13 Matching Annotations
  1. Nov 2023
    1. Economies that are heavily reliant on oil and gas revenues face some stark choices and pressures in energy transitions.
      • for: stats - oil and gas - steep drop in revenues of fossil fuel producer economies

      • stats: oil and gas - steep drop in revenues of fossil fuel reliant economies

        • per capita net income from oil and natural gas among producer economies will be 60% lower in 2030 in a 1.5 °C scenario.relative to revenues between 2010 and 2022.
      • question

        • many producer economies are not diversifying into clean energy fast enough to compensate for these steep revenue drops
  2. May 2022
    1. Templates for recurring projects.

      Food for thought.

      How do companies that produce goods (light notebooks and graph paper) turn a profit? (For either of the two aforementioned examples, anyone can make their own from possibly cheaper primitives. Making graph paper, for example, is just putting lines on paper.)

      Those goods being disposable and tangibly/temporally "rivalrous" in the physical world is one part of it, but it's not everything. People pay for convenience. (Look to e.g. paid Netflix subscriptions versus just pirating the stuff.) "Buy this ready-to-consume ebook" is one example of potentially profitable convenience that has made at least some inroads with the general public. Why shouldn't "buy this ready-to-use template" belong to the same set? Yeah, you could make your own, but this is graph paper.

  3. Sep 2021
    1. Africanslavery lacked two elements that made American slavery the most cruel formof slavery in history: the frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalisticagriculture; the reduction of the slave to less than human status by the use ofracial hatred, with that relentless clarity based on color, where white wasmaster, black was slave.

      While we've generally moved beyond chattel slavery, I'm struck by the phrase frenzy for limitless profit that comes from capitalistic agriculture. Though we don't have slavery, is American culture all-too captured by the idea of frenzied capitalism to the tune that the average American (the 99%) is a serf in their own country? Are we still blinded by our need for (over-)consumption?

      Are we recommitting the sins of the past perhaps in milder forms because of a blindness to an earlier original sin of capitalism?

      Do we need to better vitiate against raw capitalism with more regulation to provide a healthier mixed economy?

    1. What happens to this graph when we overlay pure capitalism instead of a mixed economy? What if this spectrum was put on a different axis altogether? What does the current climate of the United states look like when graphed out on it. Which parts have diminished over the past 50 years with the decrease in regulation?

      four quadrant diagram of market goods, club goods, common goods, and public goods graphed along the axes of excludability and rivalry

      Some of these areas benefit heavily by government intervention and regulation.

      We need the ability to better protect both common and public goods.

      definitions:

      • rivalry: does use by one person physically preclude use by others?
      • excludability: do laws prohibit access to these goods?
  4. Mar 2021
    1. Occasionally, like with search engines, #2 occurs because the incumbents gain massive economies of scale (classic Microeconomics), where by virtue of their being large, the cost to produce each incremental good or service at scale becomes much lower.
  5. Feb 2021
  6. Dec 2020
    1. The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning. The rise of QAnon, for example, is one of the social web’s logical conclusions. That’s because Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences. Facebook is an agent of government propaganda, targeted harassment, terrorist recruitment, emotional manipulation, and genocide—a world-historic weapon that lives not underground, but in a Disneyland-inspired campus in Menlo Park, California.

      The original goal with a bit of moderation may have worked. Regression to the mean forces it to a bad place, but when you algorithmically accelerate things toward our bases desires, you make it orders of magnitude worse.

      This should be though of as pure social capitalism. We need the moderating force of government regulation to dampen our worst instincts, much the way the United State's mixed economy works (or at least used to work, as it seems that raw capitalism is destroying the United States too).

  7. Sep 2020
  8. Nov 2017
    1. Now, on to my third problem: I think Angus Maddison may be doing things wrong. I realize this is a rather presumptuous thing to say, but I think it's true. Specifically, the assumption that GDP before 1700 was proportional to agricultural productivity seems to me not to be a good one. The reason is that even in a non-industrial society, there is a potentially huge source of GDP increases: trade. Remember, in a world where output is mostly in the form of commodities (i.e. no increasing returns to scale), the old Ricardian theory of trade makes a lot of sense. Stable ancient empires that could act as free trade zones were probably capable of dramatically increasing their per capita GDP beyond the base provided by the productivity of their land. This is the finding of Ian Morris in Why the West Rules For Now. He constructs a "social development index" that includes things like urbanization and military capabilities, and probably correlates with an ancient region's per capita GDP (it is hard to build cities and make war without producing stuff). He finds dramatic changes in this social development index over the course of the Roman Empire; at its height, Rome seems to have been extremely rich, but a couple centuries earlier or later it was desperately poor. Morris corroborates this index with data on shipwrecks, lead poisoning, and other things that would tend to correlate with output. Basically, Rome saw huge fluctuations in per capita GDP. But it is unlikely that Rome's agricultural productivity changed much over this time. Instead, what probably happened was the rise and fall of cross-Mediterranean trade. If trade could make Rome dramatically richer, and its absence could make Rome dramatically poorer, then Maddison's data set is wrong. Just because most people in 100 AD were farmers does not mean that most people were subsistence farmers. And frankly, I'm not sure how people use Maddison's data set without noticing this fact.

      Trading is very important. The West advantage over China in the past.