The Abundance Illusion | Hacker News Reader

The Abundance Illusion

carlyle.com

85 pointscwal3739 comments

Some have touted the U.S. as having achieved "energy independence" because of its status as net exporter of oil. This is premature. The U.S. is marginally a net exporter. However, it still imports a lot of oil. It just exports slightly more than it imports.

So, if the world markets gets too dicey, it'd be easy to just cut off the export taps and keep all that oil for Americans, right? Not so fast! First, it's the wrong types of oil in the wrong places. The U.S. doesn't have the infrastructure to transport that domestic oil to where it needs to be, nor the refining capacity to handle it. There's also the pesky issue of enforcing export bans and lower domestic pricing of oil. Go look up Canada's "National Energy Program" from the 80's to see what sort of things might come with that strategy.

If world oil markets go nuts, the U.S. is still very exposed. Putting up a wall would require pipelines and refineries that would take decades to build and policies that could tear apart the country. Americans have a president who is both committed to destabilizing world oil markets and opposing electrification that might reduce the impact of that instability. That's a dangerous combination.

The US on net exports 2.5M barrels a day, or roughly 10% of its total consumption, and the majority of its imports are from countries like Canada that are themselves net exporters and would be unlikely to retaliate against a US export ban.

There are definitely technical issues with refinery capacity, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable if the US seriously wanted to attempt an export ban, even in the short term. The fallout from the rest of the world in the form of other trade retaliations would likely be very serious though.

> There are definitely technical issues with refinery capacity, but I don’t think they’re insurmountable

If they were cheap or easy to solve, don’t you think US refineries would have already converted to support domestic crude? Domestic crude is cheaper than imported crude, the only reason to import is because it so expensive to convert a refinery. My, admittedly very limited, understanding is that you generally don’t convert refineries, it’s cheaper and easier to just build a new one that targets a new type of crude. Building refineries takes a few years, they’re not something you throw together in a few months when oil markets go crazy.

Looking at nationwide statistics is also a bit misleading because nobody is average. Under that scenario, oil consumers are exposed and oil producers will win big.

> The hard work Carter asked for — building the physical capacity to never need the buffer — was quietly abandoned.

But since then, US natural gas production doubled [1], and solar power is growing exponentially [2]. Leaving that out of the history seems excessively gloomy.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/hist/n9050us2a.htm [2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/183447/us-energy-generat...

The person named in the byline (can we still call them "author" when Claude wrote the text?) may have included "be pessimistic" in their prompt.

If you look at US share of energy consumption by source you can see that solar is 2.83% of energy used in the US. Natural gas is 34.2% .

https://ourworldindata.org/profile/energy/united-states

That's a really interesting/informative link you have.

Some highlights are:

- Energy use per capita has been declining since 2000

- Overall energy use has been basically flat since 2000

- Essentially, coal is being replaced by gas, almost 1:1. Lump both together and their relative share of the market is pretty stable.

- Solar went from 0.3 to 2.8% in the last 10 years, wind from 0.3% to 4.2% in the last 20 years. 7% wind/solar isn't world-leading but getting from basically 0 to 7% in 20 years is significant movement.

'Figure 2: US energy exports outpace production'

We're producing 14,000,000 barrels of oil per day and exporting about 6,000,000 per day, but the author used a graph with two different y-axis scales to make the lines cross so it looks like more oil is being exported than produced.

And to top it off both Y axes have the exact same label. The graph has no indication as to which line belongs to which axis. Of course, we can easily infer which is which from the surrounding article, but still... terrible data visualization

I thought the same thing about matching the line to the axis, but the legend is marked with LHS and RHS. It's very subtle.

Ah, missed that. Well, I think the point remains that it's an abominable and misleading graph

Different scales between the left and right sides as well. The vertical distance for 500k bpd on the left is about half of the right.

Wow, that’s an egregious chart crime. Surely there’s a way to make a chart that isn’t so dishonest. Just plotting the SPR level would make the same point honestly.

| Just plotting the SPR level would make the same point honestly.

They'd still have to zoom in a lot.

Here's the SPR level since the 80s: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=W... The big drop around 2022 is, supposedly, related to the Ukraine war.

There might be some missing context here. China and the US are not experiencing growth and development at the same rate at the same time.

In the US, everyone that has access to electricity has had it for decades.

In China, the first year where 100% of the population has had access to electricity is 2013, according to the World Bank.

China is also putting its middle class into automobiles almost a century later than the US did, and they’re almost entirely skipping internal combustion. The US has basically no urgency to replace internal combustion as they have a well-established supply of oil.

“…for energy is the lifeblood of this society and when the chips are down he who controls the energy supply controls Planet. In former times the energy monopoly was called ‘The Power Company’; we intend to give this name an entirely new meaning.”

— CEO Nwabudike Morgan, The Centauri Monopoly

Speaking of grand names with extra meanings, I admit I did smirk and chuckle at TFA's "The New Joule Order."

Odd framing. Every country, not just the US, is drawing down its oil stockpiles, including China[1]. Chinese investments in electrification will certainly pay dividends for as long as the strait of Hormuz remains closed, but they will only be partially shielded from the pain that will hit global oil markets once reserves run out, which as the author points out will probably happen this summer.

[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/china-seen-tapping-d...

Sometimes when I’m programming I get a little lost in trying to make a pipeline more efficient. While it’s a noble goal, I have to remind myself: “somewhere here, you have to pay the piper”. No matter how you squeeze the bits, distribute the work, or optimize the input, you still have to draw those pixels to the display.

The simplification and optimization makes it easier somewhere in the process, but all of those pixels still have to be drawn, somewhere, sometime.

Extending the metaphor a bit far, we’re about to try to draw the entire buffer. And we’re still populating it.

In addition to this article, I've seen well thought out assertions from knowledgeable people that Hormuz is far worse than the market thinks and the market just continues not caring.

Maybe they're both right? Horrible things can happen to oil importing economies without derailing the AI build out that's driving the US economy and stock prices.

I think there's a catch-22 where Trump will hold out as long as the market lets him and everyone in the market wants to look through him throwing in the towel.

61% AI generated, according to Pangram https://www.pangram.com/history/e5a00ace-94cc-436e-b87b-a094...

c'mon, you're Carlyle, a trusted institution for financial advice! How can I trust what you're saying if the AI-generated text is so blatantly obvious?

Is there any reason to trust Pangram's tool over Carlyle's reputation? I don't know whether this was AI generated or not, but an online tool claiming it's AI generated doesn't sway my opinion much. Are there any studies showing that Pangram's tool is well calibrated for this type of article? If not, what makes you trust it?

(I'm not sure why it was marked that way, but I vouched to bring your comment back from auto-dead. I glanced at your comment history, but don't see any clear reason for this.)

I only went to Pangram because I read through the essay and could not help but notice the Claude-like sentence structure and AI-isms in it, which distracted me and completely made me distrust the thesis of the piece.

My understanding is that Pangram is the best out of all of the AI detectors and if there is a better one I'm happy to switch to it. And it's easier to point to them than to give explicit sentences and examples about why it reads so AI-generated (and since you want it, it's these sentences in particular: "The message was unambiguous: energy is finite, security is earned, and comfort has a cost.", "That template is being applied again today — and markets have accepted it.", "One country never made the West’s mistake.", etc.)

Reading through it again, there are so many emdashes. And don't get me wrong, I was a liberal user of emdashes before AI! But just like, if your job is to communicate your thoughts to a wide audience at least respect their intelligence enough and not rely on crutches just to get an article out against a deadline.

To me these look like professional writing, and I've seen worse LLM'isms. I am with some people in that I don't usually want to read pieces where GenAI was involved. But this is one of the cases where I wouldn't want the remedy to be a life of constant purity tests and suspicion. There has been enough of that in contemporary culture. I want to trust people and let them be by default. I mean, I don't want writers to specifically memorize current LLM'isms in order to avoid them: or worse, to prompt an LLM to strip them. I believe from experience than GenAI texts have secondary bad characteristics, mainly being bland in style and thought, and often going nowhere, like mandatory student papers. This should be enough to bury or criticize them on merits more often than not.

I do see myself treating slightly broken grammar, typos as a slightly positive signal in writing in the recent years. I also see that this is messed up - I'd like to respect someone in kind if they put care in writing - and easy to fake if anybody wants to, with an LLM. If you do strongly suspect GenAI writing, I mean it's fair if a sincere opinion, but I'm tired of having those as top comments with a whole response tree. Ironically contributing to that now.

It’s either heavily AI written or the authors style has been heavily influenced by LLM writing. That said, using LLMs when writing does not mean the article is not informative, thought provoking, or relevant. An idea fleshed out in prose by an AI is not the same as AI generated content. But it is lazy writing.

How do we create an environment that incentivizes human writers to focus on their craft instead of “productivity”?

Thats maybe one of the more pressing issues of our time.

Yes there are studies, for example last year Pangram's false positives were measured to be under 0.5%.

https://www.pangram.com/blog/third-party-pangram-evals

Personally, at first I thought these sorts of tools were dumb and wouldn't really work, but I think it works because it just isn't designed to be "adversarial". If you want your AI to trick Pangram, you can make an AI to trick Pangram. It just catches people who are cutting and pasting from the AIs without putting any more effort into hiding it.

Any binary classifier can have a FPR under 0.5% if you don't have any restriction on FNR...

While I am quite skeptical of the claims linked above, that link does indeed cover the FNR at the FPR of 0.005, and finds it broadly to be on the same order of magnitude, i.e. also below 0.005.

If the FPR is very low, the FNR rate doesn't really matter if you get a positive result (unless the pre-test probability is very low, which is not the case here)

> Is there any reason to trust Pangram's tool over Carlyle's reputation?

You have your own chatbot, right? Ask it. I've never had one disagree with GPTZero yet.

I do not understand why this matters. Judge the content on its merit. It makes no difference if “AI wrote it”.

Nonsense. Of course the tool matters.

That's why I only use code written in Vim. Emacs corrupts the othewise identical bits, just like AI. Gets 'em all greasy and then they smell funny.

Get me some holy water

I wasted some time trying to get a sense of the content, to "judge it on its merit". It is a total slop. And if i knew beforehand that it is AI, i'd have spent much less time as the first short look would have confirmed that it is slop.

If AI wrote it, it is not worth effort engaging with.

Article from a trusted organization is supposed to be grounded in real-life events and filtered through their specific area of expertise. They bet their reputation on it, at least in theory. Current agents have none of that, and you can't trust their output to the same extent in practice. Too much recognizable slop in the article suggests high degree of autonomy of the agent that has been used, and raises doubts about trusting the entire article. It might be the valid opinion of the author rephrased by the model, but you can't tell as it obscures actual intent and the amount of real life data.

This has the same energy as people who don't care if controversial images in social media are AI generated, as long as they're engaging.

It makes a huge difference if the writing was manual or automated. LLMs generate verbose, generic writing, and ideas that could be concisely expressed in a sentence inflate to entire paragraphs. It's disrespectful to readers when the author saves a couple of hours by wasting thousands of their readers.

Is there a particular part you are claiming is incorrect? If so, point it out and name your sources. If not, what’s your point?

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