This is how Big Oil will die – NewCo Shift

Self-driving cars will be electric because of cost. And the cost will be so low, oil will not survive.

Source: This is how Big Oil will die – NewCo Shift, by Seth Miller

As inexpensive natural gas has pushed coal out of the market, coal consumption has dropped roughly 25% … The major coal companies, who all borrowed to finance capital improvements while times were good, were caught unaware. As coal prices crashed, their loan payments became a larger and larger part of their balance sheets; while the coal companies could continue to pay for operations, they could not pay their creditors.

The four largest coal producers lost 99.9% of their market value over the last 6 years. Today, over half of coal is being mined by companies in some form of bankruptcy.

When self-driving cars are released, consumption of oil will similarly collapse.

The costs of electric self-driving cars will be so low, it will be cheaper to hail a ride than to drive the car you already own.

Against Murderism | Slate Star Codex

Source: Against Murderism | Slate Star Codex, by Scott Alexander

People talk about “liberalism” as if it’s just another word for capitalism, or libertarianism, or vague center-left-Democratic Clintonism. Liberalism is none of these things. Liberalism is a technology for preventing civil war. It was forged in the fires of Hell – the horrors of the endless seventeenth century religious wars. For a hundred years, Europe tore itself apart in some of the most brutal ways imaginable – until finally, from the burning wreckage, we drew forth this amazing piece of alien machinery. A machine that, when tuned just right, let people live together peacefully without doing the “kill people for being Protestant” thing. Popular historical strategies for dealing with differences have included: brutally enforced conformity, brutally efficient genocide, and making sure to keep the alien machine tuned really really carefully.

Considerations On Cost Disease | Slate Star Codex

Tyler Cowen writes about cost disease. … Cowen assumes his readers already understand that cost disease exists. I don’t know if this is true. My impression is that most people still don’t know about cost disease, or don’t realize the extent of it. So I thought I would make the case for the cost disease in the sectors Tyler mentions – health care and education – plus a couple more.

Source: Considerations On Cost Disease | Slate Star Codex, by Scott Alexander

RE: This Economic Phenomenon Is Making Government Sick, by Tyler Cowen

So, to summarize: in the past fifty years, education costs have doubled, college costs have dectupled, health insurance costs have dectupled, subway costs have at least dectupled, and housing costs have increased by about fifty percent. US health care costs about four times as much as equivalent health care in other First World countries; US subways cost about eight times as much as equivalent subways in other First World countries.

I worry that people don’t appreciate how weird this is.

It’s actually even worse than this, because we take so many opportunities to save money that were unavailable in past generations. … And it’s actually even worse than this. A lot of these services have decreased in quality, presumably as an attempt to cut costs even further.

The modern conflict between opponents and proponents of free college education is over how to distribute our losses. In the old days, we could combine low taxes with widely available education. Now we can’t, and we have to argue about which value to sacrifice.

If some government program found a way to give poor people good health insurance for a few hundred dollars a year, college tuition for about a thousand, and housing for only two-thirds what it costs now, that would be the greatest anti-poverty advance in history. That program is called “having things be as efficient as they were a few decades ago”.

I’m more worried about the part where the cost of basic human needs goes up faster than wages do. Even if you’re making twice as much money, if your health care and education and so on cost ten times as much, you’re going to start falling behind. Right now the standard of living isn’t just stagnant, it’s at risk of declining, and a lot of that is student loans and health insurance costs and so on.

What’s happening? I don’t know and I find it really scary.

The Meridian of Her Greatness – sam[ ]zdat

On The Great Transformation, suffering, and still using Malick stills for all of my blog posts.

Source: The Meridian of Her Greatness – sam[ ]zdat

RE:
– The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time, by Karl Polanyi
– Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed, by James C. Scott

Man’s root state, after all, is not wealth but poverty. If we started with very little, and then capitalism made us all wealthier, is it really the devil if, while doing that, a few got wealthier than others? … And yet we do observe such things – people are really angry.

Markets are there, but “culture” in a very broad sense also is. It protects and shields the societies from market failures, largely due to kinship and social relations. When social mechanisms fail, decay, or are destroyed, we absolutely would expect to see certain forms of capitalism arising. … social relationships (whatever form they are) are not always simply media for the market. They’re also ways of containing it.

“Instead of the economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.” The metic control over societies is gone, and instead of social structures guiding the market, the market guides our social structures. Also: itself, and so the market is now “self-regulating”.

Social history in the nineteenth century was thus the result of a double movement: the extension of the market organization in respect to genuine commodities was accompanied by its restriction in respect to fictitious ones. (79)

Those “fictitious ones” are land, labor, and money. The fiction is that land, labor, and money are simply “other commodities” on the market. They aren’t – those are exactly the objects of social protection (well, money is more political, but that would get things too long and confused). Moreover: no one will treat them as such when they’re in peril.

Hence, the real fiction is that these will behave like other commodities on the market. Widgets don’t fight back when their price drops. But labor, if wages fall or unemployment abounds, will. Basing your entire society around the illusion that it will behave like everything else is ridiculous.

Has urban revival caused a crisis of success? – YouTube

What [Richard] Florida now sees is the double edge of the advice he gave and that so many followed.

A bigger, denser city, in general, increases the rate of innovation, increases the rate of startups, increases the rate of productivity; at the same time, the bigger, the denser, the more knowledge intensive, increases the rate of inequality, increases the rate of economic segregation, makes housing less affordable. So it’s a two-sided monster.