- Joe - "You have to look at both sides of the balance sheet. The costs of achieving the "overall good" can suck all the "good" out of the equation in this process. If the resources are deployed inefficiently, it means that these same resources are withheld from achieving some other "good" somewhere else, probably more good more efficiently."
I am sorry that you have such biased view on public solutions. It seems you have come to believe that only the
private sector can perform a useful service and closed off to any other possibility.
I do strongly believe that private sector solutions are usually (not always) more efficient then the public sector, but I am not closed off to the idea that public sector solutions can be useful or even efficient. Joe does not say anything in his post that states or implies he feels that either. What he does say (and I strongly agree with it) is that you have to look at what else can be achieved with the resources. If you spend a billion dollars on a decently run government program that isn't based on a stupid idea then you are likely to achieve some positive results. Those positive results however do not automatically mean that the government program was a good idea. Even if there is no direct negative results (and there often is) there is the indirect result that the billion dollars is spent on one thing and not on another. The resources could in many cases have also produced positive results in the private sector most likely many small positive results as the billion was spent in small chunks rather then on one big project. These small but numerous positive results are hard to measure esp. because in the situation where you have spent the $1bil. on a government project they are hypothetical. The money was spent on the government project and not on other things. On the other hand the shiny new result of the billion dollar project is very visible and everyone can point to it and be proud of their achievement and use it as an argument to ask
for more money so they can repeat this achievement even if it may not be as good as other possible uses for the money.
But the oil is not irreplaceable! In fact, it will be replaced by another source of energy within our lifetimes.
We can not replace oil and its many uses easily. It will requires numerous other resources to take up the slack. I
believe it is better to use it efficiently so that future generations have "the real thing" instead of a 1000 substitutions.
Joe may be optimistic about the "in our lifetimes" but in the long run it will not be particularly hard. The technology and economy supported by the use of the oil will develop and pay for the alternatives. As long as it happens
slowly and when it makes economic sense rather then being forced by inflexible regulation. Much older societies frequently used wood as fuel, and for buildings and ships and such. Wood is renewable but not at the pace that they
used it. In some cases there were local ecological disasters because of deforestation or economic disasters because of
the supply of wood running low but in the long technology and economic strength and sophistication grew so that
wood could be imported and then supplanted as a fuel. Later coal became a primary fuel. It is a very polluting fuel (at
least without modern anti-pollution devices) and it could have (and perhaps was by a few) been argued that ripping up
the ground and burning coal was damaging the environment and that we should not damage the world that our descendents will inherit. But the wealth and technology that burning coal allowed increased our comfort and our life spans and allowed us to figure out how to use cleaner fuels such as oil (or even cleaner natural gas), and develop ways to reduce the pollution that burning coal would create. The wealth created by burning oil has caused our wealth and
technology to advance still more. We can see alternatives that currently are not price effective. In the future as our
technology for exploiting these alternatives improves (and the cost of oil goes up as it becomes more scarce) these
alternatives will make sense and will be implemented on a large scale. If we produce enough energy cheap enough then
it might make sense to artificially create oil (if it is mostly gone by this time) to use for petrochemicals.
There are so many possibilities out there. Fission is here, today, fusion will be here within our lifetimes.
The world is waiting; actually has been waiting for some time now.
Not a lot of time. Fusion wasn't even seriously thought of when my mother was born. I don't think that too much effort was put in to trying to develop it when I was born. If it takes another 50 years it takes another 50 years. That is not an extremely long time when you are talking about major changes in the world economy. In the mean time if oil becomes to expensive the supply of alternatives will increase and the demand for oil will be pushed down. The problem will become more serious if governments try to artificially force down the price of oil (increasing demand and decreasing supply) but unless that happens in a big way, the problem should not be catastrophic.
You don't think we are capable of making good mass transit but we accomplished the above so easily....spoken liken a visionary scientist, right?!!
Having a good mass transit system is not just a technical or even organizational issue. It involves politics and labor
issues and the simple fact that people want the connivance and flexibility of having control over their own transportation. People want to be able to go where they want when they want by the route they want. It's kind of hard
for public transportation to provide that. With enough energy and the technology of a century or two from now it would probably be easier to build things like Joe posted about, then to get people to act according to some big plan to promote efficient transportation and minimize pollution. In the long run, baring totalitarian methods, its is easier to change the physical world, buildings and energy supplies or even climate, then it is to change people. People are unpredictable and often stubborn.
companies you invest in are developing technologies that people did not even dream about just a few years ago.
They are wonderful but they seem to be mostly focused on creating more exotic toys
You don't think there are strong practical benefits from these "toys"?
Tim |
