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Re: Xyleco - 60 Minutes
I mean, I'm sure it could be done. But done cheaply? That's the ticket. How many of the big DoD engineering flops of the last half-century came because they tried to get one platform to do too many things at once? Sometimes a cheap, simple, reliable solution to one problem really is just the most practical thing, even if it's ugly and totally not sexy. I don't think asphalt squares ever became the ideal roof aesthetic. Just like I don't think Dunkin Donuts was ever really excellent coffee. I think they were both cheap and readily available and did a reasonable job. Plus the asphalt was going to be sitting around anyways, so may as well do something with it. Same thing with Corn Stover to loop the conversation back to the thread topic. There's tons of it being produced out there and if it's gathered at all just sold off as a cheap, low-grade feed/fertilizer. If you can crack it into ethanol and xylose, then you've got something more valuable.
It's like milk, right? Milk is processed by piping raw milk into a centrifugal separator that expels solids and has separate channels for skim milk and 40% cream. Everything else, from whole milk to 2% to 1% to half-and-half to light cream is made by recombining the two and homogenizing them by pushing the mixture through thin tubes at pressure so the cream doesn't float to the top. Most people don't know that skim milk is actually arguably less processed than whole milk in that respect. But here's the thing: there's still a lot of cream left over. You can sell a lot of it off for butter or buttermilk or various cheeses and whatnot. But there's still more. So it's this sort of readily available industrial source for fat. This stuff becomes processed foods. Ice cream handles a bunch of it. Can put it in salad dressings or other junk foods that are meant to be creamy. But it's gonna be tougher to find an acceptable source of saturated fat that's much cheaper and more readily available without going to vegetable oil and hydrogenating it into trans-fat.
So oil's kind of the same way. There's products coming out of the refining process. And we built all these big refineries. if you can do something useful with the stuff that comes out, like make a roof, you may as well. In a way, oil's remarkably efficient. We get a hell of a lot of stuff out of a barrel of it. That's why it's kind of hard to beat. But the same can be said of lots of things. Vinyl siding may be practical, but don't think it's winning any beauty contests. And my old reconstruction-era home in more than one way is built like a brick shit-house compared with the new ones. But even then it was built to be cheap and functional rather than pretty. Of course, the best things for sales are 'pretty enough.' Spend a couple grand slapping a new coat of paint on her and dropping some granite on the counters and getting some stainless veneers on the appliances, but keep the price low, and suddenly she's ready to meet strangers.
Anyways, aesthetics, like plastic surgeons and Rolls Royces, are really for a select few. Most people make do with stuff off the shelf.
Your Gore & selling indulgences bit cracked me up.
That's an interesting thought experiment. I wonder if it would ever work in reality. Demand for commodities would surely fall. But commodities tend to be a relatively small part of the total price input of a lot of things. I think the 5 billion world you envision actually implies a distribution compression.
That is, it made me ask this: "Could a hundred million people in the US here-and-now live an average American lifestyle if there weren't a billion people in the developing world churning out their iPhones and knick-nacks and doo-dads and batteries and all the raw materials for a wage that allows much lower living standards?"
I think there's probably a way to make it happen. But it would require a hell of a lot more infrastructure and industrial investment (more automation, better shipping, etc) than the corporate managers & wealthy folks who control capital and investment decisions today are willing to allow. And that probably means less immediate return to capital on aggregate. Either way, iPhones and blue jeans would be getting a lot more expensive, growing in price at a pace probably not as brisk as healthcare or education, but much closer.
That said, I'm not dismissing the other side of the coin you brought up, the idea that 25 billion--or some other number--implies lower standards of living for a majority of people. There's some finite number at which that's certainly true. What exactly it is, I'm not sure. But over here on the coast, so many towns have had to blow hundreds of millions in public money already just fighting back the ocean it's a serious problem. I mean, I don't think you could find one coastal town in three that hasn't blown enough money to build a brand new school over the last decade dealing with beach erosion or building seawalls to protect roads or rebuilding sewers after storm surges. And this is early in the game. And waterfront property is disproportionately valuable, so it's easier to do economic damage there. Entire plots of land are being erased, along with the tax revenue and everything else that comes with them. Less of a concern inland. But we're human beings. We tend to populate along coasts and in low-lying areas close to fresh water, like river deltas.
Originally posted by DSpencer
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It's like milk, right? Milk is processed by piping raw milk into a centrifugal separator that expels solids and has separate channels for skim milk and 40% cream. Everything else, from whole milk to 2% to 1% to half-and-half to light cream is made by recombining the two and homogenizing them by pushing the mixture through thin tubes at pressure so the cream doesn't float to the top. Most people don't know that skim milk is actually arguably less processed than whole milk in that respect. But here's the thing: there's still a lot of cream left over. You can sell a lot of it off for butter or buttermilk or various cheeses and whatnot. But there's still more. So it's this sort of readily available industrial source for fat. This stuff becomes processed foods. Ice cream handles a bunch of it. Can put it in salad dressings or other junk foods that are meant to be creamy. But it's gonna be tougher to find an acceptable source of saturated fat that's much cheaper and more readily available without going to vegetable oil and hydrogenating it into trans-fat.
So oil's kind of the same way. There's products coming out of the refining process. And we built all these big refineries. if you can do something useful with the stuff that comes out, like make a roof, you may as well. In a way, oil's remarkably efficient. We get a hell of a lot of stuff out of a barrel of it. That's why it's kind of hard to beat. But the same can be said of lots of things. Vinyl siding may be practical, but don't think it's winning any beauty contests. And my old reconstruction-era home in more than one way is built like a brick shit-house compared with the new ones. But even then it was built to be cheap and functional rather than pretty. Of course, the best things for sales are 'pretty enough.' Spend a couple grand slapping a new coat of paint on her and dropping some granite on the counters and getting some stainless veneers on the appliances, but keep the price low, and suddenly she's ready to meet strangers.
Anyways, aesthetics, like plastic surgeons and Rolls Royces, are really for a select few. Most people make do with stuff off the shelf.
Your Gore & selling indulgences bit cracked me up.
Nonetheless, like you said, it's probably fair to say it's a substitution because they're gonna do it anyway. In general, I think it's unrealistic to expect any significant part of the population to voluntarily live far below their means to save the Earth. That's why I think the best thing we could do as a species is reduce the human population over time so that poor people can live like rich people already do without utterly destroying the planet. What's more desirable: 5 billion people living an average American lifestyle or 25 billion people living in tiny apartments eating cricket flour every meal? I'll take the former.
That is, it made me ask this: "Could a hundred million people in the US here-and-now live an average American lifestyle if there weren't a billion people in the developing world churning out their iPhones and knick-nacks and doo-dads and batteries and all the raw materials for a wage that allows much lower living standards?"
I think there's probably a way to make it happen. But it would require a hell of a lot more infrastructure and industrial investment (more automation, better shipping, etc) than the corporate managers & wealthy folks who control capital and investment decisions today are willing to allow. And that probably means less immediate return to capital on aggregate. Either way, iPhones and blue jeans would be getting a lot more expensive, growing in price at a pace probably not as brisk as healthcare or education, but much closer.
That said, I'm not dismissing the other side of the coin you brought up, the idea that 25 billion--or some other number--implies lower standards of living for a majority of people. There's some finite number at which that's certainly true. What exactly it is, I'm not sure. But over here on the coast, so many towns have had to blow hundreds of millions in public money already just fighting back the ocean it's a serious problem. I mean, I don't think you could find one coastal town in three that hasn't blown enough money to build a brand new school over the last decade dealing with beach erosion or building seawalls to protect roads or rebuilding sewers after storm surges. And this is early in the game. And waterfront property is disproportionately valuable, so it's easier to do economic damage there. Entire plots of land are being erased, along with the tax revenue and everything else that comes with them. Less of a concern inland. But we're human beings. We tend to populate along coasts and in low-lying areas close to fresh water, like river deltas.
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