Meta: I really don't like when media suggests how the reader should feel about an article by prefixing the title with "Anger as" or something like that. That's just a propaganda tool.
> The newspaper was controlled by Tony O'Reilly's Irish Independent News & Media from 1997 until it was sold to the Russian oligarch and former KGB Officer Alexander Lebedev in 2010.
This is why things like rooftop solar, microgrids, vertical access wind turbines, hydrogen, hydrogen storage, ammonia as fuel, local fuel production, etc. seem important to me.
Sure, we can eventually switch to Big Electric but then we still have the over centralization and it encourages unsustainability.
Really? There are several major oil companies in US alone, and many more throughout the world[1]. The global market for oil is more competitive than the market for pizzas in your local neighborhood.
For some reason everyone is just ignoring the huge profit margins of corporations while this whole "inflation" thing is happening. There's no reason for corporations to be profiting like this at the expense of the populace
> There's no reason for corporations to be profiting like this at the expense of the populace
BP just had a $24bn non-cash writedown in Q1[0] due to their stake in Russian oil giant Rosneft. Should the "populace"/government be giving them ~$20bn this quarter to make them whole on their entirely government-created loss?
I'm going to go out on a limb that you're not in favor of that.
No absolutely not. We also should not be giving tax payer money to corporations to pad their profit margins.
We have people we are hungry and homeless while these corporations get tons of money from the government, same with Intel getting money to build fabs. They have money, they can use theirs but they won't because it would cut into their margins and they can't see past the quarterly profits. Same with the oil companies.
Corporations do not have an inherent right to exist over the people that make them up or the people that make up Amy given country. Corporations need to be able to fail.
What investment? Nord Stream 2 AG is owned by Russian state-owned gas giant Gazprom, not Rosneft.[0] Here's who paid for NS2 to be built:
> Gazprom paid half the cost of building Nord Stream 2, with the remainder of the $11 billion pipeline project financed by British oil and gas major Shell, Austria's OMV, France's Engie and Germany's Uniper and Wintershall DEA.
There's no British Petroleum investment to "bail out."
Gazprom, Rosneft, it all seems the same. After all Schröder got chairman seat at Rosneft for his treason NS work. But yes, you are correct, Shell was the company directly involved with NS2. My bad.
They're a massive multinational producer. They get to say how much they produce and I've a bridge to sell you if you think they can't conspire with other producers to inflate prices.
These are finite resources with an expensive discovery and extraction. There's no competition to drive the price anywhere but up.
Anger as company makes money selling stuff to people that they desperately want and which allows us to maintain our historical outlier standard of living.
I wish that everyone could get what they want. The people who hate capitalism could transport themselves to an alternate reality where they make the rules and live in the hell of their own creation.
Anger as a company leverages war and scarcity to make egregious profits, lining their own pockets and deepening the poverty of people who were already struggling. That's called profiteering, not capitalism.
They are literally charging people what they are willing to pay. It’s not as if people didn’t need energy two years ago when prompt WTI went negative, it’s just the market was out of balance. We have the opposite issue now, and charging less doesn’t solve anything. Prices have to go up so that people use less of the thing we don’t have enough of.
If they could manipulate markets as you seem to imply, they would do it 100% of the time.
I need gas to drive to work. Therefore, the ultimate ceiling on the value of a tank of gas is about as much as I make at work in a week. I can't just go to a different gas station; they all set their prices within a nickel or two per gallon. This isn't a free market by any means, people must pay for gas or immediately go broke.
If petrol were 10x the current price, you wouldn't commute that distance. You'd move or get a different job.
I don't work in San Francisco because flying there every day would be too expensive, the airlines don't have the ability to force me to pay an infinite amount to them...
I suspect you mean that people would prefer to spend a lot of money on fuel rather than moving. Maybe they feel that overall moving would be a quality of life decrease.
No, I'm not talking about "preference". People don't "prefer" to live paycheck-to-paycheck, with any meager savings they're able to accumulate being consumed by unplanned expenses until they're eventually forced to take on debt to make ends meet - which only exacerbates the problem by reducing their cash flow even further.
"Just move" or "just get a new job" is great advice for a highly mobile household where the workers have skills in high demand (e.g. young tech workers with no dependents).
For a great many people, "just move" is terrible advice. Moving is financially burdensome, socially disruptive, at times irresponsible, and at other times impossible. Not everyone has the option of just picking up and moving to a place that's more economically viable. They may not have the money to move. They may have obligations tying them to a particular geographical area. There might be legal barriers preventing them from moving.
"Just get a new job" is similarly terrible advice for most workers, for whom a job is not an easily disposable or replaceable thing. It's nice to work in software, where anyone with a reasonable network can organize half a dozen interviews next week with close to no effort. Most people aren't in software, though. A friend with a STEM PhD recently spent 18 months looking for a new job. Now think about people who have less desirable education or skills. "Just get a new job" is not advice that they can act on easily; certainly not quickly in response to rising fuel prices.
I was going to write a long thing here about autonomy and economic circumstances, but I can't really be bothered. In short: people really don't like having their entire lives disrupted, and we shouldn't be building a society that expects that of the average person.
Everything you write here is true, but at the end of the day, if someone lives 50 miles from their job and fuel prices went up enough they would either move or get a new job.
Same if the local grocery stores all closed.
They're not just gonna curl up and die. They might stay and struggle and try to make it work until it's not possible, sure.
You're overcomplicating something that really doesn't need to be. I've been poor, have poor friends, we have autonomy, lol.
Would I? Or would housing costs in densely populated areas also scream upwards? You're thinking about my life on the micro scale, there's a whole forest you're missing for a tree. What happens to the farmers and truckers which the entire economy depends on? Are they just supposed to move or get different jobs too?
The economy relies on price signals. If you just sit about and pay whatever the price is for anything regardless of whether it makes sense to you, then we end up with bad outcomes.
e.g. minimum wage jobs being shit because people do them anyway.
True but "you wouldn't have chosen that job" is a very different situation from "you now have to find another".
To use your analogy, if the travel was subsidised maybe you would actually take the plane. If the plane company suddenly stops because of strikes, this affects you, not some theoretical shmuck who shouldnt be using planes.
I mean, in a basic sense, if you choose to live so far away from your job that there only exists one possible transport mechanism, then yes, you are dependent on that one transport mechanism.
If e.g. a city metro ramped prices then many people in outer zones would have the choice to either pay it, move job, or cycle/walk in.
If they bought a house next to a station with no other good transport links and no local work, well, it's not as if that wasn't known...
Some say it's the invisible hand telling me to accelerate climate change, people near the equator and/or sea level be damned. The invisible hand is an idiot.
They definitely would not run out of gas. They have more than enough production capacity that they purposely are not using so they can restrict supply artificially and raise prices. They state this blatantly in earnings calls.
The context here was gas stations, not oil companies.
The oil companies, as well, would only be slow-walking physical gasoline in hope of future price increases or, for refineries, cheaper inputs. Otherwise, they're missing out on profits by not selling it at current prices.
I was thinking the same. The way you motivate the private sector to hurry up and fix the energy crisis is to tell them there's bumper profits to be made. This money goes to renewables providers too, and in the long run, high fossil fuel prices may be the best thing to happen for energy on the continent.
Capitalism is just a tool. When local government and charities are setting up emergency heated spaces[0] because people can't afford to heat their homes at time when profits have tripled for some energy companies then that tool needs adjusting.
Someone wake me up when y'all specify exactly what these adjustments are, what these predicted impacts are, how those impacts were predicted, how the actual impacts were measured, and how they lined up with or differed from the predictions.
> Someone wake me up when y'all specify exactly what these adjustments are
> I don't come here for vapid rhetoric games.
One of the principle problems that markets solve is the calculation problem. Billions of people with their subjective and time sensitive needs are making economic decisions and trade offs for themselves, their families, and companies based on their past, present, and predicted future. There is an incredibly complicated dance of price discovery and resource allocation going on constantly. It’s extremely challenging to predict what’s going to happen even at a high level very far in the future due to the vast quantity of inscrutable information. Central planners or regulators who seek to intervene in the market cannot hope to aggregate enough information quickly enough that they can understand in order to intervene without practically assuring negative consequences. The bigger the intervention the worse the consequences tend to be. Intervening in energy markets is going to have big bad consequences. What the consequences are specifically I don’t know but being sure there will be consequences is anything but a vapid rhetorical game.
> It’s extremely challenging to predict what’s going to happen even at a high level ... Central planners or regulators who seek to intervene in the market cannot hope to aggregate enough information
I can get a text message from my bank within minutes of making a purchase on my debit card at the drugstore. And I know that drugstore's inventory system updates in real time too. Meanwhile, Amazon is building grocery stores that eliminate the need for checkout because their inventory updates at the very moment the consumer picks up the item.
It looks to me like we have all the technology we need to gather and aggregate mind-boggling quantities of information, so unless you have more detail about those challenges, I find the claim they're insurmountable to have the same weight as the claim last century that people could never walk on the moon.
You do also say that the information is inscrutable. I take that to mean that even if we have the information, we either can't process it fast enough or we don't know how to process it at all.
But I'm looking at the history of science and the pace of progress in technology--both theory and practice--and I have to wonder how long that's going to be true. Or, put another way, why should we expect it to be fruitless to explore the application of machine learning to an entire economy? Why does it need to be something sacred that we never question and never dare to answer?
Your forgetting that the complexity of calculation increases exponentially.
Let's say the entire world economy is only 1000x the size of Amazon.
The actual problem is not 1000xAmazon but Amazon^1000.
Now we're getting somewhere. Since we're talking about specific mathematical operations, that suggests you have a formal mathematical expression of the problem, and an algorithm to solve it, so that we can prove how its time complexity grows.
I would like to see the formal description of the problem and the algorithm.
It doesn't follow that knowing the big O complexity of a problem would imply knowing an 'algorithm to solve it' too. There are many known problems that do not have known solutions.
That's fair. Then I'll just take the problem specification. What I want to get around is hand-wave claims that it's too complicated for anyone to figure it out. Because if no one has a formal statement of the problem, then that tells me that people are just making unfounded assumptions.
It doesn't follow that knowing the big O complexity of a problem would imply knowing a 'problem specification' either. In fact there are unresolved problems in computer science without what you imagine to be the case.
I could start a charity tomorrow with zero donors and then complain that it's unfair that I don't have money to pay heating bills.
If these charities can't keep their lights and heat on then its because people don't find the cause worth donating too. Why aren't you paying their bills? You must not care about the needy at all.
Zero idea what any of this has to do with companies who develop energy resources. The energy doesn't magically come into existence because someone with a sob story wants it.
You've entirely misunderstood the post. It's not charities that are struggling, it's individuals whose bills have tripled in the last year. The disconnect between energy bills being so high that a non-trivial number of people are now unable to heat their homes through winter with the elderly among them at genuine risk of dying from the weather. At the same time many of these energy providers are reporting that their profits have doubled or tripled.
At this point there is clear harm being done to a large section of society by these companies and the question is what we should do about it.
Capitalism is always tempered in various ways; I don't know if a single case where it's not. "Pure" capitalism would be a dystopian hellhole, and no serious capitalism thinker ever proposed it.
So the question is how and where we should temper capitalism, and more generally how we should implement capitalism. This is not "hating capitalism". That's just red-baiting.
Companies making money selling food unfit for consumption? Selling paint with lead on? Selling cocaine?
So your comment in itself is wrong. Further you can still take the view that in general companies are free to sell in a free market, while acknowledging specific downsides that arise from that freedom.
In my view BP has done nothing wrong. That doesn't mean I would be against taxing the surplus profits to ameliorate some of the consequences of high oil prices
> "Pure" capitalism would be a dystopian hellhole, and no serious capitalism thinker ever proposed it.
Capitalism is impossible without property rights so assuming you don’t call at least a voluntary system of property rights enforcement “impure” then the very serious scholars like Rothbard, Hoppe, Block etc all proposed it. I’m not sure I agree with them but I don’t think sweeping dismissals or “hellhole” hyperbole are correct either.
