Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic • Hacker News Board

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#251

Post by olau » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

iamthemonster wrote: post #238

blorgle wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, seems dumb "economist" thinking. The idea that "if someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits" is a absurd on two fronts.The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible. Maybe you are allergic to chocolate. Maybe mince pies make you gag. Also, optimising for queue length only makes any sense in the described scenario if all…

Of course the position "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" is ridiculous at face value. But if you are a bit more generous with its intentions, then there is something that really chimes with me about it. I work in engineering support to oil and gas operations (but I'm sure this is applicable to many industries), and we have quarterly workplans and pretty fixed budgets. Of cou…

I remember attending a lecture about how to do well in the academic world well back at university decades ago, where the lecturer quoted another (famous) researcher who had a personal rule for incoming requests. Either he did it now or he did it never. Now is not literally now, but close.

Just saying no and not pretending that you might do can also be helpful in other ways. For instance, you or someone else might then realize that to get something like this done, it needs to be made much easier to do.

I've personally just finished planting 450 meters of windbreaking bushes around my orchard. Now, I should have done that four years ago - but I came up with a fancier plan, to put it on top of an embankment, and it would get rid of some of the traffic noise, and I had a guy with lots of soil in spare - great plan, except that person was really slow to respond and was actually depending on another person, and I had to get the municipality to agree, and... as it turns out, the required level of social energy to push this through was just not happening for me in my spare time. So after four years, my wife made me scrap the idea, then I almost immediately realized that hey, I could just plant the damn bushes, and here we are, a few months later, and they're out there and looking great, eight different species, future homes of birds and other wildlife.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#252

Post by sgjohnson » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 10:17 AM UTC

rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #220

gorgoiler wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How heavy is an EV bus? Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class. Would a bus be even more so, to the point of being dangerously massive?

> Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class A Tesla Model 3 weights roughly as much as its ICE equivalent (BMW 3 series).

But this doesn’t scale well. Buses will be pulling a lot more weight than a Tesla Model 3 or BMW 3er. And you’ve got the same problem with semi-trucks.

More weight to pull = more power required = more batteries required = more weight to pull. Almost a catch-22 when you factor in the increase in recharge time. For commercial vehicles, a minute of downtime is a minute of the said vehicle not making any money.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#253

Post by sgjohnson » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 10:18 AM UTC

pjerem wrote: post #236

gorgoiler wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How heavy is an EV bus? Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class. Would a bus be even more so, to the point of being dangerously massive?

EV bus are not science fiction. There are a lot of them working everyday in a lot cities. So no, there is no such thing as dangerous weight.

In my city, most buses run on hydrogen. None run on batteries.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#254

Post by Retric » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 10:33 AM UTC

zeckalpha wrote: post #211

Retric wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Plug in hybrids need to haul around an engine, gas tank, transmission, exhaust system etc. They also need extra batteries over a standard hybrid.

Those items aren’t made with as much extractive materials proportionally as EV batteries. If using PHEVs means more miles travelled are electric while less lithium is mined, great.

If you’re replacing the battery then you still need to extract those materials. Thus weight is only really meaningful in terms of vehicle efficiency not materials extraction. And of course having a plug in vehicle doesn’t mean it will be driven as a plug in vehicle where EV’s are limited to pure electricity.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#255

Post by lucian1900 » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 11:11 AM UTC

anamax wrote: post #172

lucian1900 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course. Such automation wouldn’t be sustainable under capitalism because the rate of profit would drop even further, but it would be entirely possible under a socialist economy that produces for use instead of for profit.

> Such automation wouldn’t be sustainable under capitalism because the rate of profit would drop even further I get that you don't like profits (even though investment to do automation requires profits), but automation reduces costs which INCREASES profits and/or reduces prices.

One enterprise automating increases its competitive advantage for a while, thus temporarily increasing its profits. However, over time, all enterprises will either automate or fail.

Since profits are a portion of the value generated by labour, as the proportion of costs attributed to labour drop, so do profits. There are secondary effects as well, as workers lose their jobs, their wages fall through competition and they can no longer afford to buy the commodities produced.

This phenomenon is well documented historically, as the rate of profit has an overall tendency to drop which is more clearly noticeable after bursts of automation.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/a-world-ra...

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#256

Post by timwaagh » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 12:30 PM UTC

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #185

FriedPickles wrote: post #38

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries . So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles…

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China…

We have some in Holland too. Works great. They accelerate quickly so buses don't hold up traffic and don't get many delays. Although it's too simple to suggest that by electrifying buses we save planet. Electric bikes are nice too, though fairly expensive. Most middle class folks have one. Electric cars don't seem to work at scale for now. Just unaffordably expensive and only economical for people who drive all the time and can charge on their own driveway.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#257

Post by barney54 » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 1:00 PM UTC

KennyBlanken wrote: post #158

H8crilA wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, coal is still absolutely huge: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_cons... Don't get fooled by stats from rich countries as those countries "cheat" by importing goods and materials with large entry footprints embedded into them.

In the US coal has dropped from 30% of our electricity generation to 10% in barely a few years. Coal plants around the country are shutting down because of how expensive coal is compared to wind and solar. Meanwhile we had nearly 20GW of grid-scale solar and wind added in one year, and that doesn't count small installations like residential rooftop systems.

This is not accurate. This year coal has produced 23% of US electricity. See table 7.2a. https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#258

Post by throw0101a » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 1:11 PM UTC

bruce511 wrote: post #198

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most" We have a name for them - Bus Drivers! Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week. Today 95% of all electric busses are in China…

I could not agree with you more, except for the small problem of range. I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day. Maybe a 3 on, 1 off schedule would work (leaving it some time to charge) and that will have some capital implications (more actual vehicles in the fleet) But I concur with t…

> I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day.

The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is buying 300 all-electric buses:

* https://www.electrive.com/2021/04/27/toronto-to-procure-300-...

They currently have 60 as part of a pilot project, in addition to a whole bunch of hybrids.

It seems to be a case of pay now, or pay later:

> Besides the infrastructure cost of chargers, each electric bus can cost $200,000 to $500,000 more per bus than an average $750,000 diesel bus.

> Case acknowledges that is "significantly" more expensive, but it is offset by fuel savings over time, as electricity costs are cheaper. Because the electric buses have fewer parts than diesel buses, maintenance costs are also about 25 per cent lower and the buses are expected to be more reliable.

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/electric-buses-transit-1.582...

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#259

Post by Someone » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 1:44 PM UTC

blorgle wrote: post #197

nojs wrote: post #179

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back…

Yeah, seems dumb "economist" thinking. The idea that "if someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits" is a absurd on two fronts.The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible. Maybe you are allergic to chocolate. Maybe mince pies make you gag. Also, optimising for queue length only makes any sense in the described scenario if all…

> The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible.

If there continuously is a queue, the stall owner doesn’t lose a sale when somebody walks away, and, if the owner is smart, doesn’t lose any produce, as they shouldn’t prepare more than they can, at maximum speed, sell before closing time.

Re: Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

#260

Post by loki49152 » Sun, Dec 26, 2021, 2:35 PM UTC

coliveira wrote: post #218

smt88 wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Am I just ignorant? No. Economics academia is an "emperor's new clothes" field. They generate enormous amounts of dense, complex-sounding literature, and most if it is as you describe. It's never practical. Sometimes there are interesting models that help to understand things that happened in the past, but as a field, economics seems unable to predict anything that will happen in the future (even on a fundamental l…

It's like this because they start from postulates that are contrary to reality. The idea that elements in an economic systems act in a rational way, or that there is an "invisible hand" that drives the markets, or that the markets operate in equilibrium, these are all ad hoc ideas that have no basis in reality. I classify it more like a kind of economic theology.

Assuming the rationality of economic actors goes wrong primarily because economists don’t know what “rationality” is and come up with weird accounts for what “rational” behavior would be under given circumstances. They aren’t talking about “rational” behavior in the sense laymen use the term.

The “invisible hand” is also something that actually does exist and is straightforward to explain. It’s the tendency individuals making decisions in their own self-interest to find others with compatible self-interest as the motivation to make a trade. Every mutually self-interested transaction adds up to a total gain for the overall economy because each side makes the trade precisely because they judge the other’s offer to be of higher value to them. The key to demystifying the observation is the insight that “value” is a judgement made by individuals in relation to their own lives, not some inherent property that can be determined apart from individuals value judgements.