In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.
Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. Clearly, banning leaded gasoline has that kind of justification, and therefore I'm strongly in favor of maintaining that ban and extending it wherever it isn't in place yet. The same reasonable standard should be applied to other regulations across the board.
Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated.
The worst environmental crisis in human history is going largely unchecked. I find it hard to take seriously any argument that environmental regulation has gone too far as opposed to not nearly far enough.
If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good I'm cool with revisiting anything, but the common sense wisdom around environmental regulation has been corrupted by corporate public relations campaigns.
CEQA itself is a mixed bag. I want to be clear that there are very important things the CEQA does to improve our environmental conditions[0]! The very real issue of CEQA being “weaponized”[1] stems from how environmental complaints have to be re-litigated in their entirety every time one is filed.
Say there’s a coalition of neighbors who do not want something built. They can each file a lawsuit alleging environmental issues and each will have to be handled in isolation
*I am not going into immense detail here. It is admittedly a bit more complex than this, but this is a reasonable summary
I don't know if its still true, but I recall reading once that CEQA had never been used to actually prevent or even slow the building of a dam or a mine or something. It had only ever been used to hobble otherwise neutral development. Its a good idea in theory, but I feel like the plaintiff ought to be able to articulate what environmental impact they are concerned about and maybe require a study from them in support of that claim too.
Government should be active and in charge of urban planning. It is a matter of the common good.
One of the biggest problems today is that urban planning has basically evaporated. Local and state governments don't plan towns anymore. Things are left to developers who have no other concern than to run a street off a major road and plop a few houses down, sell, and move on to the next project. No thought is given to traffic or public services or walkability or public transportation. No care is given to integration with existing urban structures. Instead of mixed-use zoning or building houses around a common public space, which are historically the more common and sensible form of urban planning, we end up with car-dependent suburban dead zones, suburban sprawl.
This should be receiving more attention from environmentalists, as urban planning is intimately related to environmental issues.
I don't know where you live, and this is going to be very dependent on where you live, but in most places that are experiencing these issues I think you actually have the problem backwards. For any given parcel of land, building upwards would be the more profitable move. Local governments deliberately legislate planning that prioritizes single-family homes, cars, and sprawl; developers are then forced to operate within these constraints. They'd rather be building density!
Yeah I'm not in favor of sprawl. It sounds like it needs to be amended, but do you want to go back to polluted air and water just because a small minority of regulations need to be repealed or amended? Wouldn't it make more sense to just revisit whatever regulations are having unintended consequences?
>do you want to go back to polluted air and water just because a small minority of regulations need to be repealed or amended?
>Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
When I say they're mostly good, but we should fix what's broken and people start hitting me with examples of broken regulation I can only interpret that as an example for why environmental regulation should be opposed by default. So I respond accordingly.
I've never said all environmental regulation is good. That would be stupid, but you should have evidence based reasons for wanting to repeal or modify a regulation.
Existing regulation was put in place for a reason and those reasons likely still matter. Even if the regulation is falling short of having unintended consequences.
All of the regulations that are used to "limit sprawl" in the US functionally prohibit the construction of new dense city blocks even moreso, and this in turn forces suburban sprawl to occur.
I'd argue that environmental regulations that impede building modern nuclear power plants to replace coal power plants are net harmful. Nuclear power safety has advanced a lot since Chernobyl.
Chernobyl design was never in use in the US, but nuclear went through a long period of near universal public opposition to its expansion because of the high profile disasters that it caused.
Now the cost of solar and storage are dropping at a rate I doubt nuclear is ever going to make a significant comeback. I'm not opposed to it, but I wonder if the economics will ever be favorable even with regulatory reform.
Graphite moderated reactors are broadly fine, the problem was with some technical specifics of that specific reactor design, and the operational culture that surrounded it. After Chernobyl, those flaws were corrected and operation of other RBMK reactors has continued to this very day, with no repeats.
Chernobyl may have done a lot to inflame cultural imagination of what could happen in the worst cases, but the US still had its own high profile disasters like Three Mile Island.
I would hesitate to call Three Mile Island a disaster, it was certainly a nuclear accident. A reactor was damaged, but no one was injured and an absolutely miniscule amount of radiation was released. The other units at the plant continued to operate until quite recently (and might actually be starting up again).
It would. People are still building some natural gas plants even despite renewables being cheaper and nuclear is far cheaper over its lifecycle than that and, other than regulatory issues, is basically better in every way.
There will continue to be new gas plants as long as there are coal plants which will be converted, usually around the time a major overhaul would need to be taken anyway.
Nuclear might be better and cheaper over it's entire lifecycle; but given that the starting costs are so high, the time to build is so long, and the US has serious problems with cost overruns in public projects, as well as the fickleness of both government and public opinion, I don't expect another plant to be built.
> nuclear is far cheaper over its lifecycle than that
That is the case for base load generation, where the plant can operate near 100% capacity all the time. But that isn't were gas is usually being deployed; it being used for reserve generation. The economics of nuclear isn't as favourable in that application as it costs more or less the same to run at partial generation, or even no generation, as it does when it is going full blast.
The closest I've gotten to somebody finding environmental regulations that were driving up the cost of nuclear was with some of the latest stuff with people trying to get rid of the LNT model of how radiation affects people.
Getting rid of LNT would allow higher doses to workers, and the way it makes nuclear cheaper is by having less shielding around the reactor.
But if you look at how recent reactors like the AP1000 failed, it's not so much because of the mere quantity of concrete. In fact, one of the big advantages of the AP1000 is that it used a fraction of the concrete and steel of prior designs. The real problem at Vogtle were construction logistics, matching up design to constructible plans, and doing that all in an efficient manner.
The construction process didn't run over budget and over timeline because of environmental regulations, that happened because we don't know how to build big things anymore, in combination with leadership asking for regulatory favors like starting construction before everything has been fully designed, which gave them more rope to hang themselves with.
I don't know the specifics of why France forgot how to build, at Flamanville and Olkiluoto, but I imagine it's a similar tale as in the US. High labor costs, poor logistics, projects dragged out, and having to pay interest on the loan for years and years extra with every delay.
If there's somebody with more specifics on how unnecessary regulation is killing nuclear, I'd love to see it. But after watching attentively and with great interest since ~2005, I've become so disillusioned with nuclear that I doubt we'll ever see it have success in the West again. Factories and manufacturing have seen productivity go through the roof over the past 50 years, while construction productivity is stagnant. Playing to our strengths, and using our very limited construction capacity on building factories rather than building generators, seems far wiser on the macroeconomic scale.
This article doesn't speak to me. What I read is, "Won't someone think of the poor UC system?" But the UC system is _massive_
> But Casa Joaquin’s neighboring, overwhelmingly white homeowners could have used CEQA to demand costly studies and multiple hearings before Berkeley officials.
> More recently, a series of court rulings that culminated last year nearly forced Berkeley to withhold admission of thousands of high school seniors...
Graduating high-school seniors are also known as incoming freshman or legal adults.
> ... because the state’s judges agreed with NIMBY neighborhood groups that population growth is an inherent environmental impact under CEQA.
Ok, let's see how big the UC school system is...
> The University maintains approximately 6,000 buildings enclosing 137 million gross square feet on approximately 30,000 acres across its ten campuses, five medical centers, nine agricultural research and extension centers, and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
I'm not seeing evidence that protestors were primarily NIMBYs and pesky white homeowners. I can find several articles citing _student_ protests.
> “It’s students who set up People’s Park in the first place, so it’s our place to defend it,” said Athena Davis, a first-year student at UC Berkeley who spoke at the rally. “It’s up to students to reject the idea that our housing needs to come at the price of destroying green space and homes for the marginalized.”
They're talking about using environmental rules to block homes for people to live in, inside cities.
Using land efficiently in walkable places is one of the most environmentally friendly things we can be doing, and supposed "environmentalists" sought to block it using "environmental" rules!
If that's not NIMBYism to you, you have blinders on.
I didn't say there was NO NIMBYs, but that this article suggests NIMBYs were the primary protestors. That doesn't seem truthful. Additionally, the UC system does have a large impact on the environment.
I'm sure there are better examples to illustrate your point
> homes for people to live in
Student housing. Which likely means partially-furnished studios with shared bathrooms and a kitchenette at best. This isn't the useful housing folks are asking for.
That's a great hypothetical, but it's not supported by the article. There are claims that NIMBYs are doing this or that, but follow the links to the supplementary articles and it's baseless. I only find evidence that students and homeless protested. Those aren't NIMBY homeowners.
To me, it seems UC wants to bulldoze a park famous for homeless camps and replace it with student housing. Pro-development is trying to cast the UC expansion in the same light as folks asking for affordable housing. But, UC is not providing useful housing for residents of Berkley.
Fortunately, this egregious nonsense lead to the CEQA rules being modified so that NIMBYs like these can't weaponize them so easily in situations like this.
The alternative is not to have no environmental regulation. California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.
>California could copy the regulations of any of the 49 other states and be much better off.
Says whom?
California has a huge population. California has a massive water shortage problem. California has wide areas vulnerable to wildfires. California has piles of small ecosystems that are fragile and can be easily wiped out.
Saying California could copy some states like Iowas regulations makes negative sense.
> If there's a specific regulation that can be shown to be doing more harm than good
In Massachusetts you can't clear shoreline. Specifically, if you buy waterfront property on a pond / lake, you can't clear the shoreline to make a beach in your backyard. You can only use what used to be there before the law was passed. There's even restrictions on building close to shorelines, so if you want to build, you need to find an existing building and renovate.
Now, I'm not a wetland expert, so maybe someone will chime in and tell me why every inch of freshwater shoreline must be undisturbed. But I like freshwater swimming and suspect that we can allocate some space for human recreation.
>Almost every environmental regulation has come after it was already shown that there was some harm that needed to be mitigated.
Ok, strong example here: the long term efforts to stop forest fires caused build up of fuel that should have burned up in small fires which then instead burned up ecosystems which evolved for small forest fires and instead were destroyed in large ones.
That's a well intentioned environmental policy that had terrible effects.
Fuel efficiency programs with the goal of reducing emissions with exceptions for work vehicles killed small trucks and meant a ton of people who do approximately 0 work drive around enormous vehicles that were designed big to match the exception criteria.
That's another one.
Ethanol to replace gasoline is also an enormous negative consequence waste that started as an environmental program.
Things don't just work because you want them to and programs aren't automatically right because of what they intend to do.
Far too many people argue for things they don't understand at all because of the surface intention of them and treat discussion about them blasphemy. (I chose uncontroversial negative examples because I don't want to get sidetracked into arguments about my examples with zealots)
what kind of common sense wisdom are we talking about here, can you give an example? understanding the impact of regulation designed to impact both the environment and the economy, two incredibly complex systems our experts are only beginning to understand, isn't generally a matter of common sense
The common sense wisdom I'm referring to is that environmental regulation is in general bad or does more harm than good.
That's an opinion I encounter constantly and it's a meme that was manufactured in PR company meeting rooms, right wing think tanks, and neo-classical economists theoretical models of how the world works.
This is not true, there is just a specific protocol you have follow to do the building work. Yes it increases costs, but it doesn't explicitly prevent them.
Congress should pass the RPM act and exempt race cars from the clean air act. I never said you can't cherry pick individual problems with environmental regulation.
I just don't like the general attitude that because you can find something to disagree with that environmental regulation as a general rule is bad. It isn't.
There are thousands and thousands of pages of environmental regulations. Obviously people are going to be able to find some things that need to be revisited, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water. Nothing should be repealed without evidence and in many cases amendments are more prudent than repeals.
Bro I can't go out without some diesel pickup rolling coal. If anything auto standards need to be higher because people aren't adult enough to follow the 'not for public roads use' model.
It's really easy to sit and demand evidence before regulating something. But consider that if we waited for hard evidence to accumulate before banning lead in gasoline, we likely never would have banned it because the hard evidence wouldn't exist.
I also don't agree on the principle that regulations are "harmful" or "helpful." Rather, you have to define who the regulation harms, and who it helps. For example antitrust enforcement harms shareholders and some employees of very large firms, but it helps many employees and arguably improves the landscape for competition between many smaller firms. So whether a regulation is preferable comes down to values.
In the case of leaded gas, it harms basically everybody, but it helps fuel companies, so it was an easy thing to change.
We had research to support the EPA phase down of lead.
Also, your assertion that lead “helps fuel companies” is fundamentally mistaken. Gasoline is a mass-produced commodity. Oil companies have single digit profit margins. These companies aren’t making Big Tech profit margins where they can absorb higher costs without passing them along to consumers. Cost savings from things like gasoline additives accrue to consumers at the gas pump.
Until the price of gas starts to remotely reflect the medium to long term costs of climate change I basically always celebrate anything that increases gas or carbon-based energy prices. Like, it sucks... but there's lots of data that consumers respond to these prices in their choices.
The way I think about it, the entirety of global civilization is massively, massively subsidizing carbon emission.
I agree. I’m just addressing the notion raised in the post above that oil companies will bear cost increases in an industry where everyone sells an identical product and consumers can just cross the street to save $0.10 a gallon.
If you wanted to pay for direct air capture of CO2 to directly "undo" your climate effect of driving, the cost would currently be about $6 per gallon. Price comes from [1], found [2] looking for a second opinion on current direct air capture cost.
That's true, and without any legislation or such prohibiting lead they would most likely have continued to use it as anyone who would have phased out lead would have been at a competitive disadvantage. But once it was banned, everybody was again on an even playing field, and as OP explained fuel is a commodity so the higher cost just flowed through to the end user prices, refinery margins stayed about where they were.
In an industry where everyone sells a completely fungible product such cost savings generally are passed on to consumers. Oil companies can profit in the short term due to fluctuations in the price of oil and things like that, but not from something like lead additives, which everyone had been using for decades.
If the end product ends up marginally cheaper, the company will be able to sell more of it, and this will lead to more profit. And sure, when you ignore the cost of the pollution, this certainly benefits the consumer, by allowing them to afford more energy and energy-based products (i.e., just about everything).
But then we come back to ignoring the cost of the pollution. It certainly gets paid for eventually, but by who? Also, it's cheaper for everyone if the pollution is eliminated to begin with rather than being cleaned up later (which is certainly a more energy intensive endeavor).
I think you're missing the point -- the point is that gasoline companies KNEW ABOUT alternative lead-free substitutes for anti-knock (such as ethanol) and chose lead because they perceived it was less profitable. [1] Specifically because ethanol wasn't patentable and TEL was, and ultimately it WAS patented.
It is more than that - lead and ethanol have other properties that engines that use them need to handle. Lead also acted as a lubricant and parts designed for engines that assumed lead fuel were designed with softer valve seats - switch to unleaded with otherwise equal octane and your will destroy the engine. (though experience shows that unless you were driving your car on a race trace most cars worked fine for longer than the car lasted). Ethanol will destroy some forms of rubber and so you need to use different seals in some parts.
TEL was patentable, but those patents were long expired before there was a big push to eliminate leaded gas.
Also, TEL being patented by Dow (which isn’t an oil company) actually was a reason oil companies would want to use an alternative, if possible. Why would they want to pay Dow to use a patented product, all else being equal?
They picked lead because it was the cheapest additive, not because it was more profitable for the industry as a whole. Those two things aren’t the same. In the oil industry, the products are identical and companies compete only on price. If you use the $0.10 per gallon additive when everyone else is using the $0.05 per gallon additive, then your sales collapse because customers just cross the street to save $0.05 per gallon. But if every company switches to the $0.05 gallon additive, that doesn’t mean the companies pocket the extra $0.05 per gallon. Most of that goes to the consumer, because, again, consumers can just cross the street to get the better price.
It’s really a collective action problem. Nobody wants their gasoline to be more expensive than other companies’. So everyone has the incentive to use the cheapest ingredient. If you ban that ingredient, prices go up. But since everyone's prices will go up, you remove the competitive disadvantage.
I think you're missing the point. Without a market-coordinating motivation (i.e., legislation), any company that adopted a more expensive anti-knock would be competed out of the market.
Ethanol has a propensity to suck up ambient moisture and is more demanding of rubbers and happily attacks aluminum.
In an age of natural rubber components, poorly sealed fuel systems with steel tanks and aluminum carburetors pretty much anything other than ethanol is the "right choice".
And once they ruled out ethanol they settled on lead because it was cheap/profitable. Obviously they chose wrong, they should've picked something more expensive but less terrible.
These weren't cartoon villains with monocles twirling their mustaches. They were normal humans making pragmatic decisions based on the constraints they faced. Without knowing the details people cannot understand what future similar fact patterns may look like.
That said, it should be no surprise to anyone that nobody wants to talk about "well we don't know how bad the harm of leaded exhaust is, we know it's not good, but it's diffuse and undefined so we'll round it to zero/negligible" type decision making, for that sort of unknown rounds to zero logic underpins in whole or part all manner of modern policy discourse.
>It's really easy to sit and demand evidence before regulating something. But consider that if we waited for hard evidence to accumulate before banning lead in gasoline, we likely never would have banned it because the hard evidence wouldn't exist.
We already knew lead was toxic before we started putting it in gasoline. Even the guy that invented it got sick from exposure and people died from exposure in their plants in the first years of operation. The problem is that we somehow require evidence that something is unsafe but don't require any evidence that its safe in the first place.
Basically everybody agrees with what you're saying which is what makes this an insidious comment.
In general the pressure against regulation comes from narrow winners (oil industry for instance) whereas the pressure for regulations generally comes from people focused on the greater good (even if they are misled by other narrow winners, for instance compliance firms).
There are valid reasons to oppose regulations. They can be used to create barriers of entry for small businesses, for example. They constantly affect the poor more than the middle class.
That is usually the opposite because the absence of regulations usually put the smallest players in a state of dependence of some huge monopolistic groups.
Think pesticides and genetically modified plants for example.
Maybe. But the original context here is an article about removing lead from gasoline. Which I’m pretty sure that helped many people based on the “greater good”.
There’s no copper sulfate in canned green beans or borax in beef. Those seem all around good.
Let’s agree that impacts of regulations are nuanced, and not try to condense it down to something overly simplistic like, “regulations hurt poor people”.
When left to their own cigaret companies tell congress cigarettes are safe and non addictive. Left alone companies pay in scrip only usable at the company store.
The 'greater good' has arguably PREVENTED much more hurt of people than it has ever hurt. Meanwhile companies have PROVEN time and time again that they WILL hurt people when left to their own devices. In environmental policies. In pay policies. In employment policies. In EVERY aspect possible.
Hundreds of book on utilitarianism have been published since Bentham (ca 1800) first argued 'why'. They argue the matter from evey perspective ad nauseam.
There are valid reasons to oppose specific regulations not all.
Imagine I open a auto repair center and I perform oil changes. It would cost me money to have used oil hauled away or I could dump it down the drain. You probably support a requirement that I pay for the service.
I'm sure there are regulations that cause actual harm to small businesses that have little or no value but I wonder what percentage it would be of the total.
We're talking about environmental regulations. It is no more good for a small business to pollute than a large one, and it's precisely the poor who are most harmed by environmental pollution.
the largest unaccounted for victims of environmental degradation are our children and their children. given that we can't even keep from poisoning our own well water for our own uses today, it really does like on the whole we're failing to regulate sufficiently.
which isn't to argue that they shouldn't make sense. or that they should be used to tilt the playing field due to corruption, but on the balance claiming that we are currently overregulated is pretty indefensible.
Lead is a textbook example of a good regulation. It’s something where the industry was doing something very harmful-aerosolizing lead and pumping it into the air—which had quite small economic benefits and was relatively easily replaced.
Some regulation achieves this kind of improvement, and we’re probably under regulated in those areas. Particulate matter, for example, is extremely harmful. But many regulations do not have such clear cut costs and benefits.
"…there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives.".
Presumably, you mean there weren't any alternatives for anti-knock additives for around the same price as tetraethyllead.
Octane ratings can be increased sans Pb if needed. Trouble is the extra refining and reduced yield increases costs which consumers weren't prepared to pay for.
Sibling comments are good. I'll add that the biggest concern is PM2.5 (particulates smaller than 2.5 micrometers). They're thought to be responsible for 70,000 excess deaths in the U.S. annually, more than homicides or drug overdoses: https://www.stateofglobalair.org/health/pm
Particulate matter is relatively large particles, so far as air pollution goes. Think things like soot or smoke, rather than specific chemicals. Burning wood and coal produces far more particulates than, say, natural gas or gasoline-gas.
Breathing in unhealthy levels of PM2.5 can increase the risk of health problems like heart disease, asthma, and low birth weight. Unhealthy levels can also reduce visibility and cause the air to appear hazy.
Outdoor sources include vehicle exhaust, burning wood, gas and other fuels, and fires. Particle pollution can also travel long distances from its source; for example from wildfires hundreds of miles away. Outdoor particle pollution levels are more likely to be higher on days with little or no wind or air mixing.
It should be uncontroversial that introducing shit into an environment where it doesn't belong is a bad idea, yet many people remain unconvinced that dumping tons of carbon dioxide a year into the atmosphere or tons of fertilizer by-products into the oceans is a bad idea.
It's less that but rather the hypocrisy of promoting burdensome regulations and bans implemented in one county (e.g. Germany) which hurts domestic industry and raises costs for its citizens, all while being silent on countries like China and India continuing to massively build more and more coal fired power plants
I will say on point one, the rate which a country can scale usage throws this off. For example the first 50 years of Germany's usage likely represents far less than a current Chinese year of usage.
Unfortunately there is hypocrisy to go around. Here's the argument China and India will use: "coal and fossil fuel always was for all its history and still is the largest portion of Germany's energy mix. It's hardly in a position to ask other countries to stop."
"China and India have the right to industrialize themselves using the same tools Western countries have used. China is leading the world in alternative energy manufacturing making clean energy profitable and India is the 4th largest renewable energy producer."
Who is proposing for environment regulation without proper scientific evidence? You both sided the argument without giving any claims about environment regulation that turned out to be not helpful.
That's why the people that would rather policy be based on their personal interests work so hard to discredit all data and the scientific method so that you can't even have that conversation.
Aren't you just waving a flag for less regulation by rushing to align yourself with this inarguable example of regulatory success? Rather than discussing the issue of what impact lead had, or how we might apply this longitudinal method to other other problems (making hair archives into a general environmental data resource), or develop longitudinal methods in general, You've chosen to issue a clarion calla gainst 'bad regulation'.
Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
....nobody was arguing this. It's a classic straw man fallacy. Further, you're leveraging a lot of emotional terms while providing zero examples, inviting potential sympathetic readers to just project their feelings onto any regulations they happen to dislike rather than establish any sort of objective criteria or lay out any map/model of regulatory credibility that could be subject to challenge or criticism.
> some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated
You're right. Off the top of my head, the stupidest environmental regulation I can think of right now is the banning of plastic straws. It's such a minuscule amount of plastic used compared to the mountains of bags and packaging used in general commerce and industry.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for protecting our environment. I just believe in evidence-based policy and setting priorities correctly. After all, money, labor, and attention are finite resources.
Your tone suggests you think they are generally not based on science and given cost benefit analysis. Probably a reflection of your media intake.
In 1981 Reagan made cost benefit analysis a requirement for EPA.
For example in 1984: the EPA " estimates that the benefits of reducing lead in gasoline would exceed the costs by more than 300 percent.... These benefits include improved health of children and others"
Trump has just scrapped the requirement to cost in human health.
I wonder if removing lead would meet the new standard.
> In my opinion it is obvious and should be uncontroversial that some environmental regulations work and are great and should if anything be reinforced, while other environmental regulations do more harm than good and need to be reigned in or eliminated.
This would be a reasonable centrist opinion, if there existed environmental regulations that do more harm than good!
Actually, I do know of one, in California, that does both harm and good and the harmful parts need to be reigned in. CEQA in California was expanded by courts after it was passed to cover all sorts of things that weren't intended by the authors. CEQA is not so much an "environmental" law as it is a "perform some massive studies law" as it doesn't really regulate anything in particular.
Mostly it serves as a route to use the courts to delay projects, largely housing in already-built-out areas. By delaying a project's approval with a court lawsuit for 2-3 years, the preliminary financing runs out, the cost of owning land without doing anything with it runs out, so projects can be scuttled without the validity of the lawsuit every being evaluated by courts.
Instead of this sort of legal courtroom process that takes long and indeterminate amounts of time, CEQA should be replaced with strict and very clear definitions of harm, or at least move the more subjective parts into a science-based regulatory body that provides answers an a short timeline that can not be dragged on indefinitely.
> Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights.
This is a very weird turn of the phrase "corporations aren't people," because there actually are highly influential politicians that made the case that corporations are people. Nobody is saying that regulations are people. That's silly.
The regulations we need to get rid of are not "environmental" regulations, they are "rent seeking" regulations that allow entrenched interests to prevent disruption by smaller interests. CEQA is not a problem because its an environmental regulation, it's a problem because it's a tool NIMBYs use to get results that are worse for the environment.
> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped
Here is a strawman for you: studies for regulation A show that it is successfull in improving habitat for endangered species.
Studies also show that the regulation increases tax burden and decreases competitiveness of national agriculture.
> It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped.
This sounds good as a general default, but there are differences of approach. The US, for example, tends to be more permissive with new chemicals while the EU tends to take a more precautionary approach. Which is better on the whole, weighing the various competing goods, I don't know. I generally favor health over economic prowess, however.
> a manipulative political maneuver
Yes, under the pretext of concern for the environment. There are well-known cases where the political opposition will commission a bogus ecological studies to stifle construction projects they either don't agree with or as a petty way to simply make the ruling party appear less successful. And naturally, the ecological study will find something, as virtually no major construction project will leave the environment unaltered, which is not to say seriously or irretrievable damaged.
This sounds nice, but in the context of actual politics it's completely meaningless.
It's like saying that some people are dangerous criminals who need to be locked up, and other people are upstanding citizens who should be free to live their lives. Everybody would agree with this. The disagreement is in how you sort people. What category encompasses someone who belongs to the opposing political party? That sort of thing.
Regulation should definitely be justified by scientific data. Who gets to determine what's enough? Who gets to determine what counts? Leaded gasoline is a great example. It was pretty well understood when it was introduced that lead was hazardous and dumping a bunch of it into the atmosphere was unwise. But this was evaded, denied, and suppressed for decades.
Even today, it's not settled. Lead is still used in aviation gasoline in the US. It's being phased out, but it's been in the process of phasing out for a couple of decades and there seems to be no urgency in it.
You'll find plenty of people disagreeing with pretty clearly beneficial environmental regulations because in their view those regulations are not supported by the data. They would completely agree with your statement, while saying that pollution from coal power plants is no big deal, climate change is a myth, etc.
There definitely is urgency to phase out leaded aviation gasoline. The FAA is proposing that we phase it out by 2030 - just 4 years from now - even though we still haven't agreed on which of the 3 competing gas blends to standardize on, the pumping infrastructure only exists at a small number of airports, and even though there's still open concerns about them causing engine damage.
Leaded gasoline for cars started phasing out 52 years ago. It was fully banned 30 years ago. If there was any urgency behind getting rid of leaded avgas it would have been gone in that timeframe.
The FAA started looking at it 14 years ago. They planned to finish phasing it out in 2023. Three years after that, leaded avgas remains ubiquitous, and there's a plan to finish phasing it out in six years. (The 2030 date excludes Alaska, which is planned for 2032.) That's not what urgency looks like.
>Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
I'm aware of political parties and politicians who make statements similar to "We have too many regulations" or "stop big government" I'm not aware of opposite.
> some environmental regulations work [...] while other [..] do more harm than good
You are (deliberately?) overlooking the elephant in the room: lobbies with money can distort the discussion.
Big tobacco knew for decades that smoking was bad but still managed to block restrictions in smoking. Oil companies knew lead was poisoning. Purdue knew Oxycontin was addicting. Facebook knows their product is toxic.
I'm an enthusiastic enjoyer of the Janet programming language.[0] Sometimes people ask questions about how to do something in the Janet Zulip instance, and I like to help if I know the answer. But I'm most likely to see those messages first on my phone.
Termux makes it super easy to pull up a Janet REPL on my phone and try some things out before I reply. You could do the same with node or Python or anything else with a CLI REPL.
Termux is the first app I install on every Android device I get my hands on. It's astonishingly capable.
I have a Bluetooth keyboard case for my Android tablet. All the time, I use Termux to ssh into my Linux machine over my home network and code on it in Neovim from my couch.
I don't bother with the default notes app on my phone. Termux + Neovim running vimwiki and syncing to a private GitHub repo is way better.
Most stuff you want at the CLI is in the Termux package repository. On the occasions when it isn't, you can install clang, make, cmake, ninja, whatever libraries you need, and build it from source. At that point most stuff just works.
Termux is incredible and single-handedly keeps me running Android.
I actually have like, four different ones... :^))) I'm a bit of a keyboard fiend.
The main one I use with my Android tablet specifically is a no-name brand, knock-off "magic keyboard"-style folio case that I got on AliExpress for like, 45 USD. I ordered the English layout, I received the Spanish one (which is mostly the same but had additional legends for Spanish characters). Le sigh. It's AliExpress, I didn't bother contacting support.
For my phone, I have a really old Zagg one that was originally for an iPad. The iPad has long since died but the keyboard lives on. Woo!
The main keyboard I type on all day at my desk is a Logitech Pebble K380s. It can store three different connection profiles, which can be either Bluetooth or Logi unified receiver. So I have one of those profiles set to connect to my Pixel 8 via Bluetooth (typing from that now). Makes toggling back and forth between that and my desktop very smooth.
On a "real keyboard" (like this K380s) there's a dedicated Esc key. Most tablet folio cases don't have Esc. I found an app called "External Keyboard Helper Pro" that lets me rebind Caps Lock to Esc. That makes Neovim much more pleasant.
Big difference! That's a full VM, while Termux is more like a Debian container. For most use cases you will have a better time with Termux, which also ships useful Android integrations such as clipboard and notifications.
Yeah but it sucks. There's a button in its settings to install a Debian chroot environment; gave it a go and it bricked itself, had to clear the app's storage and factory reset it.
Yeah, I can always use the Android Terminal once. If I re-open it, it says it's corrupted, and has to delete and re-install its minimal Debian environment.
Probably because it's trying to establish a network connection, and it might be running a networking setup that blocks until the network is up. Also, it's trying to run networking with the host so it can run things like the storage balloon driver and mounting the host filesystem.
I don't understand this comment. Yes, absolutely. Alpha versions of software absolutely suck. The end goal is making it not suck, but if it's full of breaking bugs your can't just say it doesn't suck just because they're expected.
Does it? I've looked at it only briefly (like enabled it, waited a while for it to download something big, then got a basic shell) but it seemed much less capable than Termux. Can you get cell tower info or copy to clipboard for example, or use other Android APIs?
Edit: looked into it a bit more, /etc/issue says it's a Debian 13 (latest stable), apt works with sudo (this is a locked-down device where I don't have root permission on, why does it need a fake sudo to use apt?) but of course programs like wavemon are useless because Android doesn't let you access the WiFi interface. There's no settings besides port forwarding and resetting the "partition". I don't see any documentation or info on how/whether you can interface with the rest of the system in any way. Looking on the web for Android terminal or "Linux developer environment" (as the system settings calls it) is predictably useless and only results in Google's unrelated Android SDK or other terminal emulator apps
Edit 2: okay, beware of it: I was curious if the same "you can't make the OS not kill your script" problem also happened in this OS terminal and.. it's worse. So I ran `while true; do date >> latest.txt; sleep 10; done` to see how long it'd stay alive and then did some other tasks like turning the screen off and on, opening a navigation app and zooming into a dense city, and loading a few websites. Locked the screen once more for good measure and then unlocked and opened the terminal. Guess what? It's broken. Not just crashed: I simply cannot start it anymore. The only "error handling" (Fehlerbehebung it says) step it offers is to delete all data and start with a clean system. The stack trace says there's a nullpointer in TerminalWebViewClient, with the next line being in Trichrome. It's a web browser apparently
YMMV, but I've had pretty good luck with just force closing it and launching again when getting errors like that. It doesn't necessarily mean the whole environment is corrupt, even though that is the recovery option that is presented.
It is very unreliable though. I hope Android 17 improves it, as other than the restart issues, I've generally found it to be very functional.
Even if you have Android 16 it's not guaranteed the terminal works. It's disabled by Samsung on my Galaxy A55 for some reason. Maybe the hardware doesn't support the feature.
Not to get into an iOS vs Android thing, because that’s not the point (it’s okay to appreciate both or neither, you do you).
But this is one of the things I really would love to have on my iPhone that I’m jealous of the Android ecosystem for. I know there are alternatives for iOS and I’ve used them (no need to list them here, this thread isn’t about iOS). For me, a really good terminal/CLI with good integration with the OS would be killer. But I know I’m niche and unlikely to see such a thing outside of SSHing to a remote VM.
At the point where Samsung detects a photo of a white circle while the phone is pointing upwards and substitutes a high resolution picture of the moon.
Another pretty common application is to color unused bindings with a slightly faded-out color. So for e.g. with the TypeScript LSP, up at the top of the file you can instantly tell what imports are redundant because they're colored differently.
1. Do people necessarily need to agree on the justification for a standard to agree on the standard itself? Does everyone agree on the reasoning / justification for every single point of every NIST standard?
2. What separates a standard from a case study? Why can't "don't shoot babies in the head" / "shooting babies in the head is wrong" be a standard?
> 1. Do people necessarily need to agree on the justification for a standard to agree on the standard itself? Does everyone agree on the reasoning / justification for every single point of every NIST standard?
Think about this using Set Theory.
Different functions from one set of values to another set of values can give the same output for a given value, and yet differ wildly when given other values.
Example: the function (\a.a*2) and the function (\a.a*a) give the same output when a = 2. But they give very different answers when a = 6.
Applying that idea to this context, think of a moral standard as a function and the action "shooting babies in the head" as an input to the function. The function returns a Boolean indicating whether that action is moral or immoral.
If two different approaches reach the same conclusion 100% of the time on all inputs, then they're actually the same standard expressed two different ways. But if they agree only in this case, or even in many cases, but differ in others, then they are different standards.
The grandparent comment asserted, "we have yet to discover any universal moral standards". And I think that's correct, because there are no standards that everyone everywhere and every-when considers universally correct.
> 2. What separates a standard from a case study? Why can't "don't shoot babies in the head" / "shooting babies in the head is wrong" be a standard?
Sure, we could have that as a standard, but it would be extremely limited in scope.
But would you stop there? Is that the entirety of your moral standard's domain? Or are there other values you'd like to assess as moral or immoral?
Any given collection of individual micro-standards would then constitute the meta-standard that we're trying to reason by, and that meta-standard is prone to the non-universality pointed out above.
But say we tried to solve ethics that way. After all, the most simplistic approach to creating a function between sets is simply to construct a lookup table. Why can't we simply enumerate every possible action and dictate for each one whether it's moral or immoral?
This approach is limited for several reasons.
First, this approach is limited practically, because some actions are moral in one context and not in another. So we would have to take our lookup table of every possible action and matrix it with every possible context that might provide extenuating circumstances. The combinatorial explosion between actions and contexts becomes absolutely infeasible to all known information technology in a very short amount of time.
But second, a lookup table could never be complete. There are novel circumstances and novel actions being created all the time. Novel technologies provide a trivial proof of "zero-day" ethical exploits. And new confluences of as-yet never documented circumstances could, in theory, provide justifications never judged before. So in order to have a perfect and complete lookup table, even setting aside the fact that we have nowhere to write it down, we would need the ability to observe all time and space at once in order to complete it. And at least right now we can't see the future (nevermind that we also have partial perspective on the present, and have intense difficulty agreeing upon the past).
So the only thing we could do to address new actions and new circumstances for those actions is add to the morality lookup table as we encounter new actions and new circumstances for those actions. But if this lookup table is to be our universal standard, who assigns its new values, and based on what? If it's assigned according to some other source or principle, then that principle, and not the lookup table itself, should be our oracle for what's moral or not. Essentially then the lookup table is just a memoized cache in front of the real universal moral standard that we all agree to trust.
But we're in this situation precisely because no such oracle exists (or at least, exists and has universal consensus).
So we're back to competing standards published by competing authorities and no universal recognition of any of them as the final word. That's just how ethics seems to work at the moment, and that's what the grandparent comment asserted, which the parent comment quibbled with.
A single case study does not a universal moral standard make.
There was a time when ethicists were optimistic about all the different, competing moral voices in the world steadily converging on a synthesis of all of them that satisfied most or all of the principles people proposed. The thought was, we could just continue cataloging ethical instincts—micro-standards as we talked about before—and over time the plurality of ethical inputs would result in a convergence toward the deeper ethics underlying them all.
Problem with that at this point is, if we think of ethics as a distribution, it appears to be multi-modal. There are strange attractors in the field that create local pockets of consensus, but nothing approaching a universal shared recognition of what right and wrong are or what sorts of values or concerns ought to motivate the assessment.
It turns out that ethics, conceived of now as a higher-dimensional space, is enormously varied. You can do the equivalent of Principal Component Analysis in order to very broadly cluster similar voices together, but there is not and seems like there will never be an all-satisfying synthesis of all or even most human ethical impulses. So even if you can construct a couple of rough clusterings... How do you adjudicate between them? Especially once you realize that you, the observer, are inculcated unevenly in them, find some more and others less accessable or relatable, more or less obvious, not based on a first-principles analysis but based on your own rearing and development context?
There are case studies that have near-universal answers (fewer and fewer the more broadly you survey, but nevertheless). But. Different people arrive at their answers to moral questions differently, and there is no universal moral standard that has widespread acceptance.
What multiple times of wrong are there that apply to shooting babies in the head that lead you to believe you think it’s wrong for different a reason?
Quentin Tarantino writes and produces fiction.
No one really believes needlessly shooting people in the head is an inconvenience only because of the mess it makes in the back seat.
Maybe you have a strong conviction that the baby deserved it. Some people genuinely are that intolerable that a headshot could be deemed warranted despite the mess it tends to make.
I believe in God, specifically the God who reveals himself in the Christian Bible. I believe that the most fundamental reason that shooting a baby in the head is wrong is because God created and loves that baby, so to harm it is to violate the will of the most fundamental principle in all reality, which is God himself. What he approves of is good and what he disapproves of is bad, and there is no higher authority to appeal to beyond that. He disapproves (pretty strongly, as it happens) of harming babies. Therefore, it's wrong for you, or me, or anyone at any time or place, from any culture, including cultures that may exist thousands or tens of thousands of years from now that neither of us know about, to do so.
Many people who believe shooting babies in the head is wrong would give a very different reason than I do. I would agree with them in this instance, but not in every instance. Because we would not share the same standard. Because a single case study, like the one you've proposed, is not a standard.
> 1 Samuel said to Saul, “I am the one the Lord sent to anoint you king over his people Israel; so listen now to the message from the Lord. 2 This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. 3 Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’”
Same! And I feel weird about it. The only issue I have is sometimes the task switcher hangs or fails and I can't easily switch tasks, but aside from that it ticks a lot of boxes.
Yeah, I used to have an issue where it would repeatedly request accessibility permissions even though they were already granted. But I haven't seen that one in months and haven't noticed any other glitches or bugs whatsoever.
I like how completely adjustable the home screen grid is (icon size, number of rows, number of columns, whether or not to allow sub-grid arrangement, whether to have vertical or horizontal page layout).
I like the number of shortcut gestures available (tap home on home screen, swipe up/down, two finger swipe up/down, double tap, double tap + swipe up/down, pinch in/out), and that they're all completely remappable to launch any installed app, or installed app quick action, or trigger any of like a dozen launcher actions (like opening the app drawer, opening the notification shade, locking the screen, etc).
I like how the dock can be swiped up to show a second (or, if you want, third or fourth etc) row of apps in like a "mini app drawer" just for things I use often and want there instead of picking a page where they live.
I like the widgets that it ships with (I use the combo clock + weather one).
I like that I can have the app drawer organize alphabetically (or not, if I wanted).
I like that I can turn off pretty much anything that I don't want (the news feed page, especially, but also you can have almost any of the launcher UI elements hidden by default).
And it's stable, has no ads, and nearly no pop-ups. It just lets me set what I want and then gets out of the way and works 99.9% of the time.
It's just... It's Microsoft Launcher, is the only thing.
Because, "opt-in ethics" turns stronger ethical preference into a game theoretic disadvantage.
There are two populations: population A is those who prefer ethical behavior internally and would volunteer for it even if not compelled. Population B is those who don't prefer ethical behavior internally, wouldn't volunteer for it, and must be compelled to act ethically from without if they are to act ethically at all.
In a landscape that impartially disincentivizes unethical behavior, both A and B can coexist.
But in a landscape that DOES NOT impartially disincentivize unethical behavior, everyone acts the same as before—unless there's a benefit to acting unethically. In which case, A, those who prefer to be ethical for its own sake, will inevitably be outcompeted by B, those who engage in any behavior regardless of ethics, so long as that behavior confers advantage.
Enough of that on a long enough time scale and the voluntarily ethical population just disappears.
So, either we enforce ethical behavior (even on those who need no forcing), or we create an unethical free-for-all waiting to happen.
In some cases the "waiting to happen" stage can last a surprisingly long time. Centuries, maybe. But never, as long as B's exist and are free to act, without end.
One solution to this problem that was popular in certain ancient societies was, "Round up and execute all the B's." But A) that's not very ethical, so we can't do that without becoming B's ourselves; and B) you can't tell who is a B just by looking at them, or their skin color or race or eye color or religion or whatever; and C) B's have a maximal incentive to become those who decide who is to be executed for being a B, so the whole thing is prone to MASSIVE corruption.
So the thing Liberal societies have done is create systems where we punish BEHAVIOR rather than trying to classify people. And it works, as long as we do the "impartially disincentivizing unethical behavior" thing I mentioned before.
Typically the behavior is "Very slowly, then suddenly all at once". Which makes issues easy to ignore and by the time all at once happens there is no time to actually deal with it.
If Zig does eventually save the world one day, it'll be just as much thanks to TigerBeetle as to the Zig Foundation itself.
Having a serious, dedicated, and smart partner, in industry, working hard to operationalize and turn a profit on the language is a massive boon to the whole project (and it would be even if they didn't choose to give back monetarily, but all the more since they are!).
One great way to start learning is to code your own! Here's a step-by-step guide to writing a TUI text editor in ~1000 lines of code (and it's super easy to embellish as you go): https://viewsourcecode.org/snaptoken/kilo/
Turning "environmental regulation" into a unified bloc that must be either supported or opposed in totality is a manipulative political maneuver and it should be forcefully rejected.
Regulations are not people, and they don't have rights. It is fair and reasonable to demand that environmental regulation justify its existence with hard, scientifically verifiable data or else get chopped. Clearly, banning leaded gasoline has that kind of justification, and therefore I'm strongly in favor of maintaining that ban and extending it wherever it isn't in place yet. The same reasonable standard should be applied to other regulations across the board.
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