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What is energy, actually? (2011)

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Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#111

Post by konschubert »

hliyan wrote: post #9

Somewhat 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…

4. Isn’t true.

Even at zero actual growth, you would have nominal growth that matches the inflation rate.

Inflation means that the prices of the products that the companies sell increase as well.

Inflation doesn’t matter

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#112

Post by syshum »

lonelappde wrote: post #108
syshum wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it really is not. CPI-U is manipulated to make it seem like inflation is almost at zero therefore limiting the cost of living increases for SocSec and other government programs. So instead of having a 2% CPI, we actually have closer to 9% It also allows companies cover for Wage Compression because many employers base at least part of annual raises on "Cost of living Adjustments" so if the government is saying Infl…

Question is whether you deserve salary gains to cover financial inflation, or if price cuts did to technology advancements are good enough.

Rent, Food, Gas, Utilities are the biggest drivers for personal cost of living increases, these do not have price cuts due to technology.

All 4 of the big household expenses are increasing at a rate of 7-20% depending on where you live

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#113

Post by CraigJPerry »

We make more things, but we consume less resources to do it today than ever before. That was the essential point of Andrew McAfee's book and his discussion on Econtalk the other week.

https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/

That appears to be backed up here too; this article reports that the $GDP per kWh is increasing over time.

Does this then mean that reducing GDP will have disproportionately LESS of an effect on energy consumption than it will have on value? I.e. we will have to take a much bigger hit on value produced to effect energy consumed.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#114

Post by lonelappde »

deergomoo wrote: post #23
hliyan wrote: post #9

Somewhat 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…

I've long been of the opinion that the public trading of companies is directly responsible for much of the social injustice we see in the West. As soon as there's a fiduciary duty to maximise ROI, morals go out the window. If you as an officer resist, the collective of shareholders will replace you with someone who will make more money. There's a dissolution of responsibility that comes with the distributed nature of…

> If you as an officer resist, the collective of shareholders will replace you with someone who will make more money.

How? Shareholders are either to small to wield power, or big enough to be equivalent to a private owner. There are plenty of boring public companies that don't fight for 10+% share price growth every year.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#115

Post by mrpopo »

seirl wrote: post #94
ckastner wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kind of amusing that this idea is posted here on Hacker News, the center of people seeking jobs and companies that are the definition of growth. But that's the good kind of growth, you see? I'm being sarcastic, of course. The ironic (and to me: annoying) thing about the really vocal moralists is that the concept of self-reflection seems to be entirely foreign to them. The problem is always with other people, and th…

It is the good kind of growth, the dematerialization of the economy is a major factor in the lower energy elasticity in developed countries...

It's absolutely not obvious whether digital technologies reduce energy consumption globally.

E-mail reduced the amount of letters, but Amazon increased the amount of packages.

Over-the-air TV broadcasts consumed way less energy than FHD personalized YouTube streams.

Americans own more than 20 electronic products per household.

etc.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#116

Post by hliyan »

CraigJPerry wrote: post #113

We make more things, but we consume less resources to do it today than ever before. That was the essential point of Andrew McAfee's book and his discussion on Econtalk the other week. https://www.econtalk.org/andrew-mcafee-on-more-from-less/ That appears to be backed up here too; this article reports that the $GDP per kWh is increasing over time. Does this then mean that reducing GDP will have disproportionately LESS…

I don't think the author is suggesting reduction of GDP, but the reduction of GDP growth...

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#117

Post by lonelappde »

pjc50 wrote: post #53
mlthoughts2018 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fro…

Inflation is a side effect of monetary and fiscal policy; central banks are now quite good at adjusting interest rates to keep inflation in the 0-2% band. > 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. How well this works is down to the "tightness" of the labour mar…

> quite good at adjusting interest rates

and manipulating measurements

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#118

Post by mrpopo »

saint_fiasco wrote: post #106

That's easy to say from the First World, where they already traded our (global) environment for (local) gains. But what are the people in poor countries supposed to do? Just stay poor forever?

The problem of excessive energy consumption isn't caused by the people in poor countries though.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#119

Post by Spooky23 »

hliyan wrote: post #9

Somewhat 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…

Most of these issues are ineffective regulatory systems.

Companies that don’t grow are either dying or turning into DMV.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#120

Post by javajosh »

ben_w wrote: post #93
coldtea wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would also like to point out that if there were to be no growth and no inflation (edit: and a static population level!), then the only way to add a dollar to your pile is to permanently make someone else a dollar poorer. That's fine when wealth distribution is "the 0.01% owns 80% of the wealth". Plenty of dollars to go around...

How real is that wealth? Tesla is worth billions, it hasn’t ever had a profitable year. The more I learn about how money works, the more I think of it as a convenient work of fiction — and worse, one that means fundamentally differently things to normal and super-rich.

The wealth of billionaires is quite 'real', as long as it's much smaller than the overall amount of money available.

To take a simpler case, take "quantitative easing", QE, which is a euphemism for printing money. Is that money real? Yes. And it will continue to be until people lose confidence in the currency. Remember that money is data - to print a billion dollars a central bank tells their software to do a quick `moneyToLoan += 10e9`.

The wealthy do play a different game, though. The game you play as labor is to keep yourself and your family alive, healthy, and comfortable. This game, call it game 1 is winnable! And when you win that, you get to play another exclusive game, call it game 2 which is 'allocating capital to make even more capital'. (Of course, you don't have to wait to win game 1 to play game 2, and since most people consume in proportion to income, the goalposts move, effectively keeping them in game 1 forever). But game 2 is the game that government plays, but in miniature. It's the game of power; a nice pot of money lets you reach out into the world through labor and do anything the human hand or head can do. The geeky idealists want to do something really big, like settle Mars. The cynical egoists just want MORE, and are willing to commit planetary suicide for a little extra.

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