Northwest Passage, Talez. Those big container ships use 5-15 tons of fuel per hour and if they can go north it cuts 11,000 km off the Europe-Asia sailing route. 90% of global transport is by container ship. It could be a significant change.I'm not doubting the ability to transport it. I question whether the conservation expectations and increased production expectations are based in reality.
That's an interesting energy chart. I don't understand the branch called "Rejected Energy" though.Excess heat that can't be harnessed effectively. Power generation and internal combustion engines are much less than 100% efficient.
If we think about the Weimar Republic for a moment, the problems for them began long before the hyperinflation, which really went off in 1923. Following World War I the reparations payments required under the Versailles Treaty squeezed the German government so badly that they eventually defaulted. The Treaty was just a bloody-minded pay-back by the victors of the war and brought so much subsequent grief to the World in the 1939-1945 War that you wonder what was going on in their heads.posted by wuwei at 1:01 AM on November 20, 2012 [2 favorites]
Anyway, for historians, you will recall that the French and Belgian armies then retaliated after the German default and took over the industrial area of the Ruhr – Germany’s mining and manufacturing heartland. The Germans, in turn, stopped work and production ground to a halt. The Germans kept paying the workers in local currency despite limited production being possible and you can imagine that nominal demand quickly started to rise relative to real output which was grinding to a halt. The crunch came when the export trade stalled and the only way the German Government could keep paying their treaty obligations etc was to keep spending. The inflation followed.
Link
But we DO need to:The electrical grid needs attention as well, and I'm sure there are plenty other items to address (floodwalls, etc.).
- MAINTAIN the road, highway, and bridge system we have
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.(read the whole thing for details)
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.
Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base.And so when we see tens of trillions of dollars of public institutions (not just federal and not just debt, but also entitlement spending promises, defined-benefit pension promises, etc.) whose solution is that "all they need to do is ensure [exponential growth of] their tax base", the end result of that may be bad. Exponential economic growth isn't a constant of human history, it's the result of a couple centuries of population growth (which is slowing down and graying), technological growth (which may slow or stagnate), economic freedom (which may be limited) and cheap energy (some sources of which may be peaking). Making decisions whose catastrophic failure can only be averted if growth continues at the same rates forever may be unwise.
[T]he problem with bond vigilante scare tactics runs even deeper than that — because it’s actually quite hard to tell a story in which a loss of confidence in U.S. bonds hurts the real economy. Why wouldn’t it just drive down the dollar, and thereby have an expansionary effect?posted by tonycpsu at 10:40 AM on November 23, 2012
Yes, I know, Greece — but Greece doesn’t have its own currency. What’s the model under which a country that does have its own currency and borrows in that currency can experience a slump due to an attack by bond vigilantes? Or failing that, where are the historical examples?
The closest I can come to anything resembling the danger supposedly lurking for America is the tale of France in the 1920s, which emerged from World War I burdened by large debt, and which did in fact face an attack by speculators as a result. Yet the French story does not, if you look at it closely, offer any support to the deficit scare talk we keep hearing.
But [Lloyd Blankfein] and all these folks who like to talk about raising the Social Security retirement age as if it's a no-brainer need to think harder about why they've settled on the cut to Social Security that will concentrate its pain on people who haven't fully shared in the remarkable increase in life expectancy, who don't make much money and who don't love going to their jobs every day.posted by tonycpsu at 9:02 AM on November 25, 2012 [1 favorite]
The most popular red herring Social Security hustlers have unleashed into the waters of public discourse has grown into such a massive whale of a lie that liberals frequently subscribe to it. The idea goes like this: We need to somehow "fix" Social Security because people are living longer - "fix" in this context being code for "cut." Two groups stand to benefit in the short-term from such a scheme: the greedy rich, who do not want to pay their share in taxes, and financiers, who want to move towards privatizing retirement accounts so they can collect fees. As for the masses of hard-working people who have rightfully earned their retirement, the only "fix" is the fix they will be in if already modest benefits are further reduced.Each of these points is expanded in detail in the linked piece. Read this and then try to make a reasoned argument for raising the retirement age.
Here are five clear reasons why the life expectancy argument is nonsensical, counterproductive and based on a pack of lies:
1. Social Security's original designers considered rising life expectancy.
2. Life expectancy gains since 1935 have been modest.
3. The Greenspan Commission already raised the retirement age two years.
4. Longevity gains have gone mostly to high earners.
5. Life expectancy rises are likely to slow in the future.
« Older And in today's fun IPR news we have Games Workshop... | "In 1925, California supplied ... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Ask Zimbabwe how those ones turned out.
posted by Talez at 9:20 PM on November 19, 2012 [9 favorites]