Hacker News Reader

Comment by avidphantasm | Hacker News Reader

This may be a chink in the armor, but so long as the USD still the dominant reserve currency and oil is mostly traded in dollars, does anyone care what Fitch thinks? Now there may be some movement away from USD for both of these uses, but I think this has more to do with geopolitics than what Fitch thinks or the petulance of the GOP.

View on HN

Afaik there are companies/investment products which can only invest in AAA. As long as two of three rating agencies said the US was still AAA they could probably argue that that counts. Now that it's 1/3 that probably won't work anymore.

The smarter ones have a phrase like “US treasuries or AAA rated securities” or similar.

People who aren’t familiar with the bond market would be surprised to learn all the ways you can lose money on perfectly secure bonds - if you have to sell before maturity.

Who cares if the world is signalling that they are starting to think about getting off the dollar and credit agencies are downgrading the US? Saudi Arabia is also talking about accepting Yuan as an alternative to USD.

Here we have three signals among others, go ahead and ignore them I guess…

The key is that you can always dump dollars into US bonds. Any alternative currency needs something similar, until they have that sink it doesn’t really matter.

They have been signaling that for decades, yet no action indicates that people around the world still trust the US and hence USD more than any other currency.

Well just shove a missle up someone's ass if it gets too bad. I'm not worried.

This, Arabia sits on the Big American Missile.

It seems like both Americans and non-Americans overestimate the importance of the US dollar being the dominant reserve currency and petroleum trade currency in the world.

I would say the S&P500 and the long-term economic productivity it represents is a far more important economic asset of the US than their currency. Many European pension funds would have little to show for if they didn't hold trillions in US stocks.

USD being a desirable currency to do business in is a function of the trust people have in the US’s long term economic productivity. And being able to apply force to anyone who messes with the currency such as counterfeiting it.

Oil consumption will in the medium term go down and in the long term become unimportant.

Debatable if it’ll go down by a significant amount. Still have electric cars being infeasible from a price and charging standpoint for much of America (and our electric grid can’t come anywhere close to handling a sizable percent of people changing to electric)

Batteries are getting better, but energy density is still superior with oil

Oil used for many manufacturing processes and items. I’m all for switching from plastic to glass, but the world loves plastic

Speaking of the world, developing nations still rely on coal, never the less moving to electric cars

I’d like to think we would make progress in medium term, but given the geopolitical instability, if a major world war breaks out (if it hasn’t already), I think we’d be stuck in time with oil-to-electric progress unless there’s some national security reason to go away from it.

But relying more on our grid seems to be more of a national security risk, given it’s weakly protected. And the US has been (still is?) a net exporter of oil. Worst case we ramp up production if the Saudi’s/OPEC do something crazy.

I’m still young, but I see a constant cycle of XYZ tech being promoted, promised, investors jump in, then it evaporates for 5-10 years and we slowly get the actual promises (sometimes). There’s a famous graph for this somewhere.

China has a comparable oil consumption to the US and has almost gained 25% market share for BEV. But also in the US electric cars sales are rising.

You are most likely thinking of the Gartner hype cycle, which is about visibility of topics. I think we reached the plateau of productivity by now. BEV cars also have their issues, but in many cases are the better pick over ICE cars.

A way more fitting graph to look at now are sigmoid functions, also known as sigmoid functions. They tend to model the technology adoption life cycle fairly well. Adoption in the beginning is fairly slow then speeding up just to slow down again until the technology is affordable and good enough to also handle special needs. We are currently in the phase of accelerating adoption that looks like exponential growth.

The family requirements lead me to get a minivan. There simply is no electric one, and the closest you can get is the Chrysler PHEV, which is so much more expensive than the other options (and you lose the stow and go seats) that even with the tax rebate I can’t fully take advantage of its not competitive.

$10k buys quite a bit of fuel.

But if someone wants to send me $10k I’ll buy the Pacifica today ;)

Otherwise it’s a Kia or Sienna for us.

We’ve even looked at going up to the electric Transit and the money just doesn’t work out.

Have you considered the Toyota Hybrid minivan? The people I know who have them love them. Might be a good compromise.

That's the Sienna.

Downsides - second row seats are not removable, there is no interior kidspycam, they just don't exist (have waited 1+ years so far, and time is running out)

Upsides - best mileage

I would add that they also do not reduce CO2 or human suffering very much. Ford is switching to hybrid instead of full EV and people are going to eat it up. Had they presented hybrid options when building a truck I would have bought one already. For some reason they have been sandbagging the option but are now slated to go full hog.

EV battery weight is the killer. Nevermind the charging issues.

I think AI is going to be the driving force behind technological innovation for at least the next 10 years. And the US has that market cornered expecially with the CHIPS act. I think that will drive growth in the US and be more relevant than the reserve currency status.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com