I calculated that I use 3000kwh per year (only direct electricity+gas) If everyone use such amounts there were no global warming. But humans always have not enough stuff...
That's about 350W, if my calculations are right?
What is energy, actually? (2011)
11–20 of 286 posts
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#12I calculated that I use 3000kwh per year (only direct electricity+gas) If everyone use such amounts there were no global warming. But humans always have not enough stuff...
Do you have an idea of your share of the embodied energy of all the items you use in the course of your life?
To give you an idea, if you have bought a new laptop and phone, that's around another 3000kWh already.
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#13Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion: 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. 2. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it. 3. Investors dem…
you re-discovered or independently discovered the basis marxism, sort of.
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#14Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion: 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. 2. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it. 3. Investors dem…
Ahh you forgot the thing that makes America great: a new invention opens an entire new industry that attracts investors away from current businesses that are stable and not rapidly growing discontinuing the negative spiral you described. Furthermore, companies are not obligated to perpetually take on investors. Perhaps they simply pay a regular dividend instead on the profits they already have like what power utilities do
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#15Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion: 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. 2. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it. 3. Investors dem…
We already pretty much curbed inflation. The issue is that people still expect high returns and high interest rates, but these have fallen especially risk free rates, but also maybe returns on risky investments.
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
That falls very short of what should be done to limit our impact on the planet for the sake of protecting the environment and remaining wilderness. I really don't understand this disconnect between the message of urgency about the environment and the climate, and the widespread complacency about an actual root cause of the issue (as illustrated by your comment), which is population growth: " Oh it's slowing and will…
Most of the world is empty: https://geoawesomeness.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/world-... We just need to learn to be efficient.
Most of the "empty" space on the map world is an inhospitable desert. Sahara, Australian Outback, Namib, the Arctic, North American West, Tibet, Kazakhstan, Antarctica, Patagonia.
Granted, a few pockets of wild forests left, Amazon, parts of Central Africa, New Guinea, Siberia. Under intense development pressure. Hard to call that "most of the world".
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#17Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion: 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. 2. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it. 3. Investors dem…
While that is all true, at least to me it sounds like the old explanation of why Communism failed - "It was indeed superior, but all the world had to agree so for it to work".
Say one country develops this utopia where everyone doesn't have to compete to survive, either companies or individuals.
Its neighbour though remains with the old Capitalist model. In a generation or two the struggling capitalist country could overtake the utopia one in production, wealth or even by force. Then you're back to square one.
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#18Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion: 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. 2. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it. 3. Investors dem…
Inflation may occur due to uncontrollable factors, like scarcity of resources as they are consumed at a basic rate. Increasing scarcity means everyone must now compete harder to get the same basic rate of consumption from the reduced resource pool size, regardless of whether corporations or investments or governments even existed at all.
Another source of inflation is increasing wage & benefit demands, especially from large middle or lower classes who want to afford to consume more because they value the greater consumption as an important part of life, a noble and intrinsically morally good goal of bettering one’s self through self-determined hard work such that the value of your labor and skill increases over time.
In direct response to large classes of workers demanding more pay & benefits, companies will raise their prices to pay for those increases, again totally regardless of whether a stock market exists.
I think really inflation is a side-effect of nature, and thinking along the lines of how to long-term control or remove it is counter-productive, compared with accepting that it is inevitable and then trying to come to terms with living in the future world that this implies.
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#19I calculated that I use 3000kwh per year (only direct electricity+gas) If everyone use such amounts there were no global warming. But humans always have not enough stuff...
So you don't buy
- clothes
- food
- any cloud services
- electronics
- furniture
?
Cause they would all require input of energy to harvest, process and ship
Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)
#20Somewhat tangentially related: I wrote this in a private note to a friend last year. I don't believe this 100%, but the idea is worth exploring in my opinion: 1. Corporations desperately pursue continuous growth, even when they're already profitable, and do so at the expense of the environment, employee welfare and sometimes, the rule of law. 2. Corporations pursue growth because investors demand it. 3. Investors dem…
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