Resource allocation distribution and consumption
OkGo!

Needed a place to post this
1 United States Dollar equals 1,092,500.00 Iranian Rial
https://www.google.com/search?ie=UTF-8&client=ms-android-rogers-ca-rvc3&source=android-browser&q=usd+to+iranian+rial

Anyone lend me 2M Rials for a can of coke?

Get rial.

Coal power generation falls in China and India for first time since 1970s
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/jan/13/coal-power-generation-falls-china-india-since-1970s

The Real AI Talent War Is for Plumbers and Electricians
https://www.wired.com/story/why-there-arent-enough-electricians-and-plumbers-to-build-ai-data-centers/

Meta and OpenAI have been offering multimillion-dollar pay packages to top talent, hoping to lure the best researchers and engineers away from their competitors. But there’s another dimension of the AI talent wars that has garnered far less attention: the massive shortage of electricians, plumbers, and heating and cooling technicians in the US who can build the physical data centers that power AI.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that between 2024 and 2034, there will be a shortage of roughly 81,000 electricians on average each year in the US, measured in terms of unfilled jobs. The BLS projects the number of employed electricians to grow 9 percent over the next decade, “much faster than the average for all occupations.” One McKinsey study came to a more dire conclusion: Between 2023 and 2030, it estimates that an additional 130,000 trained electricians—as well as 240,000 construction laborers and 150,000 construction supervisors—would be needed in the US.

China Clamps Down on High-Speed Traders, Removing Servers
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-clamps-down-high-speed-013817033.html

The move is the latest sign that officials are focused on leveling the playing field for investors and ensuring market stability after stocks rallied to multi-year highs this month. Regulators tightened rules on margin trading earlier this week in a bid to cool leveraged bets. They have also scrutinized some ETF trades by foreign market makers.

Futures exchanges have made preliminary plans to add two milliseconds of latency to any servers that connect from third-party computer rooms, two of the people said. It’s not clear if other exchanges are considering the same approach.

wow
good for China

European Union and Mercosur bloc of South American nations sign landmark free trade agreement
https://apnews.com/article/mercosur-european-union-trade-agreement-south-america-b779460da4b7ecb6aa15d322976fa70d

After decades of delay, the politically explosive deal still must clear one final hurdle: ratification by the European Parliament.

China Purchased No U.S. Soybeans For An Unprecedented Fifth Straight Month
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenroberts/2026/01/17/china-purchased-no-us-soybeans-an-unprecented-sixth-straight-month/?

Didn't China promise to buy soybeans?

https://www.wired.com/story/china-renewable-energy-revolution/

At the root of the solar supply chain are makers of polysilicon, the purified silicon substrate base of panels. Oversupply of this product has caused prices and profits to collapse. The Chinese government has tried to get supply under control by pushing the strongest polysilicon firms to form a cartel and squeeze out lesser players who refuse to exit the market. But so far, this seems to be a long shot.

As the oversupply of Chinese panels has spilled into the international market, the bizarre dynamics have spread with them. Just as in Shandong Province, negative prices for electricity have also become common in Germany, thanks to Chinese panels. Or take Pakistan. Around 2022, a global spike in natural gas prices made the Pakistani electrical grid even more expensive and less reliable than usual. But instead of just suffering or firing up diesel generators, millions of Pakistanis installed solar panels to free themselves from the grid. The country imported so many Chinese solar panels that the grid as a whole began to fall into what is called a death spiral. Customers started opting out, leaving the grid to charge ever higher prices, which led even more people to flee, and so on.

Wild economic stuff

Pakistan doesn't have new Ai data centers using up all the electrics?
But yeah the last mile to residentials and businesses would be hard to maintain by rhe Utility. We've seen this with legacy copper pair landlines. Lucky, Internet came along..

https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/23/business/economy-hot-americans-ai-trump

But today, as Peck notes, the top 20% of earners account for a staggering 59% of consumer spending. Yes, this is the K-shaped economy, where the rich are doing better and better while the poor are doing worse and worse. The rich have become so rich, in fact, that their spending alone can make it appear as if the entire economy is great, even as the majority of people are finding that suddenly the costs of basic staples like housing and food are getting harder and harder to bear and dollar stores warn that more and more people are going without.

Hard Times in the Delta as Farmers Consider Letting Crops Rot
Prices for nearly every major U.S. crop are below what it costs to grow them. But a drop in rice prices means another blow to farmers in Mississippi’s agricultural belt.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/business/mississippi-delta-farmers-rice-prices.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HFA.c8ES.hyZEgAv3PGAX

Things feel so hopeless that at a recent Mississippi Farm Bureau Federation meeting, a group representing farmers, participants floated the idea of a government program that would pay producers to destroy the harvested rice sitting in their bins. A similar program was put in place during the 1980s farm crisis, when the Agriculture Department paid farmers to idle land and reduce huge surpluses of crops.

it's almost like there's enough food and housing to feed and house everyone and yet there's some kind of system keeping people from sharing it

huh

-citrus greening has slashed production by over 90%
-revenues are down by more than half
-half of florida's orange growers have left the industry

Orange juice is going the way of 8-tracks

I don't know much about economics because most of what I read is people who know how to write and organize data is just "Okay here is why what I want should happen" which is apparently lucrative and a lot of Marx which mostly taught me about what a yard of linen means.

But, anecdotally, I spent a lot of time in the building occupied by the School of Business and Economics Departments because English and History and Philosophy were just kind of wedged in wherever someone had three hours to spare so I saw a lot of dudes taking notes while the instructor drew lines on a whiteboard with axes like "Overhead" and "People Dying".

Also I was late to a speaker banquet because there were three business dudes blocking a staircase in an exercise in conflict resolution where one was apparently incensed that one had done the bulk of the work and was going to get the credit and the other one was like hey calm down suggesting that he did none of either the cocaine or the work and I was like you are not at the top of the stairs or at the bottom you're just in the way and that's why they need to teach metaphors in business school.

I find that to be the discipline that pretends other disciplines don’t exist the most

For sure.
every time someone talks about STEM "superiority", I'm like, buddy, I've read your papers, I would hold back a tenth-grader for this.

Physics is like imagine a perfect sphere in a frictionless vacuum

Economics is like so about gdp

Happy Tesla Earnings Day!

Today is going to be wild!