Jim's Blog

Because the cost of renewables is falsified, installation of renewables causes power crises. Renewables are installed. The cost of renewables is hidden in some other part of the system, renewables continue to be installed, that part of the system does not get increased funding, collapses, blackouts and brownouts ensue. Fixing the blackouts and brownouts costs money, the cost of electricity then rises to reflect the actual cost of renewables that no one will admit.

The cost of renewables is assessed without regard for the fact that renewables are intermittent and unpredictable. Sometimes the sun shines, some times it does not, sometimes the wind blows, sometimes it does not, sometimes it blows too hard and the windmills must shut down. This creates a burden on the grid, and the need for backup power, and this backup power and grid load is not costed or funded

So the overburdened grid shuts down, and you get blackouts, or there just is not enough power, and you get brownouts.

Eventually industry threatens to up and leave for lack of predictable power, and then, and only then, only after major threats from major industries, the additional generating capacity and grid capacity is built – and people have to pay for it. And then, and only then, the true cost of renewables becomes apparent.

Generating electricity costs very little. What is expensive is generating it when it is needed, and not when it is not needed, and transporting it from where it is generated to where it is used.

The rational way to charge for electricity would be like internet – charge by the size of the pipeline, not how much goes through it. Most of the cost of household electricity is the grid and power stations idling for times of peak demands.

The trouble with wind and solar is that sometimes the wind blows, and sometimes it does not, and sometimes the sun shines, and some times it does not. So it puts an unreasonable load on the grid and requires some kind other power source for times people want power, but the sun is not shining and the wind stops blowing.

If you have solar power on your roof, then when you feed excess power back into the grid it costs the power company money, because they have to have the extra grid capability to support unpredictable power being fed back into the grid at inconvenient times.

Hydroelectric is OK, provided one has a decent sized dam behind it, so that one can run water through the turbines when one needs power, and not run water through the turbines when one does not. It is the dam that is expensive, and the dam that makes hydroelectric power useful. Without a large enough dam, it is as useless and expensive as wind and solar.

If we had a cheap and effective means of storing power, then wind and solar would be great, and every household and every business would cheerfully go off grid and use solar for everything. High temperature batteries relying on molten sodium, molten salt, and beta alumina membranes are promising, but they are not yet economical in sizes small enough for household use, or even use by ordinary businesses.

The only cheap and effective means for storing power is pumped hydro. You need two large dams close together, one much higher than the other, and when the sun shines you pump water uphill, and when it is dark you run water downhill through the turbines. If you have rivers suitable for pumped hydro, then wind and solar is pretty reasonable. It is costlier than carbon and nuclear, but compared to the cost of the grid, not enough to make a huge difference.

Norway uses hydro, and hydro works fine. Austria uses hydro and pumped hydro. Portugal uses pumped hydro, and for them, wind and solar works fine. But most of the EU just does not have enough suitable dams for pumped hydro. And for them, renewable power sources are very expensive.

I took a list of EU countries that use widely varying amounts of renewable electrical power sources, leaving out Norway, Portugal, and Austria because of hydro and pumped hydro.

The cost of electricity in the remaining countries is, to a good approximation, proportional to the proportion that is generated renewably. Extrapolating to 100% renewable, it would cost 55 cents per kilowatt hour, extrapolating to 0% renewable, it would cost about 10 cents per kilowatt hour.

Obamacare is in a death spiral.

Trump promised to repeal and replace Obamacare, but then ran dead on it, allowing Ryancare to fail and washing his hands of it.

Trump then announces he has to compromise with the Democrats on medicine.

Single payer for everyone, as in Britain and Canada, is a horrible disaster, but despite being a disaster, once in place it seems impossible to remove. If we get single payer, we are screwed.

The key problem of US healthcare is absurdly high and completely unpredictable health costs – you stroll into hospital for something trivial, and if you are white and male, get hit for three hundred thousand dollars for no apparent reason. Routine and standard health care procedures like a colonoscopy typically cost twenty times what they cost in the rest of the world, and even though they are absolutely routine and standard no one will tell you what they are going to cost.

So, America has to copy from countries that have attained low and predictable health costs, and most importantly, up front health costs, where you know what you are going to be charged: These are Singapore, India, and Thailand, which have single payer for poor people. Which means that when some bum shows up at the rich people’s hospital, they send him over to the poor people’s hospital.

The reason America has no market in healthcare is cross subsidies – white males pay for everyone, and this requires opaque prices. The government decrees that hospitals will take care of the poor and female, that insurance companies will take care of the poor and female, which in practice winds up as cross subsidies, white males taking care of the poor and female, which results in a system with no prices and no markets.

To get health costs down you need a market and prices. Singapore and similar countries have a market and prices, and they can get away with this politically because there is a safety net for the poor, the feckless, and the unlucky.

If you have clear up front prices, someone has to pay for the poor people. If explicit up front prices then you need an explicit overt handout in place of the hidden handout paid for through hidden prices.

The trouble with single payer for poor people is that it is apt to grow into single payer for everyone, as has more or less happened in France and is happening in Germany. But Singapore has kept single payer under control, and single payer has not swallowed up the entire medical industry in Australia.

What I would really like is a system where you can just turn the poor and the sick away, but we cannot have that when we pretend to democracy, so some kind of single payer for poor people it has to be.

The trouble is, of course, the Democrats are going to demand single payer for everyone. But as the Obamacare crisis ripens, and the mid term elections approach …

Costs of many important things, in particular education, housing, and healthcare are rising in ways that create artificial first world poverty, the inability to afford a wife and children.

Scott Alexander wrote a superficially thoughtful and well informed examination of these problems, which analysis was made stupid by crimestop.

A lot of high intelligent well informed people responded with explanations of the problem which accurately described parts and details of the problem, but crimestop prevented them from seeing, or at least prevented them from mentioning, the big picture formed by the details they quite accurately describe. Scott has collected these intelligent and detailed responses.

Among the commenters, LukHamilton observes that increased education is likely of negative value to society, and fc123 observes we are spending an awful lot of money educating stupid people in things that are unlikely to be of use to them, but then fail to put two and two together, or if they did put two and two together, they refrain from mentioning it.

The things raising costs are described correctly enough, but are treated as an assemblage of random unrelated facts. Things just supposedly happen to be this way supposedly for no apparent reason, and the fact that we cannot seem to do anything about these things also supposedly has no apparent reason.

Some leftists and a PC libertarian have noticed that progress is not progressing: Education, healthcare, and infrastructure is getting much more expensive without improving in quality, and in many respects declining in quality. Doctors no longer make house calls. Education teaches ignorance and stupidity. Infrastructure has brutalist architecture. Naturally they are completely mystified about what is causing it because crimestop makes them stupid.

First world poverty – the inability to afford a wife and children – is as artificial as the Ukraine famine. It is not a natural result of technology. Rather it is a manifestation of ever escalating left wing repression. Parents are forced to pay ever higher prices to send ever fewer children to ever lengthier periods in institutions of left wing propaganda. Used to be that getting a school leaving degree at the age of twelve showed you were a smart hard working kid. Now getting a PhD in intersectional feminist basketweaving at the age of thirty shows you are an idiot.

The ever escalating suppression of jobs forces people to live ever closer to the revolving door between regulators and regulated. Anarcho tyranny destroys housing and prevents the creation of new housing. Credentialism intended to force people to attend ever lengthening lectures on leftism forces people to waste their youth.

Reverse degree inflation, children become profitable once more. Cut regulation, price of housing falls because people can get jobs without having to live next to the regulatory revolving door. Restore marriage 1.0. Marriage then gives you the security to produce children and invest in them.

In a previous post Fixing Housing Healthcare and Education, I address those fixes.

In this post I will also address the  problem of overpriced infrastructure spending.

The rise in education costs is runaway rule by priests. Most education is useless, and gets more useless at the higher levels. If you ask why we are giving more stupid people more useless education even though it costs much more than it used to, then you also have the answer to why it costs more. If you have priests in charge, they will make everyone go to church all the time. Our education system is the state church making everyone go to church and attend religious festivals. It is time for the Dissolution of the Monasteries. We need degree deflation.

Our education system is state church making everyone go to church and attend religious festivals. In other words, degree inflation To deal with this, needs a full on attack on priestly power. We need a revolutionary transfer of power analogous to the dissolution of the monasteries.

After crushing the priestly class, then we can deflate credentials.

The priests need to be subjected to the Bishop, the Bishops to the Archbishop, and the Archbishop to the King. The Dean of a university should be appointed by the board, the Dean should have the power to hire and fire professors, and all academic funding should go through university, which is to say through the dean. If the Pentagon wants a professor at MIT to research something, it should pay MIT, not the professor. I discuss disempowering the priesthood and dissolving the monasteries in Draining the Swamp and in The Cathedral Defined.

The problem with Healthcare is that a system of cross subsidies and transfers results in a non price system, where there is no competition on price and quality. They abolished the free market in order to provide hidden subsidies from men to women, from whites to blacks, and from the rich to the poor, resulting in socialist levels of efficiency. Compare and contrast with Singapore, India, and Thailand that have free market sectors in medicine.

When you regulate healthcare so that the husband of a woman with complications of pregnancy winds up subsidizing the services provided to half a dozen women getting abortions, the result is that both the facility providing pregnancy care, and the facility providing abortions are given regulatory immunity from price competition, resulting in socialist levels of efficiency.

For healthcare to be efficient, you cannot allow people for whom healthcare is free to go in by the same door and face the same triage nurse as people who pay for their healthcare. If you want people to pay for their healthcare, they had better not see a pile of drug addicts looking for free drugs and vagrants looking for free room and board in the queue ahead of them. And you will only get efficient reasonably priced healthcare if people do in fact pay for it themselves.

Infrastructure is inefficient to the extent that it is provided by socialist means.

If I hire some people to fix my privately owned road, they come in, fix it, are done in no time. Council workers fixing council roads take a little longer. If, however, a road is being done on a federal tourist development grant, being paid for by people far away, well, when the cat is away the mice will play. That road takes a couple of years to do. Socialism is bad for infrastructure costs, especially when Democratic Party Politicians start importing vote banks, and federal socialism is worse for infrastructure costs, even if Republicans are in charge.

Infrastructure costs reflect in varying degrees, socialism, Parkinson’s law, and Democratic Party vote banks: The subway systems tend to become welfare programs for blacks, employing large numbers of blacks for their votes without any real expectation of any useful work. The most egregious examples of outrageous infrastructure costs are Democratic party vote banks, where ever more people with a Democratic Party voter profile are employed to do ever less work.

Educational inflation, (degrees are inflated in the sense that even stupid lazy people get the degree these days, and they are also inflated in that they cost a hell of a lot more) is a reflection of priestly power. Priests need to be disempowered.

Medical inflation is a result of the non market economy, that medical facilities (doctors are mere cogs within a “facility”) do not compete on price and quality.

Housing inflation is a result of regulation, zoning, and ethnic cleansing.

Infrastructure inflation is Parkinsons law: Socialist production always gets more expensive over time – and Democrat politicians hiring Democratic Party voting blocks worsens this natural tendency.

Vox, observing gigantic bureaucracies flailing incompetently, says

By the same token, while we know now that it’s certainly possible to set up a Healthcare.gov website that works as intended, we also know that on the launch date the Obama administration had not, in fact, built such a website. That embarrassing governance failure undermined the president’s signature policy initiative in serious ways, with crucial long-term repercussions.

But Vox was disinclined to wonder why the Healthcare.gov website failed.

It failed because women and minorities were in charge of setting it up. They threw ever more enormous amounts of money at it. Nothing worked until they brought in an emergency team that just happened to consist entirely of white males and east Asian males. This closely parallels the fact that Democratic Party administrations whose infrastructure building teams are full of people who profile as Democratic Party voters tend to produce Democratic Party majorities but not to produce very much infrastructure.