This causes major market distortions and worse outcomes than the econ 101 solution.
The problem is that water isn't traded on a normal market at all. Lots of people have historical water rights and pay nearly nothing for their water use. There's byzantine regulation and many have the right to use for some purpose on their land but not to resell, so the market cannot allocate to more efficient use.
If you just let the 101 level solution actually work, water prices will rise until inefficient uses like water-intensive agriculture (not even all crops!) are pushed out. Urban users easily outbid almost all agricultural use, even at what any person would consider dirt cheap prices. For example, desalinated water, which is considered expensive for agriculture, can be 40 cents per cubic meter of water. That's a lot of water! Usually the last mile of urban water delivery costs more than that.
The amount required to satisfy all urban use, including water hungry lawns etc, and datacenters, corresponds to a very minor reduction in agriculture. Perhaps even just changing which crop is grown or switching irrigation techniques.
Charging more to higher users, price discrimination, causes several problems. First, it creates an incentive to cheat. I'm not using all this water myself, its for this whole group of people who "live" here. Don't allow this kind of spreading (somehow...)? Now you actually screw any business or institution that serves a lot of people. A farm produces food for thousands- do they count as one user? A park uses much more water than a garden but serves many more people. Whatever framework you create will require another bureaucracy to run. Lobbyists will find or insert loopholes for their friends.
The heavy users actually improve the system robustness, in both electricity and water. Their higher demand pays for more supply infrastructure, which itself often benefits from economies of scale, and in a shortage they may even be more responsive to price increases due to their high use.
The 101 level solution means that Native Americans who were granted water rights by the Spanish, and guaranteed those rights by US treaties, would have to outbid urban users in order to grow subsistence crops.
The heavy users have more influence over the laws which govern the infrastructure, as the history of water rights in the West clearly shows. We see it now when secretive organizations negotiate with water companies under NDA to get water for new data centers - something a smaller water user couldn't do.
The riparian doctrine of the East, with its high rainfall, don't work so well in the dry West, which is why it generally uses the prior appropriation doctrine. Water management was traditionally under a communal system. Some of these still exist as acequia associations, which include equity and fairness in their decisions, which doesn't follow the prior appropriation doctrine.
If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them. They can choose to use it inefficiently on subsistence farming, or they could sell at the going rate. A normal market itself doesn't imply any particular allocation of water rights, just that they should be as fungible and transferable as possible.
Why are the laws that govern the infrastructure particularly important? It only matters now because its a tangle of regulation. Yes, big users can often get bulk discounts or other special arrangements by committing to use. This happens in many areas.
There's no law governing what products my grocery store must carry. Yet, I can still choose a store with many things I like, at affordable prices. My store may (and frequently does) exclude all products containing some chemical considered harmful even if it isn't banned. Of course, water has more of a natural monopoly problem, but that's more for last mile infrastructure and not broader supply.
I don't understand the details of the riparian vs prior appropriation doctrine. How does this create an issue? If the water rights are defined somehow, in a usage-independent way, only in terms of the net water removal, to account for runoff from local use, and the water from them can be traded, then a market can work regardless of the specific nature of the right.
Any association holding the rights could allocate its water internally as it sees fit. Just like any other asset? Or it could decide to sell it and distribute the money instead- perhaps even better for fairness to it's members!
> If the Native Americans have water rights, they can also sell them.
You've just described the standard practice for taking over Native American lands by economic coercion instead of direct force. Take away land and water using market forces, and a culture based on land and water shatters.
That's precisely why the Native Americans protected their rights by treaty, not market forces.
Econ 101 was created to justify British colonial expansionism. Econ 101 justifies indentured servitude. Econ 101 justifies vote selling. Econ 101 justifies rule by the rich.
We've collectively decided that some part of life are off-limits to Econ 101.
Water is not simply a commodity. Water is life. Water is culture.
> How does this create an issue?
Water rights in the West are at least a Econ 400 level course, if not graduate school.
The land and any associated rights was taken from the Native Americans by coercive force. Not a market. Not that they have any particular claim to it; states own land, not ethnicities. The particular state that controls land sometimes changes. This has little to do with any discussion of water rights.
I am suggesting expanding their water right- instead of only the right to do X, Y, Z with the water, take whatever right to the water they do have, in terms of amount of water, and say "you can do whatever you want with this much water". How to allocate resource rents doesn't have much effect on the market structure itself.
A lot of vitriol against supply and demand without any evidence.
Food is life. Food is culture. Just as much as water. Which countries have had famine, those that allocate via some system of food rights, or those that had a free market in food? The largest examples of famine I am aware of, in the USSR and Maoist China, were driven by some central allocation of food rather than a market. Not a good record.
One of the great features of markets is that things don't need to be decided collectively. Perhaps 90% of people want to wear blue T shirts, but I want a red one. If we collectively decide, I get a blue T shirt. In the market, I buy a red T shirt- perhaps at a very slightly higher price due to less economy of scale.
We certainly know of areas where vanilla markets can fail- externalities etc, but these do not apply to the situation here. The existing system of water rights doesn't feel like a collective decision, but rather entrenched special interests and lobbyists.
I can see you don't recognize native sovereignty. Tribal nations are domestic dependent nations, and count as a "state". The water rights were not taken by coercive force but remain with the nation, and at least nominally protected by treaty rights.
It's very odd that you talk about a decentralized market when water allocation in the US Southwest was decided by the Colorado River Compact in 1922. This is central allocation and, famously, based on over-estimated flow numbers.
Most large famines were caused by flooding or drought. More people died in the Chinese famine of 1906–1907 than the Russian famine of 1921–1922 and the Soviet famine of 1932–1933 combined.
> The existing system of water rights doesn't feel like a collective decision, but rather entrenched special interests and lobbyists.
That is absolutely correct, and would covered in the first week of any water rights class. In the West, "water flows uphill toward money", as I learned from reading "Cadillac Desert".
Or if you want a novel, read "The Milagro Beanfield War." The small farmers (mostly Hispanic) were drafted for WWII and couldn't farm, so lost their water rights, while the large farmers (mostly Anglo) could hire help.
"The Santa Fe Ring was an informal group of powerful politicians, attorneys, and land speculators in territorial New Mexico from 1865 until 1912. The Ring was composed of newly-arrived Anglo Americans and opportunistic Hispanics from long-resident and prominent families in New Mexico. Acquiring wealth, both groups realized, lay in owning or controlling the millions of acres of land which the Spanish and Mexican governments of New Mexico had granted to individuals and communities. The acquisition of grant lands by members of the Santa Fe Ring was facilitated by U.S. courts who had no allegiance to Mexican claims and land practices which featured allocating most of the land in grants to the common ownership of the first settlers and their descendants vs. legal private ownership."
What exists is a patchwork of economic systems, there is no cohesive whole, and you clearly prefer the US one which prioritizes the private ownership model of Econ 101.
That's why you can't view it simply through an Econ 101 lens.
A state is an entity with a monopoly on coercion. The tribal nations do not have this- while they have some carve-outs, ultimately federal law trumps theirs. So its not a matter of recognition, they simply do not meet my definition of a state.
Nominally is exactly right! The treaties have been violated many times.
You're missing the 1959-61 famine in China! Sure, famines have happened for other causes. Typically 100+ years ago before technology advanced. Now, famines largely come from poor governance.
Thanks for the background info!
Yes, I agree it is a patchwork system- and its probably quite difficulty to analyze! I'm arguing that a private ownership model with trading would lead to better outcomes, and basically end for all practical purposes water shortages.
For example, the smaller mostly Hispanic farmers you described above wouldn't lose their water rights in a rights ownership system- they could hold them, rent them out, sell them etc. But they wouldn't lose them merely for being unable to farm. Of course, water rights are a resource rent and it might be desirable to tax them as well- effectively economically partially public ownership- but this doesn't change the core argument about the efficiency of tradable rights.
This is nonsense. In every material good, the buying power of nearly everyone has increased in real terms over time, regardless of inequality. It's only in housing, with constrained supply, that inequality can drive up prices; and even in that case, it doesn't actually change the housing supply- if prices are high, that just means a lot of people who want to live there! Inequality doesn't reduce the number of houses.
Building a little reduces prices a little. Building a lot reduces prices a lot. If the prices are very high, then it's very profitable to build, so unless stopped by regulation, you will get a lot of building. Even if building merely keeps the price from going up as density increases, the value provided by living in an area goes up from agglomeration effects as it grows.
This doesn't mention the most economically sound and complete solution to traffic: dynamic congestion pricing on roads.
Due to the effects described in the article, entering a road that's close to congested imposes negative externalities due to the delay on everyone behind you, even higher if you are pushing the road below optimal throughput. Push that externality into the price, and suddenly drivers will change their behavior in the desired fashion:
1. People will move their travel to less expensive times. Even if no other change occurs than people waiting for prices to fall, the roads operate at much higher throughput due to never getting into the region of diminishing throughput.
2. People will carpool/vanpool/mass transit- no need for any special treatment for transit, a bus with 50+ people can simply outbid most cars on the road for space, even accounting for the difference in road space taken by the bus. With the economic incentive in place, you'd even expect private buses/etc to pop up spontaneously. Right now, its rarely worth it to pool/bus- it adds extra time for you, but the benefit to the road you never see. With proper pricing, its still faster to take a car, but a lot more expensive- and the carpool/bus/etc is still probably faster than driving would be with congested roads.
3. Similarly, the high prices will incentivize alternatives such as biking, subways, etc, and give very good information on exactly what routes are in high demand when, estimates of how much an improvement would be worth, etc.
Naw, the most economic solution is to make bigger bumpers and let cars push each other forward.
Think about a hose. If you have it at a certain flow and then increase the flow the water doesn't go out faster because it wants it. It flows faster because it's being pushed.
Same thing with cars, as more cars get onto the highway you want them to go at a higher speed so that the throughput matches the on ramp. We just need to cut down the number of 4 lane highways so that we have space to put exit ramps on both sides of a 2 lane highway but the increased speed will make up for it.
Yes, we should just make couplings so that a long string of cars can be attached together. The trailing cars could all follow the lead car. If you add some guide rails to the road you don't even need a fancy autonomous steering system. Swap the rubber tires for steel wheels on the guide rails and you reduce friction losses and eliminate flat tires. A centralized dispatch and signaling system could keep the system free flowing and enable high capacities.
At high demand times, you have to be very rich indeed to outbid a full bus without even thinking about it. There aren't enough people who can do that.
But say this does happen a lot-this means rich people pay enormous road use fees, which can then be used for road maintenance, construction, and improvement, as well as other transit infrastructure!
So, the rich willingly subsidize infrastructure for everyone? Seems like a win-win!
That's a nice pipe dream, but what would happen in reality is that all of the congestion fees would go to the rich (perhaps in the form of tax cuts), who would use it to buy more stock, bribe some politicians to ban buses, and then triple the congestion charge because fuck you.
The congestion fees would go to the government responsible for the roads. Of course, they could be captured by the rich, but most governments spend most of their money not on the rich.
You'd set the congestion charge, by law (at least on public roads), to the minimum required for efficient road use- not the revenue maximizing price, which would likely be much higher due to monopoly.
Why do people insist on this tired unimaginative trope. We have the past and present to look at. We know how these things work.
The rules will be crafted, the commas in the laws placed, the contracts handed out, to support those who supported the endeavor. If the plumber's trade group agrees to support it their vans will be exempt. If Palantir supports it, the RFP will be written to make it nigh on impossible to not buy their stuff. No matter how flagrant the badness of the system, if the tech industry makes even a cent, the comment section full of techies will engage in olympic level mental gymnastics and not just do bending over backwards but doing full on backflips to justify the goodness of the system. If the bus drivers have such a comment section they'll do it too.
This is how things were. This is how they are. This is how they will be. Well, right up until the point where the rest of society gets sick of our shit and leaves us in a big communal hole or gives us a free shower or whatever happens to the fashionable way to do that thing is at that point in the future...
But I suppose maybe you're right and they'll throw a few pennies of tax cuts at it if they just need a little upper middle class support to drag it across the finish line.
Depends how you define "equal". One approach is simply to scale the charge by income -- effectively, convert time to money, and charge you a congestion tax of some amount of money-earning time. "6 minutes" is 1/10000 of your annual income -- $2 for someone earning $20,000 per year, $20 for someone earning $200,000 per year.
But does a vehicle with several people in it pay for the max, min, median, average, or the driver's time? I suspect "driver" is easiest, it seems like it might work but I'll bet there are some screwy ways to game that rule, too.
And also in essentially any relevant private market for goods and services where capacity is limited, especially when there are more and less desirable times.
How do you propose people find out the cost of traveling if the pricing is dynamic? People won’t check beforehand, and they’ll already be in their cars when they find out the cost
Navigation/maps providers like Google/Apple maps, etc, will incorporate price estimates as well as time estimates- they can even show multiple options if there are price-time tradeoffs available.
There's a formal equivalence between Markov chains and literally any system. The entire world can be viewed as a Markov chain. This doesn't tell you anything of interest, just that if you expand state without bound you eventually get the Markov property.
Why can't an LLM do backtracking? Not only within its multiple layers but across token models as reasoning models already do.
You are a probabilistic generative model (If you object, all of quantum mechanics is). I guess that means you can't do any reasoning!
In the theoretical section, they extrapolate assuming a polynomial from 40 to thousands of dimensions. Why do they trust a polynomial fit to extrapolate two orders of magnitude? Why do we even think it's polynomial instead of exponential in the first place? Most things like this increase exponentially with dimension.
In fact, I think we can do it in d=2k dimensions, if we're willing to have arbitrarily precise query vectors.
Embed our points as (sin(theta), cos(theta), sin(2 x theta), cos(2 x theta)..., sin(k x theta), cos(k x theta)), with theta uniformly spaced around the circle, and we should be able to select any k of them.
Using a few more dimensions we can then ease the precision requirements on the query.
In practice you're actually hitting further problems because you don't have those synthetic top-k tasks but rather open-domain documents and queries to support.
And if you hope to get better than "just" having the top-k correct and instead get some sort of inclusion/exclusion boundary between what should be matched and what should not be matched, you'll hit the same bounds as apply to context length limitations for kq dimenionality in a transformer's attention layers, as I mentioned about 6 weeks ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44570650
I'm not following your construction. In the k=2 case, how do you construct your 4-dimensional query vector so that the dot product is maximized for two different angles theta and phi, but lower for any other arbitrary angle?
Viewing our space as two complex points instead of four real:
Let H(z) = (z- exp(i theta)) (z - exp(i phi))
H(z) is zero only for our two points. We'll now take the norm^2, to get something that's minimized on only our two chosen points.
|H(exp(i x))|^2 = H(z) x conj(H(z)) = sum from -2 to 2 of c_j x exp(i j x)
For some c_j (just multiply it out). Note that this is just a Fourier series with highest harmonic 2 (or k in general), so in fact our c_j tell us the four coefficients to use.
For a simpler, but numerically nastier construction, instead use (t, t^2, t^3, ...), the real moment curve. Then given k points, take the degree k poly with those zeros. Square it, negate, and we get a degree 2k polynomial that's maximized only on our selected k points. The coefficients of this poly are the coefficients of our query vector, as once expanded onto the moment curve we can evaluate polynomials by dot product with the coefficients.
The complex version is exactly the same idea but with z^k and z ranging on the unit circle instead.
If you want heat, why bother converting sunlight to electricity first? You lose 80%. Is it that much more expensive to use mirrors to concentrate sunlight and capture near-100% of the energy as heat?
Because with a heliostat you have to move the energy as heat and that isn't as efficient and definitely not as easy or cheap as moving it as electricity.
Do the numbers. Making the top of the heliostat isn't what matters. What matters is making the inside of a pile of dirt that hot.
I broadly agree with you, but there is really a point here about land ownership.
Although developments of the land do improve the value, and thus land ownership has significant utility economically by incentivizing this, there isn't really an economic justification for the owner receiving value for the land itself- why should someone have exclusive rights to a piece of land they didn't create? They bought it, sure, but why did the previous owner have perpetual exclusive rights?
I'd advocate for a small property tax as a replacement for other taxes, because the component that does tax "land value" won't cause economic harm, but all of income tax causes deadweight loss. (Note, Land Value Tax is great in theory, but impossible to define practically- property tax good enough, much harder to game!)
Note that in practice, the biggest abuser of land hoarding is local governments with extremely restrictive zoning that stops productive development of the land- from an economic perspective they own the land, and have sold (or in reality, seized) some but not all of the rights from the 'landowner'. Although this can have advantages to help with coordination problems, in practice it's caused enormous economic damage to many cities by preventing development. At its heart, it's a problem with land hoarding.
It's because going from 1 to 2 changes the expected worst case load from an asymptotic log to an asymptotic log log, and further increases just change a constant.
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