It's like if only we put more resources towards potential societal altering technologies like these instead of [insert random SAAS app]. Maybe tech investors aren't very comfortable with projects outside their domain knowledge and expect an quick return. Quaise last financing round was something like $20M...
I don't think domain knowledge is issue. The issue is that SAAS apps or Twitter or w/e scale infinitely in an extremely short time. What is the time horizon for drilling geothermal all over the world? There are environmental factors to consider, etc. It is fairly trivial for 4B people to be on FB but getting 4B people to get their energy from geothermal doesn't scale the same way.
The other issue is the margins are razor thin. Energy has to be cheap: so the issue is $1 billion going into this (1) might not be enough to have enough scale to make any money at all and (2) is competing with anything else you could do with $1 billion.
Which is why you need government subsidy if you want something to happen: but the you are also betting that you've picked either the right technology (it works at all) or at least you're accepting you're probably going to overpay.
Drilling and tunnelling is a huge industry with tons of markets.
If Elon was the one to do this, tech bros and investors would be all over it with ad-hoc rationalisations ("this is the tech we need to build a mars colony!"). Instead he used his "boring company" to kill public transportation, and you are here dismissing Quaise Energy - people who actually have put up the work to try something groundbreaking (literally) and whose future is not assured yet.
This is, in my view, the biggest bummer about (what I see as) Musk's descent into madness in the last few years.
It's absolutely true that this stuff is capital intensive, slow, and risky, and thus hard to get investment for. But Musk had solved that problem using showmanship and a series of successful (whether through genius or luck, it doesn't matter!) risky bets to back it up. So I think it just really is the case that because of Tesla / SpaceX / Starlink, that he could easily get however much funding he wants in private or public markets to take a giant risky bet on something like geothermal energy.
But instead he got bored of doing useful things and lost himself in petty social media drama. Tragic.
He's got solar things already. How many companies do you want one guy to run? The more stuff he does, it doesn't mean the stuff he doesn't do he's somehow to blame for.
I didn't blame him, I said that he's a tragic waste of potential at the moment.
If he were throwing himself into any of his impressive companies, sure, I'd be singing a different tune. But that's not what he's doing, he's either ignoring or actively sabotaging those, so that he has more time to be a social media influencer. He can do what he wants, but it's not admirable.
He doesn't. His solar city acquisition was nothing but a bailout and solar city was gutted down to nothing. Tesla hardly does any solar installations except on their own factories.
The issue is with the lack of good quality startups than with financing really. Long-term is not a big issue, because funds can exit before the startup’s exit through secondaries. Also some of the funds in this field are ok with long term investments.
(src: I tried setting up a climate tech venture builder / seedfund 2 years ago.)
I don't think it's exactly a scaling issue, its that you can't turn the screws on your users and bill them monthly, siphon their data, and show them ads.
one (1) good thing that may come out of OpenAI is thirst for electricity only satiable by fusion, just as demand for heat in UK could only be met by digging deeper for coal which ultimately spurred the industrial revolution.
Completely unintended side effect, but coal and oil might have created the need for massive rewilding efforts that might, ultimately not only save the forests, but winding cover back to pre-industrial levels.
what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.
yes. that's the game we're told to play, so might as well try to play it. there's literally truckloads of money in AI and the hyperscalers themselves point to power as a major issue for their datacenters, so why not try to allocate some of it to fusion?
> what a sad statement on the human condition that all of the other needs for limitless clean power did not meet the needs to justify developing fusion, yet you think that AI will? Jesus wept.
Well, AI has the promise to provide a supply of loyal slaves to anyone who can afford to pay for the electricity and compute. It's a capitalist's dream: with AI, they may never be forced by necessity to share a single thing with us poors again.
You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things. You get them because people can make money making the same product cheaper and sell it to a lot of people.
That's why all the capitalist countries are the ones where we have to keep increasing the standard of living that's counted as being in poverty. Up we go.
> You're thinking of anything but capitalism. Capitalism means you don't have to rely on powerful people sharing for you to have things.
No. Capitalism means you need to rely on being useful to the people who own things. If you're not useful to them, they won't pay ("share with") you.
For a capitalist, employees you have to pay <<< loyal robot slaves. Once you have those slaves, I predict the economy will make an abrupt shift away from consumer goods to vanity projects.
People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well. I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave. The only exception to this is taxes, which don't require mutually agreed exchange.
> People with things have to be useful to people who can do things as well.
That's not super clear, but I think I get what you're saying.
My whole point is AGI breaks that idea, and frees capital from the need for labor.
> I work to get paid a salary; my employer pays me enough that I don't leave.
And when an AGI can do your job better and cheaper than you, your employer fires you and stops paying you. And all the other employers don't hire you because they don't need you either. Then, if you're lucky, you get to live on the dole, otherwise you (eventually) get to be homeless have the opportunity to try scrape by at the margins (maybe you can squat and live off a garden for a few years, until a solar megaproject evicts you from now unprofitable farmland). In all cases you're marginalized and economically irrelevant.
If no one is hired then the employers don't have anyone to buy their stuff. Employers only do well if they provide someone else a useful good or service.
What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs. In 18th century Europe almost half the population were agricultural labourers. Mechanisation reduced that drastically. That did not mean that other jobs weren't created.
> If no one is hired then the employers don't have anyone to buy their stuff. Employers only do well if they provide someone else a useful good or service.
You're still stuck with assumptions that are obsolete in this scenario.
In the AGI scenario, the employers that are dependent on consumer sales will wither and die, as consumer buying power shrinks due to unemployment. Eventually the economy will realign towards certain kinds of B2B sales (e.g. electrical power) and vanity projects.
> What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs. In 18th century Europe almost half the population were agricultural labourers. Mechanisation reduced that drastically. That did not mean that other jobs weren't created.
Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently). There might be a rump of exceptionally talented individuals who still could be employed like today, but that's just a tiny sliver of the population. There will also be some "entertainment" jobs, like prostitute that will remain as well, but given the vast decrease in individuals participating in the economy, the total numbers would likely be less than now.
Not everything is going to be a replay of the past. As they say, "past performance is not indicative of future results."
> In the AGI scenario, the employers that are dependent on consumer sales will wither and die, as consumer buying power shrinks due to unemployment.
Why? People will find ways to exchange value.
> Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently).
What does this mean? By AGI do you mean "cleaning robots" or "entertaining bartenders" or "live music" or "person who owns this house I want to rent" or "mind I will pay to learn from"? None of those sounds like anything to do with AGI, unless the AGI is housed in a robot that can clean things (and then I don't need AGI).
Also there will be a floor of jobs not worth doing with AGI because of the energy and maintenance requirements. AGI is not a magic wand. It's a specific thing. ChatGPT being able to spit out a decent but generic essay doesn't suddenly mean that all the crazy numbers of jobs everyone does will vanish.
>> In the AGI scenario, the employers that are dependent on consumer sales will wither and die, as consumer buying power shrinks due to unemployment.
> Why? People will find ways to exchange value.
Sure, but they'll have increasingly less to exchange among themselves. They'll have nothing to sell that the AGI-powered economy wants to buy, except truly limited legacy resources like land that can be gobbled up in one-time purchases. Eventually the AGI-powered economy will monopolize the resources that are useful to it, in a way that likely conflicts with the needs of now-obsolete workers (e.g. converting vast amounts of farmland to solar power megaprojects).
That's the end-state of automation, in our current social system.
>>> What's more likely - not that AGI is likely, but still - is that people move into other jobs.
>> Not if the AGI can do all those jobs better and cheaper than most people (or even just good enough and more obediently).
> What does this mean? By AGI do you mean...
I mean intellectual automation that can do at least what a typical person can do as well as they can or better. Eventually it means the automation that can do all the jobs (or even just enough of the jobs). Eventually you won't have a new job to move into once your job is replaced.
AGI will eventually mean there will cease to be a practical necessity to using human to do labor to operate capital. The capital will be able to operate itself on behalf of its owners. Once that happens, under the current system, the owners of that automated capital will eventually accumulate all the wealth of the economy, because they'll be able to sell without paying wages. Eventually they'll pivot to vanity projects and B2B sales among themselves.
> Also there will be a floor of jobs not worth doing with AGI because of the energy and maintenance requirements. AGI is not a magic wand. It's a specific thing.
Probably, but I expect even those will eventually disappear too, at least on the mass scale needed to support billions of people, during the later stages of the economic transition.
> ChatGPT being able to spit out a decent but generic essay doesn't suddenly mean that all the crazy numbers of jobs everyone does will vanish.
I'm not talking about ChatGPT, I'm talking about the utopia the AI folks want to create.
I hope that in your scenario that everyone that can afford this notion of yours receives a robot that at the minimum is as annoying as C3-P0 if not closer to a Jar Jar.
Or worse. Personally, I think social media has been a net negative. It was done intentionally by their makers.
AI seems like it's just a victim of that, but seeing as how they have stolen all of the data they've built their tools on, then of course it's going to be no better than social media at best
That's based on the (flawed, IMO) idea that fusion just needs more resources to go faster [1]. We won't have serious fusion before decades, it's just too late to save our energy (and climate) problem.
Better go with fission at this point (preferably 4th gen because uranium 235 is limited).
Hydro, wind, and solar backed by batteries looks like an ~90% solution to grid power / ground transportation reasonably quickly and we have enough fission power plants to make up the difference.
So we already have the short term solution, it’s really 25+ years out when things get more interesting. Existing nuclear power is going to get increasingly expensive to maintain and recent construction projects have been boondoggles. So fusion has a real shot here assuming the economics work out.
Fission has gotten safer as we’ve learned from past mistakes, but each of those lessens directly results in increasing costs. Not just in obvious ways but getting better at foreign material exclusion means it takes longer to do the same tasks. Multiply that by every significant indecent at any power plant and it’s no wonder things keep getting more expensive.
> So fusion has a real shot here assuming the economics work out.
They don't yet work out, and there's no evidence that they will. I would love it if they do, but I don't think past performance is evidence of future performance. We might run into a fundamental limitation at any moment, and that would be that.
Japan's median build time for fission is under 5 years[0]. If regulatory environments and engineering specialisms could be made to work, there's no reason (other than Greenpeace) that we couldn't massively curb CO2 production from power generation pretty soon; far sooner than we could do discovery and then build for fusion.
> Hydro, wind, and solar backed by batteries looks like an ~90% solution to grid power / ground transportation reasonably quickly
What? Currently, electricity makes for 20% of our global consumption. We're not remotely talking about replacing the 80% of fossil fuels with electricity, even with fission + hydro, wind and solar.
Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.
The reality is that we don't have a 90% solution to power. Not in the short term, not in the long term. Except if new technologies that do not exist yet appear. Have a look at all those huge boats that enable globalization: how do you propose we replace fossil fuels there? Or aviation.
The solution to the energy problem is to prepare to have (much) less energy. And a good way to prepare for that is to try to produce as much electricity as we can. And that quite obviously involves fission.
> What? Currently, electricity makes for 20% of our global consumption.
An apples to apples comparison gives very different numbers. A heat pump uses 1 kWh of heat to produce 3 kWh or more worth of heat. A furnace needs over 3 kWh worth of gas to produce just 3 kWh worth of heat.
An ICE engine is more extreme as extraction, transportation, refining, takes 1/3 of the energy in oil before you even out it in the gas tank. Net result under 20% of the energy in oil ends up being used at the end of the process.
> Batteries only work to store energy for a few days, not between seasons.
There’s no point in storing power between seasons, just add more generation. A seasonal battery storing 1 MWh gets used once a season. A solar panel only used in the winter is still useful for ~4h * ~90 days. But worst case a ~3kW of solar is equivalent to that 1 MWh battery at less than 1/100th the cost, and whisk generally redundant the rest of the year it’s still reducing outages.
> An apples to apples comparison gives very different numbers.
I don't see the relation with apples. If you take electricity where it works well, then it works well. But the fact that it accounts for 20% of our energy consumption today means that it does not work well everywhere. Try planes or merchant boats, for fun.
And that's not even mentioning that on those 20%, a good part is coming from coal.
> There’s no point in storing power between seasons, just add more generation.
You're saying "just waste solar panels during the summer so that you have enough during the winter", right? I thought it was pretty clear that wasting energy was not a good idea for the future.
Replacing an ICE with a EV results in a drop in energy by your calculations even if they are doing the exact same trip. Thus showing your argument is based on nonsense.
When someone burns oil in a car you measure the energy before it’s burned and therefore before engine inefficiency. If you burn oil in an electrical generator you measuring energy after the engine inefficiency.
Thus the amount of useful energy IE what people want in electricity vs other sources is closer to 50/50 than 80/20.
> You're saying "just waste solar panels during the summer so that you have enough during the winter", right? I thought it was pretty clear that wasting energy was not a good idea for the future.
People build grid infrastructure for the worst case. Nobody complains when a natural gas power plant is only turned on for 12 hours a year because without it you get a blackout. Hell dams build spillways that can sit unused for decades, you still need them.
Thus no the panels aren’t wasted, they are doing exactly the job someone built that infrastructure for.
> Thus showing your argument is based on nonsense.
My argument is that there is a lot more than just cars in the world. Even if Americans may not understand the concept. It's easy to say "replace oil with electricity, look, I have this one example where it works well". Then try to scale that one example, and then start looking at the rest. Again... planes and merchant boats for instance.
Many boats are going electric. Home heating, industrial processes, trains, mining, etc the vast majority of energy use you can swap without issue.
Rockets and big boats can swap to hydrogen with minor issues. Really aircraft are the odd man out, but remove bio fuels from other applications and you can largely replace aviation fuel.
After we drop CO2 emissions by 99% using existing tech we'll have decades to hit 100%.
> the vast majority of energy use you can swap without issue.
Then you completely misunderstand the scale of the problem.
> Rockets and big boats can swap to hydrogen with minor issues.
Say they can if they have the hydrogen, then you have to produce a whole lot of hydrogen and transport it for them. Do you know how inefficient that is?
Because you make it work for one does not mean that you make it work for the whole world. Your reasoning seems very naive.
> After we drop CO2 emissions by 99% using existing tech we'll have decades to hit 100%.
Except that the only way we drop CO2 emissions by a lot is with a ton of sobriety.
Saying we don’t have the infrastructure is meaningless when building infrastructure is part of my argument. The only question is if we have the technology, and yes we do.
For scale, 350 gigawatts of PV was installed in 2023 that’s enough to meet ~3% of the words 25,000 TWh annual electricity demand (after accounting for capacity factor) and the rate of PV installed per year has been accelerating. Battery manufacturing capacity is already at weeks of global electricity demand per year. Utilities haven’t been building grid scale energy storage because they don’t need it, but it’s ready when they want it.
Over the next 20+ years a great deal of current infrastructure will need to be replaced simply because of age. What replaces it could be very green without significant issue.
> Saying we don’t have the infrastructure is meaningless when building infrastructure is part of my argument.
Again, you don't understand. I am not just saying that we don't have the infrastructure. I am saying that the size of the infrastructure we would need is a whole lot bigger than what you must imagine if you think that renewables can produce 99% of the world's energy.
You just vastly underestimate the problem. Saying "look, I went from selling 10 devices last year to 100 this year, so this proves that in 10 years I will be selling 1000000000000 devices per year" is the kind of reasoning you use in a startup when talking to a VC. But when you're being serious about solving a problem, it doesn't work like that.
Let me repeat it one last time: we will go away from fossil fuels, it's not a choice (they are limited in nature). We will need as much fission and renewables as we can get to compensate for as much as we can, but that won't remotely be enough (again, think about a real big merchant boat and tell me how it travels around the world without fossil fuels - not the startup way, but with a real solution).
So on top of fission and renewables, we need sobriety. A ton of it. And it means clever engineering across the board. So instead of wasting talents doing AI or polluting more with SpaceX, they should work on solving the actual problems we have for tomorrow.
3% of the worlds electricity per year isn’t several orders of magnitude from solving the problem. When I say that’s on pace to hit 100% carbon free grid before 2050 I’m not assuming crazy growth in anything.
We’re past the crazy exponentials. Global demand is still increasing every year by ~2.2% but that already includes the EV and Heat pump transition.
350GW last year, 356GW in 2024, 362GW in 2025 etc and before you know it we are done. Except 2024 is on pace to massively exceed that estimate, ~500GW looks more likely.
Again it's all startup talk. I never mentioned orders of magnitude, I mentioned complexity. You keep focusing on what already uses electricity, ignoring the fact that 80% of the energy we use is NOT electricity.
And you still haven't answered my question: how do you power a big merchant boat with electricity? Do you realize it doesn't work with batteries, or not? And do you realize that the merchant boats ARE globalization? We don't have a technical solution for that, not even as a proof of concept. And most certainly not with renewables.
99% of the energy used by mankind is sunlight, but obviously we aren’t aiming for accuracy here.
Your 80% as fossil fuels is half (coal, natural gas) which are mostly used to make electricity and therefore goes away on a renewable grid on its own. In essence you are double counting the inefficiency of fossil fuels as if it was somehow a positive. People do use some natural gas for heating and cooking, but there’s direct swap in replacements that use electricity.
“40%” is oil though again that’s what’s pumped out of the ground not what’s actually used as fuel. Subtract EV’s and year really talk about 10% “of the worlds energy” used in boats and aircraft.
> big merchant boat with electricity.
New boats can run 100% hydrogen out of the gate.
Container ships don’t actually last that long, but you can also retrofit existing engines to run 85% on hydrogen fairly easily.
I think the idea is more that the potential profit or the need for energy to prevent limiting this profitable venture will drive more capital into fusion projects. It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants. Of course that doesn't mean it will solve the problem faster.
> It's not clear that they will hit the man-month problem since it seems like there's dozens of fusion startups trying slightly different variants.
I read: "it's not clear that parallelization will not help, because they are parallelizing", which doesn't really make sense. Ok, it's not clear that parallelization will not help (just because it's hard to prove). But we have to acknowledge that fusion energy is not a new thing, and it's currently unsolved. So let's not bet our future on the hope that it will be solved in the next 10 years in such a revolutionary way that it will beat all our expectations by orders of magnitudes, shall we?
The Man Month essay describes a breakdown in work throughput because of the exponential increase in communication channels and complexity of administration. Parallel startups do not communicate with each other. It appears from the outside that fusion does not have a known critical path to completion so increasing the number of bites at the apple seems like a logical way to scale attempting to solve it.
I agree we should not count on fusion (or wide spread carbon capture) to solve our problems and pretend we can continue as if there aren't any limits. Unfortunately unrealized miracle solutions are presented all the time to problems and since a lot of tech revolves around startup culture, our industry is prone to believing in them.
You might enjoy Sabine Hossenfelder's video exploring this "I recently learned that waste heat will boil the oceans in about 400 years": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vRtA7STvH4
It turns out we can probably solve this by building planetary chimneys 5km tall that move heat to the outer atmosphere.
Since it seems like you've seen data pertaining to this, do you have any good/reputable sources? I've tried asking in various places about what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes, but usually just get accused of being a climate change denier and told to go educate myself. I'm really just curious about methodology, want to build a better mental model of how it works and how it's studied, and have never seen any discussions/papers talking about direct heating effects, so don't know where to start.
> what percentage of planetary warming is due to direct heating from energy consumption, vs. greenhouse gas effects vs. natural causes
Humans produce 20 TW of power [1]. (15 if we remove solar, wind and hydro.) The Sun delivers, to the Earth, 44,000 TW [2].
So raising the amount of the Sun's energy the earth retains by 454 parts in a million (329 if we remove solar, wind and hydro) adds to the Earth the energy of our entire civilisation. That is why emissions are the problem. Not our direct heat production.
It’s quite easy - we have numbers for humanity’s electricity and heat production. We also know how much atmosphere and oceans weigh, which we can multiply by specific heat of air and water. From this you can calculate how much we’ve heaten up the atmosphere/oceans - even ignoring the loss of heat to space/ground our impact is neglible.
Since the 70s our society gradually started putting more interest in producing useless things "for profit" or providing inane services instead of actually improving quality of life.
Imo it's a big reason for the productivity paradox
The resources now go to "cheap plastic thing made in China but assembled in the USA" or "it's like Airbnb but for cat grooming" which don't fucking improve anyone's lives but make money.
This is a nasty side effect of capitalism - it's misaligned with the best interests of society and, sometimes, completely opposite to it. Where all you measure is capital flows, you are not serving the humans.
Not really. The mythical man month fallacy of 9 women making a baby in 1 month is about rushing a specific project, and having the coordination between the individuals make it take longer. For something way bigger, like the whole field of nuclear fusion, as opposed to shipping an app next quarter, more people means more work can happen. Having more smart people work on fusion instead of HFT (eg Jim Simons), would lead to progress and advancement in the field, compared to not.
It's a gyrotron variation that requires tweaking to be useful in vertical and horizontal boring, currently supported with ~ $100 million raised from investors.
Ongoing development might well require that annually for ten years or so. It can likely kick along fine with that amount every four or five years.
This is easily within the envelop of currently ongoing development in both the energy and mineral resources exploration and aquisition domains.
When I worked tracking mineral resource development we looked at any and all mineral prospecting lease aquisitions and ownership changes globally, but for development we ruled out any intial prospectus for under $50 million as "too small to be of interest".
And that was just mineral exploration, O&G is where the big money plays.
Current drilling costs within Oil and Gas (and geothermal, a small but growing field) are huge, any work that can bring those costs down will be pursued and supported as long as some small glimmer of light shines ahead.
Eg: for a small example you could look to the R&D work being put in to reduce drill costs by 50% here:
Fervo says it drilled its fastest Cape well in just 21 days, a 70% reduction in drilling time from Fervo’s first horizontal well drilled at Project Red in 2022.
Fervo says the increase in efficiency has resulted in cost reductions, with drilling costs across the first four horizontal wells at Cape falling from $9.4 million to $4.8 million per well.
We spend about 3.5% of GDP on defense [1], and coincidentally about 3.5% on R&D [2]. People tend to wildly overestimate how large the modern US defense budget is. It's only around 13% of federal spending [3]!
We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if the Middle East was stable, China wasn't so aggressive in the South China Sea, and Russia didn't have some illusion of being able to restore the Soviet Union.
We’d probably be living like the Jetsons if we would make a serious attempt to curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality.
(ie: make returns on labor converge to - or at least track - returns on capital)
> curb (effective) tax evasion and profit offshoring to reduce inequality.
that assumes cooperation on a global scale between competing tax jurisdictions, which in my book is infinitely harder to achieve than net power via fusion
This is laughable, an ideological trope with little bearing on reality. Governments spend and also waste far more money than is not only hidden from tax obligations but also more money than is also collected through tax receipts of all kinds (all that sweet, sweet deficit spending at work). And they do indeed waste vast amounts of it, on military plans, boondoggles that go nowhere, bullshit drug wars, bloated bureaucracies that perpetuate themselves to never solve the problems behind their original purpose and so forth, but the blame for no Jetsons future is really with people hiding a fraction outside what's already taxed and keeping it from more of that same public spending waste?
If governments wanted to spend on long-term tech and energy investments, they most definitely could find the funds to do so from among their existing budgets. These budgets are in many cases at record levels anyhow. However they don't because, well, see wasteful spending causes listed above, none of which go away since they benefit so many entrenched institutional interests...
Money hidden by tax evasion is in any case not dead capital. It gets moved around, invested, reinvested, and through different means, channeled to the kinds of things that legitimate investments funds and VCs also spend their money on (presumably as a good thing, since you're not also blaming them for no Jetsons future).
Money hidden by tax evasion is the deadest of all money. It literally doesn't get moved around, invested or reinvested, because that would trigger taxable events and get the IRS after your ass.
You're flatly wrong and should read more about how tax evasion works. I assure you that if someone manages to skim an extra X millions of dollars away from the tax man, they certainly won't let it sit dead and being eaten by inflation after that effort and expense. They might as well have simply paid taxes on it otherwise.
Through an assortment of vehicles and mechanisms, that money does indeed get shifted, moved and invested in all sorts of sophisticated and fully diverse ways, just like assets that were legitimately declared. I mean, what do you think they keep it in? Giant vaults as stacks of cash, like Scrooge McDuck? Absurd, the kinds of childish ideas about tax evasion that appear here.
Ah, where do I begin? Southernplaces7, your argument reads like the greatest hits of neoliberal thought circa 1980. Sure, governments can be wasteful—cue the obligatory mention of military overspending and bureaucratic bloat—but that doesn’t negate the crux of my point: tax evasion and profit offshoring are significant drags on economic equality.
You suggest that hidden capital is always put to good use. But let’s be real, the majority of it ends up in the average urban Joe's much beloved real estate speculation, yachts, and financial instruments that do little to spur genuine economic growth or innovation. It’s like hiding your vegetables under the mashed potatoes and claiming you’ve eaten them. It’s still there, but it’s not nourishing anyone.
Or, while it's lovely to think that the hidden wealth of the ultra-rich is busily working away like Santa's elves to create a better future, the reality is starkly different.
And about that Jetsons future: it’s not about just having the funds. It’s about allocating them efficiently and equitably. When capital returns far outstrip labor returns because the wealthy can hide their money and avoid taxes, we create an unbalanced system where innovation and societal progress are stunted. It’s not just about waste, it’s about skewed incentives.
Effective tax policy isn’t about bleeding the rich dry; it’s about ensuring that those who benefit the most from the system contribute proportionately to its upkeep and progress.
And governments aren’t perfect, but they’re the only game in town for large-scale investments in public goods—think infrastructure, education, healthcare, and yes, tech innovation and green transition. So, before we go all in on the "government waste" narrative, let’s remember that the (current) alternative is a plutocracy where the rich get richer and the rest of us get crumbs. No Jetsons future in that, rather much more like the Flintstones.
Your arguments completely miss my main point. Before I get to it briefly, bear in mind that i'm not opposed to tax collection or government spending on public works, social services and etc. I generally, with certain conditions, reservations and strong criticisms do support the modern liberal social democratic state as something close to the pinnacle of socioeconomic development so far.
On the other hand using the word "neoliberal" reveals little more than a cheap, all too human love of simplistic, idiotic ideological labels with little substance. Go ahead and define whatever the hell a neoliberal is. Name a few examples and exactly how their administrations were in any marked way different from any other modern western state. Here's a hint of the silliness inherent in that, via example: Under the Bush years, the fundamental structure of government and its obligatory spending was little different from how it was under any number of leaders previous to or following that time. Let's look beyond cheap labels and at the actual structure of how governments, markets, taxes and social systems work.
As for my main point: It's simply this (and related to what I just mentioned above) in the modern world, speaking particularly in the context of the developed countries, government budgets and tax receipts from economic activity are so enormous as they stand that losses from tax evasion are far more of a boogeyman than a reality as a meaningful hindrance to resources. The average budget of the average western developed country has so many avenues for allocating funds that using lost tax revenue from evasion as an excuse for why it doesn't do so for a better future is absurd.
The numbers simply don't back it up. To take the U.S. as an example, it's estimated that losses due to illegal tax dodging were something over 600 billion in 2021. Those are losses to both state and federal tax revenues. In the same year, the federal budget alone was over 6.8 trillion. If you add in state budgets, the number gets an extra 3.8 trillion added to it. That makes the total over 10 trillion in government spending. 680 billion is a lot, no doubt, but as an excuse for why government "doesn't have enough money" for better things, it's a pallid excuse.
A significant portion of the defense spend is STEM. It takes a lot of engineering to build a bomb. It takes a lot of math to create/break encryption....
That just makes things worse. Imagine if most people working on nuclear reactors in the navy instead spent the time building and maintaining civilian equipment. The kind of people designing and building the F-22 etc where capable of more long term useful activities etc.
The US could be safe spending 1% of its GDP on defense and largely importing foreign weapon system designs for local manufacturing. There’s clearly a lower limit, but half of current spending is perfectly reasonable starting point before decisions get tricky.
Is there really that much overlap or are the budgets just so insanely high you end up with accidental overlap? Seat belts are a perfect example where the military and non military application was quite different on day one. But, military had the budget so John Stapp made the argument around how many pilots died driving in their civilian lives. Definitely a huge public benefit, but from what amounted to military funding of civilian research.
Packet switching saw first implementation outside the US including some key ideas like a router. We ended up with the ARPANET > Internet story everyone is familiar with more as an accident of history and a dash of propaganda rather than something that required US military participation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPL_network
Teflon is another one people bring up as coming from the military but was invented accidentally outside the military long before its use in the Manhattan Project.
> largely importing foreign weapon system designs for local manufacturing.
I'm pretty sure they legally can't "largely import foreign weapon designs". The Berry and Kissel amendments, not to mention ITAR and a few other regulations, put a strong incentive on in-sourcing when at all possible. The only exceptions are for things that are really hard to get domestically.
Which foreign systems? If US would’ve withdrew from cold war, half of Europe would be learning cyrylic now, and there would be few countries to import tech from. Not to mention engineers from the eastern block working for the opposite side.
This premise means that the extra dollars would be spent in a way that would justify your comment. Schools in Texas, Florida, et al would probably just replace those liberal texts with much more censored versions. They'd probably find a way to build bigger football stadiums or those other sportsball programs. New uniforms and things too. Then it'd probably pay for perks for principles and sporting directors, but sadly, there wouldn't be enough to increase the base pay of actual teachers. I'm sure there's other ways to spend that money and not a bit of it improves our advance towards the Jetsons' world.
No, you don't simply "move to a new coin". ETH is currently a 420B market cap and rewards GPU miners something on the order of 13,000 ETH a day conservatively (without fees). That's nearly 50m dollars a day or 1.5B dollars a month!
The only "other coins" available to be mined with GPUs are tiny. Ethereum classic has only a 8B market cap, Ravencoin with 1B, then many sub 1B coins.
This year with the labor shortage has shown we need more "basic" employees getting a livable wage than a country full of college educated students chasing white collar positions
This is Amazon attempting to attract more “basic” employees by increasing compensation. Amazon is hoping this program is attractive enough that they do not have to raise cash compensation as much, since these types of strings attached, reimbursement type compensation schemes are vastly cheaper than cash compensation.
It is somewhat beneficial for employees if they were already going to be working a job while going to a school Amazon will pay for, since their tuition would be paid with pre tax dollars.
I shouldn’t have to replace the display on a new computer. Especially when the part numbers are all the same. I’ve swapped the display in my x230 to get away from a ghosting panel just to get another panel that is supposedly ghost free, but still ghosts.
I wonder much of this is caused by recent installments of agricultural field drainage tile?
Land price increases allow for more farmers to afford to "improve" their farmland by adding underground pipes that quickly wick standing water away into nearby creeks and rivers. What used to be evaporated or absorbed into soils is dumping straight into waterways.
You're asking if over 600mm of rain (i.e. more than half a year's worth) in a 24 hour period in Henan was caused by recent installments of agricultural field drainage? Or if that caused the jet stream to hold the storm over NRW to drop months worth in a 24 hour period?
What about 0 percent interest rates? How much environmentally damaging malinvestment across the globe has been caused by risk free money?
Think of how carbon intensive the concrete, steel, manufacturing, power generation industry are. Not to mention the population boom beyond our earths carrying capacity needed to perpetuate our ever increasing monetary scheme requiring never ending growth where deflation can never exist.
Thank you for pointing this out. The misallocation of capital caused by artificially low interest rates caused by central banks printing money (and the "bust" and massive unemployment that follows when lenders realize that the investments are unprofitable at the true market interest rate) is not commonly discussed.
No one is paying bills right now due to COVID relief. Q4 alone saw $32B of missed student loan, $7B in missed rent and $14B of missed mortgage payments. Pent up roaring 20's demand and hyperinflation?
From what I understand debt as a percentage of disposible income has gone down during the pandemic. [1]. personal savings rates have also increased significantly[2]. I think people are underestimating the benefits of the pandemic assistance (particularly in the form of increased unemployment insurance)
