I dunno. China is a "market socialist" system -- which is a contradiction in terms. If China is socialist, then for practical purposes Norway and Sweden have to be even *more* socialist because they have a comprehensive public welfare system which China lacks. And those Nordic countries are rated quite high on global measures of political and personal freedom, and very low on corruption. In general they outperform the US on most of those measures, although the US is better on measures of business deregulation.

That's not how electricity prices work.

In non-wholesale market areas the cost of electricity is set by the government. The net return to the utility is fixed and pretty low, low to mid single digits percent. Monthly or yearly price variation in those regions are virtually always related to pass-through costs like fuel or storm damage which the utility "passes through" without markup to the customer. New large loads, like a datacenter, basically get explicitly approved by the state via regulatory mechanisms to ensure they don't raise prices for consumers in excess of the benefits they provide the region.

In wholesale markets prices are set by the market itself (which an independent regional nonprofit runs), with generators bidding into the market with cost curves. That works a little differently market-to-market, but basically the utility calculates their breakeven cost for each generator and submits that. The market stack-ranks all the generators bid in, in real time (say every 5 minutes). The controllers for the grid then send orders to the generators whether they should be online, and at what generation level. There's all kind of complexities with that I won't get into. The key observation there however should be "wait, if they're bidding in at cost how do they make money?" And the answer is the unit "on the margin", i.e. the unit that is the most expensive that is required not to have blackouts, sets the market price in any given 5 minute period. That "most expensive" unit nets basically no money. Everybody else makes a profit of whatever the difference is between the most expensive unit's generating cost and their generating cost. There are independent market monitors that make sure no generator/utility are exerting market influence to game the system (which is illegal).

The author of the blog post is picking up on something real, which is that transmission constraints are increasingly impacting wholesale prices. There's quite a bit more going on than that though, and more transmission won't solve all of it.

One issue is that the price in a given hour is increasingly set by a marginal generator that is totally divorced in price from renewables. In a perfect world those higher cost marginal generators would eventually be replaced by the lower cost technology, but in practice the lower cost technology (solar, wind) is incapable of reliably serving electricity. So the more expensive generators stick around because they have to, and the renewables operators just increasingly pocket the difference. Most grid operators use a separate market that clears once a year and compensates reliability to ensure the grid doesn't collapse because stable generators retire. That has its own insufficiencies, but the end result is that the wholesale price of electricity is increasingly meaningless for sending price signals to generators as to whether they should stay operational. It really only works for telling a generator if they should be outputting in any given minute, not if a plant should continue to operate.

Another issue is that because of the way intermittent generation (wind, solar) warp the market the wholesale cost of electricity increasingly means nothing to consumer bills either. Take California, with the ironically stable (if high) wholesale prices but the soaring retail costs. Why is that? It's because incentives are warping the generation market, and those incentives are funded outside of wholesale electricity cost. Home solar rebate programs. Transmission infrastructure cost (solar/wind are typically far from power consumers and require a lot more/bigger power lines). Insurance cost (more transmission infrastructure for solar/wind increases the likelihood of things like wildfire, which increases insurance cost). Cost to build battery storage. Etc. These things all end up as line items in a homeowners bill, and they're functionally direct costs of wind and solar.

My personal take, as someone who has worked many years in the electric utility industry, is that the wholesale markets (MISO, PJM, etc.) are intrinsically broken. Price signals are not robust enough nor forward looking enough to accurately steer decision making. A more wholistic, top down decision making process just simply works better, and allows better control over things like carbon targets (especially when you have a range of goals among participating states). These market constructs frankly weren't devised very well from the beginning, and the problems with them have grown exponentially as wind/solar/other technologies have appeared and become cost-viable. The alternative is what we had before, and what 1/3 of the US still has: vertically integrated utilities, either privately owned and heavily regulated or outright owned by a government entity.

It makes no sense to claim Chinese courts have a lot of power, although it may seem that way â" itâ(TM)s supposed to seem that way. One of the foundational principles of Chinese jurisprudence is party supremacy. Every judge is supervised by a PLC â" party legal committee â" which oversees budgets, discipline and assignments in the judiciary. They consult with the judges in sensitive trials to ensure a politically acceptable outcome.

So it would be more accurate to characterize the courts as an instrument of party power rather than an independent power center.

From time to time Chinese court decisions become politically inconvenient, either through the supervisors in the PLC missing something or through changing circumstances. In those cases there is no formal process for the party to make the courts revisit the decision. Instead the normal procedure is for the inconvenient decision to quietly disappear from the legal databases, as if it never happened. When there is party supremacy, the party can simply rewrite judicial history to its current needs.

An independent judiciary seems like such a minor point; and frankly it is often an impediment to common sense. But without an independent judiciary you canâ(TM)t have rule of law, just rule by law.

Hereâ(TM)s the problem with that scenario: court rulings donâ(TM)t mean much in a state ruled by one party. China has plenty of progressive looking laws that donâ(TM)t get enforced if it is inconvenient to the party. There are emission standards for trucks and cars that should help with their pollution problems, but there are no enforcement mechanisms and officials have no interest in creating any if it would interfere with their economic targets or their private interests.

China is a country of strict rules and lax enforcement, which suits authoritarian rulers very well. It means laws are flouted routinely by virtually everyone, which gives the party leverage. Displease the party, and they have plenty of material to punish you, under color of enforcing laws. It sounds so benign, at least theyâ(TM)re enforcing the law part of the time, right? Wrong. Laws selectively enforced donâ(TM)t serve any public purpose; theyâ(TM)re just instruments of personal power.

Americans often donâ(TM)t seem to understand the difference between rule of law and rule *by* law. Itâ(TM)s ironic because the American Revolution and constitution were historically important in establishing the practicality of rule of law, in which political leaders were not only expected to obey the laws themselves, but had a duty to enforce the law impartially regardless of their personal opinions or interests.

Rule *by* law isnâ(TM)t a Chinese innovation, it was the operating principle for every government before 1789. A government that rules *by* law is only as good as the men wielding power, and since power corrupts, itâ(TM)s never very good for long.

Class 1 and 2 e-bikes limit assist to 20 mph, not 15. You can ride them faster than that, but you have to provide the power. 20 mph is well above what most recreational cyclists can maintain on a flat course, so if these classes arenâ(TM)t fast enough to be safe, neither is a regular bike. The performance is well within what is possible for a fit cyclist for short times , so their performance envelope is suitable for sharing bike and mixed use infrastructure like rail trails.

Class 3 bikes can assist riders to 28 mph. This is elite rider territory. There is no regulatory requirement ti equip the bike to handle those speeds safely, eg hydraulic brakes with adequate size rotors. E-bikes in this class are far more likely to pose injury risks to others. I think it makes a lot of sense to treat them as mopeds, requiring a drivers license for example.

Would treating them as mopeds be so bad?

What weâ(TM)re looking at is exactly what happened when gasoline cars started to become popular and created problems with deaths, injuries, and property damage. The answer to managing those problems and providing accountability was to make the vehicles display registration plates, require licensing of drivers, and enforcing minimum safety standards on cars. Iâ(TM)m not necessarily suggesting all these things should be done to e-bikes, but I donâ(TM)t see why they shouldnâ(TM)t be on the table.

I am a lifelong cyclist , over fifty years now, and in general I welcome e-bikes getting more people into light two wheel vehicles. But I see serious danger to both e-bike riders and the people around them. There are regulatory classes which limit the performance envelope of the vehicle, but class 3, allowing assist up to 28 mph, is far too powerful for a novice cyclist. Only the most athletic cyclists, like professional tour racers, can sustain speeds like that, but they have advanced bike handling skills and theyâ(TM)re doing it on bikes that weigh 1/5 of what complete novice novice e-bike riders are on. Plus the pros are on the best bikes money can buy. If you pay $1500 for an e-bike, youâ(TM)re getting about $1200 of battery and motor bolted onto $300 of bike.

Whatâ(TM)s worse, many e-bikes which have e-bike class stickers can be configured to ignore class performance restrictions, and you can have someone with no bike handling skills riding what in effect is an electric motorcycle with terrible brakes.

E-bike classification notwithstanding, thereâ(TM)s a continuum from electrified bicycles with performance roughly what is achievable by a casi recreational rider on one end, running all the way up to electric motorcycles. If there were only such a thing as a class 1 e-bike thereâ(TM)d be little need to build a regulatory system with registration and operator licensing. But you canâ(TM)t tell by glancing at a two wheel electric vehicle exactly where on the bike to motorcycle spectrum it falls; that depends on the motor specification and software settings. So as these things become more popular, I donâ(TM)t see any alternative to having a registration and inspection system for all of them, with regulatory categories and restrictions based on the weight and hardware performance limitations of the vehicle. Otherwise youâ(TM)ll have more of the worst case weâ(TM)re already seeing: preteen kids riding what are essentially electric motorcycles that weigh as much as they do because the parents think those things are âoebikesâ and therefore appropriate toys.

Socialism with American Characteristics

Iowa's rolling farm fields of coffee

Indeed, I fully agree. The funny thing is, monthly numbers would help us move away from the distortions of the quarterly cycle. If key data reporting becomes frequent enough, you can't get into a cycle of "do adverse-numbers stuff early in the quarter and then cram positive-numbers stuff into the end of the quarter". You have to - *gasp* - just run your business normally.

Some businesses could still manage to switch to a monthly cycle, but anyone who deals significantly in transoceanic feedstocks/parts/goods shipments won't be able to.

BLS numbers aren't some sort of dark art. They're literally just the compiled numbers reported by companies. Numbers are what they are. To fight against jobs numbers is to fight against reality.

People get confused by the existence of revisions. The problem is that not all data gets reported in a timely manner. When late data comes in, it causes revisions to the earlier reported numbers, either up or down.

Firing the head of the BLS because you don't like what numbers US companies reported is just insane Banana Republic-level nonsense.

Yes, he fired the same person who was ultimately responsible for putting out crap numbers.

US reporting has always been the gold standard. Nobody has accused the BLS of "crap numbers" until Trump decided he didn't like them. It's is so way outside the norms it doesn't even resemble something that could conceivably happen in the US; this is banana republic-level stuff.

Yeah, as an investor, my reaction to this proposal was, oh HELL no.

TL / DR:

BLS chief: "Jobs are turning bad now."

Trump: "Fake news, you're fired. I'm appointing a January 6th rioter conspiracy theorist to head the BLS!"

BLS today: "Jobs were ALREADY bad!"

The fact that you take at face value a revision of Biden-era job numbers, immediately after Trump fired and replaced the BLS chief explicitly because he published jobs numbers Trump didn't like, is....

Well, it's certainly a choice.

I was thinking the same thing. What sort of an idiot will take US jobs numbers at face value right after Trump fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics chief after he reported numbers that Trump didn't like?