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Comment by moneytide1 | Hacker News Reader

I saw a "Just Have A Think" YouTube channel video recently describing the 1MV HVDC line being built across China. It is part of Belt&Road infrastructure project and will allow them to distribute excess loads to different time zones without skin effect losses of an AC line. This is a part of their COVID stimulus injection.

When American $1.2k per citizen landed in accounts, I remember checking local Walmarts in the weeks that followed and I noticed all the TVs were gone.

With such a system, China could even launch excess solar as far as Germany in their afternoon peak sun angle when German duck curve morning peak begins?

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Really, you "checked local walmarts" to inventory all their televisions? That's the biggest bunch of horse shit I've ever read, even on HN.

According to the government, only 7% of recipients used any part of their stimulus money to buy household items.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-9/receipt-and-use-of-sti...

> That's the biggest bunch of horse shit I've ever read, even on HN.

Please omit swipes like that from your HN comments. They break the site guidelines, and you owe the community better.

Your comment would be just fine without that bit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Not sure what they had in the back, but the boxed units normally stocked under the displays were all gone. Employees in electronics confirmed mass exodus of TVs during Stimulus Week. Frozen vegetables gone for a few days, 1lb beef was dwindling most times (I wasn't visiting when they expect high traffic so maybe they were just being really efficient and what I saw was what was left without passing expiration date - no reason to set out a full shelf of beef at 8pm closing).

My sample size is... 2 Walmarts in Reno. But that was the forethought - "where is all this sudden money about to go now that everyone has 'free time at home'?"

The article prompt is ex-tech-leader pointing out reduced R&D budgeting, so I wanted to test the connection that there's an obsession with "watching" or "observing" pre arranged activity [via screen] instead of participating.

Everybody got the individual choice to purchase "what's already produced and available in storage" instead of being offered state money to build a few huge projects (spanning many provinces).

You think that people are going to tell a government survey that they used the government check to buy televisions? :-)

Similar to will people who support either political candidates disclose it in an interview - especially if they live amongst a social circle that leans the other way.

This is one of the main reasons survey techniques are being replaced by observational and inferential techniques in market research.

I think it remains a valid question though. What if we had handled the unemployment by creating infrastructure jobs instead of universal handouts?

That has the added benefit of increasing the productive output of our economy.

The problem is that bankruptcies, starvation, inability to maintain your car/house/children/job, and businesses collapsing due to the sudden demand shock are all extremely expensive for the economy in the long run. Those types of losses which these universal handouts are intended for are quick to inflict and long to recover from. As an example, if your normally profitable restaurant goes under and forced to permanently close due to insolvency, it'll take years to build back up a similar restaurant with a similar rapport, client base, efficiency and success. The long term economic impact of these handouts would easily outweigh the infrastructure investments you are proposing.

When times are good though, we should be increasing taxation and investing in infrastructure. Instead, the US Republican party sought to create a massive tax cut during economic boom, which means that we are in a worse financial situation when times have become rough.

I can get behind most of what you said except the idea that tax policy should match the economic situation of the day. We need stable tax policies that normalize for the booms/busts.

For the same reason we weren't creating infrastructure jobs before coronavirus. I'm not specifying what that reason is, and not for rhetorical reasons. I'm not specifying it because the need for infrastructure investment was just as acute before covid as after, and it wasn't being done then, and won't be done now.

Universal handouts weren't to handle unemployment. They were to pay people to stay home.

Could you elaborate on a plan (of course a really rough sketch) for "creating infrastructure jobs" during a global pandemic?

I agree with the premise, but I would like to know how to accomplish something like this. Especially if you have domain knowledge, it could be enlightening to the HN readership. There are a lot of accomplished people who read these forums, and it would be cool to see a seed get planted.

Need an unemployment check? Help build a bridge, road, dam, etc.

In my mind it’s super simple. Money for labor. Problem is, most Americans would revolt if you asked them to break a sweat.

Not every unemployed person could operate a buldozer. What would you have them do, lay bricks? Train them to use heavy machinery after working in hospitality services?

Germany does this with some amount of succes but I don't know how they do it. German socialism seems to work at the expense of a zero point growth figure. They still pay the solidarity tax for East Germany.

Yes I actually would do this. Why can’t they lay bricks? Would they rather starve? There would need to be some training component for several jobs (bulldozer driver) but I think there could be a job that’s right for most. This is pretty similar to what the military does I believe, you get a job based on aptitude and such.

I don’t know if it’s the perfect solution but it feels more appropriate than our current approach. I don’t know much about the German way, I just know we pay for idle bodies while we have a lot of infrastructure that needs rebuilding.

Just from experience, I'm not sure I'd trust a military-style assessment to accurately identify skills. For example, I scored off the charts on linguistic comprehension (the Defense Language Aptitude Battery DLAB) and had a job as far from that as you can imagine.

It might be worth considering who "they" are (from your insanely outraging "why can't they lay bricks?" akin to "let them eat cake"). And why wouldn't "they" sweat for a good wage? Seriously, do some soul searching.

Your world is to make people starve or lay bricks?

It isn’t really all that valid in terms of the $1.2k payout. That was at the height of the pandemic, you absolutely didn’t want to have people out working in infrastructure jobs at that point, you wanted them to isolate at home.

But the broader question, could/should the US use this moment of mass unemployment to create infrastructure jobs: IMO, yes. But it’ll never happen because someone will say the word “socialism” and it’ll immediately become politically unimaginable.

We could do both. The GND and Freedom Dividend were both aimed at ameliorating major structural impediments to 1) infrastructure investment and renewal, and 2) grassroots-level innovation, respectively.

Of course, since they're apparently anathema to all but the leftiest lefties, we're back at square one trying to figure out what to do.

How are we going to ramp up infrastructure projects with zero notice, while people are supposed to be social distancing?

This is something an effective government would have in queue at all times. We have a track record of poor disaster planning. We generally ignore the fact that disasters will even happen.

> Really, you "checked local walmarts" to inventory all their televisions? That's the biggest bunch of horse shit I've ever read, even on HN.

So you're a mindreader.

> I remember checking local Walmarts in the weeks that followed and I noticed all the TVs were gone.

A lot of folks became retail investors for the first time right about then, too. Hertz wiped a few of them out, and SoftBank profited off the rest.

Even a "trickle up" bailout gets taken advantage of by the big fish.

It seems like you just made up the state about TV.

Seems like for most Americans, the money went to debt payment and savings, which seems quite rationale in times of uncertainty.[1]

For those in the lower income ranges, more of it went to consumers goods, but that would be expected at those income levels.

[1]https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2020/09/02/how-did-...

Investment in public assets that take up the slack in the labour market and /remain/ public assets is the alternative to UBI I want to see.

An asset like a solar plant or a HVDC line produces revenue for the public. And there's no reason an independent publicly owned corporation can't function well.

I'll admit guaranteeing that the revenue isn't wasted by a government that becomes addicted to its revenue streams is another problem. (Denmark has a bridge with €30 plus tolls that were promised to become toll free once the loans were paid off. Never happened. Norway seems to do a better job with its oil fund.)

To bring China back as the reference, important government posts are extremely prestigious and held by very capable people. Outside of propping up their stock market, it is hard to fault their public investment stategy.

However, I disapprove of the surveillance state and the human rights abuses.

A HVDC belt buckle around the earth paired with oodles of PV seems like a rare legit silver bullet. Hopefully China is wildly successful with this, spurring further investment.

Consumerism is the foundation of the American economy and due to the way the economy is currently structured it helps the world when Americans consumer more. Let’s not make value judgements about consumer spending.

However, I do agree that the US should be spending more on infrastructure. A LOT more. Arguably, spending less on infrastructure is what’s caused the loss of a lot of blue collar jobs...

> I remember checking local Walmarts in the weeks that followed and I noticed all the TVs were gone

I mean, if I had an extra 1.2k (btw, I didn't qualify), I might spend it on something fancy.

And those TVs created a lot of Chinese jobs.

You are downvoted probably because it seemed snarky but I thought it was an interesting point and appreciated it.

Please don't fret about my downvotes... most people are morons, so a comment's votes are not an indicator of anything substantive about it.

I was basically going to make the same point -- putting money in people's pockets is letting them make decisions about their own best interest, which in this case, appears to be rewarding Chinese investments in flatscreen TV factories.

As far as I can tell, the reason other countries haven't built anything like this is that it doesn't make sense from a grid engineering perspective, and the main benefit of building such a high-voltage high-capacity line is the propaganda one of being able to claim it's world leading. The big problem is that the grid needs to have enough redundancy to stay up if a single generator or transmission line fails, so the big high-capacity single transmission lines that China builds can't actually be used at close to their nominal capacity. It probably wouldn't even work as a propaganda stunt in countries with a free press; if the Trump administration built something like this, I just know the NYT headlines would be about how it was a useless Trumpian folly and showed the perils of his disdain for experts.

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