19 ms·

Buy a coal mine, drive a gas guzzler, and other uses of reverse logic

216 points by MaysonL 5y ago

divbzero 5y ago
Buying up coal deposits to prevent mining is new to me, but the idea is quite familiar in the realm of buying up rainforest to prevent deforestation.
bargle0 5y ago
I don’t buy the queue argument. It would devolve in to a bunch of churn inevitably resulting in thrown hands and black eyes.
- mgrund 5y ago
  It’s a good lesson in the importance of picking the right things to measure/optimize for. Queue length is not a good thing to optimize for by itself.
  - barbazoo 5y ago
    Exactly, I don't get how that would increase throughput.
    - boffinism 5y ago
      It's not about increasing throughout, it's about increasing user satisfaction. A system where 60 customers are served an hour, and none of them has queued, is theoretically better than one where the same amount are served, but each has queued for 10 boring minutes. You achieve this by disincentivising queueing.
      - luckylion 5y ago
        So people would only go to a stand if there's nobody being served, because being behind the person currently being served is discouraged. Essentially, you'd just move the queue: people would wait for a "spot" to open up (a stand with no customer) and then go there. If it's orderly, they kind of queue in the middle. If it's not, you'll have a large brawl as people try to get in front of each other.
        londons_explore 5y ago
        I think you misunderstood the proposed queueing system.... The stand will never be 'open'. People who arrive join the front of the queue, and are either served next, or someone else joins in front of them, pushing them back. When they're position 2 in the queue, they will only be served if 2 people are served and 0 arrive (low probably). If another person arrives, they're now position 3 in the queue, so 3 need to be served before any arrivals (even lower probably). At some point, they decide the probability of being served drops low enough that they give up and leave - this will usually happen quickly. The only way to 'game' this system is to look up the street and join the queue when it looks like nobody else is coming. If many people try to do this, then those people will be waiting forever (both want to join last - stalemate), and anyone who doesn't employ the tactic gets served.
        becuzThrowaway 5y ago
        In practice, you would just replace the queue with a disorganized rabble of people standing around, where as soon as the person currently being served leaves, there is a mad dash at the one secure spot, which is at the very front.
      - horsawlarway 5y ago
        Those who really want your product now have to mob up outside your stall and hope they're the next lucky random fucker. They're still waiting. Those who don't really want your product don't wait in a line for it anyways - the length of the line itself is a natural filter for availability of the good. Basically - has satisfaction actually gone up if those who would be extremely satisfied by your product no longer receive it, and random folks who may or may not want your product do? I'd bet money the answer is a solid "NO".
      - mcphage 5y ago
        Another way to look at it: with the queuing system, you spend 10 minutes, and you get what you want. How many minutes will it take with the no-queue system? It’s not like the thoroughput has increased. And how likely will it be for you to get what you want after that time? Is it definite?
  - jfengel 5y ago
    I don't even see how it does that. Unless there is some factor that prevents you from leaving and immediately re-entering the line at the front. I feel like I missed something.
  - jarofgreen 5y ago
    Yes! I feel this is the main point that is totally missed. The first time I read Tim Hartford years ago he was talking about this idea uncritically and I thought it was stupid then and I don't have much respect for him. The thing we are trying to optimise is not length of que, but how long and how reliable it is to get served. Under the old system you may have had to wait 10 minutes to get served BUT you knew before you started queuing it would be about 10 minutes (and thus could make an informed choice) and you can clearly see your progress in the queue and if you are patient you will be served. Under the new system it now may take you 1 minute to get served or 1 hour. Or you will try multiple times and never get served. And you will have no indication before you start queing how successful you will be. Any UX designer would easily tell you which of these systems is going to piss people off more.
- 8organicbits 5y ago
  > Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps. But you might consider applying a dose of Landsburg’s logic to your own “to do” list: don’t add a new item to the list unless you’re willing to do it immediately. I've got to ponder the to do list example though.
  - alanbernstein 5y ago
    I think you'd end up with a similar amount of person-minutes of waiting overall, it just wouldn't be as apparent who is waiting for what. As for the to do list, to me that suggestion amounts to nothing more than splitting my to do list into two, a "to do now" list, and a "to do eventually" list (well, I would call it a "two do" list), where I just move items from the second one to the first. That might have some value, but it's not a mind-blowing reversal of logic.
- ratsbane 5y ago
  The queue proposal sounds like a Monty Python skit. If we adopt the rule that the next person to be served is the most recent person to join line, it's inevitable that a second line will form with people waiting to go to the first line and if someone tries to go to bypass the second line and go directly to the first line, the crowd in the first line will direct their rage at this person and compel him or her to queue in the second line - it's just as if there were only one line and the person had cut in that.
- folli 5y ago
  I think I didn't really get the idea behind it. Wouldn't that be the same as just prohibiting of forming queues altogether? I.e. you're only allowed to order food of noone else is at the cashier?
  - becuzThrowaway 5y ago
    Pretty much, yes.
  - SilasX 5y ago
    I wonder where people will queue for the chance to pounce on that … https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687474
- becuzThrowaway 5y ago
  I feel like I've been a part of a queue like this -- at the airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. It was asinine and infuriating, and just thinking about it makes my blood boil.
- FooHentai 5y ago
  It has an obvious flaw, aside from being super annoying - just leave the queue and rejoin in front of the other person. Then they'll do the same to you. Get it going fast enough and perhaps the spin will generate free energy.
- SilasX 5y ago
  Agreed. I have a comment from a while ago unpacking the idea where I note that it will probably a) devolve into meta-queues that reproduce the original queuing system, and b) encourage anti-social behavior because people no longer value their position in line and have nothing to lose by not playing nice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182781 The whole article is embarrassingly bad, a bunch of stuff that sounds clever at first but wasn’t seriously researched or even pondered. Like the requirements to develop resources you buy or the incentive effects of paying off malicious behavior.
- tslmy 5y ago
  The article should have clarified one more assumption: In a Landsburg's queue, it is compulsory for everyone arriving at the scene to *join the queue immediately*. Otherwise, people would just swarm around the head of the queue, fighting to join the queue as soon as the current customer gets served. In the following discussions, I assume such swarms are successfully prohibited. # For those who end up going home For those who end up going home, a traditional queue is still more efficient. In a Landsburg's queue, if you decided to go home, it must be that there has been too many people joined the queue ("the queue got full"). *Their arrival takes time*. You would have waited for quite some time when you decided to bail out. A traditional queue, on the other hand, allows those who end up going home to choose to do so immediately upon arriving at the scene. You arrive at the scene, look at the queue, judge that it would take unacceptably long period of time before you can get served ("it's currently full"), and decide to go home. You never join the queue. You wait for zero seconds. # Arranging early arrivals is important *Filtering for fans.* In the book _The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life_, Landsburg himself stated that some businesses would prefer to serve fanatic patrons over mediocre customers. In an ordinary queue, customers can prove their loyalty by *arranging to arrive early*. On the other hand, by attaching the probability of getting served directly to the probabilistic nature of when one arrives, a Landsburg's queue does not allow/support proving patronage with early arrivals. *An ordinary queue is an auction.* One of the main arguments that Landsburg proposed is that an ordinary, first-in-first-out queue is inefficient because it is not a market. I disagree to some extent. Let's re-examine the act of arranging early arrivals. By arriving early, you sacrifice the liberty of arranging the day's tasks liberally, often risking postponing a couple of other chores to the next day and/or losing opportunities for spending the morning somewhere else. This *cost of flexibility and opportunity* is a bid[^1] for guarantee/priority of service. Yes, it's still not a market where you trade spots in the queue, but its auction-like nature makes it a much closer implementation than Landsburg's queue. [^1]: Well, it's technically a payment, since you don't get your money back should you lose the auction (i.e., decide to bail out from the queue). However, since it's not a game of chance, I can't call it a gamble either.
yellow_lead 5y ago
I don't think the idea of reverse logic is even clear. Exactly what aspect should you choose to reverse? A better name would be unintuitive logic, but we already know some things are unintuitive.
- ganzuul 5y ago
  Incentive. When you are given something I want it too. I might even want you not to have it if I can't have it. However, if I am the one giving you the thing it becomes important for me that you have the thing even if I no longer do. This is intuitive even if it is logically an eyesore.
tarr11 5y ago
The “Cash for Clunkers” program was actually instituted over a decade ago in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System
- Syonyk 5y ago
  And having been "grad school broke" during that era, it absolutely destroyed a decade's worth of cheap "runs and drives" grade cars that I drove and most of my friends drove. $100 cars were suddenly $1000 cars in a few months, which was fine if you owned one, bad if you were looking for another backyard project you could limp home and work on for a while. "Destroying the long tail of cheap resources for political points" is the sort of "reverse thinking" that we need less of, especially by politicians who make the right noises about caring about the poor. Great, a bunch of older cars are off the road... sucks to be someone who used those for transport if you couldn't afford the payments on a new car (or didn't have reliable enough income to even consider that option).
  - anamax 5y ago
    Eggs, comrade, eggs. Specifically your eggs. No, there won't be omelets. What are you, some sort of kulak?
    - lucian1900 5y ago
      We communists frequently argue against such programmes and instead for cheap and rational transportation for the working class, like trains, light rail and biofuel cars for rural areas. And kulaks had it coming, even my great-granddad. Destroying food during a famine is inhuman.
      - robertlagrant 5y ago
        Cheap trains and light rail require very high levels of automation. As long as you argue in favour of that as well it makes sense.
DontGiveTwoFlux 5y ago
I was curious to see if anyone had tried the coal mine bit. This is the closest I could find, a business plan to sell coal attached to carbon credits. Not sure what’s happened since 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/business/energy-environment/a-curious-plan-to-fight-climate-change-buy-mines-sell-coal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/business/energy-environme...
- hannob 5y ago
  Greenpeace had claimed that they tried to offer Vattenfall to buy their coal mines in Eastern Germany to shut them down (they were later sold to czeck company EPH), but it's a bit unclear how serious that offer was: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/greenpeace-bietet-kohle-tagebau-11155944.html https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/greenpeace-bietet-kohle-tagebau... Though maybe that's also a cautionary tale. Back when that happened (2015) the political discussion around coal in Germany was that a coal exit wasn't really part of the discussion and local politicians would say things like coal will be mined until the 2040s. Since then the debate has moved to "Coal exit in 2038", and more recently to "Coal exit very likely in 2030". What I'm trying to say: Even if you're successful with such a project, it's not exactly clear how much you gain. The political discourse on climate is moving fast (though still not fast enough).
kansface 5y ago
If environmentalists made major impact shutting down mines, the price of coal would go up incentivizing new ones or at least to increase the output of existing ones - demand hasn’t changed. Just the same with buying gas stations and shutting them down, too.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  That’s not how it works. If the price of coal goes up, other generation technologies outcompete it (renewables and natural gas). By disrupting the fossil fuel supply chain, you apply pressure to the point where coal generators are taken offline and demolished (lots of videos if you Google for coal plant demolition). This ensures you can’t go back, as the lead time is too long to build new coal and no one will finance it in the developed world. Natural gas is already marginal against renewables in many markets, and will face the same fate as coal as renewables build until they’re overbuilt.
  - runnerup 5y ago
    That's an expensive bet if your model parameters are off by just a little bit.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - toomuchtodo 5y ago
      Most risk is manageable, tail risk is unavoidable. You can do everything right and still have a government put you out of business or have the market move against you in a way you couldn’t have predicted. With that said, the theory is sound based on existing economic conditions. 75% of coal generators in the US and roughly 45% globally operate unprofitably, for example (per Bloomberg NEF).
  - nine_k 5y ago
    This might work if (1) coal production cannot be increased cheaply enough and (2) alternative generation can be deployed faster than increasing the coal supply. I think that the only kind of generation that can quickly replace coal would be based on burning LNG and turning the same turbines. Solar is great but unstable, adding a battery is pretty expensive yet. Nuclear is sadly way too slow and expensive to build, even if no NIMBY protests would appear.
oezi 5y ago
Why buy coal mines if you could just by oil tankers and let them idle? This would drive up oil prices in many places, reduce demand demand for oil and make renewables and energy efficient technologies more competitive.
- roenxi 5y ago
  For starters that plan probably wouldn't work. The cost of taking that much much oil out of the market and sitting it idly would bankrupt the parties involved. For seconds if the plan did work, the group responsible would likely be designated as terrorists and get taken out by the US military.
  - oezi 5y ago
    Why would it bankrupt anybody? Letting it sit idle or scrapping it aren't too expensive when compared to the saved CO2. The US would have certainly done something when they still were highly dependent on foreign oil.
    - roenxi 5y ago
      Oil creation & use are both flows, so there needs to be ongoing spending within an order of magnitude of the global oil market. Nobody can afford that sort of money to be spent on a completely unproductive activity, without any form of payoff. Countries would be bankrupting themselves.
- freediver 5y ago
  To take the idea a bit further, you make them into floating plantations, delivering fresh fruit/vegetables to any location in the world.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
trembonator 5y ago
FriedPickles 5y ago
To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries. So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles, a PHEV will electrify the majority of the miles with a fraction of the battery capacity. Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs".
- tw04 5y ago
  >This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just going back to regular ICE. If you outlaw ICE/make those cars unavailable, you'll find plenty of political headwinds and set the entire movement back a decade IMO.
  - chrisseaton 5y ago
    > The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask for on a public road?
    - tshaddox 5y ago
      There’s a wide range of “reasonable times” a car can get to 70 mph and the differences can definitely be noticed by normal drivers on public roads.
gumby 5y ago
> Here’s a thought: environmentalists should fight climate change by buying coal mines. Matt Levine wrote about this recently (unfortunately I could not find the reference but it was in the last month). One of the big bank tried to launch a fund for this but it was met with a hostile reception.
- scatters 5y ago
  20 December newsletter: > When you go to an ESG fund manager and say “hey wanna buy up all the coal mines” she is going to say “what no absolutely not.” And then you say “no hear me out, you are a better owner of coal mines than the alternative, this is better for the climate in the long run,” and you explain how, and she says “hmm yes your logic is impeccable,” and you say “so you’re in?” and she says “no absolutely not”. The bank was Citi, and the fund was to have been called "Coal to Zero".
  - gumby 5y ago
    Thanks for finding this.
throwawaysea 5y ago
I think I am not very clear on how ‘reverse logic’ is being defined here, but it may not matter. The problem is that real life is much more complex than these simplistic mental models we describe when we talk to each other. People’s needs, desires, and values are not interchangeable. While that one person who drives less could drive a gas car, maybe they prefer the convenience of charging at home. Likewise, the person who drives a lot may require the convenience of filling up gas in five minutes, or maybe they are doing longer trips or carry cargo/passengers (amplifying range anxiety). As for the notion of reversing queues - this doesn’t make sense to me, but maybe I am missing something. People who join a queue earlier are signaling a price, in effect. Overriding that is creating an inefficiency in a sense, and is an imposition of someone else’s valuations in place of individual people’s valuations. Apart from that, the methods mentioned here simply feel a bit antagonistic rather than cooperative. I don’t think sustainable societies are built on those types of adversarial tactics.
ErikVandeWater 5y ago
> Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute, but the queues are short. Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps. Poor example. This would annoy the hell out of customers. Theme parks also almost always have excess demands for rides. This system would only work at a failing theme park that couldn't fill up the ride to capacity. I could imagine this working with decentralized robots performing similar tasks independently, but usually a system that uses robots would be centralized.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
aomurphy 5y ago
Various environmentalists have tried this in the US. Here's a reason article about several attempts: https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-just-buy-the-land-they-want-to-protect-because-its-against-the-rules/ https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-jus... Kind of frustrating the OP's article doesn't actually do any research on why it's hard to actually do this "clever" idea. There is an actual power structure that is opposed to these sorts of actions! In general in the US it's very difficult to do this on state/federal land. You usually must make use of your rights or the leases will be revoked. Even when there is a state like Idaho where you can buy grazing rights and supposedly not use them, the state bureaucracy isn't interested in it. I guess you could do this with coal rights but the coal markets have been so bad for the last decade it's hard to see this as worth doing.
- Jiro 5y ago
  >Here's a reason article about several attempts If you read the article carefully, -- This is about leases. Leases come with conditions. You're not buying the land. -- The first example is about someone who lied and made a bid that he had no intention or ability to pay. Turns out that's actually a crime. That's not "power structure opposed to these sort of actions" in a nontrivial sense. -- There's a very good reason for much of this: Grazing, hunting, and even logging are part of maintaining the land. The owner of the land (the government) doesn't want you to stop maintaining the land and so makes sure the lease requires that you maintain it. And resource extraction comes with paying royalties to the owner, who doesn't want you cheaping out by not extracting any resources and not paying anything.
rileyphone 5y ago
https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-988-system-dynamics-self-study-fall-1998-spring-1999/readings/behavior.pdf https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-98... Im just learning about Jay Forrester, but he wrote the foundational paper on this kind of thinking. I also highly recommend Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, which contains a lot of other wisdom like this.
FartyMcFarter 5y ago
This kind of strategy ignores second order effects. For example, by buying a gas guzzler and not using it much you might lower the emissions from that specific vehicle. But supply and demand rears its ugly head: you're contributing to the increase of similar gas guzzlers' value in the market, which means that other people are more likely to maintain those vehicles in working order and resell them, instead of scrapping them or leaving them unused.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  We drive our cars about 2K miles and 5K miles a year. I’ve argued (so far without success) that it makes no sense for us to buy a used hybrid or other high-efficiency car [and divert that car from a user who would likely drive it 10K+ miles per year]. We’ve got a couple more years before I have to buy another used car, so I still might win the argument.
- tshaddox 5y ago
  Surely by that same argument scrapping or abandoning any automobile instead of reselling it is going to increase the value of new cars relative to used cars, which might be a net negative for the environment even if the newly manufactured car is a zero emission vehicle.
- olivermarks 5y ago
  We need to get used to using the term 'power consumer' instead of emotive terms like 'gas guzzler' to describe IC engines. Currently coal powered BEVs are considered by some to have superior efficiencies to gasoline powered vehicles.
  - DenseComet 5y ago
    I would expect that to be true. Not the best numbers, but Wikipedia puts coal power plants at 37% efficiency and combustion engines at 20-35%. This makes sense too, power plants have space, money, and an incentive to increase efficiency. And in reality, no power mix is 100% coal, increasing the overall efficiency to above 37%.
Synaesthesia 5y ago
Perfect example of the kind of simplistic and wishful thinking which plagues modern economics. They assume that their model of the world will solve a problem without bothering to check if it does.
fny 5y ago
If you want to cause tremendous inflationary pain to the working class and rolling blackouts through an energy transition this is how you do it. We are not at the stage where we can bootstrap green yet. You still require fossil fuels to build a green economy. Sure, coal is bad as an energy source, but that EV you want has a ton of steel inside and that requires metallurgical coal. The copper required for a green economy needs to be mined, and the machines used in a mine require a portable, dense fuel source like oil. To make matters worse, energy prices feed into other areas of the economy. Ammonia costs have skyrocketed due to the energy issues and that's causing the price of wheat and corn to skyrocket. The proper policy is carbon credits and a measured transition unless you're ready to punish the working class and developing nations.
aaron695 5y ago
Coal, and most resources like that that are part of the commons, if not developed you rightly would lose it. For the queuing as they explain it, you would just leave the queue and rejoin it, and get to the front? It works well for negatives like firing people. Reverse logic might be cooler if the article came with one example of where it worked IRL. But I guess if it works it's logic?
quickthrower2 5y ago
Clearly anyone who is pushed back in the reverse queue (can i call it a stack?) can just rejoin at the front. You would end up with a spinning “musical chairs queue”. The other examples seem pretty interesting and it has a freakinomics feel about it. The queue solution is simple - using tech: use the buzzers they give you in some restaurants that tell you your meal is ready when you are next in the queue.
gabesullice 5y ago
A different way to get to the same result as a minimum fuel requirement would be to raise base prices and offer steep bulk discounts. This would be easier to enforce than a minimum fuel requirement. Unfortunately it might raise "price gouging" complaints.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
I bought a new car this year when I graduated and got a new job. The main reason I didn't buy an EV is because of the cost, the dependability (I'm not gonna be a guinea pig wasting time getting repairs that not many people know how to resolve yet), and because I live in the Midwest where salted roads in winter just eat the hell out of everything. So I'm gonna need a new car in 5-10 years anyway. Obviously EV is the future. But with this "Vehicles as a Service" model where a lot of stuff is not meant to be touched by you, it seems like cars are just getting absurdly more expensive for no reason at all. EV is a marketing term so that somehow causes the product to be worth an extra $5k right off the bat. By driving less than 10-20 miles a week with a gas vehicle, I feel like I'm actually doing more to save the planet than the typical EV driver doing 100+ miles thinking their excessive driving is 100% eco-friendly. Consumption is never eco-friendly.
- rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
  >and because I live in the Midwest where salted roads in winter just eat the hell out of everything In which country are EVs most popular? IIRC, Norway.
hermes8329 5y ago
I sometimes wish we would just burn it all and call it a day. It would be a disaster but it's already one anyways. Just burn it all so some rich people get richer and then are out of a job because there is nothing left
- kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
  People eating food and heating/cooling their homes is what consumes the most energy.
black_13 5y ago
You should by a coal mine and close it. Is equivalent to saying „you should buy the freedom of every slave“. Somethings have to be done at the National level and collectively.
hogFeast 5y ago
The logic used in these "ideas" is so comically bad that you know an economist must have thought of them.
nojs 5y ago
> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back. > Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute Except what would actually happen is everyone who wants a widget stands around “not in the queue” until the person being served is finished, at which point there’s a mad rush to be the next person served. So basically the same thing that happens when there’s no queue :D Classic economist solution!
- alignItems 5y ago
  I thought he was going to say that each new person goes in front of the person currently being served. This would motivate people to complete their orders as fast as possible.
- blorgle 5y ago
  Yeah, seems dumb "economist" thinking. The idea that "if someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits" is a absurd on two fronts.The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible. Maybe you are allergic to chocolate. Maybe mince pies make you gag. Also, optimising for queue length only makes any sense in the described scenario if all stalls are owned by a single entity. I'm not even going to touch the "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" stupidity.
  - iamthemonster 5y ago
    Of course the position "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" is ridiculous at face value. But if you are a bit more generous with its intentions, then there is something that really chimes with me about it. I work in engineering support to oil and gas operations (but I'm sure this is applicable to many industries), and we have quarterly workplans and pretty fixed budgets. Of course our budget-holder typically asks us to do more work than we are able to deliver, so I will often have to say "this job does not make the priority list for next quarter, but we can do it the quarter after next?". However, I've found a pretty good rule of thumb is that if a job was not high priority enough to win a place on the next quarter's to-do list then by the time the following quarter comes around, it will probably get bumped off the priority list by something else higher priority. In other words, our limited budget means there is always some 'cut-off point' where work that looks important is still not quite high enough priority (compared to our other work) to ever get done. It is easy to 'form a long queue' by saying yes to work and letting it sit on our to-do list forever, but just slightly too low down to ever get done. But in our industry at least, there's a small overhead involved in just keeping that work around and passing the ownership of the task from person to person. A more realistic rephrasing could be "if you're adding something to your todo list and it's not high enough priority to bump anything else, consider how much inefficiency it will cause long-term by it just sitting in your queue for months" Maybe a little silly for your personal todo lists, but I think the idea has some applicability at a larger scale.
brightball 5y ago
The older I get, the more I enjoy reading the thoughts of economists.
human 5y ago
Sorry, but none of this works - although it’s a fun thought experiment. It’s very hard to predict human behaviour and it’s impossible to know how things will unfold over time. Closing coal mines without having an alternative power source would only create shortages and price hikes. Only 2-3% of new car sales are EVs. You not getting an EV to leave it to someone else is not going to get that number up. The line thing would exasperate people and everyone would leave. Actually, seeing long lines and impatient customers is probably the best way to accelerate service by stressing out the staff.
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  Coal price instability accelerates closures of coal plants. It basically pushes them to being unprofitable faster. The recent gas and coal shortages are a great example: it's accelerating closures in a few places. It's also scaring off investors seeing that promised life times of plants are worth nothing. Coal plants delivered last decade are already being closed. E.g. the Germans just opened a plant that will now close in 2030 (the new government is planning that). That's expensive. It's one of those things that happens more because it's happening more. Even in heavily pro-coal states in the US they are closing plants. EV sales vary world wide. In Norway, it's >70%. The Netherlands has 32%. Germany is not far behind with 28%. The US is indeed lagging a bit. An interesting effect you are starting to see in the EU is people worrying about not being able to sell their ICE car second hand, being faced with additional fees and cost for fuel, or being denied access to cities and regions. Fear of these things is becoming a big driver. And there's quite a bit of FOMO as well. Both with coal plants closing and EV adoption, fear is accelerating what was happening anyway.
Proven 5y ago
causality0 5y ago
An environmentalist organisation could do this by buying them and shuttering them. The problem with this is that eventually the government notices what you're doing and just takes it away from you. This happens regularly with attempts to preserve natural lands and resources.
- smt88 5y ago
  Another issue is that it artificially pumps up the market for coal mines, which would likely lead to the development and operation of unprofitable coal mines that would otherwise never be opened.
dleslie 5y ago
British Columbia has conservation groups doing precisely this: acquiring forestry rights with the intention of never harvesting[0]. Word has it that the Provincial Government will be supporting this effort. 0: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/conservation-private-land-acquisition-bc-1.6288600 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/conservation...
drivebycomment 5y ago
He is right that LIFO (last in first out) queue is more efficient when there's more demand than queue throughout. But the fairness isn't just a problem with the sense of justice. As indicated, with a fixed timeout, LIFO will cause more spurious timeouts when FIFO wouldn't. The best of all worlds, if the speed of light or transition between different queues isn't an issue, is to have a centralized queue management forming a super queue. Some stores do this already, creating a single queue that dispatches shoppers to a checkout counter. Doing this cuts down the average wait time, and makes people "give up" more willingly under heavy load, since the queue would look much longer.
renewiltord 5y ago
Half of these things feel like you can have way better solutions: - Spot price the gallon and set the minimum order increment to 5 gallons. Pre-purchase and then arrive to collect or pay the spot price at the time of arrival - Switch the stall queue to a ticket system. You buy your thing and plug in a contact number (or wait). You are either notified by phone (or by voice when you’re there). Lots of food courts already do this. - There’s no reason to buy coal mines. You can just political currency instead of normal currency. If your time is worthless or you have cultivated political currency for a while, the former is incredibly cheap
mleonhard 5y ago
Here's another one: Virtuous people should make and sell weapons, thereby reducing the funding to companies that lobby for invasions.
quadrifoliate 5y ago
Logic: You can produce thoughtful work, with detailed examination of how incentives played out in real life, and how real people responded to those incentives. Your work will attract both scientists and laypersons, and be read by both. However, you have to do a lot of data analysis, statistics, and present them in a way that's attractive to both sets of people. Reverse logic: Write blog posts with outrageous suggestions with little real-world applicability, that are equivalent to argument junk food. The few people who think deeply about statistics and behavioral economics will ignore it, but the vast majority of people will eagerly discuss it, link to your page, and sell your work. I think the reverse logic works!

216 points by MaysonL 5y ago

Buying up coal deposits to prevent mining is new to me, but the idea is quite familiar in the realm of buying up rainforest to prevent deforestation.

bargle0 5y ago

I don’t buy the queue argument. It would devolve in to a bunch of churn inevitably resulting in thrown hands and black eyes.

mgrund 5y ago
It’s a good lesson in the importance of picking the right things to measure/optimize for. Queue length is not a good thing to optimize for by itself.
- barbazoo 5y ago
  Exactly, I don't get how that would increase throughput.
  - boffinism 5y ago
    It's not about increasing throughout, it's about increasing user satisfaction. A system where 60 customers are served an hour, and none of them has queued, is theoretically better than one where the same amount are served, but each has queued for 10 boring minutes. You achieve this by disincentivising queueing.
    - luckylion 5y ago
      So people would only go to a stand if there's nobody being served, because being behind the person currently being served is discouraged. Essentially, you'd just move the queue: people would wait for a "spot" to open up (a stand with no customer) and then go there. If it's orderly, they kind of queue in the middle. If it's not, you'll have a large brawl as people try to get in front of each other.
      - londons_explore 5y ago
        I think you misunderstood the proposed queueing system.... The stand will never be 'open'. People who arrive join the front of the queue, and are either served next, or someone else joins in front of them, pushing them back. When they're position 2 in the queue, they will only be served if 2 people are served and 0 arrive (low probably). If another person arrives, they're now position 3 in the queue, so 3 need to be served before any arrivals (even lower probably). At some point, they decide the probability of being served drops low enough that they give up and leave - this will usually happen quickly. The only way to 'game' this system is to look up the street and join the queue when it looks like nobody else is coming. If many people try to do this, then those people will be waiting forever (both want to join last - stalemate), and anyone who doesn't employ the tactic gets served.
        becuzThrowaway 5y ago
        In practice, you would just replace the queue with a disorganized rabble of people standing around, where as soon as the person currently being served leaves, there is a mad dash at the one secure spot, which is at the very front.
    - horsawlarway 5y ago
      Those who really want your product now have to mob up outside your stall and hope they're the next lucky random fucker. They're still waiting. Those who don't really want your product don't wait in a line for it anyways - the length of the line itself is a natural filter for availability of the good. Basically - has satisfaction actually gone up if those who would be extremely satisfied by your product no longer receive it, and random folks who may or may not want your product do? I'd bet money the answer is a solid "NO".
    - mcphage 5y ago
      Another way to look at it: with the queuing system, you spend 10 minutes, and you get what you want. How many minutes will it take with the no-queue system? It’s not like the thoroughput has increased. And how likely will it be for you to get what you want after that time? Is it definite?
- jfengel 5y ago
  I don't even see how it does that. Unless there is some factor that prevents you from leaving and immediately re-entering the line at the front. I feel like I missed something.
- jarofgreen 5y ago
  Yes! I feel this is the main point that is totally missed. The first time I read Tim Hartford years ago he was talking about this idea uncritically and I thought it was stupid then and I don't have much respect for him. The thing we are trying to optimise is not length of que, but how long and how reliable it is to get served. Under the old system you may have had to wait 10 minutes to get served BUT you knew before you started queuing it would be about 10 minutes (and thus could make an informed choice) and you can clearly see your progress in the queue and if you are patient you will be served. Under the new system it now may take you 1 minute to get served or 1 hour. Or you will try multiple times and never get served. And you will have no indication before you start queing how successful you will be. Any UX designer would easily tell you which of these systems is going to piss people off more.
8organicbits 5y ago
> Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps. But you might consider applying a dose of Landsburg’s logic to your own “to do” list: don’t add a new item to the list unless you’re willing to do it immediately. I've got to ponder the to do list example though.
- alanbernstein 5y ago
  I think you'd end up with a similar amount of person-minutes of waiting overall, it just wouldn't be as apparent who is waiting for what. As for the to do list, to me that suggestion amounts to nothing more than splitting my to do list into two, a "to do now" list, and a "to do eventually" list (well, I would call it a "two do" list), where I just move items from the second one to the first. That might have some value, but it's not a mind-blowing reversal of logic.
ratsbane 5y ago
The queue proposal sounds like a Monty Python skit. If we adopt the rule that the next person to be served is the most recent person to join line, it's inevitable that a second line will form with people waiting to go to the first line and if someone tries to go to bypass the second line and go directly to the first line, the crowd in the first line will direct their rage at this person and compel him or her to queue in the second line - it's just as if there were only one line and the person had cut in that.
folli 5y ago
I think I didn't really get the idea behind it. Wouldn't that be the same as just prohibiting of forming queues altogether? I.e. you're only allowed to order food of noone else is at the cashier?
- becuzThrowaway 5y ago
  Pretty much, yes.
- SilasX 5y ago
  I wonder where people will queue for the chance to pounce on that … https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687474 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29687474
becuzThrowaway 5y ago
I feel like I've been a part of a queue like this -- at the airport in San Jose, Costa Rica. It was asinine and infuriating, and just thinking about it makes my blood boil.
FooHentai 5y ago
It has an obvious flaw, aside from being super annoying - just leave the queue and rejoin in front of the other person. Then they'll do the same to you. Get it going fast enough and perhaps the spin will generate free energy.
SilasX 5y ago
Agreed. I have a comment from a while ago unpacking the idea where I note that it will probably a) devolve into meta-queues that reproduce the original queuing system, and b) encourage anti-social behavior because people no longer value their position in line and have nothing to lose by not playing nice. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182781 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182781 The whole article is embarrassingly bad, a bunch of stuff that sounds clever at first but wasn’t seriously researched or even pondered. Like the requirements to develop resources you buy or the incentive effects of paying off malicious behavior.
tslmy 5y ago
The article should have clarified one more assumption: In a Landsburg's queue, it is compulsory for everyone arriving at the scene to *join the queue immediately*. Otherwise, people would just swarm around the head of the queue, fighting to join the queue as soon as the current customer gets served. In the following discussions, I assume such swarms are successfully prohibited. # For those who end up going home For those who end up going home, a traditional queue is still more efficient. In a Landsburg's queue, if you decided to go home, it must be that there has been too many people joined the queue ("the queue got full"). *Their arrival takes time*. You would have waited for quite some time when you decided to bail out. A traditional queue, on the other hand, allows those who end up going home to choose to do so immediately upon arriving at the scene. You arrive at the scene, look at the queue, judge that it would take unacceptably long period of time before you can get served ("it's currently full"), and decide to go home. You never join the queue. You wait for zero seconds. # Arranging early arrivals is important *Filtering for fans.* In the book _The Armchair Economist: Economics and Everyday Life_, Landsburg himself stated that some businesses would prefer to serve fanatic patrons over mediocre customers. In an ordinary queue, customers can prove their loyalty by *arranging to arrive early*. On the other hand, by attaching the probability of getting served directly to the probabilistic nature of when one arrives, a Landsburg's queue does not allow/support proving patronage with early arrivals. *An ordinary queue is an auction.* One of the main arguments that Landsburg proposed is that an ordinary, first-in-first-out queue is inefficient because it is not a market. I disagree to some extent. Let's re-examine the act of arranging early arrivals. By arriving early, you sacrifice the liberty of arranging the day's tasks liberally, often risking postponing a couple of other chores to the next day and/or losing opportunities for spending the morning somewhere else. This *cost of flexibility and opportunity* is a bid[^1] for guarantee/priority of service. Yes, it's still not a market where you trade spots in the queue, but its auction-like nature makes it a much closer implementation than Landsburg's queue. [^1]: Well, it's technically a payment, since you don't get your money back should you lose the auction (i.e., decide to bail out from the queue). However, since it's not a game of chance, I can't call it a gamble either.

yellow_lead 5y ago

I don't think the idea of reverse logic is even clear. Exactly what aspect should you choose to reverse? A better name would be unintuitive logic, but we already know some things are unintuitive.

ganzuul 5y ago
Incentive. When you are given something I want it too. I might even want you not to have it if I can't have it. However, if I am the one giving you the thing it becomes important for me that you have the thing even if I no longer do. This is intuitive even if it is logically an eyesore.

tarr11 5y ago

The “Cash for Clunkers” program was actually instituted over a decade ago in the US. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_Allowance_Rebate_System

Syonyk 5y ago
And having been "grad school broke" during that era, it absolutely destroyed a decade's worth of cheap "runs and drives" grade cars that I drove and most of my friends drove. $100 cars were suddenly $1000 cars in a few months, which was fine if you owned one, bad if you were looking for another backyard project you could limp home and work on for a while. "Destroying the long tail of cheap resources for political points" is the sort of "reverse thinking" that we need less of, especially by politicians who make the right noises about caring about the poor. Great, a bunch of older cars are off the road... sucks to be someone who used those for transport if you couldn't afford the payments on a new car (or didn't have reliable enough income to even consider that option).
- anamax 5y ago
  Eggs, comrade, eggs. Specifically your eggs. No, there won't be omelets. What are you, some sort of kulak?
  - lucian1900 5y ago
    We communists frequently argue against such programmes and instead for cheap and rational transportation for the working class, like trains, light rail and biofuel cars for rural areas. And kulaks had it coming, even my great-granddad. Destroying food during a famine is inhuman.
    - robertlagrant 5y ago
      Cheap trains and light rail require very high levels of automation. As long as you argue in favour of that as well it makes sense.

DontGiveTwoFlux 5y ago

I was curious to see if anyone had tried the coal mine bit. This is the closest I could find, a business plan to sell coal attached to carbon credits. Not sure what’s happened since 2016. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/business/energy-environment/a-curious-plan-to-fight-climate-change-buy-mines-sell-coal.html https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/business/energy-environme...

hannob 5y ago
Greenpeace had claimed that they tried to offer Vattenfall to buy their coal mines in Eastern Germany to shut them down (they were later sold to czeck company EPH), but it's a bit unclear how serious that offer was: https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/greenpeace-bietet-kohle-tagebau-11155944.html https://www.fr.de/wirtschaft/greenpeace-bietet-kohle-tagebau... Though maybe that's also a cautionary tale. Back when that happened (2015) the political discussion around coal in Germany was that a coal exit wasn't really part of the discussion and local politicians would say things like coal will be mined until the 2040s. Since then the debate has moved to "Coal exit in 2038", and more recently to "Coal exit very likely in 2030". What I'm trying to say: Even if you're successful with such a project, it's not exactly clear how much you gain. The political discourse on climate is moving fast (though still not fast enough).

kansface 5y ago

If environmentalists made major impact shutting down mines, the price of coal would go up incentivizing new ones or at least to increase the output of existing ones - demand hasn’t changed. Just the same with buying gas stations and shutting them down, too.

toomuchtodo 5y ago
That’s not how it works. If the price of coal goes up, other generation technologies outcompete it (renewables and natural gas). By disrupting the fossil fuel supply chain, you apply pressure to the point where coal generators are taken offline and demolished (lots of videos if you Google for coal plant demolition). This ensures you can’t go back, as the lead time is too long to build new coal and no one will finance it in the developed world. Natural gas is already marginal against renewables in many markets, and will face the same fate as coal as renewables build until they’re overbuilt.
- runnerup 5y ago
  That's an expensive bet if your model parameters are off by just a little bit.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Most risk is manageable, tail risk is unavoidable. You can do everything right and still have a government put you out of business or have the market move against you in a way you couldn’t have predicted. With that said, the theory is sound based on existing economic conditions. 75% of coal generators in the US and roughly 45% globally operate unprofitably, for example (per Bloomberg NEF).
- nine_k 5y ago
  This might work if (1) coal production cannot be increased cheaply enough and (2) alternative generation can be deployed faster than increasing the coal supply. I think that the only kind of generation that can quickly replace coal would be based on burning LNG and turning the same turbines. Solar is great but unstable, adding a battery is pretty expensive yet. Nuclear is sadly way too slow and expensive to build, even if no NIMBY protests would appear.

oezi 5y ago

Why buy coal mines if you could just by oil tankers and let them idle? This would drive up oil prices in many places, reduce demand demand for oil and make renewables and energy efficient technologies more competitive.

roenxi 5y ago
For starters that plan probably wouldn't work. The cost of taking that much much oil out of the market and sitting it idly would bankrupt the parties involved. For seconds if the plan did work, the group responsible would likely be designated as terrorists and get taken out by the US military.
- oezi 5y ago
  Why would it bankrupt anybody? Letting it sit idle or scrapping it aren't too expensive when compared to the saved CO2. The US would have certainly done something when they still were highly dependent on foreign oil.
  - roenxi 5y ago
    Oil creation & use are both flows, so there needs to be ongoing spending within an order of magnitude of the global oil market. Nobody can afford that sort of money to be spent on a completely unproductive activity, without any form of payoff. Countries would be bankrupting themselves.
freediver 5y ago
To take the idea a bit further, you make them into floating plantations, delivering fresh fruit/vegetables to any location in the world.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

trembonator 5y ago

FriedPickles 5y ago

To further develop the idea of letting EVs go to people who will drive them the most, the true bottleneck is batteries. So, the problem is to get batteries on the road in a way that they will displace the most gas miles as soon as possible. This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs), then in a second stage, replace those with full EVs. For most city vehicles, a PHEV will electrify the majority of the miles with a fraction of the battery capacity. Driving an EV is a green status symbol now. I wonder if they could in the future be viewed as "battery hogs".

tw04 5y ago
>This suggests a far more effective strategy of first replacing the fleet with plug-in hybrids (PHEVs) The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. So, while on paper a PHEV solution might look better, in the real world it would result in those people just going back to regular ICE. If you outlaw ICE/make those cars unavailable, you'll find plenty of political headwinds and set the entire movement back a decade IMO.
- chrisseaton 5y ago
  > The performance of pretty much every PHEV I've seen is abysmal. The people buying a Model 3 or Model S to replace their BMW or Mercedes aren't interested in something with the performance of a geo metro. How many people take their cars to race tracks to be able to tell the difference in performance? If it can get to 70 mph in some reasonable time, which almost any production car can, then what more is there to ask for on a public road?
  - tshaddox 5y ago
    There’s a wide range of “reasonable times” a car can get to 70 mph and the differences can definitely be noticed by normal drivers on public roads.

gumby 5y ago

> Here’s a thought: environmentalists should fight climate change by buying coal mines. Matt Levine wrote about this recently (unfortunately I could not find the reference but it was in the last month). One of the big bank tried to launch a fund for this but it was met with a hostile reception.

scatters 5y ago
20 December newsletter: > When you go to an ESG fund manager and say “hey wanna buy up all the coal mines” she is going to say “what no absolutely not.” And then you say “no hear me out, you are a better owner of coal mines than the alternative, this is better for the climate in the long run,” and you explain how, and she says “hmm yes your logic is impeccable,” and you say “so you’re in?” and she says “no absolutely not”. The bank was Citi, and the fund was to have been called "Coal to Zero".
- gumby 5y ago
  Thanks for finding this.

throwawaysea 5y ago

I think I am not very clear on how ‘reverse logic’ is being defined here, but it may not matter. The problem is that real life is much more complex than these simplistic mental models we describe when we talk to each other. People’s needs, desires, and values are not interchangeable. While that one person who drives less could drive a gas car, maybe they prefer the convenience of charging at home. Likewise, the person who drives a lot may require the convenience of filling up gas in five minutes, or maybe they are doing longer trips or carry cargo/passengers (amplifying range anxiety). As for the notion of reversing queues - this doesn’t make sense to me, but maybe I am missing something. People who join a queue earlier are signaling a price, in effect. Overriding that is creating an inefficiency in a sense, and is an imposition of someone else’s valuations in place of individual people’s valuations. Apart from that, the methods mentioned here simply feel a bit antagonistic rather than cooperative. I don’t think sustainable societies are built on those types of adversarial tactics.

ErikVandeWater 5y ago

> Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute, but the queues are short. Alas, the Landsburg rule can only be imposed in controlled environments such as a theme park, perhaps. Poor example. This would annoy the hell out of customers. Theme parks also almost always have excess demands for rides. This system would only work at a failing theme park that couldn't fill up the ride to capacity. I could imagine this working with decentralized robots performing similar tasks independently, but usually a system that uses robots would be centralized.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

aomurphy 5y ago

Various environmentalists have tried this in the US. Here's a reason article about several attempts: https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-just-buy-the-land-they-want-to-protect-because-its-against-the-rules/ https://reason.com/2019/11/18/why-dont-environmentalists-jus... Kind of frustrating the OP's article doesn't actually do any research on why it's hard to actually do this "clever" idea. There is an actual power structure that is opposed to these sorts of actions! In general in the US it's very difficult to do this on state/federal land. You usually must make use of your rights or the leases will be revoked. Even when there is a state like Idaho where you can buy grazing rights and supposedly not use them, the state bureaucracy isn't interested in it. I guess you could do this with coal rights but the coal markets have been so bad for the last decade it's hard to see this as worth doing.

Jiro 5y ago
>Here's a reason article about several attempts If you read the article carefully, -- This is about leases. Leases come with conditions. You're not buying the land. -- The first example is about someone who lied and made a bid that he had no intention or ability to pay. Turns out that's actually a crime. That's not "power structure opposed to these sort of actions" in a nontrivial sense. -- There's a very good reason for much of this: Grazing, hunting, and even logging are part of maintaining the land. The owner of the land (the government) doesn't want you to stop maintaining the land and so makes sure the lease requires that you maintain it. And resource extraction comes with paying royalties to the owner, who doesn't want you cheaping out by not extracting any resources and not paying anything.

rileyphone 5y ago

https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-988-system-dynamics-self-study-fall-1998-spring-1999/readings/behavior.pdf https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/sloan-school-of-management/15-98... Im just learning about Jay Forrester, but he wrote the foundational paper on this kind of thinking. I also highly recommend Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows, which contains a lot of other wisdom like this.

FartyMcFarter 5y ago

This kind of strategy ignores second order effects. For example, by buying a gas guzzler and not using it much you might lower the emissions from that specific vehicle. But supply and demand rears its ugly head: you're contributing to the increase of similar gas guzzlers' value in the market, which means that other people are more likely to maintain those vehicles in working order and resell them, instead of scrapping them or leaving them unused.

sokoloff 5y ago
We drive our cars about 2K miles and 5K miles a year. I’ve argued (so far without success) that it makes no sense for us to buy a used hybrid or other high-efficiency car [and divert that car from a user who would likely drive it 10K+ miles per year]. We’ve got a couple more years before I have to buy another used car, so I still might win the argument.
tshaddox 5y ago
Surely by that same argument scrapping or abandoning any automobile instead of reselling it is going to increase the value of new cars relative to used cars, which might be a net negative for the environment even if the newly manufactured car is a zero emission vehicle.
olivermarks 5y ago
We need to get used to using the term 'power consumer' instead of emotive terms like 'gas guzzler' to describe IC engines. Currently coal powered BEVs are considered by some to have superior efficiencies to gasoline powered vehicles.
- DenseComet 5y ago
  I would expect that to be true. Not the best numbers, but Wikipedia puts coal power plants at 37% efficiency and combustion engines at 20-35%. This makes sense too, power plants have space, money, and an incentive to increase efficiency. And in reality, no power mix is 100% coal, increasing the overall efficiency to above 37%.

Synaesthesia 5y ago

Perfect example of the kind of simplistic and wishful thinking which plagues modern economics. They assume that their model of the world will solve a problem without bothering to check if it does.

fny 5y ago

If you want to cause tremendous inflationary pain to the working class and rolling blackouts through an energy transition this is how you do it. We are not at the stage where we can bootstrap green yet. You still require fossil fuels to build a green economy. Sure, coal is bad as an energy source, but that EV you want has a ton of steel inside and that requires metallurgical coal. The copper required for a green economy needs to be mined, and the machines used in a mine require a portable, dense fuel source like oil. To make matters worse, energy prices feed into other areas of the economy. Ammonia costs have skyrocketed due to the energy issues and that's causing the price of wheat and corn to skyrocket. The proper policy is carbon credits and a measured transition unless you're ready to punish the working class and developing nations.

aaron695 5y ago

Coal, and most resources like that that are part of the commons, if not developed you rightly would lose it. For the queuing as they explain it, you would just leave the queue and rejoin it, and get to the front? It works well for negatives like firing people. Reverse logic might be cooler if the article came with one example of where it worked IRL. But I guess if it works it's logic?

quickthrower2 5y ago

Clearly anyone who is pushed back in the reverse queue (can i call it a stack?) can just rejoin at the front. You would end up with a spinning “musical chairs queue”. The other examples seem pretty interesting and it has a freakinomics feel about it. The queue solution is simple - using tech: use the buzzers they give you in some restaurants that tell you your meal is ready when you are next in the queue.

gabesullice 5y ago

A different way to get to the same result as a minimum fuel requirement would be to raise base prices and offer steep bulk discounts. This would be easier to enforce than a minimum fuel requirement. Unfortunately it might raise "price gouging" complaints.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

I bought a new car this year when I graduated and got a new job. The main reason I didn't buy an EV is because of the cost, the dependability (I'm not gonna be a guinea pig wasting time getting repairs that not many people know how to resolve yet), and because I live in the Midwest where salted roads in winter just eat the hell out of everything. So I'm gonna need a new car in 5-10 years anyway. Obviously EV is the future. But with this "Vehicles as a Service" model where a lot of stuff is not meant to be touched by you, it seems like cars are just getting absurdly more expensive for no reason at all. EV is a marketing term so that somehow causes the product to be worth an extra $5k right off the bat. By driving less than 10-20 miles a week with a gas vehicle, I feel like I'm actually doing more to save the planet than the typical EV driver doing 100+ miles thinking their excessive driving is 100% eco-friendly. Consumption is never eco-friendly.

rcMgD2BwE72F 5y ago
>and because I live in the Midwest where salted roads in winter just eat the hell out of everything In which country are EVs most popular? IIRC, Norway.

hermes8329 5y ago

I sometimes wish we would just burn it all and call it a day. It would be a disaster but it's already one anyways. Just burn it all so some rich people get richer and then are out of a job because there is nothing left

kkjjkgjjgg 5y ago
People eating food and heating/cooling their homes is what consumes the most energy.

black_13 5y ago

You should by a coal mine and close it. Is equivalent to saying „you should buy the freedom of every slave“. Somethings have to be done at the National level and collectively.

hogFeast 5y ago

The logic used in these "ideas" is so comically bad that you know an economist must have thought of them.

nojs 5y ago

> Each new person who joins a queue goes to the front, standing immediately behind the person being served. This is, of course, an outrage against reason, intuition and natural justice. It is also highly efficient. If you’re next in line to be served, but someone shows up and shoehorns herself into position in front of you, you walk away. The line is only going to get longer, and you’re always going to be at the back. > Under the Landsburg system, the stalls still serve one seasonal treat a minute Except what would actually happen is everyone who wants a widget stands around “not in the queue” until the person being served is finished, at which point there’s a mad rush to be the next person served. So basically the same thing that happens when there’s no queue :D Classic economist solution!

alignItems 5y ago
I thought he was going to say that each new person goes in front of the person currently being served. This would motivate people to complete their orders as fast as possible.
blorgle 5y ago
Yeah, seems dumb "economist" thinking. The idea that "if someone gives up and walks away, everyone behind them benefits" is a absurd on two fronts.The stall owner clearly doesn't benefit from a lost sale. Mulled wine, mince pies and hot chocolate are not fungible. Maybe you are allergic to chocolate. Maybe mince pies make you gag. Also, optimising for queue length only makes any sense in the described scenario if all stalls are owned by a single entity. I'm not even going to touch the "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" stupidity.
- iamthemonster 5y ago
  Of course the position "only add something to your todo list if you are going to do it immediately" is ridiculous at face value. But if you are a bit more generous with its intentions, then there is something that really chimes with me about it. I work in engineering support to oil and gas operations (but I'm sure this is applicable to many industries), and we have quarterly workplans and pretty fixed budgets. Of course our budget-holder typically asks us to do more work than we are able to deliver, so I will often have to say "this job does not make the priority list for next quarter, but we can do it the quarter after next?". However, I've found a pretty good rule of thumb is that if a job was not high priority enough to win a place on the next quarter's to-do list then by the time the following quarter comes around, it will probably get bumped off the priority list by something else higher priority. In other words, our limited budget means there is always some 'cut-off point' where work that looks important is still not quite high enough priority (compared to our other work) to ever get done. It is easy to 'form a long queue' by saying yes to work and letting it sit on our to-do list forever, but just slightly too low down to ever get done. But in our industry at least, there's a small overhead involved in just keeping that work around and passing the ownership of the task from person to person. A more realistic rephrasing could be "if you're adding something to your todo list and it's not high enough priority to bump anything else, consider how much inefficiency it will cause long-term by it just sitting in your queue for months" Maybe a little silly for your personal todo lists, but I think the idea has some applicability at a larger scale.

brightball 5y ago

The older I get, the more I enjoy reading the thoughts of economists.

human 5y ago

Sorry, but none of this works - although it’s a fun thought experiment. It’s very hard to predict human behaviour and it’s impossible to know how things will unfold over time. Closing coal mines without having an alternative power source would only create shortages and price hikes. Only 2-3% of new car sales are EVs. You not getting an EV to leave it to someone else is not going to get that number up. The line thing would exasperate people and everyone would leave. Actually, seeing long lines and impatient customers is probably the best way to accelerate service by stressing out the staff.

jillesvangurp 5y ago
Coal price instability accelerates closures of coal plants. It basically pushes them to being unprofitable faster. The recent gas and coal shortages are a great example: it's accelerating closures in a few places. It's also scaring off investors seeing that promised life times of plants are worth nothing. Coal plants delivered last decade are already being closed. E.g. the Germans just opened a plant that will now close in 2030 (the new government is planning that). That's expensive. It's one of those things that happens more because it's happening more. Even in heavily pro-coal states in the US they are closing plants. EV sales vary world wide. In Norway, it's >70%. The Netherlands has 32%. Germany is not far behind with 28%. The US is indeed lagging a bit. An interesting effect you are starting to see in the EU is people worrying about not being able to sell their ICE car second hand, being faced with additional fees and cost for fuel, or being denied access to cities and regions. Fear of these things is becoming a big driver. And there's quite a bit of FOMO as well. Both with coal plants closing and EV adoption, fear is accelerating what was happening anyway.

Proven 5y ago

causality0 5y ago

An environmentalist organisation could do this by buying them and shuttering them. The problem with this is that eventually the government notices what you're doing and just takes it away from you. This happens regularly with attempts to preserve natural lands and resources.

smt88 5y ago
Another issue is that it artificially pumps up the market for coal mines, which would likely lead to the development and operation of unprofitable coal mines that would otherwise never be opened.

dleslie 5y ago

British Columbia has conservation groups doing precisely this: acquiring forestry rights with the intention of never harvesting[0]. Word has it that the Provincial Government will be supporting this effort. 0: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/conservation-private-land-acquisition-bc-1.6288600 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/conservation...

drivebycomment 5y ago

He is right that LIFO (last in first out) queue is more efficient when there's more demand than queue throughout. But the fairness isn't just a problem with the sense of justice. As indicated, with a fixed timeout, LIFO will cause more spurious timeouts when FIFO wouldn't. The best of all worlds, if the speed of light or transition between different queues isn't an issue, is to have a centralized queue management forming a super queue. Some stores do this already, creating a single queue that dispatches shoppers to a checkout counter. Doing this cuts down the average wait time, and makes people "give up" more willingly under heavy load, since the queue would look much longer.

renewiltord 5y ago

Half of these things feel like you can have way better solutions: - Spot price the gallon and set the minimum order increment to 5 gallons. Pre-purchase and then arrive to collect or pay the spot price at the time of arrival - Switch the stall queue to a ticket system. You buy your thing and plug in a contact number (or wait). You are either notified by phone (or by voice when you’re there). Lots of food courts already do this. - There’s no reason to buy coal mines. You can just political currency instead of normal currency. If your time is worthless or you have cultivated political currency for a while, the former is incredibly cheap

mleonhard 5y ago

Here's another one: Virtuous people should make and sell weapons, thereby reducing the funding to companies that lobby for invasions.

quadrifoliate 5y ago

Logic: You can produce thoughtful work, with detailed examination of how incentives played out in real life, and how real people responded to those incentives. Your work will attract both scientists and laypersons, and be read by both. However, you have to do a lot of data analysis, statistics, and present them in a way that's attractive to both sets of people. Reverse logic: Write blog posts with outrageous suggestions with little real-world applicability, that are equivalent to argument junk food. The few people who think deeply about statistics and behavioral economics will ignore it, but the vast majority of people will eagerly discuss it, link to your page, and sell your work. I think the reverse logic works!