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What is energy, actually? (2011)

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Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#151

Post by lazyjones »

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…

Corporations often need to grow just like countries (with their GDP, which normally leads to tax income growth) in order to outgrow their debt. They're also affected by inflation and the resulting increase in costs. Our whole economic system is driven by debts, if we want to stop growth, we should first learn to live with deflation and then see what happens if we make debt-financing investments and expenses/consumption hard or impossible.

Logically, this would never work if other countries don't do the same.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#152

Post by mcny »

adventured wrote: post #98
new2628 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. pet theory: Inflation is way way more than zero almost everywhere (prices of services and rents reflect this), but high inflation is masked by increased supply chain efficiencies, cheapening (in some cases worsening) of products and other factors, which keep prices of physical products relatively stable.

It's asset inflation, which is where most of the Fed's inflation (eg many trillions of dollars of overvaluation into the stock market) via artificially low rates has gone since the Clinton and Bush years when they helped to spark the stock market bubble (#1, #2 and now #3) and then the housing bubble that way. Then they openly admitted to intentionally reinflating the housing market with their various market interven…

> Warren Buffett likes to regularly point out that the Fed's rates act like gravity on stock valuations. The lower the rates, the less gravity. The same is largely true of how housing is affected by the Fed's rates. If you want to absolutely crush housing prices, push Fed rates back up to where mortgage rates are at 15-20% again. What that all really means is, the lower the rates, the more asset valuation inflation occurs. It's just that for amusingly convenient reasons (ie to pretend inflation is lower than it is), most economists like to pretend that asset inflation doesn't count as real inflation in their models.

I know what you're proposing will be very unpopular but I have an idea that will be even more unpopular: a federal property tax on land + buildings at (five percent of property valuation) per year. There will be absolutely no exceptions for anyone. Everyone must pay. This money will mostly go back to local governments, toward infrastructure and utilities (mass transit, water, electricity, fiber Internet, sewage, garbage collection, education, ... ideally automated as much as possible) and a portion will go to supplement VAT to pay for supplemental universal basic income (in addition to the freedom dividend) that more than covers the new property tax on a one bedroom somewhere in the continental United States (so not necessarily midtown Manhattan).

The key difference in what I propose is the lack of exceptions. Everyone must pay regardless of whether it is a strip club or a church. You don't pay, you get evicted within fifteen years or however long we decide. I recommend eviction should happen when unpaid taxes reaches 100% of property value.

My Hope is that this will absolutely crash the housing market and stop this irrational speculation in the housing market.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#153

Post by lotsofpulp »

new2628 wrote: post #83
pjc50 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. People demand growth because they want to get richer, regardless of the prevailing conditions. 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 seems likely to accelerate the lethality of…

> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. pet theory: Inflation is way way more than zero almost everywhere (prices of services and rents reflect this), but high inflation is masked by increased supply chain efficiencies, cheapening (in some cases worsening) of products and other factors, which keep prices of physical products relatively stable.

Inflation is the opposite of cheapening, so I don’t see how that can be.

What you may be feeling though, and what isn’t calculated in any numbers, are the increases in volatility, which is itself a cost. The volatility of not living in the few economically burgeoning regions, the volatility of having to keep moving up the ladder or else falling behind, increased years of education and loans for what may or may not be a lucrative career, etc.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#154

Post by lazyjones »

mrpopo wrote: post #118
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.

Depends how you look at it. Perhaps - since it's often claimed it's our fault that they're poor - we're preventing it by keeping them poor.

For sure, economies with 1b+ population could have problematic consumption if they developed quickly, like India and China.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#155

Post by saurik »

mcny wrote: post #152
adventured wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's asset inflation, which is where most of the Fed's inflation (eg many trillions of dollars of overvaluation into the stock market) via artificially low rates has gone since the Clinton and Bush years when they helped to spark the stock market bubble (#1, #2 and now #3) and then the housing bubble that way. Then they openly admitted to intentionally reinflating the housing market with their various market interven…

> Warren Buffett likes to regularly point out that the Fed's rates act like gravity on stock valuations. The lower the rates, the less gravity. The same is largely true of how housing is affected by the Fed's rates. If you want to absolutely crush housing prices, push Fed rates back up to where mortgage rates are at 15-20% again. What that all really means is, the lower the rates, the more asset valuation inflation o…

Normally we use the term "evicted" to imply someone with a lease no longer gets usage of the property; but in this case, these people own the property, so what are you saying happens then? Does the property get given to the government, who then... sells it? I am not complaining (yet), I just want to understand what happens in your mind after the "eviction" as the term isn't clear for me in this context.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#156

Post by friendly_chap »

raxxorrax wrote: post #142
friendly_chap wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Inflation is already almost zero in much of the West. Not sure about the USA, but real inflation is closer to 7-8 percent in Europe, wage growth falling behind. "Unbiased private-sector efforts to calculate the real rate of inflation have yielded a rate of around 7% to 13% per year, depending on the locale — many multiples of the official rate of around 1% per year" https://www.businessinsider.com/if-people-knew-th…

Housing prices in my region are up 33% in 10 years. But I can buy a µC with internal memory, ad converters and countless I/O ports and interfaces for the price of a coke. The coke is actually significantly more expensive. I like µC, but housing is really great too.

What you are referring to is called biflation. Unfortunately in the current economic climate things that actually have impact on quality of life (housing, food, etc) are becoming more expensive while electronics and other things more on the cheap entertainment side are getting cheaper.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#158

Post by Ma8ee »

chkaloon wrote: post #141
Ma8ee wrote: post #135

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. Is this really true? Aren't you mixing up production growth with production? Imagine I live alone on my small farm in the middle of nowhere. I produce 20 bags of wheat every year. I eat 19 and sa…

Your growing pile of wheat incurs increasing storage and maintenance costs over time. This will be measured as positive growth, and if growth is 0 in the overall system, by definition it needs to be negative in some other locality.

> Your growing pile of wheat incurs increasing storage and maintenance costs over time.

That is quite neglible. The barn will stand there wether there's any wheat in it or not.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#159

Post by jariel »

"To reduce energy use, jump off a bridge"

This ideological nihilism creeping into the public consciousness is becoming problematic.

There are far more reasonable approaches to all of our problems.

- As energy gets more expensive, the 'value' (really just price) of products goes up, thereby increasing the GDP. So his logic is not there to start.

- GDP growth is not entirely dependent on natural resource extraction, it's actually mostly product and process innovation.

- There are immense supply side opportunities available right in front of us in Nuclear - we've not invested heavily in R&D in 30 years due to populist blowback. And guess who was leading the charge against Nuclear? The Greens. Greenpeace 'saved the whales' and 'killed nuclear', it should be noted it was founded by people who knew nothing about Nuclear, and the some of the founding leadership have ironically become 'pro nuclear'. Today France is 85% nuclear, well within striking distance of being carbon-free in terms of electricity production, that will die due to failure to re-invest in the subject. It's contentious, but within reason.

We can have our cake and eat it too, we just have to be smart about it.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#160

Post by dagss »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #86
rcMgD2BwE72F wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not necessarily. Africa, with 1.+2 billion inhabitants, has a tiny carbon footprint compared to the US (which as less than 1/3 of Africa's population). Source: https://unfccc.int/files/press/backgrounders/application/pdf...

They have a tiny carbon footprint because they are overwhelmingly poor compared to the West (granted, the US have a particularly large footprint). So either we tell them that, sorry, but they have to stay dirt poor and also to stay away from their rain forests even if they starve, or the aim is to eradicate poverty on the planet, but in that latter case their resources footprint (this is more general than carbon alon…

Only a (smallish) portion of the western carbon footprint is directly correlated with having a decent life.

Yes, the entire world cannot buy larger cars than what we need them for, we cannot fly around the world on vacations, we cannot throw away half the food we produce, we cannot buy clothes to use them once, and so on.

Such needless things, often more related to consumption culture than living standards, is responsible for a large portion of emissions.

Not only that, but we live in societies with an enormous capital in infrastructure built up from previous emissions.

I think westerners should at least start thinking about not emitting CO2 just for the fun of it, before telling others to not have too many children.

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