For over a decade the Slashdot poster has brought ignorance, libel, and the most inestimable repetitive motion, face-palming injuries to have afflicted the general public. With Medea-like intensity, this mass trauma began rising sharply four years ago, reflecting new and unexpected ravages by the keyboards of tens of thousands of monkeys and/or basement dwellers. A 2009 Department of Commerce report projected that 51,000 persons would be rendered eternally speechless by Slashdot posting atrocities in 2025. That figure will probably be reached in 2015, a decade ahead of schedule.
If you want to blame somebody, look in the mirror. Who did you vote for who failed to fight for your interests?
I don't "want" to blame someone. And it would be incorrect and counterproductive to blame myself for something over which I didn't have sufficient control.
if you already have this kind of fiat money and don't instantly throw it away as something worthless
Why would you throw it away when you can buy something that you do value with it instead? I think it is disingenuous to call it "religious kind of faith" when it simply works. I can have faith that I will somehow be alive after my death or that I won't ever spontaneously just fly up into space. One is based on hopeful feelings and one is based on concrete observation, not just during my lifetime, but of what we can see of the universe.
But I could characterize both as a "religious kind of faith", completely disregarding the differences between these two acts of faith.
This argument also ignores that the US government takes that fiat money as payment for tax debts. That gives it a concrete value even in the complete absence of faith.
And that's why conservatists can't comprehend that if they implement their policies of removing all maintenance from civil society, they'll get a civil war.
Then there are other sorts of mental failures, such as ignorance. For example, the people who think that they can give free unicorns to everyone and somehow maintain any sort of society, much less a civil one.
I'm starting to think it'll take a major Western nation falling to anarchy to drive this point home again.
When that happens, let's see how many "social safety nets" they had in place. For example, when we look at major Western nations which are falling apart, they tend to have a lot of social programs. They're countries like Greece not like the US. Similarly, when one looks at the worst off states in the US, they tend to have a lot of social safety nets, like California or Illinois rather than like Utah or Texas.
I think the fundamental problem is that consequences are ignored. For example, the use of welfare to bribe the public to ignore corruption. Or the hard fails that come when one prioritizes wants in a poor way, such as elevating social safety nets over tax collection, law enforcement, or road building.
The Greek government would be pretty close to balancing its budget, if it could actually collect the taxes it wants to collect. But it valued promising things over paying for those things.
What does welfare have to do with corruption? It's not the poor welfare recipients that are bribing the politicians.
Rather the other way around. I suppose it's one of the reasons I've never cared for this variety of welfare. The poor aren't being bribed in favor of my interests.
They claim it is to be able to push it to the refineries, but if that was true, why not build some refineries on or near the USA / Canadian boarder?
Because there are huge regulatory obstacles to building refineries. In the US there have only been a small handful of refineries built in the past few decades since the advent of the EPA. According to here there have been 15 refineries built in the US since the EPA was founded in 1970 and a total of 143 in existence. Two small new refineries in North Dakota are under construction.
Glancing at the Wikipedia page on the Keystone XL Pipeline, it's expected to have a maximum flow of around 600k barrels per day. In comparison, the US consumes somewhat shy of 40 million barrels of various petroleum products per day.
Even if that oil was refined, the resulting products would still need to be moved to where they'll be consumed.
in fact in high concentrations oxygen is poisonous, but carbon is not.
Yea, you'd choke to death long before you'd die of carbon poisoning. And pollution is context based. If it's causing a measurable externality from the quantity of the compound in the environment, then it is a pollutant.
It is 100% clear that, no matter what politicians say and what our household models of economics say, the Feds do not need your tax revenue to pay for anything.
Except that the paying of taxes to the federal government and the states is one of the fundamental ways that the US Dollar holds value.
The funny thing about fiat currencies is that the money is based upon pure faith of the religious kind.
That is absurd. The ability to exchange the US dollar, Euro, etc for things of value is readily observed. I consider money more an emergent order phenomenon.
If the government spent less than it destroyed in taxes, the economy would shrink, no matter if it were a republican (low tax, low spend) or a Democrat (high tax, high spend) policy.
Economies are much bigger than just the government part. And the non-government part tends to be a lot more productive.
In deflation, it should be a stimulus policy
The fundamental flaw of Keynesian economics is that it conflates economic activity with economic growth. Just because you have a "stimulus policy" doesn't mean that you have economic growth. Japan showed that after the 1990 recession and the US and Europe are showing it now.
I think the point is that Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" concept is very nice and dandy in theory, but, as you already seem to be aware, in the real world, the whole "free market" assumptions are mostly not valid (e.g. economical agents are NOT rational, information availability is NOT symmetrical, barriers to entry are seldom neglegible and, best of all, powerful economical agents use their leverage to introduce/modify rent-seeking regulations or other legislation that gives them an upper hand over everyone else), so expecting the market to magically self-regulate (i.e. believing in the "Invisible Hand" or, if you prefer, that supply+demand will actually regulate most REAL markets) is as wishful thinking as believing in any hypothetical, invisible dieties.
You even quoted my post where I complained about the very attitude you show here. I ask again what is the point of blaming a tool for a problem when the problem results from deliberately avoidance of using the tool?
This (i.e. anti-competitive, anti-capitalist legislation and regulations) is what you get when leave a regulatory void and you let companies (or other economic agents) openly buy politicians/legislators/laws: free market at work.
Except that it is not. Buying law is not a regulatory void, but yet another case of too much regulation. In fact, that is a pretty broad symptom common to a lot of over-regulation situations IMHO. A true "regulatory void" would not have the buying of law - it would not be possible.
The crisis in California was not one of electricity, it was one of business greed, and a lack of obligation applied to the right parties, while the wrong obligation was applied to others. That's why I call it the Enron Crisis. They made it happen. And I have no doubts that others would do the same elsewhere.
I already explained why "business greed" doesn't begin to explain the California electricity crisis. A big thing to remember is that if things had gone as planned, the remaining two private utilities, Consolidated Edison and PH&E would have completed deregulation, customers would have been charged the higher market prices during peak load periods, demand would have dropped as a consequence, and the crisis wouldn't have happened. There would have been no huge opportunity for Enron to exploit.
The California state government prevented that from happening and created a huge mess as a result.
Alternately, California government could have relaxed the rules of the market and allowed the three utilities to buy more power outside of the expensive spot market. That actually happened around mid 2001. But it could have been done in August 2000, for example, when San Diego Gas & Electric had first filed a complaint about the issue.
The crisis is appropriately named because a) it was the electricity market and not the Enron market, and b) because the primary culprit wasn't Enron but the California government which acted in a remarkably harmful way for the better part of a year.
As a more in depth aside, your current examples are really weak.
Texas has a thriving electricity generation market. Of the increased costs claimed by the study your link cites, almost 70% came from "stranded costs" payments which weren't market-based (basically paying electricity utilities for losing their monopoly status). That's almost $7 billion out of an alleged $10 billion in additional costs. More came from the cost of building wind power infrastructure.
However, that analysis didn't appear to tell the whole story.
For instance, the calculation of balancing energy savings
did not account for the multi-billion dollar expense of
building new transmission. Neither did it account for the
increased cost of purchasing additional backup capacity,
known in ERCOT as "ancillary services." ERCOT also has found
separately that wind is one of the most expensive forms
of power commonly used in Texas, with each megawatt
of power costing $53 to generate. And if one figures in its
actual operating capacity, then the cost of wind power
goes to $80 per megawatt hour.
This was another non-market cost. Looks to me like we can account for almost all of the higher costs paid by customers in the deregulated market from just these two parts that weren't market related. They were part of the deregulation process, but not actually deregulation itself.
Texas (whose companies cheated Californians out of money) politicians mocked California without any empathy. They claimed (falsely) that the problem was entirely California's 'enviro-nazi' regulations preventing supply from meeting demand during the dot-com boom. (false).
They were correct in that the above issues were contributing factors (they weren't "false" as you falsely claim). There were also the defective nature of the markets which allowed gaming of the market (by Enron and other generators and traders) and a remarkably disingenuous California government which interfered in the deregulation of the markets both by allowing the highly profitable Enron games to continue and by not allowing PG&E and Consolidated Edison to complete their deregulation process.
When we all "cooperate", there's little incentive to actually finish things. Competition works better because then your progress isn't just based on some ambiguous feelgood metric, but also the concrete things that everyone else is doing.
Well when you drill, it's generally through something. I doubt the journalist intended to imply that the drill actually made it all the way through. And there should be a bunch of near surface magma bodies in Iceland.
Slashdot Mirror
For over a decade the Slashdot poster has brought ignorance, libel, and the most inestimable repetitive motion, face-palming injuries to have afflicted the general public. With Medea-like intensity, this mass trauma began rising sharply four years ago, reflecting new and unexpected ravages by the keyboards of tens of thousands of monkeys and/or basement dwellers. A 2009 Department of Commerce report projected that 51,000 persons would be rendered eternally speechless by Slashdot posting atrocities in 2025. That figure will probably be reached in 2015, a decade ahead of schedule.
Life's overhead takes up a great deal of time if one is not among the 1% - or even the 10%.
I see no evidence that the "1%" has a lot of free time either. The rich are different from you and me. They have more money.
If you want to blame somebody, look in the mirror. Who did you vote for who failed to fight for your interests?
I don't "want" to blame someone. And it would be incorrect and counterproductive to blame myself for something over which I didn't have sufficient control.
if you already have this kind of fiat money and don't instantly throw it away as something worthless
Why would you throw it away when you can buy something that you do value with it instead? I think it is disingenuous to call it "religious kind of faith" when it simply works. I can have faith that I will somehow be alive after my death or that I won't ever spontaneously just fly up into space. One is based on hopeful feelings and one is based on concrete observation, not just during my lifetime, but of what we can see of the universe.
But I could characterize both as a "religious kind of faith", completely disregarding the differences between these two acts of faith.
This argument also ignores that the US government takes that fiat money as payment for tax debts. That gives it a concrete value even in the complete absence of faith.
And that's why conservatists can't comprehend that if they implement their policies of removing all maintenance from civil society, they'll get a civil war.
Then there are other sorts of mental failures, such as ignorance. For example, the people who think that they can give free unicorns to everyone and somehow maintain any sort of society, much less a civil one.
I'm starting to think it'll take a major Western nation falling to anarchy to drive this point home again.
When that happens, let's see how many "social safety nets" they had in place. For example, when we look at major Western nations which are falling apart, they tend to have a lot of social programs. They're countries like Greece not like the US. Similarly, when one looks at the worst off states in the US, they tend to have a lot of social safety nets, like California or Illinois rather than like Utah or Texas.
I think the fundamental problem is that consequences are ignored. For example, the use of welfare to bribe the public to ignore corruption. Or the hard fails that come when one prioritizes wants in a poor way, such as elevating social safety nets over tax collection, law enforcement, or road building.
The Greek government would be pretty close to balancing its budget, if it could actually collect the taxes it wants to collect. But it valued promising things over paying for those things.
What does welfare have to do with corruption? It's not the poor welfare recipients that are bribing the politicians.
Rather the other way around. I suppose it's one of the reasons I've never cared for this variety of welfare. The poor aren't being bribed in favor of my interests.
You mean since the EPA was created by that notorious liberal hippie Richard Nixon?
Completely irrelevant.
Right. To China.
Because anyone in the Gulf would rather ship oil to a Chinese market than to a somewhat more lucrative and far closer US market.
How is this absurd? The value of a Dollar or a Euro is based purely upon faith alone.
You don't have to believe that the dollar or Euro has value in order to exchange those units of currency for things that you do value.
Plants do produce CO2 at times.
They claim it is to be able to push it to the refineries, but if that was true, why not build some refineries on or near the USA / Canadian boarder?
Because there are huge regulatory obstacles to building refineries. In the US there have only been a small handful of refineries built in the past few decades since the advent of the EPA. According to here there have been 15 refineries built in the US since the EPA was founded in 1970 and a total of 143 in existence. Two small new refineries in North Dakota are under construction.
Glancing at the Wikipedia page on the Keystone XL Pipeline, it's expected to have a maximum flow of around 600k barrels per day. In comparison, the US consumes somewhat shy of 40 million barrels of various petroleum products per day.
Even if that oil was refined, the resulting products would still need to be moved to where they'll be consumed.
When they say "Carbon" they're actually referring to "Carbon Dioxide"
I think that was a big part of the original poster's point. It's real sloppy wording.
so an increase in CO2 would have a detrimental effect on the environment
It'd also have a positive effect on the environment. It all depends on your point of view.
in fact in high concentrations oxygen is poisonous, but carbon is not.
Yea, you'd choke to death long before you'd die of carbon poisoning. And pollution is context based. If it's causing a measurable externality from the quantity of the compound in the environment, then it is a pollutant.
Or of weird atmospheric phenomena, which also happens.
It is 100% clear that, no matter what politicians say and what our household models of economics say, the Feds do not need your tax revenue to pay for anything.
Except that the paying of taxes to the federal government and the states is one of the fundamental ways that the US Dollar holds value.
The funny thing about fiat currencies is that the money is based upon pure faith of the religious kind.
That is absurd. The ability to exchange the US dollar, Euro, etc for things of value is readily observed. I consider money more an emergent order phenomenon.
If the government spent less than it destroyed in taxes, the economy would shrink, no matter if it were a republican (low tax, low spend) or a Democrat (high tax, high spend) policy.
Economies are much bigger than just the government part. And the non-government part tends to be a lot more productive.
In deflation, it should be a stimulus policy
The fundamental flaw of Keynesian economics is that it conflates economic activity with economic growth. Just because you have a "stimulus policy" doesn't mean that you have economic growth. Japan showed that after the 1990 recession and the US and Europe are showing it now.
What is BS? After all, you do agree that inflation is a limit of deficit spending with a fiat currency.
I hope your mind regenerates pretty fast, otherwise that strategy isn't going to work for very long.
I think the point is that Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" concept is very nice and dandy in theory, but, as you already seem to be aware, in the real world, the whole "free market" assumptions are mostly not valid (e.g. economical agents are NOT rational, information availability is NOT symmetrical, barriers to entry are seldom neglegible and, best of all, powerful economical agents use their leverage to introduce/modify rent-seeking regulations or other legislation that gives them an upper hand over everyone else), so expecting the market to magically self-regulate (i.e. believing in the "Invisible Hand" or, if you prefer, that supply+demand will actually regulate most REAL markets) is as wishful thinking as believing in any hypothetical, invisible dieties.
You even quoted my post where I complained about the very attitude you show here. I ask again what is the point of blaming a tool for a problem when the problem results from deliberately avoidance of using the tool?
This (i.e. anti-competitive, anti-capitalist legislation and regulations) is what you get when leave a regulatory void and you let companies (or other economic agents) openly buy politicians/legislators/laws: free market at work.
Except that it is not. Buying law is not a regulatory void, but yet another case of too much regulation. In fact, that is a pretty broad symptom common to a lot of over-regulation situations IMHO. A true "regulatory void" would not have the buying of law - it would not be possible.
The crisis in California was not one of electricity, it was one of business greed, and a lack of obligation applied to the right parties, while the wrong obligation was applied to others. That's why I call it the Enron Crisis. They made it happen. And I have no doubts that others would do the same elsewhere.
I already explained why "business greed" doesn't begin to explain the California electricity crisis. A big thing to remember is that if things had gone as planned, the remaining two private utilities, Consolidated Edison and PH&E would have completed deregulation, customers would have been charged the higher market prices during peak load periods, demand would have dropped as a consequence, and the crisis wouldn't have happened. There would have been no huge opportunity for Enron to exploit.
The California state government prevented that from happening and created a huge mess as a result.
Alternately, California government could have relaxed the rules of the market and allowed the three utilities to buy more power outside of the expensive spot market. That actually happened around mid 2001. But it could have been done in August 2000, for example, when San Diego Gas & Electric had first filed a complaint about the issue.
The crisis is appropriately named because a) it was the electricity market and not the Enron market, and b) because the primary culprit wasn't Enron but the California government which acted in a remarkably harmful way for the better part of a year.
Texas has a thriving electricity generation market. Of the increased costs claimed by the study your link cites, almost 70% came from "stranded costs" payments which weren't market-based (basically paying electricity utilities for losing their monopoly status). That's almost $7 billion out of an alleged $10 billion in additional costs. More came from the cost of building wind power infrastructure.
However, that analysis didn't appear to tell the whole story. For instance, the calculation of balancing energy savings did not account for the multi-billion dollar expense of building new transmission. Neither did it account for the increased cost of purchasing additional backup capacity, known in ERCOT as "ancillary services." ERCOT also has found separately that wind is one of the most expensive forms of power commonly used in Texas, with each megawatt of power costing $53 to generate. And if one figures in its actual operating capacity, then the cost of wind power goes to $80 per megawatt hour.
This was another non-market cost. Looks to me like we can account for almost all of the higher costs paid by customers in the deregulated market from just these two parts that weren't market related. They were part of the deregulation process, but not actually deregulation itself.
Texas (whose companies cheated Californians out of money) politicians mocked California without any empathy. They claimed (falsely) that the problem was entirely California's 'enviro-nazi' regulations preventing supply from meeting demand during the dot-com boom. (false).
They were correct in that the above issues were contributing factors (they weren't "false" as you falsely claim). There were also the defective nature of the markets which allowed gaming of the market (by Enron and other generators and traders) and a remarkably disingenuous California government which interfered in the deregulation of the markets both by allowing the highly profitable Enron games to continue and by not allowing PG&E and Consolidated Edison to complete their deregulation process.
Clear failures of the application deregulatory ideology are frequently retroactively declared to be "wasn't actually deregulatory".
By all means, let's consider these failures. Do you have one in mind?
And here was one of the free clues.
When we all "cooperate", there's little incentive to actually finish things. Competition works better because then your progress isn't just based on some ambiguous feelgood metric, but also the concrete things that everyone else is doing.
Well when you drill, it's generally through something. I doubt the journalist intended to imply that the drill actually made it all the way through. And there should be a bunch of near surface magma bodies in Iceland.