You can't possibly be criticizing "dependence on a market". You have completely failed to understand it.
There is absolutely no reason for anyone who sees the writing on the wall to experience any pain whatsoever. The people who "see the supply shock far enough in advance" serve an important market function, as "speculators". And in a functional market, these people can save, reduce their own consumption, stock up on limited resources instead, and earn huge profits in reward. They also can earn huge losses if they bet wrong.
The hilarious irony of your and the GP posts is that we have already seen drastic supply shocks in the oil markets. The last one, in 2008, did bring almost every single economy to it's knees. Oil tripled in price in the span of a few years. It caused double-digit inflation in the US. People who couldn't afford to heat their giant homes or gas up their giant SUVs completely depleted the money markets in just a few months and destroyed the banks that had lent them money for such stupid 'investments' in the first place.
But was that just a test? Prices have gone down. The world isn't out of oil yet. If it was a test, the US failed it.
What did our leaders do? Instead of thanking speculators for ensuring that we had any oil at all, they trotted out tired old collectivist anti-market bullshit, attacked speculators, subsidized failed banks, nationalized 95% of the mortgages in the US, robbed from savers and destroyed assets in an attempt at African-engineering the global economy in order to encourage not more savings, not conservation, not an inkling of responsibility or even more production, but more idiotic consumption that will be paid for by future generations.
A heat engine operates on the temperature differential between a hot and cold source. Running the engine raises the temperature of the cold source, or heat sink. As the temperature of the sink rises, the differential falls, along with the available energy or efficiency of operation.
Even if greater amounts of energy are constantly added to the Earth, the total amount of this energy that can be utilized is limited by the ability of the Earth to radiate waste heat into space.
The subject of resource consumption and exhaustion is at the core of technological civilization. It impacts every subject discussed on this site without exception, from games to your rights online.
Not understanding this makes you an extremely poor "nerd". Willfully ignoring it makes you an imbecile. Complaining about the fact that it is even discussed makes you a real shit-head.
That's funny, because everywhere I've worked the standard method of ignoring hidden costs was to purchase poorly-designed and ill-suited proprietary software and then pass it off to internal resources to maintain* it.
You still haven't answered the question. You can quote struggling SUV-selling-ex-high-school-athletes all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that you haven't demonstrated the least bit of understanding of what the word "economy" even means.
What is the point of your proposal exactly? To reward failure? To encourage further recklessness and future crises? To waste energy and resources creating products that we have no use for? To increase "growth"? To increase employment? Or just to make some arbitrary metrics go up in value? Because that part is easy, and doesn't require destroying the real economy to accomplish. In fact, the US government has been doing it for decades. Just re-define the meaning of "growth" or fudge the calculation of those artificial metrics. Voila, problem solved. We can even create some ditch-digging jobs, or build a pyramid or something, in order to increase employment, and that should make everyone happy.
But as far as I'm concerned, the 15% of the economy that relies on dipshits taking out second mortgages on their underwater mcmansions to buy useless crap they can't afford, can just fuck right off. It isn't the "engine" of anything and the responsible people are sick of subsidizing it.
New stuff has bugs too. Surely after years of fixing bugs in the same old system, it would have to improve? You say you have enough money. Why would you want to learn new stuff if not to increase your job prospects and thus salary? You can always play around with new stuff on the side or use it implement new features.
What happens when the demand for oil suddenly drops?
what a retarded thought. demand for oil will never suddenly drop. if it began to drop even slightly, that would be a good thing, because it would mean that we had found a cheaper and cleaner source of transport energy. at that point, any "states" that failed to evolve away from the economic model of exporting all of their resource wealth would get left in the dust, and good-riddance.
Many of these states use the oil revenues to suppress internal dissent.
more circular reasoning. states distribute oil revenues to suppress conflict over allocation of collective resources.. like oil.
compulsory term service in either a military or civil capacity... force people to actually learn a skill and be productive
military "service" is not at all productive. compulsory government make-work is less productive than freedom. a better idea would be to just end the unemployment checks altogether. i'm sure, in your mind, that would cause a lot of political instability. but in reality, the cause of the instability was their existence in the first place, and the dependent fools created by it.
why do we have such a fragile system at the very core of modern civilisation?
The same reason any dysfunctional system continues to exist: by force. Wall street currently happens to be subsidized by government force, by tax breaks and bail-outs and the Fed's redistributive credit policies. But even if it weren't, it would still thrive on the force of capital hoarding and the profit motive and the endless stream of wage-slaves and suckers that lack of functional government tends to encourage.
It is arguable that American civilization itself is little more than a fragile and dysfunctional system propped up by force. Why would you be surprised that it relies, at it's core, on a dysfunctional finance system?
The most obvious criticism is that you've completely underestimated the amount of energy required for your scheme. The fact that you got the units wrong was the first clue. Mentioning fusion was the other.
30 kilowattHOURS might be a lot of electricity, but it is a tiny amount of energy, equivalent to about a gallon of gasoline. This amount might barely cover heating or cooling your 3500 square foot home every day, but it would leave nothing for transportation, desalination, recycling, food production, goods production, or other industry.
Recycling takes quite a bit of energy: transporting materials to a central location, sorting, melting, etc.
Desalination plants require huge amounts of energy. If they're solar powered, that means they have to be in low-latitudes, where most people won't live. In your scheme, "pip(ing) the water inland" means piping water uphill, also very energy-intensive.
Have you considered how much energy it takes simply to maintain a solar panel farm the size of Rhode Island? To clean the panels? How much water? In a desert?
How do you heat a house at night, in the middle of winter, with solar panels?
Why would you mandate solar panels on houses in high latitudes?
Giving each of 100 billion people 1/4 acre to live on would consume 2/3 of the world's land mass. Is there enough left over for transportation, industry, food production, nature?
But, ultimately, the practical limitations of your proposal aren't even the biggest impediment. It doesn't really matter whether we "can" do what you're suggesting. Obviously with fusion the answer is "yes". The real question is "do we want to?"
Because I, personally, don't really see the benefit in eating manufactured protein mush so that I can live with fewer resources surrounded by more people.
Right, not kickbacks but industrial espionage. Which is still only illegal in the US if it benefits a foreign entity. Why must the media be so completely worthless in reporting basic stuff like this...
Unfortunately, that doesn't work because lawyers are a top-level predator. They can only be controlled by being socialized to periodically engage in elaborate combat rituals, establishing a social structure of artificial dominance. The rest of the time they just lounge around drinking scotch and licking themselves. Really they're mostly harmless as long as you don't taunt them with political arguments.
Obviously this type of analysis is interesting and useful to consider. But I wonder if ultimately it is pointless.
The issue basically boils down to cost. Her towel analogy holds if she produces all of her own water and electricity and grows trees to make paper towels. But she doesn't. She buys water (that's probably subsidized) and electricity (that's probably taxed) and paper towels (that are significantly marked-up). Any analysis that ignores her costs borders on completely pointless.
If I build using special "green" materials at 20% higher cost, which goes to some middle-man who uses the profit to buy a gas-guzzling SUV, I haven't actually saved any energy at all.
If I buy an overpriced house in the city center to renovate, and the former owner takes the proceeds and builds a suburban mcmansion, what energy has been saved?
Let's take it even further, though. If everyone who believes in saving the planet and energy efficiency spends her disposable income purchasing only "green" products, those people will be replaced within a few short generations by people who instead spend their disposable incomes having four kids and consuming the cheapest, most ecologically destructive products possible.
Why should anyone trust a medium of exchange that has no intrinsic value and is not backed by the faith and credit of anyone or anything?
It has intrinsic value.. the same intrinsic value of fiat currencies. It is easier than barter.
Why should I or anyone accept bitcoins when there is no guarantee bitcoins will be redeemable for anything of value?
Unless you condone slavery or expropriation of wealth by force, there's no guarantee any other currency will be redeemable for anything of value either. And, in that case, why bother with currency anyways? Just pillage instead.
Where does the value of bitcoins come from?
The same place all value comes from: thermodynamics.
And now we see just how much of a joke the state-subsidized airlines are*. After having been bailed-out over and over again, not a single one of them seems to have evolved the capability to deal with a major disruption such as this. They want to stick with their outdated business model of funneling people through hubs, flying planes all in a row in little highways-in-the-sky, and being completely inflexible with regards to cancellations and re-routes. 24 hours ago I was on the beach in Dubai, and would have gladly accepted a few days worth of hotel rooms in exchange for a later flight. It wasn't even offered. Meanwhile, a colleague is paying an extra $3000 to fly around the world the wrong way because he absolutely needs to be back ASAP. Of course there was no feasible way to give him my seat. Before take-off, the pilot sounded like he was about to break out in tears as he explained that we would have to (gasp) fly a slightly different route than expected in order to avoid the ash cloud. And right now, since my flight was delayed by an hour and I spent an hour waiting in line at customs and going through security screenings, I'm booked on at least three flights that I won't be on, and anyone who might need those seats will likely be waiting on stand-by, sleeping in an uncomfortable airport chair before they are offered. I just got offered the chance to wait on stand-by for two days because all the flights are completely booked. And I'm no longer anywhere near Europe. They have no idea where my bags are, and can't manage to re-route them even within the next week. I said 'fuck it', canceled two flights, and am now awaiting a direct flight on Southwest, because they are apparently the only competent airline capable of getting me where I want to go within any kind of reasonable timeframe. And the price was completely reasonable as well.
Oh, and if you think any of this is a decent trade-off in the name of security, think again. I very nearly (accidentally) made it onto the plane with enough suntan lotion to blow a decent-sized hole in almost any fuselage. Not that that would have been necessary, of course, since a swift kick on any cockpit door will still give a terrorist all the access they need to crash a plane. And meanwhile I get to sit here looking like an idiot who hasn't shaven in two days, since safety razors are banned. I expect to see Federales walking around airports with machine-guns any day now, giving dirty looks to poor-looking travelers, as America's implementation of socialist-banana-republic-esque security theater reaches completion.
*This means American, United, Continental, US Airways, TWA, all the little third-world airlines, and probably at least a few others.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't possibly be criticizing "dependence on a market". You have completely failed to understand it.
There is absolutely no reason for anyone who sees the writing on the wall to experience any pain whatsoever. The people who "see the supply shock far enough in advance" serve an important market function, as "speculators". And in a functional market, these people can save, reduce their own consumption, stock up on limited resources instead, and earn huge profits in reward. They also can earn huge losses if they bet wrong.
The hilarious irony of your and the GP posts is that we have already seen drastic supply shocks in the oil markets. The last one, in 2008, did bring almost every single economy to it's knees. Oil tripled in price in the span of a few years. It caused double-digit inflation in the US. People who couldn't afford to heat their giant homes or gas up their giant SUVs completely depleted the money markets in just a few months and destroyed the banks that had lent them money for such stupid 'investments' in the first place.
But was that just a test? Prices have gone down. The world isn't out of oil yet. If it was a test, the US failed it.
What did our leaders do? Instead of thanking speculators for ensuring that we had any oil at all, they trotted out tired old collectivist anti-market bullshit, attacked speculators, subsidized failed banks, nationalized 95% of the mortgages in the US, robbed from savers and destroyed assets in an attempt at African-engineering the global economy in order to encourage not more savings, not conservation, not an inkling of responsibility or even more production, but more idiotic consumption that will be paid for by future generations.
Having an X-Wife sounds kind of cool. What super powers does she have?
A heat engine operates on the temperature differential between a hot and cold source. Running the engine raises the temperature of the cold source, or heat sink. As the temperature of the sink rises, the differential falls, along with the available energy or efficiency of operation.
Even if greater amounts of energy are constantly added to the Earth, the total amount of this energy that can be utilized is limited by the ability of the Earth to radiate waste heat into space.
Hopefully this is what you were asking.
The subject of resource consumption and exhaustion is at the core of technological civilization. It impacts every subject discussed on this site without exception, from games to your rights online.
Not understanding this makes you an extremely poor "nerd". Willfully ignoring it makes you an imbecile. Complaining about the fact that it is even discussed makes you a real shit-head.
So, what is the purpose of *your* post, exactly?
Affluence = population control
You're confusing cause and effect.
It doesn't require mandatory birth control measures (or enforced abortion laws, etc) to keep the population down.
No, but it does require that there is an appropriate cost to bearing children, borne by the parents.
That's funny, because everywhere I've worked the standard method of ignoring hidden costs was to purchase poorly-designed and ill-suited proprietary software and then pass it off to internal resources to maintain* it.
*re-write
You still haven't answered the question. You can quote struggling SUV-selling-ex-high-school-athletes all day long, but that doesn't change the fact that you haven't demonstrated the least bit of understanding of what the word "economy" even means.
What is the point of your proposal exactly? To reward failure? To encourage further recklessness and future crises? To waste energy and resources creating products that we have no use for? To increase "growth"? To increase employment? Or just to make some arbitrary metrics go up in value? Because that part is easy, and doesn't require destroying the real economy to accomplish. In fact, the US government has been doing it for decades. Just re-define the meaning of "growth" or fudge the calculation of those artificial metrics. Voila, problem solved. We can even create some ditch-digging jobs, or build a pyramid or something, in order to increase employment, and that should make everyone happy.
But as far as I'm concerned, the 15% of the economy that relies on dipshits taking out second mortgages on their underwater mcmansions to buy useless crap they can't afford, can just fuck right off. It isn't the "engine" of anything and the responsible people are sick of subsidizing it.
You're an idiot. Answer this question:
In a 'consumer' economy, what is it that is actually economized?
Yeah, no one ever considers that Tournament Theory works in reverse too.
New stuff has bugs too. Surely after years of fixing bugs in the same old system, it would have to improve? You say you have enough money. Why would you want to learn new stuff if not to increase your job prospects and thus salary? You can always play around with new stuff on the side or use it implement new features.
resources or geopolitics are only 2 of them
more like 1.
What happens when the demand for oil suddenly drops?
what a retarded thought. demand for oil will never suddenly drop. if it began to drop even slightly, that would be a good thing, because it would mean that we had found a cheaper and cleaner source of transport energy. at that point, any "states" that failed to evolve away from the economic model of exporting all of their resource wealth would get left in the dust, and good-riddance.
Many of these states use the oil revenues to suppress internal dissent.
more circular reasoning. states distribute oil revenues to suppress conflict over allocation of collective resources.. like oil.
compulsory term service in either a military or civil capacity... force people to actually learn a skill and be productive
military "service" is not at all productive. compulsory government make-work is less productive than freedom. a better idea would be to just end the unemployment checks altogether. i'm sure, in your mind, that would cause a lot of political instability. but in reality, the cause of the instability was their existence in the first place, and the dependent fools created by it.
why do we have such a fragile system at the very core of modern civilisation?
The same reason any dysfunctional system continues to exist: by force. Wall street currently happens to be subsidized by government force, by tax breaks and bail-outs and the Fed's redistributive credit policies. But even if it weren't, it would still thrive on the force of capital hoarding and the profit motive and the endless stream of wage-slaves and suckers that lack of functional government tends to encourage.
It is arguable that American civilization itself is little more than a fragile and dysfunctional system propped up by force. Why would you be surprised that it relies, at it's core, on a dysfunctional finance system?
The most obvious criticism is that you've completely underestimated the amount of energy required for your scheme. The fact that you got the units wrong was the first clue. Mentioning fusion was the other.
30 kilowattHOURS might be a lot of electricity, but it is a tiny amount of energy, equivalent to about a gallon of gasoline. This amount might barely cover heating or cooling your 3500 square foot home every day, but it would leave nothing for transportation, desalination, recycling, food production, goods production, or other industry.
Recycling takes quite a bit of energy: transporting materials to a central location, sorting, melting, etc.
Desalination plants require huge amounts of energy. If they're solar powered, that means they have to be in low-latitudes, where most people won't live. In your scheme, "pip(ing) the water inland" means piping water uphill, also very energy-intensive.
Have you considered how much energy it takes simply to maintain a solar panel farm the size of Rhode Island? To clean the panels? How much water? In a desert?
How do you heat a house at night, in the middle of winter, with solar panels?
Why would you mandate solar panels on houses in high latitudes?
Giving each of 100 billion people 1/4 acre to live on would consume 2/3 of the world's land mass. Is there enough left over for transportation, industry, food production, nature?
But, ultimately, the practical limitations of your proposal aren't even the biggest impediment. It doesn't really matter whether we "can" do what you're suggesting. Obviously with fusion the answer is "yes". The real question is "do we want to?"
Because I, personally, don't really see the benefit in eating manufactured protein mush so that I can live with fewer resources surrounded by more people.
Peak coal hasn't happened yet.
And states without fossil fuel alternatives usually collapsed after reaching peak wood.
the pusher system is designed to push astronauts out of the way of danger.
Right, not kickbacks but industrial espionage. Which is still only illegal in the US if it benefits a foreign entity. Why must the media be so completely worthless in reporting basic stuff like this...
Unfortunately, that doesn't work because lawyers are a top-level predator. They can only be controlled by being socialized to periodically engage in elaborate combat rituals, establishing a social structure of artificial dominance. The rest of the time they just lounge around drinking scotch and licking themselves. Really they're mostly harmless as long as you don't taunt them with political arguments.
Is this it? Catherine Mohr builds green
Obviously this type of analysis is interesting and useful to consider. But I wonder if ultimately it is pointless.
The issue basically boils down to cost. Her towel analogy holds if she produces all of her own water and electricity and grows trees to make paper towels. But she doesn't. She buys water (that's probably subsidized) and electricity (that's probably taxed) and paper towels (that are significantly marked-up). Any analysis that ignores her costs borders on completely pointless.
If I build using special "green" materials at 20% higher cost, which goes to some middle-man who uses the profit to buy a gas-guzzling SUV, I haven't actually saved any energy at all.
If I buy an overpriced house in the city center to renovate, and the former owner takes the proceeds and builds a suburban mcmansion, what energy has been saved?
Let's take it even further, though. If everyone who believes in saving the planet and energy efficiency spends her disposable income purchasing only "green" products, those people will be replaced within a few short generations by people who instead spend their disposable incomes having four kids and consuming the cheapest, most ecologically destructive products possible.
If gas taxes promote "efficient living", then surely outlawing combustion altogether would promote even more efficient living?
What backs the medium of exchange?
Math.
Why should anyone trust a medium of exchange that has no intrinsic value and is not backed by the faith and credit of anyone or anything?
It has intrinsic value.. the same intrinsic value of fiat currencies. It is easier than barter.
Why should I or anyone accept bitcoins when there is no guarantee bitcoins will be redeemable for anything of value?
Unless you condone slavery or expropriation of wealth by force, there's no guarantee any other currency will be redeemable for anything of value either. And, in that case, why bother with currency anyways? Just pillage instead.
Where does the value of bitcoins come from?
The same place all value comes from: thermodynamics.
The value comes from acting as a tamper-resistant medium of exchange.
doesn't seem fair that my ancestors lack of ability to "win" should deprive me.
Similarly, your ancestors lack of ability to provide for their offspring shouldn't deprive me.
So you're saying it's more like a series of tubes?
And now we see just how much of a joke the state-subsidized airlines are*. After having been bailed-out over and over again, not a single one of them seems to have evolved the capability to deal with a major disruption such as this. They want to stick with their outdated business model of funneling people through hubs, flying planes all in a row in little highways-in-the-sky, and being completely inflexible with regards to cancellations and re-routes. 24 hours ago I was on the beach in Dubai, and would have gladly accepted a few days worth of hotel rooms in exchange for a later flight. It wasn't even offered. Meanwhile, a colleague is paying an extra $3000 to fly around the world the wrong way because he absolutely needs to be back ASAP. Of course there was no feasible way to give him my seat. Before take-off, the pilot sounded like he was about to break out in tears as he explained that we would have to (gasp) fly a slightly different route than expected in order to avoid the ash cloud. And right now, since my flight was delayed by an hour and I spent an hour waiting in line at customs and going through security screenings, I'm booked on at least three flights that I won't be on, and anyone who might need those seats will likely be waiting on stand-by, sleeping in an uncomfortable airport chair before they are offered. I just got offered the chance to wait on stand-by for two days because all the flights are completely booked. And I'm no longer anywhere near Europe. They have no idea where my bags are, and can't manage to re-route them even within the next week. I said 'fuck it', canceled two flights, and am now awaiting a direct flight on Southwest, because they are apparently the only competent airline capable of getting me where I want to go within any kind of reasonable timeframe. And the price was completely reasonable as well.
Oh, and if you think any of this is a decent trade-off in the name of security, think again. I very nearly (accidentally) made it onto the plane with enough suntan lotion to blow a decent-sized hole in almost any fuselage. Not that that would have been necessary, of course, since a swift kick on any cockpit door will still give a terrorist all the access they need to crash a plane. And meanwhile I get to sit here looking like an idiot who hasn't shaven in two days, since safety razors are banned. I expect to see Federales walking around airports with machine-guns any day now, giving dirty looks to poor-looking travelers, as America's implementation of socialist-banana-republic-esque security theater reaches completion.
*This means American, United, Continental, US Airways, TWA, all the little third-world airlines, and probably at least a few others.
If we had sociology majors doing this stuff, we wouldn't have to consider these sorts of questions.
Because it would already have been answered by a committee of government technocrats?