Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What is energy, actually? (2011)

jancovici.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 286 posts

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#191

Post by [deleted] »

zaroth wrote: post #143
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…

> Whenever economists claim inflation is low, they're almost always exclusively talking about traditional consumer goods (in which case it is low for the most part). They comically go out of their way to ignore the inflation in housing, healthcare, education and various asset classes. This is false. The CPI weights the basket of goods that comprise the index based on the types of goods that people actually consume, w…

[deleted]

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#192

Post by BoorishBears »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #153
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.

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…

Cheapening was just one of the above comments points... strange to try and dismiss it on that part alone.

But yeah, if I add filler to my soap so that it costs me 20% less to make, but requires you to use 20% more for efficacy, I've cheapened the good, and inflated it's cost.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#193

Post by gpanders »

konschubert wrote: post #111
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

It absolutely does matter, particularly for owners of debt (bonds). Inflation will eviscerate returns on bonds and all other fixed-income investments.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#194

Post by sokoloff »

0xffff2 wrote: post #173
mcny wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Why 5%? That's enough to very nearly double the recurring cost of my house (mortgage, insurance and taxes), which seems overly punitive. Does this get offset somewhere else? Looking at a few quick numbers from Google, just residential property alone would add 50% to current US tax revenues. I'm guessing that means we'd be in the ballpark of doubling Federal tax revenue. I guess that's not necessarily a bad thing, but…

It would likely halve the market value of property, causing a massive wave of strategic foreclosures and also mean the revenue would be more like 2.5% of current property valuation.

It would also likely be a massive long-term boost to equity markets, though the transitional financial chaos would be a short-term drag.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#195

Post by formercoder »

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…

Why do so many plans such as this exist which serve to enrich our government with so much more funding when they are currently incredibly bad at spending what they have? The US spends more per capita on education than many countries who are ahead of us. Construction of public transportation is filled with corruption and inefficiency. So many tasks still require snail mail or physically going and waiting in a line when they could be done online. Why don’t we focus on getting our government to spend effectively before giving them more to spend?

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#196

Post by ryanmercer »

BjoernKW wrote: post #125
abyssin wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They need their electricity and washing machine, but do they need exotic vacations and long commutes in powerful cars? Do they need clothes that are made to be worn for a very short time? Do they need technology that's cheap to the point of it being wasted without an afterthought?

> [...] long commutes in powerful cars? People in developed countries don't need that either. Commuting being a hard requirement for modern life in an industrialised country is both a fallacy and perpetuated cargo cult. Most people working in offices today effectively wouldn't have to commute but they still do because employers require them to do so, basically because "that's the way it's always been". Doing away wit…

>Most people working in offices today effectively wouldn't have to commute but they still do because employers require them to do so, basically because "that's the way it's always been".

A million times this.

My entire office could do their job from home as even when we need something we have to email our team leads and CC our manager so I could be doing that at home, in comfortable clothes, not fighting 50-something men for access to 4 stalls and not fighting 100 something people for 2 microwaves. I mean, to be honest, getting 4-5 hours of my time back every week would actually a huge compensation... after you remove my vacation that's like 8 days a year of free time I'd get back.

But alas, my employer would never hear of working from home. Likely because of the ages of the corporate leadership: Chairman & CEO is 75, President & COO got his first degree in 1987 so is 'young' at 54~, CFO & EVP is 66, CIO is 59, VP of ops is 58, Information Services EVP & CIO is 60...

Good luck selling remote work to corporate leadership types that have 30-50 years of old-school corporation under their belts.

I'm sure any cost savings would probably be kept by the company and not not passed on to employees but I'd save 20-25 minutes of commuting a day (plus the half hour every day I waste sitting at my desk off the clock because the tardy policy is terrible, accidents are frequent on the way in and logging in to your computer and getting the time keeping software open can take as long as 5 minutes) so once you remove my vacation weeks that would get me 8~ days of free time back which alone would be nice. Plus the reduced mileage/maintenance/fuel etc for my car.

I wish I could find remote work so bad, or that my employer would adopt it.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#197

Post by jopsen »

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…

> 6. The end result is a sort of "Red Queen" effect where everyone is forced to compete harder and harder just to maintain his/her existing standard of living.

Nice pocket philosophy, if only the world was a zero sum game, but it's NOT.

The past 300 years of growth in human prosperity should make that abundantly clear.

Past 30 years the world has reduced extreme poverty by half. Not because we in the developed world got poorer.

The only fix we need is to gradually increase taxes on resources until they match the environmental impact. Sure we nee to also regulate the market, etc. To avoid draconian schemes.

But a well regulated market with solid incentives can fix many problems.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#198

Post by _qwfv »

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…

There's a book called Capital, by a guy named Karl Marx which explores this concept fairly deeply. I highly recommend "Reading Capital with David Harvey" which is a lecture series recorded this year that breaks it down and provides modern examples to illustrate the concepts.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#199

Post by jacquesm »

fnord77 wrote: post #56
deergomoo wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. and eventually you're left with sociopaths running the show.

Eventually? Inevitably, and for many companies that is a reality today.

Re: What is energy, actually? (2011)

#200

Post by acidburnNSA »

Great discussion. My favorite definition of energy is that it is a replacement for the labor and time of human beings. Energy gives us freedom to choose how to live our lives because it does stuff for us that we don't want to do. This is why so few of us are farmers. Energy leads very directly to high quality of life.

As such, per capita energy usage isn't just linked to GDP, but also to Human Development Index (a composite index to quantify quality of life that includes GDP).

Here's what HDI vs. per capital electricity usage looks like: https://i.imgur.com/8otdGxP.jpg

Bubble size is proportional to population. While correlation does not imply causation, it's quite clear that as quality of life improves, so does energy usage, to a point.

The striking thing is the knee. The knee is mentioned in the parent article from a GDP point of view but I think that's only part of the story. On the low-energy side, you can see that a little bit of energy can dramatically improve your quality of life. At the very low end is where people are cooking with indoor stoves and dying to the tune of 3.8 million per year from indoor air pollution.

Then you see for places like the USA, we could cut our per capita energy usage in half and probably not be affected from a quality of life standpoint. We're saturated.

There is a worldwide moral imperative to increase per capita energy usage of people at the low end of this curve for quality of life reasons. They deserve the ability to choose how they spend their time. Doing so requires about a 2-4x increase in total world energy production.

Energy sources that can enable that kind of gain without causing more air pollution deaths and without causing climate change are well-known. Here they are as a function of carbon emissions (equivalent) per kWh generated: https://i.imgur.com/8LQFVMO.png

Post reply on HN