Unfortunately it’s not a simple problem.

Real estate is non-commoditized for a number of reasons. A big part is that people have wildly different needs when it comes to housing. They don’t just prioritize different things, they often care about completely different factors. In many cases a feature to one person is a bug to an other.

People have tried to build large housing blocks in the past with mixed success. It’s certainly better than being homeless. Particularly in areas where all the previous housing had been bombed to rubble, the prospect of any shelter is incredibly attractive.

The DDR economy isn’t exactly one we want to model here. Remember that the overall system was so bad that people risked getting shot just to get out. Yes, there were many factors to why their economy was terrible but part of it was a Soviet era belief that the government could make major economic policy decisions without having to think too hard about the individual level details.

I wouldn’t read too much into prices in a command economy. Energy was famously cheap because the USSR overproduced energy. It was so cheap that many public buildings didn’t have light switches, they just left them on. That was money that could have been spent on more productive things. I also remember visiting the USSR during “Glasnost”. They were opening up but they still had the old price controls. Bread and Vodka prices were in single digit Kopecks. 100 Kopeck to the Ruble. The official exchange rate was something like 2 USD per Ruble. If you paid more than 1 USD for 5 Rubles on the street, you were getting ripped off. If you were savvy, 1 USD could get you up to 20 Rubles.

I do like your idea of the government building lots of housing. I’d just modify it a bit. The government builds houses all over the place. Each one is put up for auction with the minimum bid being break-even. If there’s every a time when those auctions don’t get bids, pause new construction in that area until it does.

That algorithm prevents over production of housing, allows for housing in the correct locations (as determined by the residents), automatically adjusts as demand increases, and allows for varied housing to meet the varied needs of a diverse set of residents. It’s also largely immune to speculation. If some hedge fund tries to buy all those houses, they’ll just be left holding the bag when the government pumps out cheaper alternatives.

It would crush real estate as an investment vehicle. Real estate won’t just stop going up in value, we’d be actively working to plateau or even reduce those values. I see that as a feature rather than a bug.

Housing is generally cited as the canonical opposite of commodity products. Each one has to be valued independently and there’s often a huge delta between sales price and market price.

The thing is that we always have vacant homes. Homes that are under renovation or waiting for the next tenant to move into or are in the wrong location. Vacancy rates are currently at one of the lowest points in history. We’re doing a better job cramming people into available housing than ever before and it’s not enough.

I just watched some gangsters kidnap someone in broad daylight.

https://www.aceee.org/files/proceedings/2002/data/papers/SS02_Panel1_Paper24.pdf

Shading the compressor can help but it can also hurt.

Those units can draw enormous amounts of air. Unless the shading covers a very wide area around the compressor, it’s likely to mostly pull in air that wasn’t shaded and is still at normal ambient temperature.

If the shading obstructs airflow, it can reduce the efficiency of the unit.

That vote just shows us the British House of Commons is full of racists. Nothing new there.

This is satire, right?

It’s a better measure but not a perfect one. The big problem with the US-China GDP comparison is that the US has much more of a service economy while China has a much more manufacturing based economy.

Manufacturing pollutes much more than services do but services don’t exist without the manufacturing.

That’s why I was saying a better measure would be pollution per GNP. That would cut out services and basically just count manufacturing output. That would make sense because it’s the biggest source of pollution and it’s the source you can do the most about (ie there’s a lot of room to make many parts of the manufacturing chain cleaner).

Nobody is as green as their marketing suggests and China is no exception. China is making huge investments in green tech and there’s still a long way to go.

Because humans just existing produces far less pollution than humans producing a lot of stuff.

It’s trivial to say that a bunch of hunter-gatherers don’t pollute much but we’re not generally willing to relegate people to living in the stone age.

Our economic choices have a much larger impact on pollution than our personal choices do. Ideally we’d have a measure of pollution per consumption. Everyone would have a score that calculates the total pollution created by the entire supply chain that supports their choices. So if a mine in Africa is polluting so a Chinese guy can have a nice air condition, that should be counted for China; and if a factory in China pollutes so that a guy in the US can have a new Iphone, that should be counted for the US.

I’m not aware of any such data set. The closest proxy would be GDP or GNP. That essentially provides a measure of how much pollution the total lifestyle of that population produces.

That’s not really how it works. Some random Chinese peasant (that’s the vast majority of China’s population) doesn’t produce much CO2. You can add or remove millions of them without significantly impacting coal consumption or CO2 production.

Industry pollutes. Some types pollute more than others.

China has been increasing energy usage across the board at a much higher rate than the population has been growing. It’s a nonsense plan because there’s no reason to think that reducing the population would affect that trend.

While there’s a clear trend of China using more coal there’s just as clear a trend of coal making up a smaller and smaller share of China’s power usage over time. Just about every analysis says they’re solidly on track to completely phase out coal by 2025 and nobody predicts they’ll need to shrink their population to do it.

So you’re saying there are just too many Chinese people? How many should there be?

Trains and ships are part of the logistics chain but trucks are definitely part of it. They have a big advantage of not needing train stations or ports, as long as you have a decent road. Some of the larger strip mining operations fill a truck per minute.

China effectively seems to be playing Factorio. They have a solar/wind production rate of X/day and X keeps going up faster and faster.

They’ll sell those panels and turbines to whoever will take them. They’re cheap but the sheer volume means that you need a huge economy to take any significant share of that inventory. With the US effectively out of the picture the biggest remaining economy is China. On top of that the EU does have some tariffs on Chinese renewables and that skews the deployments even more towards China.

Unreliable may have been a poor choice of words.
You can’t move coal around with pipes or wires. Someone needs to drive trucks full of coal to a power plant.

The pollution from coal tends to have a lot of externalities that drag on the economy. Lost work days, faster equipment degradation, etc.

They use coal but they have practical reasons to want to reduce reliance on coal.

GDP is total production net of total consumption. It would be cool to compare it to those factors independently but don’t know of anyone who reports that data.

I’m not looking to bestow sainthood upon any country. Just looking for the most accurate metric.

95% of the world’s new coal construction (2023)

China had the largest new coal construction in 2023 but it was far below 95%. I didn’t do all the math but it drops below 50% when you compare it to just the growth of the next three biggest coal producers.

They build most of our solar but we’ve effectively banned it now. They’re not only growing capacity to produce renewables, they’re taking the outputs that were planned for sale here and installing them locally.

Yes. And go check the percentage of coal use over time. Coal is going up. Renewables are going up much faster.

You should be pretty happy with China then. They have a replacement rate just over one. That’s lower than the US or Europe.

This has been going on for years and will continue.

China really really really needs a robust and diverse energy infrastructure. Industry needs huge amounts of energy. AI needs huge amounts of energy. The military needs huge amounts of energy.

Coal is unreliable and dirty. Oil can be blocked at the Straight of Malacca and a few pipelines.

China is also the world’s factory. They own the entire logistics chain for producing renewable generators; from raw materials to final assembly. They have all the infrastructure to not only build solar panels and wind turbines at scale, they’ve scaled up building the machines that build them.

Pollution per GDP is a better measure. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co2-intensity Pollution per GNP would be even better but I can’t find it.

Individuals don’t pollution much, it’s mostly industry. Really poor countries often don’t pollution much because they can’t afford to. Sometimes they pollute prodigiously because the only thing they can afford to do is destructive resource extraction. Rich countries can often outsource their pollution to poorer countries.

China has been making mind boggling investments in renewables. They have been expanding all their energy sources but their renewables have the lions share of the growth.

They’ve been building roads and all kinds of infrastructure. That’s what the BRI is all about, even if they’re being a bit quieter about saying the phrase. They like to build their long haul roads on elevated columns; not only because it’s less disruptive to wildlife but because it lets them use giant road laying robots to place prefab highway segments.

They dropped the one-child policy a while back but they’re having some trouble getting people to have more babies. That said, there’s some research that suggests that rural populations around the world are severely undercounted, so they may have a bunch more subsistence farmers than they, or anyone else, realizes.