We'll most likely see off-peak or dispatchable-demand energy prices become effectively negligible due to cheap intermittent sources, but the price for reliable 24/7 supply will if anything trend higher. Storage is not enough to bridge the gap in all cases, so you need either very expensive peaker plants or less expensive nuclear to provide a reliable baseload supply for those critical uses.
The baseload framing is increasingly outdated. What grids need isn't constant supply - it's flexible supply that matches variable demand. Solar + batteries handle daytime and evening peaks well. Wind fills different gaps. The remaining "firmness" problem (extended low-wind, low-sun periods) is real but smaller than baseload thinking suggests. Most studies show you can get to 80-90% renewables before you hit hard storage limits. The last 10-20% is the expensive part, but that's a different problem than needing baseload for everything.
Yes if we could only build them. I recently learned there was one built from the Columbia river hydro projects to southern California in the early 1970's Has one been built since?
Amazon has some terms in their TOS that you have to go through mediation on their terms—I tried to get the process started but could never get them to respond when I/we contacted their legal teams. I probably should have pressed harder, I'm sure there was some way to do it, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.
I feel like if you've made a good-faith effort to start the arbitration process they require you to do, and they ignore you, that is grounds for a lawsuit. And I doubt a judge would look favorably upon Amazon in that case.
Good luck for the lawsuit. I read your story and I read some other horror stories in here as well.
How is it even legal that they can withold your 40_000$ for something like 45$ like its your money, it feels so blackmirror and sad :< I hope you are doing okay right now man.
I never understand what balls these companies have in making the customer's life hell when the bills are so low. I remember a guy from HN some time ago where Azure made them unable to pay because of an unpaid bill and they literally did so many shit to wanting to pay but can't, the bill was 20$ and the frustrated user actually I think worked at large company and started either migrating multi million $ worth of yearly deals to AWS (in this case from Azure) (personally I feel like aws is ass too but in that case better than azure, personally prefer hetzner though not a 1:1 comparison)
One of the reasons why I love companies with good support system (preferably small). So that such stupidity can be stopped & they can have common sense unlike Amazon in this case.
The TOS is worded in such a way that it's almost impossible for them to lose. The best legal minds who are paid 7 figures write these things to be impenetrable. Arbitration is slow, time consuming, likely to not lead to desired outcome. Retain a lawyer just means more money and time down drain, and these companies laugh at legal threats, knowing it it ever got that far they would still win either getting the case dismissed or attrition.
That was basically my sentiment and the sentiment of a few lawyers I consulted for it. I lost so much money in the entire process overall it hurts to think about.
Why are you against increasing energy consumption? Increasing energy consumption is what pulled the world out of the feudal, warlord misery of the past. Maybe switch the focus of this feeling towards being against pollution or something that is a negative. Just being against energy consumption is quite regressive and anti-human.
To mitigate the ongoing climate catastrophe we must ramp down fossil fuels use and production. As long as there's fossil fuels in the electricity production mix, electricity use is contributes to the problem. This report tells us that fossil energy use is increasing as only 60% of the increase was covered by solar.
The world would much more easily transition to post fossil fuel if all of society was pushing for cleaner and cheaper electricity and a philosophy of using more to make life better. The attitude that we must reduce is just anti-progress and anti-human and is what many people are fighting against when they support more fossil fuels. The split of solar and wind being supported by the reduce camp and fossil fuel use into the growth mindset was a great tragedy.
Accelerating fossil fuel usage and while adding renewables to the mix is not going to pan out well. Accelerating the climate catastrophe is not pro-human. It might be pro-progress for some definition I guess if you don't mind the death toll.
Few people just want to burn fossil fuels, they want to do things with energy. Focus should be on making non-CO2 emitting energy cheap and abundant. Most people against burning fossil fuel are also not promoting more and cheaper energy use.
When I interned at Chevron someone said they (or some other oil company) were using Fourier transforms in the 1950's for seismic analysis but kept it a secret for obvious reasons. I think you couldn't (can't?) patent math equations.
The majority of the US population (65% https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/RHORUSQ156N) are home owners. I agree that high home prices are not in the interest of the majority of the population, but I bet the majority think so.
BYD does not make most of its revenue on BEVs. It is mostly batteries and more plugin hybrids than BEVs and they lose money selling BEVs (less than almost all other electric car makers though). Tesla make only BEVs and make a profit doing so (the only? large maker to consistently do so).
Tesla was only profitable the last few quarters due to selling their carbon credits to other companies. They'd have lost money otherwise. And since Trump basically did away with that, Tesla is no longer a profitable company now.
Well, you as a human train and live as a human on the output of all human civilization and if you are very efficient put people out of work. 99% of human jobs were physical labor and now machines do the work of thousands with one human superviser (oil tanker, machine loom, dump truck, train, etc). If humans are put completely out of the loop, that is a new problem for humans (super intelligent AI that takes over will likely be very bad for us) but avoiding that problem is another ball of wax.
Nah, you could reasonably regard a tax system where everybody pays <2% of their income in tax as fair and likewise one where everybody pays 50%, but there is no way to call a system fair where ordinary working people pay higher effective rates than multinational corporations.
The tax rate for corporations should be zero. The need to do tax accounting and associated financial engineering is a deadweight economic loss. Eliminate corporate income tax and raise taxes on the highest income employees and investors to make the change revenue neutral. Ultimately the profits flow to those individuals one way or another so better to collect all the tax revenue from them anyway. This change would increase economic growth and benefit everyone.
That would work if you were going to use VAT for everyone, but as long as you're using income tax for individuals, setting the corporate rate to zero would be an obvious tax dodge. You'd put all your assets and income into a corporation that pays no taxes and then have it loan you money when you want to spend it on something.
> That would work if you were going to use VAT for everyone, but as long as you're using income tax for individuals, setting the corporate rate to zero would be an obvious tax dodge. You'd put all your assets and income into a corporation that pays no taxes and then have it loan you money when you want to spend it on something.
Unfortunately this doesn't work for individuals: tax codes in, well, every first world jurisdiction, are very clear that any money going to an individual for their exclusive use is taxed.
I operate as a consultancy (registered tax-paying business); If I use my revenue to pay my bond or get surgery, that $amount is considered personal income even if the company pays for it.[1]
The real problem is that corporations are taxed on profit and individuals are taxed on revenue!
All the costs that a corporation has to foot just to remain in existence is tax-deductible. All the costs that an individual has to foot to remain in existence is taxed (double-taxed, in some cases).
A corporation that pays $amount for rent won't pay tax on $amount in income, while an individual who pays $amount in rent is taxed on the $amount in income.
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[1] I hear what you are saying about a loan that is paid back, and maybe that is one loophole I can explore, but the revenue services have seen all "hacks" and this is no doubt one of them. This is why the tax codes are so complex and convoluted - each time a hack is discovered, a new code is added to specifically shutdown that loophole. The only remaining "hacks" are those that are allowed anyway by the overall tax policy, like "individuals are taxed on all revenue, corporates are taxed on profits only"
That's not an actual problem. The IRS already has clear rules requiring that certain corporate expenses are treated as taxable individual income if they directly benefit a particular employee or investor.
> The IRS already has clear rules requiring that certain corporate expenses are treated as taxable individual income if they directly benefit a particular employee or investor.
I replied to GP with the same thought as you, but I think there might be some merit in the "loan" angle.
Lets look at the case that you operate as a consultant/contractor/etc. Your "startup" starts making some very large revenue, and you'd like to use that money to pay rent, go on vacation, pay for surgery, etc.
Any money (say, $amount) the business pays on your behalf (hospital, landlord, etc) is considered your personal income and taxed appropriately.
But, if the books reflect that it was given as a loan, and you are now on the books as a debtor (with the business being your creditor), then that specific $amount isn't taxed as your personal income (loans aren't considered income, as far as I know, because they are a liability).
So, as long as you are in control of the business, the business doesn't need to initiate the "pay back now or we start legal proceedings" process. What instead happens is that this loan amount in the business books just grows and grows (interest accumulates) until the business dies/ends/is sold without ever collecting on it.
As long as the business itself does not have outstanding creditors when it eventually comes to an end, that "loan" can be just written off.
What's the revenue service going to do? Claim that businesses can't write off debt anymore?
There's a simple way out of it if you just want to get rid of double taxation though: Make dividends a tax deduction to the corporation. Then if the corporation makes money and doesn't issue it as dividends, they pay tax on it. If they do, the corporation doesn't, but the investor does. And then it gets taxed once one way or another but not twice.
I think each company should pay a low rate on all money passing through. Let’s say 0.1 to 1%.
Building huge pyramids of shell companies has probably no economic benefit and is mostly done to evade some regulation or taxes or liability. The ideas how to abuse this are too numerous to count so the government should not try to but simply disincentivize the use of corporations just a little bit. The cost would be borne by the individuals who have the most elaborate company architectures which is probably synonymous with the biggest tax evaders.
Many problems with the tax code and all of its complications is due to the fact that people are taxed on revenue and businesses are taxed on profit (revenue -costs). It would be good to remove this mismatch. I would prefer eliminating the income tax (land tax anyone?) but you could take business on revenue (a VAT is sort of like this).
Revenue has almost no relation to the ability to pay. There are plenty of businesses making 1 or 2% profit, often because they have high pass through, like distributors of all forms, including supermarkets and stores.
I’d rather figure out how to stop taxing people and place the burden on companies entirely. Make it progressive like income tax but make it based on revenue not profits.
For fat people, getting over heated when doing things is generally the limiting factor on how strenuous one can push the body. In the cold you can exercise a lot harder before you get too hot, so the person can stress the body more than they usually would.
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