anyway, since the average life expectancy is close to a three digit number now, can we stop forcing adolescents to decide their life long field of study at the tender age of 17 or so
There are other problems with relying on market forces to drive a “renewable revolution.” One of those was highlighted in a recent issue of the Economist, under the tantalizing headline: “Clean energy’s dirty secret.”
This wasn’t, as you might think, a form of clickbait for coal industry executives or Australian politicians looking for a “dirty” centerfold spread on how wind farms and solar panels are bad for the environment. As a mouthpiece for the liberal wing of the Anglo-American bourgeoisie, the Economist is prepared to admit the benefits of moving toward a decarbonized global economy.
The “dirty secret” is that renewables are too cheap. “It is no longer far-fetched,” the magazine says, “to think that the world is entering an era of clean, unlimited and cheap power.” There is, however, “a $20 trillion hitch”:
To get from here to there requires huge amounts of investment over the next few decades…Normally investors like putting their money into electricity because it offers reliable returns. Yet green energy has a dirty secret. The more it is deployed, the more it lowers the price of power from any source.
The problem, in other words, is that the rise of renewables is making it more difficult for big energy companies to make the kind of profits they’re accustomed to. The Economist argues that this will create a drag on investment and make the transition to a sustainable energy system impossible without direct government intervention: “Theoretically, if renewables were to make up 100 percent of the market, the wholesale price of electricity would fall to zero, deterring all new investment that was not completely subsidized.”
billionaire could give me %.01 of his wealth and change my life while he is virtually unaffected.
0.01% of $1,000,000,000 is $100,000.
Which, for some people, is as much as they’d make in five years of 60 hour weeks of labor.
And this is one hundredth of one percent of the bare minimum of being a billionaire.
Also, if the billionaire has a decent bank account setup (which, let’s face it, billionaire has), that $100,000 will just come back the next time interest happens. It is a perpetually regenerating $100,000.
I could get out of debt with that.
I could quit my job to start freelancing with that.
I could finance a good chunk of my child’s education with that.
And I would still have a tiny bit leftover for fun money.
Are you willing to work weekends? Holidays? Through the birth of your child? Until you collapse?
It’s the hot new thing in job interviews: Testing whether candidates are willing to sacrifice everything — their home lives, their families, their health — for the good of their company.
The Muse recently wrote that we should be aware of “work-life balance ‘tests’” during interviews, highlighting the chief executive of Barstool Sports, Erika Nardini, who reportedly texts job applicants interviewing with the company on weekends. Nardini said she does this “just to see how fast you’ll respond,” in an interview with The New York Times. She expects to be contacted back “within three hours,” she elaborated. “It’s not that I’m going to bug you all weekend if you work for me, but I want you to be responsive. I think about work all the time,” Nardini said. “Other people don’t have to be working all the time, but I want people who are also always thinking.”
It was also reported recently that Vena Solutions CEO Don Mal asks candidates if they’d “leave [their] family at Disneyland to do something that was really important for the company?” He expects them to say yes.
Honestly they can fuck right off. I don’t want to work for a company with those expectations.
I try and bring up how he ruined free in state tuition in the name of hippie bashing when he was California’s governor often, but don’t exactly have the biggest platform.
“Worst of all, these students’ sense of the future is constrained by planning for and then paying down their student loans, often for decades. Economists are waking up to the fact that when young Americans enter the workforce burdened with over a trillion dollars in cumulative debt, they become risk averse, unwilling to move, less able to make major purchases, and slower to become homeowners. Not coincidentally, they don’t feel safe enough to register any major protests against the society that’s done this to them.”
Damn.
i am reblogging again because….. fuck ronald reagan forever and ever and ever and ever.
Economists should be adept in their fields, how are they only now realizing that paying off our student debt is a fucking priority over anything else other than food?
Weird, it’s almost like there’s something missing from the study of economics.
Who would have possibly thought that a young generation owing trillions of dollars cumulatively could have an effect on the economy?
myblog 