carefree-bob

It's fantastic when I travel. I usually book a hotel or AirBnB with a kitchen and then use instacart. I don't like the constant eating out when traveling and this has significantly improved the quality of vacations.

> The big story is that fossil fuels are relatively stable or in decline and solar is exploding.

This is true only in the sense that fossil fuels, as a percentage of total energy consumption, are stable or in slight decline. That is because total energy consumption is rapidly increasing, specifically as new forms of energy are added to the mix.

Fossil fuels in absolute terms are, however, increasing.

China is burning more coal today than ever before. Coal use is going up. Coal use as a percentage of total energy is going down.

China is burning more oil and natgas than ever before. It is increasing. But as a percentage of total energy, it is decreasing.

This also matches China's CO2 targets. China's plan is not to decrease CO2 emissions, those emissions will keep increasing. The targets are to decrease the emissions required to generate a dollar of GDP. By 2060, they want the ratio of emissions to GDP to be 60% lower than it was in 2020. If you look at historical trendlines, that is an easy target to meet, just with improvements in technology and energy efficiency, particularly when you are starting from such a high base. But people look at that goal and think that China wants to cut emissions by 60%. GDP in 2060 will be 10x what the GDP was in 2020, so a 60% cut in that ratio is still a 400% increase in total emissions. Everything is measured in terms of ratios, not absolute numbers. Ratios where the base is always rapidly growing.

This confuses a lot of people who see that the ratio of fossil fuel in the entire energy mix is decreasing, and think this means that actual fossil fuel use is decreasing. The charts, report, graphs that people cite, if you look carefully, are always ratios. Ratios with the denominator growing as the denominator is something tied to GDP, whether total output or total energy output.

It's more accurate to say that there are limits to how much additional fossil fuel capacity China can bring online, as these are mature industries, whereas nuclear, solar, etc, are young industries and there is a lot of capacity to bring online since you are starting from a low base. China's approach to energy is always "we want more of it, of any kind." The only reason that China's oil production is not increasing by 10% per year is because it's not possible for China to increase oil production that quickly. Same for coal. China is increasing all forms of energy as fast as possible.

China does not hate oil and gas.

To put things into perspective, China gets half its energy from coal, and about 10% from natgas (increasing to 15% by 2030) and about 20% from oil. China is rapidly increasing natgas use, primarily by building out new pipelines to get more natgas from Russia.

China is also increasing oil consumption as well as exploration, particularly starting with the 14th 5 year plan as well as a special seven year action plan to increase oil production, doing deep water drilling, unconventional (e.g. fracking) drilling as well as a massive shale oil boom. Over the course of that 5 year plan, China discovered more than 225 oil fields and oil production increased from 3.8 million barrels per day to 4.6 mbpd as a result of a ~500 billion CNY investment to increase production. Still China imports about 10 mbpd, so it has developed a massive 1.5 billion barrel strategic reserve, which allows China to weather disruptions in global oil supply even as it races to increase domestic production.

And China is also investing in battery capacity, with installed capacity now at 140 GW or 5% of their energy usage.

The statement that somehow "batteries neuter the advantage that gas has over coal" is not something I understand. Both coal and natgas are reliable forms of energy and are unaffected by battery capacity; you need batteries for unreliable energy such as wind or solar so that you can turn the variable output into something stable that a grid can consume.

Just as there is product-market fit, there is also product-company fit. Amazon as a company has their own cost of capital, earnings expectations, talent distribution, and organizational capacity. It is not a place where the best of the best work in mainline product development, nor is it a place that is willing or able to go through long periods of losing money in order to rapidly improve the product. The Amazon of old did that, and had different capabilities, but today's Amazon is not the same company.

Notice that you also see Google really struggling (and falling behind) in the AI race. This, despite massive resources and being responsible for key pioneering research. Same reason why IBM has failed in this area. The big established companies tend to shut their brightest people into research departments where they write papers and produce demos while the main cash cow areas remain undisturbed, so they have collections of bright people and they have money, but they rarely let their brightest people make big bets with the money, whereas startups do.

It's also why poor people spend more on lottery tickets than rich people.

I'm beginning to wonder whether P!=NP is undecidable.

"Allies" is not the appropriate term for states under your military protection, and which are dependent on you for their basic energy needs, and that host your military bases, and that do pretty much whatever you tell them in the international finance/global military sphere.

Why did Denmark sign the Greenland treaty? It's a humiliation ritual. Unrestricted access to develop the resources of the Greenland's economic zone, a perpetual veto over any foreign investment, and two new military bases, plus expansion of existing bases. With no end date. In exchange for a payment of... zero. And Denmark still needs to pay the block grant. Does that seem like a treaty between equals? What kind of country grants someone else veto power over investment in a region? What kind of country allows the hosting of foreign military bases, and still calls itself sovereign?

"Vassals" is too strong of a term. European states aren't vassals. Once in a while they give a speech against the US at the UN. And they are constantly complaining about how they are treated, as most vassals do. But they aren't allies. If the US were to file taxes, they would be listed as dependents. That is why they rage when someone who doesn't share their vision gets elected US President, but most Americans don't care who is elected in Europe.

That describes the ratio of the influence that European political leaders have on the lives of Americans vis-a-vis the influence that American political leaders have on the lives of Europeans.

And the thing about states in a subordinate position like that is that they are not respected. European political leaders like to pretend that this is a situation of equals and then complain when the US pushes them around, but it has never been a situation of equals since the end of WW2. Only the facade has been slowly dropped in the intervening years. The sooner Europe stops pretending, the better it will be for them, as not pretending is the first step towards gaining true autonomy. But each time I get my hopes up that Europe will take responsibility for their military and energy needs, I get disappointed by the resulting wave of irreality and wishful thinking.

It depends on what you mean, as I did not argue that life for the average person in a traditional society was filled with violence.

What I argued is that whenever two competing groups came into contact, wanting the same land, the result was usually genocide (or one of the groups fled to another area, where they would have to fight those inhabitants), and as a result, when history records a new group "inhabiting" or "settling" a peace of land that is new to them, then that inhabitation is generally not peaceful, but genocidal in nature. Regardless of whether there is a written history to record the violence, we can have confidence that the violence did occur.

Now, given that modern humans have been around for 300,000 years at least (the date keeps being pushed back, since before the Moroccan discovery, it was thought to be 100,000 years), and have been swarming over the whole earth, that is a lot of violence and genocide, even though it was certainly possible to live a life of peace as well for a specific individual, since migrations weren't going on all the time in all places.

This is basically all of human history. I guarantee you that whatever ethnic group you belong to, if they are the dominant group in a region, they got to be that way be slaughtering the previous inhabitants. Modern anthropology has really opened our eyes to this fact, which contradicts a lot of the post-war anthropology that wanted to say that, say, fall of the Roman Empire was mostly peaceful, or the mass disappearance of Early European hunter artifacts was merely the movement of "pots, not people". But with DNA studies we can confirm that no, it's not that everyone started using a different kind of pottery, it's that they were all wiped out by the new group that had their own styles of pottery. The men were slaughtered and women were raped. Same thing for modern day Japanese moving into the islands, or the Bantus migrating into what is now Namibia, or the Aztecs, or basically anyone else. All of history is built on fighting for land to call your own, and killing off the male population that was there before. It's biblical, even - read the book of Joshua.

Yes, in Norway, an oil state with very little mobile capital. Basically what I said about immobile versus mobile capital.

And I guess we will just pretend that Hollande's wealth tax experiment never happened, when 60,000 millionaires left, the state lost $200 Billion in capital, and the wealth tax cost the state twice as much revenue as was generated by the tax. That was for a country, France, whose wealth was not in the ground.

People really want to push wealth taxes to the point of confusing income and wealth taxes, and assuming the willingness to accept an income tax surcharge equates to a willingness to accept a wealth tax, when we have lots of data showing that whenever you tax capital that is mobile (e.g., not real estate) then you get less taxes than you expected as well as capital flight.

It's annoying to list your income, but people do it because the disclosure is limited to one year, and more importantly they can control their income, particularly whatever income is earned in a given state. Only realized income is taxed. But a wealth tax involves questions of valuation - of taxing unrealized gains -- that are in many ways arbitrary and subject to abuse, and a level of disclosure and state control that makes many people feel uncomfortable due to the massive expansion of state power it requires.

I don't know why people are so stubborn about this. Next up, they will argue that because people accepted a higher sales tax, they will accept a higher wealth tax, too. After all, you let the state mandate childhood vaccines, so you should be OK with the state mandating your diet, right? Anyways, we'll see how things work in out in California. The state already has massive deficit problems, so let's see how this addresses their fiscal problems.

Historically older people lose a lot of muscle mass, which also means they gain weight and lose mobility, some even needing assistance doing basic things like walking or getting out of their chair.

Getting enough protein and exercising is crucial as you age, and it's something a lot of people have historically not understood, since as your metabolism slows, you get less hungry right when your protein needs are increasing.

What business are in Norway that would have an opportunity to relocate? Norway gets its wealth from oil. Anyways it's strange to look at an oil state for capital flight when we have the example of France, which is much larger, and whose capital is actually mobile.

nice, thank you!

The reason why you need the dollar is because of the balance of payments identity: changes to the capital account + current account = 0

So to run a current account surplus against the rest of the world of $100, you need to accumulate $100 of financial claims belonging to the rest of the world. There are complexities, for example I switched from "trade surplus" to "current account" because things like interest payments also need to be added in, but with these adjustments, you cannot run prolonged trade surpluses without storing your money in some other nation's jurisdiction.

Now the question is, which nation is willing to accomodate inflows of a trillion dollars a year? That's right, only a single nation is willing to do that. Most nations ban or severely restrict foreign capital inflows. Those that don't ban it, they don't have the necessary financial infrastructure to accomadate the scale of surpluses that China needs to run. This is why I laugh at all these reports of "China is dumping treasuries". China accumulated over a trillion dollars of dollar claims over the last year. That's in addition to what they already had. Why? Because who else would allow those levels of foreign capital inflows into their economy.

So once again, the US is the only nation willing and able to absorb these capital inflows.

Personally, I don't think this is sustainable, it's deindustrializing the US and is highly destabilizing, but since the liberalization of global capital flows launched by the Clinton administration, we have been doing this 30 year experiment in what happens when you let countries print money and use them to buy your bonds. The results have been, in my opinion, highly destabilizing, and it's not going to end well. But many of those who grew up in this period, think this is just how the world works and they can't imagine any other system, one in which capital inflows were highly restricted and as a result, no nation ran large trade surpluses against any other. Or they don't think about this at all and believe that China's hard work and industrial prowess is why they are able to run large trade surpluses, completely ignoring the whole money printing to buy US bonds that is happening in the background. When the US was the world's primary industrial power in the period 1870 - 1920, we ran current account deficits, not surpluses. What China is doing, industrializing while exporting capital -- that is truly unprecedented and possible only due to the combination of fiat non-convertible money combined with the US allowing unrestricted capital inflows. It's a truly bizarre state of affairs.