Excel goof officially a global menace



  • Maybe we should use a (GDP / price of a loaf of bread) ratio.

    That would put the Netherlands at 321,756, according to this page and some google currency conversion.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dhromed said:

    Maybe we should use a (GDP / price of a loaf of bread) ratio.
    Not immune to fiddling. Would that be a 0.50UKP loaf or a 5.99UKP one.



  • @PJH said:

    @dhromed said:
    Maybe we should use a (GDP / price of a loaf of bread) ratio.
    Not immune to fiddling. Would that be a 0.50UKP loaf or a 5.99UKP one.
     

    Ha, sure, but I'm "obviously" not including luxurious placebobread.

    You could include both in a high/low calculation of common breads. I often vary between the €1.75 and the €2.10 bread depending on what kind of variety I want. 

    There's absolutely zero correlation between price and quality here, even though there's significant rack placement and clear package branding to indicate that the €2.10 loaves are better.

     

    But implementation details aside, I hope it's clear that what I'm trying to do is measure the actual buying power of people of basic goods.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @boomzilla said:
    SS is actually not a super huge problem. In budget terms, it's fairly easy to keep going. Medicare is where the problems are.

    I disagree. They're both really big problems. SS has massive unfunded liabilities. What's more, there are an ever-increasing number of Americans who have nothing put away for retirement. All they have is SS. I have a feeling things are going to pretty ugly.

    I'm not saying that the magnitude of SS isn't problematic, but a little means testing and some inflation adjustments and a bit more tax can take care of it. But note that current projections are fairly stable as a percent of GDP, as opposed to Medicare, which is projected to grow a lot:

    Entitlement Spending Will Nearly Double by 2050

  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Then there's the fact that GDP doesn't measure wealth or well-being, but just the value of all things produced in a country for the year.

    GDP has a lot of problems, but it seems to be a pretty decent metric for well being:

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Here's another: the Boston bombings...[as broken window falacy]

    Exactly. Ditto for hurricanes, earthquakes and alien invasions.



  • @boomzilla said:

    GDP has a lot of problems, but it seems to be a pretty decent metric for well being:
     

    For more information about SPI, click here.

    (I was skeptical of another made-up complex index being compared to GDP which is also a complex value, so I looked it up. Seems legit in principle.)

    ('complex' being that it's condensed from many other values, not i )



  • @bridget99 said:

    How did I squander it?
    Simple, you voted for people who "cut your marginal taxes" by shifting the money they took from you from the SS pot to the general fund pot when they forced Social Security to buy US Debt with it's surpluses. You bought into the idea that this way just a "loan" from SS to the general fund that will eventually be paid back not realizing or caring that you might be dead and gone before the loan came due. You were probably even happy that the government "cut" your taxes!

    NOTE: you should visualize somebody doing air quotes around all of those quotation marks.
    EDIT: added more air quotes to up the douchiness of the post.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @bridget99 said:
    Look at the part of my post you're quoting. It has nothing to do with Social Security. You need to learn to use the quote feature and/or read what actual post.

    From the context, I assumed you were talking about that. Regardless, even if you own actual US bonds, who cares? I've already told you that they're worth whatever the hell the gov't decides they're worth. Sure, they have to pay you something. No, it doesn't have to be anything of value. They can pay you in Monopoly money, if they want. As I've said, they've already played the bait-and-switch before, don't think they'll hesitate to do it again.


    Finally got it, huh? I only had to point this out... four, five times?



    And the government can't pay me back in "Monopoly money." They have to pay their bonds off in US dollars.You seem to be implying that US dollars will be worthless soon, but that's belied by the decade or so of flat prices we've experienced. I understand, of course, that reality cannot be allowed to pollute right wing politics. There's always some excuse, and the crash is always just around the corner...


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bridget99 said:

    They have to pay their bonds off in US dollars.
    Which they (or their very close friends in the Fed) can just print to their hearts' content. It would cause inflation, lots of it, but the law doesn't prevent them from doing it. They could probably also find a way to change the amount that they owe you, for example, by requiring you to work another few years before qualifying for payments. Who knows? You might even die from being charged by an escaped rhino before then, and then they'd owe your heirs nothing. Which is why it isn't a real debt.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Meanwhile, the US standard of living continues into its fifth straight decade of decline. Isn't it unbelievable that people used to support families with only one parent working and without a massive debt load? Now you need both parents working at least 50 hours a week, plus an underwater mortgage, a few car loans and not to mention some credit card debt.

    Actually, that's not, strictly speaking, true. Don't buy more house than you need, and don't buy a bunch of cars (which generalizes to don't buy a lot of shit you don't need,) and you can get by with a lot less.

    If you're some dipshit in Chicago talking about going on strike because you can't support a family because McDonald's won't pay you $15 an hour, you're probably too far down that path to be able to heed this advice, unfortunately.



  • @dkf said:

    @bridget99 said:
    They have to pay their bonds off in US dollars.
    Which they (or their very close friends in the Fed) can just print to their hearts' content. It would cause inflation, lots of it, but the law doesn't prevent them from doing it. They could probably also find a way to change the amount that they owe you, for example, by requiring you to work another few years before qualifying for payments. Who knows? You might even die from being charged by an escaped rhino before then, and then they'd owe your heirs nothing. Which is why it isn't a real debt.

    I think inflation is exactly what needs to happen here. I said that in my first post in that thread. The inability of the US political system to do a damned thing almost guarantee that inflation will be used to wallpaper over these problems. The alternative would be for the people who run our country to actually come up with some kind of major entitlement / financing reform, and I think there are just too many assclowns in that group for it to ever happen.



    I used to buy into a lot of the same right wing arguments as the rest of you. But I noticed a pattern. We elected a guy who talked like the posters here (Reagan) and, for all his talk of small government, he maxed out all of our credit. Then, we elected someone with more left wing views (Clinton), and after eight hard years, the government was actually running a surplus. Of course, the right wingers were whining about Mena the whole time, and interrogating waitresses in Arkansas, and fabricating tin foil hats, and blowing up federal buildings and Ob-Gyn clinics... but somehow the rest of the nation managed to pull itself out of the gutter it had been put into by "capitalist" warmongers. Then we elected another self-proclaimed free marketeer (G.W. Bush) and, lo and behold, that surplus had turned into a horrific deficit in a matter on months, and the economy was in the tank by the time he left, and our credit maxed out.



    Now, we've elected another more Clinton-esque, middle-of-the-road President, and he's slowly undoing all of the wars, and rationalizing our finances to the extent that politics will allow it, and yet we still get the same tired, old cries from the right: the gold standard, small government, birth certificates, etcetera. If I vote for someone who makes these nice-sounding arguments, what suggests that the result will be any different from Reagan or Bush? Do you really expect me to walk right into another cash grab engineered by the defense establishment, just because I liked "Atlas Shrugged?"



    I think this whole discussion is overblown. It was asked, "who does the US federal government owe money to?" I think this has been answered: individuals and private businesses, who are largely American, and the Social Security trust fund. There has been a whole lot of noise posted as well, by people who apparently want the USA to fall flat on its face to prove some kind of point about welfare queens or maybe about Muslim Presidents. What does this "noise" say about the people who posted it? Nothing good, in my opinion. Paying one's debts is good. Participating in the social and economic life of one's country is good... even if you don't like the President.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @bridget99 said:

    You seem to be implying that US dollars will be worthless soon, but that's belied by the decade or so of flat prices we've experienced.

    Where do you buy stuff? Who is selling all this cheap stuff to you?

    @bridget99 said:

    I understand, of course, that reality cannot be allowed to pollute right wing politics.

    Yes, about as well as you seem to understand anything.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bridget99 said:

    We may reach the magical day when ruthless kids will just abscond with the Social Security trust fund

    Ah, I found the problem. Bridget, Al Gore's lying aside, there is no trust fund. There hasn't been since at least 1986, if not before, when Congress started putting the money from Social Security directly into the General Fund. All--every last penny--of current receipts go into paying current beneficiaries and whatever else Democrats like spending a trillion dollars a year more than they bring in on. The promise you think Uncle Sam is making is that your kids and grandkids' FICA taxes will pay for your retirement, when it comes, if it comes, and what everyone here is trying to tell you is that Uncle Sam has never felt that promise is legally binding, and the courts back him up.

    This isn't rocket science, bro. I was born in 1970 and I've known this was coming since I started paying attention, about 20 years ago. The Boomers voted themselves all kinds of shit without any thought for who would pay for it, and now that it's clear that their own descendants will have to pay--and pay dearly--for it, they continue to not care. You know how we know they don't care? Because the Federal government keeps spending a trillion dollars a year more than it takes in.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bridget99 said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @bridget99 said:
    I own US government debt, in the form of shares in a fund that invests in inflation-controlled bonds issued by the USA.

    And what we're saying is "No you don't, you moron."

    Can you see how this looks a bit asinine, now that I've edited it down to its core?

    Let me explain how asinine this looks. Remember GM and Chevrolet? Remember how they went bankrupt, and Obama forced[1] all the debt holders to take an ass reaming so the unions didn't have to take a pay cut?

    You're one of GM's debt holders, and SS is Obama, the unions, and the rest of the federal government.

    [1] no, it wasn't all him, but nobody else with any power to do anything about it every actually tried before to shit on the bankruptcy process the way he managed to.



  • @bridget99 said:

    Stuff
    Well, I suppose that's one way to put it...



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    ...Then add in the fact that currency developer devaluation has outpaced nominal GDP developer supply for some time, and one is left to wonder why people even bother with GDP corporate servitude, except for the fact that ignorant people chicks think it's important, so it serves as a useful propaganda mating tool.





    There, FTFY.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bridget99 said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    @bridget99 said:
    Look at the part of my post you're quoting. It has nothing to do with Social Security. You need to learn to use the quote feature and/or read what actual post.

    From the context, I assumed you were talking about that. Regardless, even if you own actual US bonds, who cares? I've already told you that they're worth whatever the hell the gov't decides they're worth. Sure, they have to pay you something. No, it doesn't have to be anything of value. They can pay you in Monopoly money, if they want. As I've said, they've already played the bait-and-switch before, don't think they'll hesitate to do it again.


    Finally got it, huh? I only had to point this out... four, five times?



    And the government can't pay me back in "Monopoly money." They have to pay their bonds off in US dollars.You seem to be implying that US dollars will be worthless soon, but that's belied by the decade or so of flat prices we've experienced. I understand, of course, that reality cannot be allowed to pollute right wing politics. There's always some excuse, and the crash is always just around the corner...

    Flat prices. Hah, guys, let's all move to wherever the hell bridget99 lives, where gas isn't twice what it was 5 years ago, and where many kinds of food cost twice as much as it did 5 years ago, health insurance premiums aren't rising at 10% a year or whatever, etc., etc.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @bridget99 said:

    Now, we've elected another more Clinton-esque, middle-of-the-road President

    You are delusional.

    BTW, the only reason Clinton saw the deficit going downwards is because an at-the-time-still-somewhat-fiscally-responsible Republican congress forced him to cut back on his spending plans, and of course the dotcom bubble hadn't yet completely popped.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @bridget99 said:

    I think inflation is exactly what needs to happen here. The inability of the US political system to do a damned thing almost guarantee that inflation will be used to wallpaper over these problems.

    Yes, and pretty much everyone understands that this is stupid. Well, you're right about "wallpapering over" these things, because inflation will make things looks better at first, but then it will make things worse. At least, the amount of inflation that will be needed. It might not get into hyperinflation, but I would expect worse than 1970s inflation.

    @bridget99 said:

    But I noticed a pattern. We elected a guy who talked like the posters here (Reagan) and, for all his talk of small government, he maxed out all of our credit. Then, we elected someone with more left wing views (Clinton), and after eight hard years, the government was actually running a surplus. Of course, the right wingers were whining about Mena the whole time, and interrogating waitresses in Arkansas, and fabricating tin foil hats, and blowing up federal buildings and Ob-Gyn clinics... but somehow the rest of the nation managed to pull itself out of the gutter it had been put into by "capitalist" warmongers. Then we elected another self-proclaimed free marketeer (G.W. Bush) and, lo and behold, that surplus had turned into a horrific deficit in a matter on months, and the economy was in the tank by the time he left, and our credit maxed out.



    Now, we've elected another more Clinton-esque, middle-of-the-road President,

    You're wrong about several things (only because you only mentioned several things). You've left out the composition of the Congresses, for one. And I cannot imagine the thought process that puts Clinton (the master triangulator) and Obama anywhere near each other. It's true that Reagan's plan to starve the beast was a miserable failure. This screed makes less sense than your views on writing secure and user friendly Windows applications.



  • @bridget99 said:

    So nobody agrees with me except for the Chairman of the Federal Reserve? OK; I'll take that.

    Argumentum ad verecundiam fail.



  • Oh, already there's a multipage political discussion? I was just hoping that somebody else realized that Excel shouldn't clear undo stack in AutoRecover.


  • Trolleybus Mechanic

    @MiffTheFox said:

    Oh, already there's a multipage political discussion? I was just hoping that somebody else realized that Excel shouldn't clear undo stack in AutoRecover.

     

    I already told Mozilla, but they won't give me credit.

     



  • @dhromed said:

    Maybe we should use a (GDP / price of a loaf of bread) ratio.

    That would put the Netherlands at 321,756, according to this page and some google currency conversion.

    That's not far off from how PPP GDP is calculated (they use the prices of several commodities to measure inflation between currencies). Still, that doesn't get around the fact that what GDP is measuring isn't much of a reflection of wealth or how well-off people are.



  • @boomzilla said:

    ...but a little means testing and some inflation adjustments and a bit more tax can take care of it.

    Higher taxes and fewer benefits for people who actually pay for the system and you don't see that as a problem? I think we're already in a Welfare State Death Spiral, and SS is just going to speed things up. Meanwhile, they've been using the phony inflation figures just to keep from having to increase payouts. I fully expect this policy of pretending inflation doesn't exist while creating it to continue, as another covert revenue stream.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    doesn't get around the fact that what GDP is measuring isn't much of a reflection of wealth or how well-off people are.
     

    Well, only if you also reject SPI as introduced by boomy.

    @morbiuswilters said:

    (they use the prices of several commodities to measure inflation between currencies)

    I just realized that the price of ordinary goods might vary even when using the same currency and exchange rate, due to availability of a country's natural resources. So without actually having all the data, I can't tell if using common goods is a useful yardstick.

     


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Still, that doesn't get around the fact that what GDP is measuring isn't much of a reflection of wealth or how well-off people are.

    Except that it is actually a pretty decent reflection, as far as metrics go. Which is to say that no one has come up with something obviously and significantly better.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    @boomzilla said:
    ...but a little means testing and some inflation adjustments and a bit more tax can take care of it.

    Higher taxes and fewer benefits for people who actually pay for the system and you don't see that as a problem? I think we're already in a Welfare State Death Spiral, and SS is just going to speed things up. Meanwhile, they've been using the phony inflation figures just to keep from having to increase payouts. I fully expect this policy of pretending inflation doesn't exist while creating it to continue, as another covert revenue stream.

    I never said it wasn't a problem. Are you in straw man mode or just not reading carefully? Just that the magnitude of the fixes are relatively small compared to the rest of the welfare leviathan. The first step is probably to start calling it what it is, welfare for retired people.



  • @boomzilla said:

    GDP has a lot of problems, but it seems to be a pretty decent metric for well being:

    I don't see that at all. SPI seems primarily concerned with intangibles, trendy "social causes" and government spending. For example, they actually count low energy use per-$1000 of GDP as a positive indicator. But cheap, plentiful energy is the very backbone of modern economies. Without it, none of us would be here. It's only through cheap energy that we've been able to shrug off the burden of manual labor. And then they have shit like "tertiary school enrollment" (we have too fucking much as it is) and "women treated with respect" (how the fuck do you quantify that??)

    And is it any shock that countries with high GDP (which nowadays pretty much just means high rates of government spending) are also countries with large "tertiary school enrollment" or low CO2 emissions per-capita? Only countries with high levels of government spending are deluded enough to believe these are meaningful goals.

    Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a vague correlation in there. A country that has a per-capita GDP of $50k is almost certainly going to be better off than one at $5k. But when you get down to closer quantities ($45k vs $50k), I think it becomes significantly murkier. And this is where GDP is being relied on the most: we don't need to look at GDPs to know that India is shit-poor compared to the US, but GDP is often brought up in the context of comparing two developing countries or comparing a country's current economic state to previous years, and I think that's where it's the most senseless. American GDP has risen steadily for most of the last 45 years, but I'd say actual prosperity has dropped considerably since the late 60s.

    Here are some more interesting metrics: how many hours do people in the average family have to work to pay for stuff? What is the debt load of the average family? What percentage of the population receive welfare of some sort?



  • @boomzilla said:

    Just that the magnitude of the fixes are relatively small compared to the rest of the welfare leviathan.

    I don't think those fixes are small at all. If you're saying that telling working people that taxes are going to go up even more and they will receive less SS is going to even work.. No, people aren't gonna buy that shit. Most people are too ignorant and/or delusional to even realize that SS is insolvent and has been for the last 60 years. When you jack up SS taxes and cut benefits, that's going to hasten the coming economic chaos. And then consider that any politicians who do that will be crucified. It's been obvious for the last--what, dozen?--election cycles that the American people have no interest in being told the truth or accepting any kind of real solution to the nation's ills.

    I understand that, percentage-wise, the "fixes" for SS are not much, but culturally they're light years away. I think we'll see pretty severe violence before we see any fixes to SS. But maybe I am a pessimist..



  • @boomzilla said:

    @morbiuswilters said:
    Still, that doesn't get around the fact that what GDP is measuring isn't much of a reflection of wealth or how well-off people are.

    Except that it is actually a pretty decent reflection, as far as metrics go. Which is to say that no one has come up with something obviously and significantly better.

    I don't think you're actually reading what I'm saying. Sure, it's kinda useful in the extreme cases (India vs. the US, if you couldn't just tell by looking that India is worse off) but when comparing relatively close countries or the same country year-over-year, it's useless. And that's where it's deployed most often, usually to show that some policy is or isn't working.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    SPI seems primarily concerned with intangibles, trendy "social causes" and government spending.

    Yes. What I took away from the link I posted was that all that effort was put into it, and it wasn't telling you much of anything different than GDP. I certainly wasn't endorsing SPI, and I'm sure I would have many similar criticisms as you.

    @morbiuswilters said:

    Now don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's a vague correlation in there. A country that has a per-capita GDP of $50k is almost certainly going to be better off than one at $5k. But when you get down to closer quantities ($45k vs $50k), I think it becomes significantly murkier. And this is where GDP is being relied on the most: we don't need to look at GDPs to know that India is shit-poor compared to the US, but GDP is often brought up in the context of comparing two developing countries or comparing a country's current economic state to previous years, and I think that's where it's the most senseless.

    I think there's still value there. It's not perfect, and no one is saying it is (that I'm aware of). But if the per capita GDPs are similar, then you're probably looking at something similar. And changes in GDP are probably indicating something interesting, too.

    @morbiuswilters said:


    American GDP has risen steadily for most of the last 45 years, but I'd say actual prosperity has dropped considerably since the late 60s.

    Here are some more interesting metrics: how many hours do people in the average family have to work to pay for stuff? What is the debt load of the average family? What percentage of the population receive welfare of some sort?

    Don Boudreaux has done a few posts comparing old catalogs to new to see how much stuff used to cost vs what it costs today in terms of how many hours it would take for some average-type worker to buy it. Of course, many things we have today weren't available at any price.

    I definitely agree that these are important and interesting things to measure. I'm just not convinced that our prosperity is really worse, even though there are some metrics by which we are. The issues of debt are certainly important to the future, but the availability of more flexible financing (credit cards, payday loans) can be a good thing as well.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @morbiuswilters said:

    I don't think you're actually reading what I'm saying. Sure, it's kinda useful in the extreme cases (India vs. the US, if you couldn't just tell by looking that India is worse off) but when comparing relatively close countries or the same country year-over-year, it's useless. And that's where it's deployed most often, usually to show that some policy is or isn't working.

    Perhaps. I agree (as I said elsewhere) that there's plenty of noise. I guess I haven't noticed, exactly, this use of GDP. I think for the comparisons you're using, there's no way to get two people to even agree on how to rank different countries when they're that similar. To me, using GDP gets you into the ballpark, and that's about it. The rest is too subjective to mean much.



  • @boomzilla said:

    @bridget99 said:
    You seem to be implying that US dollars will be worthless soon, but that's belied by the decade or so of flat prices we've experienced.

    Where do you buy stuff? Who is selling all this cheap stuff to you?

    @bridget99 said:

    I understand, of course, that reality cannot be allowed to pollute right wing politics.

    Yes, about as well as you seem to understand anything.

    Consumer Price Index (CPI-U) changes for the last five years have been -.4%, 1.6%, 3.2%, 2.1%, and 1.9%. That averages out to well under 2% per year. Even if we round this up to 2% per year, we're talking about a price rise of 22% per decade. Historically, inflation in the USA averaged closer to 100% per decade... this was the rule-of-thumb I was taught in business school. So, we are in a time of historically low inflation.



    Now, I understand that you probably claim that CPI is bogus, and understates inflation. I think (and was taught) that it actually overstates it. It doesn't track increases in the quality of goods... sure, a car is twice as much as it was in 1985, but cars were shit back then. CPI doesn't capture that and it OVERSTATES inflation as a result. So, the government's claimed 1-2% inflation is quite likely negative in reality.



    I look at it like this: when a government outspends its revenue, it can finance the gap 1) through debt and/or 2) by printing money, i.e. inflation. The numbers tell us that we have done too much of #1 and not enough of #2. This is not some political conundrum; an automoton could look at the numbers and prescribe "more inflation, less debt."




  • ♿ (Parody)

    @bridget99 said:

    Now, I understand that you probably claim that CPI is bogus, and understates inflation. I think (and was taught) that it actually overstates it. It doesn't track increases in the quality of goods... sure, a car is twice as much as it was in 1985, but cars were shit back then. CPI doesn't capture that and it OVERSTATES inflation as a result. So, the government's claimed 1-2% inflation is quite likely negative in reality.

    There are many adjustments that understate inflation. <a href="http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpihqaitem.htm>Hedonic adjustments (adjusting for improved quality) are done by the BLS, for instance. They also use substitution of goods. It may be that the CPI overstates inflation, but they do things that you say they don't, so I think we can ignore what you recall being taught about this.



  • @notchulance said:

    http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/02/13/microsofts-excel-might-be-the-most-dangerous-software-on-the-planet/

    Because doing tabulations by hand without computer aid is always completely error-free!



  • @boomzilla said:

    @bridget99 said:
    Now, I understand that you probably claim that CPI is bogus, and understates inflation. I think (and was taught) that it actually overstates it. It doesn't track increases in the quality of goods... sure, a car is twice as much as it was in 1985, but cars were shit back then. CPI doesn't capture that and it OVERSTATES inflation as a result. So, the government's claimed 1-2% inflation is quite likely negative in reality.

    There are many adjustments that understate inflation. Hedonic adjustments (adjusting for improved quality) are done by the BLS, for instance. They also use substitution of goods. It may be that the CPI overstates inflation, but they do things that you say they don't, so I think we can ignore what you recall being taught about this.

    There's no way hedonistic adjustments capture everything they need to, though. How much did an abortion cost in 1940s Alabama? Hell, how much did a beer cost? In a lot of places at that time, neither could be (legally) had at any price, nor could black people live in certain places at any price. It's just ridiculous to say the standard of living has dropped in the US. It's true only if you assume that single-earner, white Christian households are all that matters.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @bridget99 said:

    There's no way hedonistic adjustments capture everything they need to, though.

    I would say there's no way they capture everything they could. But on the other hand, capturing anything is too much.

    @bridget99 said:

    It's just ridiculous to say the standard of living has dropped in the US. It's true only if you assume that single-earner, white Christian households are all that matters.

    I would argue it's not true even then, and I haven't been arguing that the standard of living is going down, so I'm not sure why you even brought that up.



  • @boomzilla said:

    The only thing keeping the USG afloat (as mentioned above) is that the rest of the world is in an even worse financial position

    ...except for us here in Australia, who are doing quite nicely thank you. But that will all change come September, when the cumulative effect of the Murdoch press's sustained white-anting campaign against the Government whose Keynesian economic policy put us in this sweet position will result in its replacement by a bunch of right wing moonbats with no policy vision beyond pandering to the aforesaid Murdoch and all his billionaire mates while proclaiming themselves the battlers' best friends. And they'll unwind the carbon tax to set our nascent green energy industry back another ten years and make sure we will continue to buy all our solar gear from China and Germany and our wind gear from Denmark because their Great Leader believes human induced global warming is (direct quote!) "absolute crap".

    It was looking good for a while there. Sigh.


  • ♿ (Parody)

    @flabdablet said:

    @boomzilla said:
    The only thing keeping the USG afloat (as mentioned above) is that the rest of the world is in an even worse financial position

    ...except for us here in Australia, who are doing quite nicely thank you.

    You guys are too small to matter.

    @flabdablet said:

    But that will all change come September, when the cumulative effect of the Murdoch press's sustained white-anting campaign against the Government whose Keynesian economic policy put us in this sweet position will result in its replacement by a bunch of right wing moonbats with no policy vision beyond pandering to the aforesaid Murdoch and all his billionaire mates while proclaiming themselves the battlers' best friends.

    I admit to not following Australian politics as closely as US, but it seems that Labor has been pretty retarded, and is screwing things up just fine on their own. I would have thought immediately and deliberately breaking major campaign promises would be enough (i.e., carbon tax), even if the policy wasn't as obviously stupid as that one is. But if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat...



  • Point taken, but read on. It may as well be done by hand. By a monkey. Think it would get checked then? This is an opportunity, somehow. Disallow copy-paste? Perhaps to sell spreadsheet insurance, perhaps to start Asperger Spreadsheeting Agency. Really, these guys should have released their data. I don't think anonymized data would be compelling for crowd-sourcing, unless you put the amount of money that depends on the correctness of the results. Anyway, as you can read from the blah blah here, econ is not science by a long shot, and too bound to politics.



  • @boomzilla said:

    I admit to not following Australian politics as closely as US, but it seems that Labor has been pretty retarded, and is screwing things up just fine on their own.

    Policy-wise they're doing OK on economic policy, and no worse than their opponents on anything else. Electorally, though, they're doomed - due mostly to hostile and/or lazy media that treats politics as just another content-free team sport.

    @boomzilla said:

    I would have thought immediately and deliberately breaking major campaign promises would be enough (i.e., carbon tax)

    They've had far more stick from the media for that particular broken promise than I've seen handed out to any previous Government I can remember. It's especially weird given that the particular backflip in question was pretty much a reversion to the policy stance that won the previous Labor Government its own term in office i.e. getting serious about carbon emissions by imposing a carbon price (Kevin Rudd campaigned heavily on this as a moral imperative).

    @boomzilla said:

    even if the policy wasn't as obviously stupid as that one is. But if that's the kind of thing that floats your boat...

    The only truly stupid thing about the carbon tax policy as it presently stands is an electorate that runs screaming to the exits at the mention of the word "tax", which is exactly why the Government always tries to spin it as a "carbon price" rather than a "carbon tax". Of course it is a tax in its present form.

    The most economically efficient way to shift commodity consumption patterns is by manipulating their prices, and the simplest way to manipulate the price of carbon emissions is to impose a direct tax on them. In theory you can get the same emission reduction outcome from a cap-and-trade emission pricing scheme as from a carbon tax - with cap-and-trade the Government can manipulate the cap, and with a tax it can manipulate the rate - but the tax is administratively simpler, easier to understand, easier to plan around and harder to rort. This is why most economists will recommend a carbon tax, while most financial industry lobbyists favor cap-and-trade.

    It is a pity that present Labor policy is to float the currently fixed carbon price in the future, converting the present interim scheme to full cap-and-trade. But even that is better than the idiot Opposition policy of repealing the whole thing and starting over; all that's going to do is undermine any chance that a local green energy industry might have of getting off to a solid start.

    Australia has enormous amounts of coal, which is currently making us good money. But we also have more consistent sunshine on more available land area than anybody else in the world. I can see no essential reason why, given a forward-thinking government, we couldn't become a Saudi of solar. Unfortunately, we're not going to have a forward-thinking government for at least another three years after September.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    No, you fuckface, it's a gaping wound to the local economy. Instead of using capital productively to build new things, they've got to replace old things. The measure of wealth and prosperity is not how many people you've got employed digging holes and then filling them back in.

    Just to recap:

    • I have a Pentium IV
    • Replacing it would be bad for the economy

  • ♿ (Parody)

    @flabdablet said:

    The most economically efficient way to shift commodity consumption patterns is by manipulating their prices, and the simplest way to manipulate the price of carbon emissions is to impose a direct tax on them.

    Except that there is no credible substitute and making ourselves poorer just makes it that much more difficult to ultimately find a substitute. We'll eventually need one, but not because it's pollution or destroying the planet. Making ourselves poorer will just make everything else we need to do more difficult.

    @flabdablet said:

    Australia has enormous amounts of coal, which is currently making us good money. But we also have more consistent sunshine on more available land area than anybody else in the world. I can see no essential reason why, given a forward-thinking government, we couldn't become a Saudi of solar. Unfortunately, we're not going to have a forward-thinking government for at least another three years after September.

    It's because solar sucks. Someday, I suspect we'll make it work well. But today's technology simply can't scale enough to matter. "Forward thinking" governments can go fuck themselves. I really wish they would, instead of fucking the rest of us.



  • @boomzilla said:

    Except that there is no credible substitute and making ourselves poorer just makes it that much more difficult to ultimately find a substitute.

    Substitutes for fossil fuels are only ever going to arrive piecewise. It's not like somebody is going to have a Eureka moment next week and we'll all be off coal and oil the week after. What we need to be doing right now is adopting public policy that makes both the deployment of existing substitutes and the development of new ones more rewarding than business as usual.

    The single most credible current substitute for new fossil fuel generation capacity is increased end-use efficiency, and increasing the cost of energy in what is still a fossil fuel dominated economy is a perfectly sound way to make that attractive.

    Also, the Australian carbon tax as presently arranged is not making us poorer. Yes it's resulted in an increase in direct household energy costs and knock-on costs that flow from increased energy cost elsewhere in the economy, but the overall effect on household expenditure is small (certainly much smaller than the cost increases due to privatisation of formerly state-run utilities) and much of the revenue it's raising is being given back to households as compensation; in fact this is a slight over-compensation for most households. Households that choose to reduce their own fossil fuel consumption (by installing e.g. solar hot water collectors and/or grid-tied solar photovoltaics) still get the compensation even though they ultimately contribute less toward the carbon tax; the incentive to do these things is therefore increased, which is the whole point of the tax.

    @boomzilla said:

    It's because solar sucks. Someday, I suspect we'll make it work well. But today's technology simply can't scale enough to matter.

    My home state of Victoria, just this year, exceeded 1GW peak capacity of installed rooftop solar PV. That's in a state with peak conventional capacity of around 8GW.

    If you truly believe that solar PV won't scale, there are a few points you've probably missed:

    1. Most Australian houses have enough equator-facing rooftop area to accommodate 4kW of solar panels, which is more than enough (if grid-tied) to make each household a net energy exporter.

    2. Household-scale solar panels are a mass-produced item, and mass production is something the industrial world is very, very good at.

    3. Uptake of rooftop solar is increasing rapidly in China, which is also the world's major supplier of PV panels. This is going to drive costs down. I fully expect that in under ten years it will cost less to generate a kilowatt via solar PV than via burning Victorian brown coal. I also expect to see rooftop solar and community-scale micro-grids deployed in the developing world instead of conventional power stations and poles and wires, in the same kind of leapfrog move that cellular phones have made over landlines all over Africa.

    4. Even with no form of government subsidy, and even at today's prices, grid-tied solar panels in my state pay for themselves in reduced energy bills in 10 years or less. That's a return on investment of the order of 10%pa - better than rental property and better than most shares. The carbon tax makes these numbers even more attractive.

    In fact the main issue that limits what rooftop solar power can do is not scale, but availability: if the sun doesn't shine the juice doesn't flow, so you still need that grid tie-in to keep your household working. But total grid generation capacity is currently sized to avoid blackouts during times of peak load and is therefore at least five times the size it needs to be for baseload. Peak load in this state happens in the middle of a few hot days in summer when all the air conditioners go on, and this coincides very neatly with peak output for solar PV. Quite clearly we can displace a lot of coal with PV before running into availability trouble.

    tl;dr: solar doesn't suck as much as you seem to think, and it's getting better really, really quickly, Where it is now, in my view, is about where cellular telephony was maybe 15 years ago.



  • @flabdablet said:

    In fact the main issue that limits what rooftop solar power can do is not scale, but availability: if the sun doesn't shine the juice doesn't flow, so you still need that grid tie-in to keep your household working. But total grid generation capacity is currently sized to avoid blackouts during times of peak load and is therefore at least five times the size it needs to be for baseload. Peak load in this state happens in the middle of a few hot days in summer when all the air conditioners go on, and this coincides very neatly with peak output for solar PV. Quite clearly we can displace a lot of coal with PV before running into availability trouble.

    Please. I live in Washington State, USA. Our grid doesn't even CONNECT to any place with sunshine. (Remember when Enron fucked up power distribution? California had to buy power from Mexico, because they didn't have the grid connections to pull it from Oregon or Washington.) So in addition to the solar costs, you'd have the cost of completely re-configuring our electrical grid. The one first-built in the early 30s. It ain't gonna happen here in the US. Not in any reasonable time-frame.

    If you live in a place that can make full use of solar, kudos to you.

    The real solution to all our problems is artificial gasoline, created from nuclear power and organic waste. There's been some promising developments in this area. Why is that the only workable solution? It's the only one that's backwards-compatible. Sure it doesn't reduce carbon in the atmosphere, but it's carbon-neutral and that's a good start. Also, if you had enough energy, it might be worth it to actually yank out atmospheric carbon to feed into it.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    nuclear power
     

    I love nuclear power!

    I just hate uranium mines. Those are the worst.

    This is my 10,000th post. Yes, I wasted this glorious moment.

     



  • @dhromed said:

    @blakeyrat said:

    nuclear power
     

    I love nuclear power!

    I just hate uranium mines. Those are the worst.

    This is my 10,000th post. Yes, I wasted this glorious moment.

    I'm scared of all atoms with nuclei.

    It's a known fact that they're going to try to eat me.



  • @blakeyrat said:

    Please. I live in Washington State, USA.

    So you have better insolation than Germany, which currently leads the world in installed solar PV capacity, but all you do is piss and moan about how badly off you are?

    Colour me unsurprised.



  • @flabdablet said:

    but all you do is piss and moan about how badly off you are?

    Wait what? I'm "bad off" because I don't have a solar cell on my roof? When did I say this? Where did this come from? Somehow, magically, without a solar cell I'm as good, or better, off than my comrades in Germany. Amazing.


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