Forget Covid, Fukushima is what you should be really worried about

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

We are in accord. I notice you haven't mentioned conservation or paradigm shifts, though you're a proponent of electric autonomous vehicles.

I think there should also be:

1.1 In partnership with transitioning away from fossil fuels, attention must continue to be paid to conservation, efficiency, and shifting the current economic dependence on excessive consumption, which contributes to energy waste as well as pollution and resource depletion.


[oh wow. if we add Universal Basic Income and a smattering of social justice, we've just endorsed the Green New Deal ]

Conservation is good, but what is the purpose it if externalities are built into the price of energy? On the contrary, let people use as much as they want provided they are paying for ALL of the real cost, including the cost of damage done. Ultimately it's better for mankind if power is cheap and abundant.

We need taxes on energy to deal with externalities. Carbon tax is paramount (but how do you set the level? But in any case, emitting carbon shouldn't be FREE). Coal should be banned or taxed according to its real cost.

Green New Deal? In other words, print untold trillions plus mass wealth transfers from the evil rich to finance a state managed dirigist total restructuring of society? Don't we learn from history? This has been tried, with disastrous results. No one serious believes in this nonsense.

Look better to the Nordic model, which is total opposite to this in so many ways.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

Conservation is good, but what is the purpose it if externalities are built into the price of energy? On the contrary, let people use as much as they want provided they are paying for ALL of the real cost, including the cost of damage done. Ultimately it's better for mankind if power is cheap and abundant.

Cheap and abundant energy is good. Using lots of anything without regard to the effect of that use is not. You'll never price in all externalities. Eg roads will never be 100% financed by drivers. Reckless consumption has worsened all the environmental issues we currently face.

Green New Deal? In other words, print untold trillions plus mass wealth transfers from the evil rich to finance a state managed dirigist total restructuring of society? Don't we learn from history? This has been tried, with disastrous results. No one serious believes in this nonsense.

Look better to the Nordic model, which is total opposite to this in so many ways.

Seriously?

I think the Nordic countries would look at the goals of the Green New Deal and check most of the boxes. "Done that, got that. Yes to that. Working on this. Done, done, almost done." Or they would point to the fact that they don't have several of the American issues (or to the same extent) that the GND is supposed to address. Eg as per one of your old comments, they don't have the same magnitude of disparities between the working classes and the elite. They already have the income supports, education, health care, etc. And those countries aren't as divided on climate change and other environmental concerns.

If you have sticker shock on the GND, it's because of the price of catching up all at once. Which will never happen. We both know the GND will never be implemented as currently written. Gilead ("The Handmaid's Tale") seems more likely than the GND.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

[1]Conservation is good, but what is the purpose it if externalities are built into the price of energy? ...
[2]... Don't we learn from history? ...

[1] The underlying rationale for carbon pricing is naively appealing in its simplicity. I support carbon Green-House Gas/Pollution pricing initiatives (Pigovian taxes), as one tactic, in a broader strategy towards environmental sustainability.
However, carbon is not the only environmental & sustainability challenge we face.
An effective, equitable, and universal carbon tax is, most probably, a socio-political impossibility.
Contrary to libertarian doctrine, the free market is not the immutable panacea to every question.

I submit the following for consideration:

“Why carbon pricing is not sufficient to mitigate climate change—and how “sustainability transition policy” can help”
➥ https://www.pnas.org/content/117/16/8664

“Why We Need a Carbon Tax, And Why It Won’t Be Enough”
➥ https://e360.yale.edu/features/why_w..._won_be_enough

“Hot Air Won't Fly: The New Climate Consensus That Carbon Pricing Isn't Cutting It”
➥ https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...42435118305683

[2] I’d offer the following quotes:

"We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity." ~ Stephen Hawking

"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone." ~ G. W. F. Hegel

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by GordMay

[1] The underlying rationale for carbon pricing is naively appealing in its simplicity. I support carbon Green-House Gas/Pollution pricing initiatives (Pigovian taxes), as one tactic, in a broader strategy towards environmental sustainability.
However, carbon is not the only environmental & sustainability challenge we face.
An effective, equitable, and universal carbon tax is, most probably, a socio-political impossibility.
Contrary to libertarian doctrine, the free market is not the immutable panacea to every question.

I submit the following for consideration:

“Why carbon pricing is not sufficient to mitigate climate change—and how “sustainability transition policy” can help”
➥ https://www.pnas.org/content/117/16/8664

“Why We Need a Carbon Tax, And Why It Won’t Be Enough”
➥ https://e360.yale.edu/features/why_w..._won_be_enough

“Hot Air Won't Fly: The New Climate Consensus That Carbon Pricing Isn't Cutting It”
➥ https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...42435118305683

[2] I’d offer the following quotes:

"We spend a great deal of time studying history, which, let's face it, is mostly the history of stupidity." ~ Stephen Hawking

"Rulers, Statesmen, Nations, are wont to be emphatically commended to the teaching which experience offers in history. But what experience and history teach is this - that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. Each period is involved in such peculiar circumstances, exhibits a condition of things so strictly idiosyncratic, that its conduct must be regulated by considerations connected with itself, and itself alone." ~ G. W. F. Hegel

Therefore, let's just do the same moronic things we did before, which ended in catastrophe? Because it's not worth trying to figure out how and why it went wrong?

I don't think so.

I'll offer a counter-quote:

"Insanity is*doing the same thing*over and over again and*expecting different results."

Mis attributed (apparently) to Albert Einstein, but no less true.

[GordMay]

Dockhead asked:

... what is the purpose [of] it [conservation] if externalities are built into the price of energy?

Which I tried to answer (in part).
I don't recall anyone suggesting that we "just do the same moronic things we did before, which ended in catastrophe? Because it's not worth trying to figure out how and why it went wrong"
The quotations (mine & yours) were (mine, just for) fun.

[dannc]

Originally Posted by Island Time O25

...

His answer was pretty simple. He did mention Taiwan, etc. saying that all we needed to do is to have 100% of the population wear masks for 20 days and to just quietly bury those who had severe co-morbidities and were susceptible to C19, without fuss and political grandstanding. ...

I have have seen very few people wearing masks. The vast, vast majority of people I have seen in public have been wearing masks.

Now, maybe if we were wearing N95 or surgical masks, that might make a difference.

I have shown the numbers in other virus discussions, but the US is a country full of fat people. Asian countries are not obese. Obese people are likely to have underlying health issues which makes them vulnerable to the virus. But there is more. Apparently, fat helps the virus infect the body, the more fat one has, the more virus you are going to get.

Being obese is a double whammy in regards to the virus. If a country or geographic area has few fat people the virus will have less of an affect. If a place is full of fat people, well, look out.

In the US, minority groups have the highest rate of obesity, unless their DNA is from Asia, and those groups are dying at a higher rate from the virus.

Later,
Dan

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

Cheap and abundant energy is good. Using lots of anything without regard to the effect of that use is not. You'll never price in all externalities. Eg roads will never be 100% financed by drivers. Reckless consumption has worsened all the environmental issues we currently face. Seriously?

I don't entirely disagree, but don't forget (a) poor people; and (b) the necessity of economic growth in order to create the wealth which will lift people out of poverty. It's easy for rich people to talk about "reckless consumption". Most people in the world don't consume enough, and need to be allowed to consume more.

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

I think the Nordic countries would look at the goals of the Green New Deal and check most of the boxes. "Done that, got that. Yes to that. Working on this. Done, done, almost done." . . .

The goals of policy are the most trivial, the easiest part of policy. Who doesn't want the end of poverty, education and health care for all, rainbows and unicorns? Any high school sophomore can come up with the list of goals. The hard, and the important part of policy is HOW TO ACHIEVE THEM. It's totally characteristic of polarized, tribalized politics, when people form hostile camps and stop listening to each other, that the hard nuts and bolts of how to achieve policy goals start to fade in importance, and people start congratulating themselves on having such and such goals, assuming their own moral superiority and the evilness of the enemy camp, and they lose any plot about how to actually get anything done. The GND is the ABSOLUTELY paradigmatic of this degradation of our political system, when this manifesto, this trash, which could have been written by high school sophmores, can be treated as serious policy, as if WANTING all that stuff were all there is to it.

The Nordic countries can say "done, done, working on it, almost there" because they have a political culture which grips hard problems and looks at them from different points of view, where people of different persuasions listen to each other with respect, so that politics can be put aside and the hard, hard work of policymaking can get done. They are more socialist than the Soviet Union and more capitalist than Reagan ever dreamed about -- at the very same time. Few Americans, and certainly no one on the Left who admires them, know that Finland has a FLAT TAX on income (the federal part), that the Swedish income tax is the LEAST progressive in the world among progressive tax systems, that corporate income tax rates in the Nordic countries are about HALF of the rates in the U.S. (even after the Trump reforms), that in all the Nordic countries inheritance tax is -- ZERO; wealth taxes are -- ZERO. They are much more capitalist than we are, with entrepreneurship greatly admired in society, with the Stockholm region (for example) having a greater number of startups per annum than Silicon Valley. They do not see any contradiction between taking care of everyone, AND creating that wealth through a healthy private sector which is given a maximum degree of economic freedom, in fact, you can't have the one without the other -- how are you going to pay for it, right? And they figured that out by working hard on it, and listening to each other, something we are patently incapable of doing. I say again -- the more polarized we are, the more ignorant we make ourselves, in fact you might even say -- political polarization = ignorance. I have a close friend who is a half-billionaire who BURNED his American passport and emigrated to -- Sweden. His taxes are LESS, when you consider whole life cycle of taxes including inheritance etc., but more than that -- there is no class envy or hatred in Sweden, in fact there are no classes at all -- and he simply feels more comfortable there.

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

. . . If you have sticker shock on the GND, it's because of the price of catching up all at once. . . .

Originally Posted by Lake-Effect

Which will never happen. We both know the GND will never be implemented as currently written. Gilead ("The Handmaid's Tale") seems more likely than the GND.

That's more or less exactly what Lenin said in "Chto Delat'?". And we know how "catching up all at once" through magical thinking and ruthless "bold" action, worked out in 1917 and through the 1920's.

And "Gilead seems more likely than the GND" is also more or less what the intellegentsia of St. Petersburg (later, Petrograd) thought about Lenin, right up until November 1917. The very same nice, progressive, poetry-reading people, by the way, that Lenin hung or had shot through the back of the head, a few years later, by the hundreds of thousands ("Kill more teachers", read one telegram of Lenin to Trotsky during the Civil War). Don't indulge this crap. It leads to -- this. There's nothing "cute" about it.

[Lake-Effect]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

The goals of policy are the most trivial, the easiest part of policy. Who doesn't want the end of poverty, education and health care for all, rainbows and unicorns?

A small majority of at least one superpower I can name. Maybe two.

But anyway, carry on...

[The Nordic countries] are much more capitalist than we are, with entrepreneurship greatly admired in society, with the Stockholm region (for example) having a greater number of startups per annum than Silicon Valley. They do not see any contradiction between taking care of everyone, AND creating that wealth through a healthy private sector.

Me neither.

And "Gilead seems more likely than the GND" is also more or less what the intellegentsia of St. Petersburg (later, Petrograd) thought about Lenin, right up until November 1917. ... Don't indulge this crap. It leads to -- this. There's nothing "cute" about it.

As I indicated above, no I don't believe the US currently wants "the end of poverty, education and health care for all". The GND is nothing more than goal setting, really - the earnestly progressive wing of the nominally progressive US party putting down in writing what's on their Christmas list. But no-one believes in Santa, not even Bernie or OAC.

Equating this with the Marxism and the Russian Communist Revolution... ... clearly I have stepped on a corn and you're crazy with the pain. Sorry. Stepping off of it.

[GordMay]

Originally Posted by dannc

... Obese people are likely to have underlying health issues which makes them vulnerable to the virus. But there is more. Apparently, fat helps the virus infect the body, the more fat one has, the more virus you are going to get...

I've certainly read about the likelihood of increased severity, of Covid-19, in the obese, but not the increased likelihood of catching it.
Can you provide sources?

[UFO]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

I don't entirely disagree, but don't forget (a) poor people; and (b) the necessity of economic growth in order to create the wealth which will lift people out of poverty. It's easy for rich people to talk about "reckless consumption". Most people in the world don't consume enough, and need to be allowed to consume more.



The goals of policy are the most trivial, the easiest part of policy. Who doesn't want the end of poverty, education and health care for all, rainbows and unicorns? Any high school sophomore can come up with the list of goals. The hard, and the important part of policy is HOW TO ACHIEVE THEM. It's totally characteristic of polarized, tribalized politics, when people form hostile camps and stop listening to each other, that the hard nuts and bolts of how to achieve policy goals start to fade in importance, and people start congratulating themselves on having such and such goals, assuming their own moral superiority and the evilness of the enemy camp, and they lose any plot about how to actually get anything done. The GND is the ABSOLUTELY paradigmatic of this degradation of our political system, when this manifesto, this trash, which could have been written by high school sophmores, can be treated as serious policy, as if WANTING all that stuff were all there is to it.

The Nordic countries can say "done, done, working on it, almost there" because they have a political culture which grips hard problems and looks at them from different points of view, where people of different persuasions listen to each other with respect, so that politics can be put aside and the hard, hard work of policymaking can get done. They are more socialist than the Soviet Union and more capitalist than Reagan ever dreamed about -- at the very same time. Few Americans, and certainly no one on the Left who admires them, know that Finland has a FLAT TAX on income (the federal part), that the Swedish income tax is the LEAST progressive in the world among progressive tax systems, that corporate income tax rates in the Nordic countries are about HALF of the rates in the U.S. (even after the Trump reforms), that in all the Nordic countries inheritance tax is -- ZERO; wealth taxes are -- ZERO. They are much more capitalist than we are, with entrepreneurship greatly admired in society, with the Stockholm region (for example) having a greater number of startups per annum than Silicon Valley. They do not see any contradiction between taking care of everyone, AND creating that wealth through a healthy private sector which is given a maximum degree of economic freedom, in fact, you can't have the one without the other -- how are you going to pay for it, right? And they figured that out by working hard on it, and listening to each other, something we are patently incapable of doing. I say again -- the more polarized we are, the more ignorant we make ourselves, in fact you might even say -- political polarization = ignorance. I have a close friend who is a half-billionaire who BURNED his American passport and emigrated to -- Sweden. His taxes are LESS, when you consider whole life cycle of taxes including inheritance etc., but more than that -- there is no class envy or hatred in Sweden, in fact there are no classes at all -- and he simply feels more comfortable there.



That's more or less exactly what Lenin said in "Chto Delat'?". And we know how "catching up all at once" through magical thinking and ruthless "bold" action, worked out in 1917 and through the 1920's.

And "Gilead seems more likely than the GND" is also more or less what the intellegentsia of St. Petersburg (later, Petrograd) thought about Lenin, right up until November 1917. The very same nice, progressive, poetry-reading people, by the way, that Lenin hung or had shot through the back of the head, a few years later, by the hundreds of thousands ("Kill more teachers", read one telegram of Lenin to Trotsky during the Civil War). Don't indulge this crap. It leads to -- this. There's nothing "cute" about it.

Not knowing much about Nordic countries, is the distribution of wealth then different from the rest of the Western World, where 0.1% hold most of the wealth?

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by UFO

Not knowing much about Nordic countries, is the distribution of wealth then different from the rest of the Western World, where 0.1% hold most of the wealth?

The distribution of wealth is not radically different in the Nordic countries, than in the rest of the Western world. Sweden, with a population of only 10 million, nevertheless ranks among the top 20 countries for number of ultra wealthy people, more than Spain with 5x the population, and about the same as Brazil with more than 20x the population. Sweden has more billionaires than South Korea or Japan. See: https://econlife.com/2016/04/swedish...-distribution/


"We could ask why Sweden’s inequality has remained a secret. Credit Suisse hypothesizes (2014 Wealth report) that the, “Strong social security programs, good public pensions, free higher education or generous student loans, unemployment and health insurance can greatly reduce the need for personal financial assets. Public housing programs can do the same for real assets. This is one explanation for the high level of wealth inequality we identify in Denmark, Norway and Sweden: the top groups continue to accumulate for business and investment purposes, while the middle and lower classes have no pressing need for personal saving.”"As a result, Sweden’s unequal wealth distribution appears to be generating little dissatisfaction."

What the article doesn't mention is that strong social solidarity "reduces the need for personal financial assets" not only among the poor, but among the rich as well. A striking difference in Nordic societies, compared to, say, the UK, is that rich people, especially entrepreneurs, are far less driven by money. The reason may be is that they don't really worry about falling down the class ladder where their children will lose access to the best education and the best social circles, because everyone has equal access to education. Neighborhoods aren't all that different from each other (excluding some of the immigrant areas); everyone has a country place. There is much less fear-driven money-grubbing because there is less fear altogether.



Speaking of which, another thing which will surprise Bernie Sanders types about Sweden is that the Swedes have had school choice since 1992 -- that is, any child can go to any public or private school at the expense of the state, a project which is considered an extreme right wing idea in the U.S. furiously opposed by the teachers' unions, because it gives parents a choice of taking children out of the state system and fosters competition from private schools.


But this has the effect of, again, eliminating fear. You don't have to earn the last krona because your kids' access to the schools they want to go to does not depend on your income, or neighborhood.

[GordMay]

Swedes Willing to Live to Avoid Paying Taxes
Sweden’s repealing of inheritance and gift taxes had a huge effect on Swedish society. According to a study published in The Journal of Socio-Economics, people actually appeared to postpone dying, in cases where there was a tax incentive for them to do so.
Inheritance tax was repealed for surviving spouses from January 1st, 2004, and scrapped altogether exactly one year later, and administrative data showed that people with tax incentives to die the day following the repeal, rather than the day before, were significantly more likely to do so, than those with no such incentive.
“Timing of death and the repeal of the Swedish inheritance tax” ~ by M. Eliasona & H.Ohlsson
➥ https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...802?via%3Dihub

[UFO]

Originally Posted by Dockhead

The distribution of wealth is not radically different in the Nordic countries, than in the rest of the Western world. Sweden, with a population of only 10 million, nevertheless ranks among the top 20 countries for number of ultra wealthy people, more than Spain with 5x the population, and about the same as Brazil with more than 20x the population. Sweden has more billionaires than South Korea or Japan. See: https://econlife.com/2016/04/swedish...-distribution/


"We could ask why Sweden’s inequality has remained a secret. Credit Suisse hypothesizes (2014 Wealth report) that the, “Strong social security programs, good public pensions, free higher education or generous student loans, unemployment and health insurance can greatly reduce the need for personal financial assets. Public housing programs can do the same for real assets. This is one explanation for the high level of wealth inequality we identify in Denmark, Norway and Sweden: the top groups continue to accumulate for business and investment purposes, while the middle and lower classes have no pressing need for personal saving.”"As a result, Sweden’s unequal wealth distribution appears to be generating little dissatisfaction."

What the article doesn't mention is that strong social solidarity "reduces the need for personal financial assets" not only among the poor, but among the rich as well. A striking difference in Nordic societies, compared to, say, the UK, is that rich people, especially entrepreneurs, are far less driven by money. The reason may be is that they don't really worry about falling down the class ladder where their children will lose access to the best education and the best social circles, because everyone has equal access to education. Neighborhoods aren't all that different from each other (excluding some of the immigrant areas); everyone has a country place. There is much less fear-driven money-grubbing because there is less fear altogether.



Speaking of which, another thing which will surprise Bernie Sanders types about Sweden is that the Swedes have had school choice since 1992 -- that is, any child can go to any public or private school at the expense of the state, a project which is considered an extreme right wing idea in the U.S. furiously opposed by the teachers' unions, because it gives parents a choice of taking children out of the state system and fosters competition from private schools.


But this has the effect of, again, eliminating fear. You don't have to earn the last krona because your kids' access to the schools they want to go to does not depend on your income, or neighborhood.

Sounds like an idyllic system in comparison to the ultra capitalist greed we have rampant in many areas of the Western world.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by UFO

Sounds like an idyllic system in comparison to the ultra capitalist greed we have rampant in many areas of the Western world.

Well, what's funny is that they are actually "ultra-capitalist" themselves. Just without all the greed.

These countries have their own problems (what country doesn't?). But I have been astonished at the social problems which I took for granted as being insolvable and universal, which simply don't exist here. Even more astonishing is that the solutions found don't really belong to any ideological movement which exists in other countries. It's a big mix of pragmatic solutions of different kinds, which actually work.

And I've lived in a whole lot of different countries. Including the Soviet Union.

[Dockhead]

Originally Posted by GordMay

Swedes Willing to Live to Avoid Paying Taxes
Sweden’s repealing of inheritance and gift taxes had a huge effect on Swedish society. According to a study published in The Journal of Socio-Economics, people actually appeared to postpone dying, in cases where there was a tax incentive for them to do so.
Inheritance tax was repealed for surviving spouses from January 1st, 2004, and scrapped altogether exactly one year later, and administrative data showed that people with tax incentives to die the day following the repeal, rather than the day before, were significantly more likely to do so, than those with no such incentive.
“Timing of death and the repeal of the Swedish inheritance tax” ~ by M. Eliasona & H.Ohlsson
➥ https://www.sciencedirect.com/scienc...802?via%3Dihub

Inheritance taxes are cruel -- taxing wealth all over again, that was already taxed when it was earned. And perverse: penalizing living modestly and leaving what you earned to your children and grandchildren, as opposed to just consuming it yourself.