Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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Stealing my own comment from HN on this:

That article reads a lot like "Peak Oil" concerns. There is a lot of Helium available - [1] The global reserves of helium are known to be approximately 41 billion cubic meters. Most of them lie in Qatar, Algeria, the USA and Russia. Annual global production of helium is about 175 million cubic meters, and the USA remains the largest producer. "

Regardless, this is something the market can correct for very, very easily. As helium supply becomes more scarce, the price will go up, resulting in greater supply. Most of it comes from natural gas, and is so cheap [2] it's not worth capturing. Oil trades for around $100/barrel. Helium trades at $100 for a thousand cubic feet (albeit in gas form)

Some of the problems with Helium is that Physics experiments use a LOT, and previously was so cheap that it wasn't worth trying to conserve. That's changing - [3] A recycling system can recapture about $12,000/year of lost helium for a single scientist.

From reading articles - apparently the problems isn't so much that the cost of helium is increasing - but that it's been so cheap because of the US Natural Reserves making it completely non-competitive to capture - they are basically giving the stuff away for next to nothing.

[1] http://www.gazprominfo.com/articles/helium/

[2] http://finance.yahoo.com/news/airgas-increase-prices-helium-... And on Friday, the bureau announced that it was raising the price for a thousand cubic feet for crude helium from $84 to $95

[3] http://www.nature.com/news/united-states-extends-life-of-hel...

While the US dumping its helium supply was utterly stupid and distorts the market terribly.

41 billion cubic meters / 7 billion people = less than six cubic meters per person on the planet, and when it's gone it's gone. That does not sound so hot.

Yes. People who respond to shortages of non renewable resources by saying, "I'm not concerned. Actual peak oil is 40 years further down the road than these people think it is" don't seem to grasp that that is not actually a lot of time.

This also doesn't take into account that we price helium for birthday balloons at the same price as helium for MRI machines.

I advocate switching to hydrogen for birthday balloons.

"Blow out the candles! Blow them out, quick!"

Completely agree that dumping the helium supply was short sighted - better approach would have been to auction it off in 5 billion cubic meters/lot, perhaps every 5 years, and let the market set a price.

Your arguments could be nitpicked, but lets skip that and just take as a given that you are 100% correct. That doesn't change the fact that helium is a non-renewable resource. Conservation makes sense. Maybe it won't matter to us today, or even in 40 years. But it will matter to someone else in 140 years.

In my mind, any decisions made based on markets are a short-term strategy. If a resource is non-renewable, I prioritize conservation. Where practical, I use renewable resources.

Let's just hope we've perfected hydrogen fusion by that time. Then we'll have as much energy and helium as we want!

True of energy, but not of helium. Fusion produces a lot of energy from very little fuel. Running the world on fusion would supply a tiny fraction of our helium demand.

I was being sarcastic.

Do you mean fission?

You're going to split hydrogen atoms? Into what exactly?

We'll split H into three parts: |,-, and |.

> Oil trades for around $100/barrel.

Wavering around $55/barrel at the moment.

> Regardless, this is something the market can correct for very, very easily.

This is something I don't really trust. We see that with oil and environmental concerns - when things get scarcer, subsidies start, distorting the price. Should we really put our hopes in the market, praying that it will save us?

The many billions of dollars invested in tar-sands in Canada were a market response to the increased price of Oil. They wouldn't have existed at $25/barrel Oil, but were inspire by $75/barrel Oil. I'm strongly arguing that if the price of Helium shifts from $100/1000 Cubic feet to $1000/1000 Cubic feet, that we'll likewise see similar market responses in terms of production of Helium. And we'll see radical moves towards recycling also.

And thank god for the mining of the tar sands, am I right?

This. It goes for fracking as well, where there are significant and real externalities wrought by these new methods of extracting resources from Earth. Companies largely aren't being made to pay them. It's true that the market does correct for the diminishing of supply somewhat with an increase in price, but this is not the only mechanism in play as the pureblood capitalists would have you believe. Rather, existing players are also using their political influence to weaken legislation that was originally designed to force companies to deal with these externalities, at least partly [1].

As a result, the true cost of these new resources is greater than it appears, and furthermore the external costs in our poorer health, the destruction of our environment, and the corruption of our political system, make up a greater portion of the total cost of the resource, than previous methods of extraction. There is no reason to believe this trend will reverse.

[1] Complain all you want that this isn't "true" capitalism. I don't care. The fact is we've decided that pricing these externalities directly into the market is too hard or has too much overhead, and so we patched over it with laws. If you want to change that, go ahead and try, but don't advocate weakening legislation to force someone to deal with these externalities until after you're successful.

I agree with you. Arguments about "true free-market capitalism" are funny, because we neither have it nor we'd really want to have it - exactly because of externalities and some other failure modes we do need laws to patch up.

I'm replying to the part of your post that you edited out, after I edited out the part of my post that your edited-out part was addressing :)

Yes, you're right. I overreacted, a lot. So I removed it.

But, I stand by the sentiment. This place is downright hostile to productive discussion. Your account can have a dozen or so hexes capriciously placed on it by the mods - and you'll never know directly if this was done, to say nothing of why it was done. A single downvote will grey out your post, as if the community needs to be protected from your thoughts because one jerk decided he would downvote your post (in this case so quickly after I made the post that I wonder if he even bothered to read it all).

HN members worry about 'becoming Reddit' without stopping to wonder if that would be an improvement. From a moderation and forum software standpoint, at least, it unequivocally would be an improvement. I don't want to be a part of this community anymore.

Well, I shall reply to your reply to the part I edited out after you edited out the part my edited-out part was addressing :).

> (in this case so quickly after I made the post that I wonder if he even bothered to read it all)

I think I got used to this. Sometimes you can get a few quick downvotes (or upvotes) immediately after posting, but the score usually settles to a reasonable value within an hour. I used to be nervous about downvotes, but eventually learned not to sweat it.

> HN members worry about 'becoming Reddit' without stopping to wonder if that would be an improvement.

I hate that meme here. There are a lot of subreddits that have quality discussions similar to HN. It's not fair to use Reddit as an example of a site that went downhill, because in reality it didn't.

> From a moderation and forum software standpoint, at least, it unequivocally would be an improvement.

I don't frequent Reddit enough to have an opinion on moderation policies (I'm a die-hard HN junkie), though I will second the argument about forum software. For me, Reddit's UX seems to give optimal threaded discussion experience. I wish HN would borrow at least the ability to cancel-out accidental downvote as well as an "inbox" for reply notifications (right now I'm working around it with HN Notify - I wonder how many HNers are also doing this).

> I don't want to be a part of this community anymore.

Please stay. I actually looked through your comments ( ;) ) and I see you contributing interesting viewpoints while keeping a civil tone. We need you. Good people disappearing is the very process by which a community gets destroyed.

I don't think it's hostile to productive discussion, but I do think it's hostile to common styles of forum posting. HN is heavily slanted towards punishing those who step outside the accepted community standards (which are heavily influenced by the site's suggestions). In a way, it's sort of like a stand-in for a small community enforcing good behavior. Unacceptable behavior has more consequences than a place where it can be forgotten quickly or be unknown to new people. The negative consequences are carried through in a different manner, to combat the behavior that the inherent anonymity promotes.

There is also what appears to be a purposeful set of hurdles put in place for newer users so features that are useful and common on other sites are absent, but not impossible to achieve. I suspect there's some interesting conversations behind the scenes about this. I doubt it's as simple as being elitist or not wanting to put the work in. Possibly it's engender feelings of achievement or customization from those that find solutions to the problems, which the actual purpose of promoting specific user behavior. Possibly it's to slow discussion in some cases, so as to promote reasoned discussion.

Whatever the reasoning, I find that I personally take more time with HN replies. I choose my words carefully. I temper my opinions when there's few or no references to back them up; I find the quickest way to cause misunderstandings and antagonistic replies is to be absolutist in statements that do not deserve to be, even if it's an artifact of communication and not the intent. I find the more care I put into my comments, the more useful the replies I get. Not that I won't be corrected if wrong, but that the corrections are more productive, contain more real information, and are more willing to engage in a useful discussion.

In the end, my pet theory is that HN forces a different type of discussion, and when people come in with expectations that it will be like some other discussion site, or similar to discussions sites in general on the internet, it appears close enough, but the inconsistencies eventually grate. I think there's a certain beauty in the subtlety of that, and my inability to know for sure whether it's all in my head or there really is that much care put into the system doesn't reduce it in the slightest.

I want to have it. Of course there will be externalities. There are externalities in all systems, including all current governments.

Can you heat your house with righteous indignation?

Will you need to heat your house in the first place, in 100 years?

No, but you need to heat your house a lot less if there's an economic incentive to insulate it more because fuel is less subsidized, and to design new houses to take solar heating into consideration again.

Do I want to heat my house that much if it means my children will die in poverty on a planet that went to hell? Maybe I'd want to at least switch to a different heat source?

> Do I want to heat my house that much if it means my children will die in poverty on a planet that went to hell?

Yes, you probably would, because even if you don't heat your house, it's unlikely that your individual decision will have any measurable affect on the condition of the planet in the future.

If we wanted to, if oil was so precious, we could synthesize it from other substances.

This isn't the case like with rare elements. And with most of those, even, we can recycle them indefinitely (we'll never run out of platinum).

Helium literally floats away to where we can never get it again.

Subsidies originate with government. Prices, when allowed to move freely without state interference, organically induce rationing only when necessary, and inspire the development of alternatives.

This is completely natural, rational, and built in to how markets work. No need to pray.

Scarcity has little to do with subsidy in most cases.

People who run extractive industries end up with a lot of money and are tied to specific geographical areas. Lobbying government for concessions is a high ROI activity, and always has been.

On the other side of the coin, government can break these industries too. (And does so routinely) For example, the US/Saudi mutual strategic interest now has the Saudis pumping oil as fast as possible to hurt Russia and other players. If you're a driller in North Dakota or Alberta, you're fucked.

Subsidies are not a construct of a free-market, but of a state. Which can leverage vast sums of money into such a losing game (without any "market" repercussions).

I don't understand people who use subsidies and free market in the same phrase. If there are subsidies then it's pretty clear the government has gotten involved, no? Instead of worrying about "having to pass a law to ban collecting Helium" or whatever, how about you worry about having the government not give those subsidies in the first place. Wouldn't that be easier?

I'm not talking about hypothetical perfectly free market, that neither exists nor we'd really want to have it. I'm talking about reality - businesses in bed with politicians. Those subsidies don't get granted themselves, nor they are just whims of government officials. For businesses, it's a tool like any other, to use in competing on the market.

"I'm not talking about hypothetical perfectly free market, that neither exists nor we'd really want to have it. "

Please do not speak for others.

"businesses in bed with politicians"

Isn't that a failure of the law system or, more general, "our democracy" itself? Some corrupt company in XY has no ties with you but government has (at least that's the theory). So how come government (i.e., the people there) is still getting paid by your taxes while they are clearly not acting on your behalf?

Blaming capitalism is like blaming the guy who slept with your wife instead of blaming your wife (and most probably you should also blame yourself to some extent).

"For businesses, it's a tool like any other, to use in competing on the market."

Well, for the businesses receiving a subsidy it's clearly a tool while the businesses and people paying for it much less so.

To sum up, the subsidies you talk about are neither "capitalistic" nor "democratic" so we shouldn't derive conclusions about capitalism or democracy here.

We can very well derive conclusions about the current economic system called "free market" and the current political system called "democracy" but we should agree on the definition first.

Is government regulation any less of a trust game?

In principle, government has the capability to be less stupid than the market. Companies are driven by competition, which seriously limits their choices and forces them to dig us a deeper hole. The government can, in principle, just arbitrarily decide that maybe, just maybe, we need to care about surviving for longer than next fiscal quarter or at least try and not create ourselves a hell on Earth.

Keep in mind that the golden age of capitalism was the beginning of Industrial Revolution - it took a lot of blood and subsequent regulations to get us to the point we're not slaving away 16hrs/day in a sweatshop only to die early because some "entrepreneur" sold us poison.

"In principle, government has the capability to be less stupid than the market."

It also has the capacity to be a great deal stupider, because it lacks the immediate feedback of the market spanking it.

It is not sufficient to just wave the word government at a problem. You need to do a full analysis of the incentives and demonstrate they are better. Just as raw capitalism has the obvious problems of a short-term focus, being driving by money above all else, and the issues of externalities being imposed on others, governments have the obvious problems of regulatory capture by interest groups, internal bureaucratic inefficiencies, creating high-level administrators who don't particularly care about the problem and just use the regulations as tokens in a war of turf-building, and being driven by politics above all else. And that's just the high-level table-of-contents of the problems both can have.

Governments are perfectly capable of deciding that up is down, blue is red, and don't you DARE question them or you're unpatriotic and we're going to lock you up, and they're amazingly capable of retaining these beliefs for far beyond their best-by dates because they have the power to just bull through whatever problems may arise (until they suddenly run out).

In the particular case of a supply problem it is not at all clear to me that letting the normal mechanisms of supply and demand handle it is that catastrophic... these issues happen all the time and you don't even notice. Again, let me emphasize, this happens daily. It's what the markets deal with. It's not like this is some bizarre scientific theory, it's to the level of engineering. We do it all the time.

To tack on to this, we have government subsidies of oil and ethanol production in the US, specifically to keep the price of gasoline lower than what the market would clear on its own. Government, the one that our parent post supposedly wants to regulate limited resources to save more for the future, is actively encouraging consumption faster than normal.

The only case that I'm aware of in which government regulation has successfully protected a limited resource is the fishing fields of Iceland, and they fixed that issue by creating a system of ownership--i.e. capital--where there was only the commons before.

> In principle, government has the capability to be less stupid than the market.

Only if you're applying favorable "principles" to government but not doing the same for the market. If you're treating government as a black box that acts as a perfect aggregate of the population's preferences, then yes, it can maximize economic efficiency (or probably accomplish whichever other goal you have, like egalitarianism, utilitarianism, etc.). But if you do that, it's only fair to treat the market as a black box that does exactly the same thing.

Of course, neither the government nor the market can act as a perfect aggregate of the population's preferences.

> The government can, in principle, just arbitrarily decide that maybe, just maybe, we need to care about surviving for longer than next fiscal quarter or at least try and not create ourselves a hell on Earth.

To use your example, the market can also in principle just arbitrarily decide that maybe, just maybe, we need to care about surviving for longer than next fiscal quarter or at least try and not create ourselves a hell on Earth. There's no rule in the market that says a rich capitalist, or even a group of private companies, can't just spend a bunch of resources on whatever you're talking about.

I don't think business is the answer to everything. There are a lot of ways that I think the shear size of some corporations gives them the capacity--through vertical integration--to ignore some market forces. Oligopoly is not a free market. But I think you're way off base here and are severely overstating what we should realistically expect out of government.

Even as early as Henry Ford (in positing that greater leisure time for workers was good for the business as well, as it increased per-hour productivity and created a larger consumer class), we see capitalists bucking such simplistic and reductive thinking. Also, the only modern movements towards reducing working hours lately has been from private industry as well.

I don't think there is any principle to any study of government or economics that says what you have said. Government has the capacity to enforce laws. Beyond that, what those laws are, for whose benefit they are written, that's not guaranteed. To hope that a government will adopt a certain policy for humanitarian reasons is wishful thinking.

But, if you can make an economic case for a certain policy, then it becomes much, much harder for people--either businesses or governments--to ignore.

>In principle, government has the capability to be less stupid than the market.

That may be true, but the US had a "strategic helium reserve" that we decided to sell off for no reason I can discern. I have more trust in people who are trying to maximize the amount of money they make than Congressman who can be bought and sold more easily than helium.

I at least have a theoretical way of holding my government to account. It isn't much, but it beats trying to hold a corporation to account in a world where it is not bound by laws, or barely bound by laws.

Right, which is part of the reason why I call into question trust in government. You can trust a corporation to be self-serving. If you can make an economic case for a policy, then all else being equal, the firms that adopt that policy will eat the lunch of the firms that do not. But you can't trust a government to protect the best interests of the people. I think they've demonstrated on a regular basis that they generally won't.

What is more often the case: a regulation coming into form to protect the consumer from the evils of corporations, or that regulation actually forming to protect an entrenched corporation against competitors?

We, as a society, all make up the market. When you put a monopoly power in control over it--i.e. a government--you open the door to abuse of that power, as there is no alternative. You create a single point of failure for society.

What is your theoretical way of holding your government to account? If your answer is voting, I would ask why you think your single vote influences an election more than your individual choice whether to patronize a business.

Similar answer: http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/27/what-grea...

At the end of the day we have to count on the market, but I still hate that the helium reserve has depressed the price so much that we are just throwing away the helium in natural gas wells.

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