Recycling is held up as a major solution to saving the planet. And while recycling works very well with aluminum and glass recycling, it doesn't work very well with paper (which is often bleached with toxic chemicals), or with scrap metal (which if not handled correctly may contaminate the air and ground water with heavy metals).
Personally I would like to see a market created for unbleached recycled paper pulp products, such as for the inner cardboard boxes and box liners for software (as an example) or computers. But that's just my wishful thinking...
Then those few have not stayed in that society. They are outsiders who just happen to live there, and the rest of the society would not be obligated to keep sharing their resources with the ones who didn't share back.
But land is a resource. Location is a resource. And so is mindshare. So by not evicting those outsiders who insist on living where they do but not playing well with the rest of this theoretical society, that society is still sharing some resources with these people.
So, does this society choose to stop sharing by evicting their neighbors who decide not to play well with others? Or do they continue to implicitly share some valuable resources because of a distaste of enforcing any rules in order to assure the continuation of their society?
Now, I note that there are 'oxygen bars' in Ca. that seem to be catching on. It seems that there really is a small but noticable depletion of oxygen in LA. How far must it go before pollution is reduced?
Actually, the O2 bars in LA sell O2 not because there is a noticable depletion of O2 in LA due to polution, but because breathing pure O2 is a stimulant. Several of these O2 bars were founded by various Hollywood stars who are trying to give their restaurants an edge in an area where restaurant competition is extremely cut-throat.
Pollution in Los Angeles is lower than it has been in years, by the way.
And no, I haven't been to an O2 bar--too spacey and new-agey for my taste.
Simplifying some more, we can be in a world with beer on the X axis and pizzas on the Y axis. In this simple world, free trade kicks ass. I try to avoid this whole utility business in my class and demonstrate free trade using a trading game where I provide incentives with some real money. Students like this, and it gives them a way to see how market prices can find these nice supply/demand equilibria on their own. But it is the same basic message.
What's interesting about this is that even in the limited world of a two-dimensional problem with money on one axis, and something on the other, when experiments were conducted using real students who could win real money in the experiment, plotting the results of the experiment looked like you took the graph with a line drawing of the optimal solution, put it on the firing range at 100 yards, handed some blind guy a shotgun, and have him fire a blast at the graph. That is, the experimental results only loosely clumped around the optimal result.
Granted, this is in part because you're dealing with college kids who frankly don't care that much if they win $20 or $50 for an evening's experiment. But it also largely has to do with the fact that the optimal solution (where you'll maximize your cash, for example) is often difficult to figure out.
And that's on two axis. Try scaling up to the multiple dimensional problem of the real world, and scaling up to players with varying philosophies as to how much beer and how much pizza makes them happy...
While I may admire the aim the book, the real issue in reconciling capitalism with limited natural resources is how to take the long term perspective? Wall Street "looks forward" only to the next few months or maybe a year or so on the outside.
The simple answer to this is that you use governmental regulation to create a playing field that favors the environment. This is no different than other functions of the government in an eoncomic system.
That is, in a free marketplace (free defined as the freedom to choose amongst acts which are permitted by the rules of that marketplace), the purpose of governmental regulation is to create and protect "public concerns" which are otherwise not possible strictly within the marketplace. For example, governments generally build infrastructure such as roads and flat-rate mail delivery systems because these are things that cannot be done efficiently by private corporations. (Corporations who provide mail delivery, for example, may choose to neglect poor rural areas because it costs more to deliver mail there, and so it would make more sense economically speaking to stop delivering mail there, or at least to give a price surcharge.)
The government's role in a free market, then, is to provide infrastructure construction, environmental protection, and other "public goods" which cannot be achieved in the private sector.
To me, the question has never been "should the government protect the environment"--because the government is the only group or organization who can and should. The question has always been how, in a way which does not either (a) crush the free market (through socialism, for example, or through poor regulatory choices), and (b) is unfair to otherwise innocent individuals or is caprecious or unpredictable. Asking corporations to be environmentally aware is asking them to go against their fundamental mandate to preserve the profits and cash growth of it's stockholders (who are as often as not people like you and me who hope one day to retire on our 401K and IRA plans).
To me, then, this seems to be a regulatory issue, nothing more. What we need to do is create new regulatory environments that work within the free market place, rather than imposes arbitrary controls outside the free market place.
Corporations think short-term not because the people there aren't worried about where they are going to be in the next 20 or 30 years. Corporations think short-term because that's how our economic reporting systems work: profits are reported quarterly, taxes are reported yearly. Investment cycles tend to run short-term because every year about 1/40th of the people who own those investments are retiring, and they don't want to be forced to wait another 5 years because their investment instruments are locked out from them.
And personally I think this is the way it should be. That is, I don't think we should change reporting or investment rules to a 5 year or 10 year cycle in order to force corporations to think past the next quarter, because there are people out there who want access to their investments now, and who want to get their dividends paid now, not 10 years from now when they may have died of old age.
The government is the player in the economic market who is required to think long-term, who thinks about performing acts for the social and public good.
Just my rant, but people here need to realize that they are going to live three or four times their current age.
I hope so: I would like to live to between 105 and 140...
I will buy all of the pollution credits for your industrial areas.
Actually, there are non-profits here who pool their money to buy polution credits in order to remove them from the market. And from what I hear, the AQMD allows this.
Just out of curiosity, what percentage of your industry moved to an area where it costs them nothing to pollute the air?
Supprisingly little, even though Mexico is only 200 miles south of here, and the passage of NAFTA permits them to do so pretty easily. The reason for it is that the Los Angeles shipping ports are one of the largest ocean shipping ports in the world--and it's cheaper to put in a few stack scrubbers than it is to figure out a way to transport goods over land a few hundred miles.
It's no different than a law saying "YOU MAY NOT EMIT MORE THAN THIS," other than it finances itself from its own tax.
It actually is different, because the polution credits may be bought and sold amongst companies who originally purchased them from the AQMD at auction. Further, it places a dollar cost for polution, which makes it easier to compute the break-even costs than simply passing a law. That is, if you pass a law, generally you pay nothing until you violate the law. But with the AQMD system, you know to the dime how much it's going to cost you to emit a pound of pollutants into the atmosphere--and so it allows you to quantify the cost of adding a stack scrubber verses buying another polution credit.
No need for central planning to do that. The good old market forces and capitalist greet will gladly force you into a cheaper appartment when the energetic waste caused by suburban sprawl will finally fully be billed to those who adopt that lifestyle...
Except... The desire to have your own backyard, free of sharing a common wall with your neighbors will always be valued over the efficiencies of being able to be shuttled to where you work in a cattlecar^H^H^H^H^H^H subway train. So if we assume market forces will force people into a cheaper appartment, will this really happen? Or will society concentrate on building only appartment complexes, leaving the stock of older homes and single-family bungalos alone?
And if this happens, have what we really done is improve the environment, but at the cost of making the rich richer (because the rich were the ones lucky enough to buy into a house before people stopped building houses) and the poor poorer?
I'm not suggesting that centralized planning is a great idea or a bad idea. However, I believe the consequence of this sort of action will generally be to make the gulf between the rich and the poor that much larger--if only because the rich are the ones to be able to live in more desirable conditions, even if they aren't actually wealthier on paper. (Such was the case in Communist countries, were wealth was not measured in money, but was measured in the size of your Daucha, or if you were given a chauffered limo.)
That's the problem with economics: often it's tied into politics, and often twiddling with the economic balance of power has unexpected and undesirable consequences. One of the reasons why some in academia favor socialism is because they believe it's a great bruit-force way to prevent the ill consequences of inadvertently shifing the balance of power--such as favoring building large appartment complexes may cause a widen gulf between the rich and the poor.
There are two ways you can create a habitat reserve (which was the example I pointed out with the Nature Conservency): you can regulate, bully, and otherwise use legal tricks to steal land from it's rightful owner, or you can buy the land.
Are you suggesting that regulation, legal tricks and other mechanisms to steal people's land rights is preferable to buying the land from them?
Serious environmentalism is primarily a concern of rich, developed nations (which right now are those that embrace the free market).
I'll not here that's because it costs money to clean up the environment, and only the rich countries can afford it. If you're a poor starving family living in the jungles of the Amazon, clear cutting a farm seems more important than preserving biodiversity. (Note: the majority of Amazonian clear cutting is occuring not because of large corporations raping the forest, but because of small poor families clear-cutting farm land from the forests.)
These "robber barons" were the people who masterminded the greatest technological leaps of the last century (railroad building and steel making) and the greatest economic feats (modern finance.) They turned the US from a backwater agricultural county to a great industrial power.
I have nothing against the "robber barons" of the last century--they did what they did because the regulatory environment, high unemployment in the Civil War devistated eastern states, and the desire to establish dynasties a'la the 19th century European nations created the perfect environment for them to thrive. Frankly, even if we had anti-trust laws and other devices to protect free market competition in place way back then, the Carnegies and Stanfords of the world would have still rose to incredible power--simply because the economic push westward would have overwhelmed the judicial system.
However, the excesses of the last century also pointed out some shortcomings of the that system--including worker's revolts, ludditism, and the rise of economic theories of wealth such as Marxism which gave rise to all sorts of excesses and miseries of this century.
a) we're probably going to use up every square inch of the planet regardless of what economic theories are popular. i imagine we'll eventually spill over onto other planets, and slowly expand into space.
Maybe, maybe not. If we place real value on the planet's ecology, and we figure out how to enforce that value through governmental regulation, it may be possible to alter the risk/reward curve to make it favorable to save the planet rather than to use it up as if it were an endless resource to be exploited.
Economic systems that place little or no value on the environment tend to abuse the environment more. The perfect example of this is communist countries, where the government and society placed no value on anything--and thus destroyed the environment and broke people down at fantastic speed.
The difference is that a free-market economy (which is far from what we have in the U.S.) places natural checks and balances on greed, and does a great job of keeping it from getting out of hand.
This is incorrect, and here's why. In an infinite market with infinite resources and infinite competition, your statement would be correct. That's because no matter how large any individual player gets, they cannot dominate the market and thus change the rules as to how the competition are played.
However, markets, resources and people are not infinite: they're finite. This means that when you have a player become larger and larger, they tend to control more and more of the finite market and resources that are out there. And this allows them to change the rules of the game. (That is, by achieving monopolistic status, a company can then leverage it's monopoly in order to force tying of products to allow it to dominate other markets. It allow allows the monopoly to engage in practices such as shutting people out by forcing standards in that industry, using market tying in order to raise the cost to others to do business, and otherwise shut competition out.)
In a totally unregulated market, this sort of tying, locking out and otherwise stifling competition would allow companies to create inefficiencies in the market place that allow them to profit more. This was the case with the railroads of the late 19th century, and the case of Shell Oil at the turn of this century, as well as of Microsoft today.
I think your issue is with authoritarianism and the idea of control by very few over very many.
Not really. Any society comprised of more than a handfull of people necessitates some degree of control by a very few over the very many. Even if that control is theoretically vested in a "people" as it is in our republican form of government, there are those who will have the guns, the jails, and the power to make law in order for our society to continue to operate more or less in a reasonable way.
Security necessitates giving up some degree of freedom.
The question in my mind is not if a very few should have control over the many, but how much control should we give those few, and exactly what sort of things should they control. That is, in my mind, this is an issue of policy, nothing more.
Even in a society where there is no formal government, where people voluntarily decide to give up their right to form a corporation in an effort to create a socialist economic system, what will that society do to a few who wish to stay where they are, but create a private corporation rather than yield that right to the greater society around them? Will this libertarian society treat them as criminals as it would a sociopath who decides to kill others rather than play fair within the norms of that society? Will that society ask them to leave because they decide to keep resources to themselves rather than share them? Will the people around them try to "re-educate" them, by holding an "intervention?"
And who will make that call? That is, who will decide that for the good of that society, the ideals of libertarian socialism must be adheared to, rather than allowing a few "loose cannons" form their own private concern?
You're right--I am concerned with the idea of control by the few over the many. I'm also concerned with the control of the many over the few. But I think mostly it's that my idea of freedom is my ability to be left alone.
This has been debated ad-naueseam in intro policsci classes around the world. Yes, theoretically feasible balanced models are possible and yes, they have been implemented on a small scale by a handful of privately held companies. But when you face a conference room full of angry investors who've seen their wealth diminished by your inability to beat Wall Street's profit expectations this quarter, ideas such as long term, social responsibility and eco-capitalism suddenly seem to lose much of their luster.
That's why governmental regulation is required in order to shift the market balance to make saving the environment an economically desirable goal. In that way, when a company must face it's shareholders with the bad news that new environmental measures caused a poor quarter, at least they can point to the rest of the market and say "but we're not the only one showing poor results this quarter--this is a result of an industry-wide governmental regulatory shift."
One example: Southern California Air Qualty Management District's implementation of pollution credits, where a company may only polute if it purchases the right to do so from an increasingly smaller and smaller pool of pollution credits, which are auctioned off each fiscal year. Then, companies in Southern California, instead of saying "we just lost a barrel-full of money adding stack scrubbers we didn't need so we could save the air you don't breath because you're in New York, not California", they can say "we just invested in stack scrubbers in order to reduce our reliance on an increasingly costly and scarce pollution credit pool, thus increasing our long-term viability and profitability in the SCAQMD regulatory environment."
Wow. You're right. Environmentalism really does lead to Communism and Totalitarianism.
While your comment may be sarcastic, there is a point to this: many environmental groups within the United States are also "primitivists" and "socialists." (Primitivists: the primitive man [i.e. native americans] are more spiritually evolved as they are more "in tune" with nature. Socialists: in order to make sure the distribution of wealth is "fair", we need to centralize the process of wealth distribution. And in thie process, we will have enough control to make sure that the environment is protected.)
However, this does not mean environmentalism is inherently socialist. Only that many of the groups are.
One counterexample, which I support (both with mindshare and with money): the Nature Conservency. You want to save 1,000 acres in Montana? Don't pass a new law: buy the land instead!
IMNSHO, this makes the "free market" a foolish and destructive goal, since constrained markets can be adjusted to take into account social and environmental factors more practically.
By your definition, there is no such thing as a free market, as our market is already constrained, both in terms of taxation of different products (including different tax rates depending on the source of the product, the type of product, and who the product is being sold to), and in terms of regulatory bodies which regulate everything from the quality of the products sold to what products I can sell.
An example of the tax rates: If I buy a solar heater for my house, I get a tax break in California which significantly reduces my income taxes. If I buy a car from Japan, I pay import taxes which I wouldn't pay if I bought a car from Detroit. If I try to sell wine to France, I pay an export tax, as well as France's import taxes, because France doesn't want California wine, only French wine.
Other regulations include low energy consumption regulations (so that's why all our computers are "Energy Star" compliant...), safety regulations (Hmmmmm... this baby toy was just recalled. And I just can't seem to buy a car today without airbags, even though airbags add about a thousand to the cost of the car.) And for the life of me I just can't seem to buy a slave on the open market any more, which is odd--they were sold openly just before the US Civil War. The last time I asked, my local grocery store doesn't carry marajuana.
A "free market" refers to the fact that within the constraints of various government regulations, you are free set up a company, manufacture products, sell products, and buy products as you see fit: the "free" refers to the freedom to act, again, within certain constraints. This is as opposed to socialism, where your right to set up a company is taken away from you, or communism, where your right to set up a company, manufacture products and sell products are all taken away from you. (A central body tells you what you can make and what price you can sell it at.)
Sometimes I don't think people know what socialism and communism is, at a practical level. That is, they think the theory of "equal distribution" is a good concept, but I don't think they realize that the practical upshot of this is that your right to act (again, within certain governmental constraints) is taken away from you, and your right to make products people may want and sell them at a price which maximizes your profits given the constraints of the market is replaced by a central body who doles out to you what it sees fit.
The quote is not even self-consistant: if you have "whisper quiet" cars, and you have people who use those cars, you'll have urban freeways. Period.
Unless the person who wrote this expects us to mass migrate into well structured centralized planned urban districts in order to make better use of mass transit. (I'm trying to imagine being forced by a "green" government edict out of my house and into an apartment block so that I'm closer to the subway system.)
You know what cracks me up about some of the Green folks?
A few years ago, the Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) implemented something called "pollution credits." The idea went something like this: as there is a real environmental impact on polluting, and as there is a real cost to people as the air in Southern California is a finite resource, we will tax the air. That is, we will tax the right to pollute by selling "pollution credits." Someone can then buy the right to pollute a certain amount. This money will then be used to pay for enforcement for people who pollute without having bought pollution credits first.
Over time, we can reduce pollution by squeezing the pollution credits: that is, we will simply auction off about 10% less pollution credits every few years. That way, companies now have a financial incentive to either pay a higher price to pollute, or to buy stack scrubbers and other filtering and recycling devices to reduce their emissions output from their factories.
This is a concrete example of the philosophy discussed in this book: it is a concrete example of placing a value on the air we breath in Southern California, and is a perfect example of how we can use economic incentives to reduce pollution output by forcing companies to either pony up for an increasingly expensive and smaller pool of pollution credits, or to clean up their act.
So what did the Greens do? Did they love this solution, and embrase it as an example of capitalist theory being used to save the environment.
Not exactly.
"How can you sell the right to pollute the air?!? How can you auction off our lungs like so many acres of toxic waste dumps? What kind of stupid assanine idiotic people are you, rather than telling people to stop polluting, you sell them the right to pollute?"
The reception was loud and clear. And quite negative.
Fortunately, the SCAQMD followed through with pollution credits. And in large part because of this, dispite a population that has more than doubled in the last 30 years, our air is cleaner than it has been in a long time.
I don't trust most environmentalists with economic matters--most of them are closet socialists who have to be periodically reminded that American Indians used money long before Columbus landed in the Carribean, and who have to be reminded that the "crying Indian" in those commercials in the 70's was actually Italian, not Indian. The only folks I do trust is the Nature Conservency--because when they go out to protect land, they buy it.
Except that there is no such thing as "lassie faire" capitalism except in the minds of the robber barrons of the late 19th century. "Lassie faire" capitalism makes the presumption that resources, markets and goods are effectively infinite--that is, it's the misuse of microeconomic theory to the macroeconomic market. That's why if left to it's own devices, lassie faire capitalism will consume every square inch of the planet--because the people who created the theory thought the planet was infinite, and so the issue of consuming every square inch just never came up in the rush to greed.
OTOH, capitalism is not incompatable with environmentalism--even the American Indians had forms of monetary exchange which was used to regulate intertribal exchange of goods and allowed specialization of services performed. It's just a matter of properly integrating the cost of the environment into the capitalist framework rather than treating the environment as a "free and infinite" resource.
Re:This leads to a much larger problem
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Except it's been my experience that
1) Many times, the corporate attitude that you must work 60 hours a week comes from mismanagement and a lack of professionalism when it comes to structuring the work environment. Frankly, people are incapable of working more than 50 hours a week efficiently; the extra 10 hours a week or so is full of bullshitting around the watercooler and fiddling with crap which doesn't need fliddling with, in order to fill the time so that the workers can claim they've put in their 60 hours.
2) Crunch time is often caused as much by laziness and a lack of planning--I've been on projects where we had to pull a week of all nighters in order to launch, and I've been on projects where we finished ahead of schedule and spent the last couple of weeks before launch working 40 hour weeks leasurly testing the code just to make sure nothing slipped by Q/A.
Heroics is not a demonstration of high-quality programmers. Heroics is a demonstration of crappy management and a lousy work environment.
3) People get what they pay for. That is, perhaps it's cheaper to pay someone with pizza and worthless stock options than it is to pay cach, but this is programming, folks. The difference between someone who is good at what he does and someone who sucks can be as much as a factor of 25--this is totally different from any other profession where proficiency may give you a 2x or 3x speedup at best. (Compare to construction, where the right tools and about a week to two weeks of practice will make you nearly as efficient as guys who have been building houses for years. Or compare to assembly line work, where you are no more or less efficient as the assembly line system itself.)
In this case, if paying someone 50% or even 100% more in cach rather than in worthless stock options gives you a 10x speedup in efficiency, does it make sense to save a little money and hire someone who is still using ritual taboo programming and is otherwise inexperienced in the things that can give you that 10x speedup?
Of course you can pay $600K for a 2br bungalow in Beverly Hills. However, if you are willing to have a zip code that doesn't read "90210", cut that price immediately by about 30%. And some areas cost significantly less than others: in Northridge, you can expect to pay closer to $200K/$250K for the same bungalow. (The LA Times price survey is giving prices from around $100/sqft to around $300/sqft, depending on size, location and condition. The house I'm in right now is going for ~$200/sqft in the Verdugo Hills area of Glendale.)
Compared to the rest of the country, Southern California prices have always been high. (My parents were amazed to see 2000sqft houses in Tennessee listing in the $50/60K range a few years back--being builders, my parents couldn't figure out how you could keep the cost of materials for building a house to code under $60K.) However, compared to Silicon Valley, even Brentwood (which is *the* place right now) is cheap.
While I applaud this, there are a few things here that don't make sense.
1) The cost of living in Silicon Valley should be similar to the cost of living in Sacramento for someone who owns a house. That is, the cost of gas, groceries, and entertainment should be similar (movie tickets never really vary from a low of $6 to a high of $10 per person), and utilities should be comprable as well. (The cost difference between Fresno and Los Angeles is greater, yet my utilities is only $100-$150 month more than my parents in Fresno, because I pay for water and they don't.)
The only thing that should vary is property taxes--and with the passage of Prop 13 many years ago, property taxes should only be assessed at the price you paid for your house (plus a couple of percent), and not at the price your house is potentially worth. That is, the cost to stay in your house should not have gone up more than perhaps 10% or so, and not doubled in cost.
2) My parents build houses in the Sacramento area. I know for a fact that the price you quoted for a house (approximately $45/sq ft) is way low--either the price you paid is misquoted or the finished square footage is misquoted. (I suspect the latter.) Now perhaps you are adding in basement square footage--which for an older Sacramento house would make some degree of sense. (That is, for an older Sacramento house, closer to 2500 sq ft of finished footage would make sense given the prices of housing in Sacramento.)
From what I know, house prices in Sacramento vary around $70-$110/, depending on the house, the area, and the condition of the house. Prices in Sacramento are not what they are in Silicon Valley, but they aren't what they are in Fresno, either.
My personal advice to anyone who owns a home in Silicon Valley is to stay put, rather than move. First, because job opportunities permit you to make a lot more than you can elsewhere, and second, because skyrocketing housing costs allow you to bank more equity. That's what I'm doing right now in Los Angeles, which is undergoing a similar (though less pronounced) boom--my house has gone up about $120K in equity in the last four years, and if trends continue, I hope to bank some or all of that when my wife and I retire. House equity is the only relatively secure investment you can purchase on margin, and you get to live there as well. (Meaning in the last four years I've gained about $120K equity on a $70K down payment, with monthly payments comprable after taxes to what my wife and I was paying in rent.)
Just to let you know, it's not all of California which is like this. Southern California (the Los Angeles/San Diego area) has not been affected to the same extent. And the area where I grew up (Fresno) has it's cost of living drop through the floor in recent years.
The place to be is not California. The place to be is in the southern San Francisco/San Jose/Silicon Valley area. By living in Los Angeles, I'm considered to be "out of touch". And God knows no-one wants to live in Fresno...
California is a big state. 2 1/2 hours outside of San Francisco is still California...
Why are the Balkans still a mess? Because occidental powers have no national interest in solving the long-term problems in the region.
Also keep in mind that the Balkans are still a mess because the people there are more interested in killing each other than they are in finding peace. No amount of external force can cause two people who are hell bent on killing each other from doing so.
Nothing new here; the fighting in this region of the world goes back at least 800 years...
Who had ever heard of Serbia or Bosnia before the wars over there?
I had. Ever heard of the Balkins? The area of the world where World War I started? That's the area.
Oh no, but now there's a few people fighting and killing each other the rest of the world has to intervene for "humanitarian" reasons.
Actually, we were afraid of a repeat of World War I.
No, personally I'm sick of it. The US needs to stop intervening in conflicts which have nothing to do with it.
Actually, we got involved for one simple reason: had we had the forsight to be able to murder Adolf Hitler in the 1920's, should we? Many think "yes" in this country. So we got involved in an outbreak in the Balkins because some in the US state department were afraid that perhaps, we were seeing the rise of another Adolf Hitler.
It's that fear, that we were about to see the seeds of World War III, that caused us to step in.
When I first had PacBell DSL installed on my phone line, I experienced the same sort of thing you experienced, but internally within PacBell. Turns out their Internet division is separate from their phone division, and the DSL provisioning group is a subgroup within their phone service group. I got the impression they didn't let their DSL provisioning group within 100 feet of their Internet group at any time, even if there was pizza involved.
To make a long story short, I experienced several delays, and even misplaced work orders, in part because of the segregation between divisions. And while FlashDSL and Bell Atlantic may be worse at communicating with eachother than PacBell's internal divisions were, I suspect switching to the phone company's own DSL provider may not fix this communications issue much.
Note that I'm not faulting PacBell or large bureaucracies; I suspect the separation between divisions is largely a legal construct to prevent PacBell from getting into legal hot water with the various third party DSL Internet providers...
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And don't forget the waste recycling plants who are on EPA's Superfund NPL list, such as Scientific Chemical Processing and Curio Scrap.
Recycling is held up as a major solution to saving the planet. And while recycling works very well with aluminum and glass recycling, it doesn't work very well with paper (which is often bleached with toxic chemicals), or with scrap metal (which if not handled correctly may contaminate the air and ground water with heavy metals).
Personally I would like to see a market created for unbleached recycled paper pulp products, such as for the inner cardboard boxes and box liners for software (as an example) or computers. But that's just my wishful thinking...
Then those few have not stayed in that society. They are outsiders who just happen to live there, and the rest of the society would not be obligated to keep sharing their resources with the ones who didn't share back.
But land is a resource. Location is a resource. And so is mindshare. So by not evicting those outsiders who insist on living where they do but not playing well with the rest of this theoretical society, that society is still sharing some resources with these people.
So, does this society choose to stop sharing by evicting their neighbors who decide not to play well with others? Or do they continue to implicitly share some valuable resources because of a distaste of enforcing any rules in order to assure the continuation of their society?
Think "habitat reserve," not "air polution." There is more than one cat that needs skinning.
Now, I note that there are 'oxygen bars' in Ca. that seem to be catching on. It seems that there really is a small but noticable depletion of oxygen in LA. How far must it go before pollution is reduced?
Actually, the O2 bars in LA sell O2 not because there is a noticable depletion of O2 in LA due to polution, but because breathing pure O2 is a stimulant. Several of these O2 bars were founded by various Hollywood stars who are trying to give their restaurants an edge in an area where restaurant competition is extremely cut-throat.
Pollution in Los Angeles is lower than it has been in years, by the way.
And no, I haven't been to an O2 bar--too spacey and new-agey for my taste.
Simplifying some more, we can be in a world with beer on the X axis and pizzas on the Y axis. In this simple world, free trade kicks ass. I try to avoid this whole utility business in my class and demonstrate free trade using a trading game where I provide incentives with some real money. Students like this, and it gives them a way to see how market prices can find these nice supply/demand equilibria on their own. But it is the same basic message.
What's interesting about this is that even in the limited world of a two-dimensional problem with money on one axis, and something on the other, when experiments were conducted using real students who could win real money in the experiment, plotting the results of the experiment looked like you took the graph with a line drawing of the optimal solution, put it on the firing range at 100 yards, handed some blind guy a shotgun, and have him fire a blast at the graph. That is, the experimental results only loosely clumped around the optimal result.
Granted, this is in part because you're dealing with college kids who frankly don't care that much if they win $20 or $50 for an evening's experiment. But it also largely has to do with the fact that the optimal solution (where you'll maximize your cash, for example) is often difficult to figure out.
And that's on two axis. Try scaling up to the multiple dimensional problem of the real world, and scaling up to players with varying philosophies as to how much beer and how much pizza makes them happy...
While I may admire the aim the book, the real issue in reconciling capitalism with limited natural resources is how to take the long term perspective? Wall Street "looks forward" only to the next few months or maybe a year or so on the outside.
The simple answer to this is that you use governmental regulation to create a playing field that favors the environment. This is no different than other functions of the government in an eoncomic system.
That is, in a free marketplace (free defined as the freedom to choose amongst acts which are permitted by the rules of that marketplace), the purpose of governmental regulation is to create and protect "public concerns" which are otherwise not possible strictly within the marketplace. For example, governments generally build infrastructure such as roads and flat-rate mail delivery systems because these are things that cannot be done efficiently by private corporations. (Corporations who provide mail delivery, for example, may choose to neglect poor rural areas because it costs more to deliver mail there, and so it would make more sense economically speaking to stop delivering mail there, or at least to give a price surcharge.)
The government's role in a free market, then, is to provide infrastructure construction, environmental protection, and other "public goods" which cannot be achieved in the private sector.
To me, the question has never been "should the government protect the environment"--because the government is the only group or organization who can and should. The question has always been how, in a way which does not either (a) crush the free market (through socialism, for example, or through poor regulatory choices), and (b) is unfair to otherwise innocent individuals or is caprecious or unpredictable. Asking corporations to be environmentally aware is asking them to go against their fundamental mandate to preserve the profits and cash growth of it's stockholders (who are as often as not people like you and me who hope one day to retire on our 401K and IRA plans).
To me, then, this seems to be a regulatory issue, nothing more. What we need to do is create new regulatory environments that work within the free market place, rather than imposes arbitrary controls outside the free market place.
Corporations think short-term not because the people there aren't worried about where they are going to be in the next 20 or 30 years. Corporations think short-term because that's how our economic reporting systems work: profits are reported quarterly, taxes are reported yearly. Investment cycles tend to run short-term because every year about 1/40th of the people who own those investments are retiring, and they don't want to be forced to wait another 5 years because their investment instruments are locked out from them.
And personally I think this is the way it should be. That is, I don't think we should change reporting or investment rules to a 5 year or 10 year cycle in order to force corporations to think past the next quarter, because there are people out there who want access to their investments now, and who want to get their dividends paid now, not 10 years from now when they may have died of old age.
The government is the player in the economic market who is required to think long-term, who thinks about performing acts for the social and public good.
Just my rant, but people here need to realize that they are going to live three or four times their current age.
I hope so: I would like to live to between 105 and 140...
I will buy all of the pollution credits for your industrial areas.
Actually, there are non-profits here who pool their money to buy polution credits in order to remove them from the market. And from what I hear, the AQMD allows this.
Just out of curiosity, what percentage of your industry moved to an area where it costs them nothing to pollute the air?
Supprisingly little, even though Mexico is only 200 miles south of here, and the passage of NAFTA permits them to do so pretty easily. The reason for it is that the Los Angeles shipping ports are one of the largest ocean shipping ports in the world--and it's cheaper to put in a few stack scrubbers than it is to figure out a way to transport goods over land a few hundred miles.
It's no different than a law saying "YOU MAY NOT EMIT MORE THAN THIS," other than it finances itself from its own tax.
It actually is different, because the polution credits may be bought and sold amongst companies who originally purchased them from the AQMD at auction. Further, it places a dollar cost for polution, which makes it easier to compute the break-even costs than simply passing a law. That is, if you pass a law, generally you pay nothing until you violate the law. But with the AQMD system, you know to the dime how much it's going to cost you to emit a pound of pollutants into the atmosphere--and so it allows you to quantify the cost of adding a stack scrubber verses buying another polution credit.
No need for central planning to do that. The good old market forces and capitalist greet will gladly force you into a cheaper appartment when the energetic waste caused by suburban sprawl will finally fully be billed to those who adopt that lifestyle...
Except... The desire to have your own backyard, free of sharing a common wall with your neighbors will always be valued over the efficiencies of being able to be shuttled to where you work in a cattlecar^H^H^H^H^H^H subway train. So if we assume market forces will force people into a cheaper appartment, will this really happen? Or will society concentrate on building only appartment complexes, leaving the stock of older homes and single-family bungalos alone?
And if this happens, have what we really done is improve the environment, but at the cost of making the rich richer (because the rich were the ones lucky enough to buy into a house before people stopped building houses) and the poor poorer?
I'm not suggesting that centralized planning is a great idea or a bad idea. However, I believe the consequence of this sort of action will generally be to make the gulf between the rich and the poor that much larger--if only because the rich are the ones to be able to live in more desirable conditions, even if they aren't actually wealthier on paper. (Such was the case in Communist countries, were wealth was not measured in money, but was measured in the size of your Daucha, or if you were given a chauffered limo.)
That's the problem with economics: often it's tied into politics, and often twiddling with the economic balance of power has unexpected and undesirable consequences. One of the reasons why some in academia favor socialism is because they believe it's a great bruit-force way to prevent the ill consequences of inadvertently shifing the balance of power--such as favoring building large appartment complexes may cause a widen gulf between the rich and the poor.
There are two ways you can create a habitat reserve (which was the example I pointed out with the Nature Conservency): you can regulate, bully, and otherwise use legal tricks to steal land from it's rightful owner, or you can buy the land.
Are you suggesting that regulation, legal tricks and other mechanisms to steal people's land rights is preferable to buying the land from them?
Serious environmentalism is primarily a concern of rich, developed nations (which right now are those that embrace the free market).
I'll not here that's because it costs money to clean up the environment, and only the rich countries can afford it. If you're a poor starving family living in the jungles of the Amazon, clear cutting a farm seems more important than preserving biodiversity. (Note: the majority of Amazonian clear cutting is occuring not because of large corporations raping the forest, but because of small poor families clear-cutting farm land from the forests.)
These "robber barons" were the people who masterminded the greatest technological leaps of the last century (railroad building and steel making) and the greatest economic feats (modern finance.) They turned the US from a backwater agricultural county to a great industrial power.
I have nothing against the "robber barons" of the last century--they did what they did because the regulatory environment, high unemployment in the Civil War devistated eastern states, and the desire to establish dynasties a'la the 19th century European nations created the perfect environment for them to thrive. Frankly, even if we had anti-trust laws and other devices to protect free market competition in place way back then, the Carnegies and Stanfords of the world would have still rose to incredible power--simply because the economic push westward would have overwhelmed the judicial system.
However, the excesses of the last century also pointed out some shortcomings of the that system--including worker's revolts, ludditism, and the rise of economic theories of wealth such as Marxism which gave rise to all sorts of excesses and miseries of this century.
a) we're probably going to use up every square inch of the planet regardless of what economic theories are popular. i imagine we'll eventually spill over onto other planets, and slowly expand into space.
Maybe, maybe not. If we place real value on the planet's ecology, and we figure out how to enforce that value through governmental regulation, it may be possible to alter the risk/reward curve to make it favorable to save the planet rather than to use it up as if it were an endless resource to be exploited.
Economic systems that place little or no value on the environment tend to abuse the environment more. The perfect example of this is communist countries, where the government and society placed no value on anything--and thus destroyed the environment and broke people down at fantastic speed.
The difference is that a free-market economy (which is far from what we have in the U.S.) places natural checks and balances on greed, and does a great job of keeping it from getting out of hand.
This is incorrect, and here's why. In an infinite market with infinite resources and infinite competition, your statement would be correct. That's because no matter how large any individual player gets, they cannot dominate the market and thus change the rules as to how the competition are played.
However, markets, resources and people are not infinite: they're finite. This means that when you have a player become larger and larger, they tend to control more and more of the finite market and resources that are out there. And this allows them to change the rules of the game. (That is, by achieving monopolistic status, a company can then leverage it's monopoly in order to force tying of products to allow it to dominate other markets. It allow allows the monopoly to engage in practices such as shutting people out by forcing standards in that industry, using market tying in order to raise the cost to others to do business, and otherwise shut competition out.)
In a totally unregulated market, this sort of tying, locking out and otherwise stifling competition would allow companies to create inefficiencies in the market place that allow them to profit more. This was the case with the railroads of the late 19th century, and the case of Shell Oil at the turn of this century, as well as of Microsoft today.
I think your issue is with authoritarianism and the idea of control by very few over very many.
Not really. Any society comprised of more than a handfull of people necessitates some degree of control by a very few over the very many. Even if that control is theoretically vested in a "people" as it is in our republican form of government, there are those who will have the guns, the jails, and the power to make law in order for our society to continue to operate more or less in a reasonable way.
Security necessitates giving up some degree of freedom.
The question in my mind is not if a very few should have control over the many, but how much control should we give those few, and exactly what sort of things should they control. That is, in my mind, this is an issue of policy, nothing more.
Even in a society where there is no formal government, where people voluntarily decide to give up their right to form a corporation in an effort to create a socialist economic system, what will that society do to a few who wish to stay where they are, but create a private corporation rather than yield that right to the greater society around them? Will this libertarian society treat them as criminals as it would a sociopath who decides to kill others rather than play fair within the norms of that society? Will that society ask them to leave because they decide to keep resources to themselves rather than share them? Will the people around them try to "re-educate" them, by holding an "intervention?"
And who will make that call? That is, who will decide that for the good of that society, the ideals of libertarian socialism must be adheared to, rather than allowing a few "loose cannons" form their own private concern?
You're right--I am concerned with the idea of control by the few over the many. I'm also concerned with the control of the many over the few. But I think mostly it's that my idea of freedom is my ability to be left alone.
This has been debated ad-naueseam in intro policsci classes around the world. Yes, theoretically feasible balanced models are possible and yes, they have been implemented on a small scale by a handful of privately held companies. But when you face a conference room full of angry investors who've seen their wealth diminished by your inability to beat Wall Street's profit expectations this quarter, ideas such as long term, social responsibility and eco-capitalism suddenly seem to lose much of their luster.
That's why governmental regulation is required in order to shift the market balance to make saving the environment an economically desirable goal. In that way, when a company must face it's shareholders with the bad news that new environmental measures caused a poor quarter, at least they can point to the rest of the market and say "but we're not the only one showing poor results this quarter--this is a result of an industry-wide governmental regulatory shift."
One example: Southern California Air Qualty Management District's implementation of pollution credits, where a company may only polute if it purchases the right to do so from an increasingly smaller and smaller pool of pollution credits, which are auctioned off each fiscal year. Then, companies in Southern California, instead of saying "we just lost a barrel-full of money adding stack scrubbers we didn't need so we could save the air you don't breath because you're in New York, not California", they can say "we just invested in stack scrubbers in order to reduce our reliance on an increasingly costly and scarce pollution credit pool, thus increasing our long-term viability and profitability in the SCAQMD regulatory environment."
Wow. You're right. Environmentalism really does lead to Communism and Totalitarianism.
While your comment may be sarcastic, there is a point to this: many environmental groups within the United States are also "primitivists" and "socialists." (Primitivists: the primitive man [i.e. native americans] are more spiritually evolved as they are more "in tune" with nature. Socialists: in order to make sure the distribution of wealth is "fair", we need to centralize the process of wealth distribution. And in thie process, we will have enough control to make sure that the environment is protected.)
However, this does not mean environmentalism is inherently socialist. Only that many of the groups are.
One counterexample, which I support (both with mindshare and with money): the Nature Conservency. You want to save 1,000 acres in Montana? Don't pass a new law: buy the land instead!
IMNSHO, this makes the "free market" a foolish and destructive goal, since constrained markets can be adjusted to take into account social and environmental factors more practically.
By your definition, there is no such thing as a free market, as our market is already constrained, both in terms of taxation of different products (including different tax rates depending on the source of the product, the type of product, and who the product is being sold to), and in terms of regulatory bodies which regulate everything from the quality of the products sold to what products I can sell.
An example of the tax rates: If I buy a solar heater for my house, I get a tax break in California which significantly reduces my income taxes. If I buy a car from Japan, I pay import taxes which I wouldn't pay if I bought a car from Detroit. If I try to sell wine to France, I pay an export tax, as well as France's import taxes, because France doesn't want California wine, only French wine.
Other regulations include low energy consumption regulations (so that's why all our computers are "Energy Star" compliant...), safety regulations (Hmmmmm... this baby toy was just recalled. And I just can't seem to buy a car today without airbags, even though airbags add about a thousand to the cost of the car.) And for the life of me I just can't seem to buy a slave on the open market any more, which is odd--they were sold openly just before the US Civil War. The last time I asked, my local grocery store doesn't carry marajuana.
A "free market" refers to the fact that within the constraints of various government regulations, you are free set up a company, manufacture products, sell products, and buy products as you see fit: the "free" refers to the freedom to act, again, within certain constraints. This is as opposed to socialism, where your right to set up a company is taken away from you, or communism, where your right to set up a company, manufacture products and sell products are all taken away from you. (A central body tells you what you can make and what price you can sell it at.)
Sometimes I don't think people know what socialism and communism is, at a practical level. That is, they think the theory of "equal distribution" is a good concept, but I don't think they realize that the practical upshot of this is that your right to act (again, within certain governmental constraints) is taken away from you, and your right to make products people may want and sell them at a price which maximizes your profits given the constraints of the market is replaced by a central body who doles out to you what it sees fit.
The quote is not even self-consistant: if you have "whisper quiet" cars, and you have people who use those cars, you'll have urban freeways. Period.
Unless the person who wrote this expects us to mass migrate into well structured centralized planned urban districts in order to make better use of mass transit. (I'm trying to imagine being forced by a "green" government edict out of my house and into an apartment block so that I'm closer to the subway system.)
You know what cracks me up about some of the Green folks?
A few years ago, the Southern California Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD) implemented something called "pollution credits." The idea went something like this: as there is a real environmental impact on polluting, and as there is a real cost to people as the air in Southern California is a finite resource, we will tax the air. That is, we will tax the right to pollute by selling "pollution credits." Someone can then buy the right to pollute a certain amount. This money will then be used to pay for enforcement for people who pollute without having bought pollution credits first.
Over time, we can reduce pollution by squeezing the pollution credits: that is, we will simply auction off about 10% less pollution credits every few years. That way, companies now have a financial incentive to either pay a higher price to pollute, or to buy stack scrubbers and other filtering and recycling devices to reduce their emissions output from their factories.
This is a concrete example of the philosophy discussed in this book: it is a concrete example of placing a value on the air we breath in Southern California, and is a perfect example of how we can use economic incentives to reduce pollution output by forcing companies to either pony up for an increasingly expensive and smaller pool of pollution credits, or to clean up their act.
So what did the Greens do? Did they love this solution, and embrase it as an example of capitalist theory being used to save the environment.
Not exactly.
"How can you sell the right to pollute the air?!? How can you auction off our lungs like so many acres of toxic waste dumps? What kind of stupid assanine idiotic people are you, rather than telling people to stop polluting, you sell them the right to pollute?"
The reception was loud and clear. And quite negative.
Fortunately, the SCAQMD followed through with pollution credits. And in large part because of this, dispite a population that has more than doubled in the last 30 years, our air is cleaner than it has been in a long time.
I don't trust most environmentalists with economic matters--most of them are closet socialists who have to be periodically reminded that American Indians used money long before Columbus landed in the Carribean, and who have to be reminded that the "crying Indian" in those commercials in the 70's was actually Italian, not Indian. The only folks I do trust is the Nature Conservency--because when they go out to protect land, they buy it.
Except that there is no such thing as "lassie faire" capitalism except in the minds of the robber barrons of the late 19th century. "Lassie faire" capitalism makes the presumption that resources, markets and goods are effectively infinite--that is, it's the misuse of microeconomic theory to the macroeconomic market. That's why if left to it's own devices, lassie faire capitalism will consume every square inch of the planet--because the people who created the theory thought the planet was infinite, and so the issue of consuming every square inch just never came up in the rush to greed.
OTOH, capitalism is not incompatable with environmentalism--even the American Indians had forms of monetary exchange which was used to regulate intertribal exchange of goods and allowed specialization of services performed. It's just a matter of properly integrating the cost of the environment into the capitalist framework rather than treating the environment as a "free and infinite" resource.
Except it's been my experience that
1) Many times, the corporate attitude that you must work 60 hours a week comes from mismanagement and a lack of professionalism when it comes to structuring the work environment. Frankly, people are incapable of working more than 50 hours a week efficiently; the extra 10 hours a week or so is full of bullshitting around the watercooler and fiddling with crap which doesn't need fliddling with, in order to fill the time so that the workers can claim they've put in their 60 hours.
2) Crunch time is often caused as much by laziness and a lack of planning--I've been on projects where we had to pull a week of all nighters in order to launch, and I've been on projects where we finished ahead of schedule and spent the last couple of weeks before launch working 40 hour weeks leasurly testing the code just to make sure nothing slipped by Q/A.
Heroics is not a demonstration of high-quality programmers. Heroics is a demonstration of crappy management and a lousy work environment.
3) People get what they pay for. That is, perhaps it's cheaper to pay someone with pizza and worthless stock options than it is to pay cach, but this is programming, folks. The difference between someone who is good at what he does and someone who sucks can be as much as a factor of 25--this is totally different from any other profession where proficiency may give you a 2x or 3x speedup at best. (Compare to construction, where the right tools and about a week to two weeks of practice will make you nearly as efficient as guys who have been building houses for years. Or compare to assembly line work, where you are no more or less efficient as the assembly line system itself.)
In this case, if paying someone 50% or even 100% more in cach rather than in worthless stock options gives you a 10x speedup in efficiency, does it make sense to save a little money and hire someone who is still using ritual taboo programming and is otherwise inexperienced in the things that can give you that 10x speedup?
Location, location, location.
My point was that California != Silicon Valley.
Of course you can pay $600K for a 2br bungalow in Beverly Hills. However, if you are willing to have a zip code that doesn't read "90210", cut that price immediately by about 30%. And some areas cost significantly less than others: in Northridge, you can expect to pay closer to $200K/$250K for the same bungalow. (The LA Times price survey is giving prices from around $100/sqft to around $300/sqft, depending on size, location and condition. The house I'm in right now is going for ~$200/sqft in the Verdugo Hills area of Glendale.)
Compared to the rest of the country, Southern California prices have always been high. (My parents were amazed to see 2000sqft houses in Tennessee listing in the $50/60K range a few years back--being builders, my parents couldn't figure out how you could keep the cost of materials for building a house to code under $60K.) However, compared to Silicon Valley, even Brentwood (which is *the* place right now) is cheap.
While I applaud this, there are a few things here that don't make sense.
1) The cost of living in Silicon Valley should be similar to the cost of living in Sacramento for someone who owns a house. That is, the cost of gas, groceries, and entertainment should be similar (movie tickets never really vary from a low of $6 to a high of $10 per person), and utilities should be comprable as well. (The cost difference between Fresno and Los Angeles is greater, yet my utilities is only $100-$150 month more than my parents in Fresno, because I pay for water and they don't.)
The only thing that should vary is property taxes--and with the passage of Prop 13 many years ago, property taxes should only be assessed at the price you paid for your house (plus a couple of percent), and not at the price your house is potentially worth. That is, the cost to stay in your house should not have gone up more than perhaps 10% or so, and not doubled in cost.
2) My parents build houses in the Sacramento area. I know for a fact that the price you quoted for a house (approximately $45/sq ft) is way low--either the price you paid is misquoted or the finished square footage is misquoted. (I suspect the latter.) Now perhaps you are adding in basement square footage--which for an older Sacramento house would make some degree of sense. (That is, for an older Sacramento house, closer to 2500 sq ft of finished footage would make sense given the prices of housing in Sacramento.)
From what I know, house prices in Sacramento vary around $70-$110/, depending on the house, the area, and the condition of the house. Prices in Sacramento are not what they are in Silicon Valley, but they aren't what they are in Fresno, either.
My personal advice to anyone who owns a home in Silicon Valley is to stay put, rather than move. First, because job opportunities permit you to make a lot more than you can elsewhere, and second, because skyrocketing housing costs allow you to bank more equity. That's what I'm doing right now in Los Angeles, which is undergoing a similar (though less pronounced) boom--my house has gone up about $120K in equity in the last four years, and if trends continue, I hope to bank some or all of that when my wife and I retire. House equity is the only relatively secure investment you can purchase on margin, and you get to live there as well. (Meaning in the last four years I've gained about $120K equity on a $70K down payment, with monthly payments comprable after taxes to what my wife and I was paying in rent.)
Just to let you know, it's not all of California which is like this. Southern California (the Los Angeles/San Diego area) has not been affected to the same extent. And the area where I grew up (Fresno) has it's cost of living drop through the floor in recent years.
The place to be is not California. The place to be is in the southern San Francisco/San Jose/Silicon Valley area. By living in Los Angeles, I'm considered to be "out of touch". And God knows no-one wants to live in Fresno...
California is a big state. 2 1/2 hours outside of San Francisco is still California...
Why are the Balkans still a mess? Because occidental powers have no national interest in solving the long-term problems in the region.
Also keep in mind that the Balkans are still a mess because the people there are more interested in killing each other than they are in finding peace. No amount of external force can cause two people who are hell bent on killing each other from doing so.
Nothing new here; the fighting in this region of the world goes back at least 800 years...
Who had ever heard of Serbia or Bosnia before the wars over there?
I had. Ever heard of the Balkins? The area of the world where World War I started? That's the area.
Oh no, but now there's a few people fighting and killing each other the rest of the world has to intervene for "humanitarian" reasons.
Actually, we were afraid of a repeat of World War I.
No, personally I'm sick of it. The US needs to stop intervening in conflicts which have nothing to do with it.
Actually, we got involved for one simple reason: had we had the forsight to be able to murder Adolf Hitler in the 1920's, should we? Many think "yes" in this country. So we got involved in an outbreak in the Balkins because some in the US state department were afraid that perhaps, we were seeing the rise of another Adolf Hitler.
It's that fear, that we were about to see the seeds of World War III, that caused us to step in.
When I first had PacBell DSL installed on my phone line, I experienced the same sort of thing you experienced, but internally within PacBell. Turns out their Internet division is separate from their phone division, and the DSL provisioning group is a subgroup within their phone service group. I got the impression they didn't let their DSL provisioning group within 100 feet of their Internet group at any time, even if there was pizza involved.
To make a long story short, I experienced several delays, and even misplaced work orders, in part because of the segregation between divisions. And while FlashDSL and Bell Atlantic may be worse at communicating with eachother than PacBell's internal divisions were, I suspect switching to the phone company's own DSL provider may not fix this communications issue much.
Note that I'm not faulting PacBell or large bureaucracies; I suspect the separation between divisions is largely a legal construct to prevent PacBell from getting into legal hot water with the various third party DSL Internet providers...