the price of metal, raw metal, coming out of factories like aluminum, steel, titanium is high because the cost of energy is high.
I think it’s 30%-40% the cost of smelting it. Unless you can drop the price of energy and cheapen the raw material cost, the entire manufacturing industry will be uncompetitive.
Primary smelters currently run pretty efficiently but are bottlenecked by two main factors in the USA: raw energy prices and regulations. (there’s likely some modern process improvements they could add too but those won’t increase productively as greatly).
To reduce energy costs… you’ll need about double the current energy production we have today. That sounds like a lot but it’s very doable (the US has been neglecting itself for 50 years). It could with a little push from the Government catch up in 10-15 years, think lots of nuclear and solar.
Bringing energy costs down. I see. While I'm not super well-versed in the US energy market, and I understand it's a bit complex, I do believe it's a mix of regulated and deregulated private monopolies under a bunch of regional ISOs, but there's an energy trading market down there somewhere setting spot prices, correct? So are you saying the US energy market should be, if not fully re-regulated, regulated harder, or perhaps abolished and everything should be brought back to being state or federally run (I'm not sure the US ever had that)?
It is not always in energy producers' interest to have really low energy prices, after all.
There are still a few regions that are fully vertically integrated and fully regulated with no market prices. However, much of the US is under a regional ISO that sets hourly day ahead prices and 5-minute nodal spot prices. Under an ISO the utility still handles distribution and often transmission, but generation decisions (like when should I turn on my plant and what should my output be) are handled by the ISOs optimization auction based off various inputs from the generator such as costs and constraints.
In theory, this ISO setup has saved untold millions of dollars (probably billions), by operating the grid regionally in a much more efficient manner than in the days of old. It is hard to tell though as you can't do a direct comparison very easily. The economists certainly like the price signals though, but there are numerous issues.
I believe you have it right. In theory, power generation should have been a well-regulated monopoly. Unfortunately, as soon as you add investors, aka rent seekers, the system is pushed to increase profits at the expense of the customer.
We should reset the monopoly by publishing and documenting tariffs for power and carriage. Third-party power suppliers should still have access to the power grid, with complete, transparent, and understandable costs for consumers.
There needs to be a plan for continual upgrades and maintenance, rather than starving the grid and then requiring big bursts of funding that go in part to the rent seekers.
Snark aside, let me remind you of the term "enchitification": it came about because companies in theoretically competitive markets make good products shittier.
>The entire point of producing more energy is to consume it.
If the point of producing more energy is to produce more products, and instead it gets gobbled up by idiots giving us the next crappy phone app that runs in the cloud, then it's not me that's missing the point si it?
>All those computers in the data center are just as much products as anything else.
Sure, and if they were cranked out of American factories, that'd be awesome. But since they're shipped across the Pacific on a boat, they're not really the kind of products that help.
>If you don't like the apps, by all means don't buy them.
If apps are all we get out of doubling power production, then I'll do one better and we'll just not double power production.
> It's ok to double power production for things you want,
For things that strengthen our country's economy, and provides a future for Americans, sure.
For some internationally-owned corporate conglomerates to churn out more brainwashing software garbage, no, I don't think me or other voters should give any support for that.
Oil is important but as lever to pull on because it affects China.
The invasion is meant to orient the US to fight China. We are cutting away the Middle East war baggage, trying to end the Ukraine war baggage so we can focus on China. Russia would be a nice ally against China.
China was moving around Lat Am and we are removing the communists from the hemisphere.
China likes oil. Loves oil but can’t get enough oil which is why it’s building solar and nuclear so quickly. The US can clamp down on the oil if Venezuela is an ally. So the US wants a strong Venezuela that can’t be used against us.
It’s hard to conduct war without oil.
The US has a strong incentive to make sure Venezuela comes out strong, and the Chinese have a strong incentive to not let that happen.
the entire readership of this website is clueless, it’s an echo chamber. Unless you write a thoroughly detailed contra comment you get downvoted. If you say Elon is good you get downvoted. I do not want to source my comments, I work a job! Maybe Elon is sometimes good and sometimes bad. Maybe I don’t want to drop how I know something because my employer would be very mad.
You can no longer get the full picture because all the guys with alpha (investing term) left and post on Twitter/X now. All rando accounts without their faces. Anything interesting for AI is on there now and you can chat with the actual researchers too, you don’t need to bump into them at a shoes off party after work.
There’s a lot of very uncomfortable discussion on Twitter/X if you can stomach it, you’ll end up with a much clearer picture of the world. There’s a lot of dumb stuff on there too! You have to sift through it.
HN hit its Eternal September. There’s still some really great technical stuff you can find on here though. I don’t know how long the decline has been but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.
To the extent that a dictatorship is doing well, it is evidence against the idea that democracy is the natural way to have a good economy.
That said, I don't think those states are doing *well enough* to justify such a fear. What we're looking at from the outside are basically the promo reels from a version of Disney Land made for people whose childhood dream wasn't to be a princess or a knight, but a CEO with a Lambo; what the kids see when they visit Disney has little in common with the effort needed to present the park.
those articles were written a plenty about the Davos Elite - even precovid. It’s a tad lazy now.
Sure there was some evidence of wealth concentration mattering. But there was also evidence against it (like Jack Ma). Power is still the ring to kiss.
And hopefully it’s very understood to the parent comment and agreers, wealth creation is not zero sum. When something new is created the pie gets bigger. All wealth inequality discourse is driven by that misunderstanding and a lack of building more homes https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001429212...
Maybe your brick wall is the singularity instead and I misread you but I don’t think so.
Entirely not the point. We know that monopolies and wealth _concentration_ reinforce each other, at the cost of wealth creation.
Every time a monopoly buys a company, a chance of competition gets eliminated. As monopolist have enough money to buy the government by regulatory capture or even state capture, competition cannot grow, stifling innovation and growth. Parasitism is the most apt way to understand, because the host will wither away from it.
I agree we should be busting more monopolies in the vein of Teddy Roosevelt, but you are forgetting the monopolies and capture political parties have on the states themselves.
I know its a hot issue and I apologize, but if you look at Minnesota with its likely fraud: would their social welfare program numbers look better without the fraud? Could California be run better without its (also likely) welfare fraud? You might really want this but the leadership doesn't want to root it out. So you're left with voting for the opposition but how many want to do that? Nothing happens.
There's no competition in politics. It's two parties or nothing right now.
There's Californian billionaires who loudly hate the Government but can't get anything to change. I feel you are overestimating wealth's influence too some degree as well.
Wind and solar are highly complementary. Wind tends to be peak during evening and morning, and is often stronger at night than during the day. Wind is cheaper than overbuilding solar and adding batteries.
If its a dumb idea, why waste billions of dollars on it? Do you know how much pollution that shutted down plant is? It was HugE I've gone past it. So much waste for a "dumb idea"
This is what's wrong with Americans in one succinct example. "Look at all the pollution from this field of mirrors" he thinks while driving on the freeway to Las Vegas.
this is an article about why you shouldn't live in the UK. I always think right-wing news makes it sound worse than it is.. I have a feeling it's truer than not.
Doctors do not get along and that’s too many Drs. Each patient often has multiple speciality Drs visiting them and reviewing their case up to 3 or 4 sometimes already. Imagine being on consult and trying to figure out which guy on a team of 4 you should talk to about such and such.
her at her worst is better than 90% of people at their best.
if you get through and into a good med school -match into surgery- you are Peak in a way very few are.
I don’t see this changing unless they reduce the requirements for med school; if they let anyone in who wants in and force that group to work 30hr shifts - you’ll get enough bad outcomes the system will change.
There was a study, I believe on nurses and shift durations. The study found the nurses were happier with shorter shifts - but the patients did worse. Patients come first.
I could see a group of Doctors loudly proclaiming love for Donald Trump (and mentioning very much how great he is) and pleading the case for a change and something happening. He is an interesting president.
I would be interested in hearing a european drs perspective, I heard they work shorter shifts (but no EU dr I met has confirmed, it’s like meeting a unicorn)
reply