[Duke Leto]

Well. NOBODY has manufacturing experience with Dense Plasma Focii. (Not Focuses, Focii, until someone proves me wrong.) And there exist consulting corporations that specialize in helping other corporations put in infrastructure rapidly. KPMG, Booz Allen Hamilton and others spring to mind. LPPX could also for example partner with GE to design the manufacturing process in a hurry.

As to Lerner’s politics see the Activism section of his Wiki article:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Lerner#Activism

I think there’s enough overlap with some of my desired policies and his to assume a certain amount of additional overlap. Aaron would know better than I.

[Duke Leto]

There’s no question that lower energy prices will help growth But remember the automation of the Coal industry has largely been a gradual process. We’re talking about the entire industry shutting down in 5 years or less.

And I respectfully say that LPPX doesn’t need licensees, it will have sufficient credit to do the entire job itself. I think it rollout to the entire developed world in 3 years this way. We’re basically talking about a clash between the big and the little and I think the big is the obvious winner.

Also there will be an initial Stock Market Crash as Exxon, Chevron and its ilk experience a nosedive in value. The Dow would probably go down while the Nasdaq remains steady. It’ll take time for investors to figure out that all the industries with energy costs are going to experience a long term boom. Also also keep in mind that it ain’t just the 80k coal workers we’re talking about there are all the workers at all the generating plants all over the US and the world as a whole, which is probably another million at least in the US alone, plus all the jobs directly dependent on them, another few 100k. A $3 trillion sector employs a hell of a lot of people.

What I’m talking about is a stock market boom while the overall economy remains stagnant. Look again at the economic theory. Obviously consumer deleveraging would be a great thing in the long term but not if wages remain stagnant. With my scheme of LPPX taking over where the Federal Government can’t or won’t we’ll be looking at the opposite of the 70s with “boom deflation”, with headline deflation of a moderate to high level in the face of rising wages and high employment.

A big LPPX could also advocate for more favorable policies such as higher corporate and a restoration of the pre-Reagan tax rates, single payer Healthcare, environmental regulation and cleanup, restoration of Glass-Steagal to prevent another financial catastrophe on the lines of the mortgage crisis, unionization, ending the drug war…. Basically be the anti-Exxon.

It would also incidentally be able to provide a much better wage and benefits package to the FF work force than would currently occur with the licensee scheme, see for example General Motors.

It would also get broken up on the expiration of the patent and the generators would probably end up going to the municipalities. (Which is who they should belong to in the long term.) Likewise if it develops the desalinization and the pipelines, that’s another thing that can get gradually handed over to the public sector. If it does the vacuum mag-levs than once that is fully recapitalized it can be slowly turned over to all the world’s governments creating a new international organization to encourage cooperation and economic integration.

The points of this are that big could be better than the little and guaranteeing that enough credit is created to counteract the loss of the current energy capital and employment. These are important issues and I want to lay them out.

[Duke Leto]

Assuming LPPX is selective about who it grants the licenses to in terms of builders/operators then yes your scenario might work. I have a few buts though.

Even assuming the profit-taking on the part of the licenser and the producers is kept to a minimum, you still have the extant distribution network to worry about, and they are going to be inclined to charge as much as they can get away with.

Even if the amount of money that is saved gets passed on to the electricity consumers, most of them are still big industries who won’t necessarily do any good with it, and it’s certainly not guaranteed that they’ll lower prices enough to pass significant savings on to the end consumer, even though a deflationary spiral may have set in.

Even if you get most of the profits passed on to the end consumer, you still haven’t solved the central problem of the paradox of thrift that is strangling the world economy right now in will initially be worsened by the rapid FF rollout. Fine and good to say things will work out for the best in the long run but in the long run, as Lord Keynes observed: “We’re all dead.”

[Duke Leto]

AaronB wrote: This is an interesting discussion. Focus Fusion won’t solve the systemic problems caused by fractional-reserve banking by private banks, but it could provide the power for the system that replaces it when it crashes. The crash is inevitable, regardless of who is in office, or how long they stave off the crash. The elements don’t disappear, and neither does most of the infrastructure, so I’m not too worried about the long-term effects. The short-term crises will be painful, but hopefully we’ll come out smarter in the end. Cheap energy will definitely have bad effects in certain industries, but will have good effects in others. The evolution in the energy industry will force change, but over a couple of decades, people will adapt.

Well the systemic problems with fractional reserve banking were well controlled in the US until about 1980 when the usual gang of idiots convinced everyone that bank deregulation was the way to go. There were no major bank crises for about 40-50 years and the Savings and Loan crisis hit within 10 years of the first round of deregulation, the mortgage backed securities crisis hit within 10 years of the second round when Glass-Steagal was fully repealed. I think we need someone with the resources and willpower to push a national campaign of bank regulation. Namely you.

Is it odd that I’m in the position of arguing that someone else should make themselves rich and powerful?

:cheese:

[Duke Leto]

zapkitty wrote: Just a correction: Obama and the “Democrats” heading up the national party are all DLC-Third Way neoliberal supply-siders and Obama is actually an outright Reaganite.

That is to some extent true and to some extent unfair but I won’t dispute the general point.

[Duke Leto]

tcg wrote: A truly fascinating discussion.

I can only take issue with one point. The math indicating a drop in GDP of three trillion seems valid, as far as it goes. It represents a store of money not expended in electricity costs, but what would happen to it then? I am not sure of the proportions, but a substantial part of electrical usage is in homes. A savings in electrical costs there would put more money in the hands of consumers, a group notorious for spending into the economy any spare cash they have lying around. The rest of the savings would be enjoyed by industry which could use it to expand and create more jobs. Electrical costs are the main limiting factor to profitability of many businesses. I suggest that this savings of money would jump back into the economy in a variety of ways.

If we were in a normal economy a lot of it would get consumed, but we’re in a depressed economy where everyone is trying to save. If you’re fighting against your mortgage on an underwater home the first thing you are going to do with a windfall of money is try and pay off that mortgage. That decreases your indebtedness. That decreases the overall quantity of indebtedness, which shrinks the money supply, which further depresses the entire economy. I was trying to make that clear but I didn’t do such a good job. We’re still reeling from the effects of the credit crisis in the US and may be for years to come.

[Duke Leto]

OK, short version of the above is that a recession is when you have too much shit and not enough people buying it. A boom is when you have not enough shit and too many people buying it.

Now the way the federal reserve controls inflation is by contracting the money supply (taking away babysitting scrips) and the way it does this is by raising interest rates. (Fewer people borrow, more people save.) The way it controls unemployment is by doing the opposite, lowering interest rates. (More people borrow, fewer save.)

All right, “so what” you say?

OK a nation’s Gross Domestic Product is defined as “the market value of all final goods and services produced in a country in a given period”. In other words it’s all the shit a nation produces. It’s also ipso facto all the income a nation earns. There are several formulas for GDP, but the only one we care about is the expenditure formula.

Expenditure:

GDP = Personal Consumption + Gross Investment + Government Spending + (Exports – Imports).

GDP = C + I + G + (eX – i) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product)

Another definition of a recession is when GDP goes down rather than up. Right now in the United States the economy isn’t growing fast enough because C is not going up (people are saving more rather than spending), I is not going up (businesses aren’t investing in new capital) and G is going down (because a party of unhinged and economically illiterate morons is insisting cutting government spending will help the economy). ((eX – i) is so small in the US GDP as to be negligible. )

Now normally to end a recession the Federal Reserve would just increase the money supply by lowering interest rates… oh wait a minute they are already practically 0%. So acoording to good Neo-Keynesian theory an aggressive program of deficit spending by the Federal Government to increase G will boost that GDP right back up to where it ought to be!… oh wait, aforementioned party of imbeciles controls half of congress.

So in other words there is nothing we can do to get out of the current lesser depression.

All that make sense? Good. Now remember when I said GDP is all the shit a nation produces? In the US we consume 87,000 kWh per capita per year. Let’s pretend that all of that is C and none of it is I or G. (It really makes no difference.)

87,000 kWh per capita * an average cost of 12 cents per kWh * 300 million odd capitas = ~$3.1 Trillion. The total US GDP is $15 Trillion. So in other words Energy makes up 20% of the US economy.

OK, tomorrow FF generators are perfected and instantly the average cost energy in five years all of the energy in the US is Focus Fusion based and costs 0.1 cent a kWh. That means the total consumer spending on energy is now $26 Billion. Therefore the total GDP is now abruptly $12 Trillion.

We have caused more deflation in the middle of a depression and a sharp contraction in GDP.

In other words, “Congratulations Eric Lerner, you have with the [em]best of intentions[/em] just caused the [em]biggest economic contraction[/em] in US History.”

But wait you say, doesn’t all that increased productivity mean that businesses will invest more? Mmmm… somewhat, but it still won’t be enough. You see with all that lessened demand profits are down. But won’t people just buy more and more energy to make up the difference? Using it for what, exactly? What new industries are being invested in when the government is cutting spending and corporations are tightening their belts because of a worsening depression? Won’t people have more disposable income? Yeah and the value of their houses are going down while their mortgages stay the same. But can’t the government step in and deficit spend us out of a slump? Nope, see the know-nothing party currently in control. (The same thing is to a lesser extent true in Europe. The oil producing countries have just seen their export income collapse and China and India are being pulled down by their inability to export any more to the developed world, which is in a depression.)

In fact, something like this happened when coal power came online. There was depression and mass unemployment in the industrializing world rather than a straight up increase in productivity and prosperity. That’s where the Luddites came from.

Let me put this another way. FF comes online. All coal industry workers are out of a job. They can’t buy anything. People selling to the coal miners go out of business. More people are out of a job. And so on in a vicious cycle.

The faster FF comes online, the [em]worse[/em] the heightened depression.

The only way out of this is for someone to [em]borrow and spend[/em] the $3 trillion to make up the difference. (Actually $12 Trillion because of the size of the energy economy of the whole world.)

But who could have such an enormous credit?

LPPX if it’s making and operating its own FF generators, that’s who! LPPX in this scenario would borrow against its future profits to invest in completely new industries. (Say for example a global vacuum MagLev transit network. And powerful recycling tech and mass desalinization and everything else. Hey how about a space elevator and asteroid mining?)

The only downside to this scenario is that Eric and the LPPX stockholders become exorbitantly rich. Given Eric’s commitment to social justice, I can think of much worse outcomes.

See my discussion at Internet Infidels: http://www.freeratio.org/showthread.php?t=305047

OK discuss and hurl tomatoes. I’m done.

[Duke Leto]

Don’t need sunlight for the Artificial Trees either…

[Duke Leto]

Phil’s Dad wrote: Interesting paradox your grace. If FF then why pump oil? :-/

1) Plastics.
2) Still need a portable fuel for long range light vehicles if EEStor don’t work and pumping might be cheaper than synthesizing.
3) Even if EEStor does work, you still have n million # of cars to refit or repalce and pumping from depleted midwestern wells lowers the cost of gas while that is happening without playing around in the mideast.

[Duke Leto]

Leave the guy alone. He has interest with no knowledge, which is more than can be said for most people.

[Duke Leto]

There is no practical way to compress any amount of matter to neutron star densities, nor is there any sane reason to wish to do so.

It might have a utility as a generator of strong magnetic fields, BUT if you did have 5 ml of the stuff, the force of Earth’s gravitational attraction to it would cause it to sink through anything you might care to use to hold it up. It would then rapidly move to the core, accreting the planet into itself as it progressed. You might get away with just creating a new supervolcano with the neutron bit becoming the new center of the earth. you might end up with the entire earth sucked into a small package of neutronesque material. Most likely the internal stresses inside the thing would just make it eplode in the absence of the rest of a neutron star to keep it cohesive.

No matter what happens, it’d be a losing proposition.

[Duke Leto]

Not if you like living on a spherical planet… it isn’t feasible or wise.

[Duke Leto]

Just to be clear, Rezwan, I have tried to engage the cabal of posters who I characterize as the “Libertarian Peanut Gallery” in a productive way regarding their denial of Global Warming, support for the US occupation of Iraq and vehement opposition to anything Obama so much as proposes. It has not been a useful endeavor. Their worldview does not encompass any possibility of any government policy but Laizzez Faire. To them, Tax Cuts are the One True God and Reagan is their Prophet. In order to have the slightest possibility of a useful dialogue I’d have to spend hours deconstructing their preconceptions and political prejudices and frankly, even I have better things to do!

If I were a pure layman of a liberal persuasion looking over these boards without knowing much about Eric or Aaron, I’d assume that FF was scientifically unsound because it appeals to people like the posters I am attacking. That FF was just a pseudoscientific pipe dream like abiotic petroleum. If I were a pure layman and I was not familiar with Eric’s background.

If you are, as you say, under scrutiny for having been educated in the US, for god’s sake stop posting in this thread! I feel bad enough for having exposed you to closer scrutiny by sounding you out while you are in Iran.

[Duke Leto]

You really think the US has gotten over Cold Warrior paranoia? Try suggesting a little louder that Obama is anything other than a Marxist puppet in this forum and wait for the Libertarian Peanut Gallery to chime in. (Not I should note the admins.)

[Duke Leto]

Ooh! For some reason I thought you were still in Berkeley! Take care of yourself.

[Author]

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