I like the story, I struggle to see how to outplay PE.
Yes, PE enshittifies the experience. You can be a better human and win customers that way.
The headwinds are the usual david-v-goliath going up against scale/consolidation stories:
- consolidation gives more purchasing power. When all the PE-controlled pest control vendors in the state are negotiating as one, they get bigger cost breaks
- PE has a bigger war chest. They'll enshittify eventually, but they'll undercut you longer than you can stay solvent. At that point, they'll happily buy you for pennies.
- The end-game is always monopolization. A PE firm bought up something like all the concrete mills in Georgia or one of the southern state. Any building or municipal project in the state effectively buys from that one company, even though it looks like a bunch of different local concrete mills.
- Any AI you throw at the problem presumably PE can handle more efficiently at scale.
In this toy model, the strategy that (may) outcompete is delivering a better service.
> The end-game is always monopolization
This is one happy end state of PE but let’s be clear that for large swathes of human history it has not been the goal of most participants in local economies. If PE’s edge is diluted they may find themselves less able to achieve this on the margin.
Where there's a consolidated critical asset like the concrete plant, they can monopolize the area. Different with PC when the work is being done by individual techs on their routes.
Also I'm starting with the goal "Be the best pest control company" and building up from there, rather than to monopolize it.
Utterly unqualified to suggest any causes (wait for the NTSB report on that), but couple compounding factors I've read elsewhere to begin to understand the situation and context:
- Another plane was out of position, grabbing some attention of the controller
- Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
- The colliding plane didn't have "explicit" landing clearance, but a "follow previous plane and land the same way unless told otherwise" implicit landing clearance. In Europe, planes need an explicit landing clearance, the act of granting it may have brought attention to the runway contention. US implicit system (arguably) is a bit more efficient, debate will now be is it worth it (pilots are now required to read back instructions because of past blood... will this result in same thing?)
- This was around midnight and apparently a little foggy, making visual contacts harder
Remember folks, disasters like this are rarely caused by a single factor. NTSB reports are excellent post-mortems that look at all contributing factors and analyze how they compounded into failure. Be human here.
> Stop communication was ambiguous about whether talking to previous plane or firetruck
"stop stop stop, truck 1 stop stop stop" I mean maybe it was ambiguous for half a second but he pretty quickly said "truck 1 stop". I guess we'll have to wait for the sync up to see if it was too late to stop by then
I did make a snarky derivatives comment elsewhere in the thread, but I do see you're not wrong about oil prices peaking at $138 in June 2008 (Lehman collapsed in September 2008): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/DCOILBRENTEU
I thought it was by the layers upon layers of interconnected unregulated derivatives valued at a few orders of magnitude above the underlying subprime mortgages given to anyone with a pulse.
> it was by the layers upon layers of interconnected unregulated derivatives valued at a few orders of magnitude above the underlying subprime mortgages given to anyone with a pulse
It was interconnected derivatives and structured products linked to banks that caused a liquidity crisis in the former to cause a crisis of confidence in the latter.
Meanwhile: "In the letter, Morgan Stanley said the fund wasn’t designed to offer full liquidity because of the nature of its investments, and that credit fundamentals across the underlying portfolio have been broadly stable. The bank's shares fell 2% in premarket trading Thursday" [1].
> liquidity crisis in the former to cause a crisis of confidence in the latter
Wait what? Your thesis is the GFC was caused by a liquidity crunch/bank run? Isn't that... not true?
Isn't the proximal to distal chain of events government encouraged subprime loans -> inaacurately valued MBS -> exponential, unregulated derivative instruments -> leveraged contagion. What does market confidence have to do with any of that?
> your thesis is the GFC was caused by a liquidity crunch/bank run? Isn't that... not true?
It's absolutely proximally true and it's not just my thesis. From Wikipedia: "The first phase of the crisis was the subprime mortgage crisis, which began in early 2007, as mortgage-backed securities (MBS) tied to U.S. real estate, and a vast web of derivatives linked to those MBS, collapsed in value. A liquidity crisis spread to global institutions by mid-2007 and climaxed with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers in September 2008, which triggered a stock market crash and bank runs in several countries" [1].
The subprime crisis shouldn't have been bigger than the S&L crisis [2]. What turned it into a financial crisis was the credit crunch that followed. That crunch was caused by folks running on banks that had sponsored these products.
On "inaccurately valued MBS," note that the paper marked AAA mostly paid out like a AAA security. It would be like if you were perfectly good for your word and I lent you money, but then I wanted to sell on that debt to a third party who didn't trust you at a 50% discount. What does "properly valued" mean in that context? It's ambiguous in a dangerous way. (In this analogy, you wind up paying back the debt at face value. But years later, albeit on schedule.)
Bots will absolutely infiltrate them eventually, but I think it's the only solution.
Internet promised ability to connect with anyone anywhere around the world. It felt limitless and infinite.
Turns out in an infinite world, the loudest voices are the ragebaits, the algorithmically-amplified, or the outright scammers.
Human social brain doesn't work in an infinite world, it works for a Dunbar's Number world. And we all like our psuedo-anonymous soapboxes (I'm standing on one right now), but trick will be to realize that the glitter of infinite quantity isn't the same as small-scale connection.
At least for some time I imagine a hybridization may pop up. For example you grow a community of humans that keeps bots under control. Because of this all actors are humans, and valuable because of that.
Hence you'll end up with defectors getting paid to siphon off all the conversations to some ad companies that will work on tying them with real world identities and then serving them more detailed ads in the places they cannot avoid interfacing with the open internet.
Protection of one's attention is our generation's luxury product.
Whether it's the TV hardware or the streaming service in your house, your standard of living is now judged by whether you pay extra for the ad-free tier.
Apple tends to skew luxury purchase, so it makes sense it hasn't been riddled with adware yet. The Apple logo is a status symbol that you're not being bombarded with ads in every corner of underutilized screen real-estate.
Remember when the Oppenheimer movie taught us how we got The Bomb even though the nazis had a significant head start because ze germans got rid of the smart people studying "jew physics" and what was left of their science took them to dead ends?
Replace "jew physics" with "woke physics" and you see the idiocy of this.
The nazi regime destroyed a lot of what today would be classified as "woke research" by the reactionary right. Sexuality studies, social studies and so on.
The book burnings were not only about rooting out fiction, they destroyed research.
History isn't quite so simple. Half the academic establishment, especially the human sciences, chose to side with the Nazis before they actually came to power. A lot of institutions in Europe, inside and outside of Germany, removed Jewish scientists before anyone asked them to. Ironically that mostly turned out to be the best thing that could have happened to both the Jewish scientists themselves and a number of people that chose to leave with them (there are entire cities in Europe that were founded by Jewish scientists forced to leave and the people who left with them). For example, after the UN (technically then "League of nations") fired Einstein for not being sufficiently Swiss (it's more complicated than just racism though) in 1932, he was shown why not to return to Germany and was offered a job in the US, at Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. He returned to Germany anyway and was shown why accepting the Princeton offer was a good idea, after experiencing "the degree of their brutality and cowardice". Note: he was talking about German academics and institutions, not the Nazis directly. This was before the first time the Nazis forbade Jews from teaching, which was in April 1933.
Of course, the Nazis turned out to be anti-intellectuals to an extreme degree too and whether it was by concentration camp mistreatment or using them as cannon fodder (or just sending them to the Russian front and leaving them to freeze to death), the Nazis eventually killed most of those scientists, including outside of Germany, who chose to remove Jewish scientists before being asked.
It's more complicated. At many of these top universities, woke means don't hire whites. And Jews are often lumped in with whites. The Jewish percentage at top schools has dropped dramatically as wokeism appeared. At Princeton, one top professor campaigns to "eliminate whiteness" and he's very open about it.
I mean, they definitely expelled Jewish scientists, people like Einstein and Bohr and other prominent physicists, who would have ultimately been very useful to them. Maybe their funding choices would have been different if they hadn't ousted so many researchers.
I read the Oppenheimer biography, so maybe that’s distorting things.
Oppenheimer was Jewish, but very Americanized.
Bohr was working on radar for the Nazis. Einstein had surprisingly little knowledge of nuclear physics, and famously rejected key parts of quantum physics.
The Germans had great nuclear scientists. They simply weren’t willing to spend the money it took to cold the bomb.
I mentioned two as an example, but they expelled significantly more. In 1933 they brought in laws that immediately ousted many Jews from public positions, which caused a mass exodus of intellectuals from the country. James Franck was another prominent physicist who left in protest, and he went on to work directly for the Manhattan Project.
The Nazis drawing a distinction between "Jewish mathematics" and "German mathematics" was also very real.
It's hard to imagine these policies had no effect on their ability to do research, and that it was purely a matter of funding.
"Boris Stoicheff, wrote how the mathematician Edmund Landau was 'physically prevented from entering his classroom by about seventy of his students, some wearing SS uniforms.' They demanded 'German mathematics' instead of 'Jewish mathematics.' One estimate is that the 15% of scientists in Germany who had been fired accounted for about 60% of the country’s physics-based publications."
You just slightly missed the crux of the issue here.
The big "problem" with renewables like solar is that once you've installed enough for yourself you are done for like 30 years. There is no monthly sun fee you need to keep paying. There is no solardollar, because there's nothing that needs to be extracted, transported, and sold every single day. A lot of billionaires are in an existential crisis over a world where fossil fuels are no longer the driving force of the economy. That's why we have incessant propaganda against renewable energy.
Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.
That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it. There are still costs with maintenance, repair, administration, debt servicing, and profits. If you look at your power bill today it will probably list generation, distribution, and taxes. Renewables only eliminate the generation costs, which are usually about half of the bill.
> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.
It's not going to happen soon - solar is still just 8% of world energy production. Even if solar will cover 100% of consumption on a sunny day it still would make sense to buy more panels to have enough output on a cloudy day or in the morning/evening. It's likely production of solar panels will be a good business till at least 2050 and oil business will start to decline before that unless will be propped by corrupt politicians.
But the growth rate has been huge for as long as records have been kept, and was a factor of just over 10x between 2014 and 2024, speeding up more recently.
PV and wind together are likely to start breaking the electricity market severely in the first half of the 2030s; I hope, but it's not certain yet, that ongoing battery expansion will allow the demand for electricity to increase and this can continue to the end of the 2030s, because at the current pace of development those scale up to all our energy needs, not merely our present electrical needs, in a bit less than 20 years from now. (PV alone would do all of it in 20 years at present rate of change).
Energy use goes up as civilization advances, and Jevon’s paradox suggests that we’ll use more energy as its cost goes down. Couple that with the need to replace some portion of the installed base of solar capacity over time and I think solar will be a growth industry for the foreseeable future.
I can't believe it's taken this long for someone to mention this. Even just phasing out fossil fuels (if we're still serious about that) plus ordinary growth means today's demand is a fraction of what could potentially be fulfilled by additional solar buildout.
It also assumes that there will never be demand for improved solar generation orthogonal to currently-prioritized metrics. As an example, a nice park near my house was clear-cut to install a solar farm a few years ago. I used to enjoy walks under the trees in that park, and seeing the animals that lived there. Perhaps as solar infrastructure becomes more stable and secure, concerns will turn towards the ecological ramifications of covering so much of the Earth's surface with ecological deserts, and there will be a desire to replace older generations of solar panels with ones that somehow can support or integrate more elegantly with nature. And then the next thing. And then the next thing.
Assuming we consume ~20 TW on average, a metre-squared panel kicks out ~40 W on average, and we halve that to account for batteries and other infra... I reckon we're talking about 1 million square kilometres (people will be along in a sec to check my working, but it's just a Fermi estimate).
Call it 10% of the Sahara.
Bear in mind that if we go all-electric, raw energy consumption falls significantly, many panels will be sited on buildings, solar isn't the only renewable, and solar farms aren't ecological deserts - you can graze animals below them.
I'm not saying that that magnitude of solar generation isn't a good thing. I'm saying that the solar farms of 2050 don't necessarily need to be arrays of panels on top of clear-cut land.
Grazing land is often essentially an ecological desert when compared to previous uses. Farms in general, honestly. Actually, this is a good forward example as agricultural expansion goes hand-in-hand with the Anthropocene die-off, but late advances in land use efficiency via fertilizer and other technologies means that even though these lands are super dead we also require less of them per person. What I'm proposing is analogous to even further development, where you're still somehow able to produce the same volume of food while reintroducing ecological diversity to the same land; moving away from traditional monoculture farms to ultra-efficient food forests. I don't know how you'd do it in farming, but it energy generation, it would probably involve engineering equipment to some level of symbiosis with the preexisting environment. Could we someday build literal forests of photovoltaics that support energy generation as well as a diverse natural ecosystem? Maybe. I'm sure we'll try. And that's why, ultimately, my point is that the idea that solar is an economic dead end is incorrect. This is just one potential branch on a tech tree (heh) that isn't anywhere near done growing.
>Traditionally, deserts have been seen as harsh, lifeless landscapes
This is incorrect, depending on the geographic location. Many "deserts" are actually ecologically vibrant, and "greening" them (especially for farming) threatens to destroy a measure of natural diversity.
That said, I think you and the other poster placed emphasis on the wrong part of my post, as my point was less about solar land area coverage as some sort of singular evil, and more about the *opportunity* present in continuing to develop solar technologies so that they impact the environments they're placed in less and less over time. This would mean that efficiency is not the be-all-end-all of development, and that further improvements are possible even after reaching a satisfactory level of efficient generation. The energy economy would not fall off a cliff, as some predict. It would simply shift to solving other problems.
You can see an example of this in computer engineering, with Moore's Law's fall-off and the rise of GPU-based innovation.
> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long.
If the average panel lifetime is 25 years, and it takes > 25 years to reach "full capacity" (whatever that might mean or whatever level that is at), then by definition there will be a continuous cycle of panel replacement taking place.
It's not as if we get all the PV installed in 12 months and then it lasts for 25 years ...
The 25 year thing comes from the 25 year warranties - they’re generally warrantied to be at 80% power capability at 25 years. I don’t know the real lifetime, but presumably it’s a lot longer than 25 years. And by that point, maybe we’ll have the deuteriumdollar…
Being mounted on a moving vehicle subjects them to a much more dynamic and hostile environment than having arguably better quality, fixed panels sitting in a dry desert for 25 years. I’m actually impressed that yours lasted 10 years.
Open for debate. They are mounted horizontally on the van, which makes them subject to almost no face-on wind forces at all. The aluminum frames are bolted to the van, but the van structure is metal and likely doesn't move much in terms of distances between bolts other than due to thermal expansion, which is also true of my ground-mount array (in the dry desert :)
There's more vibration on the van, but how the impacts their life compared to the months of daily 30mph+ winds hit the faces/rear of the ground mount array seems hard to tell without a lot of research (which someone may have done).
An interesting prospect is the grids getting smaller. Becoming distributed again.
Why pay the enormous maintenance cost for a continental scale grid when you can in your neighborhood have a small local grid with solar, wind and storage followed by a tiny diesel/gas turbine ensuring reliability through firming.
When deemed necessary decarbonize the firming by running it on carbon neutral fuels.
I think one place this could go, a decade or more in our future is that the electricity isn't worth metering but the fact you can have electricity is billed. Think of a typical phone service today. You don't pay to send a text or read Hacker News on your phone, but you do pay for the privilege to be able to do either of those whenever you want.
So I'm imagining instead of spending 40p per day plus 24p per kWh maybe it's £1 per day and usage isn't really metered. A few people would abuse this, but if energy is cheap enough it's barely worth caring.
In the 50's "too cheap to meter" was a saying that made sense because metering was expensive. Computers have made metering cheap.
Your internet/phone analogy is relevant. They are metered, but you aren't billed on usage. Metering is used to monitor for abuse.
Australia is already moving towards the system you envisage. They're going to give you free power between 10AM and 3PM. I bet there's fine print in it similar to internet/TV, some sort of abuse limit.
True but there are 2 technology converges that are happening at the same time cheap energy that is getting cheaper. And automation powered by that energy that also gets cheaper as energy gets cheaper as well as efficiency gains. The current world economic systems and most government systems are unlikely to survive the upheaval that this will cause in the next 15-20 years.
Old panels are continuously being replaced with new panels. This is happening now with a few year old panels. So many free old panels available, because new ones are producing 590W/panel. Over 25 years, there will be a lot more advances, panels that will be printed by textiles, or painted on surfaces, or grown by bacteria.
Very much depends on the rating. A residential panel is something like 65”x40”. A commercial sized panel is something like 80”x40”. The cell size is relatively constant, but the bigger panels are 6x12 cells instead of 6x10. Newer panels have more efficient cells, and so higher power.
Panel manufacturers can also do odder sizes as required. Example: q-cell does a 94x51” panel. This is 6x22 cells, but different sized cells as well.
Most panels are 6x, because that results in an open circuit voltage of just shy of 50V, which is convenient for code compliance.
> That said, don't think I'm like the nuclear power guys of the 50s who claimed that electricity would be so abundant that we wouldn't even bother to meter it
Funny you would say that, Australia is about to have free power for all for a few hours each day. Yep, there really is that much
It probably could have been true if regulations were not written that said if your nuclear power is going to be cheaper than other sources you have to spend on safety features until it's not cheaper.
Like the internet today, electricity could have been a flat monthly fee determined by your service line limit (similar to bandwidth) with limits in place for excess use.
Solar plants don’t need much maintenance. The lack of moving parts means mostly it is just mowing the grass. The transmission infrastructure does need maintenance. Batteries have pretty low upkeep too.
And if you live in the right place "mowing the grass" can mean you lease the land for somebody to farm goats or sheep on it and so you get a small extra income.
> Even the solar panel market is self defeating. Once there is enough installed power the demand will drop off sharply as the refresh cycle is too long. The feedback loop of capitalism means we are likely to reach that point sooner than you would expect.
No we won't. Even if we waved a magic wand and converted the entire planet to solar today, there would still be new installations tomorrow because energy demand is infinite. There's never enough, we've always used more energy as more energy sources were available.
That hasn’t really been true in the US in recent decades - efficiency improvements and deindustrialization were balancing increasing population. It’s recently started growing again because EVs, heat pumps, and DCs, but even a 3% increase in demand has caused a lot of growing pains.
Solaryuan? How does that work? You dont need to buy sun. Just the initial infrastructure. Even if, in a post oil world, china refuses to let you buy the latest panels down the line, a country could just coast on its existing solar infra. Theres no need to use the yuan to sell of buy the energy
I think you've misunderstood the term 'petrodollar'. Petrodollars are the American currency in circulation abroad because we bought other people's oil (principally Saudi), not exported our own.
The 'export' that made the US powerful was finance and political manipulation - toppling socialist / populist leaders to install puppets and controlling economies by manipulating trade.
I think your original point kind of stands, though - we are seeing a decline and independence from our supply chain is going to be a deciding factor in 'who's the next top dog', but I think the decline is going to be a lot uglier than a simple "they have it now and we don't" - it's going to be all the thrashing about that an aggressive international power does when the grift no longer works.
No, it's the US dollars circulating globally because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated, giving the US control over the entire global financial system.
> because all transactions for oil anywhere in the world are dollar-denominated
This was sort of true in the 1970s only because we ignored the Soviet Union and its allies, which included a lot of petroleum production. It's totally untrue now, in a world where America exports oil. (I traded contracts in Connecticut in the early 2010s. Oil was priced in all sorts of currencies. British and Norwegian oil, for example, is sold for local currency.)
Thankyou for pointing this out. People get very weird about how the petrodollar works, it's more about convenience than force. Like the "eurodollar" of financial clearing. In general people overlook how much America (and to a lesser extent the UK) export "stability as a service". Which becomes jeopardized if the leader is unstable.
> Can british and norweigian buy iranian oil in currency other than dollars?
Both Russia and Iran are heavily sanctioned by the U.S. Neither sells its oil for dollars by default, though either will accept them, of course.
Note, too, that pricing and settlement are different. If I’m Russia selling oil to India, I can “sell” at $50/barrel and accept payment in rupees or rubles. (Indian refineries were not paying Russia dollars for oil.)
What does it mean to lose? Like we can, uh, transfer the technology and build at whatever cost we can build at. Good luck to China charging us more than that cost.
Yes, PE enshittifies the experience. You can be a better human and win customers that way.
The headwinds are the usual david-v-goliath going up against scale/consolidation stories:
- consolidation gives more purchasing power. When all the PE-controlled pest control vendors in the state are negotiating as one, they get bigger cost breaks
- PE has a bigger war chest. They'll enshittify eventually, but they'll undercut you longer than you can stay solvent. At that point, they'll happily buy you for pennies.
- The end-game is always monopolization. A PE firm bought up something like all the concrete mills in Georgia or one of the southern state. Any building or municipal project in the state effectively buys from that one company, even though it looks like a bunch of different local concrete mills.
- Any AI you throw at the problem presumably PE can handle more efficiently at scale.
What's the strategy that outcompetes?
reply