“But seen from out here everything seems different. Time bends. Space is boundless: it squashes a man’s ego. I feel lonely, that’s about it. Tell me, though, does man, that marvel of the universe, that glorious paradox who sent me to the stars, still make war against his brother?” – Planet of the Apes
I heard she prefers to be called “aoc” because she doesn’t like capitalism.
In 1865, when Joe Biden was barely sniffing at his first hair, English economist William Jevons noticed something: that Biden’s behavior was really inappropriate. Besides that, Jevons also noticed that innovations that made coal more efficient to use led not to lower uses of coal, but to the use of more coal. This became known as Jevons’ Paradox.
When you think about it, this makes a huge amount of sense. If electricity cost 10 times as much as it does today, we’d use less of it, and The Mrs. would probably (reluctantly) turn the air conditioning up from 62°F to 64°F (23 to 52 megaparsecs/joule-furlong) in summer. To make it clear: The Mrs. likes it colder in the house than a college faculty lounge when someone mentions personal responsibility.
The more expensive or more inefficient something is, the less it is used, which probably explains why they keep Kamala Harris in a Tupperware® container when they’re not trotting her out to somehow make even less sense than Hunter Biden after a three-week coke, hooker, and greasy cheeseburger binge.
That’s weird, because I was always under the impression Kamala was the cheap resource. Who knew?
Hunter Biden on drugs: “Cocaine use? I have to draw a line somewhere.”
I was conversing back and forth about various and sundry things with Eaton Rapids Joe (you can find him HERE) on email since he decided to experiment on the tensile strength of his bones (they rarely break in compression) in a kinetic environment and is as mobile as a Ford Pinto™. That made him bored enough to drop yours truly a line. As the conversation progressed, I thought of good old Jevons.
The truth is that we swim in a pool of Jevons. You might want to soap up when you get out. Seriously, though, we normally adapt our work to use cheap (the non-Kamala kind of cheap) resources.
Here’s an example: back when I went to college, computing processor and memory time was expensive. The CPU was the pivot point. In my programming class, students were actually given an account that charged them per Pelosi-second of processing time.
Last night Pelosi was so drunk she took the train home, which was weird, because it was the first time she ever drove a train.
A Pelosi-second is the amount of time required for Nancy’s liver to absorb a bottle of vodka given to her by a Ukrainian lobbyist, so it’s pretty fast. Just like in Joe Biden’s brain, memory was rare and expensive, too. But when the cost of memory went down, we ended up using more of it.
Nowadays, because of Jevons’ Paradox, we find that computing processor power and memory are cheap. There are two pictures, three Polaroids® and six daguerreotypes of me growing up. I have more pictures of Pugsley’s first birthday cake.
One result of this is that computer code is no longer (really) optimized. Because CPU and memory is cheap, industry has decided that they can be sloppy programmers. If we have overflow in the 32GB of RAM, well, we can reboot once a month. Unless you’re in a Boeing®. Oops.
Sorry if those jokes were boeing.
That’s computer stuff. What other things have Jevons’ Paradox impacted?
Energy.
Food.
Money.
“Holy cow, John Wilder,” you’re saying, “that’s nearly as important as the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial!” Let’s start with . . .
Energy.
Yup. And in energy, especially, the Paradox has been our friend. What energy does is, essentially, provide us with amazing amounts of prosperity. It moves important stuff like fidget spinners from China to Stately Wilder Mansion for pennies. It moves less important stuff like life-saving medicine and PEZ® for unimaginably small amounts of cash.
Ubiquitous energy has made the world small. It has made huge efforts, like moving Bill Gates’ ego from place to place, inexpensive. But as we see Russian energy cut off, and Biden doing his best to make the United States energy inefficient, perhaps so the only source of energy would be AOC’s thighs rubbing together.
Is the Hooters® home delivery service called Knockers™?
Regardless, we face a future where all the inefficiency that we’ve allowed into the system due to cheap energy will have to unwind.
Next on the tour is . . .
Food.
In my early life, food has always been worth a commercial or two showing starving kids covered in flies from some hellhole where they use sharp sticks for money as well as kitchen appliances. I think it was Baltimore. Regardless, in the last decade, world hunger was solved. We had enough food so we could pave roads with Pizza Rolls® and stripe them with Hidden Valley Ranch™ dressing.
Yup. Totally solved. More than enough calories for everyone on the planet to use Oreos™ for deodorant and bathe in Coca-Cola©. Sure, sometimes people starved, but not very many, and mainly in communist hellholes where the local warlord still hasn’t gotten over his devotion to U2® and Bono comes by to make public appearances to show how much he cares. Or Baltimore.
Were people hungry?
Certainly, but they were generally fat while they were hungry. But the problem was solved.
Broccoli is a great thing to eat when you’re hungry and want to stay hungry.
In a world where Ukraine and Russia aren’t exporting grain and fertilizer, however, this changes. Sure, in the United States we can probably count on food for everyone, just expensive food. But that world hunger thing? Yeah, it’s back in play.
What’s left?
Money.
Huh? I thought we were awash in money, so much so that gasoline was more expensive than supporting the Ukraine for an afternoon? Well, no. Money is the one thing that is getting more expensive.
The reason is simple – we’ve had nearly zero percent interest since 2008. The Fed® has been shoving it down the throat of banks. Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden have been printing it as fast as they can, since it didn’t seem to matter.
They also make cameras, the Go-Provolone®.
Until it did. And now interest rates are higher. But who needs money? The same people paying record-high prices to try to extract Energy. The same people who need to borrow cash to fertilize fields and plant seeds and harvest them.
Yup. Expensive money means less energy and less food.
Oops.
Well, there must be a bright side?
Yes, thankfully there is.
Faculty lounges all over the continent will heat on up. And maybe personal responsibility will make a reappearance. Or maybe AOC will see her shadow, but that’s scary.
That means six more weeks of communism.
Funny you should mention Jevon’s Paradox.
I came across an article about how much renewable energy had dropped in price over the years, especially solar, and I find myself a little sceptical of such amazing results. See for yourself : https://ourworldindata.org/cheap-renewables-growth . This should mean that solar is gonna take over for future electricity growth. I remain a little sceptical of this, even tho I acknowledge that you can go out and buy solar panels today for your home at a pretty amazing $1 to $1.50 per watt. Er, excluding installation labor. And batteries to allow after-sundown usage. And depreciation since UV from the sun slowly degrades the panels. Still…
Despite my scepticism of solar leading the way of electric growth, I am absolutely positive that that Jevon’s Paradox is NOT gonna lead magically to the green dream of an electric Tesla in every garage and a vast junkyard of old ICE (internal combustion engine) cars. Let’s run the numbers. A $70K Tesla Long Range Model S goes 400 miles with its optional (and expensive) 100KW / 350 V battery. At 60 MPH that battery travels 400 mi in 6.66 hours (Elon’s mark of the devil) so the car is using a continuous 100,000 W / 6.66 = 15KW – hr of energy every hour the car runs. Let’s say grid electricity is 10 cents per KW-hr (a reasonable average) so the Tesla is burning $1.50 per hour in electricity costs per hour. This compares with a couple of gallons of gas burned per hour costing around $8 gas costs per hour for a 30 MPG ICE vehicle that costs half the Model S price. So…electric vehicle costs twice as much but uses “fuel” costing five times less than current Biden-did-this high prices. So far so good.
Let’s scale this up. There’s 275 million cars in ‘Murca. They drive a total of around 3,000 trillion miles in a year ( even accounting for a pretty significant COVID drop in the past few years…see https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315 ). Convert em all to electric and we need 3000 trillion miles / 15 Kw-h per mile = 200 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity to run a ‘Murica “green” electric car fleet.
Danger, Will Robinson!!! ‘Murica “ONLY” generated a total of 4 trillion killowatt-hours of electricity in (see https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=427&t=3 )!!! So…even if we gave out free Tesla Model S and diverted our entire present electric power SOLELY to recharging them, we’re still sitting in the dark being 50 times short of the electricity needed to power this green pipe dream.
Takeaways: Jevon’s Paradox is true, but doesn’t mean you can ultimately get whatever you want. In the past, we have not appreciated the miracle and impact of cheap oil. In the present, we do not appreciate the danger of Peak Oil and the Energy Cliff ( see https://www.explainingthefuture.com/peak_oil.html ). In the future, things are gonna be a lot differrent, and not in a good way. Our current energy lifestyle is unsustainable, and solar / wind is not gonna magically save the day. Rules for thee and not for me? Ha. It’s gonna be walk / bugs for thee and ride / steak for me. Do yourself a favor, watch Mad Max Fury Road for a travelogue thru our coming wonderful world.
Meanwhile, I’m waiting for the crash in the best place in America….come join me!
https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/why-huntsville-is-the-best-place-to-live-in-the-u-s-in-2022-23
ACK!!! My calculations above are wrong but I’m gonna say it’s not my fault. The chart at https://afdc.energy.gov/data/10315 is wrong. The Y-axis is labeled as “trillions” but it shoulda been labeled “billions”. 3000 billion = 3 trillion. Americans drive around 3 trillion miles a year, not 3000 trillion like the chart says and like I used in my calculations. So it would actually take 0.2 trillion kilowatt hours to power an electric car fleet, out of the 4.0 trillion KWh-hours we generate now – or “only” 5% of our present power generation.
Maybe it will take a little longer to get to Mad Max than I thought. Maybe Green Utopia is only 275M * $75K = $20 trillion worth of Tesla purchases away after all.
Thanks for pointing out when I’m full of BS, John.
Don’t sweat it – it’s an easy mistake to make. Numeric mistakes don’t jump out as easily as writing mistakes do (except for those oddballs who even THINK in numbers).
A whole lot of that rosy “Mandatory Solar will be so PEACHY!” crowd is looking at predictions based on optimal output – not real life.
For those of us in the North, who need to use large quantities of power to keep from freezing our nether regions off, a lack will not just be inconvenient, it will be potentially deadly in a prolonged cold spell (which tends to happen in cycles). There are years – the last several – when the winters have been relatively mild, with a few weeks of cold. But, there are also years when the snow is hip-deep, the temps are consistently sub-zero for many weeks, and roofs are in danger of caving from the weight of snow and ice.
For the South, a prolonged hot spell can kill (heat stroke is an actual medical condition), loss of food from electrical outages is a budget-killer, and lack of water will kill off the agriculture industry.
Reliable energy is the key to a nation’s success economically. Redundant sources of power, ability to switch to backup, and affordable vehicle power.
Deliberately hobbling the economy is the very definition of stupidity.
Now that’s the money shot: only $20 trillion for the Leftest dream electric utopia. Or they can just remove cars from the plebs?
Ka-ching! We have a winner
Ricky-
No disagreement that Huntsville’s a great place to live (have a Bama MBA, spent some time in North AL years ago). But, I’m always apprehensive of these US News lists, lots of politics involved when you have Green Bay & Portland OR on it and omit Savannah, as well as Greenville & Charleston SC. Plus, Raleigh’s a dump compared to Charlotte.
Solar can’t. Too diffuse.
“…six mi\ore weeks of communism.”
The truth is that Prez *’s cabinet & advisors, plus Thoroughly Midern Woke Millewy, believe that communism “works”. Wait, “communism works”???
Reminds me of the Rocky Show when two guys in trenchcoats came up to Bullwinkle and one said “Army” and the next “Intelligence”.
Bullwinkle’s response, “Isn’t that a contridiction of terms?”
This administration is more like the Rocky Horror, right?
I clearly remember those days when megacycles were dear and RAM cost a fortune. My first company desktop after graduating with a comp sci degree and settling into a cubicle the size of a small toilet stall had a whopping 4 MB of RAM and a cavernous 85 MB hard drive. You’d better believe that we minded our while loops and memory leaks.
But today? The young turks on staff write code as if computing power and memory are doubling every 007 months (Roger Moore’s Law). Never heard of Jevon and his paradox before. But if I ever met anyone by the name of Jevon, I would expect that he would either be waiting hand and foot on some British lord, or holding the pistol sideways as he pulls up his saggy pants.
And speaking of demand that will forever outrun supply, how about batteries? Every time there is a new breakthrough in battery technology, someone in engineering gets the bright idea that this means we can cram MOAR features and work MOAR energy demands into the product profile. I’d be happy just to be able to leave a couple of AA’s in the mini Mag lite for a year without having to scrape them out with a knife the next time the lights go out.
LOL. My first PC had a 1MHz Z-80 with 16K of RAM and a cassette tape deck for storage because I couldn’t afford a hard drive. That forced me to learn assembly language, for which I am forever thankful – there is nothing more beautiful than a working assembly language program, a combination of zen, origami, suduku, and a crossword puzzle all rolled up in one. As soon as you introduce a compiler to get to a higher level “human friendly” language, you lose something…clarity. And these days on top of that is the evil blight of object-oriented programming, but don’t get me started….
You want to see where Jevon Paradox is gonna take computer tech in 20 more years, check out this breakthrough – 1000 GHz CPUs are coming in server farms that can support liquid nitrogen cooling.
https://scitechdaily.com/breakthrough-discovery-of-the-one-way-superconductor-thought-to-be-impossible/amp/
Yeah, well my first abacus could only count to minus 3 and was missing all but one of its beads…
This PC one-downmanship reminds me of the pre-Python routine wherein a group of prosperous Brits attempt to out-brag one another with how desperately poor they were:
——————————————————
GC: House? You were lucky to have a HOUSE! We used to live in one room, all hundred and twenty-six of us, no furniture. Half the floor was missing; we were all huddled together in one corner for fear of FALLING!
TG: You were lucky to have a ROOM! We used to have to live in a corridor!
MP: Ohhhh we used to DREAM of livin’ in a corridor! Woulda’ been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woken up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House!? Hmph.
EI: Well when I say “house” it was only a hole in the ground covered by a piece of tarpolin, but it was a house to US.
GC: We were evicted from our hole in the ground; we had to go and live in a lake!
TG: You were lucky to have a LAKE! There were a hundred and sixty of us living in a small shoebox in the middle of the road.
MP: Cardboard box?
TG: Aye.
MP: You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!
GC: Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at three o’clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of hot gravel, go to work at the mill every day for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would beat us around the head and neck with a broken bottle, if we were LUCKY!
TG: Well we had it tough. We used to have to get up out of the shoebox at twelve o’clock at night, and LICK the road clean with our tongues. We had half a handful of freezing cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at the mill for fourpence every six years, and when we got home, our Dad would slice us in two with a bread knife.
EI: Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o’clock at night, half an hour before I went to bed, (pause for laughter), eat a lump of cold poison, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad would kill us, and dance about on our graves singing “Hallelujah.”
——————————————————
I had to hand-chisel this reply to Ricky in Latin on a sun-baked cow chip using my fingernail, pass it through the 8-track Betamax and then fire up the Corvair to run it across town to the Pony Express pick-up box outside the Blockbuster Video store just for you to see it. Check your privilege, all you modern PC snobs!
“Pre-Python”, you say? I’d say that’s Classic Python, of the full Monte style.
LOL – PC one-owwnmanship!!! Let’s keep going. My first computer was an Edmond Scientific DigiComp-1, and even as a kid, yes, I loaded those little white pegs for every example they had listed in the manual. I remember being amazed at the time that it really could play NIM, which is of course even simpler than tic-tac-toe. I was easily impressed.
This was how a lot of computer programmers of a certain age got started as kids.
http://retrocmp.com/articles/digi-comp-1/302-digi-comp-1-introduction
OK, Ricky, you win.
But, I did get introduced to programming in 7th grade, when our math teacher showed us the time share machine, that worked by punched tape. He was excited by how the computer could play blackjack (it didn’t look like any blackjack I’d even seen). Just didn’t engage me, due to the time lag between input and output.
But, the Commodore 64! My husband bought it with money from settlement of a lawsuit (I thought it a ridiculous waste of money). One evening, when the TV was reruns, and there were no books I hadn’t read, I was bored enough to pull it out (he was working nights).
Several hours later, I had to be pryed away from my fascination with getting the sprites to move around the TV screen. That was the start of a very long slide into computer geekhood.
Since we seem to have a lot of computer geeks here, let me add another comment about the DigiComp-1. As a kid I did not truly understand what a marvel it was. It is a programmable (via placement of the pegs) with a three bit memory, 1X3 pixel output display and a manual clock that was implemented not with a quartz crystal but by your hand pulling one plastic tab back and forth. It is truly a clever design for an actual functioning mechanical computer that has all the essential design elements we recognize today. Here is an excellent 4 minute video on how a functionally equivalent modern LEGO knockoff of the DigiComp-1 operates and is able to accomplish anything at all:
https://youtu.be/UulJaoDAflw
In the past 75 years since ENIAC computers have of course gone electronic, progressing from vacuum tubes to microprocessors. But computers have existed for thousands of years, and for most of that time they have been mechanical by necessity. The oldest computer we know of is the legendary Antikythera Mechanism, and of you’ve never heard of that, it’s worth your time to learn a little about it. Truly an astonishing artifact from over 2000 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/81445/15-intriguing-facts-about-antikythera-mechanism
Best guess is that it was made by Hipparchus and/or Posidonius. Those guys win the “computer one-downmanship” trophy hands down.
Yup, that was my first computer.
I’d say I remembered having to input a program on long cards with holes punched in, but that was my mom.
She also wins all the he “I was so poor” competitions. 😁
If you’re tired of leaking batteries, try lithium non-rechargables. At a manufacturer’s web site, I read that their alkaline cells were guaranteed not to leak (if used properly), and if they do, send in the damaged equipment for a refund. Then I read that their lithium cells were guaranteed not to leak, but if they do, call us so our engineers can fly out to see what the heck happened. OK, maybe that wasn’t exactly what they said… but they seemed a lot more confident with the lithiums.
But, seriously, if you care about your equipment, you’ll never leave batteries in it unless you’re going to use it within an hour.
My first PC had 20MB of HD space, and (I think) a meg of ram. It cost me $100. Good times.
Commenting on the remark about the Mrs keeping the house at near freezing temps; in my previous to retirement career, I had to have the house very cool all the time, because I’d spend all my working hours in a hot climate, further exacerbated by a furious pace from clock in- to clock out. A few years removed from that, then in a luxurious position compared to the prior, I then and now am the one who needs extra clothing, comforters and a heating pad, sometimes even in the summer, when indoors just to survive this meat locker.
I write in the basement, which is meat locker temps, so in winter I wear a thick poncho with a blanket and slippers. I like it.
My original PC was a TRS-80 with a whopping 16K RAM and a cassette tape deck. Some years later, I did most of the work for my BS in Computer Science on a Packard-Bell PC with 640K RAM and a 40M hard drive. It was impressive how great some of the games were that would run on such small amounts of memory. A couple of my favorites were the original SimCity and Balance of Power.
It should come as no surprise that the coming standard of living will drop dramatically in our new carbon-free future. This is the big ugly secret of renewables that they are careful not to say out loud.
Hah! I used to play the Original Pacman on my slide-rule.
I did some programming on a TRS-80 in school. Not good programming. And not more than like sixty lines. But programming.
Six weeks! We got off easy compared to Russia.
The second Bolshevik Revolution won’t be gone that easily.
They didn’t Long March through everything for no reason.
The STASI state wasn’t built just to disband and the COV-LARP ring to rule them all is still held by the Fauci (CCP) shitgolem.
The Nicky Jankowicz kabuki regarding MiniTRU and Das Heimat Schutze was just a distraction until the $40 billion could be sent to Launderia or the 51st state Ukraine.
Remember brother on brother WAR is a feature to the controllers for demoralization.
Well, things go faster now . . . the Jank lost her crank in only two weeks.
I had a chance to talk to George Gilder after he spoke at an internet conference in Chicago in the 90s. I don’t remember everything from that conversation, but I do remember that when I asked him what he saw as the future direction of technology and how to benefit from it, his response was to exploit the plentiful resource be it memory, CPU, bandwidth, etc. Ever since then I’ve observed that this has been the driving principle behind our economy. I thought it made sense in limited, targeted applications, but never understood how it could be broadly sustainable in the long term, especially since it went against Biblical principles on how to manage your finances. For example, the Bible tells us to avoid debt, yet our entire economy has become built on easy credit and continually rolling over that debt. I fear that we are about to find out who was right, Jevon & Gilder or Yahweh.
The Gods of the Copybook Headings say that Jevons and Gilder were right. For a brief moment.
Regarding energy, I hear that the US Congress is considering punishing OPEC for “price gouging”.
How could they do that? Maybe be seizing OPEC-country financial assets in the US.
What’s the OPEC counter-measure? Sell the assets … quietly, but ASAP.
What kind of assets? Government bonds. US Corporate Bonds. Stocks. Real-estate investment trusts.
What happens when the urge to sell assets increases? Prices of assets go down.
What happens when the price of a bond goes down? The yield goes up.
What do we call rising bond yields? An increase in interest rates.
What happens when interest rates go up? Recession.
How can the Fed reduce interest rates? By buying up the bonds themselves, to compensate for the foreign sellers.
How can the Fed afford to buy more bonds? By printing money.
What happens when the money supply increases? Inflation.
Ta-Da! Circular.