Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Road Walker who wrote (374519)	3/18/2008 7:51:23 PM
From: TimF	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1576627

If unit labor costs went up, would you say the process was more efficient? Efficiency of labor in economic terms would be productivity. In physical terms it would mean lack of wasted motion or effort, or unproductive activity. If wages go up there isn't any direct connection to either of these ideas. It doesn't directly make them go up or down. Indirectly the business owner will likely try to push hard for higher productivity if he has to pay more per hour for labor. If we did use your definition of efficiency, your earlier statement (that started this whole part of the discussion) was that we had not increased energy efficiency (actually looking back I see that it was about oil, not energy in general). Well using your definition thats the same as saying energy (or oil) prices have gone up. It doesn't make much point to use "high efficiency" to mean "low prices", when its simpler to make the statement directly about the price. That way you avoid confusion, and you avoid the need to come up with some other term to take over the normal meaning of "efficiency". So your statement is then "The investment, 6 years ago, would have brought us a lot closer to lower oil prices". The investment in question was a hypothetical investment of $440 billion, six years ago to try and develop and build infrastructure for oil alternatives. Investing billions may have brought us closer to some good alternative. Or it may have just been malinvestment, going to politically favored fuels like alcohol from corn or some or perhaps some fuel that becomes the fad of the moment that people think will provide some good solution, but that never becomes a good choice in the real economy. And in the meantime we would be paying interest on that $440bil.