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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldSomeone's gotta say it
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    2 days ago

    You really think companies in America with monoplies would lower prices just because their costs went down?

    So, theoretically, there’s a point at which induced demand through lower prices can raise profits. Having a monopoly on an elastic good only benefits you when you’re onboarding new clients at an escalating pace. Private energy companies looking to increase energy consumption overall may well take an upfront haircut on the retail price in order to encourage more people to adopt hardware that consumes the commodity.

    But - over the long term - sure, the incentive is to capture more revenue in pursuit of higher profit. And that means raising prices faster than inflation.

    That said, a public investment, could be pursued as a loss-leader. Public money invested in publicly owned utilities raises the availability of low-cost energy for private consumption. This is spent in pursuit of higher overall economic growth.


  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtoTechnology@lemmy.worldSomeone's gotta say it
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    2 days ago

    Our utility bills would be cheaper if the government invested

    So much of the price of a thing is bound up in the administrative overhead and profit extracted at every step of the delivery process. You can pull a kwh of energy out of the ground, in the form of a lump of coal or a liter of gas, for pennies on the dollar when it is eventually sold retail. And that’s before we consider the pricing impact of artificial scarcity that occurs under the ERCOT model of wholesale electricity auctions.

    By contrast, the TVA system has kept prices below (often far below) the national market rate simply by operating at-cost as a public enterprise. Energy companies in socialist states - from Sweden to Iran to China - can even retail electricity at subsidized rates (below cost of production) as a loss leader intended to spur high value domestic energy-hungry industries like steel manufacturing and chip fabrication.

    Getting to green energy now that the global economy is flush with dirt-cheap high yield solar panels and market-competitive lithium batteries definitely cuts the raw labor / machine costs of fossil fuel extraction. And they defer the tail costs of fuel waste pollution management as well as the associated ecological and human health knock-on effects. But even sticking to the old fossil fuel economy is cheaper under a public system when the costs of operation aren’t inflated by the demands of private administrators and investors.








  • What is up with Valve and their obsession with those stupid touchpads? I hated that on the old Steam D-Pad. Hypersensitive seemingly every moment except when you needed it to be.

    The XBox and the PS figured out how to make traditional controllers very well. Nintendo loves to get freaky with it and does a better than average job of innovating in the space. But Valve just seems to want to cobble together spare parts into a janky whatever the hell this is. I don’t get it.

    Whomever is making these things, you don’t have to keep doing this. Just be normal!


  • Nah, his complaint was lack of torque.

    Maybe just had torque confused with horsepower? That’s been the historical trade-off between gas and electric. Sure, its very easy to get an electric motor to jump into action. But it is comparatively difficult to generate the same amount of power with equivalent fuel density.

    A gallon of refined gasoline packs insane energy.

    Much of which is lost to heat when combusted, which is the historical hang-up.

    Not that batteries don’t have their own heating problems. But the benefit of batteries is that they’re an engineering problem we can solve with miniaturization, which we’ve become incredibly good at. We’re at a soft ceiling in terms of engine chemistry. Petroleum is about as refined as we’re going to get it. Combustion’s math is what it is. Improvements to the efficiency of modern engines have stalled out as an automotive tool, even to the point that a gas engine powering an electric capacitor in a hybrid yields performance improvements over the gas engine just spinning the wheels directly.