Let's actually look at what the tragedy of commons is. It's a group of people with a choice on how much to use a resource, basically use in sustainable way or to exploit the resource at a greater rate at personal advantage. Government intervention doesn't eliminate the choice or the self-interest, unless the people involved are eliminated as well.
And sure, its influence can change the relative cost/benefits of the choices involved as to make self-interest coincide with public interest (which is a far cry from eliminating self interest!), or its influence can make the tragedy of the commons problem even worse or create new tragedy of the commons problems.
But self interest didn't go away. Government influence just changed the relative payouts of individual choices. This is particularly important because it means the underlying problem still exists and can remanifest should conditions change if the payout for overexploiting a resource goes up substantially.
You are living proof that your statement isn't always true.
Except, of course, when it is. You already gave an example of when it is true, such as killing people.
One merely needs a specific counterexample in order to disprove a general statement. Your government not only has spared your life, it allows you to sit down at a computer and start ranting. That means you have considerable latitude to indulge in your self interest no matter what rules are in place.
No one is so stupid that they can't see the distinction between individuals' behavior when utilizing a resource according to their own self interest, and individuals' behavior when utilizing a resource under government influence.
You demonstrate here that you are that stupid. You don't have to be.
First, "influence" is not even a little bit the part of the definition of tragedy of the commons. One can still act in one's self-interests even when influenced by outside events or actors. It's not even hard to do.
Further, it's absurd to consider a purely imaginary situation where one is free of influence. You've just relegated the tragedy of the commons to the realm of leprechauns and unicorns. That's not part of the definition BTW.
For example, the tragedy of the commons has a fundamental influence - the existence of an exploitable public good. It remains completely irrelevant whether that public good was provided through a government or the vagaries of nature.
So to summarize my argument, influence doesn't neutralize choice or self-interest, influence is not part of the definition of tragedy of the commons which you agreed was the definition of the term, and the definition of tragedy of the commons is agnostic to what circumstances lead to the creation of the situation.
You're just one of those people on the internet who will never concede when they are wrong
When would I have an occasion to demonstrate that behavior in this thread?
Parts of it will have to be closed off to the press and public
Then it's not a very public trial. National security has been heavily abused here. I no longer consider the exposure of state secrets more dangerous than the current situation.
Utter bullshit. The government can regulate the common pasture with simple rules such as "an individual may only graze 2 cows 3 days a week". The disincentive to break the rule would be a simple fine, and that hardly qualifies as extraordinary intervention.
Or the government could not do that and allow the situation to continue. There's no law of physics that guarantees that government will act as above.
And even in that situation, they haven't precluded the tragedy of the commons. What happens when I sign up 50 people to act as proxies so that my cattle herd can continue to overgraze the commons? The dilemma still exists, it just takes more convoluted behavior and strategies to take advantage of it. If the stakes of cattle grazing get high enough, then defection behavior will become worthwhile.
And of course, the current California situation with water management indicates that tragedy of the commons readily happens even in the presence of a government.
Make no mistake. Snowden is a traitor in every and any sense of the word. NSA's whole purpose is to spy on the outside world, which is what snowden has told others about.
That's not what traitor means in the US sense. It means enemies of the US not outsiders of the NSA.
I have said, we should hive him a medal, and then put 2 between his eyes for his treason.
Tyrants operate that way.
Of course, in 2006, when I saw the neo-cons remove oversite of our work, I also knew that things had happened and they did not want to take responsibility for their action.
[...]
However, once he outed the information about spying outside of America, he became a traitor.
What did you think was going to happen? Snowden could just step forward as a whistleblower and the trained unicorns at the Department of Justice would make sure this evil never happened again?
There's a simple solution. The US President can a) pardon Snowden completely, b) apologize to the US public for the reckless, out of control actions of the US intelligence community, particularly the NSA, and c) fire a substantial number of people who would have been in the know about these criminal activities. That didn't happen.
With government involvement, individuals are PREVENTED from acting in there own self interest
Pursuit of self interest is not a bit you set. To prevent you from acting at all in your self-interest requires extraordinary intervention, such as killing you. As long as you have the power to make a choice which can materially affect your self interest, you have enough power as an individual to drive a tragedy of the commons scenario.
No, you gave an erroneous definition - one that's at odds with the long accepted definition.
Remember when I wrote But I'm sure you have your own definition for "tragedy of the commons"? Isn't it amazing that I was able to predict that you would put forth your own definition of the phrase? I wonder how I was able to do that?
Not at all. Your definition is more than sufficient. I felt no need to redefine what was already what I meant.
Government mispricing a resource resulting in overconsumption of said resource does NOT fit the definition of "tragedy of the commons".
Q: How can government "misprice" a resource? A: By making it a public good and then pricing it lower or higher than the costs of providing that good. Tragedy of commons happens by your definition when overly low prices result in overconsumption by the public or some subset. Recall your definition:
The tragedy of the commons is a term, originally used by Garrett Hardin, to denote a situation where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each's self-interest behave contrary to the best interests of the whole group by depleting some common resource.
Here, the situation is created by a low priced public good which is the resource which is depleted as per your given definition. It doesn't matter that a government or the public good it created is not an individual any more than it doesn't matter that a common pasture (or the community which uses the common pasture) of the original example is not an individual. My examples meet the conditions of the definition.
The circumstances by which the tragedy of the commons scenario is set up is not part of the definition! The government is not making the decisions of the tragedy of the commons scenario - it is merely creating the circumstances by which a subset of the public, the "individuals acting independently and rationally according to each's self-interest" make the actual decisions which meet the conditions of the definition.
See how it is defined in terms of individuals and rational self interest? By definition, government has nothing to do with the process.
That is foolish. The obvious counterexample is the price of water. Much of it in California is offered at fixed rate by various governments no matter how bad the drought gets. So why will those individual customers, acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interests, conserve water? Answer: they won't because there is no incentive to. Hence, one of the many ways that the tragedy of the commons interjects itself into government policy.
In other words, government creation of cheap public goods which are then overconsumed by the public in a normal display of the tragedy of the commons scenario.
Why is Snowden considered a traitor? What enemy has he deliberately aided? Every US citizen has Snowden to thank for shedding light on the current illegal NSA activities.
ow, Russia and CHina have the data that they want (which was EVERYTHING that snowden had).
Unless, of course, that didn't happen. I've noticed that anonymous leaks from governments have a remarkably high likelihood of being outright lies.
My guess is that America will INSIST on having snowden turned over for prosecution in return.
I call your bluff. If Snowden has committed a real crime, then let's have a real, public trial. If the US is unwilling to provide evidence publicly supporting their contentions, then fuck them. Snowden walks.
One, is the government is best positioned for protecting the "tragedy of the commons".
I disagree. But it's worth noting here that whether or not government is better positioned than the private world to prevent tragedy of the commons, government creates lots of tragedy of the commons situations.
lastly, the government has the ability to tax water and raise the price of existing water to be on par with what it would cost coming from
a desalination plant before the plant has even been built reducing the demand. Charging more for water makes more sense than
rationing it.
You know what is even better? Markets. Increased scarcity would have already both resulted in raising the price of water and encourage people to find new ways to bring water into the California market.
By the same token, desalinating enough water for California's agricultural needs is on a scale that I don't think you have really thought about.
I spent 15 seconds thinking about it. The time was more than sufficient.
The energy consumption alone would be staggering. Getting the water from the coast to the central valley (where most of the crops are) would be staggering. The physical infrastructure to actually do the desalinization is staggering.
"Staggering" is not relevant. You admit it is possible, but that it would be impractically expensive. That's what I said.
But yes, it's possible. Just like it's possible to convert America from gasoline to hydrogen.
and the response was that desalination would not come close to meeting the water demands of California.
There's many orders of magnitude more water in the Pacific Ocean than California can consume (especially given that most of that water would be returning to the Pacific). They can easily meet the needs of California with desalinated sea water. The real problem is cost of that water.
The reason models fit the past better is that much of the unknown data from that future is known data in the past and factored in to the model runs.
Of course. But I've run into several cases where the future performance of the model was excused on the basis of natural variation in climate despite past performance fitting very well. The variation didn't suddenly change the moment the model went from past to future.
How do you expect scientist to predict things like the cycles of ENSO or volcanic eruptions ahead of time?
How much are those models modeling that which they shouldn't be modeling?
I DID NOT limit my numbers to the US population - the numbers refers to the TOTAL losses to the civilian 'useful' population as a DIRECT RESULT and from DIRECTED / $$_FORCED_$$ enaction of the drug war policies promulgated by our 'leaders' in the US legislature !
Consider the fact that the DEA, Washington congress-critters (alien by nature), and the 'self-righteous' and affiliates have killed, crimilalized, marginalized, and jailed MORE PEOPLE than all of mankinds war losses put together./quote>
No, they haven't. It's a matter of running the numbers. For example, the Second World War killed around 70 million directly. Then add on Mongolian invasions and the Taiping Rebellion, you're talking about around half the current US population.
the problem with our current government is we have a corrupt government. you don't solve that be weakening government, you solve that with strong anticorruption laws, make regulators and regulations actually regulate corporations, rather than simply be controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to regulate, the bullshit corrupt status quo we have now
Strong anti-corruption laws would weaken the government since it would greatly inhibit bureaucrats from monetizing their power. And if we had those in place, how much of the current US government really would survive?
Conversely, the huge size and complexity of the US government is an impediment to any attempts to control corruption.
the problem with our current government is we have a corrupt government. you don't solve that be weakening government, you solve that with strong anticorruption laws, make regulators and regulations actually regulate corporations, rather than simply be controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to regulate, the bullshit corrupt status quo we have now
Strong anti-corruption laws would weaken the government since it would greatly inhibit bureaucrats from monetizing their power. And if we had those in place, how much of the current US government really would survive?
I'm stating the obvious. Obama is out of here in about a year and a half and there's not going to be Obama-like politicians to follow in his footsteps or carry on his legacy.
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And sure, its influence can change the relative cost/benefits of the choices involved as to make self-interest coincide with public interest (which is a far cry from eliminating self interest!), or its influence can make the tragedy of the commons problem even worse or create new tragedy of the commons problems.
But self interest didn't go away. Government influence just changed the relative payouts of individual choices. This is particularly important because it means the underlying problem still exists and can remanifest should conditions change if the payout for overexploiting a resource goes up substantially.
You are living proof that your statement isn't always true.
Except, of course, when it is. You already gave an example of when it is true, such as killing people.
One merely needs a specific counterexample in order to disprove a general statement. Your government not only has spared your life, it allows you to sit down at a computer and start ranting. That means you have considerable latitude to indulge in your self interest no matter what rules are in place.
No one is so stupid that they can't see the distinction between individuals' behavior when utilizing a resource according to their own self interest, and individuals' behavior when utilizing a resource under government influence.
You demonstrate here that you are that stupid. You don't have to be.
First, "influence" is not even a little bit the part of the definition of tragedy of the commons. One can still act in one's self-interests even when influenced by outside events or actors. It's not even hard to do.
Further, it's absurd to consider a purely imaginary situation where one is free of influence. You've just relegated the tragedy of the commons to the realm of leprechauns and unicorns. That's not part of the definition BTW.
For example, the tragedy of the commons has a fundamental influence - the existence of an exploitable public good. It remains completely irrelevant whether that public good was provided through a government or the vagaries of nature.
So to summarize my argument, influence doesn't neutralize choice or self-interest, influence is not part of the definition of tragedy of the commons which you agreed was the definition of the term, and the definition of tragedy of the commons is agnostic to what circumstances lead to the creation of the situation.
You're just one of those people on the internet who will never concede when they are wrong
When would I have an occasion to demonstrate that behavior in this thread?
Think for a change.
Parts of it will have to be closed off to the press and public
Then it's not a very public trial. National security has been heavily abused here. I no longer consider the exposure of state secrets more dangerous than the current situation.
Utter bullshit. The government can regulate the common pasture with simple rules such as "an individual may only graze 2 cows 3 days a week". The disincentive to break the rule would be a simple fine, and that hardly qualifies as extraordinary intervention.
Or the government could not do that and allow the situation to continue. There's no law of physics that guarantees that government will act as above.
And even in that situation, they haven't precluded the tragedy of the commons. What happens when I sign up 50 people to act as proxies so that my cattle herd can continue to overgraze the commons? The dilemma still exists, it just takes more convoluted behavior and strategies to take advantage of it. If the stakes of cattle grazing get high enough, then defection behavior will become worthwhile.
And of course, the current California situation with water management indicates that tragedy of the commons readily happens even in the presence of a government.
Make no mistake. Snowden is a traitor in every and any sense of the word. NSA's whole purpose is to spy on the outside world, which is what snowden has told others about.
That's not what traitor means in the US sense. It means enemies of the US not outsiders of the NSA.
I have said, we should hive him a medal, and then put 2 between his eyes for his treason.
Tyrants operate that way.
Of course, in 2006, when I saw the neo-cons remove oversite of our work, I also knew that things had happened and they did not want to take responsibility for their action.
[...]
However, once he outed the information about spying outside of America, he became a traitor.
What did you think was going to happen? Snowden could just step forward as a whistleblower and the trained unicorns at the Department of Justice would make sure this evil never happened again?
There's a simple solution. The US President can a) pardon Snowden completely, b) apologize to the US public for the reckless, out of control actions of the US intelligence community, particularly the NSA, and c) fire a substantial number of people who would have been in the know about these criminal activities. That didn't happen.
Well, isn't that what government is? A monopoly on violence?
You're still yacking, meaning that your government hasn't inflicted enough violence on you to prevent choice.
So the quoted statement that government intervention prevents individuals from acting in self interest is true.
You are living proof that your statement isn't always true.
With government involvement, individuals are PREVENTED from acting in there own self interest
Pursuit of self interest is not a bit you set. To prevent you from acting at all in your self-interest requires extraordinary intervention, such as killing you. As long as you have the power to make a choice which can materially affect your self interest, you have enough power as an individual to drive a tragedy of the commons scenario.
$1 billion is a lot different than $800 billion. Not to mention the energy costs needed to run them.
Exactly.
No, you gave an erroneous definition - one that's at odds with the long accepted definition.
Remember when I wrote But I'm sure you have your own definition for "tragedy of the commons"? Isn't it amazing that I was able to predict that you would put forth your own definition of the phrase? I wonder how I was able to do that?
Not at all. Your definition is more than sufficient. I felt no need to redefine what was already what I meant.
Government mispricing a resource resulting in overconsumption of said resource does NOT fit the definition of "tragedy of the commons".
Q: How can government "misprice" a resource? A: By making it a public good and then pricing it lower or higher than the costs of providing that good. Tragedy of commons happens by your definition when overly low prices result in overconsumption by the public or some subset. Recall your definition:
The tragedy of the commons is a term, originally used by Garrett Hardin, to denote a situation where individuals acting independently and rationally according to each's self-interest behave contrary to the best interests of the whole group by depleting some common resource.
Here, the situation is created by a low priced public good which is the resource which is depleted as per your given definition. It doesn't matter that a government or the public good it created is not an individual any more than it doesn't matter that a common pasture (or the community which uses the common pasture) of the original example is not an individual. My examples meet the conditions of the definition.
The circumstances by which the tragedy of the commons scenario is set up is not part of the definition! The government is not making the decisions of the tragedy of the commons scenario - it is merely creating the circumstances by which a subset of the public, the "individuals acting independently and rationally according to each's self-interest" make the actual decisions which meet the conditions of the definition.
You've just confirmed you don't know what "tragedy of the commons" means.
I explained why tragedy of commons was involved. The matter is settled. It's not my fault that you continue with this argument.
See how it is defined in terms of individuals and rational self interest? By definition, government has nothing to do with the process.
That is foolish. The obvious counterexample is the price of water. Much of it in California is offered at fixed rate by various governments no matter how bad the drought gets. So why will those individual customers, acting independently and rationally according to their own self-interests, conserve water? Answer: they won't because there is no incentive to. Hence, one of the many ways that the tragedy of the commons interjects itself into government policy.
In other words, government creation of cheap public goods which are then overconsumed by the public in a normal display of the tragedy of the commons scenario.
ow, Russia and CHina have the data that they want (which was EVERYTHING that snowden had).
Unless, of course, that didn't happen. I've noticed that anonymous leaks from governments have a remarkably high likelihood of being outright lies.
My guess is that America will INSIST on having snowden turned over for prosecution in return.
I call your bluff. If Snowden has committed a real crime, then let's have a real, public trial. If the US is unwilling to provide evidence publicly supporting their contentions, then fuck them. Snowden walks.
One, is the government is best positioned for protecting the "tragedy of the commons".
I disagree. But it's worth noting here that whether or not government is better positioned than the private world to prevent tragedy of the commons, government creates lots of tragedy of the commons situations.
lastly, the government has the ability to tax water and raise the price of existing water to be on par with what it would cost coming from a desalination plant before the plant has even been built reducing the demand. Charging more for water makes more sense than rationing it.
You know what is even better? Markets. Increased scarcity would have already both resulted in raising the price of water and encourage people to find new ways to bring water into the California market.
800 such plants would produce 40 billion gallons of fresh water per year.
Per day not year as the other replier noted.
By the same token, desalinating enough water for California's agricultural needs is on a scale that I don't think you have really thought about.
I spent 15 seconds thinking about it. The time was more than sufficient.
The energy consumption alone would be staggering. Getting the water from the coast to the central valley (where most of the crops are) would be staggering. The physical infrastructure to actually do the desalinization is staggering.
"Staggering" is not relevant. You admit it is possible, but that it would be impractically expensive. That's what I said.
But yes, it's possible. Just like it's possible to convert America from gasoline to hydrogen.
So what?
A single $1 billion desalination plant near LA will provide 50 million gallons of fresh water per year.
So that would be 800 such plants. 800 is not that much greater than 1. I'm not seeing the impossibility.
You could solve the water problem in the first place by using it less for farming, golf courses, etc.
Even with the huge drought in California, water has no perceived value. This is one place where the government needs to probably step in.
Why do you think water has no perceived value in the first place? It's because government has "stepped in" for over a century.
and the response was that desalination would not come close to meeting the water demands of California.
There's many orders of magnitude more water in the Pacific Ocean than California can consume (especially given that most of that water would be returning to the Pacific). They can easily meet the needs of California with desalinated sea water. The real problem is cost of that water.
The reason models fit the past better is that much of the unknown data from that future is known data in the past and factored in to the model runs.
Of course. But I've run into several cases where the future performance of the model was excused on the basis of natural variation in climate despite past performance fitting very well. The variation didn't suddenly change the moment the model went from past to future.
How do you expect scientist to predict things like the cycles of ENSO or volcanic eruptions ahead of time?
How much are those models modeling that which they shouldn't be modeling?
I DID NOT limit my numbers to the US population - the numbers refers to the TOTAL losses to the civilian 'useful' population as a DIRECT RESULT and from DIRECTED / $$_FORCED_$$ enaction of the drug war policies promulgated by our 'leaders' in the US legislature !
It's not going to add much more to the list.
Consider the fact that the DEA, Washington congress-critters (alien by nature), and the 'self-righteous' and affiliates have killed, crimilalized, marginalized, and jailed MORE PEOPLE than all of mankinds war losses put together./quote> No, they haven't. It's a matter of running the numbers. For example, the Second World War killed around 70 million directly. Then add on Mongolian invasions and the Taiping Rebellion, you're talking about around half the current US population.
the problem with our current government is we have a corrupt government. you don't solve that be weakening government, you solve that with strong anticorruption laws, make regulators and regulations actually regulate corporations, rather than simply be controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to regulate, the bullshit corrupt status quo we have now
Strong anti-corruption laws would weaken the government since it would greatly inhibit bureaucrats from monetizing their power. And if we had those in place, how much of the current US government really would survive?
Conversely, the huge size and complexity of the US government is an impediment to any attempts to control corruption.
the problem with our current government is we have a corrupt government. you don't solve that be weakening government, you solve that with strong anticorruption laws, make regulators and regulations actually regulate corporations, rather than simply be controlled by the very corporations they are supposed to regulate, the bullshit corrupt status quo we have now
Strong anti-corruption laws would weaken the government since it would greatly inhibit bureaucrats from monetizing their power. And if we had those in place, how much of the current US government really would survive?
I'm stating the obvious. Obama is out of here in about a year and a half and there's not going to be Obama-like politicians to follow in his footsteps or carry on his legacy.