The groupthink on/. regarding nuclear is completely out of hand. I know I'll get downvoted to oblivion for this, but you all need a dose of reality using 2016 numbers.
We can wait for wind, solar, and battery technology to get cheaper but that does nothing for the carbon we'd be producing while we wait.
May have been true in 2011, but this is 2016 and the game has changed already. Coal is no longer cheap and natural gas/wind is MUCH cheaper than nuclear on a levelized cost of energy basis. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Imposing expensive energy sources on people with regulation, like wind and solar, is just as detrimental to the poor as a direct tax on energy.
Nuclear? That's your "inexpensive" alternative? That's crazy expensive compared to wind, natural gas, and hydro. We ought to be replacing coal with natural gas and wind as quickly as possible (which I think we are currently doing).
Nuclear power is both inexpensive and has a carbon footprint even lower than wind and solar.
No, we already saw that claim is false.
Waiting for solar and wind energy to get cheaper is foolish.
Agreed, since we don't have to wait. That's already the situation today.
We've been giving all kinds of money to the wind and solar industry for decades, through taxation and subsidies, in the hope it would be cheaper than coal someday. How much longer do we have to do this before it meets the definition of insanity?
Wrong again. Solar is already cheaper than coal in many markets. Coal isn't the cost standard anymore, it's natural gas. Get with the program.
TLDR: Solar and wind are already cheaper than both coal and nuclear in many markets. Wind is cheaper than that. Nuclear is an expensive option and definitely not the panacea that it's touted as every time these stories appear on/.
Silence!! Didn't you know the internet is now only used for bashing things that Trump might potentially do, while acting as if they both already happened and had horrible repercussions!?
Yes, you are right. The story goes a bit deeper though. Apple is buying government bonds to repatriate the profits that they held offshore to protect them from the US corporate tax rate (35%). Overall it's bad for the government since if Apple just paid the taxes it would increase the government's tax revenue and they wouldn't have to issue so many bonds in the first place. Still, it's better than just keeping the profits offshore since at least they are keeping the government solvent by buying their crappy bonds.
I think the story was pretty poorly framed. The interesting part is that the bonds are being purchased with profits that were held offshore to avoid paying corporate income tax. This scheme is possible because of the government's deficit spending and all of the bonds that they must sell off to create the new debt.
Totally agree with this action long-term. In the short-term I'm a little bit worried about suddenly increasing the monetary supply by repatriating the billions (trillions?) of foreign held US corporate money. With all the "quantitative easing," debt, and money printing, a sudden increase in money supply could cause rapid inflation and develop into a fiscal crisis. Maybe money needs to be repatriated slowly.
Apple deserves no blame for earning interest on bonds that they purchased. The problem is the unethical profit offshoring to hide from the equally unethical 35% corporate tax rate, which is really just a tax for small businesses since large businesses do exactly what Apple is doing. Tangentially, if the U.S. didn't need to sell so many bonds to pay for their deficit spending this wouldn't be happening in the first place.
TLDR: The problems here are 1) the government's additiction to debt and 2) offshoring profits to protect them from the 35% corporate tax rate, among the highest in the world. Earning interest from purchased bonds is totally fine.
Actually, parent specifically said "global fossil fuel subsidies," not "US fossil fuel subsidies." Your comment and danbert8's comment applies only to the US. Lucas123 is correct.
The grandparent danbert8's comment (modded +5 insightful, I suspect the mods are either biased or sleeping) states some facts but completely ignores the bigger picture. The social, economic, and environmental cost of fossil fuel use is not accurately depicted when you look at just government subsidies. I won't copy/paste my reply to his comment, but please read it if you want to discuss further.
While there are technically few subsidies in our accounting books for fossil fuel energies, please don't ignore the many expenses that are externalized and pushed onto taxpayers, consumers, and the government.
1. How about the Iraq war and other "oil wars" in the Middle East? I think we should count the financial cost of those when we calculate the extra cost of fossil fuels. Not even to mention the loss of life incurred as a result of fighting over oil, which has reached millions.
2. How about environmental damage such as oil spills that never really get cleaned up, pollution in the air, greenhouse gasses, etc? I think we should include the social and environmental costs that we indirectly pay for through damage to our natural resources like the oceans, soil, and atmosphere. The damage caused by fossil fuel harvesting and use directly impacts people's quality of life, health, and pocketbooks.
3. How about the future cost of climate change? We don't know how climate change will affect global GDP in the long run, but most predictions suggest that all but far North and far South will experience changes that are detrimental on the whole.
In short, if you think that the price we pay at the pump or on our utility bill represents the full cost of our exploitation of fossil fuel resources, I believe that you are mistaken.
I want to begin a new party: the STATISTICS party. We have no emotions, we have no views, and we have no values, just cold hard indisputable and dispassionate facts. Anyone want to join me? Seriously, I'm just so tired of these derpy politicians in D.C. who don't believe in data unless it supports their stupid arbitrary opinions and who base all their decisions on emotions. We need more dispassionate people in charge. On matters of fact, base decisions on fact. On matters of ethics/morals, stay away because nowhere does it say the Government has the power to legislate morality. Let people figure out what's right for themselves.
Right, they had a product that filled a niche in the market and that was enough at first. But making hardware is not a good business unless there are some major barriers to entry for the competition. Unfortunately, that is probably not the case for a camera with a protective cover. They will not thrive and may not survive as solely a hardware company where anybody can mimic their features and undercut their prices. This attempt to pivot into a media company made tons of sense, I wonder what went wrong.
Totally myopic comment. The assembly component of the cost of an iphone is already tiny. The total unit cost including components is only around $200, I'd guess the labor contributes around $20 of that. Even if assembling it in the U.S. was twice as expensive that would only add $40 to the price. Anyway, the higher wages in the U.S. will be irrelevant as human labor is increased with machine labor. Trained humans working with machines are waaaaay more productive than sweatshop labor. The increased productivity will offset the more expensive labor. No big deal, no $3000 iPhone.
Your idea doesn't really make any sense at all. You claim that society allows corporations to misbehave because they gain taxes from the corporation. But all the corporation does is shift profit offshore, reduce the pay offered to their labor, and raise consumer costs to offset the tax cost. It won't affect the golden parachutes, executive bonuses, etc. The bottom line is that PEOPLE pay the taxes -- and the leaders of the companies decide who gets to pay what part of those taxes.
If you want the people who earn the most to pay the most, then tax income at the personal level and make it a progressive tax. Corporate tax is generally going to end up being regressive because the people who are most effected by it will INEVITABLY be the people who have the least power and therefore the poorest.
I'm saying this all of the time (ok not ALL of the time) and get nothing but confused looks.
I mean, massively profitable billion dollar companies aren't really paying taxes anyway. They keep it offshore. Why do we keep this burden of massive corporate taxes in place when it only affects those who are too poor to bypass it by abusing the loopholes? Makes no sense at all.
One of the things that kind of puzzles me about the idea that being "pro business" and "pro not-fucking-up-the environment" being mutually exclusive is that potentially fixing climate change could be great for industry, if it got past its short sighted myopia.
Switching over to a low/no CO2 economy doesnt just mean shutting down coal plants. It means shutting down coal plants and building solar/wind/nuclear plants. Surely this counts as "economic activity". Those wind farms don't build themselves and those solar panels wont service themselves.
Not only that, energy is a valuable commodity. The sun gives us 173,000 terawatts of FREE power. Mankind's entire GDP is powered by just 17 terawatts at a cost somewhere around $6 trillion annually. Imagine what we could accomplish by harnessing just a fraction of the sun's power.
Hillary and Bernie aren't hard denialists like Trump, but they are deniers nevertheless. They think AGW is really happening and must be stopped. But they think a nudge here and there is enough to avert any discomfort. Plans calling for reducing CO2 emissions by 50% by 2050 and the like is really really too little too late.
Eccoing parent; summary is misleading at best. The rate of CO2 increase has stopped increasing. In other words, the CO2 is increasing at the highest rate it ever has, it's just that now the second derivative is 0. That means it's a linear increase, not exponential. We need the overall slope of CO2 concentration vs time to become 0 or negative in order to mitigate the damaging effects of greenhouse effect.
Robots have the potential to be 1000's of times more productive and cost 1000's of times less than human laborers. In the race to the bottom, a country which relies on cheap human labor is doomed to fail.
iPhones and other smartphones being made here will probably up the prices slightly, but most of the estimates I've heard are absurd.
No they are not. For one many/most of the key components for smartphones (and laptops and desktops and...) are made in China too. Where do you think you are going to get parts? The supply chain for these does not exist in the US or EU. Worse China has a monopoly on rare earth minerals without which you cannot build many modern electronics. The US has reserves of these but re-opening the mines for these would not happen overnight.
Trump starting a trade war would drive up prices dramatically on a huge amount of goods and would almost instantly trigger a recession or depression. It would be catastrophically stupid of him to do that. A trade war would benefit no one and it sure as hell would not increase net jobs in the US.
Maybe this will finally give us the incentive we need to do a better job recycling our out-dated electronics. This will have a long-term economic benefit, since in the long-run reclaiming metals should be cheaper than mining them. Even better, companies might actually start designing products with end-of-life reclaim procedures in mind.
I'd also suspect that the increased wages (higher demand for employees = fewer minimum wage jobs) would more than offset the price increases you'd see.
No it would not. The number of extra people who would be employed by this wouldn't offset the extra cost of production. That is why it is being produced in China now. If that were not true then we would already see production happening here in the US. Furthermore having a few people making higher wages doesn't help the millions who would have to pay more for the product itself. I don't work for Apple or a smartphone manufacturing company so someone else having higher wages doesn't help me one bit.
I disagree again. With improving automation, the advantage of cheap human labor in China is diminishing and will continue to diminish. An investment in American infrastructure could negate the advantage the Chinese possess in manufacturing.
I bet most politicians have no idea what is meant by order of magnitude. They argue over millions and leave 10's of billions at stake. OK, we need a scientific equivalent of the supreme court. A completely (or as close to completely as possible) non-partisan group who are experts in a variety of scientific fields. Experts who know a little of politics and a lot of math. Their job will be to analyze disagreements pertaining to key issues that are scientific in nature being discussed in another branch of government. After hearing both sides of the argument they will perform a "peer reviewed" report of each side and cut through the bullshit. I'm just getting kind of sick of politicians arguing (half-assedly) about subjects which they cannot hope to understand because they have the wrong background. Even worse than arguing half-assedly about subjects they don't understand, politicians (predictably) politicize things that aren't even political!! Statements of fact should not be considered partisan, ever.
I understand the need for renewable energy and the appeal of appearing to save money on the electric bill, but from a broader perspective small solar installations will always be more expensive than massive utility-scale installations. If the electricity from a small solar installation saves money over the utility, it means the utility had better start installing solar because they are being undercut by it. If the money saved is only *after* tax rebates, then it's not really saving money - it's spending tax dollars. In this case, why not offer the same rebate to the electric utilities? Large installations are just fundamentally better. They always have the right angle, no trees, better economy of scale, better management, easier installation. From the perspective of society as a whole, it just makes more sense to keep electricity as a centrally run utility. If the utilities are falling behind, we need to force/help them to catch up. Maybe this kind of market pressure is what they need to get their act together, but I hope we don't end up hamstringing ourselves by abandoning our utility companies before they can catch up with the times. I'm pretty sure we still need them even if they're being slow to modernize and make the switch to renewables.
Not to be a downer but the number of people killed by famine, drought, sea level rise, etc will probably be more effective at curbing CO2 output than any policy measures.
No. People dying in famine/drought/etc will have little effect on population and probably have a negative effect on attempts to conserve energy and transition to renewable energy. The correlation between unrest (especially the type of unrest caused by mass deaths) and fertility rate is well known at this point and many theories exist in this realm. Basically everyone who is an expert on fertility rates will tell you that you are wrong. In a prolonged disaster population will decline slightly, then come back with a vengeance. It's been shown again and again that areas in which people are likely to be killed prematurely (to disease, famine, etc) have much higher birthrates as a direct result. In all, the population growth INCREASES relative to areas in which people live long, prosperous lives. So, NO, the unrest caused by global warming will not serve to improve our situation, it will accelerate population growth and be entirely counter-productive.
We should focus our efforts on improving access to education, energy and other resources, and contraception to everybody in the world. That's the only proven effective way to reduce birthrates to the extent where population growth is negative.
Slashdot Mirror
We can wait for wind, solar, and battery technology to get cheaper but that does nothing for the carbon we'd be producing while we wait.
May have been true in 2011, but this is 2016 and the game has changed already. Coal is no longer cheap and natural gas/wind is MUCH cheaper than nuclear on a levelized cost of energy basis. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Imposing expensive energy sources on people with regulation, like wind and solar, is just as detrimental to the poor as a direct tax on energy.
Nuclear? That's your "inexpensive" alternative? That's crazy expensive compared to wind, natural gas, and hydro. We ought to be replacing coal with natural gas and wind as quickly as possible (which I think we are currently doing).
Nuclear power is both inexpensive and has a carbon footprint even lower than wind and solar.
No, we already saw that claim is false.
Waiting for solar and wind energy to get cheaper is foolish.
Agreed, since we don't have to wait. That's already the situation today.
We've been giving all kinds of money to the wind and solar industry for decades, through taxation and subsidies, in the hope it would be cheaper than coal someday. How much longer do we have to do this before it meets the definition of insanity?
Wrong again. Solar is already cheaper than coal in many markets. Coal isn't the cost standard anymore, it's natural gas. Get with the program.
TLDR: Solar and wind are already cheaper than both coal and nuclear in many markets. Wind is cheaper than that. Nuclear is an expensive option and definitely not the panacea that it's touted as every time these stories appear on /.
Silence!! Didn't you know the internet is now only used for bashing things that Trump might potentially do, while acting as if they both already happened and had horrible repercussions!?
Yes, you are right. The story goes a bit deeper though. Apple is buying government bonds to repatriate the profits that they held offshore to protect them from the US corporate tax rate (35%). Overall it's bad for the government since if Apple just paid the taxes it would increase the government's tax revenue and they wouldn't have to issue so many bonds in the first place. Still, it's better than just keeping the profits offshore since at least they are keeping the government solvent by buying their crappy bonds.
I think the story was pretty poorly framed. The interesting part is that the bonds are being purchased with profits that were held offshore to avoid paying corporate income tax. This scheme is possible because of the government's deficit spending and all of the bonds that they must sell off to create the new debt.
Totally agree with this action long-term. In the short-term I'm a little bit worried about suddenly increasing the monetary supply by repatriating the billions (trillions?) of foreign held US corporate money. With all the "quantitative easing," debt, and money printing, a sudden increase in money supply could cause rapid inflation and develop into a fiscal crisis. Maybe money needs to be repatriated slowly.
Apple deserves no blame for earning interest on bonds that they purchased. The problem is the unethical profit offshoring to hide from the equally unethical 35% corporate tax rate, which is really just a tax for small businesses since large businesses do exactly what Apple is doing. Tangentially, if the U.S. didn't need to sell so many bonds to pay for their deficit spending this wouldn't be happening in the first place.
TLDR: The problems here are 1) the government's additiction to debt and 2) offshoring profits to protect them from the 35% corporate tax rate, among the highest in the world. Earning interest from purchased bonds is totally fine.
Thank you for this post, I'm glad there is somebody else out there who hasn't drank the "inflation is great" cool-aid.
Actually, parent specifically said "global fossil fuel subsidies," not "US fossil fuel subsidies." Your comment and danbert8's comment applies only to the US. Lucas123 is correct.
The grandparent danbert8's comment (modded +5 insightful, I suspect the mods are either biased or sleeping) states some facts but completely ignores the bigger picture. The social, economic, and environmental cost of fossil fuel use is not accurately depicted when you look at just government subsidies. I won't copy/paste my reply to his comment, but please read it if you want to discuss further.
While there are technically few subsidies in our accounting books for fossil fuel energies, please don't ignore the many expenses that are externalized and pushed onto taxpayers, consumers, and the government.
1. How about the Iraq war and other "oil wars" in the Middle East? I think we should count the financial cost of those when we calculate the extra cost of fossil fuels. Not even to mention the loss of life incurred as a result of fighting over oil, which has reached millions.
2. How about environmental damage such as oil spills that never really get cleaned up, pollution in the air, greenhouse gasses, etc? I think we should include the social and environmental costs that we indirectly pay for through damage to our natural resources like the oceans, soil, and atmosphere. The damage caused by fossil fuel harvesting and use directly impacts people's quality of life, health, and pocketbooks.
3. How about the future cost of climate change? We don't know how climate change will affect global GDP in the long run, but most predictions suggest that all but far North and far South will experience changes that are detrimental on the whole.
In short, if you think that the price we pay at the pump or on our utility bill represents the full cost of our exploitation of fossil fuel resources, I believe that you are mistaken.
I want to begin a new party: the STATISTICS party. We have no emotions, we have no views, and we have no values, just cold hard indisputable and dispassionate facts. Anyone want to join me? Seriously, I'm just so tired of these derpy politicians in D.C. who don't believe in data unless it supports their stupid arbitrary opinions and who base all their decisions on emotions. We need more dispassionate people in charge. On matters of fact, base decisions on fact. On matters of ethics/morals, stay away because nowhere does it say the Government has the power to legislate morality. Let people figure out what's right for themselves.
Right, they had a product that filled a niche in the market and that was enough at first. But making hardware is not a good business unless there are some major barriers to entry for the competition. Unfortunately, that is probably not the case for a camera with a protective cover. They will not thrive and may not survive as solely a hardware company where anybody can mimic their features and undercut their prices. This attempt to pivot into a media company made tons of sense, I wonder what went wrong.
Yes, which is precisely why they wanted to expand *out* of the hardware business. I guess they're giving up, and it's probably not a good sign.
Totally myopic comment. The assembly component of the cost of an iphone is already tiny. The total unit cost including components is only around $200, I'd guess the labor contributes around $20 of that. Even if assembling it in the U.S. was twice as expensive that would only add $40 to the price. Anyway, the higher wages in the U.S. will be irrelevant as human labor is increased with machine labor. Trained humans working with machines are waaaaay more productive than sweatshop labor. The increased productivity will offset the more expensive labor. No big deal, no $3000 iPhone.
Your idea doesn't really make any sense at all. You claim that society allows corporations to misbehave because they gain taxes from the corporation. But all the corporation does is shift profit offshore, reduce the pay offered to their labor, and raise consumer costs to offset the tax cost. It won't affect the golden parachutes, executive bonuses, etc. The bottom line is that PEOPLE pay the taxes -- and the leaders of the companies decide who gets to pay what part of those taxes.
If you want the people who earn the most to pay the most, then tax income at the personal level and make it a progressive tax. Corporate tax is generally going to end up being regressive because the people who are most effected by it will INEVITABLY be the people who have the least power and therefore the poorest.
I'm saying this all of the time (ok not ALL of the time) and get nothing but confused looks.
I mean, massively profitable billion dollar companies aren't really paying taxes anyway. They keep it offshore. Why do we keep this burden of massive corporate taxes in place when it only affects those who are too poor to bypass it by abusing the loopholes? Makes no sense at all.
One of the things that kind of puzzles me about the idea that being "pro business" and "pro not-fucking-up-the environment" being mutually exclusive is that potentially fixing climate change could be great for industry, if it got past its short sighted myopia.
Switching over to a low/no CO2 economy doesnt just mean shutting down coal plants. It means shutting down coal plants and building solar/wind/nuclear plants. Surely this counts as "economic activity". Those wind farms don't build themselves and those solar panels wont service themselves.
Not only that, energy is a valuable commodity. The sun gives us 173,000 terawatts of FREE power. Mankind's entire GDP is powered by just 17 terawatts at a cost somewhere around $6 trillion annually. Imagine what we could accomplish by harnessing just a fraction of the sun's power.
How much did 1.4MW and 60 battery units cost? What is the buyback period compared to burning 300 gallons of diesel per day?
Doesn't even need to look like a sports car. Just a fun little two-seater and I'm in.
Hillary and Bernie aren't hard denialists like Trump, but they are deniers nevertheless. They think AGW is really happening and must be stopped. But they think a nudge here and there is enough to avert any discomfort. Plans calling for reducing CO2 emissions by 50% by 2050 and the like is really really too little too late.
Eccoing parent; summary is misleading at best. The rate of CO2 increase has stopped increasing. In other words, the CO2 is increasing at the highest rate it ever has, it's just that now the second derivative is 0. That means it's a linear increase, not exponential. We need the overall slope of CO2 concentration vs time to become 0 or negative in order to mitigate the damaging effects of greenhouse effect.
Robots have the potential to be 1000's of times more productive and cost 1000's of times less than human laborers. In the race to the bottom, a country which relies on cheap human labor is doomed to fail.
iPhones and other smartphones being made here will probably up the prices slightly, but most of the estimates I've heard are absurd.
No they are not. For one many/most of the key components for smartphones (and laptops and desktops and...) are made in China too. Where do you think you are going to get parts? The supply chain for these does not exist in the US or EU. Worse China has a monopoly on rare earth minerals without which you cannot build many modern electronics. The US has reserves of these but re-opening the mines for these would not happen overnight.
Trump starting a trade war would drive up prices dramatically on a huge amount of goods and would almost instantly trigger a recession or depression. It would be catastrophically stupid of him to do that. A trade war would benefit no one and it sure as hell would not increase net jobs in the US.
Maybe this will finally give us the incentive we need to do a better job recycling our out-dated electronics. This will have a long-term economic benefit, since in the long-run reclaiming metals should be cheaper than mining them. Even better, companies might actually start designing products with end-of-life reclaim procedures in mind.
I'd also suspect that the increased wages (higher demand for employees = fewer minimum wage jobs) would more than offset the price increases you'd see.
No it would not. The number of extra people who would be employed by this wouldn't offset the extra cost of production. That is why it is being produced in China now. If that were not true then we would already see production happening here in the US. Furthermore having a few people making higher wages doesn't help the millions who would have to pay more for the product itself. I don't work for Apple or a smartphone manufacturing company so someone else having higher wages doesn't help me one bit.
I disagree again. With improving automation, the advantage of cheap human labor in China is diminishing and will continue to diminish. An investment in American infrastructure could negate the advantage the Chinese possess in manufacturing.
I bet most politicians have no idea what is meant by order of magnitude. They argue over millions and leave 10's of billions at stake. OK, we need a scientific equivalent of the supreme court. A completely (or as close to completely as possible) non-partisan group who are experts in a variety of scientific fields. Experts who know a little of politics and a lot of math. Their job will be to analyze disagreements pertaining to key issues that are scientific in nature being discussed in another branch of government. After hearing both sides of the argument they will perform a "peer reviewed" report of each side and cut through the bullshit. I'm just getting kind of sick of politicians arguing (half-assedly) about subjects which they cannot hope to understand because they have the wrong background. Even worse than arguing half-assedly about subjects they don't understand, politicians (predictably) politicize things that aren't even political!! Statements of fact should not be considered partisan, ever.
I understand the need for renewable energy and the appeal of appearing to save money on the electric bill, but from a broader perspective small solar installations will always be more expensive than massive utility-scale installations. If the electricity from a small solar installation saves money over the utility, it means the utility had better start installing solar because they are being undercut by it. If the money saved is only *after* tax rebates, then it's not really saving money - it's spending tax dollars. In this case, why not offer the same rebate to the electric utilities? Large installations are just fundamentally better. They always have the right angle, no trees, better economy of scale, better management, easier installation. From the perspective of society as a whole, it just makes more sense to keep electricity as a centrally run utility. If the utilities are falling behind, we need to force/help them to catch up. Maybe this kind of market pressure is what they need to get their act together, but I hope we don't end up hamstringing ourselves by abandoning our utility companies before they can catch up with the times. I'm pretty sure we still need them even if they're being slow to modernize and make the switch to renewables.
Not to be a downer but the number of people killed by famine, drought, sea level rise, etc will probably be more effective at curbing CO2 output than any policy measures.
No. People dying in famine/drought/etc will have little effect on population and probably have a negative effect on attempts to conserve energy and transition to renewable energy. The correlation between unrest (especially the type of unrest caused by mass deaths) and fertility rate is well known at this point and many theories exist in this realm. Basically everyone who is an expert on fertility rates will tell you that you are wrong. In a prolonged disaster population will decline slightly, then come back with a vengeance. It's been shown again and again that areas in which people are likely to be killed prematurely (to disease, famine, etc) have much higher birthrates as a direct result. In all, the population growth INCREASES relative to areas in which people live long, prosperous lives. So, NO, the unrest caused by global warming will not serve to improve our situation, it will accelerate population growth and be entirely counter-productive. We should focus our efforts on improving access to education, energy and other resources, and contraception to everybody in the world. That's the only proven effective way to reduce birthrates to the extent where population growth is negative.