Tuesday, October 4, 2022

If Immigration is Bad Support Solar Power

The economic arguments against immigration are almost all nonsense. 

If expanding the population is bad, then shrinking the population must be good. 

Want to "create jobs," you moronic Luddites? Trying to undo automation? Easy: stop using black gold. Use solar panels to crack water for hydrogen. 

It's immensely labour-intensive. You spend at least 90% of the hydrogen you make transporting the remainder to where it needs to go. Which means you need ten times as much solar, which means ten times as much labour. Jobs! Jobs for everyone! Jobs everywhere!

E.g. build a giant chimney in the Sahara. Use the induced wind to run turbines, which power the water pumps and desalinators. Ship the resulting hydrogen and use it for everything. 


Indeed, perhaps solar is still too efficient. Why not power batteries using hand cranks? Don't exactly need an education to turn a crank for eight hours. Supervision costs are nice and low. Might end up using half the labour force to create energy, but hey: isn't that exactly what we wanted? Jobs!

 

Or maybe, just maybe, consider that the market is perfectly capable of clearing. Demand for jobs creates supply of jobs, same as demand always creates supply. If there's lots of "structural unemployment" that means the available labour isn't worth the lowest price you're allowed to pay for it. That's not a Capitalism problem.

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