The 1.6T number is nice but also eye-catching and what matters most is how few parameters are active in practice, that’s what brings the most of the efficiency
That shows wealth can go up without people feeling better, if most gains come from assets then it mainly helps those who already have those assets while others mostly see higher costs
31/1 is kind of wild and its hard to justify corn ethanol on efficiency alone; so it looks like this exists mainly because of the policy and not because it’s actually a good way to produce energy
Solar scaling this fast looks to be less about the green against fossile but to be more about changing the cost structure of energy => fossil fuels are strongly marginal-cost, solar is capex heavy with almost zero marginal cost so that change alone has big impacts for how energy comes into the inflation
Double whammy, we could say? This is a lesson for any positive change: ethics only brings you so far, but find the economical way to do it and the change will work by itself.
Finding the economical way to do it costs a lot of money. The economies of scale that solar needed to reach before it became the low cost option were built on enormous subsidies from Germany, China and others.
Then let's also add the state-owned coal/fossil companies kept artificially afloat, producers tax expenditures, publicly funded rail transport or handling infrastructure or water systems, subsidized coal electricity prices... then indeed we can discuss apples to apples.
can't help but wonder if the aggregate of the solar PV subsidies made in the last 25 years are higher or lower than the aggregate of energy price subsidies made when the Ukraine and/or Iran wars made fossil fuel prices spike...
True, but ethics got us to the point where solar was economical. It's never just been about ethics, it's been about getting it to this point where it's cheaper.
The interesting point is that the 10Y–3M spread is still carrying the signal despite repeated claims the post-QE regime broken the yield curve.
I am curious to see if people think that term structure still gets the recession risk or if the liquidity conditions and fiscal dominance now matter more than the curve
Its an interesting argument but the main issue may be that the bottleneck is not bromine itself but qualification and purification infrastructure. That matters because physical scarcity have very different resilience options
This isn’t really looking like AI scarcity it’s more like compute becoming the bottleneck : when the access depends on chips energy and capital it stops being a pure software game and the winners are often whoever can secure capacity first
Intersting cases like this one are a good reminder that the market structure takes source directly into the pricing because when the distribution and access are concentrated then the pricing power often shows up as fees rather than headline prices ; this makes inflation harder to measure but still very real so antitrust in that sense isn’t just about competition and it’s one of the few levers that can affect price dynamics at macroeconomic level
This looks like a systemic issue and not just Backblaze : because we’ve layered cloud on top of cloud and call it backup but it’s very linked. When a provider changes the rules then a big part of that safety just disapears and its the same pattern in finance: looks diversified but it isn’t
Interesting that global imbalances have never really disappeared but they were just hidden by low rates : cheap liquidity made deficits easy to finance and reduced the pressure to adjust ; now with higher rates those imbalances start to be important again bacause debt becomes more expensive, the capital flows become more selective and currency pressure is increasing
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