Jevons Paradox

It seems similar to anecdata as the US migrated from dialup to broadband internet services. In theory you could finish downloading everything you needed in a fraction of the time so the bandwidth should remain unused longer.<p>In practice, people started downloading everything. I just need this Linux distribution but here&#x27;s a dozen more I can now get in minutes and try out that were prohibitive to download before to experiment with but now aren&#x27;t. People started downloading video game demos like crazy, setup file servers on their home systems, etc.<p>It turns out the new efficiencies tend to be quickly gobbled up by existing processes that were stonewalled before. As long as there are problems bound by some technological constraint, any efficiency gains disappear rapidly as they&#x27;re quickly integrated into existing or new processes. You didn&#x27;t use that much bandwidth before because it was scarce but now you have a firehydrant so let&#x27;s see what we can use. Humans are pretty great at quickly finding ways to gobble up and expand resources whenever they&#x27;re found. Once you break one of those barriers it may be that the other barriers weren&#x27;t as unsormountable which leads to rapid rise in demand. That&#x27;s been my 2 cents.

And in this corner: Braess&#x27;s Paradox, &quot;the observation that adding one or more roads to a road network can slow down overall traffic flow through it.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Braess%27s_paradox" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Braess%27s_paradox</a>

A theory I&#x27;ve often had: the Jevons paradox explains why desktop software remains so slow despite the massive improvements in hardware speeds. When you improve the efficiency of the hardware, software starts to demand more CPU cycles, since there&#x27;s less of an incentive to optimize.

In data science and machine learning you can see this paradox in the fact that no amount of data is enough: once you get enough data to run a simple model, you will want to make the model as complicated as the available data allows and beyond. And you&#x27;re short on data again.

I think this is probably why we&#x27;ll eventually have some sort of carbon rationing if we really want to take limiting carbon emissions seriously. There&#x27;s only so much making things more efficient can accomplish.

I’ve given this some thought with regards to small-scale off-grid solar and battery use. Last summer I installed 540Ah (12v) in a houseboat and was able to power a small air conditioning unit overnight to allow our family to sleep comfortably when the temps are &gt;80F&#x2F;26C. Most nights we would wake with about 40% charge, allowing us to cook breakfast on an induction cook top.<p>At least in my small world of river glamping, having an efficient battery&#x2F;solar&#x2F;appliance system leads me to use and rely on it more.<p>If you have it you may as well use it, especially if it’s renewable once it’s installed.<p>This may all seem totally obvious but keep in mind one of the first steps to building out this kind of system is tallying up your intended energy usage. We didn’t “need” to have A&#x2F;C but it makes the entire experience that much more accessible&#x2F;enjoyable with small children in small spaces.<p>The spreadsheet of usage can quickly snowball as watt-creep sets in and you think: “well if I’ve got this efficient refrigerator to store breakfast then I’ll probably need a kettle for coffee” etc.<p>Can’t wait for summer!

I believe this explains a modern proliferation of paperwork. Computers made it more efficient to administer and complete but because of Jevon&#x27;s Paradox we spend more time on it instead of less.

Yet, domestic electric power use is in sharp decline. It turns out people have as much light as they want.<p>It will be rising again sharply as people start charging their cars, and replacing furnaces with heat pumps.

Yup, here’s an article talking about this as applied to crypto, like Bitcoin: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tftc.io&#x2F;martys-bent&#x2F;issue-678&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tftc.io&#x2F;martys-bent&#x2F;issue-678&#x2F;</a><p>&gt; We haven&#x27;t even touched on the future dynamics of mining, which provides the long-term security that people are so worried about.<p>&gt; As oil and gas companies continue to wake up and realize they can use all of the FREE gas they are currently wasting on their fields to mine bitcoin, this will severely reduce the price at which your average miner can mine profitably. An externality that many are blind to at the moment.

There is no paradox, if one is familiar with the modus operandi of human species: &quot;given the opportunity to consume the humans will consume to the point when there is anything left to consume&quot;

As far as all this goes First, there are Timers for power switches. I have one that splits off into 3 I run mine on a 15&amp;15. And I having a second set for 30m&amp;2h. If you thought about the road system, we are yet to be make full advantage of all possibility.. For we are yet to take advantage of our, Up yet. We are still only capable of driving on flat. Yes, we do have planes andvARE able to use about 0.001% of its capabilities. Yes, its does decongest pur roadways but not enough to clear say T.D. NewYork, or L.A.. We are our future. even as slow as we are progressing.. It IS Progression.

I imagine the following, if the price of clean energy catches up with the price of fossil fuel, the price of fossil fuel will fall and its use will increase.

This reminds me of programming through the decades: going from binary&#x2F;punch cards to assembly to high level languages to even higher level languages (and libraries and frameworks): at each jump, programmers can do the same thing as before with less effort and time. Did this mean less demand for programmers?<p>Nope! Actually the opposite: per-programmer productivity rising meant <i>more</i> demand for programmers, because programmers became more useful, and it turns out “manipulate information” is a skill with nearly endless uses.

Economists don&#x27;t know how to divide?<p>It appears to be increased consumption, if you don&#x27;t do it &#x27;per capita&#x27;.

Is this really a paradox or acknowledgement that efficiency will adopt the most cost effective inputs.

This is why we can’t rely on technological progress alone to stop global warming.