Comment by dist-epoch
5 months ago
Some of us call this "capitalism". Prices are driven by offer and demand, efficient market allocation to who can extract most value from a resource, we like that on HN.
5 months ago
Some of us call this "capitalism". Prices are driven by offer and demand, efficient market allocation to who can extract most value from a resource, we like that on HN.
Prices are actually driven by value. How much do you want the thing? Do data centers value power? I would think so, since they cannot operate without it. Utilities should be charging them a premium.
If utilities charge them a premium, why would they sell power to those which do not pay the premium instead of auctioning all power?
Because they're theoretically regulated and ordered to do so. The market for power is not a free market due to the locally monopolistic nature of it.
Things cost exactly what we pay for them.
> Prices are driven by offer and demand, efficient market allocation to who can extract most value from a resource, we like that on HN.
What is the value of the bottom-half of income earners being able to pay for heating and cooking?
This is not capitalism because the laws are distorting the market, favoring large corporations over consumers.
Captialism is really good at efficiency. But it is not so good at allocation, specifically for essential goods, and that's the problem here.
How do you define what is an essential good here? For electricity I would place most residential usage near the bottom in priority and definitely below a datacenter. People complaining about facing a tradeoff between setting the thermostat a couple degrees higher this summer or facing a higher power bill just doesn't get much sympathy from me.
If you view powering people's homes as a lower priority than powering a data center then there is no reasonable discussion to be had here.
Why do you want to subsidize the data centers of some of the largest and most profitable corporations in the world?
And this is precisely why raw, unfettered capitalism isn't really the norm in the developed world.