costs.
The amount of energy wasted in stopping a truck is phenomenal. And I see avoidable stops all the time when I am driving. Worst is when there is a red light at the bottom of a hill, and the truck is accelerating towards it. If the truck driver were to bide his time, hopefully the light will have changed to green by the time he gets there, if not, he at least hasn't wasted energy in accelerating only to have to brake. If you see stopped cars up ahead lay off the gas! If the light has been green far ahead and you can see it - lay off the gas, it's going to turn red.
We have to realize that the biggest, most efficient batteries on the roads are the hills (gravitational potential energy). Every time you get to the top of a hill, you have charged up that battery. If you don't have to brake at the bottom or on the way down the hill, you have successfully used that stored energy. If you have to brake, you have wasted that energy. If you accelerated on the way down, or started with too much speed at the crest, you have just wasted even more energy.
It would be dead simple to track fuel volume/distance per driver. At the end of the month, rank the drivers. Pay a bonus on a sliding scale for saving more fuel, give the best trucker a small prize, and also require the rest of the drivers under a certain rank to drive with the best drivers for training.
Once you get your truck drivers to have a clue and paid accordingly, you will also get more buy-in when it comes to things like aerodynamic improvements that involve some work from the driver.
But really, this is only a stop-gap measure to trains, localized production for everything bar high $/kg items, reduced consumption, etc.
Minnesota's report claims, "The marketplace is still in flux, and it is not certain that a single standard will emerge."
Well, it looks like we standardized on MS-ODF. It has all the benefits of ODF, but with new, undocumented features that we all can't live without, such as uh, ribbontables.NET. We may not be able to read this format in 20 years by a non Microsoft application, but according to independent studies funded by Microsoft, our productivity will increase 150% in the meantime.
The next big big problem is that these things are going to get trashed by tornadoes in that area and the flying blade pieces will likely kill some people. We are talking tornado alley here.
The chances of any particular area being involved in a tornado are pretty remote. Even in tornado alley. Lots of places have been near a tornado, but I'd lay dollars to donuts that if you randomly picked 10 spots on a map, none of them would have been struck by a tornado within a 100 years.
Unfortunately, quality is quality. It is probably true that for whatever minimum quality you desire, there is something cheaper and not as good. Unfortunately there are things more expensive that are not as good, often with better marketing. It would be nice if you could just purchase the most expensive thing available to get the best. But that is no guarantee that it's actually better.
There is no substitute for doing your research, especially internet research. Unfortunately these days you have to google a bit more to see beyond the astroturf, but it's still more than possible if you are sharp and have enough time.
Perhaps that's where the "good, fast, cheap, pick any two" engineering aphorism falls down. You can get "good", sometimes even great by simply going fast and expensive. But it's still somewhat of a crap shoot. If you want great, it will take time. And it will cost what quality costs. It could be insanely cheap. It might be really expensive. You just don't know until you do the research.
The satisfaction I get from having the best, or near the best but at an insane price, is unbeatable. It's even better when you have better gear than people who have paid way more and are desperately clinging onto whatever subjective BS the marketer has told them about their product. And you can tell when they know it - they regurgitate the same baloney the marketer or salesman told them, only more emphatically.
I know if you added up the hours to do the research and multiplied it by some wage you probably aren't getting paid anyway, it can look expensive. At the same time, research is fun. And almost always, you get something that at the minimum will do the job. Not spending the time trying to make something that won't work do the job, then finally having to return it, then doing the research you should have done in the first place - that's worth a lot. And very often you surprise yourself with how good your purchase actually was.
So? Last time I looked, Japan is pretty crowded with a very limited amount of arable land. Why should someone in Japan starve to make room for a foreigner?
I certainly see a move to low power, passive, small form factor but acceptably performant computers. Re-reading your post, I think I see a lot of the same thing.
If there is an exception, I think it will be hardware manufacturers realizing the power of the repository to provide a vast amount of functionality for zero investment. As for closed source, for-profit software, I see it either being web-based or being crafted into some sort of one-click install solution. Or perhaps a password protected repository that you pay for access.
I guess it comes down to how people use a TV versus a computer. The environment a person watches a movie or a TV show is different form how they surf the internet or use an office suite. I certainly don't like to watch a movie unless I'm reclined somehow, and the screen should be large. An appliance that plays games, music and HD video is useful in this space. At the same time, using a computer for office or net surfing is something best done privately, at a desk.
As for games on that system for the desk, I think it the quality of games it receives will depend on the ability of gaming companies to extract revenue from such a system. It all depends on how many are on desks. Given enough desks and games-performant hardware, there will be a market and the games will be ported.
I think this will happen for games as well. At the moment the PS3 and the XBox use about 190 Watts, while the Wii uses about 18 Watts. The Wii is relatively non-performant graphically, yet successful commercially. This makes a good argument that as the polygons get smaller, those needing more polygons are a smaller and smaller niche market.
Linux is desktop ready. Whether you are ready for Linux or not, depends on your dependency on software based on Microsofts products.
Very elegant comment - as simple as possible, no simpler. You have identified the biggest problem someone has when moving to Linux. Drivers can be dealt with easily enough - either buy a pre-packaged linux system, or go hunting for hardware that is known to be working in Linux. Software is the deal breaker.
Each individual software that will only run on a Microsoft product is like a separate claw of the monkey on your back. If you snip each claw off, one by one, the monkey falls off. Just don't try and rip the monkey off with its claws still in you - that way lies pain.
I have to go through this long ass appeal process and physical in order to prove how lean I am every year.
Of course insurance companies are going to try and extract every last dollar they can from you on bogus pretexts. How else are they going to increase their profit margins?
I'd give them a waist measurement and a hip measurement, tell them to read the following study and tell them to check back in 5 years or you'll get yourself another insurance company. Or why not just take the money you are throwing at insurance companies and reinvest it yourself? You are obviously low risk, unless you have some other ticking timebomb medical condition. In fact, on waist size alone you are low risk. If you are athletic, I bet you have a comparatively smaller WHR than waist size relative to the rest of the population.
Denial
Anger -You are somewhere between here
Bargaining -and here
Depression
Acceptance
Wouldn't it be easier just to move to the acceptance phase and bypass all that useless crap in the middle?
But what all of you people are failing to understand is that, while getting rid of cheap oil to focus on alternative fuels and renewable resources is a good thing, THE SPEED WITH WHICH GAS PRICES HAVE INCREASED IS MURDERING OUR ECONOMY.
Of course I understand that. I thought it was pretty obvious. If you think we require 50 years of increased prices, logically we should have been increasing taxes on oil steadily from 50 years ago, i.e. in 1958. We didn't, so we are paying for it now. We have needed to have replacement technologies (most of which involves increasing efficiency at the expense of aesthetics or labor or discipline or thought) make rational business sense, which means a relatively high IRR or NPV or payback period. We are getting that now, and of course, a lot of people are feeling pain.
This is symptomatic of the way in which cheap oil has infected our thinking. I remember reading business books from the 1980s that spoke of efficiency versus effectiveness. According to such books, the best managers were effective, and efficiency was irrelevant. The idea being that if you can make X amount of money, the effective manager made that money ASAP, efficiency be damned. The naturally efficient person who might make a fraction of X in the same time because he insisted on running a more lean operation (which inherently takes more time) was an inferior manager. And this had its own logic that made sense - the effective manager who just earned X could reinvest it and get a higher return, enriching the company he worked for at the greatest rate.
Of course, it was temporary cheap oil and cheap energy that made this feasible. High rates of return on projects and high rates of growth of economies encourages people to ignore projects that do have longer payback periods and smaller rates of return, or are harder. e.g. solar power, efficiency audits, insulation, etc. Long term, this is indeed a very stupid way of looking at things. Given a government that panders to the average greedy and stupid person (IOW democracy), we didn't think it necessary to put the necessary fetters on capitalism to cause it to make long-term sense, i.e. high taxes on finite resources from the very beginning. Waaaaa! That would slow down our economy!
But instead, we've gone from $0.85/gal to $4.00/gal in 8 years. Most of us are still spinning our heads, trying to figure out how it happened. It can't be 5x as expensive to produce a gallon of gas as it was in 2000
Of course it isn't. However, the supply is relatively inelastic, and limited. Given that demand has grown we are seeing higher prices as a result. If you were to ration fuel, it would still have a very similar effect - widespread hardship. And there would be a gray/black market popping up to sell fuel from those who were poor to those who were rich at a real price, and probably higher than current prices because of all the work involved in evading police etc.
The underlying problem is the supply limitation - everyone has to make do with less. No, scratch that. The underlying problem is that we have allowed ourselves to use finite energy resources for things that do not provide lasting benefit. Worse than that, we have configured our societies so that they are highly dependent on finite energy. It might be ok if we just needed cheap oil to take a holiday. But most of us need it just to get to work! That was profoundly stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
Chances are good that if they had a Y chromosome, they'd be software engineers now, and chances are they'd still be better than you are. Being wired the way they are (i.e. to want to raise families post-puberty if they are girls) ensures that the genes encoding for brilliance at programming get passed on more than 50% of the time. To me that's neither sad nor disheartening.
And in Soviet Russia when you are 65, grocery store needs to go get YOU!
The move to lossless codecs (audio and video) will slow that down somewhat, since the sizes of the files will be inherently larger than 5MB for a song and 700MB for a movie. So will a move to higher definition video. I suspect that games will be the last holdout, since an experience that is different each time according to a player's input can be recorded but is not interesting to watch. If all calculations are done server side and kept secure, you can't crack it.
But yeah, you're right.
Colonizing the moon, mars etc. has little to do with learning things, and less to do with romance. It's an off-site backup for humanity. Irrespective of whether you personally care about any subset of humanity to want to preserve it, there are enough people who do.
BTW I don't see why places like the Gobi Desert won't be settled eventually. It has space, and very regular (although not particularly powerful) sunlight. It's just that as far as places to colonize on earth go, there happens to be lower hanging fruit... for now. Look into the future a few decades, perhaps a century or two. Humankind will start noticing some real limits. Limits of energy. Limits of space. Limits of rainfall. Limits of materials.
At exactly the same time as these limits kick in, humankind will also start discovering efficiency. We (or at least, an intelligent subset of us) will learn how to survive in inhospitable areas by building environments that require only a solar energy input. A ready supply of air, earth gravity, shielding from cosmic radiation and probably abundance of some materials as opposed to others is the only difference between there and the moon.
If it's a choice between raising a family in the Gobi Desert or not at all, it will be done by someone, especially with billions of people desiring a solution (a sizeable fraction of those with a clue), the open source movement and the internet allowing for the gaps in knowledge to be filled by experts in independent fields. For the same reasons, the moon will be colonized after the Gobi Desert is filled to capacity. Neither will happen in 2008 though.
However, from the original perspective of a backup plan for humanity, I think it's worth working on fleshing out the framework now instead of in a century's time, so that at least we know what gaps are missing. An ounce of prevention, a stitch in time, etc.
What they could do would be to make an improved trustworthiness metric, taking into account the major way fraudsters manipulate ebay user ratings. I'm sure there are people at google (or ebay) who are savvy enough to calculate the odds of a particular seller ripping off a buyer (or vice versa, I suppose) as a function of item price and terms of sale for the item to be sold, and previous transaction history: (both number, feedback, item prices, types of items, type of sale terms, and also the trustworthiness rank of the person giving the feedback) etc.
So instead of merely a trustworthiness rank for a person, which is all very well, what buyers want is to know to what extent they can trust a particular transaction. So, generate some data by developing an auction site on the ebay model (if you are google, if you are the monopolist in question aka ebay, I guess you could always innovate, cue horse laugh), mine the data, fit the data to a statistical model, and figure out the likelihood of a particular transaction going resulting in negative feedback. Once you have a good model, you can also sell insurance for a transaction. It's easy - just (transaction price) * (probability of negative feedback) * (1 + some markup for profit). Adjust the model or increase the margin over time as people attempt to scam the insurance.
If you like that idea and you are google, it's probably within your capabilities to figure out who I am, what my email is and email me a job offer if you so desire. ;) If you are ebay I guess you can reply to this thread.
It will be a lot more profitable for the studios to make your average summer blockbuster and hire a bunch of shills to rate the bejeezus out of the movie on imdb, making it rank with the best for as long as it plays in the theaters. It seems to have been standard operating procedure for several years now, unfortunately.
The most attractive features to my mind are the fast application/OS loading times, and shock survivability, at least for the portable market segment.
I always liked the Weird Al version.
http://www.mp3-download-lyrics.com/music/Weird-Al-Yankovic/Windows-95-Sucks_220634.html
Probably something similar to Philip Greenspun's excellent "Career Guide for Engineers and Computer Scientists". It's probably a good lesson.
http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/
At a human level, might makes right, always has, always will. If there is a proviso, it is within the realms of what might can detect and punish. Intellectual property may not be an illusion, but if the concept ceases to be enforceable then it may as well be an illusion.
There's no need for such extreme measures, especially here in this location.
I've had good results with pfsense. Nice GUI, not too hard to set up, shapes traffic well enough that web browsing does not slow down appreciably. Games are tougher though, but I'm not in the same boat as you - if I want to game I just ensure that I'm not downloading anything at the time. I suspect I could have my cake and eat it too, but currently it's too much effort.
:)
I tried smoothwall, m0n0wall, IPCop, and pfsense before settling on pfsense. YMMV.
From memory, I did a google search of slashdot and "traffic shaping" to uncover those options.
Probably the biggest bang for buck is driver education, training and incentives. Truck drivers are better than the average person, but they still are pathetic as far as driving to save fuel. The biggest things truck drivers can do to save fuel are:
1. Slow down - go minimum legal speed on the highway. (This lowers air resistance, and the energy expended to combat air resistance is proportional to speed squared.
2. Anticipate to avoid braking at all costs.
The amount of energy wasted in stopping a truck is phenomenal. And I see avoidable stops all the time when I am driving. Worst is when there is a red light at the bottom of a hill, and the truck is accelerating towards it. If the truck driver were to bide his time, hopefully the light will have changed to green by the time he gets there, if not, he at least hasn't wasted energy in accelerating only to have to brake. If you see stopped cars up ahead lay off the gas! If the light has been green far ahead and you can see it - lay off the gas, it's going to turn red.
We have to realize that the biggest, most efficient batteries on the roads are the hills (gravitational potential energy). Every time you get to the top of a hill, you have charged up that battery. If you don't have to brake at the bottom or on the way down the hill, you have successfully used that stored energy. If you have to brake, you have wasted that energy. If you accelerated on the way down, or started with too much speed at the crest, you have just wasted even more energy.
It would be dead simple to track fuel volume/distance per driver. At the end of the month, rank the drivers. Pay a bonus on a sliding scale for saving more fuel, give the best trucker a small prize, and also require the rest of the drivers under a certain rank to drive with the best drivers for training.
Once you get your truck drivers to have a clue and paid accordingly, you will also get more buy-in when it comes to things like aerodynamic improvements that involve some work from the driver.
But really, this is only a stop-gap measure to trains, localized production for everything bar high $/kg items, reduced consumption, etc.
Unfortunately, quality is quality. It is probably true that for whatever minimum quality you desire, there is something cheaper and not as good. Unfortunately there are things more expensive that are not as good, often with better marketing. It would be nice if you could just purchase the most expensive thing available to get the best. But that is no guarantee that it's actually better.
There is no substitute for doing your research, especially internet research. Unfortunately these days you have to google a bit more to see beyond the astroturf, but it's still more than possible if you are sharp and have enough time.
Perhaps that's where the "good, fast, cheap, pick any two" engineering aphorism falls down. You can get "good", sometimes even great by simply going fast and expensive. But it's still somewhat of a crap shoot. If you want great, it will take time. And it will cost what quality costs. It could be insanely cheap. It might be really expensive. You just don't know until you do the research.
The satisfaction I get from having the best, or near the best but at an insane price, is unbeatable. It's even better when you have better gear than people who have paid way more and are desperately clinging onto whatever subjective BS the marketer has told them about their product. And you can tell when they know it - they regurgitate the same baloney the marketer or salesman told them, only more emphatically.
I know if you added up the hours to do the research and multiplied it by some wage you probably aren't getting paid anyway, it can look expensive. At the same time, research is fun. And almost always, you get something that at the minimum will do the job. Not spending the time trying to make something that won't work do the job, then finally having to return it, then doing the research you should have done in the first place - that's worth a lot. And very often you surprise yourself with how good your purchase actually was.
The one exception is where all hexes surrounding the hydra are filled with dragons.
So? Last time I looked, Japan is pretty crowded with a very limited amount of arable land. Why should someone in Japan starve to make room for a foreigner?
I certainly see a move to low power, passive, small form factor but acceptably performant computers. Re-reading your post, I think I see a lot of the same thing.
If there is an exception, I think it will be hardware manufacturers realizing the power of the repository to provide a vast amount of functionality for zero investment. As for closed source, for-profit software, I see it either being web-based or being crafted into some sort of one-click install solution. Or perhaps a password protected repository that you pay for access.
I guess it comes down to how people use a TV versus a computer. The environment a person watches a movie or a TV show is different form how they surf the internet or use an office suite. I certainly don't like to watch a movie unless I'm reclined somehow, and the screen should be large. An appliance that plays games, music and HD video is useful in this space. At the same time, using a computer for office or net surfing is something best done privately, at a desk.
As for games on that system for the desk, I think it the quality of games it receives will depend on the ability of gaming companies to extract revenue from such a system. It all depends on how many are on desks. Given enough desks and games-performant hardware, there will be a market and the games will be ported.
I think this will happen for games as well. At the moment the PS3 and the XBox use about 190 Watts, while the Wii uses about 18 Watts. The Wii is relatively non-performant graphically, yet successful commercially. This makes a good argument that as the polygons get smaller, those needing more polygons are a smaller and smaller niche market.
http://www.ecogeek.org/content/view/1102/
Each individual software that will only run on a Microsoft product is like a separate claw of the monkey on your back. If you snip each claw off, one by one, the monkey falls off. Just don't try and rip the monkey off with its claws still in you - that way lies pain.
I'd give them a waist measurement and a hip measurement, tell them to read the following study and tell them to check back in 5 years or you'll get yourself another insurance company. Or why not just take the money you are throwing at insurance companies and reinvest it yourself? You are obviously low risk, unless you have some other ticking timebomb medical condition. In fact, on waist size alone you are low risk. If you are athletic, I bet you have a comparatively smaller WHR than waist size relative to the rest of the population.
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/179_11_011203/wel10182_fm-1.pdf
Anger -You are somewhere between here
Bargaining -and here
Depression
Acceptance
Wouldn't it be easier just to move to the acceptance phase and bypass all that useless crap in the middle?
Of course I understand that. I thought it was pretty obvious. If you think we require 50 years of increased prices, logically we should have been increasing taxes on oil steadily from 50 years ago, i.e. in 1958. We didn't, so we are paying for it now. We have needed to have replacement technologies (most of which involves increasing efficiency at the expense of aesthetics or labor or discipline or thought) make rational business sense, which means a relatively high IRR or NPV or payback period. We are getting that now, and of course, a lot of people are feeling pain.This is symptomatic of the way in which cheap oil has infected our thinking. I remember reading business books from the 1980s that spoke of efficiency versus effectiveness. According to such books, the best managers were effective, and efficiency was irrelevant. The idea being that if you can make X amount of money, the effective manager made that money ASAP, efficiency be damned. The naturally efficient person who might make a fraction of X in the same time because he insisted on running a more lean operation (which inherently takes more time) was an inferior manager. And this had its own logic that made sense - the effective manager who just earned X could reinvest it and get a higher return, enriching the company he worked for at the greatest rate.
Of course, it was temporary cheap oil and cheap energy that made this feasible. High rates of return on projects and high rates of growth of economies encourages people to ignore projects that do have longer payback periods and smaller rates of return, or are harder. e.g. solar power, efficiency audits, insulation, etc. Long term, this is indeed a very stupid way of looking at things. Given a government that panders to the average greedy and stupid person (IOW democracy), we didn't think it necessary to put the necessary fetters on capitalism to cause it to make long-term sense, i.e. high taxes on finite resources from the very beginning. Waaaaa! That would slow down our economy!
Of course it isn't. However, the supply is relatively inelastic, and limited. Given that demand has grown we are seeing higher prices as a result. If you were to ration fuel, it would still have a very similar effect - widespread hardship. And there would be a gray/black market popping up to sell fuel from those who were poor to those who were rich at a real price, and probably higher than current prices because of all the work involved in evading police etc.The underlying problem is the supply limitation - everyone has to make do with less. No, scratch that. The underlying problem is that we have allowed ourselves to use finite energy resources for things that do not provide lasting benefit. Worse than that, we have configured our societies so that they are highly dependent on finite energy. It might be ok if we just needed cheap oil to take a holiday. But most of us need it just to get to work! That was profoundly stupid.