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To: pater tenebrarum who wrote (57395)	1/11/2001 10:35:50 PM
From: Tom M	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

Heinz, why does everybody use phrases like "golden economic age", and "good as gold", and "gold standard"? I hear it in movies, print, commercials - everywhere. When will we just get rid of it!!! It costs money to store, you have to pay to protect it - yuck! Only thing going for it is it doesn't tarnish. Bring on the next Bretton Woods Beanie Baby Standard and let's get this new era into second gear - imho.

To: pater tenebrarum who wrote (57395)	1/11/2001 11:16:55 PM
From: Don Lloyd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

hb - ...incidentally, a prominent optimist/bull on the LW forum, Eric Baranov, argues that the next big step forward technologically should involve an entirely NEW energy source - something along the lines of cold fusion. ending the dependency on fossil fuels. of course he's merely speculating, but IF such an innovation became available, it would certainly bring about a golden economic age. ... I don't think so. The infrastructure that has evolved to supply the economy's energy needs in a number of forms is very efficient, even if it often seems excessively fragile. The limits to its efficiency and robustness are most often the results of political choices. If you were to compare the overall economic costs of energy supply to the entire economy, it might be 15% at most, far less than the costs of taxation, for example. In this light, even a perfect, costless energy source is limited in how much improvement it can provide, even if we ignore the destruction of the capital that is embedded in the present infrastructure and the additional capital investments that must be made to support the new. If you invent the lemon, its use is not a simple matter of incremental improvement of the processing of apples. You must first retreat from an economic fitness peak that has evolved to efficiently exploit apples, and then begin an entirely new lemon exploiting infrastructure which can evolve to its own fitness peak. If it is not clear from the beginning that this peak may significantly surpass the old apple peak, the process will never proceed beyond the point of risk evaluation. Regards, Don

To: pater tenebrarum who wrote (57395)	1/12/2001 9:39:33 AM
From: yard_man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

I wouldn't rule out the possibility of something new that removes the hurdle of the "economies of scale" There are a small group of folks that don't want to be dependent on the utility infrastructure -- right now they must take an approach that includes a lot of different technologies ... I think passive solar design, composting toilets, photovolatics, the use of energy that isn't first converted into electricity to perform some kinds of work instead of electrical machines, local methane generation from ag wastes -- these are all great, but they all entail significant up-front investment in your home design. Not practical to retrofit ... Also that doesn't mean that the market for fuel cells or solar isn't large -- all I was trying to say is these are not apt to benefit from any crisis in California. Re: fossil fuels -- when it comes to oil and NG -- we need to come up with something in the next generation or so, but there is quite a bit more coal -- some say 100 - 150 years worth taking into account expected energy growth If we could just get consumers to accept a little more up-front cost on dwellings -- there is a lot that could be done to blunt the cost of peak demands. The annoying thing about electricity is that it cannot be stored efficiently. Got to be generated at the same time it is consumed. We all pay a lot for the convience of being able to do the wash when cooling loads are at their highest ... Real-time pricing to the consumer would never fly, but the engineer in me loves to imagine all the possible innovations that would result if consumers could get that price signal on an hourly basis and act on it -- whole new industries would be created