Posted in Central Planning, Environment on Jul 23rd, 2020
Posted below without comment: Adirondack Mountain Club, Inc.Conservation Committee Resolution •WHEREAS, the State has regularly acknowledged that the Adirondacks receive 10 to 12 million visitors a year; •WHEREAS, despite this, the State has not made proportional or even significant investments to build the necessary infrastructure to support these numbers, leading to an artificially high rate […]
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Simply buying all of the coal that is in the ground would be fantastically less expensive than almost any climate solution, and respect the property rights of companies and sectors that have invested for many decades in that sector. It would avoid the bounceback problems vis-à-vis carbon taxes and other demand limiting ideas (or the […]
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Posted in Economic Illiteracy on Nov 28th, 2019
Today I reprint a slightly edited piece I put together several years ago. I’d change a lot of it, from the content to the tone, if I were to do it over – but one must live with one’s younger self. Happy Thanksgiving to all. Four centuries after the celebration of the first Thanksgiving, there […]
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Posted in Disingenuous, Environment on May 1st, 2019
The city of Jakarta is sinking quite rapidly because of land subsidence (they are removing tons of groundwater). It is reported that the Northern part of the city has sunk … eight feet … in just the past decade. Why? Largely because city residents freely pump groundwater, causing the land that sits above it to […]
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Posted in Environment on Apr 22nd, 2019
My back of the envelope guess of what the market value of the top 10 oil companies in the world, and all of the coal producers in the world, is about $3 trillion. If climate change is the worst thing to ever face humanity, and we are opposed to nuclear and we don’t think we […]
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Posted in Extended Order, Knowledge on Apr 8th, 2019
Here is the policy-making equivalent: The 1994 discovery of arsenic in groundwater in Bangladesh prompted a massive public health campaign that led 20% of the population to switch from backyard wells to less convenient drinking water sources that had a higher risk of fecal contamination. We find evidence of unintended health consequences by comparing mortality […]
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For years I have waffled back and forth between being way too reactionary and concerned about the insane ideas that are put forth, or way too lax in trying to stay out of the news. For my own mental health and for what I thought would help contribute to good debate, I have chosen to […]
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Posted in Disingenuous, Education on Nov 5th, 2018
We’ll write up a lot more on this and some other “educational content” soon …
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“This is, of course, a very unrealistic assumption … these operations are often extremely costly … to prevent many transactions.” That was him referring to the oft-straw man argument by opponents of Coasean insights about “transactions costs being zero.” Coase obviously knew that. And he obviously was making a different point. The Coase Theorem as […]
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I almost have a hard time believing that this article and experience is not a case of double trolling. Underlying these alleged “social constructions” is the most deeply concerning of them all. This is the belief that in urgent need of “disrupting” is the simple truth that science itself—along with our best methods of data-gathering, […]
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