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

timharford.com

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

#281

Post by KennyBlanken »

barney54 wrote: post #257
KennyBlanken wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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/

Bullshit.

2021, 72.4 Billion BTUS total use and 8.6 Billion BTUs from coal.

11%.

Sorry I was off by one percent.

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

#282

Post by kjkjadksj »

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…

LADOT and LA METRO are converting their bus fleets to electric. Its thousands of busses so these things take time.

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

#283

Post by fomine3 »

timwaagh wrote: post #256
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…

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 t…

Quick accelerate for family car is not needed but for bus is helpful to reduce traffic jam. I wish buses have at least hybrid powertrain.

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

#285

Post by steveylang »

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…

I just feel bad for the one ‘good actor’ who is never going get a coffee at the Christmas market.

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

#286

Post by quadrifoliate »

Logic: You can produce thoughtful work, with detailed examination of how incentives played out in real life, and how real people responded to those incentives. Your work will attract both scientists and laypersons, and be read by both. However, you have to do a lot of data analysis, statistics, and present them in a way that's attractive to both sets of people.

Reverse logic: Write blog posts with outrageous suggestions with little real-world applicability, that are equivalent to argument junk food. The few people who think deeply about statistics and behavioral economics will ignore it, but the vast majority of people will eagerly discuss it, link to your page, and sell your work.

I think the reverse logic works!

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

#287

Post by lucian1900 »

HideousKojima wrote: post #268
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

">When some starve and others hoard food, is property more important than hunger? Yes, because destroying private property rights will lead to further famines. It's something called second-order effects" There is this really interesting second order effect I heard about, very few people know about it - apparently masses of starving people might not just quietly watch their family succumb to famine, sometimes they sta…

>sometimes they start cutting off heads of whoever is in charge I wish they'd actually done so to Stalin, seeing as he was the one in charge and his policies were the cause of the famine. Instead, it seems like the majority swallowed his propaganda blaming the kulaks hook, line, and sinker.

Or the white army and the kulaks were indeed to blame and people at the time understood that, while you swallowed propaganda blaming the Bolsheviks.

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

#288

Post by SilasX »

tslmy wrote: post #275
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…

The article should have clarified one more assumption: In a Landsburg's queue, it is compulsory for everyone arriving at the scene to *join the queue immediately*. Otherwise, people would just swarm around the head of the queue, fighting to join the queue as soon as the current customer gets served. In the following discussions, I assume such swarms are successfully prohibited. # For those who end up going home For t…

> In a Landsburg's queue, it is compulsory for everyone arriving at the scene to join the queue immediately. Otherwise, people would just swarm around the head of the queue, fighting to join the queue as soon as the current customer gets served. In the following discussions, I assume such swarms are successfully prohibited.

That’s still a non-physical solution because you can’t actually operationalize that rule.

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

#289

Post by zeckalpha »

Retric wrote: post #254
zeckalpha wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There’s more aluminum and steel available above ground than lithium.

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

#290

Post by robertlagrant »

lucian1900 wrote: post #255
anamax wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 t…

You're over-valuing labour. Labour is one thing, but not everything. What you're describing assumes people can't get other jobs, which is not true, and that of competition, which is where multiple parties automate, and so profits decrease (because monopolies are bad).
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