"Welcome to my weekly rant!""Welcome to my weekly rant!"
As far as openings go, that's quite brilliant.
He goes through some typical common-pool resource problems: parking spaces or lane/traffic access. With better markets and prices for the scarce economic resources they include, you'd have better outcomes -> rationing not by size, timing, circumstance but by perceived, subjective value (and, the critics might say, the wealthy)
It's a neat little example but extrapolates beautifully to almost everything we humans do. It goes to the fundation of what capitalism is (#1416952), how to optimize and better use the things we have in pursuit of the things "we" "want."
It reminded of this pretty provocative book from a few years back (Radical Markets by Glen Weyl and Eric Posner.)
When he went onto electricity, though, I think he lost it a bit. Neither I (#1434263), nor most SN Bitcoiners, are strangers to these topics, understanding full well the intermittency problem of renewables (aka "unreliables). Cochrane suggested that
What if residential customers saw a different price all the time, again with a little app that tells you how much it's going to cost for the next hour? [...] Then you'd have an incentive to run the heat and AC only when it's cheap, to recharge your electric car only when it's cheap. There's a lot you can do to shift your unit energy usage around
= cheap power when supply is high, expensive when scarce.
This is correct, and superficially appealing as far as it goes.
Having watched my dad doing exactly this — electricity metered in 15-minute segments, a convenient app to monitor, his mind going "oh, gotta switch on/off accordingly" — my conclusion is that it doesn't meaningfully move the needle. There are only so many things in a household you can shift around (you gonna turn off the fridge, freezer, or heat pump on 15-minute whims?). After playing this game for a while, it was quite obvious that my dad could only ever more the last 5%-ish of his total monthly consumption... yeah, makes sense and every optimization at high rates releases valuable electricity elsewhere on the grid but really? It's too tiny!
Maybe if you're charging a Tesla outside or has smarthome devices opportunistically turning on the washing machine or pre-loaded laundry, or deciding how much California heat to endure vs running the AC then yeah, I get it.
While we’re perfectly happy with people paying quite a lot of money to get on an airplane first, I think that just messaging, people say, oh, it’s unfair. Only the rich will be able to do it, but let’s change that messaging.
This makes me wonder what the price of getting a post on the front page of SN is.
This post (#1442015) has 3694 sats in zaps and is in the top spot.
On my mobile, this post (#1442045) is just above the fold and has 1324 sats in zaps.
(Both posts were posted in the last 4 hours, so we don't have to worry about time decay)
So it seems like the price to get on SN's front page today is more than 1300 sats or so. But SN's is a dynamic market, so that price might change depending on what other people are willing to pay.
The front page is rationed by perceived subjective value. The question I have is: is the fact that it works this way still too opaque? Because I get the sense (even from my own self) that we don't really think about SN as putting a price on front page space. But perhaps, I've just been dense.
I think people have been reluctant to put a price on social media things like distribution or visibility or followers. Probably for lots of good reasons. And so maybe that's why I haven't previously thought of SN as doing this. But it may be what I was trying to get at in #1406771.
It's also why I've really been interested in the move SN has made to remove trust. Trust messes up pricing. It's interesting that so many different platforms rely on it. If pricing works for allocating parking or lane space, why shouldn't it work for allocating visibility in social media?
Because it doesn't, not really. Most posts get to the top because of others zapping them, not the poster paying. So we don't think of it as a price to get it to the top, but rather as a result of SN's own incentive to surface posts that its users enjoy.
Of course, ever post shares space with each other, so if you do happen to want to pay to promote your own piece, then yes you can see it as the cost to boost it to the top. It's not a one time fee though, you gotta keep paying to keep it on top.
Why does it matter who pays the price? The only way to get on the front page is for someone to pay for the space (either the poster or other stackers). I frequently make the calculation of how much it will cost to get a certain post I want to zap onto the front page. I do this because I want other stackers to notice it. For instance, I zapped raw avocado's Gox post shortly after he posted it because I wanted to make sure other stackers wouldn't miss it. Sure, some of the calculation is my desire to zap raw avocado because he did a great job with it and I want to incentivize him to do more, but that was not my primary motivation.
I suspect SN is easier to use if one thinks about the front page as an auction for space (visibility?).
It also addresses somewhat the problem of an incentive to zap. In the past, I've felt that the main incentive to zap is to encourage posters to post more things of that kind. But it means that a zap is kind of a good will payment or value for value. But if zapping is actually about paying for space, the incentive is different: it's to bring something to other stacker's attention.
I think that's the point, though. Some things pull a ton of electricity, while most of our stuff is trivial. I'd love to be able to set some sort of dynamic demand schedule for the fridge or AC, neither of which need to run at specific times. As is, I change their settings when we enter our peek-pricing period in the afternoon.
you manually turn down the fridge during the day...? Seems like bad use of time.
Most fridges already have some sort of turn-on-turn-off thing to regulate the temperature. I guess they can get more frisky with the leeways (a few degrees up or down is fine)
I turn off our mini/wine fridge during peek hours. I haven't figured out how to adjust the new main fridge yet, so I leave it alone for now.
raw prices are also rarely the final interesting signal; much more often, you're interested in some function of price, like the relative price [has it risen/fallen and by how much], or some product of price and volume.
ultimately the only people who deal with the same number as the price are people who trade unit amounts, and in most cases, the amounts anyone trades are determined more by their allocated capital [or by their needs for the goods] than by some momentary price.
can't buy freedom, but it has a price :D