371–380 of 524 posts
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I think you’re gravely misguided. BAC has nothing to do with sin, it’s connected to the morality and ethics of putting your fellow citizens at risk of your impaired driving.
Indeed, this is the point I'm after. Glad we could get there.
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If lithium mining brings in money to buy water and other things as well, then it's not great, but it's probably the better choice.
True, but are they actually offsetting the negarive costs by doing things like that, or are the companies protecting their profits?
The more I read about prices of different commodities the more I realise the biggest movement in prices is not because of demand and supply but rather because of speculation and gambling. And how most of the news is manipulated. For example they are equating lithium price fall with stagnating car sales. Where as car sales might be stagnating but electric car sales are taking a larger portion of total car sales ie ele…
commodities with inelastic supply and inelastic demand are prone to very wide price swings.
inelastic supply means that increasing prices don't increase supply. in the case of lithium, it take time to bring new production capacity online, so supply is very inelastic in the short term.
inelastic demand means that increasing prices do not decrease demand. in the case of lithium, batteries are a very valuable product, and the raw cost of lithium is a small percentage of their total value, so increasing prices for lithium do very little to reduce demand.
the price movement here is totally predictable and exactly what you would expect based on standard economic formulas taking into account supply/demand elasticity. it is not speculation or gambling.
demand went up, supply lagged, the price spiked, supply increased, the price went back down.
electric car sales may still be growing but growing at a lower rate, and projected demand growth is probably decreasing relative to projected supply, so the price is falling.
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I won't propose any exact criteria, given that this is HN and I am in no mood for nitpicking games, which usually follow after a demand for something exact. However, if I were considering investment from my own pocket, political and economic stability would play a much higher role for my decision making than GDP per capita. And Argentina would therefore be a big no-no, while Chile might make the cut. Would you make a…
> I won't propose any exact criteria, given that this is HN and I am in no mood for nitpicking games, which usually follow after a demand for something exact. I understand that, you were the one who dismissed GDP per capita as an objective measurement of economic development. The point I was making that the OECD exists to espouse a particular model of global economic organization and development, which is politically…
Yeah, OECD is very political. No disagreement about that.
But I would say that the correlation of "being attractive for FDI" and "having good standards of living among the general population" is rather high and given that FDI tends to predate said growth of standards of living, there actually may be causality.
Excluding resource-rich countries that grew fat on something that comes out of the earth, pretty much every country whose standards of living soared since, say, 1950, attracted a lot of FDI beforehand.
After all, the same things that attract investors (stability, low crime, high educational attainment, reliable electricity supply, rule of law) tend to be good for the citizens as well.
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Right, but in NK you starved to death at the governments whim as they had little to no ability to feed themselves. These conversations are barely worth having unless you're willing to go into long chains of explaining the complexity behind the situations.
Sure, but if you stay on topic I'm just saying there isn't a clean 1:1 correlation between political ideology and environmental harm.
[1] "But while demand for lithium has been subdued, many believe the expanding supply outlook for the metal is mainly what is pushing prices lower this year, with a wave of fresh supply expected to come online from facilities in China, Australia and Chile. Five analyst forecasts, including ones from Bank of America (BofA), JPMorgan Chase and Morgan Stanley that were reviewed by Bloomberg in mid-January, for instance, anticipated production increases of between 22 percent and 42 percent in 2023 alone. “Supply is coming on stream faster than you can say ‘boo’. Demand remains strong, but prices have been unsustainable for some time now,” analyst Dylan Kelly of Ord Minnett recently told Mining.com."
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Same thing happens with the gas stove threads. I can’t believe that actual people are that invested in burning hydrocarbons.
I'm not hugely invested but I do prefer cooking on gas. I've had element stoves, they suck. I then had gas, it's great. I stayed in an Airbnb for a month and a friend's condo for a week with induction, it was better than radiant but worse than gas to me. Also the power goes out at my house about 2x a year when we have windstorms. The stove still works, induction doesn't. So I can still cook and make coffee. My other…
I’m guessing this might be a temperature dependent issue. I enjoy using a cast iron to brown meats, but I really dial it back in homes without true range hoods (e.g. they vent back indoors). If I go for maybe 25% browning, I can massively reduce the smoke. It feels a shame to not do a steak to perfection, but when I’ll prefer that to venting the whole place for an hour.
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What's the one thing that will solve 99.99% of climate change issues?
General non-discriminatory carbon tax. Investing heavily in nuclear. Just 2 obvious ideas that noone is even trying.
Neither of these are 99.99%. Probably not even 80%.
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No, I would not like to rephrase. This specific incremental change is at best a distraction and at worst very harmful. We can do many things at once, question is why aren’t we tackling any of the actual problems?
Changes are incremental in general, because change takes time, at least if you want change with not too many unwanted side effects. Suppose you would say, from tomorrow on, it is totally forbidden to burn any fuel. Most activities would stall and as a result people would starve.
Honestly just think about it. You really think it’s fruitful to try to start solving this problem by convincing someone that they need to no longer use a gas stove when “insert billionaire” is flying around on a private jet? It’s a non-starter. It reeks of injustice even if it’s the right thing to do and the public will instead of cooperate will fight tooth and nail until perceived justice is accomplished.