People willingly pay those costs because people are not willing to live with the alternative - i.e. to live without what fossil fuels allow them to do.
There is no such thing as an "involuntary subsidy". It's called making a choice!
The fossil fuel industry does not impose costs on anyone. We accept the costs because we consider the alternative to be worse.
The opportunity cost of not using fossil fuels is much greater, at the present moment, than the opportunity cost of using them. Therefore the idea of fossil fuels being subsidised is at best, uninformed or economically illiterate, and at worst, dishonest.
The public generally doesn't want to pay more for fossil fuels than they are willing to pay now. And as the public are the ones who "pay" these externalities, they are paying exactly what they currently want to pay for the fossil fuels.
To use an analogy, I am not generally subsidising a supermarket when I drive there to buy groceries. I am incurring additional costs that I am willing to incur to get my groceries.
One day, maybe once we have alternatives that can replace fossil fuels, the public may well be unwilling to pay for these externalities, and at that point, if government continues to allow fossil fuel companies to spew into the environment, then yes, they could be considered to be subsidised. But at the moment, no, they are not subsidised. In fact, they are heavily taxed in many places (such as the UK where I live).
Claiming that fossil fuels are being subsidised by 5.3 trillion implies that we would be 5.3 trillion better off without them. I challenge that implication. If we were to stop using fossil fuel today, we would find ourselves more than 5.3 trillion worse off. We couldn't feed ourselves, could take sick people to hospitals, couldn't take medicines to hospitals etc.
This isn't to suggest that we should develop alternative - but the fact that there is no replacement now means that there is in reality no subsidy.
I don't mind calling them externalities. But subsidy is misleading as it implies that governments are actually cutting cheques to the value of 5.3 trillion dollars to fossil fuel companies each year. They are not.
And there are also significantly externalities to stopping fossil fuel use overnight that would easily dwarf the 5.3 trillion dollars that the analysis ignores. There is no substitute available today that could replace fossil fuels overnight. If all of the hydro, nuclear, wind and solar disappeared tomorrow, the world would barely blink in comparison, and we would probably be ok within the year.
Did you even look at that page? A lot of the "subsidies" are "externalities", "local air pollution" etc.
It is clearly misleading to use subsidies in that sense as governments are not giving 5.3 trillion dollars to oil firms every year. They should just call them externalities.
Google and Facebook's service do not cost money to their direct users. They cost money to advertisers. Google and Facebook build audiences, and then sell access to them.
If they get this wrong, and show their audiences the wrong sort of adverts, they do not make any money.
Prices won't drop because of technological improvements. What is being sold is finite real estate - space on user screens. This is basically being auctioned, and therefore prices will nearly always remain high. The only reason for prices to drop is if the audience drops - e.g. people spend less time and search less often on Google.
Maybe they should allow the person they are accusing a fair hearing before they publish. Their research could have been proven to be hopelessly wrong, and they would have avoided publishing the fake news.
Except that Whatsapp actually say they use end-to-end encryption. I know this, because I have Whatsapp, and the first time I exchange messages with anyone, it says that.
Why should google provide its competitors (who pay it nothing by the way) with free advertising? Why is this important?
Maybe Google needs to rebrand Google Search as Google Advertising and just make it clear that high placement in search results is in its gift, and that the only way to guarantee high search placement is to outbid your competitors. Maybe, Google should come up with a way to separate it's price comparison business operationally from search, but still be allowed to buy high search placement from its own search engine. That way, they can claim to be treating their competitors fairly.
Search is not a market. Selling advertising is. It makes no sense to demand that companies only do search or advertising - no ones pays for search. but advertisers pay for eyeballs.
This is equivalent to saying that {insert TV station} should be forced to show adverts by their competitors because they cannot use their dominance in terms of good TV to dominate advertising.
Google has built the world's largest discovery engine. In addition to pages that score highly on other metrics, Google also promotes pages where other companies have paid them.
This is sensible because if you are paying Google, then you expect your actual customers to reward you with higher sales that cover you advertising costs. This is a market working as it should.
The advantage that Google has built in advertising is fair. They invested a lot of money and time and effort to build a business, and they are now getting their just rewards for that.
This is one of the reasons why European tech firms lag behind the US. They are tied up in knots by unfavourable regulatory/ legal requirements, and then the EU complains that American firms, which face a more business friendly environment back home, start to dominate. It probably hasn't occurred to the EU that their own bureaucracy is causing this.
Millions will perish? Really? I have an even worse prediction for you. More than 10 billion people are going to die in the next 100 years.
(You see what I did there?)
Now that isn't to say that we should do nothing about climate change, but if, and it's a big if, the price of climate changes is a few (or even scores of) millions of lives, we need to balance this with the billions whose lives are better off as a result of increase access to energy (including to CO2 producing energy).
We already have people living in places where the temperature routinely goes above 50 Celsius, and they haven't all dropped dead yet.
The problem with all of those examples is that they were "me too". Perhaps with the exception of Drugstore.com. Even then, that wasn't really taking advantage of what Amazon really is.
If you read the article, Amazon is about scale. Whole Foods gives Amazon scale that is doesn't have in the grocery business and allows it to build out a delivery infrastructure (surely its end game) to support that scale and beyond.
Amazon presents itself as the world's shopping site, but Amazon is really a logistics company. And logistics companies need scale.
The value of a developer is dictated by the value of what they produce, but their cost (as in what a developer is paid) is determined by two things (1) the cost of a replacement developer, and generally what another developer with a similar skillset, will demand, and (2) what the same developer is able to earn elsewhere.
In a reasonably working labour market, (2) is implied by (1).
The need for copyright is clear from the relevant laws and statutes that it is meant to encourage the production of works of authorship.
Our culture is richer because people have created these works.
Now, I don't agree with these seemingly infinite copyrights. I would prefer a much shorter copyright term - I would go for 40 years. I don't think copyrights need to be much longer than that to encourage production of works of authorship.
However, I would definitely not want a return to wealthy people deciding what constitutes good art and therefore what is worthy of funding. We are on the cusp of truly democratizing the creation of works of art in a way that was just not possible even 2 decades ago.
I trust the market, and I trust copyright (as a concept) even though I also think current copyright periods are excessive.
Copyright is working now. Not perfectly, but it is working nonetheless. The proof is in companies such as Microsoft (and others) making bank every month.
Nowhere does anyone say that copyright needs to work perfectly for it to be considered to be working successfully.
And what other ways (other than patronage) are available for people to fund content? Put some ideas on the table, rather than just hypothesize that there are other means available.
Content locking is not mandatory. You, or anyone else, can create content and distribute it completely free of charge.
You are probably not going to spend $200m on any content that you want to give away for free, and therein lies the problem.
Yes, studios fear disruption, but the disruption they fear isn't about free content. They are much more worried that the likes of Amazon and Netflix are going to supplant them.
I imagine that if a typical old monitor is approximately 50cm * 50cm * 50 cm, then you can fit about 1 billion of them into a hole in the ground that is approximately 500m * 500m * 500m.
This isn't to suggest that waste that is currently unrecycleable is a good thing, but this is a problem that can be managed by having a plan to deal with the issue.
Brazil has a population density of 22 people per square mile. To put that figure in context, the US has a density of 84, China of 142 and India of 386.
It is easy for Brazil to lead the way on renewables because, per capita, they have way more resources than others.
That isn't to say they shouldn't, but they cannot be a realistic example for all countries to follow.
He was executed in Texas for murder and arson based (...) many arson experts now believe he was almost certainly innocent. Oops.
Another strong argument against the death penalty.
Also another argument against leaving decisions on technical matters to prosecutors. There were many chances to save that guy's life, and none were taken. There was testimony in good time that showed that there was no evidence that he had deliberately caused the fire, but it wasn't listened to.
In any case, if a person is being found guilty of such a crime, I believe the jury needs to say what evidence was key in convicting. In this case, the key bit was that the fire had been started deliberately and, more specifically, that an accelerant had been used. If that testimony had been invalidated (which it later was), then basically the glove didn't fit, and the man should have been acquitted. This would have given the man an opportunity to put his effort into disproving the one key bit of evidence that was nailing him.
This also means that statements such as "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way." are ignorant and ethically wrong,
Slashdot Mirror
People willingly pay those costs because people are not willing to live with the alternative - i.e. to live without what fossil fuels allow them to do.
There is no such thing as an "involuntary subsidy". It's called making a choice!
The fossil fuel industry does not impose costs on anyone. We accept the costs because we consider the alternative to be worse.
No, if it is available to anyone, then it is just known as "the tax code".
OK, I will put it another way.
The opportunity cost of not using fossil fuels is much greater, at the present moment, than the opportunity cost of using them. Therefore the idea of fossil fuels being subsidised is at best, uninformed or economically illiterate, and at worst, dishonest.
The public generally doesn't want to pay more for fossil fuels than they are willing to pay now. And as the public are the ones who "pay" these externalities, they are paying exactly what they currently want to pay for the fossil fuels.
To use an analogy, I am not generally subsidising a supermarket when I drive there to buy groceries. I am incurring additional costs that I am willing to incur to get my groceries.
One day, maybe once we have alternatives that can replace fossil fuels, the public may well be unwilling to pay for these externalities, and at that point, if government continues to allow fossil fuel companies to spew into the environment, then yes, they could be considered to be subsidised. But at the moment, no, they are not subsidised. In fact, they are heavily taxed in many places (such as the UK where I live).
Claiming that fossil fuels are being subsidised by 5.3 trillion implies that we would be 5.3 trillion better off without them. I challenge that implication. If we were to stop using fossil fuel today, we would find ourselves more than 5.3 trillion worse off. We couldn't feed ourselves, could take sick people to hospitals, couldn't take medicines to hospitals etc.
This isn't to suggest that we should develop alternative - but the fact that there is no replacement now means that there is in reality no subsidy.
I don't mind calling them externalities. But subsidy is misleading as it implies that governments are actually cutting cheques to the value of 5.3 trillion dollars to fossil fuel companies each year. They are not.
And there are also significantly externalities to stopping fossil fuel use overnight that would easily dwarf the 5.3 trillion dollars that the analysis ignores. There is no substitute available today that could replace fossil fuels overnight. If all of the hydro, nuclear, wind and solar disappeared tomorrow, the world would barely blink in comparison, and we would probably be ok within the year.
Did you even look at that page? A lot of the "subsidies" are "externalities", "local air pollution" etc.
It is clearly misleading to use subsidies in that sense as governments are not giving 5.3 trillion dollars to oil firms every year. They should just call them externalities.
Google and Facebook's service do not cost money to their direct users. They cost money to advertisers. Google and Facebook build audiences, and then sell access to them.
If they get this wrong, and show their audiences the wrong sort of adverts, they do not make any money.
Prices won't drop because of technological improvements. What is being sold is finite real estate - space on user screens. This is basically being auctioned, and therefore prices will nearly always remain high. The only reason for prices to drop is if the audience drops - e.g. people spend less time and search less often on Google.
Maybe they should allow the person they are accusing a fair hearing before they publish. Their research could have been proven to be hopelessly wrong, and they would have avoided publishing the fake news.
Except that Whatsapp actually say they use end-to-end encryption. I know this, because I have Whatsapp, and the first time I exchange messages with anyone, it says that.
Why should google provide its competitors (who pay it nothing by the way) with free advertising? Why is this important?
Maybe Google needs to rebrand Google Search as Google Advertising and just make it clear that high placement in search results is in its gift, and that the only way to guarantee high search placement is to outbid your competitors. Maybe, Google should come up with a way to separate it's price comparison business operationally from search, but still be allowed to buy high search placement from its own search engine. That way, they can claim to be treating their competitors fairly.
Search is not a market. Selling advertising is. It makes no sense to demand that companies only do search or advertising - no ones pays for search. but advertisers pay for eyeballs.
This is equivalent to saying that {insert TV station} should be forced to show adverts by their competitors because they cannot use their dominance in terms of good TV to dominate advertising.
Google has built the world's largest discovery engine. In addition to pages that score highly on other metrics, Google also promotes pages where other companies have paid them.
This is sensible because if you are paying Google, then you expect your actual customers to reward you with higher sales that cover you advertising costs. This is a market working as it should.
The advantage that Google has built in advertising is fair. They invested a lot of money and time and effort to build a business, and they are now getting their just rewards for that.
This is one of the reasons why European tech firms lag behind the US. They are tied up in knots by unfavourable regulatory/ legal requirements, and then the EU complains that American firms, which face a more business friendly environment back home, start to dominate. It probably hasn't occurred to the EU that their own bureaucracy is causing this.
Millions will perish? Really? I have an even worse prediction for you. More than 10 billion people are going to die in the next 100 years.
(You see what I did there?)
Now that isn't to say that we should do nothing about climate change, but if, and it's a big if, the price of climate changes is a few (or even scores of) millions of lives, we need to balance this with the billions whose lives are better off as a result of increase access to energy (including to CO2 producing energy).
We already have people living in places where the temperature routinely goes above 50 Celsius, and they haven't all dropped dead yet.
The problem with all of those examples is that they were "me too". Perhaps with the exception of Drugstore.com. Even then, that wasn't really taking advantage of what Amazon really is.
If you read the article, Amazon is about scale. Whole Foods gives Amazon scale that is doesn't have in the grocery business and allows it to build out a delivery infrastructure (surely its end game) to support that scale and beyond.
Amazon presents itself as the world's shopping site, but Amazon is really a logistics company. And logistics companies need scale.
The value of a developer is dictated by the value of what they produce, but their cost (as in what a developer is paid) is determined by two things (1) the cost of a replacement developer, and generally what another developer with a similar skillset, will demand, and (2) what the same developer is able to earn elsewhere.
In a reasonably working labour market, (2) is implied by (1).
The need for copyright is clear from the relevant laws and statutes that it is meant to encourage the production of works of authorship.
Our culture is richer because people have created these works.
Now, I don't agree with these seemingly infinite copyrights. I would prefer a much shorter copyright term - I would go for 40 years. I don't think copyrights need to be much longer than that to encourage production of works of authorship.
However, I would definitely not want a return to wealthy people deciding what constitutes good art and therefore what is worthy of funding. We are on the cusp of truly democratizing the creation of works of art in a way that was just not possible even 2 decades ago.
I trust the market, and I trust copyright (as a concept) even though I also think current copyright periods are excessive.
Copyright is working now. Not perfectly, but it is working nonetheless. The proof is in companies such as Microsoft (and others) making bank every month.
Nowhere does anyone say that copyright needs to work perfectly for it to be considered to be working successfully.
And what other ways (other than patronage) are available for people to fund content? Put some ideas on the table, rather than just hypothesize that there are other means available.
Content locking is not mandatory. You, or anyone else, can create content and distribute it completely free of charge.
You are probably not going to spend $200m on any content that you want to give away for free, and therein lies the problem.
Yes, studios fear disruption, but the disruption they fear isn't about free content. They are much more worried that the likes of Amazon and Netflix are going to supplant them.
The only realistic alternative to a copyright based system is a system of patronage, where we only get to see stuff commissioned by wealthy people.
And if you don't like the fact the Bieber copyrights his music, then stop listening to his music for crying out loud.
I imagine that if a typical old monitor is approximately 50cm * 50cm * 50 cm, then you can fit about 1 billion of them into a hole in the ground that is approximately 500m * 500m * 500m.
This isn't to suggest that waste that is currently unrecycleable is a good thing, but this is a problem that can be managed by having a plan to deal with the issue.
Brazil has a population density of 22 people per square mile. To put that figure in context, the US has a density of 84, China of 142 and India of 386.
It is easy for Brazil to lead the way on renewables because, per capita, they have way more resources than others.
That isn't to say they shouldn't, but they cannot be a realistic example for all countries to follow.
He was executed in Texas for murder and arson based (...) many arson experts now believe he was almost certainly innocent. Oops.
Another strong argument against the death penalty.
Also another argument against leaving decisions on technical matters to prosecutors. There were many chances to save that guy's life, and none were taken. There was testimony in good time that showed that there was no evidence that he had deliberately caused the fire, but it wasn't listened to.
In any case, if a person is being found guilty of such a crime, I believe the jury needs to say what evidence was key in convicting. In this case, the key bit was that the fire had been started deliberately and, more specifically, that an accelerant had been used. If that testimony had been invalidated (which it later was), then basically the glove didn't fit, and the man should have been acquitted. This would have given the man an opportunity to put his effort into disproving the one key bit of evidence that was nailing him.
We have seen the future, and it is online subscription video!
My Sennheisers do that.
This also means that statements such as "The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way." are ignorant and ethically wrong,
Why would that be ethically wrong?
The musicians should then perform more often if they want more of their fans to see them. Or perform at bigger venues. Or both.