Name: The coal question
ISBN: 9780353513778

What Hacker News says

dredmorbiusJun 2016

As others have mentioned, different metals and the propensity to work them require differing amounts of knowledge. They also require vastly different amounts of fuel.

Egypt was fuel-starved. Its only arable region is along the banks of the Nile river, a band at best a few kilometers wide, which to this day remains the population center of the country. Wood came either from up-river (rarely), or from other points in the Mediterranean. I'm weak on the specifics, but the ancient references to the Pines of Lebanon bear on this.

Meteoric iron is valuable because it is molecularly pure iron. It's essentially supernova ash -- what's left after the final stages of stellar fusion result in least-nuclear-potential atoms, iron and nickel. It's molecularly pure because it hasn't rusted -- in space, no one can hear you rust, either.

Iron on Earth is rusted in large part due to the early stages of biological evolution in which the great oxygenation event occurred, and with it the great rusting -- oxidation of what was, at the time, pure molecular iron lying on Earth's surface, with the now newly-available oxygen. Semlting is a de-oxidation process.

Many of the great iron ore fields are also the result of biological activity -- early-stage microbial life using iron (I am not sure of how specifically) in its own metabolic processes, and depositing large stratified bands of iron as a result. These ores are 1-3 billion years old. As with other resources, they're among those humans have been tearing through, literally, at an amazing clip over the past 200 years.

Iron smelting prior to the age of coal was performed using charcoal. Charcoal kilns -- you can find pictures online -- are large beehive-shaped stone structures which were stacked full of wood and lit afire. The wood was pyrolised but not combusted, pushing out the impurities. This is close in chemical properties to coal which is, in essence, wood subject to somewhat longer pyrolisation processes, as well as geological formation.

And the modern switch from charcoal to coal (originally sea-coal, opportunistically harvested chunks broken from open seams along the English seashore) occurred as what had been a heavily-forested Britain was exhausting its own renewable wood resource and turned instead to coal. An activity which already by the late 1700s was recognised as unsustainable (John Williams, A Natural History of the Mineral Kingdom, 1789).

Discussed at greater length in William Stanley Jevons' The Coal Question:

https://archive.org/stream/coalquestioninqu00jevo#page/14/mo...

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technothrasherJul 2026

I assume the reference was to the Jevons paradox, as described in Jevons' 1865 book, "The Coal Question". Watt's steam engine massively increased the efficiency of coal in steam engines, which increased the use of coal fired steam engines, which increased coal consumption.

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dredmorbiusJan 2025

Thanks for that.

There's a Jevons Paradox article up now and I'll put most of my thoughts there: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42863808>

If you care to respond though, my first question would be what examples of falling input prices not subject to the Jevons Paradox are. Several of the more notorious ones involve energy, and that was Jevons's principle topic of study (The Coal Question most notably).

I've got my own theory of how technological mechanisms function, with an ontology of nine elements. Fuels are one of those, information is another. See prior comments: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

As might be pertinent to AI and LLM, whilst fuels and power applications seem to scale linearly against input (constant slope, if not 1:1 relation), information processing delivers far more variable returns, often with critical thresholds. Network effects and Metcalfe's Law are the best known of these (if highly inaccurate themselves, see Tilly-Odlyzko's refutation), but another is the limited returns of predictive and targeting applications.

For the latter, the 18 order of magnitude increase in computing power from 1965--2025 (60 years, about 20--30 Moore's Law cycles) has roughly doubled the length of accurate long-term weather forecasting from roughly 5 days to 10. It's made possible fully-resuable first-stage boosters for orbital spaceflight, which is visually impressive, but has only resulted in a five-fold reduction ($1,400/kg vs. $5,400/kg) in low-Earth orbit (LEO) launch costs (Falcon Heavy vs. Saturn V). SpaceX are looking for another factor of 2--4 reduction (to $250--600/kg), but that's still far less improvement than we've seen in raw compute. At some point orbital physics, the rocket equation, and fuel chemistry simply dominate other considerations.

Similarly, AdTech makes possible far more targeted advertising, but to heavily diminishing returns, the core result has been an abandonment of non-targetable media by advertisers, notably print and broadcast, as well as an arms-race between the browser (for a very small fraction of the market) and advertisers (the largest of which also has the largest browser marketshare), and a concentration of advertising revenue amongst two online entities, Google (a/k/a Alphabet) and Facebook (a/k/a Meta).

Which makes me wonder what applications AI LLMs might practically be put to. Advertising, manipulation, fraud, and propaganda certainly seem to be benefiting.

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nindalfSep 2023

This isn’t a new idea. In 1865 the economist William Stanley Jevons pointed out that increasing the efficiency of machines that burned coal would lead to more coal being burned, not less.

Making something more efficient makes it cheaper, unlocking new use cases and consumption by people who couldn’t afford it earlier. That’s what we call Jevons’ Paradox.

Jevons was worried that the UK would run out of coal entirely. This question, asked in 1865, is similar to the 20th century worry of Peak Oil.

> Are we wise in allowing the commerce of this country to rise beyond the point at which we can long maintain it?

Jevons, William Stanley. The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal Mines. Macmillan and Co., 1865.

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throw0101aMay 2022

> ..but, being so cheap, it also enabled crazier ways of using fuel […]

See:

> In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons' effect) occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises as falling cost of use increases demand.[1] The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2] However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.[3]

[…]

> The Jevons paradox was first described by the English economist William Stanley Jevons in his 1865 book The Coal Question. Jevons observed that England's consumption of coal soared after James Watt introduced the Watt steam engine, which greatly improved the efficiency of the coal-fired steam engine from Thomas Newcomen's earlier design.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

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specialistDec 2021

Yes and:

> The bloat and slowness is generally due to incompetence.

I'm sure this is true.

I'm also reminded of "office automation". Conventional wisdom was that new technologies would reduce the use of paper. However, for decades, paper usage went up, and it took a long time for the reduction to happen.

Curious, no?

Was increased paper usage an instance of Jevons Paradox? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

I have questions.

So then why did paper usage eventually plummet?

Given long enough time frame, is Jevons Paradox a phase? 150 years after Jevons book The Coal Question, coal consumption is finally tanking. Decades after the start of data processing and office automation, paper usage finally tanked.

Is this generalizable?

Clearly software bloat (and by extension web page bloat) are catalyzed by better tools. Like the democratization of word processing (et al) begat more paper usage, IDEs (et al) begat more code production.

If there is a downside slope to Jevons "rebound effect" (efficiency -> lower cost -> higher consumption), what could it look like for software bloat? What are some possible causes?

For coal and paper, it was displacement by even cheaper alternatives.

What's cheaper than large, slow web pages? Or conversely, how do we raise the cost of that bloat?

Making a huge leap of reasoning:

My optimistic self hopes that the key resource is attention (people's time). Social media values each person's eyeballs at $100/yr (or whatever). So all the nominal costs of all those bloated web pages is pretty cheap.

My hope is the displacement of software bloat will be somehow related to maximizing people's cognitive abilities, making better use of attention. So replace web surfing, doom scrolling, and the misc opiates of the masses with whatever's next.

This hope is strongly rooted in Clay Shirky's works Cognitive Surplus and Here Comes Everyone.

Thanks for reading this far. To wrap this up:

I regard software bloat as a phase, not inevitable.

I imagine a futureperfect media ecosystem not dependent on ad supported biz models, the primary driver for web page bloat.

I have no idea if people smarter than me have studied the tail end of Jevon's Paradox. Or even how much predictive power the Paradox has at all.

I have no idea what the displacement may look like. Maybe patronage and subscriptions. Or maybe universal basic income, so amateurs can self produce and publish; versus "platforms" exploiting user generated content and collaborative editing.

A bit of a scrambled thesis, I know. I'm writing to understand, sound out a new idea. Thanks for your patience.

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