Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic | Hacker News Reader

Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

timharford.com

216 pointsMaysonL278 comments

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back.

> Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute

Except what would actually happen is everyone who wants a widget stands around “not in the queue” until the person being served is finished, at which point there’s a mad rush to be the next person served. So basically the same thing that happens when there’s no queue :D

Classic economist solution!

I thought he was going to say that each new person goes in front of the person currently being served. This would motivate people to complete their orders as fast as possible.

Yeah, seems dumb "economist" thinking. The idea that "if someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits" is a absurd on two fronts.The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible. Maybe you are allergic to chocolate. Maybe mince pies make you gag.

Also, optimising for queue length only makes any sense in the described scenario if all stalls are owned by a single entity.

I'm not even going to touch the "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" stupidity.

Of course the position "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" is ridiculous at face value.

But if you are a bit more generous with its intentions, then there is something that really chimes with me about it.

I work in engineering support to oil and gas operations (but I'm sure this is applicable to many industries), and we have quarterly workplans and pretty fixed budgets. Of course our budget-holder typically asks us to do more work than we are able to deliver, so I will often have to say "this job does not make the priority list for next quarter, but we can do it the quarter after next?".

However, I've found a pretty good rule of thumb is that if a job was not high priority enough to win a place on the next quarter's to-do list then by the time the following quarter comes around, it will probably get bumped off the priority list by something else higher priority. In other words, our limited budget means there is always some 'cut-off point' where work that looks important is still not quite high enough priority (compared to our other work) to ever get done.

It is easy to 'form a long queue' by saying yes to work and letting it sit on our to-do list forever, but just slightly too low down to ever get done. But in our industry at least, there's a small overhead involved in just keeping that work around and passing the ownership of the task from person to person.

A more realistic rephrasing could be "if you're adding something to your todo list and it's not high enough priority to bump anything else, consider how much inefficiency it will cause long-term by it just sitting in your queue for months"

Maybe a little silly for your personal todo lists, but I think the idea has some applicability at a larger scale.

I think sometimes a "black hole" is exactly what's needed for these requests. OK, sure, it's noted, and that's what we'll do if we somehow have nothing better to do.

I remember attending a lecture about how to do well in the academic world well back at university decades ago, where the lecturer quoted another (famous) researcher who had a personal rule for incoming requests. Either he did it now or he did it never. Now is not literally now, but close.

Just saying no and not pretending that you might do can also be helpful in other ways. For instance, you or someone else might then realize that to get something like this done, it needs to be made much easier to do.

I've personally just finished planting 450 meters of windbreaking bushes around my orchard. Now, I should have done that four years ago - but I came up with a fancier plan, to put it on top of an embankment, and it would get rid of some of the traffic noise, and I had a guy with lots of soil in spare - great plan, except that person was really slow to respond and was actually depending on another person, and I had to get the municipality to agree, and... as it turns out, the required level of social energy to push this through was just not happening for me in my spare time. So after four years, my wife made me scrap the idea, then I almost immediately realized that hey, I could just plant the damn bushes, and here we are, a few months later, and they're out there and looking great, eight different species, future homes of birds and other wildlife.

Exactly, it does not make sense at all. The "queue" is not the main thing and "buying" is the main thing. The "economist" thinking here is akin to "Lets not make everyone rich, lets make everyone poor"

> The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible.

If there continuously is a queue, the stall owner doesn’t lose a sale when somebody walks away, and, if the owner is smart, doesn’t lose any produce, as they shouldn’t prepare more than they can, at maximum speed, sell before closing time.

I hope my ignorance can be forgiven, but every time I see economist lit it comes off as incredibly reductive. There's always something (like the secondary fight-night line you mention) that seems intuitively obvious to me but gets glossed over. Am I just ignorant?

> Am I just ignorant?

No. Economics academia is an "emperor's new clothes" field. They generate enormous amounts of dense, complex-sounding literature, and most if it is as you describe. It's never practical.

Sometimes there are interesting models that help to understand things that happened in the past, but as a field, economics seems unable to predict anything that will happen in the future (even on a fundamental level) and therefore can't seem to graduate to the level of science.

And if you are able to do that most likely you will find yourself in a hedge fund but not in the academia.

It's like this because they start from postulates that are contrary to reality. The idea that elements in an economic systems act in a rational way, or that there is an "invisible hand" that drives the markets, or that the markets operate in equilibrium, these are all ad hoc ideas that have no basis in reality. I classify it more like a kind of economic theology.

Yeah, that rational markets bit I keep hearing about sounds more like an example of proof that the markets we have are not rational. Like; "IF the markets WERE rational, they would probably do thing" and then thing is something that is observably not happening.

The purpose of economics is to explain complex interaction between systems. Analogy is a powerful communication tool. Such phrases allow us to communicate and reason about systems.

The concepts raise the standard of policy development. Consider how much easier it is to discuss a proposal thanks to 'The Tragedy of the Commons'. Those few words serve as a shorthand for a dynamic. Without it you might need to spend half an hour stepping people through the dynamic each time you wanted to refer to it, and you would lose people along the way.

Assuming the rationality of economic actors goes wrong primarily because economists don’t know what “rationality” is and come up with weird accounts for what “rational” behavior would be under given circumstances. They aren’t talking about “rational” behavior in the sense laymen use the term.

The “invisible hand” is also something that actually does exist and is straightforward to explain. It’s the tendency individuals making decisions in their own self-interest to find others with compatible self-interest as the motivation to make a trade. Every mutually self-interested transaction adds up to a total gain for the overall economy because each side makes the trade precisely because they judge the other’s offer to be of higher value to them. The key to demystifying the observation is the insight that “value” is a judgement made by individuals in relation to their own lives, not some inherent property that can be determined apart from individuals value judgements.

Economics is an extremely political science, a lot of common knowledge about what economists believe/predict/do is probably wrong. There is about as much visibility into what economics actually predicts as into physics, mathematics or any other science.

Most economics is quoted to try and score points in political debates where the lines are already drawn, conclusions already reached and people are mainly looking for tools to push their preferred solution. In such an environment, you might expect to see an enormous amount of very low quality economics content - probably full of motivated reasoning if you look for it.

It doesn't say much about the state of the field, more about how hard it is to find the field in amongst the dross. Eg, it is reasonably clear that most people writing about about Marxism or Keynesianism haven't read Marx or Keynes wrote.

Yeah - the stalls have the same capacity, the same consumer demand is present, but now we have fights!

It's also a bizarre example, because there's already a very simple solution from fast food.

Sometimes you can serve customers about as quickly as it takes for them to order and pay (e.g. hotdogs) and then there's typically no queue, or if you can't keep up and the queue is intolerably long like in this example, then they take your order and give you a number which gets called out when you're done.

This is exactly how a popular food truck would work at a fair, and you don't wait in a queue for ages, you mill around a bit and you come back when your food's ready.

Tim Hartford addresses this: “ the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps”

He’s using it to explain reverse logic, and then moves onto the more practical application in a todo list (discussed elsewhere in the comment tree).

The article should have clarified one more assumption: In a Landsburg's queue, it is compulsory for everyone arriving at the scene to *join the queue immediately*. Otherwise, people would just swarm around the head of the queue, fighting to join the queue as soon as the current customer gets served. In the following discussions, I assume such swarms are successfully prohibited.

# For those who end up going home

For those who end up going home, a traditional queue is still more efficient.

In a Landsburg's queue, if you decided to go home, it must be that there has been too many people joined the queue ("the queue got full"). *Their arrival takes time*. You would have waited for quite some time when you decided to bail out.

A traditional queue, on the other hand, allows those who end up going home to choose to do so immediately upon arriving at the scene. You arrive at the scene, look at the queue, judge that it would take unacceptably long period of time before you can get served ("it's currently full"), and decide to go home. You never join the queue. You wait for zero seconds.

# Arranging early arrivals is important *Filtering for fans.* In the book _The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life_, Landsburg himself stated that some businesses would prefer to serve fanatic patrons over mediocre customers. In an ordinary queue, customers can prove their loyalty by *arranging to arrive early*. On the other hand, by attaching the probability of getting served directly to the probabilistic nature of when one arrives, a Landsburg's queue does not allow/support proving patronage with early arrivals.

*An ordinary queue is an auction.* One of the main arguments that Landsburg proposed is that an ordinary, first-in-first-out queue is inefficient because it is not a market. I disagree to some extent. Let's re-examine the act of arranging early arrivals. By arriving early, you sacrifice the liberty of arranging the day's tasks liberally, often risking postponing a couple of other chores to the next day and/or losing opportunities for spending the morning somewhere else. This *cost of flexibility and opportunity* is a bid[^1] for guarantee/priority of service. Yes, it's still not a market where you trade spots in the queue, but its auction-like nature makes it a much closer implementation than Landsburg's queue.

[^1]: Well, it's technically a payment, since you don't get your money back should you lose the auction (i.e., decide to bail out from the queue). However, since it's not a game of chance, I can't call it a gamble either.

> In a Landsburg's queue, it is compulsory for everyone arriving at the scene to join the queue immediately. Otherwise, people would just swarm around the head of the queue, fighting to join the queue as soon as the current customer gets served. In the following discussions, I assume such swarms are successfully prohibited.

That’s still a non-physical solution because you can’t actually operationalize that rule.

I just feel bad for the one ‘good actor’ who is never going get a coffee at the Christmas market.

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries. So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible.

This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles, a PHEV will electrify the majority of the miles with a fraction of the battery capacity.

Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs".

>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs)

The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just going back to regular ICE. If you outlaw ICE/make those cars unavailable, you'll find plenty of political headwinds and set the entire movement back a decade IMO.

> The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro.

How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask for on a public road?

There’s a wide range of “reasonable times” a car can get to 70 mph and the differences can definitely be noticed by normal drivers on public roads.

Doesn't matter. Consumers like the specs, and showing off how quick they can get to 40mph on a residential street.

I guess that’s a rhetorical question? Because clearly many people do actually prefer a BMW to a geo metro, despite the price difference.

There’s an extremely obvious difference in 0-60 times between a Prius and a Model 3, and that matters on an on-ramp. (Replace 0-60 with 5-60 or 25-60 or whatever you measure of acceleration you prefer).

Is it necessary? No, obviously, people aren’t dying left and right trying to merge in Priuses. It is very noticeable, however.

I have been driving Priuses for a good chunk of my life now, and there’s really no way I could safely max out their acceleration while merging. Typically the right-lane traffic on highways here flows at 75 MPH when there isn’t much congestion. Why would you benefit from greater acceleration?

It makes very little sense from my perspective. What am I going to do, cut someone off? Floor it and merge with no consideration for the trajectories of other vehicles?

It’s not that difficult, and I live in an area with notoriously short on-ramps. You’ve still got plenty of road to match the speed of the cars on the highway and shift your position so you land between two cars. Accelerating as you’re about to merge just makes that more difficult, especially with a short on-ramp.

Yeah, sometimes people don’t know how to drive and stop or slow down on on-ramps. I don’t care how fast my car can accelerate; if the person in front of me isn’t reaching the same speed as the cars on the highway, I’m going to stop much farther back on the ramp, wait for them to do their thing, and resume proper merging once they’re out of the way. I don’t want to have to deal with flooring it and trying to time everything while accelerating.

Have you ever driven a plug-in Prius (the Prius Prime here in Québec)? It's got wonderful acceleration when using the all-electric mode.

What opportunity do you have for dramatic acceleration driving legally on a public road? 0-60 in 3s vs 20s how much time can that really add up to shaving off your drive?

I borrowed (actually traded; swapping with my truck) a ~2016 Prius for a month and hated driving it.

Merging is slow; I ended up flooring it and only reaching ~50 mph by the end of the onramp. Bay area ramps are, however, very short. Try the SB 101 Rengstorff ramp in Mountain View, it's horrible. In fact, that very ramp is why I replaced my 2002 Saturn LW200 with a 2010 BMW 135i in 2012.

The Prius also can't maintain speed up hills. I would engage cruise control and find myself dramatically slowing down on any uphill segment. By contrast none of my cars have this problem - the 2010 BMW 135i, the 2022 Chevrolet Bolt, and the 2000 Chevrolet Silverado all do just fine. Of the three, the Bolt is my favorite to drive.

That is, of course, not an indictment of PHEVs in general, just the Prius in particular. It's under-powered for unremarkable basic driving. Hopefully the Prime and other models newer than what I drove are better.

Sounds like the car you drove was defective.

I have an auris which is mechanically identical to a Prius. I have not driven those exact roads but I have never struggled going up hills and it will hit 60mph from a standstill in just under 10s, so with a rolling start of say 20-30 getting onto the onramp you are at 60 or so in 6 or 7 seconds. If your onramps are so short that you can't drive for 6 or 7 seconds before merging, then I guess that is a different problem.

Maybe, but I doubt it. It wasn't throwing any codes and I notice other Priuses also sagging by 5-8 mph on uphill sections of 280. Nowadays I habitually change lanes if I see a Prius in front of me just prior to an incline.

The official spec sheet says ZVW30 Prius has a 73kW(99PS) engine and a 60kW(82PS) motor, so combined it's a 130kW(180PS) system if it was possible to do so. 130kW is about as much as a Caterham Seven and slightly less than fast motorcycles. Take a Porsche 918 and it does 0-60 in 3.2 and goes around the ring in 7 minutes... with a 450kW(600hp) + 210kW(280hp) hybrid drivetrain.

There is nothing in hybrid configuration that makes a car slow, if not faster, not just Tesla quickening but actually overall faster. It's definitely Prius product design problem that is creating an impression that hybrids are slow ugly cars.

You don't have metered on-ramps? These are ones with a traffic light at the start where one has to come to stop at the light and then accelerate to match your speed with the traffic.

Very rare in UK at least .. and the few that exist are only active when traffic is at a near standstill.

Yeah, they are the same in the US, only metered when there is a lot of traffic. Which exacerbates the need for acceleration because you need not only match the speed before the ramp ends but also find a hole in the heavy traffic.

Why do you need to accelerate so much if the traffic is so slow?

Perhaps this is a cultural thing, but bad traffic here means stationary or less than walking speed. There is no need for hot rod acceleration in these situations!

Don't need to accelerate if the traffic is slow, need to accelerate if the traffic is heavy i.e. a lot of cars driving on the same road at 60-70 mph.

In my area, if the ramp meters are on, traffic on the highway isn't moving faster than 35mph and might very well be at a dead stop. Why would I need hyper-acceleration?

I am perplexed by the insinuation that an average power car is less safe than a sports car on public roads. Everything I was taught shows that proper driving technique is paramount, and I would have to see data supporting a contrary assertion.

While we can construct edge scenarios where a fast car can get you out of trouble (mostly when overtaking) I'm willing to bet that's a marginal effect that is trumped by the inherent danger of very powerful cars in the hands of inexperienced drivers - i.e 100% of the first time buyers who never drove one.

Seems more like a rationalisation for wanting a cool toy, "don't worry honey, those 500HP will mean the world when merging to drop the kids to school".

Yeah this sounds to me like a lot of "whatabout"ing.

"I can't drive anything that does less then 3s 0-60s because <insert some flimsy reason>". If you want a fast car, just come out and say it. Driving a high performance car can be exhilarating - I have a second/weekend fast car for precisely the reason that I enjoy it, but I don't pretend it is required or that it is particularly responsible or socially acceptable to boot it away from the lights or go accelerate like shit off of a stick when merging with faster traffic. My hybrid does 99% of my driving, and the other is strictly a weekend guilty pleasure. I've never been in a situation in normal driving where the hybrid couldn't do something my weekend car would have handled (apart from just blow someone off at the lights if they have pissed me off)

The arguments here against PHEVs and EVs etc used to be towing speed boats up mountains every week (it was never made clear why people were taking speed boats up a mountain so frequently! Surely there is not much water up a mountain...)

I guess people need new arguments now that range and towing and charging are solved issues for 99% of people's needs.

I am sure someone will now reply about their journey out to meet their parents in the country with no chargers on the journey there etc etc... Did you try driving your speedboat there instead? :)

The person I was responding to said the difference was impossible to notice on public roads. I gave an example of a situation where it is noticeable and everyone decided that I meant it was a situation where it’s necessary (despite explicitly saying that it isn’t necessary).

It’s the kind of thread that makes me really wish people on the internet would read what’s written, not what they’d like to think was written.

I still don’t really understand how you can end up in that situation. It seems contrived. With proper driving technique, it shouldn’t be possible. Granted, mistakes happen, but I’ve never been in a situation where the difference was noticeable or relevant.

The argument here is about comfort, not impossibility. Someone who is comfortable driving a 5s 0-60 car just won't buy a 10s 0-60 replacement. Not because it is impossible to get to places in the latter but because it's uncomfortable.

If you want these people to replace their 5s cars with hybrids you need to offer 5s hybrids.

> If you want these people to replace their 5s cars with hybrids you need to offer 5s hybrids.

These are readily available.

Driving for fun on public roads is safe, legal, and popular. You won't wish it away.

Our Pacifica plug-in hybrid minivan is fantastic. We go months without refueling.

The met police use a variety of PHEVs as response vehicles including BMWs and Mitsubishi. Performance is not an issue.

My Volt has 300lb/ft of torque and accelerates quite lovely. Sport mode is a fun drive. Much more pep than the VW diesel I used to have. And the car drives for 80-90km on battery without touching the ICE. I go months without filling. I drive 93% electric, only using gas for road trips. You've looked at the wrong PHEVs.

> You've looked at the wrong PHEVs.

You’re looking at a PHEV that no longer exists.

Many I've seen in Europe are pretty fast - Merc 350e for example has 0-62mph of 5.9s and top speed of 155mph. BMW 330e is 6.1s and 140mph. Granted some are slower, but no one ever bought a brand like Toyota etc expecting high-performance, so it is not surprising if they are slower (FWIW my Toyota non-plugin hybrid is actually pretty fast from a standstill, but won't win any races beyond 20mph)

6s to 62mph is pretty nippy - if you need faster than 6s 0-62mph then you are likely in a fairly small niche group.

Looks like the base Tesla 3 is 0-62 in 5.8s and 140mph top speed so pretty comparable.

A model 3 performance does 0-60 in 3.2 seconds with some guys going faster on a track with sticky tires. Someone looking at a Benz (at least in the US) isn’t buying the base model 3.

The Benz starts at $54k in the US, that’s definitely model 3 performance territory.

In the UK, a Tesla 3 performance is £60k. A base Tesla 3 is about £43k. An equivalent Merc 300e is £45k.

Base Tesla 3 and base 300e appear to be mostly the same price and mostly same 0-62 performance at 5.8s and 6.1s.

I would guess that performance isn’t the main consideration for most folks, but you should check out the BMW 330e and 530e. Both are plug-in hybrids with very respectable performance numbers. You can even get them with the M-sport package (not that it makes them faster, but it makes them a little sportier).

>The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal.

The Chevy Volt was pretty sporty (damn the suits who killed it), and

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI-DUULV1tE

>The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes

Well there's your problem. The fact that EVs are toys is making you think PHEVs are also toys. There are PHEVs currently on the market that can compete with the Ford Focus and the Honda Accord.

BMW's and Porsche's PHEVs are pretty good, why other companies cannot follow the same formula (add batteries and electric motor to a regular car without crippling the existing drivetrain) is a mystery. It appears most want you to buy their BEV so they intentionally make PHEVs unappealing.

We looked at the BMW X5 Hybrid recently and it’s kind of a joke. There’s a large (24kWh) battery pack but it only gets 31 miles of range on a full charge. The charge itself takes eight hours on a 240V circuit because they only installed a 16A charger (the i3 has a 32A charger.) Meanwhile it’s gas mileage is lower than the equivalent ICE version. It does not feel like a serious effort to move a lot of customers onto EV usage, more like a compliance car. No idea about the Porches but I understand those to be at an even less affordable price point.

The message I replied to was about performance, not range. PHEVs do not have 300 miles electric range, even BMW. I have an 45e and have no problems with it: it fully charges in ~7 hours, I drove about 6K miles last year and filled total 5 times (not full tanks, I live in an apartment building with shared chargers that go out of order for weeks so I fill up when charger is broken and I have less than 1/4 tank), it still has 90% of tank filled in the early November.

I live in a rural area and 31 miles of range is enough to drive into the largest town where everything is, and back again, without the ICE coming on.

That's not a "joke."

31 miles with a small/light/inexpensive battery and reasonably rapid charging would not be a joke, particularly if you also got some gas-only efficiency benefits. But the X5 has a relatively huge and heavy 24kWh battery pack - nearly 1/3 the size of a Model Y, a car that gets 10x the electric range. The result is a substantial cost increase over the gas-only X5, plus gas mileage that is actually worse. Moreover, the internal charger is so weak that you can’t add any substantial range by charging at your destination unless you occupy a charger all day long (the Model Y charges at up to 42 miles/hr on AC, the BMW will add maybe 4.)

In the US, at least, 45e MSRP is 3700 more than 40i xdrive and 45e comes standard with air suspension, which is a 2K+ option on 40i (can't look it up now because it's not even available at this time). I would not call a ~2000 a substantial cost increase on a 60K+ vehicle. But there is more - you get 7500 tax credit from the feds and in some states you get the state credit too so it's actually cheaper than even rear-drive sdrive 40i with the fed credit alone.

In other words, with some luxury features, small sales numbers (easy to take a small margin when you’re selling next to none) and a massive $7500 Federal subsidy it compares with the ICE on affordability. But I would prefer to save those valuable $7500 tax credits for vehicle designs that can actually be built and sold at scale. That’s the problem here: PHEVs are supposed to be a bridge to full EVs, but this thing is an obsolete dinosaur that will barely move the needle on electrification. It’s also fairly obvious that within the extended warranty lifespan of this vehicle, BMW will ditch this design and completely replace it with a platform that is a good EV first, rather than an ICE with some expensive bolt on electrification.

I frankly don't care about the needle of electrification. I responded to your claim that it is substantially more expensive, which had been false in my experience. If BMW will drop this design or the price incentive will change I am not going to be buying a BEV for sure, it's going to be an ICE or hybrid from another brand. Luckily the trend seems to be opposite, the 45e replaced the horrendous 40e and had been a great success so I doubt BMW will be killing this line any time soon.

Traditional automaker tend to get a bit paternalistic and perhaps communist in American terms - the new Camry your team is going to build and sell is going to carry life and moments of its drivers, and their families, and their neighbors waving hands for next decades, each year adding up in tens of millions as the cars are built and shipped - it’s definitely not going to do 0-60 in under 2 seconds because they can’t get around that for better or worse. Maybe even 5 seconds is too much. Is 7.5s too slow? Debatable. Think about kids! Our future!

Tesla is at the other side of spectrum when it comes to it, so they just put what they make because they can. They managed to set the benchmark for BEV so others follow them for BEV products.

I've carpooled in a Prius and a Honda Civic Hybrid. Both of those cars seemed to be extremely capable of accelerating to pass other cars on the freeway. I was riding in the Prius one time and my friend was complaining about the Prius being slow, when we got stuck behind a car going 60 mph. Beep boop, he idly jumped up to 80, passed the guy, dropped back to 67, and went back to complaining that his car was slow.

I was terribly impressed; my car would've had to put more work in to do that.

Panamera turbo s e-hybrid or the cayenne turbo s e-hybrid certainly doesn’t have “abysmal” performance

Plug in electric hybrids strike me as insanely complex machines compared to Ev's. It strikes me as highly unlikely that from an environmental standpoint our (societies) time is better spent building them, than it is spent increasing the rate at which we can build batteries.

I'd expect EVs to be cheaper if they are actually simpler, last time I looked that wasn't really the case outside of cars produced in China that most western customers wouldn't buy.

Cost isn’t the same thing as complexity. EVs are probably more expensive because batteries are expensive.

You can get a Bolt for around $11k after incentives. OK the incentives part is a wrench in the equation to be sure, so it may be hard to answer my question…

Are you saying hybrids cost less than that?

How do the EV incentives compare to fossil fuel subsidies?

Where are the incentives taking the price of a Bolt that low? My LEAF just turned 7 and I'd probably buy a Bolt immediately if I could get one in the $11K range. (The LEAF has been great all around, but only being able to count on 75 miles is annoying from time to time.)

I'd like to know this too -- have had my eye on the Bolt for some time.

The 2022 Bolt base price is $31k and it is no longer eligible for federal tax credits. In my state, EVs are partially exempt from state sales tax, but that just means the total price is something like $32k including tax (instead of $33.5k).

If Build Back Better passed, the Bolt would be eligible for a $12.5k federal credit, so I'd be looking at $19.5k. But that bill is stalled and the Bolt isn't even available to buy new right now -- GM halted manufacturing until at least February due to a battery defect.

It looks like a few states offer tax rebates of $3-5k, so that might get you close to $11k if you could get the dealer to knock a few thousand off MSRP, but I have no idea if that's realistic (and again, this assumes BBB or something similar passes).

> But that bill is stalled and the Bolt isn't even available to buy new right now -- GM halted manufacturing until at least February due to a battery defect.

Not only that, a subsidy that large would dramatically increase short-term demand without meaningfully increasing short-term supply. So either they would raise the price or they'll be sold out before you can buy one, e.g. because they all went to the friends and associates of the dealers.

California. I have to admit it’s second hand (and outdated.. last year…) information, but worth looking into imho even though I’d rather see anyone get a Tesla.

I’m actually in the market for an EV or PHEV that seats 6 or more, and my search started with the Model X. But I’ll probably wind up getting a Volvo XC90. It’s around $30K cheaper, which is nice, and more importantly, if I ordered a Model X tomorrow, the expected delivery date is January 2023.

Did you take the resell value into account?

PHEVs are more complex, but arguably not more complex than having both a BEV and an ICE vehicle. If a BEV covers 95% of my driving needs, that sounds great, but it still means I need two cars if one is a BEV.

5% of your drives sounds like a problem solved by a car rental, not by owning two vehicles.

Unless those 5% of rides start an airplane flight away, I can't imagine very many people are going to pay all the costs to own a car and all the costs and hassle/time-wastage of renting a car once or twice a month. They'll buy a PHEV, hybrid, or conventional car and wait for the BEVs to improve. (I'm a LEAF owner, but can trade cars with my spouse when I need to. I think twice in 7 years we've both needed to drive a distance in a single day where the shorter drive would stress the LEAF.)

Right, but that’s exactly my point, you wouldn’t own two vehicles, and you wouldn’t own one vehicle that still requires you to regularly rent a second vehicle. You’ll just own a single vehicle that covers 100% of your driving needs.

Plug-in hybrids are, in the US, at average car cost now, but this may be because of EV credits.

This makes very little sense. The complexity is an implementation detail. PHEVs are cheaper than EVs by a wide margin, complexity be damned, and are more practical to boot. Building PHEVs does not in any way reduce the amount that will be spent on battery R&D; PHEVs will consume all the batteries we can throw at them because we will still want the biggest battery pack available.

Quality over quantity - and if prices indicate anything it’s a more efficient approach. Battery building is also limited to lithium availability, so there’s many more cars you can convert if you put 1/5 of the battery in each one. Fuel is much more energy dense than batteries so the removed weight is making the car more efficient as well. Ultimately I think it’s important to value flexibility and maximizing tradeoffs, which I feel plug in hybrids achieve.

Internal combustion engines are very complex. Yet they can be produced really cheap.

It's a bit like microchips.

Vast sums (think tens to hundreds of billions) have been invested into the "machine that makes the machine". Cranking out engines at this point is relatively simple.

Path dependency is a very powerful force.

And, not being in the industry, I don’t quite understand why.

Look at diesel electric locomotives. They run the diesel only for power and they use the electric motors for drive. Why doesn’t this model work in cars and allow us to get rid of the transmission like a full EV does?

Gas engines have an optimal RPM. Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge?

Instead, they are complex vehicles with EXTRA transmission like components.

The only car I know of that works this way is the BMW i3, which came with an optional 'range extender' that's essentially a little gas generator with a 2(!) gallon tank. One complaint I've heard is that it doesn't necessarily put out enough wattage to fully drive the car under certain (hilly, cold) conditions (But, I have to imagine that could be solved with a bigger generator).

The problem as I understand it is that California's regulations require that the range extender doesn't provide more range than the car's internal battery. How this ended up the case I have no idea.

You can convince the i3 to believe it's a European car which increases the range extender's utility dramatically. You can unlock more fuel as well as have the generator turn on whenever you want (as opposed to at only very low SOC), largely mitigating hills.

The purpose of the small gas tank was to qualify for California subsidies and ZEV credits. California doesn't want to subsidize anyone who might buy a PHEV or BEV with REX and then run it 100% on gasoline.

Somr hybrids do, they're called "series hybrids" as opposed to "parallel hybrids" or may be referred to as Extended Range Electric Vehicles (or some other ordering of those words.)

It doesn't work because of energy loss converting mechanical to electric and back is higher than mechanical transmission straight to the wheels. Honda does do something like what you describe at low speeds but the efficiency is not very good. Toyota and some other manufacturers use clever arrangements of planetary gears + motor/generator to keep the engine closer to optimal parameters independent of wheels. I'm not sure a modern hybrid system is more complex than a modern automatic transmission.

> Why doesn’t this model work in cars and allow us to get rid of the transmission

Nissan e-Power system does exactly that, but requires full EV powertrain. Added cost. Also punishes transmission suppliers.

> Why wouldn’t a hybrid run the engine at exactly that RPM to generate the best charge?

Toyota THS system kind of does this. Output shaft is driven at a speed that is function of resistance and generator RPM and engine RPM thereby allowing RPM to stay in optimal-ish area.

The more I think about future drivetrains, the remarkable and more remarkable Prius starts to look for me - everyone hates hideous Toyota aesthetics and so do I, but Toyota hybrid system is rather ingenious and really something.

Plug-in hybrids can be as simple as normal hybrids with bigger motors and batteries.

On power-split device hybrids, the hybrid system outright replaces the automatic transmission which is the true "insanely complex" component.

Such complexity is still cheap to mass manufacture.

> Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs".

Yes, but this exists now, with the government handouts and tax credits. They overwhelmingly go to affluent people who need these things the least.

There are unsexy trades like replacing oil burning heaters for gas or wood pellet stoves but these often aren't viewed as green enough and the people who would benefit have no one advocating for them.

consumers don't prefer oil, but what matters is whether their properly had a gas line.

You need lighter, more energy dense batteries that can charge faster.

You get all of that with Graphene. It’s just a question of cost. I’m honestly shocked that they haven’t put them in the top end Tesla’s yet to showcase the technology.

> For most city vehicles, a PHEV will electrify the majority of the miles with a fraction of the battery capacity.

There have been studies on how PHEVs are used in the real world and this is just not what's happening, see e.g.: https://theicct.org/publications/phev-real-world-usage-sept2...

On the other hand, the study proves that PHEVs with decent battery capacity actually do that, the average is just too low:

>. Most PHEVs have type-approval all-electric ranges of 30–60 km and electrify 5,000–10,000 km a year. PHEVs with high all-electric ranges of 80 km or more achieve 12,000–20,000 km mean annual electric mileages, which is comparable to the annual mileage of the car fleet in Germany and the United States.

> For private cars, the average utility factor (UF)—the portion of kilometers driven on electric motor versus kilometers driven on combustion engine—is 69% for NEDC type approval but only around 37% for real-world driving

Not a majority, but 37% of your driving on electric is a significant chunk. Would

And to take a Prius Prime for an example, you can still have a very efficient vehicle when you're running in normal hybrid mode:

> C/D observed 75-mph highway driving (hybrid mode): 47 mpg / 49 mpg / 47 mpg

If you're trying to make the most difference with limited battery production, that's 8.8 kWh of batteries for a Prius Prime. You can make more than 6 of them with the batteries that go into a single "low range" Model 3 (54 kWh).

Six cars doing a bit over 1/3 of their miles in electric mode, or one car doing all of its miles in electric mode?

That's a relatively short electric range car, if 25 miles isn't doing enough for most people there's probably a good middle ground where you use half the batteries of a long range EV but cover 90% of your milage in EV mode.

This is of course ignoring that the Model 3 is a lot more fun to drive than a Prius Prime, but just to make the point about battery usage.

It was kinda my dream to have drop-in kits that would turn any ICE into a plug-in micro-hybrid and just run the electric system off extra batteries for as long as possible, and then kicking in the alternator once finally required.

Could work as more and more stuff becomes electric in cars instead of running off accessory belt.

You can also fully charge a 10kWh battery overnight on a 120V charger.

Almost all affordable PHEV are not very good cars though.

They are basically shitty electric cars and a shitty fossil cars combined.

>Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs".

I already view them as battery hogs. It baffles me that anyone thinks they make sense. We have the battery supply to either make a small minority of cars EVs or to make all cars PHEVs.

PHEVs are cheaper, more practical, and more environmentally sound.

Do you know how to get more batteries on the road? Make more batteries and sell them for less.

This is Tesla’s business model and a huge reason Li batteries are so much less expensive today.

I’d say the inverted logic is more like buy electric cars now even though they don’t hold their resale value due to economies of scale catching up on you.

Yes, exactly.

One can think of it this way also: if 85 kWh of battery modules is made, how should they be placed to reduce the most CO2.

You can put them into 8 plugin hybrid cars with 10 kWh battery in each, and it's used for commuting in each of them, replacing 80% of yearly kilometers with electric ones, that's maybe 10 x 20,000 x 0.8 = 160,000 km electric driving. Those cars still drive 10 x 20,000 x 0.2 = 40,000 km with gasoline (for long road trips etc).

Or you can put them all into one Tesla. If it's a regular private car, it drives 20,000 km per year and thus we have 20,000 km of electric driving.

So in this calculation, it would make more sense from environmental point of view to put the battery modules in hybrid cars.

Now, maybe the Tesla is a Taxi and is actually driven 100,000 km per year, then it's different.

Or maybe the luxury Teslas that sit on driveways as status symbols are changing how people think, or are driving innovation and have massive leverage that way.

But it's complicated.

Plug in batteries don’t last very long because they charge and discharge every day. Due to this they end up either costing several times as much manufacturing capacity as you’re assuming or they simply get driven as non plug in hybrids which makes them less efficient than EV’s.

Further ramping up battery production isn’t any kind of long term barrier, so plug end hybrids just result in less investment in battery manufacturing and thus slower adoption of EV’s.

LFP batteries have practically unlimited recharge cycles.

Higher density LFPs are coming too.

I would agree in general with the parent, but with LFPs hitting mainstream 200-300 mile range in pure EVs, and no real resource constraint, hybrids and "standard range" can be LFP and then NMC chemistries can be dedicated to higher density needs.

10kWh LFP’s don’t last the lifetime of the average plug in hybrid due to regenerative breaking adding a lot of charge cycles when total battery capacity is that low.

30m/s to 0 on a 2000kg vehicle = 900000 J or 0.25kWh, on a at best 10kWh battery adds up.

Really? I remember Jeffrey Dahn saying they were effectively unlimited, for whatever LFP chemistry they were testing, back when the million mile battery was being advertised.

Also LFPs don't have sourcing issues, and I think the minimum range hubrid should be 70 miles, so that would be bigger than 10kwr.

If 10kwhr is only 20-30 miles... I think we should have 25kwhr at a minimum. 20-30 miles becomes like 10 miles in deep winter, and even then the ICE is doing the heat/cooling. You need 70 miles to handle weather range degradation for that sweet 50 mile daily usage range.

Bumping things to 25kWh vs 10 kWh and sure that can last the lifetime of the vehicle, but it also means replacing 1 EV with ~3 plug in hybrids vs 8 that the original poster mentioned. And you now have to manufacture and maintain 3 ICE powertrains which further cuts into the savings.

Plug in hybrids can be a great option for many drivers, but IMO they they essentially inherit the downsides of both EV’s and ICE. For example they have issues sitting unused for long periods. Need to replace belts and spark plugs etc. They risk both a battery fire and gasoline fire etc etc.

Better to use the batteries than hauling around mostly unused batteries all the time.

Plug in hybrids need to haul around an engine, gas tank, transmission, exhaust system etc. They also need extra batteries over a standard hybrid.

Those items aren’t made with as much extractive materials proportionally as EV batteries. If using PHEVs means more miles travelled are electric while less lithium is mined, great.

If you’re replacing the battery then you still need to extract those materials. Thus weight is only really meaningful in terms of vehicle efficiency not materials extraction. And of course having a plug in vehicle doesn’t mean it will be driven as a plug in vehicle where EV’s are limited to pure electricity.

There’s more aluminum and steel available above ground than lithium.

There is unused capacity, but all batteries in an EV are used slightly over a commute. That can lead to a much less damaging wear-pattern on the batteries, extending their life by a lot.

Or if you bought a Tesla 3 to 8 years ago - the “waste” is probably made up for by allowing Tesla to survive financially. But yes - wildly complicated. I’d imagine any honest thinker has to retreat to “I suppose it’s unmeasurable”, which is unfortunate.

> I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs".

Adding social punishments here would hurt momentum. It is far better to reward imperfect progress than to create a social environment where people feel like they'll never be good enough.

I mean your logic is sound but car companies dragged their feet for years on even plug in hybrids and so just like the mulled wine example in the article, it wouldn't work in the real world. GM had an amazing things with the Voltec architecture. ~50 miles on electric was more than enough for even the most discerning customers yet they never really extended it past the Chevy Volt. It should have been rolled out to all of their vehicles. That would help push them to also drive down the cost and eventually make it the standard powertrain on their cars. Over the course of 1 generation you have eliminated a large chunk of co2 emissions from transportation.

Instead they never introduced it to other cars, now they have discontinued the Volt(because who wants an overpriced Chevy Cruze anyway?) and now they nothing for sale because of battery issues.

Battery issues will be resolved in the next few years as more factories come online so I don't see how a "battery hog" issue will arise unless there is a fundamental shortage of raw materials. Seems like the battery companies are also investing in recycling so this eventually becomes a closed loop system.

There is also something counter-intuitive - we are making better and cheaper batteries because we are using so many batteries and planning to use _so much_ more. The cost curve and the profit motive are wonderful things.

"To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most"

We have a name for them - Bus Drivers!

Why is all the discussion is focused on personal cars, they sit idle 90% of the time. First vehicles to go electric should be bussed, light delivery vans, taxis and all other service vehicles that are in motion over 10 hours a day, 365 days a week.

Today 95% of all electric busses are in China, because our leadership thinks that since we don't have a planned economy, no planning of any kind is needed at all.

I could not agree with you more, except for the small problem of range.

I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day.

Maybe a 3 on, 1 off schedule would work (leaving it some time to charge) and that will have some capital implications (more actual vehicles in the fleet)

But I concur with the premise-work on reducing driven-miles not on "what percentage of vehicles" are electric.

For vehicles which are in nearly continuous use, the capital costs are essentially irrelevant next to fuel and maintenance, both of which are far cheaper for EVs. It might take a few years to pay for replacements.

Right, electrics can be optimized to a usage. Some buses could have capacitor banks recharged at every stop. That sort of tactic would be nonsense for a daily driver.

There is that in my city. A new bus line able to recharge bus capacitors at some stops. It looked like pretty hard to implement but it’s working interestingly well.

City buses seem like a great use case for battery swapping!

Depends a lot on the exact bus system, but thinking loosely about San Francisco: maybe retrofitting ~10 terminals with swap+recharge capabilities means most routes only need 1-2 hours of juice between swaps?

> I'm not sure batteries will support vehicles being in motion 10 consecutive hours. And in some categories (busses, delivery bikes) it will be as lot more than 10 hours a day.

The Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) is buying 300 all-electric buses:

* https://www.electrive.com/2021/04/27/toronto-to-procure-300-...

They currently have 60 as part of a pilot project, in addition to a whole bunch of hybrids.

It seems to be a case of pay now, or pay later:

> Besides the infrastructure cost of chargers, each electric bus can cost $200,000 to $500,000 more per bus than an average $750,000 diesel bus.

> Case acknowledges that is "significantly" more expensive, but it is offset by fuel savings over time, as electricity costs are cheaper. Because the electric buses have fewer parts than diesel buses, maintenance costs are also about 25 per cent lower and the buses are expected to be more reliable.

* https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/electric-buses-transit-1.582...

How heavy is an EV bus? Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class. Would a bus be even more so, to the point of being dangerously massive?

> Battery-electric cars are already pretty hefty for their class

A Tesla Model 3 weights roughly as much as its ICE equivalent (BMW 3 series).

But this doesn’t scale well. Buses will be pulling a lot more weight than a Tesla Model 3 or BMW 3er. And you’ve got the same problem with semi-trucks.

More weight to pull = more power required = more batteries required = more weight to pull. Almost a catch-22 when you factor in the increase in recharge time. For commercial vehicles, a minute of downtime is a minute of the said vehicle not making any money.

EV bus are not science fiction. There are a lot of them working everyday in a lot cities. So no, there is no such thing as dangerous weight.

In my city, most buses run on hydrogen. None run on batteries.

"being dangerously massive?"

What does this mean? Do you expect a bus to weigh more than a fully loaded truck? Trucks in uk weight up to 44 tons, the largest double-decker bus is 12.

If we omit the batteries, there have been electric buses since forever - trolley buses. They come also in hybrid variants too to serve more distant bus stops.

You're can do trolley buses with batteries as well, which charge while passing through central parts of their lines with overhead power, and discharge during the rest of their journey.

There’s a critical difference; convincing your local government to switch to electric buses is rather more difficult than choosing how to spend your own money.

If you're a local US government, you probably have trouble keeping the lights on, let alone justifying CapEx on more buses.

King County in Seattle recently costed a transition to all-electric: the conclusion was that it would cost 41% more than sticking with the current hybrids, and would be equivalent to reducing service by 237,000 hours annually. https://seattletransitblog.com/2020/11/02/metros-fleet-all-e...

Have they included emissions and healthcare considerations in those cost estimates?

Well, one would imagine that the externalities are mitigated by the fact that they are spread. AGW isn’t even bad for that region: abundant water, solid local government, improved arable land.

Eh, if AGW leads to more events like the triple digit heat waves in a region that has less than half of all buildings AC-capable due to the mild climate, it's pretty awful.

A lot of local water also comes from snowpack built over winter, which has been decreasing.

Which causes less emissions, the amount of solo drivers you’d switch with all the lost service hours or the marginal electrification of hybrid buses that have regenerative braking, stop and go and don’t go above 30mph?

IMO the case for all electric buses is a bit weakened by two things:

* for an electric hybrid bus with regenerative braking, the city bus is pretty much running on batteries most of the time anyways, because it never goes above 30MPH and there's so much stopping and starting to repower the batteries.

* in practice, BEB fleets need to be bigger than their diesel equivalent fleets because of the range anxiety. In particular, BEBs and their higher weight perform worse on elevation rises, where they are spending more energy to lug the heavier weight around, and in winter. Winter is interesting, because the way current bus heating works is that they take the waste heat from the ICE and dump that inside. Electrically heating a bus takes additional energy, and on top of that batteries perform worse in cold weather. The problem is severe enough that so far the most successful cold-weather BEBs maintain a fossil fuel system just to keep the bus warm.

We have some in Holland too. Works great. They accelerate quickly so buses don't hold up traffic and don't get many delays. Although it's too simple to suggest that by electrifying buses we save planet. Electric bikes are nice too, though fairly expensive. Most middle class folks have one. Electric cars don't seem to work at scale for now. Just unaffordably expensive and only economical for people who drive all the time and can charge on their own driveway.

Quick accelerate for family car is not needed but for bus is helpful to reduce traffic jam. I wish buses have at least hybrid powertrain.

LADOT and LA METRO are converting their bus fleets to electric. Its thousands of busses so these things take time.

Except that the kind of long distance drivers you suggest in the first paragraph would get minimal benefit from a PHEV, since it only covers the first 40km or thereabouts.

My wife and I only put like 10000km per year on our car, so I generally run down the battery fully on my PHEV and just touch a bit of the gas. That would barely make a dent in a multi-hour commuter's usage.

The hard part is the short-term solutions are unpalatable: pushing back hard on oversized vehicles that are wasteful of fuel and hazardous to people who choose small, efficient, green options.

A Hummer EV uses so much battery to build you could make three Nissan Leafs... but if you didn't make the Hummer EV, the driver would stick to a monstrous huge gas-burner.

So fundamentally, fighting climate change in a world without plentiful batteries demands strong disincentive to driving oversized vehicles.

Which is, of course, politically unpalatable because destroying the earth, obstructing visibility, and threatening your fellow drivers in a hypermassive oaf of a truck is freedom.

I read somewhere PHEV users don’t really bother charging effectively making them even worse than gas guzzlers.

Also that seems what Toyota is thinking with their anti-BEV lobbyism.

Hugely variable. I only burn about 20 gallons of gas per year. About one third of that is to avoid fuel spoiling, one third of that is for when I need longer trips, and one third when I screw up charging.

Even so, I get about 40MPG, so much better than an average vehicle.

It does sting to maintain an engine for 800 miles a year.

never thought about that, do the oil come out looking new?

I don't change my own oil anymore, but I imagine that it's just barely picked up some color-- Honda specifies synthetic and it's only a few hundred miles per change.

Pretty soon I'm going to be out of warranty and I'm going to stretch the oil change interval a bit beyond what they suggest-- 16 mos instead of a year. It just feels wasteful.

This also has an econ person fallacy in it. PHEV is only ever more environmently friendly when it gets plugged in as much as possible (in reality every night to cover next days drives). And people rarely do as PHEV is marketed to sell SUV’s by the BMW’s of the world and also reduce their fleet emission fines on paper by not making their customers inconvenience themselves.

Various environmentalists have tried this in the US. Here's a reason article about several attempts: https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-jus... Kind of frustrating the OP's article doesn't actually do any research on why it's hard to actually do this "clever" idea. There is an actual power structure that is opposed to these sorts of actions!

In general in the US it's very difficult to do this on state/federal land. You usually must make use of your rights or the leases will be revoked. Even when there is a state like Idaho where you can buy grazing rights and supposedly not use them, the state bureaucracy isn't interested in it.

I guess you could do this with coal rights but the coal markets have been so bad for the last decade it's hard to see this as worth doing.

>Here's a reason article about several attempts

If you read the article carefully,

-- This is about leases. Leases come with conditions. You're not buying the land.

-- The first example is about someone who lied and made a bid that he had no intention or ability to pay. Turns out that's actually a crime. That's not "power structure opposed to these sort of actions" in a nontrivial sense.

-- There's a very good reason for much of this: Grazing, hunting, and even logging are part of maintaining the land. The owner of the land (the government) doesn't want you to stop maintaining the land and so makes sure the lease requires that you maintain it. And resource extraction comes with paying royalties to the owner, who doesn't want you cheaping out by not extracting any resources and not paying anything.

This kind of strategy ignores second order effects.

For example, by buying a gas guzzler and not using it much you might lower the emissions from that specific vehicle. But supply and demand rears its ugly head: you're contributing to the increase of similar gas guzzlers' value in the market, which means that other people are more likely to maintain those vehicles in working order and resell them, instead of scrapping them or leaving them unused.

Surely by that same argument scrapping or abandoning any automobile instead of reselling it is going to increase the value of new cars relative to used cars, which might be a net negative for the environment even if the newly manufactured car is a zero emission vehicle.

We drive our cars about 2K miles and 5K miles a year. I’ve argued (so far without success) that it makes no sense for us to buy a used hybrid or other high-efficiency car [and divert that car from a user who would likely drive it 10K+ miles per year].

We’ve got a couple more years before I have to buy another used car, so I still might win the argument.

We need to get used to using the term 'power consumer' instead of emotive terms like 'gas guzzler' to describe IC engines. Currently coal powered BEVs are considered by some to have superior efficiencies to gasoline powered vehicles.

I would expect that to be true. Not the best numbers, but Wikipedia puts coal power plants at 37% efficiency and combustion engines at 20-35%. This makes sense too, power plants have space, money, and an incentive to increase efficiency. And in reality, no power mix is 100% coal, increasing the overall efficiency to above 37%.

Electricity doesn't transport well over wire. iI don't think mass market BEVs are viable until battery technology significantly improves and small modular nuclear reactors can provide local clean power.

https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Rolls-Royce-subm...

Does petrol just appear at the station ready for use? Less than half of crude oil makes it into your car.

It travels thousands of miles from the well to refinery, where a chunk of it is burnt to power fractional distillation and separate out Sulphur, impurities, bitumen, kerosene and other stuff that would ruin your car. It's burnt to power catalytic cracking, to convert heavier compounds into something combustion engines can burn. Obviously t is consumed in engines of trucks and ships to deliver it to a petrol station.

Look at the other side of this: by buying an EV, you're increasing the demand and increasing the cost barrier to owning one, so people are more likely to buy a cheaper, gas car. An EV you're not going to use much that sits in your garage is one less on the market to drive the supply up.

Generally, the idea that people toss their cars in the garbage is wrong. They enter the secondary market and someone drives them either way. Scrapping them only happens when their useful lifespan is over.

Buying a newly made gas guzzler is a different story.

Exactly, it induces demand. Same went for efforts to reintroduce ivory in a more ethically sourced way back onto the market. Demand exploded and kick started poaching again. There are other examples too.

As for buying coalmines, typically mining rights are sold to miners as licenses that owners expect to get a percentage from. When the buyer turns out to be an environmental NGO the license gets revoked pretty quickly. This happened in the US earlier this year. These strategies will often run into implementation complexities.

> This kind of strategy ignores second order effects.

I think half the examples listed are used to teach people about second order effects. Yet the writer of the article seems to have taken them at face value…

If environmentalists made major impact shutting down mines, the price of coal would go up incentivizing new ones or at least to increase the output of existing ones - demand hasn’t changed. Just the same with buying gas stations and shutting them down, too.

That’s not how it works. If the price of coal goes up, other generation technologies outcompete it (renewables and natural gas).

By disrupting the fossil fuel supply chain, you apply pressure to the point where coal generators are taken offline and demolished (lots of videos if you Google for coal plant demolition). This ensures you can’t go back, as the lead time is too long to build new coal and no one will finance it in the developed world. Natural gas is already marginal against renewables in many markets, and will face the same fate as coal as renewables build until they’re overbuilt.

That's an expensive bet if your model parameters are off by just a little bit.

Most risk is manageable, tail risk is unavoidable. You can do everything right and still have a government put you out of business or have the market move against you in a way you couldn’t have predicted.

With that said, the theory is sound based on existing economic conditions. 75% of coal generators in the US and roughly 45% globally operate unprofitably, for example (per Bloomberg NEF).

This might work if (1) coal production cannot be increased cheaply enough and (2) alternative generation can be deployed faster than increasing the coal supply.

I think that the only kind of generation that can quickly replace coal would be based on burning LNG and turning the same turbines.

Solar is great but unstable, adding a battery is pretty expensive yet.

Nuclear is sadly way too slow and expensive to build, even if no NIMBY protests would appear.

FYI, coal is still absolutely huge: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_supply_and_cons...

Don't get fooled by stats from rich countries as those countries "cheat" by importing goods and materials with large entry footprints embedded into them.

True, but even China and India are moving to renewables rapidly. Renewables are absolutely exploding (confirmed even by the growth rate from your wiki reference) and will like replace most global fossil generation over the next 10-15 years.

> By 2026, global renewable electricity capacity is forecast to rise more than 60% from 2020 levels to over 4 800 GW – equivalent to the current total global power capacity of fossil fuels and nuclear combined. Renewables are set to account for almost 95% of the increase in global power capacity through 2026, with solar PV alone providing more than half. The amount of renewable capacity added over the period of 2021 to 2026 is expected to be 50% higher than from 2015 to 2020. This is driven by stronger support from government policies and more ambitious clean energy goals announced before and during the COP26 Climate Change Conference.

> The growth of renewables is forecast to increase in all regions compared with the 2015-2020 period. China remains the global leader in the volume of capacity additions: it is expected to reach 1200 GW of total wind and solar capacity in 2026 – four years earlier than its current target of 2030. India is set to come top in terms of the rate of growth, doubling new installations compared with 2015-2020. Deployments in Europe and the United States are also on track to speed up significantly from the previous five years. These four markets together account for 80% of renewable capacity expansion worldwide.

https://www.iea.org/news/renewable-electricity-growth-is-acc... (IEA: Renewable electricity growth is accelerating faster than ever worldwide, supporting the emergence of the new global energy economy)

In the US coal has dropped from 30% of our electricity generation to 10% in barely a few years. Coal plants around the country are shutting down because of how expensive coal is compared to wind and solar. Meanwhile we had nearly 20GW of grid-scale solar and wind added in one year, and that doesn't count small installations like residential rooftop systems.

While renewables have had an impact, hasn't it mostly been replaced by natural gas?

This is not accurate. This year coal has produced 23% of US electricity. See table 7.2a. https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/

Bullshit.

2021, 72.4 Billion BTUS total use and 8.6 Billion BTUs from coal.

11%.

Sorry I was off by one percent.

No, you are not looking at electricity generation. Here's the data: https://www.eia.gov/totalenergy/data/monthly/pdf/sec7_5.pdf So far in 2021, coal has generated 719,038 million kwh out of a total of 3,142,341 million kwh.

Yes this is similar to China attempting to corner the market on Lithium, but then as soon as they squeezed prices, Chile suddenly built out a massive amount of Lithium production.

You cannot "buy all the coal" any more than you can:

- buy all the oil (OPEC vs. NA shale fracking)

- buy all the lithium (China vs. Chile)

- buy all the magnesium (Freeport, TX vs. China vs. get from any seawater anywhere)

People can still start new mines, but the price of coal will increase due to the capital costs that incurs (and the time it takes to ramp up production). This works the same as a tax on coal, or a subsidy on its competitors: some people will keep using it, but people on the margins will be pushed to the alternative.

The fact that the cost increase is likely front-loaded due to the time it takes to ramp up a new mine is probably extra beneficial in the case of coal, since it's on its way out as a technology. Mining coal might be worth it right now, but will it be worth it by the time your new mine is up and running?

With lithium, the answer would be yes, because lithium demand is growing. With coal, hopefully not so much.

> With lithium, the answer would be yes, because lithium demand is growing. With coal, hopefully not so much.

Yah, if nothing else the regulatory risks would make one pretty nervous about dumping a ton of money into a new coal mine.

'Sodic aluminum oxide', anyone? Seems like... it is um winter !? (-;

It seemed to work for diamonds.

There are big differences on the availability of resources of all of those. Each one will behave differently if you try to "buy it all out".

In particular, relatively rare minerals that have been extracted in a relentless scale like coal and oil are harder to replace than very abundant ones that have been extracted on an opportunistic way like lithium. (Magnesium is also very abundant, but has seen more intensive extraction.)

It sounds like you’re assuming the price elasticity of demand of coal is low.

It's pretty much what environmentalists have done with dams, right? They buy them and then dismantle them to restore the natural flow of rivers. It's more effective than lobbying the government to pass legislation forcing the removal of the dam.

Has this happened frequently?

A small-ish scale recent example in Finland: https://hiitolanjoki.fi/en/category/hiitolanjoki-river-resto...

I don't know. It was a thing a few years ago, I believe I learned about it in the documentary Dam Nation (but I might be mistaken).

Google no longer works for me to find things again that I vaguely remember. What I do remember was that they had taken out multiple smaller dams on a river, and if memory serves me right, a group had bought them for a reasonably low amount as the previous owners had no more use for them.

Most of what I found with a quick search from what I remembered were public/private partnerships to remove obsolete dams (Riverkeeper seems to be a larger player).

But there's other products that compete and it takes time for products to get to market.

If you shut down some number of oil production the price would go up quickly but it would take much longer for alternative sources to come online.

Also when prices of gas goes up, unlike in the past, there are now alternatives in EVs.

Not if environmentalists also managed to shut down or replace consumers of coal, such as power plants.

Since power plants are usually run by utility companies that often have governments as major shareholders and the general public (including environmentalists and people sympathetic to their goals) as direct customers, they are more likely to be receptive to pressure than coal mines, which are often privately held corporations that sell into the anonymity of bulk markets.

There's a counter argument on the Marginal Revolution economics blog which points out that supply of coal mines is inelastic and environmentalists can simply purchase mining rights for mines that are currently uneconomical to prevent it.

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2021/10/be...

thanks for posting this. had no idea about the "use it or lose it" clauses! what the hell, america?

I don’t buy the queue argument. It would devolve in to a bunch of churn inevitably resulting in thrown hands and black eyes.

It’s a good lesson in the importance of picking the right things to measure/optimize for. Queue length is not a good thing to optimize for by itself.

Exactly, I don't get how that would increase throughput.

It's not about increasing throughout, it's about increasing user satisfaction. A system where 60 customers are served an hour, and none of them has queued, is theoretically better than one where the same amount are served, but each has queued for 10 boring minutes. You achieve this by disincentivising queueing.

So people would only go to a stand if there's nobody being served, because being behind the person currently being served is discouraged. Essentially, you'd just move the queue: people would wait for a "spot" to open up (a stand with no customer) and then go there.

If it's orderly, they kind of queue in the middle. If it's not, you'll have a large brawl as people try to get in front of each other.

I think you misunderstood the proposed queueing system.... The stand will never be 'open'.

People who arrive join the front of the queue, and are either served next, or someone else joins in front of them, pushing them back. When they're position 2 in the queue, they will only be served if 2 people are served and 0 arrive (low probably). If another person arrives, they're now position 3 in the queue, so 3 need to be served before any arrivals (even lower probably).

At some point, they decide the probability of being served drops low enough that they give up and leave - this will usually happen quickly.

The only way to 'game' this system is to look up the street and join the queue when it looks like nobody else is coming. If many people try to do this, then those people will be waiting forever (both want to join last - stalemate), and anyone who doesn't employ the tactic gets served.

In practice, you would just replace the queue with a disorganized rabble of people standing around, where as soon as the person currently being served leaves, there is a mad dash at the one secure spot, which is at the very front.

Those who really want your product now have to mob up outside your stall and hope they're the next lucky random fucker. They're still waiting.

Those who don't really want your product don't wait in a line for it anyways - the length of the line itself is a natural filter for availability of the good.

Basically - has satisfaction actually gone up if those who would be extremely satisfied by your product no longer receive it, and random folks who may or may not want your product do? I'd bet money the answer is a solid "NO".

Another way to look at it: with the queuing system, you spend 10 minutes, and you get what you want. How many minutes will it take with the no-queue system? It’s not like the thoroughput has increased. And how likely will it be for you to get what you want after that time? Is it definite?

I don't even see how it does that. Unless there is some factor that prevents you from leaving and immediately re-entering the line at the front.

I feel like I missed something.

Yes! I feel this is the main point that is totally missed. The first time I read Tim Hartford years ago he was talking about this idea uncritically and I thought it was stupid then and I don't have much respect for him.

The thing we are trying to optimise is not length of que, but how long and how reliable it is to get served.

Under the old system you may have had to wait 10 minutes to get served BUT you knew before you started queuing it would be about 10 minutes (and thus could make an informed choice) and you can clearly see your progress in the queue and if you are patient you will be served.

Under the new system it now may take you 1 minute to get served or 1 hour. Or you will try multiple times and never get served. And you will have no indication before you start queing how successful you will be.

Any UX designer would easily tell you which of these systems is going to piss people off more.

> Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps. But you might consider applying a dose of Landsburg’s logic to your own “to do” list: don’t add a new item to the list unless you’re willing to do it immediately.

I've got to ponder the to do list example though.

I think you'd end up with a similar amount of person-minutes of waiting overall, it just wouldn't be as apparent who is waiting for what.

As for the to do list, to me that suggestion amounts to nothing more than splitting my to do list into two, a "to do now" list, and a "to do eventually" list (well, I would call it a "two do" list), where I just move items from the second one to the first. That might have some value, but it's not a mind-blowing reversal of logic.

The queue proposal sounds like a Monty Python skit.

If we adopt the rule that the next person to be served is the most recent person to join line, it's inevitable that a second line will form with people waiting to go to the first line and if someone tries to go to bypass the second line and go directly to the first line, the crowd in the first line will direct their rage at this person and compel him or her to queue in the second line - it's just as if there were only one line and the person had cut in that.

I think I didn't really get the idea behind it. Wouldn't that be the same as just prohibiting of forming queues altogether? I.e. you're only allowed to order food of noone else is at the cashier?

Pretty much, yes.

I wonder where people will queue for the chance to pounce on that …

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687474

I feel like I've been a part of a queue like this -- at the airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. It was asinine and infuriating, and just thinking about it makes my blood boil.

It has an obvious flaw, aside from being super annoying - just leave the queue and rejoin in front of the other person. Then they'll do the same to you. Get it going fast enough and perhaps the spin will generate free energy.

Agreed. I have a comment from a while ago unpacking the idea where I note that it will probably a) devolve into meta-queues that reproduce the original queuing system, and b) encourage anti-social behavior because people no longer value their position in line and have nothing to lose by not playing nice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182781

The whole article is embarrassingly bad, a bunch of stuff that sounds clever at first but wasn’t seriously researched or even pondered. Like the requirements to develop resources you buy or the incentive effects of paying off malicious behavior.

# For those who end up going home

For those who end up going home, a traditional queue is still more efficient.

# Arranging early arrivals is important

*Filtering for fans.* In the book _The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life_, Landsburg himself stated that some businesses would prefer to serve fanatic patrons over mediocre customers. In an ordinary queue, customers can prove their loyalty by *arranging to arrive early*. On the other hand, by attaching the probability of getting served directly to the probabilistic nature of when one arrives, a Landsburg's queue does not allow/support proving patronage with early arrivals.

Perfect example of the kind of simplistic and wishful thinking which plagues modern economics. They assume that their model of the world will solve a problem without bothering to check if it does.

I think I am not very clear on how ‘reverse logic’ is being defined here, but it may not matter. The problem is that real life is much more complex than these simplistic mental models we describe when we talk to each other. People’s needs, desires, and values are not interchangeable. While that one person who drives less could drive a gas car, maybe they prefer the convenience of charging at home. Likewise, the person who drives a lot may require the convenience of filling up gas in five minutes, or maybe they are doing longer trips or carry cargo/passengers (amplifying range anxiety).

As for the notion of reversing queues - this doesn’t make sense to me, but maybe I am missing something. People who join a queue earlier are signaling a price, in effect. Overriding that is creating an inefficiency in a sense, and is an imposition of someone else’s valuations in place of individual people’s valuations. Apart from that, the methods mentioned here simply feel a bit antagonistic rather than cooperative. I don’t think sustainable societies are built on those types of adversarial tactics.

Clearly anyone who is pushed back in the reverse queue (can i call it a stack?) can just rejoin at the front. You would end up with a spinning “musical chairs queue”.

The other examples seem pretty interesting and it has a freakinomics feel about it.

The queue solution is simple - using tech: use the buzzers they give you in some restaurants that tell you your meal is ready when you are next in the queue.

I was curious to see if anyone had tried the coal mine bit. This is the closest I could find, a business plan to sell coal attached to carbon credits. Not sure what’s happened since 2016.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/business/energy-environme...

Greenpeace had claimed that they tried to offer Vattenfall to buy their coal mines in Eastern Germany to shut them down (they were later sold to czeck company EPH), but it's a bit unclear how serious that offer was: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/greenpeace-bietet-kohle-tagebau...

Though maybe that's also a cautionary tale. Back when that happened (2015) the political discussion around coal in Germany was that a coal exit wasn't really part of the discussion and local politicians would say things like coal will be mined until the 2040s. Since then the debate has moved to "Coal exit in 2038", and more recently to "Coal exit very likely in 2030".

What I'm trying to say: Even if you're successful with such a project, it's not exactly clear how much you gain. The political discourse on climate is moving fast (though still not fast enough).

Why buy coal mines if you could just by oil tankers and let them idle? This would drive up oil prices in many places, reduce demand demand for oil and make renewables and energy efficient technologies more competitive.

For starters that plan probably wouldn't work. The cost of taking that much much oil out of the market and sitting it idly would bankrupt the parties involved.

For seconds if the plan did work, the group responsible would likely be designated as terrorists and get taken out by the US military.

Why would it bankrupt anybody? Letting it sit idle or scrapping it aren't too expensive when compared to the saved CO2.

The US would have certainly done something when they still were highly dependent on foreign oil.

Oil creation & use are both flows, so there needs to be ongoing spending within an order of magnitude of the global oil market. Nobody can afford that sort of money to be spent on a completely unproductive activity, without any form of payoff. Countries would be bankrupting themselves.

To take the idea a bit further, you make them into floating plantations, delivering fresh fruit/vegetables to any location in the world.

Sorry, but none of this works - although it’s a fun thought experiment. It’s very hard to predict human behaviour and it’s impossible to know how things will unfold over time.

Closing coal mines without having an alternative power source would only create shortages and price hikes.

Only 2-3% of new car sales are EVs. You not getting an EV to leave it to someone else is not going to get that number up.

The line thing would exasperate people and everyone would leave. Actually, seeing long lines and impatient customers is probably the best way to accelerate service by stressing out the staff.

Coal price instability accelerates closures of coal plants. It basically pushes them to being unprofitable faster. The recent gas and coal shortages are a great example: it's accelerating closures in a few places. It's also scaring off investors seeing that promised life times of plants are worth nothing. Coal plants delivered last decade are already being closed. E.g. the Germans just opened a plant that will now close in 2030 (the new government is planning that). That's expensive. It's one of those things that happens more because it's happening more. Even in heavily pro-coal states in the US they are closing plants.

EV sales vary world wide. In Norway, it's >70%. The Netherlands has 32%. Germany is not far behind with 28%. The US is indeed lagging a bit. An interesting effect you are starting to see in the EU is people worrying about not being able to sell their ICE car second hand, being faced with additional fees and cost for fuel, or being denied access to cities and regions. Fear of these things is becoming a big driver. And there's quite a bit of FOMO as well.

Both with coal plants closing and EV adoption, fear is accelerating what was happening anyway.

> Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute, but the queues are short. Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps.

Poor example. This would annoy the hell out of customers. Theme parks also almost always have excess demands for rides. This system would only work at a failing theme park that couldn't fill up the ride to capacity.

I could imagine this working with decentralized robots performing similar tasks independently, but usually a system that uses robots would be centralized.

Buying up coal deposits to prevent mining is new to me, but the idea is quite familiar in the realm of buying up rainforest to prevent deforestation.

The “Cash for Clunkers” program was actually instituted over a decade ago in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System

And having been "grad school broke" during that era, it absolutely destroyed a decade's worth of cheap "runs and drives" grade cars that I drove and most of my friends drove.

$100 cars were suddenly $1000 cars in a few months, which was fine if you owned one, bad if you were looking for another backyard project you could limp home and work on for a while.

"Destroying the long tail of cheap resources for political points" is the sort of "reverse thinking" that we need less of, especially by politicians who make the right noises about caring about the poor. Great, a bunch of older cars are off the road... sucks to be someone who used those for transport if you couldn't afford the payments on a new car (or didn't have reliable enough income to even consider that option).

Eggs, comrade, eggs. Specifically your eggs.

No, there won't be omelets. What are you, some sort of kulak?

We communists frequently argue against such programmes and instead for cheap and rational transportation for the working class, like trains, light rail and biofuel cars for rural areas.

And kulaks had it coming, even my great-granddad. Destroying food during a famine is inhuman.

Cheap trains and light rail require very high levels of automation. As long as you argue in favour of that as well it makes sense.

Of course. Such automation wouldn’t be sustainable under capitalism because the rate of profit would drop even further, but it would be entirely possible under a socialist economy that produces for use instead of for profit.

> Such automation wouldn’t be sustainable under capitalism because the rate of profit would drop even further

I get that you don't like profits (even though investment to do automation requires profits), but automation reduces costs which INCREASES profits and/or reduces prices.

"I get that you don't like profits (even though investment to do automation requires profits)"

That's literally opposite of how accounting works, if you reinvest everything, your profit is 0%. Profits are what's lefts after Cost of good sold, reinvesting, etc. which you then may distribute to shareholders.

> That's literally opposite of how accounting works, if you reinvest everything, your profit is 0%.

Wrong - Profit is revenue minus costs.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profit_(accounting) and all of the other definitions on the web. Reinvesting affects cash flow but not profits.

One enterprise automating increases its competitive advantage for a while, thus temporarily increasing its profits. However, over time, all enterprises will either automate or fail.

Since profits are a portion of the value generated by labour, as the proportion of costs attributed to labour drop, so do profits. There are secondary effects as well, as workers lose their jobs, their wages fall through competition and they can no longer afford to buy the commodities produced.

This phenomenon is well documented historically, as the rate of profit has an overall tendency to drop which is more clearly noticeable after bursts of automation.

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/07/25/a-world-ra...

> Since profits are a portion of the value generated by labour

That's simply not true. Profits = revenue - costs. Revenue, what buyers pay, is based on perceived value. That perceived value may come from labor, but it can also come from some mechanical transformation (ie automation). It can even come from something else, such as color. (I'm assuming that red paint costs the same as blue and takes no more labor to apply.)

You're over-valuing labour. Labour is one thing, but not everything. What you're describing assumes people can't get other jobs, which is not true, and that of competition, which is where multiple parties automate, and so profits decrease (because monopolies are bad).

> Such automation wouldn’t be sustainable under capitalism because the rate of profit would drop even further

Not really. Successful automation increases profits. E.g. McDonald's touchscreen menus came about because minimum wage increased, and the value of labour became less than its cost, so investment in automation was required.

What else do you think incentivises expensive, failure-prone automation attempts? It increases value and thus competitiveness in the marketplace of the automating company.

>And kulaks had it coming, even my great-granddad. Destroying food during a famine is inhuman.

Don't take people's property by force and not expect them to fight back. And especially don't use their fighting back as an excuse to oppress and slaughter them, that's what's truly inhuman. And the famine was caused by collectivization policies in the first place, you're just blameshifting your failed policies onto the victims of it.

When some starve and others hoard food, is property more important than hunger?

The famines were environmental, for centuries. It was only collectivisation and industrialisation of agriculture that stopped the famines.

>When some starve and others hoard food, is property more important than hunger?

Yes, because destroying private property rights will lead to further famines. It's something called second-order effects, which Communists seem utterly incapable of understanding.

>The famines were environmental, for centuries.

None were ever on the scale of those caused by the Soviets, Mao, and others, so they clearly weren't just environmental.

>It was only collectivisation and industrialisation of agriculture that stopped the famines.

Industrialization is doing some Atlas-tier lifting for the rest of your argument in that sentence. Collectivization did nothing to stop famines unless you count causing millions to die and thereby having fewer mouths to feed in the following years. Reversing collectivization, on the other hand, increased food output six-fold in Xiaogang, China: http://www.china.org.cn/china/features/content_11778487_2.ht...

Edit: Note that the villagers of Xiaogang had to undo collectivization in secret because they risked literally life imprisonment and execution. They even made pacts with each other to care for the others' children until adulthood if any of them were caught and executed.

Edit2: Since HN won't let me reply to your response directly, here it is. I lived in the Czech Republic and befriended countless people rich and poor who suffered under the evils of Communism. Communism has led to political violence in every single country that has adopted it, without exception. For a good historical overview (since you implied I haven't read any boons on the matter) I would recommend From the Gulag to the Killing Fields, which contains excerpts of historical accounts from every single country that established Communist regimes. You support a Godless ideology of murder, oppression, and lies.

First order effects surely should not be ignored merely because second order effects exist. Starving because someone might be upset they are no longer a lord is illogical.

You should read some history books, you appear to have instead accepted western propaganda.

">When some starve and others hoard food, is property more important than hunger? Yes, because destroying private property rights will lead to further famines. It's something called second-order effects"

There is this really interesting second order effect I heard about, very few people know about it - apparently masses of starving people might not just quietly watch their family succumb to famine, sometimes they start cutting off heads of whoever is in charge, or just is in the wrong place at the wrong time.

>sometimes they start cutting off heads of whoever is in charge

I wish they'd actually done so to Stalin, seeing as he was the one in charge and his policies were the cause of the famine. Instead, it seems like the majority swallowed his propaganda blaming the kulaks hook, line, and sinker.

Indeed, seems like French are better at it and more decisive.

Or the white army and the kulaks were indeed to blame and people at the time understood that, while you swallowed propaganda blaming the Bolsheviks.

This stuff should be history 101. It’s depressing to see someone here having to state the biggest lessons of the 20th century, learnt by the spilling of the blood of millions.

Let's have a sense of proportion. There is a significant difference between applying a mild economic disincentive and the starvation of 3.9 million people.

“Cash for Clunkers” was a massive subsidy to the car industry.

Seems you motto is 'Communism for me, but not for thee'?

On one hand, it's cheap transportation for less well-off. On the other hand, it's one of the worst pollutants, per person-mile traveled.

A lot if America was built on a presumption of cheap car transportation, when the exhaust was considered free. Now we are starting to pay the price of it, and such places start to look less and less sustainable. But a lot of people lives there, and won't easily move to a metro area and start relying on public transport.

Metro areas aren't magically sustainable. If anything, metro areas are very unsustainable whenever there's a supply chain issue, which is whenever there's an election to be won now.

You should by a coal mine and close it. Is equivalent to saying „you should buy the freedom of every slave“. Somethings have to be done at the National level and collectively.

I don't think the idea of reverse logic is even clear. Exactly what aspect should you choose to reverse? A better name would be unintuitive logic, but we already know some things are unintuitive.

Incentive.

When you are given something I want it too. I might even want you not to have it if I can't have it. However, if I am the one giving you the thing it becomes important for me that you have the thing even if I no longer do.

This is intuitive even if it is logically an eyesore.

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-98...

Im just learning about Jay Forrester, but he wrote the foundational paper on this kind of thinking. I also highly recommend Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, which contains a lot of other wisdom like this.

British Columbia has conservation groups doing precisely this: acquiring forestry rights with the intention of never harvesting[0].

Word has it that the Provincial Government will be supporting this effort.

0: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/conservation...

Logic: You can produce thoughtful work, with detailed examination of how incentives played out in real life, and how real people responded to those incentives. Your work will attract both scientists and laypersons, and be read by both. However, you have to do a lot of data analysis, statistics, and present them in a way that's attractive to both sets of people.

Reverse logic: Write blog posts with outrageous suggestions with little real-world applicability, that are equivalent to argument junk food. The few people who think deeply about statistics and behavioral economics will ignore it, but the vast majority of people will eagerly discuss it, link to your page, and sell your work.

I think the reverse logic works!

If you want to cause tremendous inflationary pain to the working class and rolling blackouts through an energy transition this is how you do it.

We are not at the stage where we can bootstrap green yet. You still require fossil fuels to build a green economy. Sure, coal is bad as an energy source, but that EV you want has a ton of steel inside and that requires metallurgical coal. The copper required for a green economy needs to be mined, and the machines used in a mine require a portable, dense fuel source like oil.

To make matters worse, energy prices feed into other areas of the economy. Ammonia costs have skyrocketed due to the energy issues and that's causing the price of wheat and corn to skyrocket.

The proper policy is carbon credits and a measured transition unless you're ready to punish the working class and developing nations.

He is right that LIFO (last in first out) queue is more efficient when there's more demand than queue throughout. But the fairness isn't just a problem with the sense of justice. As indicated, with a fixed timeout, LIFO will cause more spurious timeouts when FIFO wouldn't. The best of all worlds, if the speed of light or transition between different queues isn't an issue, is to have a centralized queue management forming a super queue. Some stores do this already, creating a single queue that dispatches shoppers to a checkout counter. Doing this cuts down the average wait time, and makes people "give up" more willingly under heavy load, since the queue would look much longer.

An environmentalist organisation could do this by buying them and shuttering them.

The problem with this is that eventually the government notices what you're doing and just takes it away from you. This happens regularly with attempts to preserve natural lands and resources.

Another issue is that it artificially pumps up the market for coal mines, which would likely lead to the development and operation of unprofitable coal mines that would otherwise never be opened.

A different way to get to the same result as a minimum fuel requirement would be to raise base prices and offer steep bulk discounts. This would be easier to enforce than a minimum fuel requirement. Unfortunately it might raise "price gouging" complaints.

Half of these things feel like you can have way better solutions:

- Spot price the gallon and set the minimum order increment to 5 gallons. Pre-purchase and then arrive to collect or pay the spot price at the time of arrival

- Switch the stall queue to a ticket system. You buy your thing and plug in a contact number (or wait). You are either notified by phone (or by voice when you’re there). Lots of food courts already do this.

- There’s no reason to buy coal mines. You can just political currency instead of normal currency. If your time is worthless or you have cultivated political currency for a while, the former is incredibly cheap

> Here’s a thought: environmentalists should fight climate change by buying coal mines.

Matt Levine wrote about this recently (unfortunately I could not find the reference but it was in the last month). One of the big bank tried to launch a fund for this but it was met with a hostile reception.

20 December newsletter:

> When you go to an ESG fund manager and say “hey wanna buy up all the coal mines” she is going to say “what no absolutely not.” And then you say “no hear me out, you are a better owner of coal mines than the alternative, this is better for the climate in the long run,” and you explain how, and she says “hmm yes your logic is impeccable,” and you say “so you’re in?” and she says “no absolutely not”.

The bank was Citi, and the fund was to have been called "Coal to Zero".

Thanks for finding this.

Here's another one: Virtuous people should make and sell weapons, thereby reducing the funding to companies that lobby for invasions.

The older I get, the more I enjoy reading the thoughts of economists.

I sometimes wish we would just burn it all and call it a day. It would be a disaster but it's already one anyways.

Just burn it all so some rich people get richer and then are out of a job because there is nothing left

People eating food and heating/cooling their homes is what consumes the most energy.

The logic used in these "ideas" is so comically bad that you know an economist must have thought of them.

Coal, and most resources like that that are part of the commons, if not developed you rightly would lose it.

For the queuing as they explain it, you would just leave the queue and rejoin it, and get to the front? It works well for negatives like firing people.

Reverse logic might be cooler if the article came with one example of where it worked IRL. But I guess if it works it's logic?

I bought a new car this year when I graduated and got a new job. The main reason I didn't buy an EV is because of the cost, the dependability (I'm not gonna be a guinea pig wasting time getting repairs that not many people know how to resolve yet), and because I live in the Midwest where salted roads in winter just eat the hell out of everything. So I'm gonna need a new car in 5-10 years anyway.

Obviously EV is the future. But with this "Vehicles as a Service" model where a lot of stuff is not meant to be touched by you, it seems like cars are just getting absurdly more expensive for no reason at all. EV is a marketing term so that somehow causes the product to be worth an extra $5k right off the bat.

By driving less than 10-20 miles a week with a gas vehicle, I feel like I'm actually doing more to save the planet than the typical EV driver doing 100+ miles thinking their excessive driving is 100% eco-friendly. Consumption is never eco-friendly.

>and because I live in the Midwest where salted roads in winter just eat the hell out of everything

In which country are EVs most popular? IIRC, Norway.

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