Monday, February 26, 2024

What Subsidies Say


I'm genuinely stunned at how good OpenAI's Sora AI video previews are. It makes existing video models look like silly toys. Everyone will be a filmmaker.--De Kraker

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The Coke and Pepsi pricing strategies are being scrutinized under an obscure law known as the Robinson-Patman Act. The law prohibits suppliers from offering better prices to large retailers at the expense of their smaller competitors. The largely dormant 1936 law is aimed at promoting a level playing field between small retailers and large chain stores.

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What Subsidies Say

Subsidies are supports outside of normal analysis. Sometimes subsidies just jump-start something before its time. Create a foundation for a new structure, large or small. Clean energy is not a "transition," it is a destructive overturning of the present without a real vision of what is to come.

If the “clean energy transition” were economically efficient, financial support would be available. Market forces would affect the “transition” without Beltway interference. But unconventional energy is very far from efficient. It needs all the help it can get. So its devotees take money from the productive and efficient part of the economy and underwrite the inefficient 'new energy' economy with the diverted money.
 
An honest cost analysis of these policies will not be forthcoming because this is not a matter of commerce or economics but rather of ideology. And ideology--while passionate --generally has long escaped the intellect.


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