Because solar cars do not use "fuel" and the solar energy that is used is limitless and cannot be converted into an equivalent measure to compare to other engine types, Whoa whoa whoa, cannot be converted into an equivalent measure? I think that should be, "cannot afford engineer imaginative enough to find an equivalent measure".
The goal is most distance on the least fuel, right?
The input is fuel, right?
The output is distance, right?
Solar cells take fuel to make, right?
So, compare distance over life of the vehicle, to non-solar energy used over the life of the vehicle, including construction.
Problem solved.
Better yet, find "ecological damage" measure for extraction of each input (fuel, metal) to produce the vehicle, and divide distance*cargo load mass, by that.
How do you propose to sort them out? If there was an easy way to do it, farmers would just sieve out the Monsanto(r) seeds and use the "pure" corn for replanting. Um, maybe not gather seeds from the parts of the fields that turned out significantly better than your normal techniques are capable of producing and that you as the farmer there damn well know it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Monsanto's objection was that they deliberately selected the crops from Monsanto's strain for replanting. That would imply that you'd be in the clear if you simply randomly selected crops to replant, excluding obviously bad ones.
Completely different. Selective breeding does not introduce new information into a species' genome. Isn't that what creationists say to refute evolutionary theory?
If Monsanto is so concerned about their unnatural crops cross-pollinating other corn and beans, then they should GM it to keep it from doing that. It's not the fault of people trying to avoid it that the wind blows.
That's like running over a kid in a crosswalk while the walk sign is lit and suing the kid for being there because he dented your car. The kid's doing what he's supposed to do, you're infringing on his space, and then you blame him. That's what Monsanto is doing. Well, if you want to start an analogy war...
This would be like Monsanto researching, patenting, and producing self-replicating shape-shifter robots, many of which sneak into factories and slip into the output pile and form themselves into near-exact copies of the factories' output, destroying one widget for each widget they copy. Then, the factory owners, who often retain some of the output for e.g. spare parts, notice they actually have self-replicating robots among their widgets. They discover the capabilities and then use their reproductive capabilities to make widgets, which they then sell for profit.
Relevant similaries captured by my analogy:
-Monsanto has spent a lot of its resources on developing something genuinely useful, which it patents. -Through carelessness and intentional spreading, these units trespass onto others' property and modify their output, which also regularly gets good and bad invaders. -The factory owners normally exploit natural phenomena that affect their processes. -Monanto's units replace those property owners' normal output, but with better functionality. -Those property owners notice the better functionality, and that it clearly could not have come from anything they did, and exploit its greater functionality and reproductive capability to make more of them.
Inferences from analogy:
-Monsanto should compensate others for their loss of normal spare parts. (I said they should replace lost normal seed.) -Monsanto should be forced to use better containment protocols. -Factory owners (farmers) should not be allowed to use reproductive capabilities of Monsanto's self-replicators, as that would infringe on a well-deserved patent.
First, let me apologize for characterizing all victims of Monsanto contamination who replant, as "hicks". That was unnecessary and pejorative.
Seed come from plants, and farmers have been harvesting seeds for replanting for millenia. Now if you happen to farm next to a field that has Monsanto(r) plants, you can't use the same technique used for 1000s of years Well, while I'm clearly out of my depth in agricultural knowledge, I doubt they needed *those specific seeds* for a full replanting. Even if that were the case, that would at best justify Monsanto compensating them for the lost seed (which is up to what now, ten cents a ton?).
It's true that people have replanted for thousands of years, but is this "the same"? The amount of labor that went into the research for the new plant varieties, when you consider gains in productivity just since 1850, is (by rough approximation) is equal to about ten unbroken years of labor from everyone on the planet in 2000 B.C. Let's accept that leeching off of moderate amounts of others intellectual works is okay. Let's accept that modern use of IP legal rights is ridiculous.
Nevertheless, thousands of years ago, it was simply not possible to pirate that much intellectual labor! The kind of replanting that happens today, just can't be compared to what happened back then.
Defending Monsanto (even in a qualified way) isn't good for one's karma, but...
Even farmers who try to avoid Monsanto products can end up with their fields being contaminated with seed from other farmers' nearby plots, and then Monsanto sends their lawyers after them. Actually, not quite. If your fields get contaminated with Monsanto crops, they won't sue. If you sell the contaminated plants for money, they won't sue or demand royalties. They will only sue if you collect the seed and replant it. I don't think that's too unreasonable. Let's face it: most of these hick farmers should know it wasn't their ingenuity that led to them having these superior crops, and know exactly what they're doing by replanting.
That said,
Monsanto even sends the lawyers after companies that advertise the fact that they DON'T use Monsanto products (e.g. the dairy in the article advertising its avoidance of hormone treated cows). this practice on Monsanto's part, I absolutely do not support. People have the right to make true statements about their products, even and especially if it's irrational to buy based on that. There's no evidence that Monsanto technologies are bad for you? Even if that were the case, so what? There's no scientific evidence that a rabbi's blessing will make your food healthier, or that a kosher diet will help you in the afterlife, yet we still permit products to be labeled as kosher.
Yeah, I thought that framing was pretty ridiculous. Even more so since you don't actually need 1/2 the training any brain surgeon must go through (college electives, geography, etc.) to do brain surgery. And ditto your comment about doctors whose patients ask questions.
If I had seen the article sooner, I would have f/p'd with:
'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia' If you had to avoid sounding like a dumbass, would you prefer to make false dichotomies, or blow goats?
I semi-followed that story, but my question was more: why don't vigilantes go after everyone who shows their face in public as aiding spammers or spamming? The BlueFrog thing was all online activities.
What I'm getting at is, there should be legions of people who hate spam with a passion. While I don't advocate violent vigilante attacks against spammers (so please don't hit me with the "your post advocates a (x) vigilante...), I would imagine that there are enough people ready/willing/able, that every time a spammer *or their attorneys* actually show their faces, then *bam* next thing you know they're a victim of several pranks, get death threats, families threatened, law firms threatened, litigants followed out of court and intimidated, etc etc etc ad infinitum.
I would futher imagine that by this point, spammers would be so afraid of showing their faces, that they would do everything possible to avoid a court appearance, and thus lose every case actually making it to a hearing, by default.
Yet... we do not see this. Spammers and their attorneys do in fact show their faces.
This is like 4chan vs. The Church of Scientolog (except that in that case I have to clarify that it's 4chan I dislike, not the people joining their campaign as "Anonymous", and the Church of Scientology I dislike, not the people who simply believe in the underlying religious philosophy).
Btw, why is it that spammers ever appear in court? Why haven't vigilantes already made it a practice to terrorize anyone who publicly acts in furtherance of spamming?
I'm completely clueless about making web pages (*turns geek card*) but my reading of that clause is:
"If some URL that stems from your website is not in use by you, Network Solutions can put a filler page in their pointing to a Network Solutions site."
In other words, if I own soggyballs.com, and someone tries to go to soggyballs.com/cereal.htm, and I don't have a cereal.htm, and that link is therefore dead, people will get a page that says:
"That location does not exist. This site is hosted by Network Solutions, blah blah blah, here's a link to our site."
if you overdose and cannot afford health insurance, are rushed to the ER and tax payer money pays for your treatment and recovery, then it is our business. AH, okay, hm, that sounds like pretty solid reasoning there. If my using drugs imposes costs on you, then by golly, society absolutely has the right to ban them. Case closed.
Now -- just real quick -- point me to exemption in the drug laws for people who take their drugs in a facility equipped to handle O/Ders and does so solely with money from the users?
Oh, you mean... there isn't one?
But... oh, golly, now I'm confused. I thought drugs were banned because of the *costs* they impose on others. But now, now you're telling me that they're illegal even when the users themselves, in advance, contain these costs so they don't spill onto others.
Hm... I guess... I guess that would make that justification for drug prohibition COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT, now, wouldn't it?
Slow drivers are not the problem. Fast drivers are not the problem. Slow *or* fast drivers that unnecessarily screw with the flow of traffic *are* the problem. When driving to work, I think about 1,000 drivers are going slower than I would like to drive. Yet... somehow... I don't view them as "a problem". And somehow... they don't cause any accidents. Ditto for fast drivers.
How can this be? Because whether you drive fast or slow, you can be a problem, or you can *not* be a problem.
Everyone going the speed limit, however, would be a major problem. Why? For the same reason that everyone going the same speed would be a problem: It forms walls and wolf packs (I mean the car kind -- I'm not delusional) and generally impedes your ability safely move around.
Oh, look! An obstacle you need to react to! Quick! Avoid it! Oh, wait- driver to my right, driver to my left, drivers in my blind spots. Nowhere to go! So we get an accident and a big pileup. ("But I want everyone to maintain 5 seconds of distance too!" Well, even assuming you can get *everyone* to do that, you just choked traffic flow WELL below the road's capacity.)
If you want it to be safe, you *need* cars going different speeds *so that* safe spaces can be maintained for everyone. I've been in situations where a few well-placed assholes *going the speed limit* form a wall, resulting in me and everyone else being locked in the exact same relative position for some 30 miles, with *no* possibility of moving around. You're telling me *that* is safe?
Seriously folks -- stay to the outer lanes when not passing. Faster traffic goes by smoothly, and everyone is safe. Everyone gets along. Problem solved.
You're on the right track, but I'm curious about what you count as a solution.
Are you saying it "solves" the problem if I, personally, use public transport[ation but I'll use the British convention cause it's shorter]? Surely not because that makes my commute longer, and everyone else's about the same.
Are you saying your solution is "everyone go use public transport"? Well, sorry, that's cheating. If you permit, as solutions, a change in millions of individuals' choices, then you're not understanding what it means to solve a problem. To make my point clearer: Would you accept "everyone stop committing murder" as a solution to the crime problem? Clearly not, because the relevant question is how to get people to stop committing murder! For the same reasons, it's not a valid solution to say, "Everyone go use public transport."
A relevant solution must be of the form of a *public policy* that *results* in everyone using public transport (which hopefully doesn't also induce massive inefficiencies on the side).
So, how do you propose to get people to decide to use public transport, in a way that shortens commute times, accomplishes the transition smoothly, and helps toward long-term infrastructural and planning improvements? That is the problem, and here is my solution.
Let me take your same solution and problem statement and propose a better solution:
Problem: GIVEN one person's change in behavior, reduce unnecessary traffic jams. (We can't reduce NECESSARY traffic jams through driving behavior i.e. ones that are an artifact of too many cars. For a realistic solution to that, go here.)
If we're going to change ONE person's behavior, it would be more effective for the passing-lane camper to STOP CAMPING THE PASSING LANE AND MOVE THE HELL OVER, YOU SELF-CENTERED, CLUELESS MORON.
If that one person does so, traffic will flow much more smoothly, as then all those tailgaters, WITHOUT changing their behavior, will glide through easily. No "wolf packs" or walls will form.
Remember porn sites? How about record porn *video*?
I was thinking if they could tap into e.g. the optical nerve and auditory cortex, then you look the same but get an audio-video recording of everything, and FPS porn would... benefit.
Privacy would be hurt though because it's that much harder to observe someone recording you.
As much as I would like to explain the errors in reasoning in your posts, you have revealed yourself to have very fundamental problems in your ability to rationally discuss this issue. Look at this exchange:
[Taxes impose costs] Compared to what exactly? Your other mythical option that doesn't impose enormous harms on the economy? The consensus among economists is that *given* a harm to the economy, carbon taxes get you the most CO2 reduction. Any other option will, for a given net CO2 reduction, do more unnecessary harm to the economy, since they're just crude approximations to what we really want. Taxes impose losses compared to not taxing, [bold added] For those reading, please think about what just happened there: MrNaz doesn't realize that the appropriate basis for comparison is
-Government policy A to solve CO2 emissions problem, vs. Policy B to solve CO2 emissions problem
NOT
-Government policy A vs. nothing
He doesn't see that you have to compare the economic (deadweight) losses of one counterplan, to the economic losses of his favored plan, NOT the losses of the counterplan, to nothing.
Even without going further into his other basic errors (like trivializing the ability of government to accomplish anything, but ONLY with respect to ideas he disagrees with), it should be pretty clear at this point that there is no reason to continue further.
Observers, please understand why.
And I'm asking you to mod back down his comments because they have reasoning errors like the above, NOT because he favors different policies than I do. (My own down modding is for rudeness about Ubuntu which I have since apologized for -- see sig.)
~w00t! Karma back to bad!~
Even if this could be measured and quantified, given that fossil fuels cause irreparable harm to the environment, the real cost could be said to be infinite....Sounds silly doesn't it? It is. Just like anyone who attempts to monetise the value of breathable air. I don't know how much of what you said was sarcasm, but you quite clearly cannot believe this and it cannot be true. If it were the case, we would ban all fossil fuel use, and spend all available resources on e.g. containing volcanoes on the off-chance that they might foul up the air too much. (infinity bad * tiny chance of something causing it = infinitely bad result = top priority for all resources)
While the benefit of having breathable air may be effectively infinite, the cost of undoing the risk of any given threat to it, is not. Therefore, the cost we should impose on fossil fuels is finite, and there is a finite tax that captures the full cost.
Also, you completely sidestepped the taxation deadweight loss issue. I don't see how adding a deadweight loss to environmental harm is a good thing. Your thinking on this is still muddled. ANY REGULATION YOU IMPOSE TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT HAS A DEADWEIGHT LOSS. The only issue is, which one has the least, and taxation of the bad is always that one.
The community loses, and the government just ends up squandering the tax dollars on harebrained "environmental harm mitigation" schemes. Er, if you already accept the government will completely botch any proposed program, then the question of which regulation proposal is best, is moot.
They're not trying to regulate every little thing, they're trying to say "don't do anything that harms the environment"
Not really. For one thing, they're going after one subset of that (CO2 emissions), and they're NOT going after everything that emits CO2(which would include breathing and campfires!) , even though all CO2 emissions are equal per unit. The real criterion is the imagined *inefficiency* that they're targeting. Which I consider fundamentally pointless since one factor in determining efficiency is utility to people, which exists only in their minds. That's why it makes much more sense to accept their judgment of how much utility these activities provide, and simply charge them the *cost* that is imposed on others.
Aside from the enormous harm that taxations place upon the economy
Compared to what exactly? Your other mythical option that doesn't impose enormous harms on the economy?
The consensus among economists is that *given* a harm to the economy, carbon taxes get you the most CO2 reduction. Any other option will, for a given net CO2 reduction, do more unnecessary harm to the economy, since they're just crude approximations to what we really want.
carbon sinking is not even possible given the engineering capacity we as humans have.
So all the design plans certified by real engineers are...
Furthermore, even if it *were* possible, there is no way to know what damage the CO2 does in the meantime while it is being sinked.
This just sounds like rationalization. Somehow, it's possible to find a human CO2 emission + CO2 atmospheric concentration + global warming + global weather pattern shift link...
but there's no way to approximate what damage if any is done in the intermediate time.
I could debunk this, but the real barrier is that you don't WANT CO2 sinking, under any circumstance, to be a valid option, because protecting the planet is only one goal you're targeting, but you want to slip in policies targeting other goals on the way.
You really have no understanding of the problem, do you?
Er, for someone who doesn't understand the differences between carbon credits and carbon taxes, that's a pretty unreasonable thing to say.
Under a carbon tax, no rights are bought or sold. You emit CO2 from fossil fuels, you pay a tax. That obligation cannot be bought or sold, nor would anyone be made better of by doing it.
The complete commodification of the rights to pollute simply mean that companies will simply find a way to price in the dollar value of pollution credits to get away with whatever they are doing now.
Great! (aside from the minor nitpick about how they're pricing in a tax rather than a credit)That's exactly what we want them to do: whatever's profitable, *after* paying to undo the negative externalities they're throwing off onto others.
That... was... the problem we were trying to solve... right?
Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure. It takes a real fundamentalist (or a complete idiot) to attempt to solve market failure by the application of more market instruments.
I'm almost shaking at how ridiculous you're being now. You're making a blanket dismissal of all market solutions to market problems on the grounds that "type X approaches can never solve type X problems"??? So, problems of regulations can't be solved by regulations? So no loophole in regulations can ever be closed? That would be the implication of what you're saying.
You're also not quite showing an understanding of what exactly the market problem *is* that we want to solve. The market problem is that (unjust) costs of an activity, which are im
I'm sorry, it seems pretty ridiculous to me to attack climate change by trying to go after *each* and *every* little thing someone deems inefficient given the benefit and environmental cost. You'll never be able to enumerate everything that's inefficient, because a) there are so many activities, and b) it depends on quantity that exists solely in other people's minds.
We're going after barley today, and tomorrow it will be celery or lack of solar panels on buildings or computer that go to sleep too slowly etc etc etc.
A much more rational and simple approach would be: Tax all fossil fuels at the current cost of sinking the resulting carbon out of the air. (Actually, you just want to sink the fraction of existing output that needs to be removed in order to stabilize concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but if I put that in the definition it would be too hard to untangle.)
Apply the funds to sinking CO2.
Then, all product use is carbon neutral. For all people, adjusting to climate change is simply a matter of buying whatever you want, so long as its cost is justified by its current price (which has been changed to account for the tax.) Given the new prices, all entrepreneurial activity redirects to account for higher fossil fuel costs and raises resources spent on minimizing this input.
This method is necessarily the least painful approach because and change in activities necessarily comes from those activities that have least benefit, as people currently judge them, and work up from there.
Furthermore, as the price of sinking goes down, the tax can go down.
Furthermore, this is robust against non-compliant countries, as their goods can be tarriffed to pay for whatever sinking they won't pay for. Or, if necessary, other countries can sink CO2 using general tax revenues.
Oops, I forgot, people would still be able to drive SUVs under this, so scratch it.
Slashdot Mirror
Nor the EXPLOSIONS at the five tri-hull weld points, right?
:-/
Or am I thinking of something else...
The goal is most distance on the least fuel, right?
The input is fuel, right?
The output is distance, right?
Solar cells take fuel to make, right?
So, compare distance over life of the vehicle, to non-solar energy used over the life of the vehicle, including construction.
Problem solved.
Better yet, find "ecological damage" measure for extraction of each input (fuel, metal) to produce the vehicle, and divide distance*cargo load mass, by that.
Next?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe Monsanto's objection was that they deliberately selected the crops from Monsanto's strain for replanting. That would imply that you'd be in the clear if you simply randomly selected crops to replant, excluding obviously bad ones.
That's like running over a kid in a crosswalk while the walk sign is lit and suing the kid for being there because he dented your car. The kid's doing what he's supposed to do, you're infringing on his space, and then you blame him. That's what Monsanto is doing. Well, if you want to start an analogy war...
This would be like Monsanto researching, patenting, and producing self-replicating shape-shifter robots, many of which sneak into factories and slip into the output pile and form themselves into near-exact copies of the factories' output, destroying one widget for each widget they copy. Then, the factory owners, who often retain some of the output for e.g. spare parts, notice they actually have self-replicating robots among their widgets. They discover the capabilities and then use their reproductive capabilities to make widgets, which they then sell for profit.
Relevant similaries captured by my analogy:
-Monsanto has spent a lot of its resources on developing something genuinely useful, which it patents.
-Through carelessness and intentional spreading, these units trespass onto others' property and modify their output, which also regularly gets good and bad invaders.
-The factory owners normally exploit natural phenomena that affect their processes.
-Monanto's units replace those property owners' normal output, but with better functionality.
-Those property owners notice the better functionality, and that it clearly could not have come from anything they did, and exploit its greater functionality and reproductive capability to make more of them.
Inferences from analogy:
-Monsanto should compensate others for their loss of normal spare parts. (I said they should replace lost normal seed.)
-Monsanto should be forced to use better containment protocols.
-Factory owners (farmers) should not be allowed to use reproductive capabilities of Monsanto's self-replicators, as that would infringe on a well-deserved patent.
It's true that people have replanted for thousands of years, but is this "the same"? The amount of labor that went into the research for the new plant varieties, when you consider gains in productivity just since 1850, is (by rough approximation) is equal to about ten unbroken years of labor from everyone on the planet in 2000 B.C. Let's accept that leeching off of moderate amounts of others intellectual works is okay. Let's accept that modern use of IP legal rights is ridiculous.
Nevertheless, thousands of years ago, it was simply not possible to pirate that much intellectual labor! The kind of replanting that happens today, just can't be compared to what happened back then.
That said, Monsanto even sends the lawyers after companies that advertise the fact that they DON'T use Monsanto products (e.g. the dairy in the article advertising its avoidance of hormone treated cows). this practice on Monsanto's part, I absolutely do not support. People have the right to make true statements about their products, even and especially if it's irrational to buy based on that. There's no evidence that Monsanto technologies are bad for you? Even if that were the case, so what? There's no scientific evidence that a rabbi's blessing will make your food healthier, or that a kosher diet will help you in the afterlife, yet we still permit products to be labeled as kosher.
If I had seen the article sooner, I would have f/p'd with: 'if you had to have brain surgery would you prefer someone who has been through medical school, trained and researched in the field, or the student next to you who has read Wikipedia' If you had to avoid sounding like a dumbass, would you prefer to make false dichotomies, or blow goats?
So, if I don't pay up, you'll put me in the bus lane, i.e. a lane with restrictions on who can be in it, therefore allowing it to move faster? Thanks!
Hey, how much faster can you send me data if I kill your cat?
Wow, have dogs learned to post on slashdot? Maybe that was Link in wolf form after finding a computer?
I semi-followed that story, but my question was more: why don't vigilantes go after everyone who shows their face in public as aiding spammers or spamming? The BlueFrog thing was all online activities.
... we do not see this. Spammers and their attorneys do in fact show their faces.
What I'm getting at is, there should be legions of people who hate spam with a passion. While I don't advocate violent vigilante attacks against spammers (so please don't hit me with the "your post advocates a (x) vigilante...), I would imagine that there are enough people ready/willing/able, that every time a spammer *or their attorneys* actually show their faces, then *bam* next thing you know they're a victim of several pranks, get death threats, families threatened, law firms threatened, litigants followed out of court and intimidated, etc etc etc ad infinitum.
I would futher imagine that by this point, spammers would be so afraid of showing their faces, that they would do everything possible to avoid a court appearance, and thus lose every case actually making it to a hearing, by default.
Yet
What am I missing?
I was hoping something that doesn't pollute or have horrific smell (do I repeat myself?) like maybe a fuel cell sort of deal.
Hm, I probably wouldn't mind junk mail so much if there were an easy way to liquify nonmetallic material and use it as fuel for my home...
A pox on both your houses...
This is like 4chan vs. The Church of Scientolog (except that in that case I have to clarify that it's 4chan I dislike, not the people joining their campaign as "Anonymous", and the Church of Scientology I dislike, not the people who simply believe in the underlying religious philosophy).
Btw, why is it that spammers ever appear in court? Why haven't vigilantes already made it a practice to terrorize anyone who publicly acts in furtherance of spamming?
I'm completely clueless about making web pages (*turns geek card*) but my reading of that clause is:
"If some URL that stems from your website is not in use by you, Network Solutions can put a filler page in their pointing to a Network Solutions site."
In other words, if I own soggyballs.com, and someone tries to go to soggyballs.com/cereal.htm, and I don't have a cereal.htm, and that link is therefore dead, people will get a page that says:
"That location does not exist. This site is hosted by Network Solutions, blah blah blah, here's a link to our site."
Isn't that standard practice?
Now -- just real quick -- point me to exemption in the drug laws for people who take their drugs in a facility equipped to handle O/Ders and does so solely with money from the users?
Oh, you mean
But
Hm
Wrong, wrong, and wrong.
... somehow ... I don't view them as "a problem". And somehow ... they don't cause any accidents. Ditto for fast drivers.
Slow drivers are not the problem. Fast drivers are not the problem. Slow *or* fast drivers that unnecessarily screw with the flow of traffic *are* the problem. When driving to work, I think about 1,000 drivers are going slower than I would like to drive. Yet
How can this be? Because whether you drive fast or slow, you can be a problem, or you can *not* be a problem.
Everyone going the speed limit, however, would be a major problem. Why? For the same reason that everyone going the same speed would be a problem: It forms walls and wolf packs (I mean the car kind -- I'm not delusional) and generally impedes your ability safely move around.
Oh, look! An obstacle you need to react to! Quick! Avoid it! Oh, wait- driver to my right, driver to my left, drivers in my blind spots. Nowhere to go! So we get an accident and a big pileup. ("But I want everyone to maintain 5 seconds of distance too!" Well, even assuming you can get *everyone* to do that, you just choked traffic flow WELL below the road's capacity.)
If you want it to be safe, you *need* cars going different speeds *so that* safe spaces can be maintained for everyone. I've been in situations where a few well-placed assholes *going the speed limit* form a wall, resulting in me and everyone else being locked in the exact same relative position for some 30 miles, with *no* possibility of moving around. You're telling me *that* is safe?
Seriously folks -- stay to the outer lanes when not passing. Faster traffic goes by smoothly, and everyone is safe. Everyone gets along. Problem solved.
You're on the right track, but I'm curious about what you count as a solution.
Are you saying it "solves" the problem if I, personally, use public transport[ation but I'll use the British convention cause it's shorter]? Surely not because that makes my commute longer, and everyone else's about the same.
Are you saying your solution is "everyone go use public transport"? Well, sorry, that's cheating. If you permit, as solutions, a change in millions of individuals' choices, then you're not understanding what it means to solve a problem. To make my point clearer: Would you accept "everyone stop committing murder" as a solution to the crime problem? Clearly not, because the relevant question is how to get people to stop committing murder! For the same reasons, it's not a valid solution to say, "Everyone go use public transport."
A relevant solution must be of the form of a *public policy* that *results* in everyone using public transport (which hopefully doesn't also induce massive inefficiencies on the side).
So, how do you propose to get people to decide to use public transport, in a way that shortens commute times, accomplishes the transition smoothly, and helps toward long-term infrastructural and planning improvements? That is the problem, and here is my solution.
Let me take your same solution and problem statement and propose a better solution:
Problem: GIVEN one person's change in behavior, reduce unnecessary traffic jams. (We can't reduce NECESSARY traffic jams through driving behavior i.e. ones that are an artifact of too many cars. For a realistic solution to that, go here.)
If we're going to change ONE person's behavior, it would be more effective for the passing-lane camper to STOP CAMPING THE PASSING LANE AND MOVE THE HELL OVER, YOU SELF-CENTERED, CLUELESS MORON.
If that one person does so, traffic will flow much more smoothly, as then all those tailgaters, WITHOUT changing their behavior, will glide through easily. No "wolf packs" or walls will form.
Just seems much more effective to me, is all...
Remember porn sites? How about record porn *video*?
... benefit.
I was thinking if they could tap into e.g. the optical nerve and auditory cortex, then you look the same but get an audio-video recording of everything, and FPS porn would
Privacy would be hurt though because it's that much harder to observe someone recording you.
And when I make VoIP calls using a microphone..?
You'll take a nap on the plane and wake up with a horse's head under your blanket.
-Government policy A to solve CO2 emissions problem, vs. Policy B to solve CO2 emissions problem
NOT
-Government policy A vs. nothing
He doesn't see that you have to compare the economic (deadweight) losses of one counterplan, to the economic losses of his favored plan, NOT the losses of the counterplan, to nothing.
Even without going further into his other basic errors (like trivializing the ability of government to accomplish anything, but ONLY with respect to ideas he disagrees with), it should be pretty clear at this point that there is no reason to continue further.
Observers, please understand why.
And I'm asking you to mod back down his comments because they have reasoning errors like the above, NOT because he favors different policies than I do. (My own down modding is for rudeness about Ubuntu which I have since apologized for -- see sig.)
While the benefit of having breathable air may be effectively infinite, the cost of undoing the risk of any given threat to it, is not. Therefore, the cost we should impose on fossil fuels is finite, and there is a finite tax that captures the full cost. Also, you completely sidestepped the taxation deadweight loss issue. I don't see how adding a deadweight loss to environmental harm is a good thing. Your thinking on this is still muddled. ANY REGULATION YOU IMPOSE TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT HAS A DEADWEIGHT LOSS. The only issue is, which one has the least, and taxation of the bad is always that one. The community loses, and the government just ends up squandering the tax dollars on harebrained "environmental harm mitigation" schemes. Er, if you already accept the government will completely botch any proposed program, then the question of which regulation proposal is best, is moot.
Get reading.
They're not trying to regulate every little thing, they're trying to say "don't do anything that harms the environment"
Not really. For one thing, they're going after one subset of that (CO2 emissions), and they're NOT going after everything that emits CO2(which would include breathing and campfires!) , even though all CO2 emissions are equal per unit. The real criterion is the imagined *inefficiency* that they're targeting. Which I consider fundamentally pointless since one factor in determining efficiency is utility to people, which exists only in their minds. That's why it makes much more sense to accept their judgment of how much utility these activities provide, and simply charge them the *cost* that is imposed on others.
Aside from the enormous harm that taxations place upon the economy
Compared to what exactly? Your other mythical option that doesn't impose enormous harms on the economy?
The consensus among economists is that *given* a harm to the economy, carbon taxes get you the most CO2 reduction. Any other option will, for a given net CO2 reduction, do more unnecessary harm to the economy, since they're just crude approximations to what we really want.
carbon sinking is not even possible given the engineering capacity we as humans have.
So all the design plans certified by real engineers are ...
Furthermore, even if it *were* possible, there is no way to know what damage the CO2 does in the meantime while it is being sinked.
This just sounds like rationalization. Somehow, it's possible to find a human CO2 emission + CO2 atmospheric concentration + global warming + global weather pattern shift link ...
but there's no way to approximate what damage if any is done in the intermediate time.
I could debunk this, but the real barrier is that you don't WANT CO2 sinking, under any circumstance, to be a valid option, because protecting the planet is only one goal you're targeting, but you want to slip in policies targeting other goals on the way.
You really have no understanding of the problem, do you?
Er, for someone who doesn't understand the differences between carbon credits and carbon taxes, that's a pretty unreasonable thing to say.
Under a carbon tax, no rights are bought or sold. You emit CO2 from fossil fuels, you pay a tax. That obligation cannot be bought or sold, nor would anyone be made better of by doing it.
The complete commodification of the rights to pollute simply mean that companies will simply find a way to price in the dollar value of pollution credits to get away with whatever they are doing now.
Great! (aside from the minor nitpick about how they're pricing in a tax rather than a credit)That's exactly what we want them to do: whatever's profitable, *after* paying to undo the negative externalities they're throwing off onto others.
... was ... the problem we were trying to solve ... right?
That
Pollution and environmental issues are *the* classic economic textbook example of market failure. It takes a real fundamentalist (or a complete idiot) to attempt to solve market failure by the application of more market instruments.
I'm almost shaking at how ridiculous you're being now. You're making a blanket dismissal of all market solutions to market problems on the grounds that "type X approaches can never solve type X problems"??? So, problems of regulations can't be solved by regulations? So no loophole in regulations can ever be closed? That would be the implication of what you're saying.
You're also not quite showing an understanding of what exactly the market problem *is* that we want to solve. The market problem is that (unjust) costs of an activity, which are im
I'm sorry, it seems pretty ridiculous to me to attack climate change by trying to go after *each* and *every* little thing someone deems inefficient given the benefit and environmental cost. You'll never be able to enumerate everything that's inefficient, because a) there are so many activities, and b) it depends on quantity that exists solely in other people's minds.
We're going after barley today, and tomorrow it will be celery or lack of solar panels on buildings or computer that go to sleep too slowly etc etc etc.
A much more rational and simple approach would be: Tax all fossil fuels at the current cost of sinking the resulting carbon out of the air. (Actually, you just want to sink the fraction of existing output that needs to be removed in order to stabilize concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere but if I put that in the definition it would be too hard to untangle.)
Apply the funds to sinking CO2.
Then, all product use is carbon neutral. For all people, adjusting to climate change is simply a matter of buying whatever you want, so long as its cost is justified by its current price (which has been changed to account for the tax.) Given the new prices, all entrepreneurial activity redirects to account for higher fossil fuel costs and raises resources spent on minimizing this input.
This method is necessarily the least painful approach because and change in activities necessarily comes from those activities that have least benefit, as people currently judge them, and work up from there.
Furthermore, as the price of sinking goes down, the tax can go down.
Furthermore, this is robust against non-compliant countries, as their goods can be tarriffed to pay for whatever sinking they won't pay for. Or, if necessary, other countries can sink CO2 using general tax revenues.
Oops, I forgot, people would still be able to drive SUVs under this, so scratch it.