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Comment by leaf8937 | Hacker News Reader

price of electricity should be doubled after a certain high use. lots of businesses just leave their ac and lights on despite not needing, all because its too cheap.

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Yeah, IMHO it makes no sense that they get cheaper power than residential users (well, it does make financial sense for the electric businesses to attract big customers using low prices, but that's not my point) : the cheapest power should be for the poorest citizens (but with limits to maximum power and lack of guarantees for continuous power supply), while the most expensive power should be for the businesses requiring lots of uninterrupted power ! (Note that cryptominers should be able to deal very well with programmed power cuts...)

Even for poor citizens, electricity shouldn't be subsidized. They should get straight up money and decide for themselves if they want to use it for (non-subsidized) electricity or if they can use it more efficiently on something else.

In theory, I agree : it's probably everyone else that should be taxed instead.

The issue here is that at the very bottom you end up with really nasty vicious poverty circles... and now that I think of it, we don't know in advance what kind of combination of minimum low power and low time fraction of guaranteed supply is the best, and how you combine market discovery for that with regulation...

There are many people here with a lot of potentially destructive ideas. How do u know the exact needs of each business? What u would do is to make many go bankrupt just bc of a regulation.

Of course, I know that many of you... as lomg as it is not your own business everything is ok.

If they can only exist when subsidized, we need to decide explicitly whether the business is worth subsidizing. Not keep lots of businesses alive through subsidized electricity while they would otherwise not be profitable.

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