@dazinism @freakazoid @cjd

I think by Occam's Razor, there's no reason to think there are other reasons for interaction, until shown an example that can't be explained by "harsh" utility.

Can you enumerate some of those other possible reasons?

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @freakazoid
This same question arrives again and again. Did we fall from grace or are we better every day ?
Plato clearly believed that we fell from grace, from the perfect republic with the perfect Philosopher King.
Lots of lore around this belief of fall from grace. The innocent and peaceful hunter-gatherers wiped out by the cruel and mechanistic Europeans is a really common belief system.

@cjd @dazinism @freakazoid
it's funny how ideas like "it used to be better" and "don't change things, you're making everything worse" are usually ascribed to right wing, while left wing is all about progress... yet these days what appears to be a left wing group also says it used to be better in the past, but it means much further past.

Is it all because we only remember the good parts of what it was like in the past?

@Wolf480pl
@dazinism @freakazoid
I think the difference of belief between "fall from grace" and "better every day" is at least as important a spectrum as right vs left. You see fall from grace thinking in leftist ethnic guilt and also in rightist traditional family. On the better every day side the left has scientific socialism and the managed society and the right has ethnic pride.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl I don't know anything about "managed society", but people are terrible at science and even if they weren't, the economic calculation problem is not solvable even in theory, so "scientific socialism" as I understand it is not achievable, and there are all kinds of ways that pursuing such a thing could get us into a really bad place.

Left libertarians are also "better every day" folks.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @dazinism
My personal opinion of "scientific socialism" can be summed up in James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State. But that ideology continues to exist and I would argue that lots of "lets just pass a law" ideas (for which the Left is known) are rooted in this thinking.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl Oh yes absolutely. This is a common issue with people who pride themselves on being intellectual - they tend to overestimate the capacity of intellect to overcome problems. At least when it fits with their worldview. For things that don't they're perfectly happy to point out all the problems with human arrogance.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd This is why I like the idea of keeping interventions simple, transparent, and as measurable as possible rather than either avoiding them entirely or allowing unlimited intervention for any purpose. Try something. If it works, great. If it doesn't, get rid of it and do something else. When the sum total of interventions in any given area becomes complex, replace them with something simpler.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
This.
This is Science.

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd It's science in that it acknowledges the limits of our ability to actually measure or fine-tune the effect of interventions in society. It can easily depart from being science depending on what we call "measurable". I do not believe economics, for the most part. In particular macroeconomics is unfalsifiable, and things like GDP include economic activity we know is bad like cleaning up after Deepwater Horizon.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl (Not that they shouldn't have cleaned up, just that there's no way that should increase GDP. The total damage of the spill, which is not actually measurable, needed to be subtracted out.)

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd I think you're probably better off not even trying to make it scientific, or even measuring except in the case of easily measurable things like prison populations, birth rate, etc. I considered not even including the term "measurable" since they really don't need to be as long as they're simple and transparent. Then people can just decide if they're happy with it because they understand it.

@cjd @dazinism @Wolf480pl What you can do is have "evidence-based" interventions. Again, provided they're simple and transparent. UBI and EITC are obvious ones. We don't know the impact of EITC on employment but since there's no cliff and it increases at the beginning we can guess it probably encourages it (which may or may not be good, but it's better to debate about that than about what effect it even has).

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd Another example is a carbon tax. We know a carbon tax will encourage switching to alternatives. We don't know how much or how fast, so we can just ratchet it up gradually until we get what we want. We may have no idea how much was due to the tax, but who cares?

Cap and trade, on the other hand, requires setting caps and measuring emissions, and it gets gamed to hell and misses all kinds of other emissions.

@freakazoid @cjd @dazinism
how do you carbon tax without measuring emissions?

@Wolf480pl @dazinism @cjd @freakazoid You can do it to an extent by measuring inputs, although it's quite possible that inputs aren't accurate!

(For instance, if a process generates methane, its carbon footprint is vastly higher than its inputs would indicate. The inputs could even be carbon neutral, and the emissions are positive...)

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism Right. You tax the carbon at the point it enters the market, whether by being imported or pumped from the ground. The underlying assumption is that all carbon eventually becomes CO2.

Some can become methane, which lasts long enough and has a potent enough effect to be worth taxing or regulating as a pollutant in its own right. But there are far fewer methane sources than CO2.

...

@dazinism @cjd @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr One could have a tax credit for sequestration, but deciding what should count as sequestration will probably be challenging.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
One problem with climate change is there's really no incentive to deal with it. If a democratic state starts to tax carbon, as soon as it begins to actually harm the economy people will vote that government out of power. Clean air is different because people in the cities directly feel the pain, climate change is always Someone Else's Problem.

@cjd @freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism
Today in absolute condemnations of capitalism: " One problem with climate change is there's really no incentive to deal with it." This may be a hint.

@zeh
I don't care what kind of economic system you have, when people start to have difficulty putting food on the table, they're going to vote you out, and quality of life is unfortunately highly correlated with energy consumption.
@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism

@cjd
That makes no sense. You're mistaking your experience for what is possible, when the first is a tiny subset of the second. Voting inside "economic systems" that constrict your options to what is profitable is a travesty of freedom and there could be as many ways to live well as there are people, correlated to energy spending or not.

@freakazoid @bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @dazinism

@zeh @dazinism @Wolf480pl @freakazoid @cjd Even a socialist autarky uninterested in profit can easily run into situations where, if carbon taxation starts impacting quality of life for the masses (that is, it artificially causes scarcity that does not otherwise exist), they'll attempt to depose the government (whether it's democratic or not), unless you have effective suppression of information flow.

Which is why you need to make alternatives to carbon emission and make them attractive enough that quality of life doesn't degrade, or at least make it such that you can blame degradation on someone else.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Interestingly enough, this seems to be something that entrepreneurship is fairly good at. I'm sure there are other ways to accomplish it, and entrepreneurship (at least when funded by intellectual property) is obviously bad at certain kinds of invention, like certain types of drugs and medical treatments, but nonprofit foundations seem to do the best job there, not government grants.

@freakazoid @dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl I think there's a difference between R&D and deployment, though.

Private organizations do seem to be very good at throwing ideas at the wall and proving that they work... but getting them to the masses is extremely inefficient due to how capital allocation works in the private markets.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism @zeh (Just look at, say, Tesla as an example, and how rocky their ramp is. We know the technology works and can be cost-effective as fuck, at this point. The capital markets can't divorce that from the vagaries of a slow-building startup that isn't designed for an "exit". Meanwhile, China's state capitalism is subsidizing them massively (presumably partially to get access to their IP, but still) and in under a year they'll be from farmland in Shanghai, to a factory there. I don't think this is the *best* approach either, but it seems to work better than whatever we're doing in the west...)

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Tesla is an interesting example. Elon Musk has as much money as he does because of the factors I mentioned, but Tesla itself is in many ways a charity; VCs and angels would never have financed such an endeavor out of a profit motive. It's going to take a very long time to even come close to paying Musk back, much less making him more money than he's put in.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr And the current pattern of bringing new technologies to "early adopters", who tend to be wealthy, first means that those early adopters are the ones paying for the research. One can imagine ways to accelerate this process, but most new products that aren't just minor iterations on old ones end up failing, so most of the time you'd just make failure more costly in total.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Making failure more costly is bad, because the process of invention is mostly a random search, so failure should be fast, cheap, and plentiful.

This is a major problem with the current way the markets are allocating capital. Uber has essentially been treated as if the investors are certain it will succeed if only it gets enough money and grows large enough.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr In a way this is a self-fulfilling prophecy, because that money is getting spent on lobbying and driving competition out of the market. But it's also extremely costly, because to make an above-market return on their investment, the investors are betting on the irrational exuberance of the public after it IPOs.

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism IOW, their plan is to build this thing that looks like the "next Facebook" and dump it on the public. And the public will suck it up because with enough VC money almost any idea can be made to look good.

So raise interest rates, shift more money into debt financing which requires actual profits, and actual savings accounts (or treasuries and CDs), and make companies grow more slowly and fail more quickly.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr (Those latter things were consequences of raising interest rates, not additional actions that need to be taken.)

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism Addressing the other points in your post, while it's true that we know the technology works, the problem is that we also know there are a bunch of alternative technologies that are likely to be even better, so going "all in" now has a decent chance of producing a worse outcome (possibly much worse) than an approach that puts the decisionmaking and risk in the same (preferably distributed) hands.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr In my view the best approach by far is to push *away* from the thing we know for sure is bad and let people decide on their own what they think the best alternative is. The best way to do that is with a carbon tax.

...

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism The problem is that you need to make alternatives accessible and available.

If carbon taxation pushes everything out of availability, and progressive redistribution of the carbon tax isn't sufficient (you need to watch for things like developers increasing close-in housing costs in response to carbon taxes purely because the market can bear it, too, as this hits lower income people the hardest), then you need to subsidize, which means you've gotta pick winners and losers.

Also, I'm not aware of any technologies that look more promising than battery-electrics for personal car-based transportation - yes, there's hydrogen, but that's been a fossil fuel industry boondoggle for decades.

Mass transit also needs to be subsidized in every case I've seen, and mass transit systems can't just be given to "the market" to decide, you have to actually choose something and do it.

And, really, we don't have time to wait for better technologies to come to fruition, we need to go all-in on mitigation *now*. We have eleven years. Once the crisis is resolved, we've got time to rethink things in better ways.

@freakazoid @Wolf480pl @cjd @dazinism @zeh (Also, to be clear, I'm not saying that personal electric cars are the answer. They're *an* answer that is palatable to a wide swath of the population, but that should be deployed alongside improvements for low-speed vehicle infrastructure for electric-assisted low-speed vehicles (bicycles and scooters being among them), as well as widespread mass transit with frequent service intervals.)

@bhtooefr @Wolf480pl @zeh @cjd @dazinism I agree that battery powered cars appear to be the best choice, for cars. What we don't know is what kind of battery or charging system is best. If we picked CCS chargers and lithium ion technology, we'd be stuck with a system where charging takes at least 10x as long as fueling. Long lines at charging stations, etc.

@dazinism @cjd @zeh @Wolf480pl @bhtooefr Investing in alternatives to cars is exactly what the government should be doing. It can use a carbon tax to partially fund this if it wants, but IMO the carbon tax should be considered independently of any redistribution. If the carbon tax is a good idea, we should implement it. If subisidization of mass transit is a good idea, we should do that. Doesn't matter where the money goes from the first or comes from for the second.