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Doom Rooster posted:"Oh man, 26 new posts in the energy thread today! What cool story/breakthrough happened?!?" Kind of my thoughts too. Then... 'Oh hey look, some of the most GED arguments I've heard in a while,'
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Feb 28, 2017 23:26
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QuarkJets posted:You said "own". It doesn't cost anything for the US government to simply own real estate. What. If the US government doesn't currently own that real estate, it absolutely does, because it needs to acquire it from the current owners. quote:But even if we change your wording to "nationalize" instead of "own", why would you assume that nationalization of all commercial real estate holdings would need to be performed with a single year of tax revenues? For the nth time, I have not not stated that nationalizing requires *purchasing* anything. I am, and always have been, addressing the claim it is weird for countries to not be able to afford all things which reside within each country's jurisdiction. I have specifically stated that governments don't need to purchase anything at market value in order to nationalize them. The Ender posted:Kind of my thoughts too. I did kind of forget out tedious a me/Fishmech argument can be. I'll leave it alone now.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:40
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Phanatic posted:
And what you're saying is wrong. It is in fact weird for a country to not be able to afford it's own means of production, were it to choose to want to own all of it. It's really quite difficult for it to happen, especially since most countries out there already own a large amount of valuable infrastructure and industry. You'd have the most problem with it in a country where most things are owned by foreign governments and corporations perhaps, but that's rather rare, and would be what is weird.
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Feb 28, 2017 23:44
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Rime posted:Nationalized industries are not purchased at fair market value. In the United States they have to be, more or less. In that context "the government can't afford it" was still pretty dumb, but from a practical standpoint it's kind of right. I doubt many states could pass the bond issue necessary to buy that much poo poo (what's your justification for blowing up their taxes?), and the votes certainly aren't there to do it nationally in Congress. It's not 100% certain the USA even could condemn ERCOT assets, there's a reason they avoid most FERC jurisdiction. I also have to question what you want to accomplish through government ownership. Is it something that could be accomplished through regulation? Then do it that way. Is it something that would actually be accomplished by the government as it exists (sometimes run by Trump), not as you expect it to? LOL if you think it would reduce costs. Labor would sure as hell go up for the rank and file, and that's not even counting the union renegotiations against the new "whatever, not my money" management team. Who if they're getting government pay probably aren't all that eager, capable, and motivated to do the sweeping changes you think are needed and can't be done by regulation. Wxhode fucked around with this message at 23:58 on Feb 28, 2017 |
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Feb 28, 2017 23:56
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In the context of energy infrastructure the benefits come from national standardization, central planning for capacity alterations and transmission infrastructure upgrades and the ability to amortize costs for things like backup plants, as well as the inability to externalize costs such as emissions and destructive labour practices. It's rather difficult to do things like build nuclear plants without government-scale investment, and even harder to do it efficiently without a national-scale order for a design.
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Mar 1, 2017 00:01
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This is why we need to mine some near earth asteroids. 
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Mar 1, 2017 02:23
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Charlz Guybon posted:This is why we need to mine some near earth asteroids. We'd probably advance more as a species by launching the same amount of mass but of our financial class rather than asteroid mining equipment.
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Mar 1, 2017 02:31
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Baronjutter posted:We'd probably advance more as a species by launching the same amount of mass but of our financial class rather than asteroid mining equipment. Not a fan of hedge funds, but even without them demand would be outstripping supply. One metallic near earth asteroid would contain more metal (especially rare earths) than has ever been mined in human history.
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Mar 1, 2017 02:40
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And if the delivery mechanism malfunctions the influx of all of that ore would really... crash the market! 
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Mar 1, 2017 02:54
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Phanatic posted:What. If the US government doesn't currently own that real estate, it absolutely does, because it needs to acquire it from the current owners. That's not owning, that's acquiring. And acquiring real estate can be as cheap as "free" depending on the circumstances. The US has a just compensation clause but plenty of other nations don't quote:For the nth time, I have not not stated that nationalizing requires *purchasing* anything. Then why did you bring up the cost of all commercial real estate in the US? Of what relevance was that if you already understand that nationalization does not require purchasing? (also, in the US it actually does require a purchase, thanks to the 5th amendment)
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Mar 1, 2017 04:32
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And "just compensation" can be defined in a lot of ways. If a company is unwilling to start up a gas generator because it isn't profitable, the implication is that the value of it is ... nothing? Seems like a good deal.
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Mar 1, 2017 04:37
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When you nationalize something, it's because there are mission elements incompatible with free market forces. With national military, it's to meet security and logistical needs a standing professional army serve that PMCs can't....and the fact that the military is a cost center in terms of its function as a training and jobs program. If you want to talk resilient energy grids, you need to treat your energy industry like a strategic asset. What national customers downstream of political /military fuckery in the first half of this decade quickly saw was a need to be able to buy gas from literally anyone other than Russia and your upstream nations, ship it in at a coastal facility, and pump it southwest to northeast. That was literally not possible in the euro gas distro system as designed and built 2010. The capability to distribute gas in a more resilient and thus more strategically reliable, not-loving-you-as-a-liability-of-political-unrest-or-pressure was not something free market forces were adequately able to prepare for, even in the far more regulated and generally-redundant energy industry ecology of the EU. We in the US of A have loving shoestring resiliency to node failures. One man hits a pipe with a backhoe in Alabama and three states enter limited state of emergency readiness. Someone does the same loving thing a month later during repair and ho loving boy. We are laughably, hilariously exposed to complete and total collapse of society with a couple cars - not car bombs, just cars - hitting the right places at medium speed as described in assessments funded by federal agencies. We can slowly come back online as the few contractors who know how to repair the damaged systems triage based on affected population, industry, and probably thinly- veiled Nationalizing energy infrastructure, to me, is the process whereby we invest more than what is barely needed to operate into our grid so it doesn't become a liability in times of war, terror, cyberconflict, or other forms of fuckery.
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Mar 1, 2017 04:44
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If the free market isn't adequate to meet the threat of sea level rise and whatever other observable terms you can throw around without actually saying "climate change," launch nationalized storage and transmission projects. The single greatest sticking point with our resilience is grid node fault, followed by inability to meet peak by any aggregate of factors like grid fault, generation fault, and financial and administrative fault like that described a few pages back wherein, in our current ecosystem, plants can go out simply due to a failure in foresight on policy, price, renewable generation, peaking generation and the margins between them. This is poo poo that takes some hands on attack, people. I liken  smart grid infrastructure to the Eisenhower interstate system. Get bent and build it.poo poo, leave generation and even storage in the hands of the free market. If we can nationalize the interconnect to the point where it is highly redundant and capable, other issues may become much more manageable. Potato Salad fucked around with this message at 04:58 on Mar 1, 2017 |
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Mar 1, 2017 04:53
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nah modern first world countries can't afford to own power lines, we can only afford like maybe a couple of copper wires but that's it
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Mar 1, 2017 05:36
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What if the feds just funded and oversaw improvements? If (and this is a big if) you had the right oversight, then redundancy and system hardness could be improved without changing ownership of all these separate private companies.
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Mar 1, 2017 13:34
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"What if the government just paid for everything and private companies made all the money off it?"
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Mar 1, 2017 21:42
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angryrobots posted:What if the feds just funded and oversaw improvements? If (and this is a big if) you had the right oversight, then redundancy and system hardness could be improved without changing ownership of all these separate private companies. Thatcherism fails, every time.
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Mar 1, 2017 22:41
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OwlFancier posted:"What if the government just paid for everything and private companies made all the money off it?" If the goal is a stronger and more efficient grid, the money spent to make that happen probably wouldn't be recovered by the many separate companies that would need to work together to make it happen. So it's not going to happen. That this work could benefit some individual companies or groups more than others is no different than any other public works. The goal is a great improvement for everyone, by funding a project that will never happen in the normal course of business. Or we can sit on our hands and lament that everything in between the coal mine to our electric meter isn't owned by the government.
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Mar 2, 2017 02:38
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angryrobots posted:If the goal is a stronger and more efficient grid, the money spent to make that happen probably wouldn't be recovered by the many separate companies that would need to work together to make it happen. So it's not going to happen. What's the argument for power generation and distribution being privately owned in the first place, other than historical inertia?
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Mar 2, 2017 02:43
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:What's the argument for power generation and distribution being privately owned in the first place, other than historical inertia?  Regulated private firms with a profit motive and a fear of fines for regulatory fuckups and actually being fired as a result perform better than government owned firms that don't face any sort of meaningful discipline for going slow, spending too much money on poo poo, or anything else. As an example, PURPA with permissive avoided cost calculations gets you a lot more renewables (arguably too many in a few areas) built a lot faster than you'd get from a national utility making more renewables a policy and investment goal. Also consider a Post Office vs. Fedex and UPS analogy. If there were no Fedex the Post Office would suck even more, albeit while losing a lot less money. If Fedex and UPS had the 1st class flat rate universal service obligation they'd make less money but still provide better service than the Post Office. Number Ten Cocks fucked around with this message at 03:00 on Mar 2, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 02:57
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angryrobots posted:What if the feds just funded and oversaw improvements? If (and this is a big if) you had the right oversight, then redundancy and system hardness could be improved without changing ownership of all these separate private companies. Remember when we gave billions of dollars to telecom companies to build out internet infrastructure and they spent all of it on marketing and employee bonuses
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Mar 2, 2017 02:57
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That's definitely not the issue I was addressing, but I do not think there is any reason to think that the government is interested in getting into the business of electricity. It is my understanding that even the many cooperatives that started (at taxpayer cost in the form of cheap loans) under the REA were intended to operate at a loss for some time, and eventually be bought out by private investors once they became profitable. Some Telco coops went that way, but most electric coops have remained member-owned non profits.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:04
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Number Ten Cocks posted:Regulated private firms with a profit motive and a fear of fines for regulatory fuckups and actually being fired as a result perform better than government owned firms that don't face any sort of meaningful discipline for going slow, spending too much money on poo poo, or anything else. Do you have any actual evidence for this? Because historical examples would suggest that (a) private firms are going to do the bare minimum to fall within regulatory compliance, (b) the regulations will be inadequate, either for unforeseen reasons or by design, and (c) meaningful discipline for corporations or their executives is a pipe dream. edit: Oh, and a private entity is automatically more expensive due to relative cost of capital, all else being equal. For-profit companies even more so due to existing only to provide returns to investors. AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Mar 2, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 03:05
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:What's the argument for power generation and distribution being privately owned in the first place, other than historical inertia? Honestly the whole building out the thing in the first place reason is a pretty good reason on its own? Historical inertia is the primary reason for any ownership situation. Number Ten Cocks posted:If Fedex and UPS had the 1st class flat rate universal service obligation they'd make less money but still provide better service than the Post Office. Lol no they wouldn't. I think you're grossly underestimating the cost and hassle in actually providing service out in loving nowhere like the USPS has to do. Taffer posted:Remember when we gave billions of dollars to telecom companies to build out internet infrastructure and they spent all of it on marketing and employee bonuses No, they spent the money on building cell phone infrastructure instead, which happened to actually supply the speeds that the "broadband" label required at the time: 200 kilobits per second. Later, that pioneering work in setting up cell towers and fiber backhaul made switching to high speed cell services with 3G and later 4G much easier. It was arguably more useful in the end than the original ISDN and slow DSL systems the grants had been intended to provide. All those telcos made huge profits on selling those cell towers and their fiber backhaul to the major cell providers later though. And that resulted in huge bonuses for the executives, naturally.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:08
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Do you have any actual evidence for this? Because historical examples would suggest that (a) private firms are going to do the bare minimum to fall within regulatory compliance, (b) the regulations will be inadequate, either for unforeseen reasons or by design, and (c) meaningful discipline for corporations or their executives are a pipe dream. How are the historical examples for publicly owned firms. I'm saying one sucks less, than not Nirvana is achievable. I admit, though, that USSR Power, Inc., let the private enterprise side down with that Chernobyl thing, bet I bet their stock options really went underwater after that. Are you seriously going to tell me it's harder to get fired as a private employee who contributed to a bankruptcy or a fine of millions of dollars than a government employee who did anything short of a felony or workplace harassment?
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Mar 2, 2017 03:11
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Trains again spring to mind, the private operators of my local line defaulted on running it, so the government had to take it over, fined them less than they offered to pay to cancel the contract early, invested a bunch of money into it, made it good and cheap, then they sold it to someone else and now the service is worse and more expensive. Not sure private ownership really does any good tbh.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:12
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:
As I pointed out the last time you made this claim, this is patently untrue. The capital costs are not any lower for the public sector than for the private sector. http://www.capitalresearch.com.au/downloads/GovtCostCap.pdf http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2325507 http://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/mck...e_projects.ashx
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Mar 2, 2017 03:17
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OwlFancier posted:Trains again spring to mind, the private operators of my local line defaulted on running it, so the government had to take it over, fined them less than they offered to pay to cancel the contract early, invested a bunch of money into it, made it good and cheap, then they sold it to someone else and now the service is worse and more expensive. Your local train line sounds unprofitable. I'm not sure if that's a good comparison to electricity transmission.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:18
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Phanatic posted:As I pointed out the last time you made this claim, this is patently untrue. The capital costs are not any lower for the public sector than for the private sector. That only holds up if you impute the risk of each individual investment made by the government, including the risk that a private entity making that investment will outright fail, against the cost of capital. That's obviously a nonsensical way to measure things in a country that borrows in its own currency and has a broad portfolio to offset those risks. It's effectively the same argument as claiming that a diversified multinational corporation has the same cost of capital on an individual project as a start-up, which is provably inaccurate. It's only relevant for internal calculations on whether to make the investment, but when it comes time to actually raise the funds, one of the two can obviously do it cheaper.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:27
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angryrobots posted:Your local train line sounds unprofitable. Actually under state ownership it was. It still is now, but as they cut the service and raised the prices, that's hardly surprising. I'm sure eventually they'll default and the state will have to step in again and dump more money into it and then they'll sell it off again because we can't have the state owning profitable businesses.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:29
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:That only holds up if you impute the risk of each individual investment made by the government, including the risk that a private entity making that investment will outright fail, against the cost of capital. That's obviously a nonsensical way to measure things in a country that borrows in its own currency and has a broad portfolio to offset those risks. That makes exactly zero sense. I mean to say, it is literally incoherent.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:35
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Phanatic posted:That makes exactly zero sense. I mean to say, it is literally incoherent. a: Startup XYZ decides to borrow money to build a power plant b: GE decides to borrow money to build a power plant (assuming the parent corp and not a subsidiary dedicated to the power plant is on the hook for the debt) c: The US government decides to borrow money to build a power plant What do you think the relative interest rates on those loans are going to be? Cost of capital as defined in your links is an accounting fiction (admittedly useful for making investment decisions), while the actual cash interest paid on this debt is going to be lower for b than for a, and lower for c than a or b.
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Mar 2, 2017 03:42
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Number Ten Cocks posted:
It's funny that you bring up the USPS, because they actually disprove the thesis that you set up in your first paragraph by being both more efficient and better performers than their private counterparts, despite being a government-owned entity with the onerous service obligations that you brought up. FedEx and UPS are already worse performers, I don't know why you expect that they'd do any better with the generally unprofitable responsibilities that the USPS holds Also, private energy companies are woefully inept and inefficient compared to their POU counterparts, further disproving your thesis in an even more relevant way
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Mar 2, 2017 05:59
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I'm glad the 20th century settled the debate over the socialist calculation problem, but I guess it was too much to hope people realized it 25 years later.
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Mar 2, 2017 06:12
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The great socialist utopia of Nebraska
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Mar 2, 2017 06:16
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Number Ten Cocks posted:I'm glad the 20th century settled the debate over the socialist calculation problem, but I guess it was too much to hope people realized it 25 years later. There's not a developed country in the world that hasn't socialized some sectors of it's economy. The only clear lesson from the 20th century is that growth is optimized by some compromise of public and private ownership, and for sectors like energy where optimizing profits can result in outcomes that are less than efficient for the economy as a whole it's very much an open question.
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Mar 2, 2017 09:08
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:a: Startup XYZ decides to borrow money to build a power plant Who cares? Yes, the government can borrow money at a lower interest rate. The cost of borrowing money to invest is not the same thing as the cost of capital, and if that's all you meant then you were using that term incorrectly. quote:Cost of capital as defined in your links is an accounting fiction (admittedly useful for making investment decisions), It's not an accounting fiction. It's the *opportunity cost* of making that investment, the *return* on the investment needed to make the investment preferable to doing something else with that money instead. Opportunity costs do not decrease because it is a public-sector project rather than a private-sector project. If they did then the government should just fund literally everything. AreWeDrunkYet posted:There's not a developed country in the world that hasn't socialized some sectors of it's economy. Sure. And the central planning problem is still hugely significant. The incentives provided by the government are no more guaranteed to be rational than the incentives provided by a market. For example: Yes, great, the government owns the roads, and it was the government's incentivizing roads that led to the mass suburbanization of America and a bunch of unpleasant consequences. Federal road grants to states prioritize expansion over maintenance, so states are incented to build new projects instead of maintaining the things that actually exist. Agriculture is heavily socialized, this has led to a whole *bunch* of perverse incentives that lead to things like growing the most water-hungry crops there are in the most water-poor states in the union. The government can easily be more irrational than markets, like a bunch of rail projects demonstrate. The grid needs work. The utilities are, in fact, investing in fixing it. http://www.utilitydive.com/news/why-utilities-are-rushing-to-replace-and-modernize-the-aging-grid/361922/ When you suggest nationalizing electrical production and distribution, what existing problem do you suggest this would fix simply by virtue of being nationalized? And are you considering any new problems that the new state of affairs would create? Phanatic fucked around with this message at 16:17 on Mar 2, 2017 |
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Mar 2, 2017 15:52
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The combination of cheap personal transportation and cheap land was what led to the mass-creation of suburbs, not government-owned roads. The government building roads to these suburbs was an effect, not a cause. Plenty of HOAs in fact own and maintain their own roads If state and local governments never bothered to build any roads, you'd still have a massive buildup of suburbs from the 1950s to today
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Mar 2, 2017 22:50
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"Hey look at what our local government did, they built this crazy road network on all of this cheap land! We should put some houses next to these roads that the government happened to create"
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Mar 2, 2017 22:51
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Nah suburbia was directly subsidized by the government who saw it as an investment and a public good. In places where the government didn't spend a fortune on roads and infrastructure and tax breaks and mortgage tax credits didn't see nearly as much sprawl. It was a terrible vicious circle between various levels of government, private developers, and "consumer choice". Suburban expansion and home ownership (for whites) was an explicit government policy. Local governments got addicted to the short term influxes of cash from big subdivisions and it was often a race to the bottom to try to attract development. At the same time governments put laws into place that made traditional urban development very difficult or outright impossible. The only way to make mass sprawl financially attractive for developers and cheap enough for mass adoption by even the working class was to subsidize a lot of the costs while letting developers privatize the profits. But this wasn't seen as a bad trade off back then because this was seen as a public good by a lot of well meaning people, like investing in schools or hospitals. Finally the middle and even working class could all live in hygenic suburbs.
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Mar 2, 2017 23:02
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