The separation between the cause and the effects are way less important than their polarity. High-order effects tend to be smaller, but they are also way more numerous, so things can cancel out or end-up resolved on either way.
since this would be very meaningful for my understanding and reasoning about many social fields such as business or politics, i‘d like to know whether you have source material that supports the premise? is this a grounded concept or more of an ad hoc observation
https://www.law.uchicago.edu/sites/default/files/file/coase-...
The consideration of externalities that don't impact the bottom line is so alien to the real observation of the rites of capital that it might as well be written on the inside of a particularly boring rock in the oort cloud.
Leaving aside the fact that the Economics prize isn't actually a Nobel Prize, topics which historically haven't been given enough attention are exactly where the highest impact research takes place.
If externalities had always received the attention they deserved, Coase would have never received his prize, because his work would not have been so important.
I think its safe to say that externalities are not, and were not, an ignored sector given more than a century of serious work, and the fact that it is covered in any intro level Econ course.
It turns out that for many purposes friction and externalities are small enough that they can be ignored for most purposes.
Physicists and Economists are very aware of the tradeoffs.
Although, I am all for a data driven world but somehow it is my opinion that we have ended up with the worse of both as combined with the goodhart's law, this measurable thing just ends up somehow getting manipulated for short term gains over real long term damages.
As is your case in the example, the business will ruin the river for everyone having severe damage both culturally and I think financially as well given downstream effects of all people depending upon that river.
But the business has externalized the losses to the people and the people have externalized the responsibility of the river to the government and the government believes in absolute free capitalism! (or sometimes the businesses give the government some money in the pocket ie. corruption. "Cost of doing business" they said.)
I am not against capitalism itself (that Adam smith proposed) but capitalism in its current form is definitely something... and surely some if not most of us might agree to the fact that system isn't working as intended (well not working if it was intended for us ie.)
You could probably do some simulations to see this was almost always going to be a losing strategy. Detailing the N order effects is good accounting, but the picture likely gets murkier the more you try to extrapolate N+1.
It's all petty BS and I really do hope the electorate gets it together.
Otherwise they'd impeach Trump by now. Even if they make a 2 month ceasefire deal now, it will start again after that.
They are also incapable of forming a coalition. They pushed the Saudis and all the Gulf states, who hate Iran with a passion to the moderate "maybe starting a war was not such a good idea" camp. The latest noises about forcing them to make friends with Israel is exactly what you would do if you wanted to be absolutely sure that they will never help you. The noises about annexing Greenland and Canada made sure that nobody in Europe is going to be part of any coalition there willingly.
That's what happens when you take stupid decisions on your own because you're a big bully boy and allies are for chumps.
They absolutely are
If you want a used 20' container, they're under $1000 right now in the Fontana area. Probably much less in quantity.
It's actually strange that we don't seem to have any system for just dropping containers at the destination until the contents have been processed, instead of the current system that essentially mandates unloading the container rapidly as soon as it shows up because an entire truck+driver is waiting for the unloading to complete.
For palletized loads it's easy to unload them into temporary space in the building they're delivered to, but not everything is palletized.
There are big forklifts for taking containers off trucks and stacking them. Some recipients buy in bulk, store for later use, and stack their own containers. But most distribution centers want to get the contents into pickable inventory and start selling it.
The US military does a lot of container stacking, because they want reserves, not a "just in time" supply chain. "Moving Mountains", by Gen. Gus Petronis, covers this. He handled logistics for the Gulf War.
1. Not even in retrospect - intelligence agencies knew this was a significant risk and I'd bet your average person on the streets would have come to the realization that it was a bad idea if they thought about it for like a week.
edit; grammar and syntax for clarity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ahlH32Lprto is a video from Peter Zeihan covering that exact topic.
Trump seems to be able to do that well enough in the normal business world. The thing is when it comes to countries its harder to get them to roll over because if a dictator looks too weak its off with their head. If you give a dictator the choice of ruling over an impovrished country or dying in a coup, they are going to choose the former. On top of that its hard to make international coercive deals stick. In the normal business world, you can sue if someone reneges. When it comes to countries, what are you going to do? Whine to the UN? Good luck with that. Countries can stick with deals when it suits them and forget about them when it no longer does. At worse that may not make countries want to make deals in the future, but if it was a coercive deal that doesnt matter much.
Just because somebody tells us they are not lying does not mean they are not. But some people believe it because it makes them feel great again.
The idea that a chump who bankrupted a casino could outmaneuver the country that invented the term "checkmate" was always profoundly stupid... so of course, Trump's supporters lapped it up like antifreeze.
1: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/tony-schwartz-trumps-ghostwrite...
To me, the interesting part is that people used to believe it in the first place. Anything that I heard of the guy and his agenda 2025 or whatever it was called had some really weird points which America (and for what its worth, the world, who didn't have any say in the American election but is dragged into it as the prices of my gas station rise)
Was it the silos of internet in an ever-polarizing nation that created the perfect conditions for a trump-esque person to take political power?
I should read more American history but Reagan seems like a similar guy but the only difference seems to be the short-term vs long-term consequences in the damage of Reagan's trickle-onomics (note that Trump's damage is pretty irreparable as well)
$611 for 2x 5 gallon buckets just to do my garage.
This is an extremely HN specific and tech industry specific comment. Go for a day-long drive through middle America, like from Nebraska to Wyoming or something, and 95%+ of the people you will see are living on less than $60,000 total family income per year. A very small selection of very specific jobs start at $200k a year.
But tech workers are a tiny sliver of the population so no, $200k starter jobs are extremely unusual in USA.
& this increased commerce all around the globe.
but destroyed due to bad propaganda.
Nobody ever thinks of, you know, building redundancy for Hormuz?
Not to mention USA investing heavily in fraking to counter balance the middle east...
When you have questions like that in mind, the answer is pretty much always „yes, that’s a well known topic of discussion in that field“
You can see alternatives that exist here: https://hormuzstraitmonitor.com/alternative-routes/
(Really neat website, I think it was shared on HN a few months ago?)
There is a lot of other proposed routes but it’s actually pretty hard to create them in that region, lots of actors with their own interests and not the best history of collaboration. And Iran would definitely be against it given it reduces their influence
First, some context. OPEC/OPEC+ generally set their production to meet demand and to keep oil prices stable. That means they aim for a floor and ceiling on oil prices. Every 3 months they meet and try and anticipate demand. Produce too much and the price is too low. This hurts revenue. Produce not enough and it creates political instabilities, both locally and abroad. It would in particular hurt security guarantees with the US that go back to FDR and King Faisal making an oil-for-security deal in 1945. Now, that doens't mean OPEC members can't and don't cheat. They can and do. But it is generally successful [1].
In January-February 2020 we had the start of the pandemic. A lot of people weren't paying attention or thought it could be contained. That was over by March 2020 and much of the world went into lockdown. A lot of travel just stopped. This had an immediate effect on the oil market. Nobody was buying. Nobody had places to store excess oil. Russia and Saudi Arabia got into an oil price war. And the futures price briefly went negative [2]. This technically was an extreme contango market [3].
So what did the Trump administration do? Well, in my estimation, they panicked. They feared this would be devastating to US oil producers. So then-president Trump went to MBS and cajoled him into getting OPEC to massively cut oil production [4][5]. How much? Initially by 9.7 million barrels per day and then going down over the next 2 years to 6.3 million. That's roughly 10% of global crude oil output.
When I say "panicked", because of the OPEC meetings every 3 months, this would've happened anyway. OPEC would've cut production. The market would've stabilized. Instead, Trump locked OPEC into a 2 year cut and essentially gave them permission to drive up oil prices. And that's exactly what happened. This deal maps pretty much exactly to the pandemic inflation spike.
And nobody talks about it. Republicans were keen to blame Biden. Democrats chose to blame "greedy" oil companies even though no amount of US production could replace what OPEC had cut. Biden even went to Riyadh to beg MBS to increase production and he refused [6]. And nobody talks about any of it.
That was 10%. The Hormuz closure is 15-20% and also impacts natural gas, helium, fertilizer and a bunch of other things not impacted by the OPEC deal. Oil is being kept at a futures price of ~$100/barrel by record withdrawals from strategic reserves. By early July, those strategic reserves will be empty and there'll be no way to inject oil back into the market other than reopening the Strait. And that will lag weeks because oil container ships move as fast as bicycles.
So think back to the pandemic. Shipping containers 6x'ed. Gas prices went way up. It impacted jet fuel and sea freight. All of that is coming in the next month or two and there's honestly little we can do about it now. If the Strait reopened today, these second and third order effects are already baked in.
This is now a structural repricing event and we're going to see crude oil and gas prices near current levels probably for years.
Oh and oil CEOs are starting to warn about the coming energy shock [7][8] so buckle up.
[1]: https://www.macrotrends.net/1369/crude-oil-price-history-cha...
[2]: https://www.congress.gov/crs_external_products/IN/PDF/IN1135...
[3]: https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/contango.asp
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/article/economy/special-report-trump...
[5]: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/trump-touts-great-saud...
[6]: https://www.congress.gov/117/meeting/house/114185/documents/...
[7]: https://www.thestreet.com/investing/stocks/chevron-ceo-drops...
[8]: https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/energy/articles/exxon-warn...
IIRC there’s also major long-term supply destruction happening, because wells have to be capped around the Persian Gulf since the tanks are full.
* https://en.macromicro.me/charts/94482/imf-strait-of-hormuz-n...
(screenshot https://images2.imgbox.com/cd/73/yMf1mwKy_o.png )
every 1 single day = another 1 week of misery for the world
100 ships per day now single digits sometimes zero
90 days = 90 weeks
except it's going to be still like this in SIX MONTHS if not all the way through January 2029
wait until Cuba happens some Friday night too
America as an organization needs to stand up and get retributive with robbing government coffers or it'll just breed even more kleptocracy.
> As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron
Trump often said "Tariffs is the most beautiful word". I think he said that because he thought his followers were too stupid to realize that he was transferring tax-burden from the rich to the middle-class and poor. That's why he thought they were "beautiful". They enabled him to gaslight people.
American people are not stupid but many of us have to work hard so there's not a lot spare time nor energy to try understand what is actually happening. Fox News is misleading us purposefully playing emotional tricks on patriotic Americanss.
Now import-companies should get back the tariffs they paid. But does it mean they will lower their prices? Probably not.
As the saying goes: “The voters know what they want, and they deserve to get it good and hard”
That is why. Because if you dont "take revenge" things will get worst. Because not taking revenge made conservatives know the strategy works.
I don't want the EU to join a protracted Iran war.
Europe cannot contribute relevant naval power to reeopen the strait. They cannot significantly turn the tides in a ground invasion, nor do they have the impetus to. The only thing they can do is legitimize Israel's war, and why would they do that? It's not like America or Israel are any closer to achieving their key objectives, Europe wouldn't even get a tour-de-force out of it. This is purely CENTCOM's fuckup, NATO has nothing to do with it.
