I didn't know the title was difficult to decipher, but the reason for it sounding unnatural is that title lengths are limited on HN. But thanks for all the suggestions.
Actually, this would not always be true. Yes, in many cases would, but it would depend on the elasticity of supply and demand. The total size of the tax incidence would be government revenue from the tax.
The idea is not necessarily to outlaw carbon emissions, but to set a tax equal to the economic burden the emissions place on the global economy.
But a tax such as this should be designed to be revenue neutral--which we as humans are capable of doing.
Even though these things are possible, economic policy is so filled with politics, and politics is so filled with corruption, that I have little to no hope it will change.
>If students have to generate their own power, they are much less likely to waste it. How far would students go to reduce their efforts? Would hot showers go out of fashion?
The article's discussion of human power and incentives to use it beg the point to be made about the right way to fix the tragedy of the commons market failure with atmospheric pollution (and all the other problems with fossil fuels as well).
There are so many ways to reduce energy consumption that government regulation can't possibly legislate and adequately regulate (and it's barely even trying at the moment).
For example, I try to make a point to bike, walk, take the stairs, use efficient driving habits, and try to often take cold showers. I admittedly do this primarily because I like the exercise, the cold water is more refreshing and better for my skin, I save money, but as as an added bonus I feel some satisfaction that I consume less fossil fuels. But I would do all these things more if I saved more money from it.
And taxing bad things is better than taxing good things (like income and investment).
I think this is one of the things we will look back from the future and think, what were people thinking--they taxed jobs when they could have taxed something like environmental destruction? What?
But American politics are what they are. Our public transport across the country varies, but generally it is laughably bad, and that's just another example of an extremely low hanging fruit to grab.
I've travelled to many countries and the US is the only country I've been to where citizens have a legitimate and real fear of their government using force against them for something that most people would define as 'not doing anything wrong.'
Perhaps, in America, we should stop putting people in jail for not doing anything wrong.[1][2][3][4]
>I'm sure you can find someone to deny the genocide of Native Americans
It has never been officially recognized by the US government. It's not "simply a false statement," it's a fact. Yes, we both learned about the Trail of Tears, but we don't recognize Native American genocide as what it is. Your presenting the Trail of Tears as a strawman for Native American genocide.
There are a lot of people saying this.[1] I'm sorry you felt the need to write such a condescending remark about internet message board arguments, that in combination with a straw man argument is really low.
This comes across as unreasonable to me. Of course I am not trolling. I am responding directly to the comment above me, and I'm not aware of why you would say something so accusatory. Yes, I could be wrong about this, and I'm aware this is a controversial topic now, but I'm not sure what you are asking me to "not do." I think disagreement should be met with facts to support why you disagree, not with insults.
Hi, I can't respond to your comment below. I just want you to know it's not correct. I also learned of the Trail of Tears, but the US Government paid per head for killing Native Americans, and never formally recognized or apologized for it. It has never been recognized as an attempted genocide. It's not an "internet argument," it's a fact.
I'm also aware of Pol Pot, but to be honest, I have to admit I don't really know a lot about his rise to power and the genocide of ethnic groups in Cambodia. I would bet money most people don't know who Pol Pot is. I don't remember covering it.
The US stance on the Native American genocide(s) is basically denial that it happened, or at minimum, failure to admit it.
Feynman was a particularly interesting, intelligent, but also a very moral person. He said in an interview in his older years, while tearing up: 'I know the difference between right and wrong.'
Of science, my favorite bit from him is that 'in science, it does not matter what your last name is, how brilliant you are, how beautiful your theory is, all that matters is if it experimentally agrees with nature. That's all that science is'[1]
After devoting his time to science, he indulged in sex, drugs and art, and in the meantime had a great deal good to say about not just nature, but about morality as well. My type of person.
OK I can see now this is going down a dark road to that line of thinking and that was not my intention. This is a very controversial topic* and I wasn't aware of this. I didn't mean to open up a bucket of worms. I'm still a bit perplexed. Since reading here I've done some research and learned the Cambodian Genocide claimed around 1/3 the death toll of The Holocaust, yet I'd bet most people haven't heard much, or anything, about it. Could you name the leader in charge of it, or how it came about? What about: how can we avoid it from happening again? Keep in mind, it happened much more recently.
The Native American genocide is barely recognized as even being real (and never officially in the US), even though it was directly funded (paid dollars per head killed--pretty blatant, isn't it?) by the US and California governments.
And for God's sake I'm not trying to say anything in support of racism or Nazis, as you alluded to, that's ridiculous and awful.
I find that in mentioning atrocities we don't even recognize as ever happening (Native Americans) as a really hard mental gymnastic maneuver required. How is it logically any different than Holocaust denial? I literally never covered the Cambodian or Native American genocides in school. I find it hard to believe others have had much different experiences in their educations as mine was very vanilla at large public schools and universities, but I would certainly like to know if that's the case or not.
I don't have any tolerance for racism myself, and please stop speaking in a condescending tone. It's unnecessary at this point as you've already made yourself clear that you view yourself as righteous and my comments as uneducated, and further doing so is not productive.
Can't we do more for Native American peoples? Isn't this a step in the right direction away from racism? Or, is their attempted-genocide deserving of continued denial? What do you think?
1-reloading the page shows karma is changing rapidly with a consistent average
OK, well I don't claim to be an authority on this subject. It just really appears to look like two methods that reached the same result; though one sounds more unnatural than the other to us (i.e. in 2016 the US dropped 26,000+ bombs on Muslim-majority countries, but we have very few places resembling death camps, and none of them are--at least in name--racially motivated).
Anyways, both I think we can all agree are bad. I just didn't know so many non-Jews died in the holocaust.
>Is it possible you are just not well versed on the subject?
Well I took required history classes in high school and university and scored well enough in those courses. This is what I was taught. That's what my statement is about. I was aware that other ethnic groups were targeted, but did not know the numbers in some cases were similar to those that Jews suffered. I had a very real understanding they were, by a far margin, the largest group to suffer.
>You can't compare the number of dead and conclude anything meaningful from that alone.
Of course you can. The number of innocent people murdered is a very meaningful number.
I never disagreed with the rest of what you said. I don't disagree with you that Jewish hatred was not a cornerstone of Nazi philosophy and that other European countries did not collaborate in anti-antisemitic policies.
However, it's not appropriate to just throw aside the number of lives lost as "not meaningful alone." What other single metric would you select to be considered to be more meaningful?
>Interesting to note that nazis killed as much ethnic poles as polish jews
Wow. Why is the holocaust taught with such a focus on one ethnic group of victims? I thought Jews were the only significant group of victims, but that's clearly not true.
It's also interesting to note that one legitimate government still exists in the world that funded the genocide of what many estimate to be a larger number of people than were killed in the Holocaust, but it's commonly not referred to as a genocide. Instead, it's "wartime deaths," or something else.[1]
To be fair, there are more people worried about how they can afford healthcare and home ownership than worried about increasing the number of millionaires and wealthy corporations in America--we already lead the world there, while we trail behind in the former problems.
You're being downvoted, but dissenting opinions should be allowed, even when it comes to climate change. There is a reasonable argument to be made that climate change alarmism is not productive. I saw Bill Nye answer the question of 'what happens due to global warming,' to which he replied, 'people's qualities of life will most likely go down because people will fight over resources,' that said, right now we have a surplus of resources in a very real sense. We already basically have productive capacity to feed every person on earth, but it's politics and greed that makes people starve, not resources.
Whether the down-voters like it or not, climate change is a very real and scientifically established fact, but what that will do to people on the world is not a scientific fact. It's just what currently most people predict will happen (and disagreeing with this is feels like some kind of thought crime in the traditional sense--it's not science). The world is not going to end. Biodiversity and Biomass is decreasing. The Northwest Passage is being opened up. Iron fertilization will become a more likely policy to sequester carbon and increase biomass in the oceans. Sea levels will rise. Extreme weather patterns most likely will increase. Productive farm land may or may not increase. Russia actually may have a fair bit to gain from it. But the fact is, there is a lot we really don't know.
In the very long run our civilization will need to harvest as much energy from the sun as possible, but in the meantime we've done a pretty fantastic job of screwing up the planet, so it's a pretty good idea to stop emitting so much pollutants into our atmosphere, since we don't really know for sure, but we have a lot of reasons to think it won't be good. That's really the best argument to end climate change, but it's probably not convincing enough to change behavior in large numbers of people.
That said, the politics and bureaucracies around climate change have started to resemble the War on Poverty and War on Drugs--institutions which now exhibit bureaucratic intertia (have an inherent perverse incentive structure, and they rationally (evilly) place their own survival over that of solving the problems they're tasked with).
>If you are someone who wants more wind power to be produced, you want it to be cheap. You should be rooting for cheaper wind prices, which come with increased efficiency (including less employees per unit of energy produced).
This is a pretty good point, and it also leads in to an argument to be made for an important distinction between productivity and jobs.
People like jobs. Politicians and corporations talk about creating jobs. They're seen as universally good, but that is not necessarily the case. Especially as tech becomes more capable of automating more tasks, which may displace labor at a rate in which people have increasing difficulty in retraining quickly enough, it's appropriate to have a cultural shift in perhaps still valuing jobs, but not over valuing human dignity and economic productivity. An example I witnessed: The very grumpy woman in Paris who took a Euro from me to use the toilet could be given the same amount of money generated by an automated toll while she does something productive. Or even she could just do something which she enjoys and would be happier doing, but is non-productive, and that would still be Pareto efficient: it makes one better off without making anyone else worse off.
Policy should not seek to create jobs just for the sake of creating jobs. With appropriate, just and fair economic policies, it really shouldn't matter how many jobs an industry creates: it matters how much utility, and at what utility per dollar the industry is capable of. That is, assuming you care most about human welfare. I think most politicians care most about money and power.
>We have been transported back to the early 20th century
>Brandeis wanted to eliminate monopolies, because (in the words of his biographer Melvin Urofsky) “in a democratic society the existence of large centers of private power is dangerous to the continuing vitality of a free people.”
>Brandeis generally opposed regulation — which, he worried, inevitably led to the corruption of the regulator
Reading American Economic History has given me the idea that problems of corruption were taken more seriously in the past than they are today -- which this article seems to be alluding to.
It seems to be an issue that isn't circulating today. I've never heard of someone mention Andrew Jackson with reference to how fiercely he seemed to want to fight against corruption. Lincoln gave the banks the finger and instead, empowered congress to take control of the nation's money supply, and won a war in which the banks had been betting against him by doing this. By contrast, it seems today people view big banks as a kind of mandatory evil that we should just shut up about and tolerate.
Further, it does appear that most politicians, especially Presidents, must be subservient to the interests of lobbies and power groups in Washington.
Perhaps also, today we take it for granted that a lot of good sense was taken in the past to build this country.
I have a strong sense that today's political climate and social culture is ignoring growing problems of the bigness described in the article--concentrations of power. I have heard a lot of people say everything is corrupt, it doesn't matter, which at least in my reading, appears to have not been the case in the past. If that is true, I'm not sure if America would look the same today if it wasn't true.