There are always those who want to herd people like cattle or sheep (for their own good, of course -- can't let those morons make bad decisions about their lives when others know better). But in the past few decades they seem more open about it.
Cost of improving prisons. If the US prison system sees a majority of convicts return as recidivists, then most of the money spent on the earlier incarcerations was wasted. So, on the one hand, why spend (waste) even more? On the other hand, why continue to spend any money doing the same, ineffective, things?
Costs of public school infrastructure. If one popular purpose of the school system is simple, safe, child care while parents work, isn't it sad that schools don't operate late and/or night shifts supporting families who are employed on such schedules? Perhaps the capital utilization would be much better when buildings and equipment is used more hours per day. On the other hand, teachers and staff likely would object to working later, unless paid a substantial shift differential.
Related to school structures -- immigration. Stereotypically many workers and families come to the US to labor in seasonal industries like agriculture and construction. School (childcare) facilities that shut down all summer don't support those workers as well as they support citizens working year-round (office or service-sector) jobs. If we ran summer schools -- especially if we emphasized assimilation skills like English language and trade crafts -- we'd keep vulnerable kids out of the fields and make better residents or even citizens of them. Again, capital utilization for facilities in full year production would be improved. But also, current workforce would likely require huge pay incentives to give up multi-month summer vacations...
Private pensions. When the large corporation, union, or government invests for their workers' citizens' old age there will be investments. But sometimes (CalPERs) there will be failed investments. An entire structure is at risk to collapse all at once. If thousands or millions of individual investors make many different decisions, some will succeed and some fail -- at different times and for different reasons. The costs of individual failures make tragic headlines. The costs of systemic structural failures are incalculable.
David, this could go on all day. All week. The rest of the year...
Prisons are an interesting case. Having them terrible places is generally viewed as a cost. But someone could argue that the worse they are the greater the deterrent effect of the threat of prison. He could even argue that if prison becomes twice as bad we can make sentences half as long and get the same deterrent effect at a lower cost.
Seen from the other side, a well meaning change designed to make prison less bad could be seen as a cost rather than a benefit.
The obvious one from my POV involves the "benefits" of advertisements, especially advertisements tailored to the interests of the person to whom they are presented.
Unlike some people (you, IIRC a conversation between us correctly), I don't expect advertisements to give me useful information. A typical advertisement minimizes information in favor of attempts to trigger emotional reactions. What information they do include has a fairly high chance of being inaccurate or misleading. Attention given to them is usually wasted.
If I must be presented with advertisements, I prefer them to be maximally easy to ignore. Irrelevance is a benefit.
This would be at least somewhat different if ads weren't constantly repeated to the same audience. I can e.g. clearly remember a chain private school that indoctrinates children into a set of beliefs I associate with certain political positions under the guise of teaching them to think; its ads infest a podcast which I otherwise like.
But my point here is that some people appear to *like* ads, and not merely in their capacity as vendors.
Meanwhile, I find out about relevant-to-me new products by word of mouth, sometimes as the result of venting about the unavailability of something I'd really like to have, or the aggravations of the kludge I'm using to approximate my desired functionality.
That too involves lots of unproductive activity (venting), but the ratio of time spent to results achieved is much much better than paying attention to ads.
One thing that saddens me about this tendency is that it undermines the public trust needed to *actually* deal with a sufficiently grave crisis—when everyone is well aware that crisis will be used to push for ordinary priorities, of course we resist emergency measures!
The Romans in the days of the Republic would deal with a crisis (usually military) by electing a “dictator” with near-absolute power, who would use this power for the sole purpose of responding to the crisis and then resign. They recognized that coalition or democratic governance was a difficult beast in a true emergency, and therefore got the benefit of a strong executive without its excesses. But that requires an immense amount of public trust, and without a Cincinnatus figure you will be strictly worse off by giving over that much power.
In a way, it’s a classic prisoners’ dilemma/Kantian bargain: both of us want this crisis to be dealt with; you also want to use it for your own ends; knowing that your measures will long postdate the end of the crisis, I want to oppose any measures not strictly necessary, and use it for my own ends if I can. Both of us would be better off if we agreed that neither of us would use it for our political advantage, since we both really do want the crisis dealt with! But we can’t (can no longer?) credibly make that bargain, and so we end up with a worst case scenario where no one’s political priorities get fully realized, more “temporary” emergency measures either of us oppose are enacted, and we flail from crisis to crisis helplessly.
When Covid restrictions meant blaming foreigners and restricting immigration/trade, the Right took it very seriously and the Left pooh-poohed it, resulting somehow in unnecessarily harsh measures that still totally failed to keep out the disease. When covid measures became a matter of extreme domestic restrictions on individual and commercial behavior, the Left decided they had been the reasonably concerned party all along, and the Right turned on a dime against it—leading to extremely burdensome and yet totally unhelpful restrictions. Would we not all have preferred measures actually calculated to respond to the crisis? This is why we can’t have nice things.
When I think of benefits that are really costs, I think of many forms of political activism. I frequently hear people encourage each other to be more politically involved, implying that getting one's views known is a benefit.
Any political issue not trivially solved will develop at least two sides, each populated by a large group of people, who put large amounts of time and resources into getting their position known, "raising awareness", persuading the other side, persuading the middle, or persuading some influential policymaker to implement their position.
If the country split quietly overnight, and each side somehow fully occupied its own fragment of it, there would be no one left to persuade, and all the time and resources spent otherwise on persuasion could be spent on either implementation or on other pursuits. In some cases, the amount spent on implementation seems less than that on activism - imagine spending 30 cents of every education dollar on books and 70 on advertisements.
This leads me to see political involvement as a cost, not a benefit. If everyone sought instead to implement their preferred policies on themselves alone, more of the actual benefit would occur, for all sides.
If the desired effect is deterrence, then the recidivism rate is the measure of that effect. Whatever it is we're doing (or spending) now, it doesn't seem to work particularly well.
Terrible-ness has a terrible track record with regard to deterrence. Most famously, public executions of pickpockets were well attended by crowds of good citizens who needed no deterrence AND by un-deterred free pickpockets preying upon those crowds.
Perhaps those who can't or don't fit in and contribute to the community should merely be removed, isolated, and distanced from the community, without regard to their potential future return and restitution to the community, Carried, or sent, to the far frontier: Australia, the Yukon, Panama, Siberia ... The cost side of such removals are somewhat easy to measure but how would we estimate the benefits, if any, to the original community, to the frontier, to the transportees ...? Costs borne by the convicted transportees themselves were and are, I think, of no particular interest to those doing the accounting.
The recidivism rate is not the measure of deterrence — you are assuming that people deciding whether to commit a crime don't consider the risk of punishment in advance or that potential criminals have no way of knowing how bad the prison is until they go there, neither of which is plausible.
Your point about pickpockets is only evidence that the punishment did not reduce the rate of pickpocketing to zero, not that it did not reduce it.
England in the 18th century, which is when your pickpocket anecdote is from, did in fact follow the policy you recommend. Many people convicted of capital felonies were not hung, they were pardoned on condition of agreeing to transportation, initially mostly to North America, later to Australia.
Given that prisons present an interesting problem, what -- if not recidivism rates -- is the measure of any value? How do we formulate the trade offs in prisons, or the criminal justice system generally?
Do you mean to suggest deterrence is not measurable at all? Deterrence is, wouldn't you agree, at least one desired goal of the system? Is there a higher, measurable, goal? (Human lust for vengeance being immeasurable...)
Pickpockets represent a fairly extreme use case in attempting deterrence, however successful or otherwise. Another is the ST-TNG episode where Wesley Crusher walks on the grass. The world police force very thoroughly monitors a few precincts at random over short random intervals, identifies any offenders of any laws in the sampled place and time, and arranges those offenders be summarily executed. (Global grid cells, computer models, statistics ... it's almost like IPCC science, after all) No effort to make the degree of offense scale to a degree of punishment. No consideration of mitigating circumstances (Wesley was chasing a frisbee thrown by a pretty young girl...) The model is even more draconian than hanging a cutpurse. More effective? How would we evaluate it? WESLEY was clearly un-deterred by risks, being completely ignorant of the rules OR the consequences. The police of this world apparently invested no resources in publicizing the system for visitors. Cost = Zero. The costs of violations -- crushed blades of grass are treated just like broken windows like armed robbery -- similarly drop out of the formula. The recidivism rate of the punished -- executed -- also drops out. Status was SUPPOSED to drop out -- no "diplomatic immunity" exceptions or "juvenile offender" allowances. (Picard kirked the Prime Directive on this episode.) It would seem to me that if we can't build a model of this fictional model then we have no hope of formulating a more realistic and reasonable one.
The ancient Code of Hammurabi somewhat similarly uses identical phrasing for a single form of punishment applied to crimes ranging from theft, rape, murder, arson, counterfeiting, perjury, fraud ... Most cuneiform translators render the phrase as "shall be put to death". Standardizing the phrase and punishment is, again, a way to reduce complexity in the system. And so we'd infer Wesley the jaywalking grass Crusher would in deathly serious trouble in Babylon, too. But I've read the argument that the wording is MEANT to be understood as "shall be severely punished". If so our ancient forefathers might have allowed out-of-town teenaged jay-walkers to escape execution without the drama of our hypothetical decedents.
Computer models, algebraic formulations, rhetorical arguments, and a whole bunch of shouting and hand waving have been applied to the complexities of crime and punishment. Without, I fear, much consensus despite millennia of effort and, supposedly, divine guidance from at least a dozen different deities.
As we (for values of "we" used by John Kerry and his ilk) consider climate catastrophe we should be worried about what sorts of reactionary resistance our plans may encounter, how acts of resistance might be judged and punished under existing law, and whether or not new laws (executive orders, regulations, Directive 10-289...) are necessary, and how much (or even IF) our actions are actually changing climate-damaging behaviors and so helping the climate.
"...experiments to see whether one or another version of geoengineering will work."
Any such "experiments" would affect the entire world, and could very plausibly cause great harm.
The author seems to take it as given that "climate change" is a problem, and specifically that CO2 is a problem. Is he by any chance aware that throughout most of the earth's history CO2 was much higher than it is today? It was about three to five times as high when dinosaurs roamed the earth and life was thriving, as long as one of the big guys didn't eat you.
With regard to "climate change", I favor doing the one thing that humans absolutely HATE to do: nothing.
You are misreading my post. I didn't say anything about my beliefs about the consequences of climate change. My point was that people who do see it as a serious problem do not act as one might expect if that was their chief concern.
As you would know if you had followed my writing on the subject, I don't think we know whether the net effect of climate change on humans will be positive or negative:
My first substack post, which dealt with that question:
The idea of a geoengineering experiment is to do something on a very small scale that, done on a large scale, might affect climate, then look for the predicted small effect.
It's a little off topic, but I would like to see @TerraformIndies succeed in making natural gas from atmospheric CO2. It takes energy, but they think it would be economical given an energy source.
And yes, I cautiously support fracking and strongly support nuclear power, and the people who hate both usually don't support @TerraformIndies either.
When I look at US media I see one stupid moral panic after another. It's just awful. I think we are right to support the Ukraine against Russian invasion, but hate the moral panic over it in the media. And the worse the climate gets, the more we need a serious response, and the more damage done by the moral panic over climate change. When the life of the mind is moral panics the mind is mad.
I know nothing about Terraformindies, but it sounds as though what you are describing is a battery, not a power source, since what you are getting back when you burn the natural gas is the energy you put in when you made it, minus some. That's similar to the role of hydrogen made by electrolysis.
You mentioned nuclear power as a possible solution. As you probably know, the LNT model of harm vs. dose drives up cost of nuclear. Many pro-nuclear activists think LNT should be replaced with a more realistic model that accounts for biological repair mechanisms. Here’s a link to Dr Edward Calabrese’s excellent video series: https://hps.org/hpspublications/historylnt/index.html. He documents an unbelievable amount of scientific misconduct pushing LNT. A lot of the fraud was committed by Nobel laureates. Dr Calabrese believes serval key papers supporting LNT should be retracted. I sure would like to hear your take on his history and recommendations.
I don't know his work, but it's obvious that the effect isn't linear because if it were cancer rates in Denver and other high cities would be much higher than they are. I thought everyone already knew that.
I didn't know (don't know, not having viewed the video series) that the explanation was fraud. Was the motive opposition to nuclear power or to nuclear weapons? Either would be a reason to exaggerate the damage from radiation.
LNT originated with the very influential Hermann Joseph Muller, a Nobel laureate, who was convinced from the beginning that radiation damage was cumulative and linear. During his career, evidence accumulated that organisms can and do repair radiation damage if the dose is below a threshold. But he and his supporters ignored and suppressed all evidence suggesting a threshold. His ideas were supported by the Rockefeller Foundation (who I believe felt guilty for their involvement in the Manhattan Project). Fear of fallout from atomic bomb testing was promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation and others even though the Atomic Energy Commission maintained it was safe. In short, the public's fear of radiation and supporters of Muller led to LNT being adopted as gospel at the EPA and NRC. In addition to Dr. Calabrese's work, I would point you to jackdevanney.substack.com for extensive evidence that LNT is a bad theory that has had a huge negative impact on all things nuclear. LNT may be the worst scientific fraud of all time.
I find it telling that people opposed public education because they want to be able to brainwash their children in isolation. They can't have much faith [sic] in their ideas. We raised our kid with heterodox ideas (e.g., free-thinking, vegan diet, non-speciesist, etc. More via the link.) and had no fear of public school.
What makes you attribute that motive to people opposed to public schooling; It isn't the motive I suggested. It is close to what I suggested critics of home schooling believe is wrong with it, but I said nothing to suggest that the critics were correct.
Speaking as a former homeschooler, we wanted our kids to be ABLE TO READ. When public education can't accomplish that -- and they can't, for substantial fractions* of those enrolled -- the schools revert to daycare. And free cafeteria meals.
Matt, how did you arrange a vegan diet for your kids in a public school? Did your local district allow traditional ("old school", so to speak) sack lunches prepared by a parent at home and carried to school? Many US local public schools don't. It's often perceived as unfair if some kids have choices -- fruit or an Oreo in the sack -- when the masses have only watery applesauce on the tray. Better if everybody has to take a tray.
* In Texas this year, about 1/4th of kids, third graders after FIVE YEARS Pre-K through 3rd Grade of public school classroom instruction, are not even "approaching" literacy standards.
The (primary) reason to homeschool is not that that public education will brainwash the child in an unreversable way, but rather that public education is mostly a useless waste of time.
There are always those who want to herd people like cattle or sheep (for their own good, of course -- can't let those morons make bad decisions about their lives when others know better). But in the past few decades they seem more open about it.
Cost of improving prisons. If the US prison system sees a majority of convicts return as recidivists, then most of the money spent on the earlier incarcerations was wasted. So, on the one hand, why spend (waste) even more? On the other hand, why continue to spend any money doing the same, ineffective, things?
Costs of public school infrastructure. If one popular purpose of the school system is simple, safe, child care while parents work, isn't it sad that schools don't operate late and/or night shifts supporting families who are employed on such schedules? Perhaps the capital utilization would be much better when buildings and equipment is used more hours per day. On the other hand, teachers and staff likely would object to working later, unless paid a substantial shift differential.
Related to school structures -- immigration. Stereotypically many workers and families come to the US to labor in seasonal industries like agriculture and construction. School (childcare) facilities that shut down all summer don't support those workers as well as they support citizens working year-round (office or service-sector) jobs. If we ran summer schools -- especially if we emphasized assimilation skills like English language and trade crafts -- we'd keep vulnerable kids out of the fields and make better residents or even citizens of them. Again, capital utilization for facilities in full year production would be improved. But also, current workforce would likely require huge pay incentives to give up multi-month summer vacations...
Private pensions. When the large corporation, union, or government invests for their workers' citizens' old age there will be investments. But sometimes (CalPERs) there will be failed investments. An entire structure is at risk to collapse all at once. If thousands or millions of individual investors make many different decisions, some will succeed and some fail -- at different times and for different reasons. The costs of individual failures make tragic headlines. The costs of systemic structural failures are incalculable.
David, this could go on all day. All week. The rest of the year...
Prisons are an interesting case. Having them terrible places is generally viewed as a cost. But someone could argue that the worse they are the greater the deterrent effect of the threat of prison. He could even argue that if prison becomes twice as bad we can make sentences half as long and get the same deterrent effect at a lower cost.
Seen from the other side, a well meaning change designed to make prison less bad could be seen as a cost rather than a benefit.
The obvious one from my POV involves the "benefits" of advertisements, especially advertisements tailored to the interests of the person to whom they are presented.
Unlike some people (you, IIRC a conversation between us correctly), I don't expect advertisements to give me useful information. A typical advertisement minimizes information in favor of attempts to trigger emotional reactions. What information they do include has a fairly high chance of being inaccurate or misleading. Attention given to them is usually wasted.
If I must be presented with advertisements, I prefer them to be maximally easy to ignore. Irrelevance is a benefit.
This would be at least somewhat different if ads weren't constantly repeated to the same audience. I can e.g. clearly remember a chain private school that indoctrinates children into a set of beliefs I associate with certain political positions under the guise of teaching them to think; its ads infest a podcast which I otherwise like.
But my point here is that some people appear to *like* ads, and not merely in their capacity as vendors.
Meanwhile, I find out about relevant-to-me new products by word of mouth, sometimes as the result of venting about the unavailability of something I'd really like to have, or the aggravations of the kludge I'm using to approximate my desired functionality.
That too involves lots of unproductive activity (venting), but the ratio of time spent to results achieved is much much better than paying attention to ads.
One thing that saddens me about this tendency is that it undermines the public trust needed to *actually* deal with a sufficiently grave crisis—when everyone is well aware that crisis will be used to push for ordinary priorities, of course we resist emergency measures!
The Romans in the days of the Republic would deal with a crisis (usually military) by electing a “dictator” with near-absolute power, who would use this power for the sole purpose of responding to the crisis and then resign. They recognized that coalition or democratic governance was a difficult beast in a true emergency, and therefore got the benefit of a strong executive without its excesses. But that requires an immense amount of public trust, and without a Cincinnatus figure you will be strictly worse off by giving over that much power.
In a way, it’s a classic prisoners’ dilemma/Kantian bargain: both of us want this crisis to be dealt with; you also want to use it for your own ends; knowing that your measures will long postdate the end of the crisis, I want to oppose any measures not strictly necessary, and use it for my own ends if I can. Both of us would be better off if we agreed that neither of us would use it for our political advantage, since we both really do want the crisis dealt with! But we can’t (can no longer?) credibly make that bargain, and so we end up with a worst case scenario where no one’s political priorities get fully realized, more “temporary” emergency measures either of us oppose are enacted, and we flail from crisis to crisis helplessly.
When Covid restrictions meant blaming foreigners and restricting immigration/trade, the Right took it very seriously and the Left pooh-poohed it, resulting somehow in unnecessarily harsh measures that still totally failed to keep out the disease. When covid measures became a matter of extreme domestic restrictions on individual and commercial behavior, the Left decided they had been the reasonably concerned party all along, and the Right turned on a dime against it—leading to extremely burdensome and yet totally unhelpful restrictions. Would we not all have preferred measures actually calculated to respond to the crisis? This is why we can’t have nice things.
When I think of benefits that are really costs, I think of many forms of political activism. I frequently hear people encourage each other to be more politically involved, implying that getting one's views known is a benefit.
Any political issue not trivially solved will develop at least two sides, each populated by a large group of people, who put large amounts of time and resources into getting their position known, "raising awareness", persuading the other side, persuading the middle, or persuading some influential policymaker to implement their position.
If the country split quietly overnight, and each side somehow fully occupied its own fragment of it, there would be no one left to persuade, and all the time and resources spent otherwise on persuasion could be spent on either implementation or on other pursuits. In some cases, the amount spent on implementation seems less than that on activism - imagine spending 30 cents of every education dollar on books and 70 on advertisements.
This leads me to see political involvement as a cost, not a benefit. If everyone sought instead to implement their preferred policies on themselves alone, more of the actual benefit would occur, for all sides.
If there are externalities, a distinction must be made between private costs and benefits and public costs and benefits.
Perhaps some people find that public benefits are private costs to them and public costs are private benefits to them.
If the desired effect is deterrence, then the recidivism rate is the measure of that effect. Whatever it is we're doing (or spending) now, it doesn't seem to work particularly well.
Terrible-ness has a terrible track record with regard to deterrence. Most famously, public executions of pickpockets were well attended by crowds of good citizens who needed no deterrence AND by un-deterred free pickpockets preying upon those crowds.
Perhaps those who can't or don't fit in and contribute to the community should merely be removed, isolated, and distanced from the community, without regard to their potential future return and restitution to the community, Carried, or sent, to the far frontier: Australia, the Yukon, Panama, Siberia ... The cost side of such removals are somewhat easy to measure but how would we estimate the benefits, if any, to the original community, to the frontier, to the transportees ...? Costs borne by the convicted transportees themselves were and are, I think, of no particular interest to those doing the accounting.
The recidivism rate is not the measure of deterrence — you are assuming that people deciding whether to commit a crime don't consider the risk of punishment in advance or that potential criminals have no way of knowing how bad the prison is until they go there, neither of which is plausible.
Your point about pickpockets is only evidence that the punishment did not reduce the rate of pickpocketing to zero, not that it did not reduce it.
England in the 18th century, which is when your pickpocket anecdote is from, did in fact follow the policy you recommend. Many people convicted of capital felonies were not hung, they were pardoned on condition of agreeing to transportation, initially mostly to North America, later to Australia.
Given that prisons present an interesting problem, what -- if not recidivism rates -- is the measure of any value? How do we formulate the trade offs in prisons, or the criminal justice system generally?
Do you mean to suggest deterrence is not measurable at all? Deterrence is, wouldn't you agree, at least one desired goal of the system? Is there a higher, measurable, goal? (Human lust for vengeance being immeasurable...)
Pickpockets represent a fairly extreme use case in attempting deterrence, however successful or otherwise. Another is the ST-TNG episode where Wesley Crusher walks on the grass. The world police force very thoroughly monitors a few precincts at random over short random intervals, identifies any offenders of any laws in the sampled place and time, and arranges those offenders be summarily executed. (Global grid cells, computer models, statistics ... it's almost like IPCC science, after all) No effort to make the degree of offense scale to a degree of punishment. No consideration of mitigating circumstances (Wesley was chasing a frisbee thrown by a pretty young girl...) The model is even more draconian than hanging a cutpurse. More effective? How would we evaluate it? WESLEY was clearly un-deterred by risks, being completely ignorant of the rules OR the consequences. The police of this world apparently invested no resources in publicizing the system for visitors. Cost = Zero. The costs of violations -- crushed blades of grass are treated just like broken windows like armed robbery -- similarly drop out of the formula. The recidivism rate of the punished -- executed -- also drops out. Status was SUPPOSED to drop out -- no "diplomatic immunity" exceptions or "juvenile offender" allowances. (Picard kirked the Prime Directive on this episode.) It would seem to me that if we can't build a model of this fictional model then we have no hope of formulating a more realistic and reasonable one.
The ancient Code of Hammurabi somewhat similarly uses identical phrasing for a single form of punishment applied to crimes ranging from theft, rape, murder, arson, counterfeiting, perjury, fraud ... Most cuneiform translators render the phrase as "shall be put to death". Standardizing the phrase and punishment is, again, a way to reduce complexity in the system. And so we'd infer Wesley the jaywalking grass Crusher would in deathly serious trouble in Babylon, too. But I've read the argument that the wording is MEANT to be understood as "shall be severely punished". If so our ancient forefathers might have allowed out-of-town teenaged jay-walkers to escape execution without the drama of our hypothetical decedents.
Computer models, algebraic formulations, rhetorical arguments, and a whole bunch of shouting and hand waving have been applied to the complexities of crime and punishment. Without, I fear, much consensus despite millennia of effort and, supposedly, divine guidance from at least a dozen different deities.
As we (for values of "we" used by John Kerry and his ilk) consider climate catastrophe we should be worried about what sorts of reactionary resistance our plans may encounter, how acts of resistance might be judged and punished under existing law, and whether or not new laws (executive orders, regulations, Directive 10-289...) are necessary, and how much (or even IF) our actions are actually changing climate-damaging behaviors and so helping the climate.
"...experiments to see whether one or another version of geoengineering will work."
Any such "experiments" would affect the entire world, and could very plausibly cause great harm.
The author seems to take it as given that "climate change" is a problem, and specifically that CO2 is a problem. Is he by any chance aware that throughout most of the earth's history CO2 was much higher than it is today? It was about three to five times as high when dinosaurs roamed the earth and life was thriving, as long as one of the big guys didn't eat you.
With regard to "climate change", I favor doing the one thing that humans absolutely HATE to do: nothing.
You are misreading my post. I didn't say anything about my beliefs about the consequences of climate change. My point was that people who do see it as a serious problem do not act as one might expect if that was their chief concern.
As you would know if you had followed my writing on the subject, I don't think we know whether the net effect of climate change on humans will be positive or negative:
My first substack post, which dealt with that question:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/my-first-post-done-again
The post I put up five days ago, which contains in the first paragraph a footnote with links to my past posts on the subject:
https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/climate-policy-the-public-good-problem
The idea of a geoengineering experiment is to do something on a very small scale that, done on a large scale, might affect climate, then look for the predicted small effect.
Yes, it's a battery in that sense.
It's a little off topic, but I would like to see @TerraformIndies succeed in making natural gas from atmospheric CO2. It takes energy, but they think it would be economical given an energy source.
And yes, I cautiously support fracking and strongly support nuclear power, and the people who hate both usually don't support @TerraformIndies either.
When I look at US media I see one stupid moral panic after another. It's just awful. I think we are right to support the Ukraine against Russian invasion, but hate the moral panic over it in the media. And the worse the climate gets, the more we need a serious response, and the more damage done by the moral panic over climate change. When the life of the mind is moral panics the mind is mad.
I know nothing about Terraformindies, but it sounds as though what you are describing is a battery, not a power source, since what you are getting back when you burn the natural gas is the energy you put in when you made it, minus some. That's similar to the role of hydrogen made by electrolysis.
You mentioned nuclear power as a possible solution. As you probably know, the LNT model of harm vs. dose drives up cost of nuclear. Many pro-nuclear activists think LNT should be replaced with a more realistic model that accounts for biological repair mechanisms. Here’s a link to Dr Edward Calabrese’s excellent video series: https://hps.org/hpspublications/historylnt/index.html. He documents an unbelievable amount of scientific misconduct pushing LNT. A lot of the fraud was committed by Nobel laureates. Dr Calabrese believes serval key papers supporting LNT should be retracted. I sure would like to hear your take on his history and recommendations.
I don't know his work, but it's obvious that the effect isn't linear because if it were cancer rates in Denver and other high cities would be much higher than they are. I thought everyone already knew that.
I didn't know (don't know, not having viewed the video series) that the explanation was fraud. Was the motive opposition to nuclear power or to nuclear weapons? Either would be a reason to exaggerate the damage from radiation.
LNT originated with the very influential Hermann Joseph Muller, a Nobel laureate, who was convinced from the beginning that radiation damage was cumulative and linear. During his career, evidence accumulated that organisms can and do repair radiation damage if the dose is below a threshold. But he and his supporters ignored and suppressed all evidence suggesting a threshold. His ideas were supported by the Rockefeller Foundation (who I believe felt guilty for their involvement in the Manhattan Project). Fear of fallout from atomic bomb testing was promoted by the Rockefeller Foundation and others even though the Atomic Energy Commission maintained it was safe. In short, the public's fear of radiation and supporters of Muller led to LNT being adopted as gospel at the EPA and NRC. In addition to Dr. Calabrese's work, I would point you to jackdevanney.substack.com for extensive evidence that LNT is a bad theory that has had a huge negative impact on all things nuclear. LNT may be the worst scientific fraud of all time.
I find it telling that people opposed public education because they want to be able to brainwash their children in isolation. They can't have much faith [sic] in their ideas. We raised our kid with heterodox ideas (e.g., free-thinking, vegan diet, non-speciesist, etc. More via the link.) and had no fear of public school.
https://www.mattball.org/2023/08/from-down-under-so-while-i-may-disagree.html
What makes you attribute that motive to people opposed to public schooling; It isn't the motive I suggested. It is close to what I suggested critics of home schooling believe is wrong with it, but I said nothing to suggest that the critics were correct.
I'm curious about the "non-speciest" part. Does that mean that slapping a mosquito counts as murder?
Speaking as a former homeschooler, we wanted our kids to be ABLE TO READ. When public education can't accomplish that -- and they can't, for substantial fractions* of those enrolled -- the schools revert to daycare. And free cafeteria meals.
Matt, how did you arrange a vegan diet for your kids in a public school? Did your local district allow traditional ("old school", so to speak) sack lunches prepared by a parent at home and carried to school? Many US local public schools don't. It's often perceived as unfair if some kids have choices -- fruit or an Oreo in the sack -- when the masses have only watery applesauce on the tray. Better if everybody has to take a tray.
* In Texas this year, about 1/4th of kids, third graders after FIVE YEARS Pre-K through 3rd Grade of public school classroom instruction, are not even "approaching" literacy standards.
https://tea.texas.gov/about-tea/news-and-multimedia/news-releases/news-2023/tea-releases-results-for-2023-staar-3-8-assessments
Yes, much better to brainwash them en masse.
The (primary) reason to homeschool is not that that public education will brainwash the child in an unreversable way, but rather that public education is mostly a useless waste of time.