nmrm2

(note: not continuing with this thread because holy fuck hivemind downvotes.)

I get your point, but there are exceptions. In particular, utilities come to mind. All locations I've lived except 1 provided exactly one option for high-speed internet. I don't see that changing in most parts of the US any time soon. Ditto for water and electricity, depending on locality. Even temporary monopoly abuse in either of those two sectors can have devastating humanitarian impacts.

Sharing economy type stuff makes complete sense when it's something you share often enough to want first dibs, but not often enough that renting it out from time to time is an inconvenience. But if you're renting it out full time then I'm not sure I understand how the incentives line up. Seems like if they notice you're doing well they could just swoop in and under-cut you next time the contract is up.

But the people with the skill-set and interest in doing that are going to do so anyways; I don't see how anti-theft tech would convince that type of person to shell out an extra few hundred for a bike. They would just buy something and install it themselves.

I just don't see the market for integrated anti-theft. Seems more like a custom component type of thing.

If you're spending that much on a bike then you're cycling regularly (communter and/or every weekend type). You're not going to ride a shitty bike if you're riding that often. Bikes aren't like cars -- a Corolla will get you from point A to point B just as well as a Cadillac, but a doubling in the price point of a bike (esp. 500 to 1000 range!) has a massive impact.

Of course there are people who buy racing bikes and ride them a few times a year. But those people rare enough that it doesn't make sense to spend the money designing and stocking a product just for them. And anyways, the guy on the sales floor is probably going to be the most important factor in their purchasing decision.

I don't think the author or anyone else disagrees... the article was specifically about science fairs, not science projects generally. It's right in the title. And reiterated in the portion of the text where the author juxtaposes their childhood experience with their child's experience.

> This isn't someone being born with silver spoons in their mouth. This is regulation thoughtlessly applied with no thought about the costs.

It's both (which gets to the heart of what I consider the most compelling arguments for decreased regulation). Whenever there are bureaucratic barriers, knowing the right sorts of people works wonders. You might even say it's a privilege...

Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you can, but the costs to the environment involved in doing so are prohibitive. In any case, I don't think it's totally obvious that this is actually possible ATM.

> If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory

Yeah, well, reality > model. Unless we colonize space, destroying earth = infinity. So the implication of your statement is that pricing is a bad model for certain types of environmental damage. However...

> would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags.

...the realistic impact of most types of irreversible environmental damage has no known bound, but is not infinite.

Difficult-to-bound unknowns also make it impossible to quantify damages a priori at the level of detail necessary for pricing. Again, reality > model, so accurate pricing is a bad mechanism.

I think there are reasonable arguments against plastic bag bans. But trying base policy on an accurate accounting of the cost of long-term or irreversible environmental damage is a fool's errand in many cases.

(Also, note that my point is that in general, pricing environmental externalities is weird. Plastic bags aren't even nearly the best example of this, but are illustrative of the most common solution -- don't price, disincentivize.)

You're missing the point.

If you charged a million dollars for every bag used then basically no one would use plastic bags. Or at least few enough people that the aggregate environmental impact would be negligable. As it turns out $5 or $10 would probably work as well as $1M.

The whole point is that it's totally impossible to come up with realistic estimates for something like plastic bag waste. So you set the prices high enough to disincentivize their use.

The purpose is the disincentive, not actually putting accurate prices on externalities. Confusing these two things is the source of the confusion in SilasX's original post.

More generally, the language of economics ("pricing-in externalities") doesn't make sense when discussing irreversible damage to the environment:

1. When you can't repair the damage, the idea of "pricing-in" externalities is just confused thinking. (You can't buy a new planet and not all environmental harm can be reversed by spending money. At least for now.)

2. For any consumer behavior that causes irrevesable damage to the environment, the cost is at once too large to quanify and also too small to notice. (Many forms of pollution have highly nonlinear effects on the environment that are often impossible to quantify, especially at a global scale. I have no idea how anyone would go about calculating the "cost" of a lifetimes' use of plastic bags or fossil fuels, for instance, especially when you have to add up the permanent loss of a resource to humanity for the rest of the time it's on the planet.)

That said, I wasn't in the Pacific Northwest, and my general impression is that people from that region are, on balance, more honest than in the region that I came from. But of course generalizations and grass is always greener and all that.