migsvult

This is very cool. And very timely. Recently had a discussion on whether we wanted to build out a new video pipeline through weavy or something more declarative like this. Surprised that there don't seem to be many similar tools. I suppose most folks either use weavy or just chain API calls. JSX is an interesting choice too.

This post mentions apps used as an individual. I think that more or less makes sense for some subset of engineers that enjoy this type of weekend project. But once you extend this out to an org, and you're saving a sub for every 'seat', a lot of things start making sense to homebrew. And yes, you get less polish, but you also get customizability. Our small startup reduced spend on subscriptions by several thousand by having one jr replace non-core subscriptions with simple vived alternatives over the course of a couple weeks. Even outside of the savings, I think I prefer the new apps.

As other have pointed out, most money is already digital. This is really about retail bank accounts at central banks, and how how this gives policy makers additional tools.

Which..... seems fine? As long as companies can build products on top of this system, and as long as people can diversify across various types of e-dollars and the existing set of securities, it sounds pretty good.

And for the parts of the world where few people have bank accounts, it sounds like an obvious big win.

> Taking cash from the economy, which is a productive asset, useful for investment, and purchasing land which you plan to do nothing with, is most definitely an economic loss. There is no question about this step.

No man. The cash doesn't evaporate. It goes to the sellers of the rights, who then plug it right back into the economy. They may even go right back and purchase that same stock! If it makes it clearer, try to think of the coal rights as a bond with zero interest rate. Obviously, people trading the bond around doesn't destroy value.

> Give us an estimate.

I'm not sure your 20 trillion dollar estimate is very relevant. Most folks see the next 30-40 years as the key phase we need to get right, after which the switch to renewable will be more or less complete. In other words, your usage of 400 years of coal WAAAAAY overstates the size of the problem. But yeah sure I'll throw some numbers up.

If you assume mineral rights are 5% of total cost (if you buy them intelligently), and that you can rustle up $5B in cash, and that in the next 30 years you have a gradual slowdown of coal usage anyways, then the scheme cuts between 10 and 20% of US coal production. Not too shabby. Now, I admit my numbers are soft and optimistic, but it's by no means "orders of magnitude" below what it needs to be.

> Another factor is to slow down production today one has to buy more than mineral rights

I see no reason why this is the case. According to the article the gov't owns most of the rights, and the whole idea is to make it easy for private actors to buy just the rights.

> You also ignore the fact I stated that as places get purchased, since this does not change demand, so other places will simply produce more or more places will become coal mines.

Well yeah, but at higher cost. Producers are forced to use less optimal sites, and to outbid each other. This lowers overall production as coal is made less competitive than gas/oil/renewables. That's the whole point.

Well yeah obviously. The entire point of the scheme is to lower our coal usage by shifting into less economically efficient forms of energy. That strictly implies lower overall economic output.

If fact, any emission-lowering scheme (besides funding new technology) will lower economic output.

But the question at hand is if the sale of assets itself would cause economic output to go down, if the billionaires selling their stock and purchasing land rights would somehow destroy value. And the answer is clearly no.

"First, most billionaires don't just have billions in cash laying around usable to buy things. ... The economic loss from this step would be huge."

There would be no economic loss. In real terms, the companies that the billionaires are selling are just as valuable. The sellers might be big enough to cause the paper value to go down temporarily, but it would only hurt the sellers themselves. And obviously, in nominal terms the cash would enter right back into the economy once the coal was purchased. So there would be near-zero negative impact to the overall economy from the asset sales.

"This puts the value of the US coal around 20 trillion (ignoring a few factors like present value, etc., but this is around the total value). To purchase the land right from owners would cost somewhere around this amount, give or take an order of magnitude."

It's hard to get exact numbers, but the total value of US coal is many many times higher than the value of just the mineral rights. The legal right to mine $50 worth of coal is obviously worth way, way less than $50. In other words, you can wipe out a huge amount of coal usage with smartly bought mineral rights, especially, like the story alludes to, if you buy them in such a way as to be inconvinient to everyone around you.

I think the basic idea is sound. The main problem would be that such a solution would be profoundly regressive. Western billionaires literally plunging poor people into darkness. It's probably not a bad plan B if an international political solution fails and things get very dire.

two thoughts

1. In the 70's and the 80's our Soviet counter-intel was fairly compromised. Aldrich Ames and Robert Hassan are just the biggest examples. That probably does a better job explaining a Soviet CI advantage than 'we looked at the things agents did and looked for correlations.' I mean, every agency has been doing that forever.

2. There are a number of different types of cover, like the article points out. Diplomatic cover is the 'laziest' and for some (usually very low lever or very high level) people it's not really meant to fool anyone. There's private sector cover, with dummy corps and rented office buildings, and genuine P&L sheets. Private sector cover can be extremely clandestine, and extremely sophisticated. As AndrewKemendo points out, the things that this article points out are maybe not very impressive at all.