Hacker News Reader

Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

It's also lack of systems thinking.

When you turn a product liability into an asset, you increase the margins of the primary product, meaning you want to produce more of your primary product.

When that growth is coming at a cost to your competitors, then this is an overall win. But if it increases the overall supply, then it gets very hard to call it a carbon reduction, in the same way that vehicle fuel efficiency and safety have also increased total miles traveled and total land converted into housing.

View on HN

I don’t see how doing something like this increases the global demand for whiskey/hard liquor. Also if one distillery can do it, so can others which is also an overall win.

It doesn't necessarily change the demand, but it changes the supply curve by making it cheaper per unit to produce whiskey. Previously, you could sell whiskey, and the waste was garbage. Under this hypothetical scheme, now you could make money on the waste, too, reducing the price of production.

Would this be an example of the Jevons paradox?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I can't really tell. Certainly jevon's paradox adjacent.

Reminds me of Kingsford Charcoal.[1]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingsford_(charcoal)

You are assuming that having more supply will mean they need to immediately lower their prices. Glenfiddich is a premium brand. Have you once seen Apple lower prices on their MacBooks because they had too many in stock?

It doesn't increase the demand. What it means is that if Glenfiddich needs more fuel to meet its own fuel demand, it will have to do so by creating more whiskey, even without demand for the additional whisky.

Or they could just buy fuel like everyone else. If their biogas is cheaper than fossil fuels they can buy then they’ve stumbled onto something much bigger than whiskey.

Yes, I expect the only reason it would be cheaper is because it's waste stream that they would otherwise discard. So yeah, it wouldn't make any sense for them to produce more whisky just to produce more fuel - they would want to use as much fuel derived from waste as they can and purchase any deficit or sell any surplus...

This stunt just got them a huge amount of free advertising.

I haven't thought about Glenfidfish since my Playboy days.

(I took a class on advertising in college. In one assignment, we were told to pick out the sexual imagery in magazine ads. Glenfiddish seemed to have a lot.)

> When you turn a product liability into an asset, you increase the margins of the primary product, meaning you want to produce more of your primary product.

Which brings up an interesting question: what software product liability can be turned into an asset that increases the margins of the primary software product?

Technical debt, security gaps, defects, etc. are difficult liabilities for me to imagine turning into assets that increase the margins of the primary product. There are certainly external actors who could treat those liabilities as their assets.

Technical debt is great for a consultancy brought in to clean it up.

Security gaps are great for black hats who monetize penetrations based upon them.

Defects are great for outsourced support organizations who manage the ticket flow based upon them.

Without significant scaffolding surrounding those liabilities that far exceeds what nearly any organization I have known is willing to put up (think: US shuttle program levels of scaffolding), I cannot think of lower hurdle means to turn product liabilities into assets. In the manufacturing world, some product liabilities like in the OP's article are waste stream conversions, where the application of more technology turns low-grade embedded energy into some more useful form.

Software "waste stream" seems to demand significantly more technology than industry is willing to accept in most foreseeable futures.

No "drinking for the planet" then? Disappointing.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com