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Scarcity is artifically created in the modern age
My local library can only lend out x copies of each ebook at a time, so sometimes I’m in a queue for the last lenders loan time to run out
Surely just pirate it so you can read it on your timetable, and take the book from the library when it’s your turn to give that author the lending stats?
cough Anna’s cough archive cough
If you need it in a jiffy, but libraries and authors could both use support.
No, it’s not. It’s a practical problem, not an economic one, but leave it to the tankies here to take it as an opportunity to show how many slogans they have learned.
Unfettered capitalism will be the end of us.
Capitalism can work to our benefit. It’s main benefit is incentivising people to get more, which seems to work well at encouraging people to be productive. The main idea is supposed to be efficient resource allocation, but that plainly does not work as it leads to wealth accumulation at the top.
Our problem is twofold. The first problem is we externalize negative costs onto society. So environmental damage, health costs, workers pensions, roads, bridges etc.
The second problem is efficient wealth distribution. Currently we focus on income rather than wealth. We should tax wealth just as much as income. We certainly should make any use of an asset as collateral a taxable event.
Some things that might help. We should look at changing taxation systems to be a formula rather than bands. The more income you get, the higher it goes. The lower your income, the lower you’re taxed. Same as now but rather than having to meet a threshold to move bands, every dollar is taxed based on where it falls in the distribution curve. It would be more complex for people to get their heads around at first, but actually simpler for all calculations going forwards.
UBI would also help with redistribution and make society more efficient overall.
UBI would also help with redistribution and make society more efficient overall.
UBI is a band-aid, not a solution. It’s a way to keep a broken system working for a little bit longer until it’s no longer politically expedient to help those in need. It props up capitalism in the guise of giving people a leg up.
It’s selling people bootstraps so they can lift themselves up by them.
UBI is not a band aid. It would be a complete overhaul of our economic system with a major change in how we value people, time products and services.
It is not a way to prop up capitalism, but a way to use capitalism for better equality and minimum standards of living.
What you’re describing could just as well not be capitalism. Why cling to capitalism?
Practicality for one. How do you change the world economy when they couldn’t even get together to manage a respiratory disease by wearing masks and isolating for 2 to 3 weeks.
There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as a concept. It’s how it’s abuses. Regulation and rules to circumbet that can help.
Communism doesn’t work. China shows some totalitarianism works, but I don’t want to lose personal freedoms for the greater good.
What system would you suggest would address capitalisms faults yet has a chance to actually happen?
Practicality for one. How do you change the world economy when they couldn’t even get together to manage a respiratory disease by wearing masks and isolating for 2 to 3 weeks.
You could say the same about UBI. Proper implementation requires wealthy to give up their wealth. Do you see that practically happening?
There is nothing inherently wrong with capitalism as a concept. It’s how it’s abuses. Regulation and rules to circumbet that can help.
Except that the system inherently causes capital accumulation and rewards abusive behavior. The kind of rules and regulations you’re thinking of work against capitalism and the wealthy are allowed to circumvent those rules anyway (see how they avoid paying tax).
Communism doesn’t work. China shows some totalitarianism works, but I don’t want to lose personal freedoms for the greater good.
I’m not going to get into the details of what communism actually is supposed to be or how the USSR or China are not necessarily the way to communism. I’m just going to point out that socialism does not have to go the way of USSR or China.
What system would you suggest would address capitalisms faults yet has a chance to actually happen?
Socialism. Not the Leninist way but the Marxist way. Marx described socialism as a process, a series of steps necessary to dismantle capitalism and establish communism. He didn’t go into details on what those steps are or how many steps they may or may not be. So to be true to Marx I’m not saying “let’s completely throw capitalism in the bin and go into planned economy” but rather lets treat it as a process. We don’t need to establish communism, but lets take step by step towards a better future.
And as such I think the smallest first step, which in many ways is already a huge step, is changing the ownership of companies. Everyone working at the company is also the owner of the company and gets a say in how the company operates. That change alone would improve working conditions and arguably have companies do less shady shit. But realistically I don’t see it happening any more than I see UBI happening in the way that you imagine.
UBI can be changed gradually. It loses some of it’s efficacy in distribution but it doesn’t need to be revolution. It can be evolution. It also does not mean a high risk of capital flight for the first movers. This means countries or areas can do it incrementally, one at a time, rather than a complete global shift at once. The wealthy won’t want to give up their wealth, that’s a given. That is the case for any change we plan for better distribution, so it’s not really an argument against or for any change.
Yes, it favours capital accumulation and rewards poor behavior. So what I have suggested adding is a method that leads to better wealth distribution and to disincentivise the negative externalities. Correct the flaws, so to speak. There is no perfect system that cannot be exploited. It’s a case of risk mitigation not elimination.
Socialism may stop companies doing shady shit, but will it make them.less competitive on the world stage? Remember, they are competing with non socialist countries initially. As you mention, it would be a means of transition. Yet, every country that has tried communism has failed, often with devastating consequences for the people there. Our world and nation state economies are much more complex and intertwined than before, yet efficient use of resources was not possible then. The problem is not the theory, it is people. Power corrupts.
I don’t have a problem with changing the ownership structure. However, can you point to any cooperative that was able to scale in the way that modern companies in a capitalist system do? Cooperatives exist and on a local scale can be beneficial. On a macro scale, they are less efficient and society as a whole is worse off for that loss of efficiency. That is the problem. Capitalism priorities profits, which require growth. The key is not to ensure broader ownership, but rather broader distribution of the wealth and profits created by that. We already have examples of that with share disbursement as a reward. Perhaps we could look at that being a regulated norm, in tandem with pensions payments etc.
This is a great write up. I think the problem with economic theory discussions is it is an extremely complex and nuanced topic. Saying ‘capitalism bad’ is popular, but not very constructive.
I think one big point that gets bungled in these economic debates is markets. That’s supposed to be the shining light of capitalism because of how efficient markets are at allocating scarce resources. The point that I think is missed, is that markets can be used very effectively outside of a capitalist system. They need to be designed for other economic systems, but they can easily handle the biggest argument with socialism; centralized control.
I feel that is a major point missing in these debates and I just wanted to give it some attention.
Widespread UBI in a capitalistic system would see all prices immediately rise to extract that UBI money and go back to its old ways immediately after that.
And of course the tax system should be changed, but many millions in lobbying and campaign money is used to get it in its current state and keep it there. Everything is for sale, including the law.
The only point you have going for capitalism is the supposed productivity, but any system that has a way to reward performance can do the same just fine. There is a range of economic models between capitalism and communism, several of them very market based.
A good example which i always felt would work well with minimal systemic change is the free money system (freigeldsystem), which is largely private enterprise. The big differences are that all land and natural resources are owned by the public/the state, leasing it out to companies; and negative interest making the hoarding of wealth impossible.
These key changes give the public a large degree of power over the private sector, since they could simply choose not to lease any land to companies who are not compliant with the public needs, and largely remove the capitalist class - the owners, the profit parasites, the shareholders, the ones living off their hoarded wealth - from the system
I like this concept. I do think it would generally slow resource extraction because companies would be more wary to invest in the large infrastructure if they don’t have perpetual ownership of the land. I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing, just an outcome I think is likely.
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Capitalism does not incentivize people to get more, it incentivizes a very exclusive few to get it all.
You’re confusing capitalism with communism.
The rise in productivity, wages and wealth in most countries that adopted it would bef to differ. Yes, there is more wealth created at the top, but that can be corrected with other policies.
You just mentioned a number of ways that capitalism could be “fettered” to work more for the benefit of all. But the person you responded to said “unfettered capitalism” (unless they changed it later). :-)
I assumed they were using hyperbole as no country has unfettered capitalism. All our restrictions on it in some form. My suggestions would be one way we could do this. There are others.
One problem is that most of your solutions have been attempted before and they failed to stick - e.g. a majority of people who are alive today were present when the top marginal tax rate in the USA was 90% (I am focusing on that b/c the OP referred to MIT), and when that was true, government programs were so well & sufficiently funded that we literally went to the moon! (but how often have we been back there since? granted, there isn’t much real reason to go…:-P)
e.g. people started hiding their wealth in offshore tax havens, only bringing in what they need in the short term to get by at any given moment. This relates to globalism as in how much is a wealthy person even a resident of any one country, despite them living in it 100% of the time and getting 100% of their income from it? If you open up a broom closet and maybe assign 0-1 employees to it, but file the paperwork for thus you can make anything into your “global headquarters” even for a multi-national, multi-billion dollar corporation - Amazon does this all the time, and moreoever keeps shifting it around to take advantage of tax incentives offered to them to move it there (for awhile).
Another way that people hide their wealth - Donald Trump is famous for this (among other things:-) - is to keep the actual financials low while still having the full quality of life experience. So he and his family may not “earn” much, yet still live in a fantabulous apartment that they value in the millions if not billions of dollars. Their cars, helicopters, private jets etc. also may not be directly “owned” by them, but rather by their corporate entity, which is subject to all the tax burdens and benefits of such - so even though he gets the exclusive use of all of his “stuff”, does he truly “own” it, at least as far as tax reporting purposes go?
Even UBIs have been tried before - e.g. slaves might be given their rations regardless of output, so that their families could eat even while taking care of the next and present generation of workers rather than produce work product directly.
So it is not that nobody has ever heard of these things before, it is just that they do not “stick”. e.g. Donald Trump, after taking advantage of that whole financial system, when he gets into power decides to defund the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), essentially the police who monitor for such excesses and abuses as he and others like him are exactly likely to try to get away with. (And yes, the IRS - the general taxation services & enforcement division - got its funding reduced as well, but that gets off into a whole HUGE tangent where it is not just its funding level, but direct mandates to specifically not go after the most wealthy offenders, or rather the particular style of crimes that they are able to abuse, which are more complex and can be held up in court for years and thereby take up a disproportionate amount of resources to enforce) And then on top of that, Donald Trump also lowered the wealth taxes - so both by making things legal, and also by reducing the ability to enforce certain particular styles of crimes that are illegal, he steadily moved the notch more towards “unfettered capitalism” and away from “placing restrictions on it in some form”. Nothing ofc is 0% or 100%, but there is a spectrum, and we do move along somewhere on it.
So, extremely unfortunately, it is not hyperbole at all - the most narrow interpretation of it as meaning equal to precisely 0% restrictions would be, but the common interpretation is to look at the spectrum and see the direction we are moving along it towards that particular extreme end, as in “more unfettered now than it was in the past”. You may actually therefore be in agreement with the person you are arguing with, but missing out on that b/c you keep talking about how to “solve” the crisis, as if the solution could be to simply pass a handful of laws and the problem would be over. However, pass those laws how - through Congress? And with the Supreme Court now having been stacked with judges that each day are revealed to be even more corrupt than we suspected in the past, ready to strike down any law that may cause their own personal quality of life to degrade i.e. they might receive fewer free rides on private jets if they displease the billionaires that they have befriended?
Well, anyway if you are speaking on purely theoretical grounds, or perhaps in Aussie land it may even be possible on practical ones, but in America we do tend to feel that we are well and truly and even royally fucked by the system, and any such “solution” seems unlikely to ever be possible to implement, for the simple fact that our overlords do not wish it. We may have come too far down this road, to the point where even the entire federal government cannot fight against them any longer, except in perhaps specific areas, but not overall, not anymore:-(. Ironically this illustrates the dangers of unfettered capitalism: I get that capitalism isn’t so much “good” as it is the lesser of other competing evils (socialism being demotivating etc.), but it really is like harnessing the power of this giant behemoth beast, whereas if you let the beast take over control then you can become well and truly and royally fucked…:-(. When riding a mount, one must always remain in control, or else… well, we are about to find out I suppose.
i.e. capitalism may be good, but only if properly restrained.
Capitalism is neither good or bad. It’s a tool. It’s the people that design the system that hold ultimate responsibility.
All the things you say about things having been tried previously applies just as much to socialism, Marxism and other forms of non capitalism economies.
Slow incremental improvements pay off dividends in just the same way that slow incremental worsening has made things worse.
I think faster broader changes would help more, but that doesn’t make them easier to implement.
Yes, there is a despair with how the world is worsening. We have a lot of things to blame for it. Facebook, trump tax laws, tax havens etc. Yet people continue to use facebook and continue to vote for Trump.
What needs to be done is fight and push for better candidates and better policies. Many are doing that but not at the level that is required. When was the last time you went to a political meeting? Or a rally or march? Those questions are rhetorical. I know I haven’t been in a long time. We have become complacent and despondent as a society. Things are harder, but also easier. We have lots of conveniences now that were unthinkable at the times you mentioned where things were subjectively better in the past.
Things were not better for women and minorities. Things were not better for child workers. Things were not better for lgbtqi people. Slaves were not better off by having a UBI. Please be aware that ubi means you have no obligation to work. Any income from work would be on top of the UBI. With advancement in productivity. I don’t see how society will function without UBI or cutting hours significantly. Jobs in transport, logistics etc will all go. AI will kill many more in communication.
Exactly - bad implementations of communism, bad implementations of capitalism, bad implementations of whatever utopian form of government we can dream up in theory, all suffer b/c they are bad implementations, even if in theory they are perfect. Beyond that, some theories may themselves just be “bad” overall, if the theory is too far removed from reality.
One problem that the USA has found for itself is having allowed itself to devolve to become a 2-party system, where no other parties matter. This is a fundamental phase shift b/c at that point the parties no longer try to accomplish positive aims, and instead merely try to “not” be the other side. Biden won b/c he wasn’t Trump, Trump won b/c he wasn’t Hilary Clinton, Obama won b/c he wasn’t Romney, or McCain, Bush won b/c… well it goes back many, many decades. Afaik, no democracy has ever survived that.
Nor does it seem to matter even, b/c regardless of who wins, the wealthy are in charge. School shootings are a perfect example of that - our CHILDREN are being MURDERED… and nobody gives a damn. I recall one poll result where 80% of the American people were for some form of gun control, and that rose to >90% of responsible, registered gun owners! Also that was a decade ago, so surely after all that we’ve seen since, it could be even higher? There is nothing that engenders bipartisan efforts in Congress these days - but 80-90% agreement among the American populace is astounding!!?!! However, it does not matter one bit what we want - b/c the lobbies want something else there, and they are willing to pay 10-fold more than the counter-lobby, hence children continue to be murdered all across the nation (typically in poorer schools though).
In addition to being horrific, that example also reveals that our democracy is beyond broken, it is no longer “democracy” at all, but a plutocracy where regardless of whoever votes for whatever goal to be done, the rich control what actually gets done, regardless.
So to fix something like that… assuming that it even could be fixed, would take… I have no idea. But going to a political rally will not begin to cover it. We may literally have a civil war coming up, or at least it is highly expected (among experts, it is said) to have some kind of “constitutional crisis event”, much like the January 6 protests where Donald Trump attempted the most ineffective coup that I have ever heard of, yet still was solidly an attempt.
And one potential reason for all that is that whereas the wealthy previous wanted to use middle-class workers to be the underpinnings of society - doctors, researchers, lawyers, engineers, etc. - now they gloves are coming off, and they would have divide the world into the haves vs. have-nots. That CPG Grey Rules for Rulers really helped me see this clearly, though also depresses me:-).
Yes, that’s a great response. I would disagree on some points but agree overall.
What people fail to see is that all these systems are just that, systems we use as a tool. Its up to us to design the system such that it benefits more people. However, those that design the systems have an incentive to design them to be reelected rather than what’s best. We need to overcome that. One way that can help is sunset clauses on bills. They expire after a set time and need to be devoted on. It should reduce the effect of interest groups, or at least require more funding for them to be able to intervene multiple tines over multiple years with more and more politicians and beurocrats. Basically, reduces their investment. Next one is term limits.
Its a great video, by the way, I hadn’t seen it before. It does emphasize why democracy is better, but what might be missed is capitalism as part of democracy is what also provides that extra wealth that mininoses the risk of revolt and increases number of stakeholders or power brokers.
Those whonarguse socialism or communism forget that there is still a ruling class working in their own interest and that ruling by committee is slow and inefficient. Just ask anyone on a committee.
I agree, the wealthy have an outsize influence. The wealthy is not one person. It is a constant rotation of power brokers coming in and our of power. Take the USA, the 1% is 3 million people. Sure, there are a large number who stay at the top and corrupt society with their interestd, but they don’t control all the levers. They focus their efforts on controlling the interests that will benefit them most, usually taxation.
Gun law is a great example of people wanting change but not having consensus on that change. However, much ofnthst change was thwarted nut the NRA using membership moneybfron the same people that claim to want change. We now know they also took money from Russia, in an effort to destabilise. Russia understands that a large mass of people effects vhsbge. They have weaponised it. Those seeking to stabilise and improve the world need to do the same.
The fact that Trump, who staged a shitty coup, is a horrible person and has clear mental instability is on line to be reelected is a shitty endorsement of current politics. That’s not the fault of democracy as a concept, that’s the fault of bad rules, like the electoral college, like campaign finance rules, like citizens first etc. All of which the democrats have not touched, ever.
I don’t see a civil war coming. Society is too comfortable(even if financially very tough) for people to revolt violently end masse. I do expect some form of constitutional crisis. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened after the coup. Many of the problems identified by that, remain uncorrected. If something is tradition and not codified, it is useless as a protector of democracy.
I think the complexity of society and the intersecting interests of so many people and groups is what makes civil war so much less likely in developed countries. I can’t think of the last time it has happened. The closest thing is middle east or eastern Europe, but that was fallout from global power struggles more than general unrest.
They probably meant “unchecked capitalism” and it would have worked had we continued to keep it in check. The inequality is so excessive now that correction would be criticized as demotivating to industry and innovation. At this point, I think they’re just trying to run out the clock so we don’t collapse before the world burns.
Sadly it does kinda look that way, but even more devastatingly sad than that is the near certainty that we are giving them far too much credit for forethought there. To think that the likes of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg has that level of strategic capabilities, rather than simply “gimme monay, now puh-lease”, is rather generous. More likely they will be shocked that the leopards (themselves in this case!!?!!?!!) have eaten their faces off too, and as the move Don’t Look Up perfectly illustrates, they too will be more surprised than anyone else as the world ends. But hey, at least they got theirs while the getting was good, right? :-(
i.e. Business Intelligence (acumen) is not the same thing as actual intelligence (IQ), and definitely not the same as emotional ability to empathize, with others and even one’s future self (EQ?). If these people could understand something, but it is to their financial detriment to do so hence they won’t, then it is no longer a matter of helping them understand (IQ), but rather of motivating them to care (EQ) and thereby actually do something about it (business).
I get what you are trying to say, but you sound like someone in an abusive relationship that still believes they can fix the abuser somehow.
I think these are reasonable suggestions to make society more equitable. Do you disagree with any of them? Or just don’t like them because they modify the existing system instead of tearing it all down?
Bbbut be just needs anger management classes…
They are reasonable suggestions if you refuse to think outside the box of capitalism.
And no, thinking outside of capitalism doesn’t require to tear it all down. That is exactly what the capitalist want us to think with their TINA.
What would you change it for? We’ve tried many systems globally and historically. Capitalism seems to be the best at reducing poverty.
No it’s not. Russian and Chinese state capitalism turned two preindustrial countries into global superpowers in a matter of decades, and lifted unprecedented numbers of people out of poverty. And they weren’t even communist! Communism has been tried in places like Catalonia and economically, it succeeded. Militarily, not so much, but only because all the capitalists turned against them. Capitalism is the bottom of the barrel when it comes to lifting people out of poverty.
Yes, China and Russia had rapid advancements in reducing poverty by embracing capitalism market principles. That’s partly the point.
Nobody is advocating for pure capitalism. No country practices it. It’s theoretical and has no restrictions, or regulations.
That’s a completely ahistorical take. Capitalism is best at creating poverty when you look at it globally. Yes it is good at concentrating riches in a few places, and from a rich western perspective it may look like it “reduced” poverty, but even that is starting to become questionable these days.
No, its really not. Capitalism increases productivity and wealth. How that wealth is distributed varies by country. Russia for instance has oligopolies that mean most goes to individuals. Europe has social programs that mean its more evenly spread. Its up to the countries and law makers to plan that well. Its not the fault of the concept if its misused. Its a tool, like any other.
40 years of néolibéralisme cannot be undone overnight, it will take small steps to reverse the damage done, and to normalise societal expectations
Nikola Tesla was a radical anarchist then, I guess? :-P
I mean, in a lot of ways he didn’t care about the economics of his inventions. He wanted to transfer electricity wirelessly across huge areas and there really wasn’t a way to monetise that if everyone could just tap into that.
In a communist society you could build something like that, in capitalism you’re not going to find an investor to do this.
I wish Tesla had just invented induction stoves instead of going for his holy grail. I don’t think induction is a good way to move power over large distances, but it’s a great way to cook dinner.
I guess since we still don’t have wireless transmission there were probably physical limitations to what he was trying to do. You would think someone would’ve tried it in the century since.
I don’t think there was a huge capitalist conspiracy to stop this from happening unless someone can point me to something that says otherwise.
We do have wireless charging for phones, and induction stoves that transfer heat. And yes there was a bit of a conspiracy regarding Tesla, it is quite famous, but I will leave you to direct your own studies there however you see fit. One part is that Edison was not so much the “inventor” as his reputation may naively lead people to believe as an “exploiter” as in he ran an invention sweatshop company. But anyway you are right to be suspicious of Tesla ofc - he wasn’t very practical and maybe it was after being burned by his experiences with Edison but he did not set out to prove his ideas in the most practical manner and instead went off the deep end trying to solve the more scientific and engineering aspects further rather than take forward what he had already shown irt short distance transfers. So the conspiracy wasn’t “huge”, just a consequence of him having been blacklisted by Edison combined with his own business ineptitude to not find financial backers. I am only saying though that the limitations were not entirely physical (the long distance ones are, but not the short distance ones), so much as practicality especially in the business sense of taking a product from conception all the way to market.
Yeah, obviously induction charging has been around (and is easy enough to monetise), but he was famously trying to build a way to transfer electricity over long distances, and I’m assuming this isn’t possible without incurring huge losses.
Agree on all you said about Edison, he basically was that eras Elon Musk, taking credit for the work of others.
he was famously trying to build a way to transfer electricity over long distances, and I’m assuming this isn’t possible without incurring huge losses.
Yes, I believe you are correct about that, although I too do not know what precisely those limitations are:-).
For one thing, Tesla was not entirely truthful to his investors:
Astor thought he was primarily investing in the new wireless lighting system. Instead, Tesla used the money to fund his Colorado Springs experiments.
And for another, he chased down the wrong path for awhile:
The observations he made of the electronic noise of lightning strikes led him to (incorrectly) conclude that he could use the entire globe of the Earth to conduct electrical energy.
So, it is not quite a full “conspiracy” to claim that he somehow deserved additional funding despite all of his past shortcomings. It sounds to me more like hindsight being 20/20, we now realize how he was correct, how he was wrong, and overall people try to use him as an example of capitalism’s failings. Like the first rule of inventions are that when one fails you should try try again, except that’s obviously not true - yeah try a few times but ultimately spend your time on what looks most likely to work, not repeating to extend forward a string of endless failures. i.e., people try to use his example in spite of the facts, not because of them. Maybe, it looks like.
And it’s likely true - if as much effort had been put into that technology as was put into Edison’s, perhaps we really would have solved that long-distance problem by now - maybe. Therein lies the germ of truth imho: you cannot overcome it if you refuse to even so much as try? So in that case, it is truly the constraints of capitalism that killed the spirit of innovation there, as in we could (maybe) have had something, if only profits were not people’s sole motivation.
Similarly and in a much more damaging manner we see drug companies researching palliatives and “care options” rather than actual cures. The goal of any corporation - even ones working in a medical field - is solely to make profits. Hence Viagra and Cialis, and funding goes towards further development of pain relief and such, even as funding was taken away from research towards cures for common diseases (even ones the researchers themselves believed they were “close” to solving!).
All of this works together as arguments against capitalism being the best economic system - it works well in theory but only up to a point, similar to socialism, and irl the systems that have worked the absolute best was a blending of the two, with each providing a different mixture of benefits and detractions. e.g. if Tesla had been under a socialist system or in more of a blended one, could his excesses have been reigned in and what innovations would we have today in that case? We will never know ofc, but at least I am attempting to frame the argument that I commonly hear from people who don’t quite state their reasoning, so this is my attempt to reconstruct it. :-)
I guess I should’ve started with the wiki article, which spells out he was working off the erroneous assumption that the atmosphere was somehow more conductive than it really is.
Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion.
Thus, Ben Franklin wins electricity, and they made Tesla into a joke, who goes on to be a recluse, yeah? Edit: Thomas Edison rather
To be fair, having a mismatch between when energy is available and when it is needed is going to be a problem under any economic system, since it’s a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources
You gotta recharge your phone battery sometime though - and if electricity had a different cost for nighttime vs. daytime, you can bet that people would choose the day option whenever possible.
(I chose a mobile device here bc it doesn’t need any “extra” battery or technology beyond what would already normally be at hand.)
Most places in the US have peak and off peak hours with different pricing already. Certain smart thermostats can take advantage of this for running your AC and such.
Thats basically how its done in most of Europe. Price changes every 15 minutes and some smart system starting washing machines etc if a certain threshhold is reached.
Of course you can also get a hedged contract where you pay a fixed price and don’t need to care about it, but you have the choice.
Uh, in my part of Europe we don’t have 15-minute changes, that would be a nightmare.
You can have a contract where the day is split in 3 or 4 different rates, so that it’s cheaper to run your washing machine at night for instance.
I don’t get why that would be a nightmare. In my country the electricity prices change per hour for dynamic contracts (they just follow the energy market) and with normal usage it’s cheaper on average than fixed contracts, including those with peak and off-peak rates. For gas it’s a day price, again same as the energy market. For both electricity and gas the prices for the next calendar day are published in the afternoon (that’s how the energy market works). The companies charge a little extra per unit and a small fixed fee per month.
Contracts with fixed rates (including nighttime and daytime rates) have to buy in advance, which means that unforeseen circumstances are included in the price and they also have to account for the fact that they might need to buy extra or sell off their excess based an actual usage.
It’s priced per hour, and fairly low slopes, I think. Haven’t looked at actual smart grids, though. Basically you’ll know that electricity will be cheap (or even negative net) the following night or day or that there will be certain very expensive peak times from 8-10 and 15-17 or so.
In places like Spain, there are different energy plans and some do include “Peak” and “Valley” price variances. Peaks are high demand, like when cooking dinner, “Valley” are the opposite.
You can adapt to these inefficies, sure, but doing so still takes more planning and effort (in this case in carefully timing one’s phone charging, and in avoiding power using activities like that during non ideal times) than if there was no mismatch of availability and demand. It lessens the impact of the problem, but does not entirely remove it.
The answer to this is local energy storage. It could be at the home level, but doing it by neighborhood/industrial block would be better
Then, you lessen the strain on the grid at large, and you also capitalize on the periods of low demand. This means less spot energy production and built in storage, making it easier to make the most of renewables while minimizing the need to fire up a natural gas plant to make up the difference
it’s a fundamental inefficiency that must be worked around with additional effort and resources
In the OP the use of the word “problem” rather than something like “challenge”, and referring to the problem being the pricing structure (negative) makes it seem like we’ve switched topics slightly, but if you are just referring to the foundational inefficiency of energy distribution then yeah I agree it is definitely a challenge. However, that challenge need not be so overwhelming (even perhaps solely wrt pricing) that it negates the benefits of having that form of technology available altogether. e.g. if the power company itself, or each recipient building individually, had its own battery (if let’s say those were cheap & sustainable) then that could work, without the users needing to care much. I forget which city but one example in Germany iirc pumps water up a mountain during the day, then at night or on a cloudy day that potential energy falling back down generates electricity again. So yes a “challenge” for sure but not necessarily an insurmountable one!:-)
Also, there are “problems”/“challenges” wrt use of fossil fuels as well, which have implications for climate change, and therefore even purely from a profit perspective there’s government laws & subsidies and public perception that can affect it, which could push the overall net towards being beneficial to store that energy for later.
Giant rubber bands.
You’re welcome
Enter nuclear fusion… unlimited energy always and forever.
Solar power is just really inefficient nuclear fusion
Just 20 more years of research. At least text was predicted 1990. And 2000. And 2010. And 2020. And last year.
And 2010. And 2020.
Who exactly was making this claim in 2010 or 2020. Basically every serious prediction I’ve seen in decades has been to to tune out “2070, if all goes well”
my pet theory on the “nuclear fusion is coming in the next 20 years” thing is that science journalism has reported on every minor breakthrough related to fusion technology. being able to theoretically confirm it, being able to actually accomplish a test run, being able to use some other forms of nuclear fusion (like a tokamak vs a stellarator), being able to very recently, break even. Earlier on, in the optimistic post-war nuclear period, some dipshit probably gave an estimate that we’d have it in the next 20 years because everyone was so optimistic, and ten it stuck around. so every time someone brings up nuclear fusion, which happens a decent amount, the “it’s only been 20 years away for the last 80 years” remark gets popped off and spreads around without any really clear origin point. I think probably also the sheer number of breakthroughs reported over time means that people are going to be skeptical, since everyone interprets science journalism as always reporting on the one life-changing breakthrough, rather than just being a kind of steady background noise, like any journalism.
I think you’re entirely correct, yeah. I also suspect that whoever originally said “fusion in twenty years” probably also meant “fusion in twenty years, with enough funding”, which hasn’t been the case for fusion - or scientific r&d in general - imo.
not exactly but for all practical purposes might as well be
I’m personally very excited about how it does seem to be finally making progress if slowly, but realistically, I’m less convinced that it’ll be the solution to all our energy needs than many are. The physics of the process itself is very efficient, sure, but the kinds of machines needed to harness it are literally among the most expensive and complicated things built by humans, and they don’t even produce net energy yet. Granted, the cost of such things should be reduced once they are industrial machinery and not exotic scientific instruments loaded with experiments, but I’d bet that the reactors themselves will still be incredibly expensive and complex (and therefore have expensive maintenance). This doesn’t say good things about the actual cost of the resulting energy, even if the fuel is quite abundant. We could get abundant energy with a similarly high if not quite as much fuel efficiency with advanced fission reactors and fuel breeding, but the cost of those kinds of plants has been relatively prohibitive, and the costs of renewables has been falling. I could certainly see it possible for fusion to reach net energy, only to get used only on specialized roles or for base load power because solar panels end up being cheaper. In a sense this has already happened. It is theoretically possible, if not practically desirable, to use fusion energy in a power plant already, by detonating fusion explosives in a gigantic underground chamber full of water to heat it up, and harnessing the steam. Such ideas were considered during the cold war, but never developed, at least in part because it was calculated that they wouldn’t be cost competitive compared to other power options.
I agree with you, but I don’t think it means we stop the pursuit. It won’t be viable or cheap enough in time to help in the transition off fossil fuels. If it does pay off the way some people think it may be a viable energy source for carbon sequestration to undo some of our stupidity though. I think it’s worth that moonshot.
Oh I wasn’t suggesting we should stop the pursuit. I just think it won’t be a magic bullet for solving our energy needs the way some proponents seem to suggest it will be.
That’s not really net energy gain from a practical standpoint. Technically yes, they get more energy than was present in their lasers, but those those lasers aren’t created perfectly efficiently, and so the actual electricity needed to create them still is much higher than the energy output of the reaction
It’s pretty easy to imagine fusion being great - but it’s still just in our imaginations. No one has yet been able to build a working fusion power plant. There has been progress over the decades that people have tried, but its still a way to go yet. So although we can imagine that it could produce clean and plentiful energy, we just comparing sci-fi tech to current tech. The future reality might not be so great, and the current reality is that fusion power isn’t possible at all.
To illustrate my point, lets imagine solar power from a ‘theoretical’ point of view, like fusion is described. Solar power uses no fuel; gets its power from sunlight. There is enough energy coming from the sun to meet the whole world’s energy needs with just reality small amount of area. Solar power produces no waste biproducts… So if we just imagine the benefits of solar power, it sounds pretty much perfect. In in reality though, although solar is very good, it is still far from perfect. Construction, maintenance, and disposal of the panels are where the costs are. And so to compare to fusion, we’d need to know what it would take to build, maintain, and disposal of the fusion power plants. Currently we can’t do it at all - so the costs are basically infinite. But even if our tech improves to the point where it is possible… it’s hard to imagine it will be easy or cheap - especially because there will be radioactive waste. (Radioactive waste not from the fuel, but from the walls and shielding of the reactor, as it absorbs high-energy particles produced by the operation of the power plant.)
Every previous adoption of technology has taken - what, 50 years? - between having the technology and being set up to make use of it. Gasoline did not immediately have car engines to put into, nor kerosine a whole city’s worth of lamps set up to receive them, etc.
Though at first, if fusion could power up the existing electrical grid then it could e.g. make electrical cars more efficient in the net/overall sense, even if vehicles operating directly on fusion power themselves would take many more years. So fusion really might be different than those that came before, if we are anticipating and more ready for it than previous technical advances?
Though yeah, it will have its own challenges e.g. the radioactive wastes, so fusion would not begin to replace greener energy approaches such as solar, wind, and geothermal, only perhaps supplement them.
radioactive wastes
afaik, this isn’t a thing for nuclear fusion. fission, to a very limited degree. yes, but fusion, no, not really.
Not for the direct reaction itself but I thought there was something about spraying the container down or some such… I am probably entirely BSing here:-). In any case, whenever someone figures out a method to make it practical, then we’ll see whatever downsides there may be to that:-P.
It’s definitely a problem with the grid, since too much supply is at least as big a problem as too much. Hopefully we’ll get things like molten salt batteries so we can soak up this excess and decarbonise heavy industry.
Why couldn’t the solar panels simply be turned off - is that not an easy solution to having too much intake?
You’re wasting energy then, and you also need to have some controller on each one to communicate with the grid. No country has a smart grid yet.
Yeah but you said it was a “problem” - like I dunno, likely the excess energy start a fire or something? - whereas turning them off seems like it would reduce that to the system merely being less efficient than would otherwise be possible.
Anyway, definitely some kind of energy storage battery seems naively to me like it would be the best solution, even if used in conjunction with several forms of energy production (solar, wind, geothermal, maybe biomaterials etc.).
They do shut off (“curtail”) renewable energy because it is a problem - excess power can destabilise the grid, causing brownouts and blackouts and also physically damage grid equipment like transformers and transmission lines over time.
Like turning them off… Which is fine. Turning off solar panels is literally built into the systems and can be automated
Sure, but you’re not getting as much output from your panels as you could in total that way, making them less efficient overall. I’m not saying you can’t run a power grid on this stuff, just that the adaptations to use them in a grid effectively have costs, and those costs are not exclusive to capitalism
Just use the extra energy to shoot random laser beams into space… Make sure the aliens know we’re armed
I get the sentiment in here, but the poster is missing an important point: there is a reason some group of lunatics (called the TSO or Transport System Operator or in some cases other power producers) are willing to pay for people to consume electricity when there is too much of it; They are not doing it for the sake of being lunatics, the electrical system cannot handle over or underproduction. Perfectly balanced (as all things should be) is the only way the grid can exist.
The production capacity in the grid needs to be as big as peak demand. The challenge we face with most renewables is that their production is fickly. For a true solarpunk future, the demand side needs to be flexible and there need to be energy storages to balance the production (and still, in cold and dark environments other solutions are needed).
In off-grid, local usages we usually see this happen naturally. We conserve power on cloudy low-wind days to make sure we have enough to run during the night (demand side flexibility) and almost everyone has a suitably sized battery to last the night. The price variability is one (flawed) mechanism to make this happen on a grid or bidding zone level.
There conclusion is shit, but doesn’t the electrical grid require the amount generate and consumed to be effectively the same? I could see the difference being more of an issue as renewable become more prevalent, and we unfortunately cannot just turn off the sun when we don’t need it.
Yeah, it’s a bit ragebaity. Afaik the solar panels can be “turned off” (disconnected from the grid/open load) just fine, and there absolutely needs to be a way for this to happen automatically (a proper smart grid).
The big power plants are another story.
The first reauui found is kinda interesting — even conventional diesel generators have this issue https://www.cat.com/en_US/by-industry/electric-power/Articles/White-papers/the-impact-of-generator-set-underloading.html
Negative electricity prices primarily incentivise investments into energy storage, this is thus not a problem except in the very short run.
The OP hints at what the real “problem” is: lack of opportunity to extract profits due to inability to control and create (artificial) scarcity, which is at the core of capitalism.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028461/solar-value-deflation-california-climate-change/
I’m not sure I’d call their conclusion shit. It’s harder to get people to build solar if they have to pay people to take the power or trigger the emergency shutdowns.
They end with a discussion on how to fix it, not some claim we shouldn’t do solar because it can’t turn a profit. Batteries, shifting demanding use to be during peek solar production hours, or sharing power better between grids and the like.
Not many thing can do opportunistic consumption, especially consumer electronics. I can only think of charging, heating(water and air) and AC. If price update period is big then washing machines and dryers.
I hate to be the akshully guy but the big problem isn’t economics but usage. We can’t store electricity at any kind of meaningful scale so generation needs to be balanced to meet demand. Unused excess power needs to go somewhere, hence the negative prices (the market way of saying, “please somebody take this electricity it’s doing more harm than good on the grid”).
Shutting down solar is super easy. You just need a switch. Wind is a bit more complicated, but it is basically stopping the rotor. The reason for negative prices are subsidies. So they can sell to the government or get some extra money as to be able to operate them properly.
Also we do not need to store insane amounts of electricity. As soon as your grid is large enough weather balances itself out fairly well. For the EU the worst production of solar and wind combined was still 897GWh in a day last year. The average was 1770GWh per day. So worst case it was half the average prodcution. If you go weekly it is 9335GWh and 12423GWh respectivly so even less. So you really only need a good enough grid and something like a days worth of storage. That actually ends up being pretty reasonable, as soon as you consider stored hydro and other flexible electricity generation.
Just send all that extra power for free over to the tech companies training AI to fix the problem of how much energy it consumes.
I like the system where the excess power is used to pump water into a reservoir up a mountain and when power is needed it runs it down a turbine into a lower reservoir.
Yea there are plenty of ways to store energy using things like gravity as a battery. The crap saying we can’t handle the extra energy is BS. We won’t, cuz money before planet, but we 100% can.
Most places where this can be done, it is already being done. The low hanging fruit for pumped hydro was all picked decades ago, and at great cost to the ecosystems it destroyed in the process - turns out that drowning thousands of acres in massive man-made lakes had a bit of an impact on the plants and animals that lived there.
Not saying that the benefits weren’t worth the cost, that’s a whole different debate. But there’s little to no opportunity to scale this energy storage tech beyond it’s current footprint.
Just make a tall and really skinny lake.
What if we filled space elevator shaft with water :o
/s just in case
Well, you have to handle excess power produced, you can’t just dump it on the ground.
If the grid produces too much power in excess of what’s being consumed, parts of it need to shutdown to prevent damage.
That’s why the price can go negative. They’ll actively pay you to use the power so they don’t have to hit emergency shutdowns.
As we build more solar plants, the problem gets exacerbated since all the solar plants produce power at the same time until it’s in excess of what anyone needs. Unlimited free power isn’t very helpful if when it’s producing it’s producing so much that it has to be cut from the grid, and when demand rises it’s not producing and they have to spin up gas turbines.
That’s before the money part of it, where people don’t want to spend a million dollars to make a plant that they need to pay people to use power from.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/07/14/1028461/solar-value-deflation-california-climate-change/
They go on to talk about how getting consumption to be shifted to those high production times can help, as can building power storage systems or just ways to better share power with places further away.
You quite literally could dump it into the ground (wire).
You can’t.
“Can” and “should” are different things.
And that’s why you can’t.
As some other comments have explained in better terms, you can hook it to ground directly, technically. But you can’t if you like, want things to be good and not broken all to hell.
We could do so much good with excess power generation if we wanted to. We could produce hydrogen. We could electrolyse CO2 out of the air. We could filter the plastic out of ocean water. We could analyse space radiation. We could run recycling plants. We could flood the bitcoin market. We could run a desalination plant. Why does this have to be a problem?
Because we’re not doing those things at the moment?
Having a solution available doesn’t make it not a problem.
Something having a problem doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing, and not all problems are bad things, they’re just things that need figuring out.
People too often think that identifying an issue with something means that it’s being argued that we should abandon it or that it’s unfixable.
Solar is not a perfect technology, because there are no perfect technologies. It has solvable problems are or will need to be addressed as we keep using it. That’s fine and normal.
It is normal, but this particular “problem” looks more like an opportunity than most. Seems silly to be complaining about it.
Anyway, is it “Fish and a …” ?
Who’s complaining? Read the article I linked, it’s what the quote came from. Informing people about an issue, discussing it’s consequences and listing some solutions is hardly complaining.
I’m not sure why you put problem in quotes, it’s an issue that has to be resolved which is the definition of a problem. It’s not silly to me to talk about an issue.
You think we should do carbon sequestration with the power. That’s a great notion. Should we tell the solar plants they need to do that, should the public build them, or should we incentivize companies to do it somehow?I just can’t see how people are this upset about an article explaining how “more than we can handle” means “people might stop making more” and “we need to figure out how to handle it”.
I’m not sure what you’re talking about with the fish?
Government should invest in more energy storage so the excess can be used later, like at night
That and incentivise smart devices like water heaters that run when power is cheap, which is effectively a rudimentary battery
If all grids did was put high resolution pricing data on the wire we could make those decisions for ourselves.
It still takes upfront investment. that’s easy if you’re wealthy but a lot harder if you’re pay check to pay check + there’s no reason landlords would do it. part of it is the high resolution pricing data, but we need more than just that
Everything is a cost.
It could quite easily be cheaper to pay people to use energy than it is to store it. Once that equation changes then hopefully they start buying storage.
Problem is that storing electric energy at a large scale is really difficult, with lots of engineering and research effort going into finding solutions. Investment into storage is good, but it’s still an area of active research how to even do it.
This is interesting in the UK because the government agrees on a set a price it will pay wind farms for energy.
If power is expensive the wind farms lose out and get paid less than the value of energy. But when wind power is high and prices low they get paid the guaranteed price at the goverments expense. The government even tells them to turn of the turbines and they still get paid.
Bare in mind peak wind can last weeks rather than solar hours. But this system is one of the main reasons UK is a world leader in wind.
People struggle with the economics of losing money being the optimal solution and they want some magic situation where nothing is wasted at 0 cost but provides all demand exactly when required. Nothing works like that.
Well, you have to handle excess power produced, you can’t just dump it on the ground.
Thats literally what a “ground” is electrically. The ground.
We literally design electrical systems to do exactly this, all day long. You can literally “dump power into the ground.”
If you could do that there’d be tones to research going on about how to extract the energy stored in the ground as the storage capacity would in many orders of magnitude greater than we have now. We’d also be probably capturing the energy released in thunderstorms.
A chance for @bradorsomething, son of Gondor, to show his quality!
When we refer to the grounded conductor (the neutral), it does have a reference to the ground potential of the building receiving power. But the current generated by the power plant seeks the least resistive path back to its source, and the grounded conductor provides a path back to the generation plant that carries no voltage potential for electricity to draw towards or away from - the wire simply accepts the flow of energy to or from the power plant, to complete the circuit without changing the voltage potential.
There is also a grounding wire, which is green or bare, which is present in building in the US to allow anything electrified by stray wires to complete the circuit and trip the breakers in the panel. This wire joins to the grounded conductor (the white colored neutral) at the main panel where the utility provides power… utilities use the neutral as their ground, so current completes the circuit back to the power plant through the neutral.
When I say “the circuit looks for a path back to its source,” I’m playing a little fast and loose here… the current seeks the most potential to complete the circuit pathway. This path is almost always the return path to the power plant.
Join us next week, when I explain that lightning doesn’t care much about our wire at all, because at that scale it’s like the ocean caring about a moat at a sand castle!
No, you can’t.
The ground in a circuit doesn’t dissipate energy — the energy gets dissipated elsewhere. That’s what ground is: it’s what we call the electrical part of a circuit where the energy has already been dissipated (I’m being a little casual with my electricity, but I think it’s a valid statement nonetheless — ground is defined as the zero potential).
You can try this out by plugging a wire from hot to ground in your house (please don’t do this). The energy gets dissipated in the wires. This is bad, because it is a lot of energy dissipated very quickly. Best case you throw the breaker. Worst case you burn down your house.
You can run it through a very large grid of aluminum fins which get hot, and you know, I don’t know, boil water with it or something to be used for uh, purposes, such as heated water. :)
Yep absolutely — a few kW? I can burn that no problem. A MW? Well…that takes a little more thought. A GW? That’s a whole different ballgame.
Haha, thanks for taking my comment with humor and stride. Yeah, you’re right. I still think having too much energy is a good problem to have overall.
I do microsolar and when my batteries are full (rare), I just unplug them. The solar panels just sit baking in the sun, and then cool off at night.
What is microsolar? Tried looking it up, didn’t come up with much.
It’s having a very small (typically less than 2 kW) solar system
So… You can use it. As exactly described. By the description of the problem.
Sorry for being snarky, but this is exactly what the “paying people to use your energy” part of this situation is.
It’s weird that that’s possible as such an easy solution, and all those electrical engineers never thought to use it, instead putting in load banks and all sorts of contrivances to heat metal in an emergency, or find complex ways to hide excess production in normal load and balance production by managing the generators.
Even weirder that the people who run solar grids opted to pay people to take excess power rather than just dumping it on the ground, although a lot of them have also taken to heating metal instead, or water for smaller home setups.Yes, you can technically connect your generator directly to the ground. This isn’t something people want to do because it can damage equipment.
It’s why that heating metal trick is used as part of the emergency shutdown rather than as part of load regulation, and they don’t want to use it because they have to make sure the right bit of metal melted.None of this has anything to do with people needing to react to excess current in an electrical grid, and not just let it be a situation that happens. It requires intervention was the point of the phrase.
As a professional engineer who literally designs solar power plants for a living, this is not how electricity works. It is true that solar inverters can throttle their output by operating at non-optimal voltages, but you can’t just dump power into the ground without causing major issues to the grid infrastructure.
Why?
I’m not doubting you, I’m just a big curious nerd
In an ideal picture, ground isn’t where energy gets dissipated — there’s no such thing as “dumping energy to ground” (or if you prefer, everything is “dumping energy to ground”).
If ground dissipates significant energy, this has all sorts of Very Bad implications. For starters, the ground can no longer be at uniform potential if it dissipates — so now we have a ground that isn’t actually at ground! (This just follows from Ohm’s law.)
Another way of stating this is to imagine what sort of circuit you need to “dump energy to ground.” This is probably just a wire connecting hot to ground — but what happens if you do this in your home, i.e., plug a wire from hot to ground (please do not do this!)? It gets really, really hot, and will probably either throw the breaker, melt, or start a fire. The reason it gets hot is because it’s the wire that dissipated the energy.
Ok. So the reason the wire gets hot is because it has finite resistance. So what if we choose an imaginary superconductor instead? Well, now we’re trying to draw infinite power, which is bad! In practice of course it won’t be infinite, and will be determined by the resistance of the power lines feeding it. But remember that wire that got really hot? Now we’re treating the power lines that way. So this is really not good, and besides, we wanted to use a controlled amount of power, which this clearly isn’t.
So, we can be smarter here and add some resistance to our load — instead of a wire from hot to ground, we now have maybe a coil of low-but-finite resistance wire. This works great, and it’s just a resistive heater.
The problem isn’t dumping energy at a human scale (e.g., an individual space heater) — the problem is when you have excess power on an industrial scale.
If all the energy is actually being released by the wire through resistance, then why’s the potential of the ground changing?
The potential at the ground isn’t (or shouldn’t) be changing — which is the same thing as saying the power isn’t being dissipated in the ground. So the power isn’t being “dumped to ground,” it’s being dumped through the wire.
So basically, two options: 1) you dissipate power in the load, which is what should happen, and everyone is happy. 2) you dissipate power across your ground, which means ground is no longer really ground, and all sorts of nasty and dangerous things can happen.
Does lightning cause those nasty things to happen?
Unlimited free energy of any sort is unsustainable. Our planet is a balanced system that has evolved over eons, simply adding energy upsets this balance and probably not in ways that will ultimately be beneficial for us. We can see many negative effects already from adding massive amounts of fossil energy to the system (besides the greenhouse effect and pollution) such as population growth beyond the bounds of the planet.
Remember what Conservatives said about “not enough power”? I think that might be a lie
I dont get the argument about hydrogen not being effective and too much energy going to waste in its production, when we have to stop wind turbines during windy seasons because they generated too much electricity that what can be sold. If we have too much electricity. We can store it in hydrogen and dont mind how much goes to waste. It would be wasted anyway
Get on half hourly tariff if you can (example for the UK is Octopus Agile).
As long as you don’t concentrate your usage between 4pm and 7pm, it saves a shitload of money over a regular tariff. The other day, they paid me to put the washing machine on.
