that's your little conspiracy theory. it really is nothing more or less than the new pet project of a billionaire in a world that is approaching technological saturation - so coming up with new meaningful ideas becomes harder and harder which invites "entrepreneurs" to come up with fancy stupid inventions.
Well spotted, and you're absolutely correct - I was being sarcastic, and to be so on this site took an awful lot of consideration, especially as I refuse to use '/s'.
Further regarding my 'point' (dig?), I would have responded the same had the poster said '...as a German I apologize for [obvious historical things]'.
The irony that the couple are immigrants added an extra dimension.
I also refuse to tag sarcasm. Your typical computer nerd tends to be also a bit high on the autism spectrum which correlates with difficulties at identifying irony and sarcasm - which explains the downvotes even for statements which are in line with the HN mainstream (like your's). Keep the sarcasm coming!
Is that a double-joke? Or whatever it is being called. Like seemingly a blow against Mainz but what do you see across the Rhine from Kastel? Mainz. there's your superior view ... maybe I'm overthinking it.
Mainz-Kastel is a district of Wiesbaden, right across from Mainz. As the name implies, it used to be a part of Mainz, but after WWII, the Rhine was a convenient border between the French and US occupied regions, so it was made a part of Wiesbaden. Culturally, Mainz-Kastel is very much Mainz though, sharing for example the tradition of "Fassenacht", Mainz Carnival.
So most people there feel like being Mainzer, and enjoy the beautiful view from across the river onto the Mainzer Schloss (Palace).
This is one of those examples where the cake is shrinking so everybody will get a smaller piece. Now if all participants would cooperate the cake could be made to grow. But this will afford people to not take as big of a piece as possible for a while. And because nobody trusts each other, every participant instead focuses instead on keeping the future pieces at least as large as they used to be which means taking relatively speaking an increasingly large chunk. And that's not sustainable so everything breaks down at some point and wars start over getting something from the cake.
Same shit with carbon emissions, now fishing and soon water.
Absolutely. This could be fixed with the teachings from the 'Prisoners dilemma'.
I am starting to think that there are big decisions, that have a worldwide impact, that cannot be left just to the local government of turn.
Take for example Bolsonaro's approach to the Amazon. Those are decisions that impact the whole world, possibly for generations to come. We cannot allow a local government to do what they want just because they happen to have this piece of land in their own country. We need a global system to enforce measures to protect the planet.
Is this the role of the UN, EU, etc.? In Brazil's specific case, concerted sanctions were proposed to convince Brazil to behave a certain way [0]. If this doesn't work, maybe the carrot is better than the stick. I know this case is a little unique because the Brazillian government appears to be acting against the will of its people with regards to conserving the rainforest.
Economists have many choices when their models break: they can go poetic "tragedy of the commons", technical "externalities", John Nash "prisoner's dilemma", or even sort of nonsensical "internalizing externalities".
Nope. Tragedy of commons means that everybody share a legit right over resources but management fails. This is invasion, burn and plunder by a third part (one that does not necessarily has a legit right over the resource) while the commons are sleeping.
I've never heard that definition of "tragedy of the commons." Rather, I've always seen it used to describe a situation where everyone would benefit if everyone took one action, but individually the incentive structure is to do the opposite -- effectively you're able to get the things you want for minimal personal cost and with large external costs.
It very explicitly applies to shared resources like fisheries, and it crops up in much more mundane scenarios too. E.g., when water costs are split between multiple apartments you can pay peanuts for nearly unrestricted personal water use by offloading most of the costs to everyone else.
> I've never heard that definition of "tragedy of the commons."
Is a simplification, but the idea that I wanted to stress is that everybody in a "tragedy of the commons" case has some kind of legal rights to exploit the shared resource.
Pirate fishing doesn't has rights over the resource. Is an illegal activity, parallel to the legal quotes, that boycotts any measures taken for a sustainable management.
And not property rights the way water rights sometimes works, where a group of people all have the right to take all they can.
If the same people owned an aquifer but all had to pay for what they used, the water would be more properly priced.
With water, as with fish, people often pay the cost of taking the resource and not a price that reflects the value of the resource.
The value is actually more like the future cost of replacing the resource. Once your aquifer is empty, you must ship water in. Or desalinate. That's more like the real cost.
With a species of fish, the replacement is incalculable. But one thing is clear. The price should increase rapidly as it becomes scarcer, preserving the incentive to keep the population viable.
That can't happen if people just pay the cost of going out there and getting the fish. The price has to reflect the value of the fish too.
If the right too harvest a population were a piece of property that could be bought and sold, the incentive to preserve the population would be stronger.
You might even see technologies that avoid taken pregnant females and that count how many males there are so you have enough of those too.
This is almost word for word the economic advice given by Larry Summers to Russia when Yeltsin (an American puppet) was figuring out what to do with Russian industries after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
He told them to put it in private hands. He told them it didn't really matter whose hands it ended up in. He told them that provided it was in private hands with property rights well respected then the economy would thrive throughout the 90s.
It ultimately ended up mostly in the hands of the oligarchs or abandoned while the rest of Russia starved. A lot of it got clawed back in the early 2000s and has been better managed since.
companies, with full ownership of the land, are ruining the topsoil of their land because the cost of farming sustainably is greater than the cost of acquiring new land
Property rights don't work that way, unfortunately we can't price everything correctly because too many special interests are out there and people are easily fooled.
This. It’s a shame a magazine called “Economist” eschews the simple answer any economist would provide and instead advocates a complicated regulatory scheme like this.
The article explains why bans may be preferable to market-based solutions in this case. The gist is that it's easier to enforce a ban ("nobody is allowed to fish here until 2022! get out!") than any kind of pricing mechanism ("let's see, yesterday a random Chinese trawler came in and picked up, I guess, 4 tons of mackerel, so add that to the week's total and..."), and many of the relevant countries with depleted fisheries may not even have the regulatory capacity for the latter.
The problem with that simple answer, is that fish move. If you don't catch them on your patch, you don't get to reap the benefits next year - the person with the patch north of yours gets to catch them next month.
This is kind of like saying that, because farmers must occasionally let their field lie fallow, government must ban farming in some areas. Fish migratory patterns would naturally be priced into the fishing rights market.
No, it's not. If a farmer leaves a field fallow they will benefit from it later because the field does not move. If you do not fish an area you will not benefit from it later because the fish do move.
This is not a hypothetical; it's the reality fishermen have been dealing with for decades.
There's a story.
An isolated native from a South American jungle met a researcher and was taken to the city for the first time. He saw a traffic policeman on the street and asked who is that, why is he dressed like that, why are people following his direction etc.
When explained, he thought immediately the idea sounded great. In their tribe, they got locked into spirals of revenge. He said he wished they could have police in the jungle as well.
Many societies have decided to respect some common rules. Sometimes it means that someone as a person can't quite do what they would like to do. That is the price.
The societies not being able to organize well were overrun by others, more organized ones. Sometimes the rules were changed.
As if 50% of the US population is going through some kind of collective psychosis. Just looking at how a significant portion of his fans act and look on those rallies. Dressing up with jumpsuits having flags and his face allover or wearing stupidly huge hats with a motto printed on it. As if they are on some comic con where Trump is some sort of super hero. Carrying assault rifles like they can't wait to save the world from imagined threats, dressing up like Romans with shields and helmets. Totally delusional. This level of celebrated infantilism I've never seen anywhere else so far. There are nuts everywhere but that many?
In line with the broken-window-theory you could call the respective department to collect randomly deposited trash and bulk garbage or report broken infrastructure.
Also calling the police to report antisocial behavior like cars intentionally causing noise by means of illegal manipulations, excessive partying, etc.
Breaking out the bylaw book and getting the police on speed dial is fundamentally the wrong way to deal with visible poverty. A litany of $20-$200 fines is a net negative to the neighborhood no matter how you distribute them.
Well, that's your opinion - but reality would like to have a word with you. Doctors in the US are giving out Adderall (similar to meth) and Fentanyl (even more addictive and dangerous than Heroin) like candy.
criminalization should be reserved to actions which cause harm to another person who didn't agree to the respective interaction.
If an adult decides to take a drug - fine.
If another adult sells a drug to another adult - where's the problem?
OTOH I'd like to see the concept of mitigating circumstances removed in criminal justice. If somebody takes a drug and commits a crime - full responsibility.
In an ideal world theres no problem but the reality is murkier. Im thinking of crime against vulnerable people, especially that these drugs impair one’s senses. I’d like drug trading to be legal but heavily regulated and the enforcement taken seriously.
It would also do a very good thing to educate people about the risks of addiction, the simptoms of it and where to ask for help for it.
