Quotulatiousness

August 24, 2023

“Facebook has made a calculated business decision about the value of its fucks. These fucks are expensive. So they won’t give any.”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson fought the good fight as long as she could, but finally had to load up the old shotgun and share both barrels with the participants in the ongoing clusterfarce over the Online News Act (the artist formerly known as Bill C-18):

Look, I’ve largely said my piece on the Online News Act: it’s poorly conceived legislation that risked terrible outcomes. It’s pointless, now, with those terrible outcomes unfolding, to say “I told you so”.

But the response to the news that Meta has decided to continue blocking news — even in the face of devastating wildfires in B.C. and the Northwest Territories — has been such disingenuous dumbfuckery from every corner that I have failed to bestill my cursed fingertips.

Let’s start with this quote from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who at a recent press conference, said: “Right now in an emergency situation where up-to-date local information is more important than ever, Facebook’s putting corporate profits ahead of people’s safety, ahead of supporting quality local journalism … This is not the time for that”.

Wait, a major global corporation that has been labelled as actually literally evil by both progressives and conservatives in recent years is putting its own profits and self-interest ahead of the priorities and values of politicians and pundits?

Sir, surely thou art in jest.

Is this government only now figuring out that major global corporations exist to extract profits; that whatever social corporate responsibility roles they may choose to enact, they aren’t a public service? Is Trudeau shocked — shocked, I say! — to just this very moment discover that Meta isn’t actually some combination of the Red Cross and Reuters?

I mean … welcome to the adult world, I guess, and please leave your copy of Adbusters near the coat check at the door.

But if Meta is as evil as all that, why did so few politicos or pundits anticipate that the company would follow through on its explicit threat to block news if C-18 were passed? This is like watching an Allied general who says: “I think these Nazi fellows are the baddies!” and then gets flustered when the guys with skulls on their caps pull out their guns and start shooting in the midst of afternoon trench tea. “Well, I never. That’s hardly sporting!” This is some Black Adder comedy, friends, and we may be on the side of the angels, but our angels also happen to be a little slow in the head.

Oh, but surely Meta wouldn’t block news to put their own self interest “ahead of people’s safety”, hmmmm?

With advance apologies, but is our antipathy toward Meta so intense that we’re going to straight-face pretend that AM radio, FM radio, emergency text alerts and broadcasts, municipal and provincial emergency websites, formal and informal social media networks and chat groups, and local news broadcasts with websites that can be accessed directly through web browsers all just ceased to exist, simultaneously, the very moment that CBC stopped being able to post news links to Instagram?

If Facebook is actually putting lives in danger, that’s an admission of impotence and incompetence from our entire communications infrastructure, including government, private and public media. It is an incredible and embarrassing self-own.

June 26, 2023

America can’t build anything these days and “it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault”

Filed under: Books, Bureaucracy, Government, Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism by Paul Sabin. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

Today, pundits across the political spectrum bemoan America’s inability to build.

Across the country, NIMBYs and status-quo defenders exploit procedural rules to block new development, giving us a world where it takes longer to get approval for a single new building in San Francisco than it did to build the entire Empire State Building, where so-called “environmental review” is weaponized to block even obviously green initiatives like solar panels, and where new public works projects are completed years late and billions over budget — or, like California’s incredible shrinking high-speed rail, may never be completed at all.

Inevitably, such a complex set of dysfunctions must have an equally complex set of causes. It took us decades to get into this mess, and just as there’s no one simple fix, there’s no one simple inflection point in our history on which we can place all the blame.

But what if there was? What if there was, in fact, a single person we could blame for this entire state of affairs, a patsy from the past at whom we could all point our censorious fingers and shout, “It’s that guy’s fault!”

There is such a person, suggests history professor Paul Sabin in his new book Public Citizens: The Attack on Big Government and the Remaking of American Liberalism. And he isn’t isn’t a mustache-twirling villain — he’s a liberal intellectual. If you know him for anything, it’s probably for being the reason you know what a hanging chad is.

That’s right: it’s all Ralph Nader’s fault.

How’d he do it? By creating what’s now called the public interest movement: a new form of activism through which citizens force change — or, more often, block change — by suing the government. Though it was begun with the best of intentions and achieved some real good along the way, this political innovation led to the constipated governance we all complain about today.

How did a movement launched by an unassuming 30-year-old lawyer become the dominant form of activism in the country, and completely change the way our government operates?

To find out, we have to go back to a time before Ralph Nader had even hit puberty — the era of the New Deal.

[…]

It is the inherent nature of politics that no reform works forever, because the next generation of political entrepreneurs will inevitably discover new ways to bend the process to their will. Eventually, there will always be another Dick Fosbury revealing a way to work the system that no one saw coming.

Still, I do think some of the blame for the way this all panned out can be laid on Nader’s particular personal idiosyncrasies. His ironclad black-and-white view of the world, combined with his near-pathological aversion to dealmaking and compromise, made him uniquely suited to a form of activism that focused on regulatory and legal action rather than coalition-building and electoral politics. Nader was infamously rigid and inflexible, so it’s no surprise that his movement was too. But a less rules-oriented movement might have created fewer of the bureaucratic barriers that have now become a hindrance to progressive action.

Much like the movement whose story it tells, Public Citizens the book is a worthwhile project that nonetheless suffers from significant flaws. The main problem is that it can’t decide if it’s a historical narrative or a work of political theory. As a work of political theory, it doesn’t take nearly a strong enough stand — I’ve made explicit a lot of claims that are only lightly implied in the book. I think we’re making the same argument, but the book makes its argument with such a delicate touch that it’s hard to be 100% sure.

As a historical narrative, Public Citizens has a much simpler problem: it’s boring. The author writes like an academic (which, to be fair, he is), and the book is quite light on colorful details. The uncreative chapter titles (chapter three is called “Creating Public Interest Firms”) give you a taste of what the writing is like. One particularly egregious issue is how little biographical information is provided about Nader, even though the majority of the book is about him. For someone who apparently subscribes to the Great Man theory of history, the author includes surprisingly little information about the Great Men themselves. Any interesting biographical fact you read in this review — even something as basic as the fact that Nader never married—is almost certainly something I found through other sources.

Paradoxically, this book manages to be simultaneously boring and too concise. It’s over in less than 200 generously-spaced pages, and I frequently had to look stuff up on the internet to get a full understanding of what was going on. I get the sense that the author is trying to give this book mass appeal, but come on: anyone who’s willing to read a nerdy book like this is willing to read an additional hundred pages or so. Besides, Robert Caro and Ron Chernow have proven that people will read thousand-page tomes if the story is compelling and the details are juicy.

Basically, my critique of Public Citizens is like that old Catskills joke about the restaurant where the food is terrible — and the portions are too small.

June 6, 2023

Australia’s “teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023”

Filed under: Australia, Government, Health, Law — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Christopher Snowdon on Australia’s determination to stamp out vaping … even at the cost of vastly increasing the number of tobacco smokers:

More bad news from the supposed world leader in tobacco control. Official figures show that teen smoking rates rose sixfold between 2018 and 2023, from 2% to 12.8%.

It’s been over a decade since Australia introduced plain packaging, a policy that the Southern hemisphere’s wrongest man, Simon Chapman, likened to a vaccine for lung cancer. Australia has had the highest cigarette taxes in the world for ages, the sale of nicotine e-cigarettes has always been illegal, and all they have to show for it is an insanely big black market for both tobacco and e-cigarettes, more children smoking and a whole bunch of people using unregulated vapes. The wowsers just can’t stop winning, can they?

Naturally, this has led to much soul searching among the tobacco control elite who are having to reassess their assumptions in the face of this overwhelming evidence of policy failure.

I’m joking, of course. They are doubling down again.

If you spoke to someone from the reality-based community, they would tell you that children find it easier to access a product when the market is in the hands of illicit traders because illicit traders don’t care who they sell to. They might also point out that the Australian government has gone out of its way to portray vaping as being at least as bad as smoking. School children in Australia are taught that vaping causes brain damage. Public health agencies produce websites that purport to tell people the facts about vaping but actually tell them lies and misleading half-truths.

February 13, 2023

Appliance futility by design

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Cancon, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Tal Bachman recounts a miserable — but increasingly common — experience with modern “energy efficient” home appliances:

The LG 5.8 cubic foot Capacity Top Load Washer sat in the laundry room, brand new. Maybe it was my imagination, but it looked insouciant.

Dad said it was the latest and greatest in laundering technology. Supposedly, some sort of internal sensor system (having something to do with a computer) fine-tuned water levels depending on clothing weight. Or something. I can’t remember exactly what he — or was it the moving guy? — said.

I did notice the washing machine had several preset wash cycles — Allergiene, Sanitary, Bright Whites, Towels, Heavy Duty, Bedding, and more. You could select them with a shiny, space-age-looking chrome dial. (I would later discover the machine had other fancy features with names like TurboWash™ 360, ENERGY STAR® Qualified, Smart Diagnosis™, and ThinQ™ Technology [Wi-Fi Enabled]).

[…]

Well, it was win-win-win, with a minor caveat. The caveat was the washing machine. Turns out that for all its razzle-dazzle features, it didn’t actually clean clothes. Even worse, it took hours to not clean clothes. The “Allergiene” cycle, for example, took almost four hours. Yet when you pulled your clothes out, you could still make out the orange juice or tomato sauce stains. I’d never encountered a more useless washing machine.

“How you feeling about this new washing machine?”, I asked Dad, a few days after the hunkering down began.
“Great!”, said Dad.

Okay, I thought. That’s not unusual. Music — as opposed to the mundane or practical — occupies most of Dad’s awareness, and always has. Besides, most of his clothes are black, and he probably hasn’t noticed it’s not removing the ketchup stains. Maybe he will in a few weeks.

And maybe in the meantime, I thought, I could figure out a way to reprogram the machine for cycles which actually washed. And were faster.

But no. That turned out to be way too much to hope for. The machine allowed no independent control over water volume, cycle time, or water temperatures. It only allowed selection of a preset computerized cycle — none of which got your clothes clean.

[…]

Yet more irritating was the reason it skimped on water and power: it was trying to stop global warming. Oops — I mean “climate change”. It was “environmentally friendly”. Except it wasn’t, because you usually had to run at least two cycles to get your clothes clean. That’s right: you had to use the same amount of water in the end anyway, and double the electricity.

And so — not for the first time — I had stumbled upon yet another example of technological “progress” which exacerbated the very (pseudo) problem it purported to solve. The new useless LG “Save the World!” piece of garbage was the home equivalent of Hollywood stars taking private jets to a carbon reduction conference in Switzerland.

[…]

The US Department of Energy, I discovered, had begun imposing energy efficiency regulations in the early 1990s. A decade later, they made the regulations even stricter (see here also). Then, as the years passed, they made them even stricter. And then stricter. And then stricter. All the while, the feds offered appliance manufacturers huge tax incentives — i.e., huge cash rewards — to accelerate their phase out of functional washing machines.

Government succeeded. Today, minus the loophole-exploiting Speed-King (which the feds will probably crush soon), you cannot find a new washing machine — front- or top-loading — which washes clothes anywhere near as well as its predecessors. The rationale for this — saving the world from global warming — doesn’t even rise to the level of ludicrous. Just for starters, as I type this, we’re enduring one of the coldest winters ever recorded. New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Observatory just recorded a wind chill calculation of minus 109 degrees Farenheit, an all-time record for the United States (and approaching midway between the average temperatures of Jupiter and Mars). Temperatures are thirty degrees Farenheit colder than average in many places. Why would anyone want to bring temperatures down even further? And at the cost of destroying washing machine functionality? And what loon could actually believe home washing machines change the climate?

In any case, thanks to an essentially totalitarian government run by bought-and-paid-for liars, control freaks, and imbeciles, we have gone technologically backward — certainly in the appliance domain, but in others — for no good reason at all. (Regulations have also downgraded dishwashers, toilets, showers, and other appliances, but we can discuss those another time)

Back in 2019, Sarah Hoyt expressed her frustrations with “modern” “energy-efficient” appliances which matched our experiences exactly.

January 8, 2023

QotD: Unintended consequences, fuel economy division

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Business, Economics, Government, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It’s a claim that you encounter a lot — an insult really — that people are buying bigger and bigger trucks to compensate for … something. Here’s one particularly cringeworthy example, because the person making it doesn’t seem to realize the go-kart he’s praising doesn’t meet US emissions standards.

    whenever americans say that they *need* a massive pickup truck that gets 12mpg just show them the Subaru Sambar

    utility vs. ego pic.twitter.com/NqexDbQcok
    — sam (@sam_d_1995) May 11, 2022

In response, a lot of people will defend their big truck purchase by saying they need a larger vehicle for their family, their business, or just because they like it. And to an extent, market forces are partly responsible for the increase in truck sizes, particularly when it comes to features like crew cabs. But it turns out that even a lot of people who like the big trucks don’t know the full story of how their trucks got so big.

The rest of the story is something the folks at Freakanomics might enjoy because it is a classic tale of unintended consequences. In brief, Obama-era fuel regulations incentivized automakers to build bigger trucks.

One particular goal of the Obama Administration was to increase fuel efficiency through the typical political process: telling someone else to do it. To that end, the DOT and the EPA handed down a series of standards that nearly doubled the miles-per-gallon requirements for cars and light trucks.

The administration praised their own new standards as “groundbreaking”. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood predicted that the program would “result in vehicles that use less gas, travel farther, and provide more efficiency for consumers than ever before”.

The intent was to put pressure on automakers and force them to work out the engineering to meet the tough new standards. Their blindspot was failing to recognize that by placing the regulations solely on cars and small trucks, they had created a much simpler solution.

The new platform-based standards set fuel economy targets based on wheelbase and tread width, that is, how far apart the wheels are. If your vehicle is longer and wider, the fuel-economy targets shrinks. In the words of Dan Edmunds of Edmunds.com, “There was kind of an incentive to maybe stretch the wheelbase a couple of inches and set the tires maybe an inch [farther] apart, because you get a bigger platform and slightly smaller target.”

The regulations meant to get better mileage out of vehicles also made it easier for larger vehicles to meet fuel-efficiency standards. In what should have been an unsurprising move, when faced with the choice between reengineering their vehicles or simply going bigger, automakers chose to go bigger.

AndToddSaid, “The Real Reason Why Are Trucks Getting Bigger”, Todd’s Mischief blog, 2022-05-13.

September 15, 2022

The promise of grand “green” plans versus the reality when the plans are implemented

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Elizabeth Nickson on the contrast between how things like the “Green New Deal” are represented by their proponents and the media and what their actual real-world outcomes are like:

“Forest fire” by Ervins Strauhmanis is licensed under CC BY 2.0 .

Ever wonder what happens to a region once it is “preserved”? Right now, all through the US and Canada, governments are taking giant bites of land, and locking them down under the guidance of the UN’s Agenda 2030, which means a full 30% of the land and waters will be “saved”. If anyone notices, the local media preens and praises itself. Aren’t we all so wonderful and enlightened and caring, the PR says, and the newspapers copy it line-for-line.

No, it’s terrible. It is possibly the very worst thing ever. Set-aside land degrades. There aren’t enough bureaucrats in the world to take care of it. Besides out in the forest or up on the ranges is decidedly not where a civil servant wants to be. As a result none of them know what they have done. It’s a loop, politicians, stupid women and beta males, civil servants engaged in a masturbatory celebration of their goodness and triumph over commerce. From hipster neighborhoods all over North America a song of self-praise rises like smoke into the air.

Except now, right now, I sit in a smoke haze courtesy of the set aside forests in Washington State which are burning. Look, this is simple to think through. In the early 90’s Clinton ratified the spotted owl preservation plan and hundreds of millions of acres of forest were left to themselves, no cutting, no grazing, no firewood collection, no thinning, no fire breaks, no removal of dead trees, especially not beetle-killed trees. In fact, no touch.

What happens when a formerly industrial forest is left to itself? A thousand tiny trees start to grow right up against each other. They grow like carrots that haven’t been thinned. They grow so thick they can’t get light. They draw all the water from the ground, they end up like tinder. Around them brush grows — it too cannot get light or much water so it too is desiccated. It grows up the trees, trying to get at the water in the trees, and acts as a fire ladder

Boom.

Massive canopy fires, which, since they decommissioned the roads into the forest, are very very difficult to either brake or put out.

On every single environmental metric, in every single system, these people destroy the land. What they do is exactly the opposite of what they claim. They take massive amounts of tax money to “save” land and then they destroy the resource. And the towns in the resource area. And the families, and the tax base.

I could go through every environmental goal, and tear it apart. None of them use science that is provable. It can’t be duplicated, its assumptions are wrong, its statistics fiddled. Tens of thousands of papers are used to create these policies, written by the environment movement through its NGOs, funded by rich morons from old families, most of whose ancestors created environmental devastation themselves. I can refute the math and assumptions of EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEM given a maximum of four hours and one phone call. No one challenges these studies, and these abominations then become law. Law that destroys the water and land.

September 14, 2022

Whisky – Scotland’s Water of Life

Filed under: Britain, Business, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 13 Sep 2022

(more…)

June 28, 2022

If your gas can sucks – and it probably does – thank the EPA

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Environment, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The editors at FEE dug out an old classic article from Jeffrey A. Tucker that still holds up ten years later:

The gas gauge broke. There was no smartphone app to tell me how much was left, so I ran out. I had to call the local gas station to give me enough to get on my way. The gruff but lovable attendant arrived in his truck and started to pour gas in my car’s tank. And pour. And pour.

“Hmmm, I just hate how slow these gas cans are these days,” he grumbled. “There’s no vent on them.”

That sound of frustration in this guy’s voice was strangely familiar, the grumble that comes when something that used to work but doesn’t work anymore, for some odd reason we can’t identify.

I’m pretty alert to such problems these days. Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice.

It’s like the barbarian invasions that wrecked Rome, taking away the gains we’ve made in bettering our lives. It’s the bureaucrats’ way of reminding market producers and consumers who is in charge.

Surely, the gas can is protected. It’s just a can, for goodness sake. Yet he was right. This one doesn’t have a vent. Who would make a can without a vent unless it was done under duress? After all, everyone knows to vent anything that pours. Otherwise, it doesn’t pour right and is likely to spill.

It took one quick search. The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009 … it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents”. It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do.

And don’t tell me about spillage. It is far more likely to spill when the gas is gurgling out in various uneven ways, when one spout has to both pour and suck in air. That’s when the lawn mower tank becomes suddenly full without warning, when you are shifting the can this way and that just to get the stuff out.

June 20, 2022

Criminal justice reform

Filed under: Law, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Time Well Spent, an interview with Charles Fain Lehman that considers the divergence between “what everyone knows” (based on how or if the media reports on an issue) and reality in the criminal justice system:

“Tombstone Courthouse State Historic Park” by August Rode is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I want to really dive into your work at City Journal and elsewhere because you’ve produced some of the most informative and sensible material on crime and crime policy I’ve found online, but before that I’m wondering: where does your interest in crime reporting come from, and what inspires you to keep going in the wake of what seems like a pro-crime movement capturing our newsrooms, elite colleges, and preeminent government institutions? You were the first person to support my interest in converting to Judaism as a black dude (as I mentioned in our dms), and so I have to ask also if Jewish culture centralizes the importance of issues of public safety in some way? Let’s get into it.

In some senses, my interest in crime is just a product of my natural contrarianism — I am rarely satisfied with the popular explanation. When I first started out as a reporter (at the Washington Free Beacon), I focused on domestic policy broadly, which I still do to some extent. I have a fluency with numbers, and so my first intuition was to dig into publicly available data. What I regularly found was that data about the criminal justice system simply did not align with the account of reality pushed by the criminal justice reform movement. Books like The New Jim Crow and documentaries like Thirteen give the impression that most people are in prison for marijuana possession on trumped up mandatory minima, all at the behest of the private prison-industrial complex. In reality, the majority of offenders are in prison for murder, marijuana possession is barely an asterisk in prison populations, mandatory minima explain little of the growth in prison populations, and few prisoners are held in private prisons at all. So I began to develop the sense that perhaps the story popular with people, even conservatives, my age was not precisely up to snuff.

The other issue that I think started me down the road to my “tough on crime” stances today was learning about death penalty abolitionism. I wrote a long essay (unfortunately never published) about the death of Clayton Lockett, who was executed in Oklahoma with a drug called midazolam, which lead to a fairly horrible death. What became apparent to me in researching the piece is that Oklahoma only used midazolam because anti-death-penalty activists had lobbied pharmaceutical firms to stop selling more reliable drugs, namely pentobarbital and thiopental, to states, forcing them to switch to less reliable methods. This sort of unintended consequence is actually a common theme across abolitionist activism. For example, in 2019 the Supreme Court blocked the execution of Vernon Madison, a 68-year-old man whose lawyers argued that dementia rendered him incompetent for execution. But of course, Madison only developed dementia because he’d been awaiting execution for literal decades, since he murdered a police officer in 1985.

These may seem like fairly specific issues, but I think they can allow us to identify a common theme with the progressive current in criminal justice reform, namely a belief that “justice” is primarily a concern of the accused — protecting his rights, defending him against the state, etc. Values like due process are, of course, important. But our discourse obfuscates entirely the basic fact that most criminals have committed heinous acts, and that the first responsibility of justice is to redress those harms through punishment. I am motivated, in other words, by a basic belief that justice matters, and that many reformers, in their zeal for fairness or equity or whatever, actively undermine the pursuit thereof.

I don’t think this is consciously a Jewish attitude, which is to say I don’t think I came to this sentiment because I was taught at some point that this is what Jews believed. That said, I tend to think the view that one of the ways that Judaism is distinguished from Christianity is the primacy of justice in the former, compared to the primacy of mercy in the latter. To the Christian, everyone is a sinner, and so the differences between me and the death row prisoner are ontologically trivial. (A view like this I think motivates someone like the Atlantic‘s Liz Bruenig, whom I credit as one of the few honest death penalty opponents, even as I disagree with her.) Judaism, by contrast, is fundamentally a religion of law: God says that these things ought to be done, and to live well is to do them. Of course, Judaism thinks a great deal about the balance of justice and mercy — the Talmud blunts the Torah‘s death penalties, for example. But Judaism always proceeds from the view that there are laws which should be respected, and that violating those laws requires consequences. So in that regard, I suspect that my views are inflected by Judaism. And indeed, coming around to those views I think helped me to think more about Judaism, too.

June 2, 2022

“Like many problems in American history, recycling began as a moral panic”

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jon Miltimore recounts the seminal event that kicked off the recycling pseudo-religion in North America:

The frenzy began in the spring of 1987 when a massive barge carrying more than 3,000 tons of garbage — the Mobro 4000 — was turned away from a North Carolina port because rumor had it the barge was carrying toxic waste. (It wasn’t.)

“Thus began one of the biggest garbage sagas in modern history,” Vice News reported in a feature published a quarter-century later, “a picaresque journey of a small boat overflowing with stuff no one wanted, a flotilla of waste, a trashier version of the Flying Dutchman, that ghost ship doomed to never make port.”

The Mobro was simply seeking a landfill to dump the garbage, but everywhere the barge went it was turned away. After North Carolina, the captain tried Louisiana. Nope. Then the Mobro tried Belize, then Mexico, then the Bahamas. No dice.

“The Mobro ended up spending six months at sea trying to find a place that would take its trash,” Kite & Key Media notes.

America became obsessed with the story. In 1987 there was no Netflix, smartphones, or Twitter, so apparently everyone just decided to watch this barge carrying tons of trash for entertainment. The Mobro became, in the words of Vice, “the most watched load of garbage in the memory of man.”

The Mobro also became perhaps the most consequential load of garbage in history.

“The Mobro had two big and related effects,” Kite & Key Media explains. “First, the media reporting around it convinced Americans that we were running out of landfill space to dispose of our trash. Second, it convinced them the solution was recycling.”

Neither claim, however, was true.

The idea that the US was running out of landfill space is a myth. The urban legend likely stems from the consolidation of landfills in the 1980s, which saw many waste depots retired because they were small and inefficient, not because of a national shortage. In fact, researchers estimate that if you take just the land the US uses for grazing in the Great Plains region, and use one-tenth of one percent of it, you’d have enough space for America’s garbage for the next thousand years. (This is not to say that regional problems do not exist, Slate points out.

The widespread imposition of recycling mandates across North America was probably an inevitable reaction to the voyage of the Mobro. For many people, this was the end of the story, as things that were previously just buried in landfill sites would now be safely and efficiently put back into the economy as re-used, re-purposed, or actual recycled products. Win-win, right?

Sadly, the economic case for recycling many items is weak to non-existant. The demand for recycled materials was lower than predicted and often only maintained through subsidies and hidden incentives that couldn’t last forever. Once the incentives went away, so did much of the created demand. Worse, the way a lot of the stream of recyclable materials was handled was by shipping it off to China or certain developing nations — in effect, paying them to take the problem off the hands of western governments. This resulted in even more problems:

Americans who’ve spent the last few decades recycling might think their hands are clean. Alas, they are not. As the Sierra Club noted in 2019, for decades Americans’ recycling bins have held “a dirty secret”.

“Half the plastic and much of the paper you put into it did not go to your local recycling center. Instead, it was stuffed onto giant container ships and sold to China,” journalist Edward Humes wrote. “There, the dirty bales of mixed paper and plastic were processed under the laxest of environmental controls. Much of it was simply dumped, washing down rivers to feed the crisis of ocean plastic pollution.”

It’s almost too hard to believe. We paid China to take our recycled trash. China used some and dumped the rest. All that washing, rinsing, and packaging of recyclables Americans were doing for decades — and much of it was simply being thrown into the water instead of into the ground.

The gig was up in 2017 when China announced they were done taking the world’s garbage through its oddly-named program, Operation National Sword. This made recycling much more expensive, which is why hundreds of cities began to scrap and scale back operations.

May 30, 2022

Technocratic meddling in developing countries at the local level

Filed under: Africa, Books, Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

One of the readers of Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten has contributed a review of James Ferguson’s The Anti-Politics Machine. The reviewer looked at a few development economics stories that illustrate some of the more common problems western technocrats encounter when they provide their “expert advice” to people in developing countries. This is one of perhaps a dozen or so anonymous reviews that Scott publishes every year with the readers voting for the best review and the names of the contributors withheld until after the voting is finished:

    But even if the project was in some sense a “failure” as an agricultural development project, it is indisputable that many of its “side effects” had a powerful and far-reaching impact on the Thaba-Tseka region. […] Indeed, it may be that in a place like Mashai, the most visible of all the project’s effects was the indirect one of increased Government military presence in the region

As the program continued to unfold, the development officials became more and more disillusioned — not with their own choices, but with the people of Thaba-Tseka, who they perceived as petty, apathetic, and outright self-destructive. A project meant to provide firewood failed because locals kept breaking into the woodlots and uprooting the saplings. An experiment in pony-breeding fell apart when “unknown parties” drove the entire herd of ponies off of cliffs to their deaths. Why, Ferguson’s official contacts bemoaned, weren’t the people of Thaba-Tseka committed to their own “development”?

Who could possibly be opposed to trees and horses? Perhaps, the practitioners theorized, the people of Thaba-Tseka were just lazy. Perhaps they “didn’t want to be better”. Perhaps they weren’t in their right mind or had made a mistake. Perhaps poverty makes a person do strange things.

Or, as Ferguson points out, perhaps their anger had something to do with the fact that the best plots of land in the village had been forcibly confiscated to make room for wood and pony lots, without any sort of compensation. The central government was all too happy to help find land for the projects, which they took from political enemies and put in the control of party elites, especially when it could use a legitimate anti-poverty program as cover. In Ferguson’s words, the development project was functioning as an “anti-politics machine” the government could use to pretend political power moves were just “objective” solutions to technical problems.

A local student’s term paper captured the general discontent:

    In spite of the superb aim of helping the people to become self-reliant, the first thing the project did was to take their very good arable land. When the people protested about their fields being taken, the project promised them employment. […] It employed them for two months, found them unfit for the work, and dismissed them. Without their fields and without employment they may turn up to be very self-reliant. It is rather hard to know.

Two things stand out to me from this story. First, the “development discourse” lens served to focus the practitioners’ attention on a handful of technical variables (quantity of wood, quality of pony), and kept them from thinking about any repercussions they hadn’t thought to measure.

This is a serious problem, because “negative effects on things that aren’t your primary outcome” are pretty common in the development literature. High-paying medical NGOs can pull talent away from government jobs. Foreign aid can worsen ongoing conflicts. Unconditional cash transfers can hurt neighbors who didn’t receive the cash. And the literature we have is implicitly conditioned on “only examining the variables academics have thought to look at” — surely our tools have rendered other effects completely invisible!

Second, the project organizers somewhat naively ignored the political goals of the government they’d partnered with, and therefore the extent to which these goals were shaping the project.

Lesotho’s recent political history had been tumultuous. The Basotho Nationalist Party (BNP), having gained power upon independence in 1965, refused to give up power after losing the 1970 elections to the Basotho Congress Party (BCP). Blaming the election results on “communists”, BNP Prime Minister Leabua Jonathan declared a state of emergency and began a campaign of terror, raiding the homes of opposition figures and funding paramilitary groups to intimidate, arrest, and potentially kill anyone who spoke up against BNP rule.

This had significant effects in Thaba-Tseka, where “villages […] were sharply divided over politics, but it was not a thing which was discussed openly” due to a fully justified fear of violence. The BNP, correctly sensing the presence of a substantial underground opposition, placed “development committees” in each village, which served primarily as local wings of the national party. These committees spied on potential supporters of the now-outlawed BCP and had deep connections to paramilitary “police” units.

When the Thaba-Tseka Development Project started, its international backers partnered directly with the BNP leadership, reasoning that sustainable development and public goods provision could only happen through a government whose role they primarily viewed as bureaucratic. As a result, nearly every decision had to make its way through the village development committees, who used the project to pursue their own goals: jobs and project funds found their way primarily to BNP supporters, while the “necessary costs of development” always seemed to be paid by opposition figures.

The funding coalition ended up paying for a number of projects that reinforced BNP power, from establishing a new “district capital” (which conveniently also served as a military base) to constructing new and better roads linking Thaba-Tseka to the district and national capitals (primarily helping the central government tax and police an opposition stronghold). Anything that could be remotely linked to “economic development” became part of the project as funders and practitioners failed to ask whether government power might have alternate, more concerning effects.

As we saw earlier, the population being “served” saw this much more clearly than the “servants”, and started to rebel against a project whose “help” seemed to be aimed more at consolidating BNP control than meeting their own needs. When they ultimately resorted to killing ponies and uprooting trees, project officials infatuated with “development” were left with “no idea why people would do such a thing”, completely oblivious to the real and lasting harm their “purely technical decisions” had inflicted.

May 12, 2022

Too many cannabis retailers? “… a scrappy band of politicians is coming together to save main street from the excesses of the free market”

Filed under: Business, Cancon, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Steve Lafleur points out that the temporary surplus of cannabis stores will inevitably self-correct, as most retail situations tend to do on their own without needing the “helpful” hand of government to intervene:

Lately there has been a moral panic brewing in Toronto about the number of marijuana stores in Toronto. Take this New York Times article, for example, which captures the mood with the quotes from various Torontonians. Or this BlogTO piece. And here is a link to a story about two city councilors (including my own) pushing for a moratorium on new pot shops.

At least on its face, the panic hasn’t been about the availability of cannabis products or any kind of (unsupported) claims about pot shops attracting crime. Rather, the concern is that there is simply an unsustainable number of shops that may be cannibalizing other retail opportunities. So a scrappy band of politicians is coming together to save main street from the excesses of the free market.

What could possibly go wrong?

The boom in pot shops is real. Legal marijuana retailing is a new phenomenon, and there has been a gold rush in the sector. This was first evident in financial markets during the 2018-19 weed stock boom (which went bust) as investors sought to capitalize on the rollout of legal marijuana sales in Canada. There are now nearly 2,000 pot shops in Ontario, and it’s not hard to find two on the same block. People aren’t wrong to point out that there has been a rapid buildout of marijuana retailers. Hence the push by City Council and now the Ontario Liberal Party, to restrict clustering of pot shops.

To be sure, new trends can push out old trends. And this can be frustrating. For instance, one insidious trend recently replaced two of my two favourite hole-in-the-wall restaurants: poke bowls. The trendy Hawaiian rice bowls have taken cities by storm. Businesses, understandably, want to capitalize on the trend. If people want it, businesses will sell it.

Trends can create dislocations. No one knows in advance how many poke restaurants — or pot shops — the market will bear, where they should locate, or what their operating hours should be. But through a process of trial and error, retailers and consumers will figure this out. And if it is just a flash in the pan trend, many will fail.

But that’s okay. That’s just the creative destruction of the market at work. It’s not always pretty, but it’s how we get new products and services. It’s a process. Sometimes the market rewards annoying things. But trying any effort to plan these things in a way that avoids over-saturation of short-lived trendy businesses would be rife with unintended consequences.

May 11, 2022

City governments that can’t even set a budget want to spend, spend, spend to fix global problems

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Economics, Government, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s one of my standard quips that the more government tries to do, the less well it does everything, but Chris Bray‘s city government shows that I’m being far too Pollyanna-ish:

We’ve built political systems that are astoundingly disconnected; they go where they go, and you can’t turn them, or even try to communicate with them. I just spent weeks trying to get basic information about the operation of the criminal justice system in Los Angeles County, where I live — a problem I started writing about here. Just as I was getting really frustrated that I couldn’t get anyone in county government to tell me anything about anything, I saw an interview with Sheriff Alex Villanueva, who says that he’s never met our district attorney, and has only managed to speak to him on the phone once. Then a staff member in the office of our county supervisor finally responded to my repeated questions about local criminal justice statistics with a quick message letting me know that, as Supervisor Barger’s criminal justice staff assistant, she doesn’t have local criminal justice statistics. So, no, you’re probably not going to communicate with your government; it doesn’t even communicate with itself. The sheriff has never met the DA. That’s the world we’re living in.

I live in a tiny suburban city, a little over three square miles. As I’ve written before, the city is a relentless shambles, constantly fumbling its simplest tasks while holding city council meetings to offer bold pronouncements on the city’s direct role in managing the climate of the planet. We went the better part of the last fiscal year without a budget, because the fifth finance director in two years screwed up the budget proposal so badly that the council couldn’t vote on the worthless thing.

Cities are supposed to regularly adopt an updated general plan that makes educated guesses about business and residential growth, so they can prepare for change around questions like do we have enough fire stations for the population we expect to have in five years? Our current general plan was adopted in 1998; the city is now in its sixth year of a fumbling effort to write a new plan, with no sign that it’s moving toward success. Meanwhile, our small-town city council is focused on getting electric patrol cars for the police department — to control the climate of the planet — and banning the sale of tobacco products, to take the fight to Big Tobacco. (Three square miles.)

I can’t get my city government to fix a bunch of basic and obvious problems, in a city where I pass members of my city council in the supermarket. I send out email messages to them, but nothing comes back from them in response. They go where they feel like going, endlessly pursuing lawn sign politics in a city government that struggles to complete budgets and basic planning documents; currently they’re signaling that their next interest is in developing a local mandate for residential greywater systems, and they won’t be talked out of it in favor of completing their endlessly incomplete basic tasks.

Now: Put your hands on the levers to stop the madness of the United States of America sending tens of billions of dollars to Ukraine. Right?

May 4, 2022

Good intentions to rectify problems caused by earlier good intentions in Charleston, South Carolina

Filed under: Economics, Government, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Everyone seems to agree that affordable housing is a major need across North America … it certainly is in the Toronto area! In South Carolina, local politicians are doing what they can to make legal changes to encourage more affordable residences to come to market … even when the problem is at least partly caused by earlier attempts to encourage more affordable housing to come to market:

“A converted carriage house, Tradd Street, Charleston, SC” by Spencer Means is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The City of Charleston is considering new legislation that would deregulate accessory dwelling units in hopes of increasing the supply of affordable housing in the city. Also known as carriage houses or mother-in-law suites, accessory dwelling units are small structures that are built in the backyards of homes, and they can be a great source of affordable housing for those in need.

The initiative, which was proposed by Councilmember Ross Appel two weeks ago, would remove red tape that is currently presenting a significant barrier for building this kind of housing. The ironic part is that the regulation which is primarily to blame for stopping the creation of these units was passed specifically to make these units more accessible.

“The city is looking at taking away a rule that requires these buildings to be affordable for 30 years,” WCSC reports, “which, Appel says, has been an obstacle for developers and homeowners.”

“We don’t want people to be artificially limited in terms of what they can charge,” Appel said. “The affordability requirement was a good-intended measure, but actually, that’s been currently in effect for the past year and a half, and we haven’t had a single accessory dwelling unit permitted since that time.”

Put simply, the affordability requirement backfired big time. Its goal was to make new accessory dwelling units more affordable, but by restricting the price people could charge it actually made them so unprofitable that people just stopped building them altogether. For all practical purposes, new accessory dwelling units might as well have been banned.

The implications are not hard to tease out. With no new accessory dwelling units to live in, people have been forced to bid up other kinds of housing, which has no doubt contributed to soaring housing prices. This is why Appel is eager to repeal this rule. He knows that building more supply is the key to bringing prices down, and he knows that regulations like this have been getting in the way of that process.

There’s a maxim in economics that this story highlights: the solution to high prices is high prices. The reasoning goes as follows. When a good like housing becomes scarce, prices naturally rise. But as prices rise, producers see an opportunity for profit and begin expanding the supply. Then, as additional supply comes to market, prices begin to fall.

March 14, 2022

QotD: Crime and (lenient) punishment

Filed under: Britain, History, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

A few years ago, an eminent British criminologist said, or admitted, that criminology was a century-old conspiracy to deny that punishment had any effect whatever on criminal behavior.

And certainly, no intellectual ever earned kudos from his peers by arguing that punishment was necessary, let alone that current punishments were too lenient. In general, the more lenient he was in theory, and the more willing to forgive wrongs done to others, the better person he was thought by his peers to be.

In a way, this was understandable. The history of punishment is so sown with sadism and cruelty that it is hardly surprising that decent people don’t want to be associated with it.

Often, horrific punishments were carried out in public, half as deterrence and half as entertainment. Clearly, they failed to result in a law-abiding society, from which it was concluded that what counted in the deterrence of crime was not severity of punishment but the swiftness and certainty of detection.

While the latter are important, however, they are obviously not sufficient. It is not the prospect of detection that causes people to refrain from parking in prohibited places, but that of the fine after detection.

This is so obvious that it would not be worth mentioning, had not so much intellectual effort gone into the denial of the efficacy of punishment as such. Despite this effort, I doubt whether anyone, in his innermost being, has ever really doubted the efficacy of, or necessity for, punishment.

In Britain, leniency has co-existed with a very large prison population. This is not as contradictory as it sounds: for the fact is that something must eventually be done with repeat offenders, who do not take previous leniency as a sign of mercy and an invitation to reform but as a sign of weakness and an invitation to recidivism. Instead of nipping growth in the bud, the British system fertilises the plant.

Theodore Dalrymple, “Our Leniency, and the Necessity of Punishing Crime”, The Iconoclast, 2021-11-29.

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