All airspace? Nothing. Can they regulate the airpsace inside your house when flying paper airplanes, or the airspace above your house when you're throwing a frisbee? I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court would knock that one flat.
The practical airpsace used by most aircraft? If they didn't, it would be an unholy mess for a particular aspect of interstate commerce. That's pretty much exactly what the commerce clause is for. I'm not arguing that they can regulate "all airspace." I'm just noting that the implication that the feds shouldn't regulate airspace at all is false for practical purposes and almost certainly false for constitutional purposes.
It's not possible to value something without being willing or able to pay for it? In the absence of trade, does nothing at all have value? If you were the only person in the world with no concept of sale or barter, would you be unable to distinguish between your preferences for dirt versus fish versus water in any given situation?
But since you decide, and someone else can have different values, in what sense are they intrinsic to the thing being bought and sold?
In the sense that they have intrinsic properties that give them value (like the edibility of food or the conductivity of copper), and in the sense that that's how economists use the term. If you really want to strike the term from the dictionary, take it up with the economics field. Lots of fields have terms of art that use words in ways that don't mesh perfectly with their more colloquial or philosophical definitions, but that doesn't mean those terms are meaningless. If the object loses basically all of its value if you can't trade it to somebody else, then it has little or no intrinsic value. That's a useful thing to note in some cases.
I am sure you being funny, but exactly where do you suppose the Constitution gives the Federal government the authority to regulate airspace? In what twisted way will they imagine a drone operator, flying a home built drone, in the airspace of 1 state, involves interstate commerce?
You jumped from "regulate airspace" to "regulate drones" there. Having the feds regulate airspace makes good sense, given that a huge portion of air travel is interstate and having 50 different regulatory bodies for something that almost always crosses state lines would be a disaster for interstate commerce over the air. Once you have that, it's pretty straightforward to say that their job is to regulate flying things that may occupy or present hazards to that commercial airspace. Maybe small drones that stay out of airspace used by regular aircraft should be exempt, but I don't think that's the same as "not regulating airspace."
A simple definition of intrinsic value is, "What value do I place on this item if I can't sell it to anyone else?" The fact that the value is subjective and situation dependent doesn't change the fact that it has a value to its owner that is not dependent on what others are willing to pay for it.
That's even true for, say, a dental partnership. When they incorporate, rules are set. You can't just have one part-owner come in and start stripping the copper wire out of the walls on a whim because he owns a percentage of the company whose value exceeds that of the wire. There are rules. That doesn't make him any less of an owner. Here's the real test: If the company closes up shop and liquidates everything, do you get a piece of that "everything" according to the type and quantity of shares you have?
A piece of a company that has assets and make stuff has no intrinsic value? I'll go so far as to say that the price of a stock may not accurately reflect the intrinsic value of the underlying company, but most companies have intrinsic value, even if it's just the paperclips in the office.
I'm not sure how that contradicts anything I said. Add to that experiment "take your eyes off the screen and try to dial the phone while playing" and see if it lowers your score even more. One is bad. The other is worse. Making the worse thing happen is not a good idea.
I'm going to need you to clarify that a bit. Can you write a definition of "safety" that is a continuum from "completely unsafe" to "completely safe" for driving in the absence of cell phones but not in the presence of cell phones? Or is safety a boolean variable in one case and not the other?
I agree that doing something with a 100% probability of death is not a good idea and is "unsafe" but how does that bear on, say, the same car on tracks with a 50% chance of hitting the wall? A 1% chance? A 0.00001% chance? Is it still intrinsically unsafe? Using cell phones increases the probability of a bad outcome by some amount, but it's hardly a guarantee of a bad outcome. It also provides a benefit to the cell phone user. So are the trade offs worth it?
We used to get along without all sorts of technologies that we have now. That doesn't mean that somebody who, say, damages the power grid isn't being a total dick and making life worse for the peopel around him. "Don't be such a whiner. Your great grandfather did just fine without electricity."
I'd say that's a pretty narrow definition of the word "cause." If I do something and it causes something to happen that wouldn't have otherwise happen, there's a pretty good argument to be made that I was a primary cause, even if other factors were invovled. Making a bad situation worse isn't acceptable just because the situation is already bad.
I don't think that it necessarily follows that everything that can be done to increase safety should be done. I mean, if "safety at all costs" was all that mattered, we wouldn't strap ourselves into boxes on wheels and go zipping down the highway at 75 mph. We trade safety for efficiency all the time, and the trade-off point is one of rough social consensus rather than technocratic fiat.
Humans do a lot of communicating. It's an important part of our daily activities. Likewise, we spend a lot of time in cars. If we can spend the time in cars more efficiently, that's a win. Whether the safety trade off is too large is something we need to decide on a society. Maybe a total ban is what we need. But given the propensity for people to do it, I'm not sure that a total ban would be accepted by enough people to make it work.
I don't have any research handy, but I'm pretty sure that of all cell phone tasks, dialing is probably the most distracting and dangerous. Anything that increases the likelihood that a person is going to redial a disconnected call is probably a really bad idea from a safety perspective.
Electricity is fungible. Every kwh that somebody with a solar panel doesn't buy from the grid is a kwh that is available to non-solar users on the grid. All else held equal, additional capacity affectcs the supply/demand balance even if that additional capacity is directly consumed by the owner of the panel and never ends up on the grid.
Tax revenues are zero sum. Every dollar of tax break on X is a net tax increase of $1 on ~X. If I cut taxes on solar and raise taxes on all other industries to make up for it, I'm subsidizing solar with money from the other industries. It has nothing to do with philosophy and whether the government "owns" everything. Tell me the difference between these two scenarios:
1) Bob and Joe both fund a $20 government with $10 in taxes each. We want Joe to go to college, so we give him a tax break for it, dropping his tax to $9 and increasing Bob's taxes to $11 to make up the gap.
2) Bob and Joe both fund a $20 government with $10 in taxes each. We want Joe to go to college, so we tax both Bob and Joe $11 and then we give $2 in government money to Joe.
Is the latter a "subsidy" and the former just gold old Americans getting to keep more of their money, or are they both just different ways of accomplishing the same thing?
The greatest trick Congress ever pulled is to spend money on things they like by "cutting taxes" and having people believe that's actually what's happening.
So, state your position. Is it that our oil reserves are large enough and our growth in usage slow enough that there well not be a shortage on any meaningfully foreseeable timescale?
On the other hand, you have to be able to afford that car in the first place, and that's an additional 8% of a median income - worse for those with incomes lower than the median - that can't be spent on anything else.
That's true at some margin, but for anybody with the capacity to borrow money (which is most of us at the price margin you're talkng about), that extra 8% is a massively good investment that will pay off many times over. Seriously, if you were in the market for a car and just as you were about to buy it, I offered to sell you a brand new 1974 model (with 1974 manufacturing quality) car in the same class for 7.5% less than you were about to pay, would you jump on it?
1) You can get a decent new car for not all that much beyond the top end of that range. The primary thing that has changed is that the minimum wage pays less in real terms, which has nothing to do with planned obsolescence or anything like that.
2) Don't think of those cars as just "cars." Think of a car as a set of passenger (and or cargo) miles driven. Given that you can easily drive a cheap-ass Nissan Sentra 150k miles before doing anythng beyond scheduled maintenance, you're purchasing a lot more passenger miles than you were in 1974, and it will cost you less per mile in maintenance and fuel to drive those miles.
3) That new car is a lot safer than your 1974 death trap. Its interior is likely nicer and more feature rich. It's a better car overall.
Cars are probably the single greatest success story of improved value in durable goods.
Let's say we go after the bastards, then. Make tobacco illegal and drive them underground. We could outsource the production and distribution of tobacco to Los Zetas and it would be a net win, right? At least that terror Philip Morris would be out of the picture.
To some extent, I measure how threatening they are by how dangerous they are to me as a bystander. I'd much rather see a major cigarette outlet near my house than an illegal marijuana distribution center. I can avoid most of the problems with a cigarette outlet by simply not going in. Not so much with the drug import hub.
We seem to have managed to neuter them pretty effectively by taxing cigarettes and making the public aware of just how bad they are for us. It looks like smoking is down about 60% in the US just due to minor regulation and social trends. Our approach with other drugs doesn't seem to be following the same trend.
Finally, measuring "evil" in absolute numbers is fraught with problems. If all we care about is number of dead rather than how they died and why, we'd be pounding on GM's door too. And of course, I don't think we Americans would be so unconcerned about the drug war if it was our country that they were turning into a failed state. Deaths notwithstanding, the total collapse of law and order in a democracy is something that should be talled on the "drug cartels are bad" side of the ledger, even if it's not our country they're doing it to. Duffel bags full of the heads of police officers and elected officials in some foreign country aren't a really big deal for us, so we tend to turn down the knob on "evil" when we assess it.
For all of the badness of Philip Morris, I think I'd still rather they be running the show than the guys who kidnap busloads of people, rape them or make them fight to the death, and then bury them in the desert.
I don't think that's just personal squeamishness talking. It may very well be that the sociopaths who did bad stuff for the cigarette companies are just as evil as the sociopaths who run the cartels. But they do seem to control themselves a little better when they can make tons of money by staying in the law's good graces.
Serious organized crime groups will just make up any lost weed money with other drugs.
If they were able to increase their profits from other drugs at a whim, why would they wait to incur marijuana losses before doing it? Why wouldn't they just do it now?
You're describing the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" problem, though. Major urban areas are hard to get into becuse they're super crowded, and super crowded means a huge number of potential employees and amenities. Plenty of people can get into San Francisco every day. Evidence: San Francisco is chock full of people every day.
Sure, it would be easy for people who live in the exurbs to commute to a Google office in their particular exurb, but there just aren't enough potential Google employees to run a Google office living in a single exurb.
It's not 100% of the problem, but rent control is a major issue. Given a choice between selling or occupying your property and renting it out, rent control gives the owner a very strong disincentive to rent. So even with the same number of units, the split between "owner occupied" and "rental" shifts strongly in favor of owner occupied dwellings.
In summary: Having some profit is acceptable. Horever, to want 900% profit as in the example is simply stupid, blind greed.
We're to understand that you mean that 900% doesn't actually happen, but if it did it would be bad. And while some profit is good, too much profit is bad. But for unspecified values of "some" and "too much." So realistically speaking, are we in a state where "too much" profit is being made? If so, how do we know that? And what amount would be appropriate?
We're talking about a very practical problem here, so some concrete answers would be useful. As far as I can tell, the profit in the home building business is not abnormal, so are we saying that businesses in general are making too much profit? If so, what would be a more appropriate profit margin and how do you decide what that is?
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All airspace? Nothing. Can they regulate the airpsace inside your house when flying paper airplanes, or the airspace above your house when you're throwing a frisbee? I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court would knock that one flat.
The practical airpsace used by most aircraft? If they didn't, it would be an unholy mess for a particular aspect of interstate commerce. That's pretty much exactly what the commerce clause is for. I'm not arguing that they can regulate "all airspace." I'm just noting that the implication that the feds shouldn't regulate airspace at all is false for practical purposes and almost certainly false for constitutional purposes.
I'm pretty sure that I didn't say anything like that. Rereading my post, yes, I'm completely sure.
It's not possible to value something without being willing or able to pay for it? In the absence of trade, does nothing at all have value? If you were the only person in the world with no concept of sale or barter, would you be unable to distinguish between your preferences for dirt versus fish versus water in any given situation?
In the sense that they have intrinsic properties that give them value (like the edibility of food or the conductivity of copper), and in the sense that that's how economists use the term. If you really want to strike the term from the dictionary, take it up with the economics field. Lots of fields have terms of art that use words in ways that don't mesh perfectly with their more colloquial or philosophical definitions, but that doesn't mean those terms are meaningless. If the object loses basically all of its value if you can't trade it to somebody else, then it has little or no intrinsic value. That's a useful thing to note in some cases.
You jumped from "regulate airspace" to "regulate drones" there. Having the feds regulate airspace makes good sense, given that a huge portion of air travel is interstate and having 50 different regulatory bodies for something that almost always crosses state lines would be a disaster for interstate commerce over the air. Once you have that, it's pretty straightforward to say that their job is to regulate flying things that may occupy or present hazards to that commercial airspace. Maybe small drones that stay out of airspace used by regular aircraft should be exempt, but I don't think that's the same as "not regulating airspace."
A simple definition of intrinsic value is, "What value do I place on this item if I can't sell it to anyone else?" The fact that the value is subjective and situation dependent doesn't change the fact that it has a value to its owner that is not dependent on what others are willing to pay for it.
That's even true for, say, a dental partnership. When they incorporate, rules are set. You can't just have one part-owner come in and start stripping the copper wire out of the walls on a whim because he owns a percentage of the company whose value exceeds that of the wire. There are rules. That doesn't make him any less of an owner. Here's the real test: If the company closes up shop and liquidates everything, do you get a piece of that "everything" according to the type and quantity of shares you have?
A piece of a company that has assets and make stuff has no intrinsic value? I'll go so far as to say that the price of a stock may not accurately reflect the intrinsic value of the underlying company, but most companies have intrinsic value, even if it's just the paperclips in the office.
I'm not sure how that contradicts anything I said. Add to that experiment "take your eyes off the screen and try to dial the phone while playing" and see if it lowers your score even more. One is bad. The other is worse. Making the worse thing happen is not a good idea.
I'm going to need you to clarify that a bit. Can you write a definition of "safety" that is a continuum from "completely unsafe" to "completely safe" for driving in the absence of cell phones but not in the presence of cell phones? Or is safety a boolean variable in one case and not the other?
I agree that doing something with a 100% probability of death is not a good idea and is "unsafe" but how does that bear on, say, the same car on tracks with a 50% chance of hitting the wall? A 1% chance? A 0.00001% chance? Is it still intrinsically unsafe? Using cell phones increases the probability of a bad outcome by some amount, but it's hardly a guarantee of a bad outcome. It also provides a benefit to the cell phone user. So are the trade offs worth it?
We used to get along without all sorts of technologies that we have now. That doesn't mean that somebody who, say, damages the power grid isn't being a total dick and making life worse for the peopel around him. "Don't be such a whiner. Your great grandfather did just fine without electricity."
I'd say that's a pretty narrow definition of the word "cause." If I do something and it causes something to happen that wouldn't have otherwise happen, there's a pretty good argument to be made that I was a primary cause, even if other factors were invovled. Making a bad situation worse isn't acceptable just because the situation is already bad.
I don't think that it necessarily follows that everything that can be done to increase safety should be done. I mean, if "safety at all costs" was all that mattered, we wouldn't strap ourselves into boxes on wheels and go zipping down the highway at 75 mph. We trade safety for efficiency all the time, and the trade-off point is one of rough social consensus rather than technocratic fiat.
Humans do a lot of communicating. It's an important part of our daily activities. Likewise, we spend a lot of time in cars. If we can spend the time in cars more efficiently, that's a win. Whether the safety trade off is too large is something we need to decide on a society. Maybe a total ban is what we need. But given the propensity for people to do it, I'm not sure that a total ban would be accepted by enough people to make it work.
I don't have any research handy, but I'm pretty sure that of all cell phone tasks, dialing is probably the most distracting and dangerous. Anything that increases the likelihood that a person is going to redial a disconnected call is probably a really bad idea from a safety perspective.
Electricity is fungible. Every kwh that somebody with a solar panel doesn't buy from the grid is a kwh that is available to non-solar users on the grid. All else held equal, additional capacity affectcs the supply/demand balance even if that additional capacity is directly consumed by the owner of the panel and never ends up on the grid.
Tax revenues are zero sum. Every dollar of tax break on X is a net tax increase of $1 on ~X. If I cut taxes on solar and raise taxes on all other industries to make up for it, I'm subsidizing solar with money from the other industries. It has nothing to do with philosophy and whether the government "owns" everything. Tell me the difference between these two scenarios:
1) Bob and Joe both fund a $20 government with $10 in taxes each. We want Joe to go to college, so we give him a tax break for it, dropping his tax to $9 and increasing Bob's taxes to $11 to make up the gap.
2) Bob and Joe both fund a $20 government with $10 in taxes each. We want Joe to go to college, so we tax both Bob and Joe $11 and then we give $2 in government money to Joe.
Is the latter a "subsidy" and the former just gold old Americans getting to keep more of their money, or are they both just different ways of accomplishing the same thing?
The greatest trick Congress ever pulled is to spend money on things they like by "cutting taxes" and having people believe that's actually what's happening.
So, state your position. Is it that our oil reserves are large enough and our growth in usage slow enough that there well not be a shortage on any meaningfully foreseeable timescale?
That's true at some margin, but for anybody with the capacity to borrow money (which is most of us at the price margin you're talkng about), that extra 8% is a massively good investment that will pay off many times over. Seriously, if you were in the market for a car and just as you were about to buy it, I offered to sell you a brand new 1974 model (with 1974 manufacturing quality) car in the same class for 7.5% less than you were about to pay, would you jump on it?
A few points:
1) You can get a decent new car for not all that much beyond the top end of that range. The primary thing that has changed is that the minimum wage pays less in real terms, which has nothing to do with planned obsolescence or anything like that.
2) Don't think of those cars as just "cars." Think of a car as a set of passenger (and or cargo) miles driven. Given that you can easily drive a cheap-ass Nissan Sentra 150k miles before doing anythng beyond scheduled maintenance, you're purchasing a lot more passenger miles than you were in 1974, and it will cost you less per mile in maintenance and fuel to drive those miles.
3) That new car is a lot safer than your 1974 death trap. Its interior is likely nicer and more feature rich. It's a better car overall.
Cars are probably the single greatest success story of improved value in durable goods.
At 2 miles a day, you could walk or drive a modified Hummer that burns whale oil while towing a mobile hot tub and it would barely make a difference.
Let's say we go after the bastards, then. Make tobacco illegal and drive them underground. We could outsource the production and distribution of tobacco to Los Zetas and it would be a net win, right? At least that terror Philip Morris would be out of the picture.
To some extent, I measure how threatening they are by how dangerous they are to me as a bystander. I'd much rather see a major cigarette outlet near my house than an illegal marijuana distribution center. I can avoid most of the problems with a cigarette outlet by simply not going in. Not so much with the drug import hub.
We seem to have managed to neuter them pretty effectively by taxing cigarettes and making the public aware of just how bad they are for us. It looks like smoking is down about 60% in the US just due to minor regulation and social trends. Our approach with other drugs doesn't seem to be following the same trend.
Finally, measuring "evil" in absolute numbers is fraught with problems. If all we care about is number of dead rather than how they died and why, we'd be pounding on GM's door too. And of course, I don't think we Americans would be so unconcerned about the drug war if it was our country that they were turning into a failed state. Deaths notwithstanding, the total collapse of law and order in a democracy is something that should be talled on the "drug cartels are bad" side of the ledger, even if it's not our country they're doing it to. Duffel bags full of the heads of police officers and elected officials in some foreign country aren't a really big deal for us, so we tend to turn down the knob on "evil" when we assess it.
For all of the badness of Philip Morris, I think I'd still rather they be running the show than the guys who kidnap busloads of people, rape them or make them fight to the death, and then bury them in the desert.
I don't think that's just personal squeamishness talking. It may very well be that the sociopaths who did bad stuff for the cigarette companies are just as evil as the sociopaths who run the cartels. But they do seem to control themselves a little better when they can make tons of money by staying in the law's good graces.
If they were able to increase their profits from other drugs at a whim, why would they wait to incur marijuana losses before doing it? Why wouldn't they just do it now?
You're describing the "nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded" problem, though. Major urban areas are hard to get into becuse they're super crowded, and super crowded means a huge number of potential employees and amenities. Plenty of people can get into San Francisco every day. Evidence: San Francisco is chock full of people every day.
Sure, it would be easy for people who live in the exurbs to commute to a Google office in their particular exurb, but there just aren't enough potential Google employees to run a Google office living in a single exurb.
It's not 100% of the problem, but rent control is a major issue. Given a choice between selling or occupying your property and renting it out, rent control gives the owner a very strong disincentive to rent. So even with the same number of units, the split between "owner occupied" and "rental" shifts strongly in favor of owner occupied dwellings.
We're to understand that you mean that 900% doesn't actually happen, but if it did it would be bad. And while some profit is good, too much profit is bad. But for unspecified values of "some" and "too much." So realistically speaking, are we in a state where "too much" profit is being made? If so, how do we know that? And what amount would be appropriate?
We're talking about a very practical problem here, so some concrete answers would be useful. As far as I can tell, the profit in the home building business is not abnormal, so are we saying that businesses in general are making too much profit? If so, what would be a more appropriate profit margin and how do you decide what that is?