Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by close04 | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand. You just focused on arguing weaker interpretation of what I said, discussing infinities, and obsessing about why people bring up lights.

> And I do want to plug what Citizen_Lame said in a sibling comment, the obsession with lightbulbs whenever energy comes up is a bit odd

I think you want to distract from not making your point. But easy, light used to consume a lot. By some statistics [0] just a few decades ago it was ~10TWh, close to 15% of household consumption, which in turn was higher than industrial consumption (1.1:1). So lights consumed ~8% of UK electricity. Is 15% in a household or 8% for the country so insignificant that mentioning it is ridiculous?

Personal anecdata, I can use more energy but I realistically (not in "infinite energy" world) want and need exactly as much as I use.

[0] https://www.academia.edu/81562463/Energy_consumption_in_UK_h...

> Let's put one thing front and center, you called it "rationing". You could be right or wrong, but you haven't supported your case at all, to demonstrate it's not just supply-demand.

Supply/demand and prices are rationing. Prices represent the limit on how much of a resource someone can use before there is reason to believe they should stop. It's happens to be best form of rationing we have, the other methods tend to lead to disincentives to improve the situation (consider, for example, how the market rations out limited supplies of RAM right now - prices go up and people who pay get the RAM and all the money going to RAM producers gives them resources and incentive to build new capacity to produce more RAM). There isn't a limit on demand for electricity other than the price, it does literally everything. At the extreme case, if it were somehow cheap enough, we'd be able to use it to fabricate new matter. But every step of the way there are population-level opportunities to use more energy to get more comfortable if there is enough of it.

You've been using the term "rationing" in a negative way, though. That implies more than the mere existence of supply and demand.

I suppose we'll just have to agree to disagree; I don't see what is negative about the use of the word rationing. There are finite resources, some people won't have as much as they could use. There needs to be some system to work out who gets what; it isn't easy to get away from that. I recommend prices, but other methods have been tried. The alternatives tend to work badly and are not recommended.

But when prices go up 100-200%, that suggests the market is rationing pretty hard.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com