> The popular narrative that, unchecked by government, a business will eventually rise to absorb everything is not borne out by practice.
I get your point, but there are exceptions. In particular, utilities come to mind. All locations I've lived except 1 provided exactly one option for high-speed internet. I don't see that changing in most parts of the US any time soon. Ditto for water and electricity, depending on locality. Even temporary monopoly abuse in either of those two sectors can have devastating humanitarian impacts.
Aren't most utilities gov't supported monopolies? I think the logic is that for some utilities it doesn't make economic sense to have 5 companies all providing water to a house (5 water lines underground?).
The gov't gives the utility a monopoly in exchange for full coverage to all customers and pricing oversight.
There are plenty of examples where private companies control water distribution without government assistance or oversight if you look past the USA. We don't need fanciful theoretical speculation to know what happens in practice.
(note: not continuing with this thread because holy fuck hivemind downvotes.)
Airbnb is great if you're out of town for a week to a month or more (for business travel, vacation, etc.). The $ you make more than covers a professional cleaning service for when you get back, which leaves the place cleaner than when you left.
But at that point, what are you offering? (Genuinely curious. Capital? Taking on the risk? Insight/market research?) And is that worth the overhead that goes into your pocket?
Sharing economy type stuff makes complete sense when it's something you share often enough to want first dibs, but not often enough that renting it out from time to time is an inconvenience. But if you're renting it out full time then I'm not sure I understand how the incentives line up. Seems like if they notice you're doing well they could just swoop in and under-cut you next time the contract is up.
Guaranteed demand, parking (there are legal issues where being an individual or first party business owner of vehicles is easier than being a ZipCar). You're leasing cars for ~$500/mo for 36mo each. That gets paid regardless of demand. If your stable gets used enough to bring in >$500/mo in external customer net revenue per car, that would be pretty exceptional. Most likely you'd make $100/car/mo and get a bit of extra professional maintenance for the fleet vs. just owning them and having a dealer service.
What's interesting is if car manufacturers start to develop vehicles specifically for this kind of market. I'd love to have personalization settings (nav, seat, climate, driving controls, etc.) which follow me as a driver across a fleet of identical or related vehicles. You might also have a "valet mode" (some cars do now), "renter mode", and "owner mode", with different performance limits (I can ruin a $1-2k set of tires in 10k miles of spirited driving, but if I ran the right profile on the car, I could make them last 30k miles). Might also make some maintenance/safety things non-overrideable for renters -- you can't start the vehicle if the brakes/tires/fluids/etc. are not good, for insurance and vehicle-damage reasons.
I think the typical fear actually goes the other way -- that infrastructure won't be able to handle increased peak demand, leading to a lot more gridlock/pollution, longer commute times, etc. when more people are driving.
Reducing the need for parking in city's should have a massive net positive impact. In time we should see self driving electric cars on electric highways which can mean unlimited range and vastly reduced pollution. Even if all you do is drive one person to and from public transit that lets a wide swath of family's go one car without public parking fees.
> Especially as the price approaches four digits, "what if this gets stolen?" has to be near the top of most potential buyers' list of concerns and probably chills sales to some degree.
If you're spending that much on a bike then you're cycling regularly (communter and/or every weekend type). You're not going to ride a shitty bike if you're riding that often. Bikes aren't like cars -- a Corolla will get you from point A to point B just as well as a Cadillac, but a doubling in the price point of a bike (esp. 500 to 1000 range!) has a massive impact.
Of course there are people who buy racing bikes and ride them a few times a year. But those people rare enough that it doesn't make sense to spend the money designing and stocking a product just for them. And anyways, the guy on the sales floor is probably going to be the most important factor in their purchasing decision.
> You're not going to ride a shitty bike if you're riding that often.
Yes and no. If you ride that much, you won't be riding a shitty bike. However, it is NOT the case that if you ride that much, riding a "non-shitty" bike means you ride an expensive bike. Bike manufacturers would love for you to think that you need to pay a lot to get a decent bike, but it isn't true. You can easily spend $50 to $300, trick out the components for another $50 to $200, and have a _fantastic_ ride that can beat the pants off of most bikes out in the wild, including bikes that cost thousands. And, the more you ride and the longer you've been riding, the more likely doing this comes easily.
But the people with the skill-set and interest in doing that are going to do so anyways; I don't see how anti-theft tech would convince that type of person to shell out an extra few hundred for a bike. They would just buy something and install it themselves.
I just don't see the market for integrated anti-theft. Seems more like a custom component type of thing.
I'd go further than that -- riding a cheap bike with a heavy U lock makes theft so rare in most places that it's not worth wasting any further time/money on the problem.
>...by which I mean the experiment itself without the "fair" elements
I don't think the author or anyone else disagrees... the article was specifically about science fairs, not science projects generally. It's right in the title. And reiterated in the portion of the text where the author juxtaposes their childhood experience with their child's experience.
> This isn't someone being born with silver spoons in their mouth. This is regulation thoughtlessly applied with no thought about the costs.
It's both (which gets to the heart of what I consider the most compelling arguments for decreased regulation). Whenever there are bureaucratic barriers, knowing the right sorts of people works wonders. You might even say it's a privilege...
You seem confused about the point of plastic bag taxes/bans. The purpose of plastic bag taxes isn't to "price-in" an externality; rather, the purpose is to fundamentally change consumer behavior.
More generally, the language of economics ("pricing-in externalities") doesn't make sense when discussing irreversible damage to the environment:
1. When you can't repair the damage, the idea of "pricing-in" externalities is just confused thinking. (You can't buy a new planet and not all environmental harm can be reversed by spending money. At least for now.)
2. For any consumer behavior that causes irrevesable damage to the environment, the cost is at once too large to quanify and also too small to notice. (Many forms of pollution have highly nonlinear effects on the environment that are often impossible to quantify, especially at a global scale. I have no idea how anyone would go about calculating the "cost" of a lifetimes' use of plastic bags or fossil fuels, for instance, especially when you have to add up the permanent loss of a resource to humanity for the rest of the time it's on the planet.)
OK then, let's say that for every plastic bag someone uses they are charged 1 million dollars.
Do you believe that this would "price in" the cost of a plastic bag? Do you believe that, given a million dollars for every bag used, the government could clean up this supposedly irreversible damage?
I believe it could. Not only that, I believe the price would be much less than 1 million dollars.
Or how about this. Let's say they instead used that money to fix a completely different problem that is also causing permanent damage, and is equal or worse than the damage caused by plastic bags.
There is always a price. There are always trade-offs and opportunity costs.
> Do you believe that, given a million dollars for every bag used, the government could clean up this supposedly irreversible damage?
You're missing the point.
If you charged a million dollars for every bag used then basically no one would use plastic bags. Or at least few enough people that the aggregate environmental impact would be negligable. As it turns out $5 or $10 would probably work as well as $1M.
The whole point is that it's totally impossible to come up with realistic estimates for something like plastic bag waste. So you set the prices high enough to disincentivize their use.
The purpose is the disincentive, not actually putting accurate prices on externalities. Confusing these two things is the source of the confusion in SilasX's original post.
> it's totally impossible to come up with realistic estimates for something like plastic bag waste.
If it is, then it's also totally impossible to show that plastic bags are harming the environment enough to make draconian regulation a net gain.
In other words, the real purpose of the regulation is an arbitrary exercise of power: some people just can't help telling other people what to do, and when those people get to write laws and regulations, this is what you get. "Saving the environment" is just the latest ad hoc justification.
>The purpose of plastic bag taxes isn't to "price-in" an externality;
Maybe, maybe not; I was responding to a poster who was justifying it on that basis.
>More generally, the language of economics ("pricing-in externalities") doesn't make sense when discussing irreversible damage to the environment:
>When you can't repair the damage, the idea of "pricing-in" externalities is just confused thinking. (You can't buy a new planet...
Well, you can repair the damage from plastic bags.
>2. For any consumer behavior that causes irrevesable damage to the environment, the cost is at once too large to quanify
If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory. If the damage is infinitely bad, then it it would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags. But however bad they are, they're not infinitely bad. Such a model would justify arbitrarily high bag fees, not some piddling ten cents with the hope of changing long-term consumer behavior.
>If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory. If the damage is infinitely bad, then it it would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags. But however bad they are, they're not infinitely bad. Such a model would justify arbitrarily high bag fees, not some piddling ten cents with the hope of changing long-term consumer behavior.
Sometimes that's the reality of the situation, there are things that cannot be priced. That's why we don't consider a murder tax an acceptable way to deal with homicide.
We also don't treat murder as being infinitely bad, and we reject policies that would decrease the murder rate because they would cost us in terms of something else we value e.g. privacy and convenience.
It's the same principle -- however bad some harm X is in the abstract (be it death or environmental catastrophe), it doesn't justify arbitrary measures to fight it, be it more cameras tracking your movement or $20/kg taxes on plastic bags, because in every practical sense the actual harm is bounded.
> Well, you can repair the damage from plastic bags.
Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you can, but the costs to the environment involved in doing so are prohibitive. In any case, I don't think it's totally obvious that this is actually possible ATM.
> If your model contains infinities, it's automatically unhelpful; that takes you into Pascal's Wager territory
Yeah, well, reality > model. Unless we colonize space, destroying earth = infinity. So the implication of your statement is that pricing is a bad model for certain types of environmental damage. However...
> would justify draconian measures against even trivial risks of too many plastic bags.
...the realistic impact of most types of irreversible environmental damage has no known bound, but is not infinite.
Difficult-to-bound unknowns also make it impossible to quantify damages a priori at the level of detail necessary for pricing. Again, reality > model, so accurate pricing is a bad mechanism.
I think there are reasonable arguments against plastic bag bans. But trying base policy on an accurate accounting of the cost of long-term or irreversible environmental damage is a fool's errand in many cases.
(Also, note that my point is that in general, pricing environmental externalities is weird. Plastic bags aren't even nearly the best example of this, but are illustrative of the most common solution -- don't price, disincentivize.)
It sounds like you're saying you don't know how bad X is relative to other things, and nobody can make an estimate, but it's definitely not infinity, and the possibility of X favors your preferred policy over others.
That doesn't sound like it justifies any one tradeoff over another, nor tell us how we should decide to.
1. Click on the "World Press Freedom Index" link in the first sentence of the article, then click on the "METHODOLOGY" link in the subheader (black and white bar).
Cheating was rampant at my American high school; teachers were either completely incompetent or were aware of the cheating and didn't care. Penalties were similar to what you describe.
That said, I wasn't in the Pacific Northwest, and my general impression is that people from that region are, on balance, more honest than in the region that I came from. But of course generalizations and grass is always greener and all that.
I get your point, but there are exceptions. In particular, utilities come to mind. All locations I've lived except 1 provided exactly one option for high-speed internet. I don't see that changing in most parts of the US any time soon. Ditto for water and electricity, depending on locality. Even temporary monopoly abuse in either of those two sectors can have devastating humanitarian impacts.