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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   23731 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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Given how stupid the COVID-19 response was, I've lost faith that anything with the slightest bit of ambiguity or cost+benefit can be handled reasonably by our society. Wind turbines generate electricity, externalities be damned. Hell, I'd label the entire anti-nuclear movement "virtue-signaling", and we haven't "examined ourselves closely" for the 80 years that's been going on. I blame it on 2 parts conflict theory, 1 part Moloch.

Killing birds is a tragedy of the commons. From my reading of history, nobody has found a good way to actually ensure a proportional response to a tragedy of the commons. We either threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers, write some sad articles that change absolutely nothing, or funnel money into mismanaged non-profits. Even when a fairly simple law by Congress could save tens of millions of otherwise lost books, we can't do that because it might benefit Google.

Take the blackpill and accept that this probably won't get fixed. Ensure you and yours are benefiting from this foreknowledge. When I take my kids to see their grandfather (we're far apart so this is infrequent), we always take a walk into the nearby forest to see the family of bald eagles that have set up a nest there. And they've seen fields of flowers, and we have a huge physical collection of old books. My kids don't fully understand why their weird dad is obsessing about these particular things, but they don't need to.

From my reading of history, nobody has found a good way to actually ensure a proportional response to a tragedy of the commons.

I'm surprised that you are (presumably) at least 35 and can't think of a time when a tragedy of the commons was resolved or largely mitigated effectively. Off the top of my head:

  1. DDT

  2. CFCs

  3. Bald eagles (no longer considered threatened or endangered)

  4. Urban smog (largely due to car exhaust)

  1. DDT is a great insecticide, and the environmental impacts were grossly exaggerated. The egg shell thinning, in particular, was a lie. I would bet that the banning of DDT has resulted in the deaths of over a million people from insect-borne diseases.
  2. I'm unsure about CFCs.
  3. With all endangered species, the response of "threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers" has been somewhat effective at actually saving them. I know people who have made their land inhospitable to some specific endangered turtle because if anyone found one of those turtles on their land, the land would lose its value and become a liability. My ideal, impossible solution would be some way to actually incentivize saving endangered species rather than just severely punishing everyone we can catch.
  4. I am not happy with the regulatory environment for American automobiles. I want mini trucks. I hate how CAFE has resulted in exactly 2 sizes of consumer vehicles available: either a "passenger car" or a "SUV/truck/van". I do not like the increased car prices from all the rules. I hate the regulatory capture that prevents new car manufacturers from threatening established ones. There is less smog, yes, but it's not like the way we did that in the US was without cost.

Actually, the example I had in mind when I wrote that was drunk driving. Our penalties for drunk driving are wildly disproportionate to the actual cost to society. We give far lower sentences to people who endanger or accidentally kill others by different means. We went with the extreme penalties to force a culture shift, and it worked. But it's not proportional. It lacks the beauty of the Invisible hand that solves so many of our other problems. It's not that we've never solved a tragedy of the commons, it's that I don't think we've ever solved it well.

No, the eggshell thinning was not a lie. It really is a great insecticide, it's a shame that's it's real bad shit for non-insects.

You'd probably lose your bet if only because it's not actually internationally banned for pest control. You just can't dump tons of it onto your crops anymore.

Yes, car regulations come with a cost - as a sedan driver I'm not happy about mega trucks sharing the road with me thanks to CAFE standards. But you can't pretend that urban smog is nowhere near as bad as it was in the 70s. That's obviously a tragedy of the commons mitigated. The mitigation isn't perfect, but that's an absurd standard.

If you're talking about hypothetical (and probably non-existent) deaths from lack of DDT you ought to weigh the people who didn't die of air pollution much more than the fact that you don't have a minitruck.

It's not that we've never solved a tragedy of the commons, it's that I don't think we've ever solved it well.

That may be because you appear to be largely unaware of the details of the examples I posted. The irony of being obsessed with showing your kids eagles that were nearly eradicated thanks to DDT crippling their eggshells while claiming that was a lie is heady stuff - history is truly doomed to repeat.

Yeah, remember the ozone layer? In elementary school they scared us half to death with tales of skin cancer and whatnot.

Solved by a couple chemists coming up with better alternatives for a few pennies more and an international convention on switching over the course of a decade.

No one talks about solved problems (why would they) and so availability bias minimizes them in our minds.

Remember the specter of acid rain as well?

If we're on this topic, then let me link the relevant SSC post.

Solved by a couple chemists coming up with better alternatives for a few pennies more and an international convention on switching over the course of a decade.

And right as DuPont's patent on manufacturing R-12 was at its expiration date. Convenient.

This is the consensus among the HVAC tech community.

R-12 was invented in the 1930s and was long out of patent. I think they DID pull that with some of the replacements -- the whole "Oh yeah we fixed that and it was no problem" story would be a lot more convincing if every few years they didn't decide the replacements are no good and now you have to replace all your equpiment AGAIN.

R-12 was invented in the 1930s and was long out of patent.

But not the [patents on the] processes used to make it, which expired shortly before the ban.

R-12 has been manufactured since the 1940s; manufacturing patents were ALSO expired. Dupont did not have a monopoly on R-12 (or R-22) production by 1996 or shortly before.

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