{"id":1159,"date":"2005-02-07T09:25:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-07T15:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1159"},"modified":"2005-02-07T09:25:00","modified_gmt":"2005-02-07T15:25:00","slug":"currency-housing-transportation-and-energy-oh-my","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/?p=1159","title":{"rendered":"Currency, Housing, transportation, and energy, oh my!"},"content":{"rendered":"

In response to a comment<\/a> by on a post<\/a> in ‘s journal, I present <\/p>\n

Currency stuff: There’s a big difference (surprising to me, but there you have it) between the intranational valuation of a currency and the international valuation of that currency. <\/p>\n

Current speculations (near certainties) are that the yuan is internationally undervalued while the dollar is overvalued, due to the fixed exchange rate. This means that China’s exports are more desireable to the outside world and that imports are less so. Great if you have something to export, lousy if you want something from another country. It’s like a tarriff, but implicit. Lousy for consumer happiness, good for producers. Meanwhile, the US is encouraged to spend its money abroad and outsource its production. <\/p>\n

But, supposedly, this has little direct effect on prices of domestic goods. Unless those domestic goods are dependent on some imported factor, most notably oil. <\/p>\n

Energy: Oil is used throughout our economy. Transportation and extraction (both mining and farming) mostly. The short problem with oil isn’t that it would run out. The problem is that its price could rise, due to increasing inaccessibility (we tap the easy to reach sources first) and increasingly difficult to refine (we go for the easier to refine sources first), as well as increasing demand (hello, industrializing China and India). At some point on the oil price curve, though, we’ll just start substituting biomass fuels, most notably biodiesel. <\/p>\n

For electricity we have coal and uranium, both of which we mine. I don’t know if the mining equipment is largely electrified, but I sorta suspect that there’s mobile fuel consumption involved somewhere along the line (which implies a crude oil derivative, but I’d kinda suspect they’d want to keep oxygen consuming combustion out of the mines themselves. But in strip mines, it’s vehicles, all the way). <\/p>\n

Fuel cells based off hydrocarbons (they do exist) are about twice as efficient as internal combustion engines in generate electricity, though they still have issues preventing their general deployment, most notably (I believe) either consumption of catalysts or consumption of leads. For hydrogen fuel cells, you are completely correct. This is more a technology development issue. And an underinvested one at that. <\/p>\n

Housing:
\nHousing is a flexibly consumed good, though that isn’t immediately obvious to us. I was at a friend’s place this weekend. He, his significant other, and their three kids occupy a space 3-5 times the size of my current residence (shared by 3 people). Which is significantly larger than the trailers I’ve been in, shared by as many as 5 people (and I know housing gets denser than that, too). <\/p>\n

Big picture: I doubt the american economy will collapse. If the dollar does weaken sufficiently, we’ll start exporting, rather than importing. What china does could have some very interesting ramifications in this regard. If oil prices go up alot, people will tighten their belts, and move closer together. Suburban housing would drop in price, urban housing would rise. Depending on the severity of the adjustment, banks supporting the current suburban boom would fold as people defaulted on their loans. Investors in urban real estate would win big time. Fat cats would continue to drive (or maybe there would be rationing), but buses and trains would take on increasing importance, while fuel efficiency measures were researched. Biodiesel would pick up and people would start driving diesels, which would spread the smell of bacon fat and french fries through our streets as biodiesel rose in production (mmm, poetic license, mmmm, probably more realistically large scale biodiesel production would rely on genetically engineered algae). <\/p>\n

Without some seriously amazing technological breakthroughs, though, the suburbs are an economic burden on society. The more suburban we get, the more our need for oil rises, the more the price rises, the less sustainable suburbs get. (I’m using suburban as “private auto dependent”, it has many other possible meanings, but that’s the one I’ve chosen.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In response to a comment by on a post in ‘s journal, I present<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1159","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1159"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1159\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1159"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1159"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cheerfulchaotic.crazycrew.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1159"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}