because markets can’t build public goods.

durr.

Sorry to break it to you Wookie, but the "free market" isn't the deus ex machina your corporate puppet masters have apparently led you to believe it is.

You can't say durr. I saw that in something today. Might have been Ant-Man and the Wasp. Not sure about that. Good night.

You are the last person on earth who should be sarcastically thanking someone for writing thought provoking posts. You’re basically Ayn Rand, if Ayn Rand were a character in one of her own books.

holy **** this is profound

If building rail and distribution hubs is punishing Walmart, I’m pretty sure they’d say “hit me harder daddy”.

Hold your horses



you forgot about ELON MUSK

i'm gonna delivvrr amzn prime by shooting a p3n1s shapd MISSILE at yoUR FACE. we go to mars!!1

Remember when I posted this?



well we can’t just ~build stuff we need~, an oligarch hasn’t decided that he wants to own it!!!” - wookie06

ELON MUSK, patron saint of the public private partnership. A fair and equitable division of labor. The public pays, the private profits.

Anybody bought something on Amazon lately? It's getting kind of creepy. For prime, they're encouraging me now to pick a day of the week to have my **** delivered, like that's my shopping day or something that they're replacing, where all my junk shows up on my doorstep. Apparently if I'm to believe Jon`C and other folks, also to send me stuff I never ordered and let me send it back.

Free markets are perfect, you have no clue what you’re talking about. Firms are simply making the rational profit maximizing choice to drive their customers to extinction. It’s working exactly as intended and it would be wrong for the government to interfere.

So basically liberals, since classical liberalism through Reagans neoliberal resert, invented

an economic system that offers no incentive for considering the long term impacts of production choices,
a legal framework that bars professional managers from considering long term impacts,
a political system that rewards representatives for discounting long term impacts,
an economic dogma against incentivizing or forcing businesses to consider the long term,
and a personal philosophy against understanding problems holistically

and then liberals can’t undersrand why people like wookie06 believe “global warming was made up by China”

you guys have never met a commons you didn’t want to make a tragedy

btw, we recently saw 10-year treasury bond demand surge enough for yields to dip below that of [edit] 3-month treasuries. Recession by the end of the year?

And the fact that the Fed has been selling $50B/month of treasuries (people are calling it "quantitative tightening") since December at least, which it had previously picked up in the wake of the Great Recession, means that even this yield is likely higher than it would otherwise be had the bond market not been influenced by the Fed's Open Market Operations.

You must be joking lmao

Not really. Most of our waste comes from **** we individually don’t need, want, or care about. Long global supply chains are just exercising arbitrage opportunities to the benefit of capital owners, not us. Most transport pollution is caused by commercial freight, not individual, something that’s currently done in an intentionally inefficient and polluting way because companies don’t have to pay for dirty ways of doing it. Electronics and appliance manufacturers literally conspire to make their products non-maintainable to force repeat purchase. Single use plastic packaging like clamshells are typically more than 30% of the total carbon footprint of a product, but people ****ing HATE clamshells. And the simple fact is, none of us currently have ANY realistic choice here. You can’t choose to buy a smartphone with a replaceable battery anymore. You can’t choose to buy a set of jigsaw blades without a clamshell. That’s all that exists on the market.

I’m not saying it would be exactly the same. But there’s a baffling level of inefficiency in big businesses and how they do practically everything, so we shouldn’t underestimate how much we can save by forcing these companies to optimize over encouraging individuals to. If we get normal people to fundamentally change their consumption habits it will drop carbon emissions by, what, 20%? Big business is way bigger than we are, and they will dig their heels in until the end of life on earth because that’s what big businesses do.

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy. I expect a recession every 10 years because the great minds in finance ultimately cause one every 10 years.

Can't fix global warming without fixing* capitalism

*capitalism can't be fixed as it's working exactly as it's supposed to. The correct term here would be "overcoming".

I never said I don't believe in global warming. The theory may very well prove to be true someday.

yup. When economists look at race to the bottom activities like regulations arbitrage and wasteful product packaging, you know what game they use? Prisoner's dilemma. Businesses would be better off with an alternative. They want the alternative. They just can't unilaterally pursue it because our economic system is designed to punish firms that try.

At this point really the best you can hope for is that your children survive long enough to forgive you.

Yeah we're possibly seeing the beginning of a recession. Which, this early, would massively help the Democrats in 2020. It's probably the only way they could win, tbh.

Also wrt your comments earlier, you're probably right that I'm being too hasty to declare the extinction of humans imminent, but I think it's important to poke people into recognizing just how serious our issues are and how far we are from any real solution. People should still imagine extinction because it's the one thing that would actually shock people into action.

It's not really a matter of belief. It's what the evidence best suggests. IDK, maybe to you scientific reasoning is a matter of faith?

I brought up dark energy to frame the statement. Some people have the intuition that space colonies or whatever will allow humans to persist indefinitely. It's something to come to terms with, but humans will necessarily go extinct. Many people don't like thinking that must be true, but it must. So the question is what we want to make of our existence. It's a way of framing the discussion that you don't often see.

In any case, whenever people talk about space colonization, I think of this:



"Wouldn't this be great? We just have to figure out.. how to make it work."

As far as I can tell, we're stuck on this ****ing planet so we better take its condition seriously.

bleh double post

I don't disagree with any of this. Maybe we can use all of the already manufactured clamshell packagings that won't be used in this alternate future where there's an incentive to cooperate to put all of the excess energy already in the ocean into.



This is also my strategy. Like, at least don't refuse to have it on the table, because that doesn't make any sense. It will happen as you say, and it's a better topic to consider than how we will innovate our way to not having to change the way our world runs. And it aggravates the **** out of people which is great.

I'm a pretty environmentally conscious person, actually. I just don't buy hook, line, and sinker into every fauxialist proposal to save the planet. On a tangent, though, humans, or at least most of them, can't actually survive this planet. We're not rugged enough. Who knows if human activity's effect on the climate is buying or losing us time?

Well all of the rich people causing this problem have apparently decided to murder you and move to mars, so it doesn’t matter what you think anyway.

Termites caused global warming, it only makes sense they'd move to Mars since that's where evil insectoid aliens live.

I've never heard of insectoid aliens, just reptillians. Do we know that they're actually evil?

methane gas

This really doesn't make any sense. First, I don't know where you got your data on the ratio carbon emissions due to personal to commercial transportation, as sources are pretty hard to find, and a bit old, but the ones I have found say that it's a substantial percentage. Commuters, airline traffic, is significant, even at a glance.

Second, the US has the most extensive freight rail network in the world already. That's actually why we have no passenger rail, we put all of our eggs into the freight basket, and it's actually really good. You are also trivializing supply chain logistics. JIT exists to eliminate waste and reduce infrastructure investment, all of which have a carbon cost. Now, our infrastructure could probably be a lot more carbon neutral if it weren't designed around automobiles and highways, but we committed to that path well before we even knew it was an issue. There's really no feasible way to rebuild all of our cities around a more efficient transportation topology at this point, even if it turned out that the massive carbon cost of doing so could be justified. It certainly wouldn't be "easy".

um, ackshually

The EPA. According to them, personal transportation accounts for at most 37% of US transportation carbon emissions (10.4% of total). The true amount is certainly lower, however, because the EPA groups together all personal ground transportation that can carry 12 or fewer people (a category that also covers the vast majority of commercial traffic that you will see on the roads, including most buses).

I didn't say it was insignificant. I said it was relatively tiny. I also said it was the most difficult (read: expensive) thing to change, so the effort would be better spent on almost anything else.

It is intellectually dishonest to group airline traffic with personal transportation. It is not personal, it is commercial, and for even medium distance travel most people don't have credible alternatives.

This is a meaningless statement. The US has the largest economy in the world, so it obviously should have the most extensive freight rail network. That says nothing about whether that network meets modern needs. It's also not the kind of rail I was talking about.

You have no passenger rail because passenger airliners benefit from deep government subsidies and uninternalized externalities. Passenger rail couldn't compete against it. Despite government intransigence, however, mass transit is oversubscribed throughout the developed world (particularly rail, where it is available). If it were available, high speed rail would also eliminate the majority of domestic air traffic (because any flight shorter than 3 hours or so would actually take less time to complete on a train).

Yes, I am.

JIT has waste and carbon costs and infrastructure investment costs too, the difference is that the costs of hub and spoke are internalized, while JIT costs are almost totally externalized. So I guess what I'm saying is, I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. Welfare is good, as long as it's Walmart? Alternatives aren't free so we shouldn't do them?

Which is why I said personal transportation is the hardest part to change.

What you said was,



I'm pointing out that outside grid power, it's very difficult to reduce carbon emissions.

Personal transportation is a large contribution, and very difficult to change. If you read the EPA's definition of "passenger car", it is a vehicle carrying 12 passengers or less, which is primarily used for carrying passengers. The percentage of those vehicles that are being used as buses as vanishingly small. A stupid fraction of light duty trucks on the road are also used by people commuting to work for no other reason that it's fashionable. You can argue about weather buses or airlines count as personal or commercial transpiration, but private individuals use them, and it would be a major issue if they didn't have access to them. Yes, the government heavily backed planes and automobiles for human transportation, because the US government does it's central planning via. subsides and tax breaks. That's not intrinsically a bad thing, because some degree of centralized planning is needed, expect it turns out their choices were wrong.

Though, I'm not sure how well passenger rail would work in the US. The US is pretty huge, so for most trips, even high speed rail is going to take forever. Rail also has to make many stops, which slows it down considerably. High speed rail might have had a place for short distance trips between cities, but we typically just use cars for those trips due to a lack of mass transport. It's very possible that dedicating rail lines to fright is a better from an emissions standpoint.

You are treating JIT and spoke and hub as if they are mutually exclusive, and they aren't. Extreme JIT might degrade spoke and hub efficiencies, but given the cost of fuel is not insignificant, manufactures are incentivized to optimize their distribution networks. Remember, the carbon cost of wasted good is also pretty high, because you have wasted both the energy required to manufacture and transport and recycle the unneeded goods.

But really, it's all moot, because the only party in the US who is interested in reducing carbon emissions is dominated by neo-luddites who strongly oppose all of the methods that could make the biggest difference on any useful time horizon.

hm

So I finally started watching Hand of God on Prime and there's this tech billionaire that wants all the data. One of the reasons he cites is how some city, don't remember where or if this is actually true, synchronized all the traffic lights and reduced emissions by some sizable percentage. Now, of course I didn't learn this concept from the show but it did remind me about it and it made me wonder how much relatively benign steps like that could reduce emissions.

I find Chomsky is pretty frustrating. By the title of the video, I am guessing it's the same as this. But what I find really annoying, and maybe even dishonest, is that while Chomsky cites the biologist, Ernst Mayr, as having made the argument that intelligence is a "lethal" mutation, in his debate with Carl Sagan about SETI (in which Mayr argues that highly developed intelligence is likely to be an extremely rare occurrence in the universe), Mayr never comes close to saying this!

What Mayr did say is that he thinks that intelligence is a fairly useless and expensive mutation, all else equal. I wasted 20+ minutes scouring that debate transcript for anything resembling the Malthusian argument of Chomsky cited by Reid, and, well, it's just not there. Shame on Chomsky for being either sloppy or intellectually dishonest and wasting my time chasing a phony citation.

Have a think on this:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

Interesting although not related to reducing emissions. It's also interesting to note that modern cars are tuned primarily for emissions.

Reminds me of how in an RTS game like warcraft I try to efficiently mine resources like gold by having the correct number of peasants so that rarely will more than one be waiting. I also upgrade the townhall for mining bonuses as quickly as possible. Of course the mine collapses fairly quick.

Full employment and capital investment? That central planning stuff sounds great.