> If, say, the NYTimes is promoting scams (they are) they should be fined or worse.
Cue a "free speech" court case that the current SCOTUS would happily let slide for a few mil and a yacht ride. Really hope the incoming US gov can pass some regulation putting a leash on SCOTUS's corrupt behavior.
I was not smart enough to pursue my childhood dream of being an astronomer and seeing stuff like this always reminds me of that - and that folks studying anything off planet are some of the smartest people in history.
The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview. I asked for facts - which HN is generally a fact based environment instead of broad hand wavy fear based statements.
As an aside - thank you for the isolated cases that you sent as evidence which I haven't clearly been following as closely. I know it is a significant problem in the UK but kind of on the other end of the political spectrum.
> The fact that both of you feel that way makes me concerned about your worldview.
Like I've stated, there are an unusual amount of authoritarian sympathizers in this forum - though it's possible they are bots. When I first heard of the forum and signed up, it was noticeable and I almost did not stick around, but ultimately decided it was better to know what is going on around the world and the posts here are far better quality than somewhere like reddit. Nothing to do with my worldview, just an observation from being around here for 10+ years. It's nothing personal against you.
It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again.
No, they are definitely terrified about it happening again. Deepwater Horizon cost BP nearly $70 billion total in direct financial payouts, including $20 billion in fines. $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP. This is an enormous amount of money, even for a large corporation such as BP. BP suspended their dividend because of the spill.
That's a massive amount of money that could have went to paying shareholders, and that's why they don't want it happening again.
Just about every week there’s news of some kind of ecosystem damage by another negligent company that streams into my RSS feed.
Related, but the American gov recently invaded a country to take its oil while simultaneously shutting down funding for green energy projects. Exhausting.
The problem is sometimes the lessoned learned is don’t be responsible.
So no longer own oil tankers and instead each ship is owned by its own LLC so just that piece goes down and the liability gets capped to its insurance contract.
I think you are still on the Deepwater Horizon thing, a judge had this to say about that.
"In September 2014, a US district court judge ruled that BP was primarily responsible for the oil spill because of its gross negligence and reckless conduct."
But my comment was related to parties that break their empire into little bits to avoid responsibility. And yes, the corporate veil can be pierced. No, that happens so rarely that it hardly matters.
I don't condone corporate negligence or violations of environmental protection laws, but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization. We're going to have an impact.
> but some kind of ecosystem damage is an inevitable consequence of humans existing with an advanced industrial civilization
Well in this case the consequence is "we are destroying the conditions of our own survival". Open question is whether an advanced industrial civilisation can survive at all.
Literally, yeah. The carbon footprint of the advanced industrial activity of ants is scary, we are trying to convince them to slow down with their aviation.
"Everything applies to the others, except for the one thing that makes it different". When it is "EXACTLY the same, EXCEPT for", it means it is not, actually, the same.
Humans are obviously unique in that they totally dominate all the effects that could keep their activity under control. At the scale of the whole planet, i.e. at the scale of most species.
> For anyone that has raised animals or spent much time in nature, it’s clear humans are relatively low impact and pretty clean per human.
What the hell does that mean? Are you saying that "humans destroying the conditions of life for most species on Earth" is okay, because humans are clean enough to shower everyday? "Dirty, dirty horses, they never clean their teeth!"
I honestly don't have a clue what the hell you are trying to say. That each species takes as much space as it can? Sure. And the ecosystem being in balance means that they can't get to the point where they destroy it. Humans are unique in the sense that they have reached the point where they can (and are) destroy most species (including themselves).
There were a few mass extinctions in the history of Earth. We are measurably living in one. It's the first one that is caused by a species. So yeah, OBVIOUSLY humans are unique in this.
Yes but we could have a significantly less one though. We're extremely wasteful and plan ahead poorly for minimizing the environmental impact, which becomes a partisan political issue instead of just doing our best to live in a healthy environment.
If you compare our impact per capita and per dollar of GDP it’s much less today than 50 years ago. There’s just more dollars and more capita.
We are getting better at this. Time will tell if we are getting better at it fast enough. Ask someone in 2126.
And no I don’t think we will be dead, but if we do too much damage the world may be severely degraded and they might be quite angry at previous generations for basically leaving them with the bill.
Well I haven't accepted, allowed, or overlooked anything so apparently the definition doesn't apply. And I flagged your comment since it was obviously made in bad faith.
especially if you take 'invaded' as face-value as being in the past. are we talking about Iran, Venezuela, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Panama, Nicaragua, Honduras or Mexico?
(some countries could be mentioned multiple times)
(some people will want to argue if all of these were true military invasions. fine, then let's call some of them CIA coups, soft-power takeovers, planned regime changes etc.)
(tried to contain this list to instances were it was about oil, remove the oil and the list would get a loooot longer)
What’s exhausting is shifting the goal posts. BP should be held up as a great example where the responsibility transferred onto the shareholders.
“Oh, but there are other bad actors doing things” is not a counterpoint. That’s the same as claiming a government can’t work by pointing to a different failed policy every time someone points how how a policy failure was corrected.
> $140 billion if you include total financial cost to BP.
That's more than their current market cap ($127B), and the stock price right now is not that far from where it was just before the spill ($49 now, around $59 just prior to the spill).
I'm just curious how that was accomplished, given that it would not have been a great time for them to be borrowing or issuing new shares, for obvious reasons. Maybe if it was spread out over like 10 years it could be more doable, but still that seems like a lot.
Essentially how most businesses (big and small) handle this situation. Multi pronged approach.
Sold a bunch of assets to raise funds (about 38b apparently), cut the dividend, borrowed the remaining (you'd think after such an event it's 'hard' to raise capital but in reality BP has a great financial record and there's a chance they had prior agreements in place) and then spread cost out over ~10 years.
That fuel paid for people to get to work, it paid for people to get food to them, it paid for ambulances to get to hospitals. It was also the gaskets that let your plumbing and toilet work, the covering on the electrical wires in your home, and the sanitary wrapper over the medical equipment that saved numerous lives today.
Humans may all die, but the planet was here before we were, and will continue to be here long after we're gone. We should be better stewards, sure.
I had an interesting conversation with a geologist working on old superfund mining sites.
He explained that the pollution is awful, but the metals extracted also electrified and connected the US.
He said we can both accept that it was a worthwhile trade, while also paying the bill to remediate the damage now.
We were discussing new lithium mines and he said similar tradeoffs exist today, but we have much more knowledge and technology to mitigate the downside.
BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster. They sold $45B in global assets and subsidiaries (including most of their refinery business and land holding 6 billion barrels of proven reserves) and cut their dividend to fund the damages and fines.
> BP share price was over $100 the month before the disaster
If you checked the share price via Google Finance, it's off by 2x. The share price on April 19, 2010 (a day before the disaster) was $59.48, not >$100. Google Finance is erroneously reporting the price.
Even if it was enormous enough in fines to put them out of business, the industry as it is with all its inherent risks will still exist because that is still legally allowed. Forget a fine; outlaw the behavior that lead to the issue. Incentivize new emergent behavior instead of just hedging.
The behavior that leads to the issue is individual consumers driving cars. Outlawing this would nuke demand for fossil fuels which encourages risky well drilling. But since 99% of Americans drive they tend to get very unhappy about the prospect of banning the vroom vroom. This is a real and challenging political problem. We can't get around it by pretending that corporations drill for fun.
There is no oil drilling off the Santa Barbara coast. There is plenty of oil there, they just care about different things. I agree it would be good to get rid gas cars, but you can't just outlaw them-- for practical and legal reasons. Maybe have the price of every environmental harm added to each gallon and let people adjust their habits accordingly?
I’d take it a step further. Most people don’t drive by choice, but because of the zoning and regulations that create sprawling suburbs meaning almost no one can live without a car. Can’t get to work, can’t get groceries, can’t get the kids to day care without a car.
Edit: want to add the sprawl also makes efficient mass public transportation nearly impossible.
Cars make themselves not-fast by their sheer inefficiency unless huge amounts of taxpayer money is continually poured to the infrastructure. What’s incredible is that cars have been getting even larger, an example of astonishingly perverse incentive structures.
From my experience in the third world with quite poor infrastructure (e.g. unpaved roads, lack of traffic control devices anyone respects etc.), cars and motorcycles are still everywhere.
Some places like Ethiopia have simply switched to EVs by encouraging their import and discouraging import of non-EVs. Now, most vehicles there are EVs.
Yes. Which is exactly the problem. If cars cause traffic jams - never mind their other externalities only some of which are fixed by EVs - then that just means cars are too cheap and their true costs aren't reflected in their price. Cars are a classic tragedy of the commons, everyone in traffic would prefer that there be less traffic so they could get to places faster.
Describe how you think these “true costs” should be imposed. In the third world, infrastructure isn’t generally subsidised. People have to pay for everything. Yet cars, trucks, and motorbikes are still preferred - including EVs.
It is often a huge increase in a family’s quality of life once one of them saves enough to get a motorbike or ebike.
People nowhere pay for the full external and opportunity costs of cars, particularly ICE cars, in the purchase price (or even in fuel price), including carbon emissions, particulate emissions, noise, waste of space, perceived and actual safety, and so on.
Cars are literally an econ 101 textbook example of negative externalities.
Two-wheel vehicles are much more reasonable in all ways, I’m not arguing against them (although two-stroke ICEs are definitely terrible things).
A recent Conversations with Tyler episode with Jared Diamond made this point. Diamond mentions touring a oil drilling facility expecting to be outraged but being shocked at the safety effort on display. His explanation was that the oil companies are terrified of spills.
The most galling/depressing thing to me is that our population is so overwhelming that if even just 1% of us are bad actors, that's still so many that catastrophes like this (environmental and otherwise) become mathematically inevitable.
It isn't so much that 1% can even do this though. What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale? We cannot pull the sufficient levers. We don't have authority. We don't have actual power.
But the real danger is that we have given certain members of our species superhuman abilities to unilaterally make decisions, where these then go on to cause harm on a scale that would never be possible as just 1% of our species operating within the scope of what 1% of our species can reach with their two hands. We've creating living gods essentially. We've even created nonliving gods: pools of capital people are beholden to grow that they themselves do not even own or control, but are enslaved to them nonetheless. Decisions are what is good for the nonliving god: what grows the money pile in the quarterly time frame, not what is good for our species or even what is truly individually good for the people believing themselves to have any control over these pools of capital.
> What can I or you possibly do that can wreak havoc on this scale?
Build a bunch of drones that carry explosives and leave them outside chemical plants, refineries, and nuclear plants across the world and then launch a simultaneous attack on infrastructure.
Budget $1000-$2000 per drone and then whatever your costs of transportation for the road trip are.
I very much doubt it. For consumers it is all about cost. Heating in winter with Natural Gas is 1/3 the price of electricity and much cheaper than Oil.
To get people off of fossil fuels, remove oil subsidizes and tax fossil fuels a lot. Otherwise moving to renewals will take a very long time.
And yes, we can put up solar panels on your house, but that cost $ which people do not have. Solar Panels should be subsidized in an easy manner for people to get funds for installation.
Yes. Not immediately—firstly, because the finite speed of light in a vacuum precludes simultaneity—but eventually, when relieved of rent-seeking intermediaries, we'd be free to invest in sustainable infrastructure.
We are already massively investing into renewable energy... to the tune of about $1trillion since 2020 in the US. In 2024, 95%+ of all new electricity capacity was solar/wind/batteries.
Seems like you believe the current system is not conducive to clean/sustainable infrastructure, but the world I think you want is actually the one we're already in.
Think it's still a mixed bag. There's not broad consensus (in the US at least) that continued investment in renewables is the future. We're still investing heavily in fossil fuels, we've had two military campaigns in the last three years to influence global oil supply and the sitting US President signed an emergency order to bypass restrictions on fossil fuel projects on literally his first day in office. There's plenty of people and policy makers who are fine with the fossil fuel status quo.
Oil subsidies total $4.5 trillion in that same period, and the ratio used to be worse, so it doesn’t take a genius to see why people accuse the energy policy of being biased toward a dangerous status quo.
I didn't say renewable energy—I said "sustainable infrastructure", and I was principally thinking of public transit, but there are countless more dimensions above and beyond energy generation.
Even still, fossil fuel revenues dwarf renewables by ×3-6.
"It’s truly exhausting to know the damage we’ve done to the ecosystem and how many bad actors only concerned with profit are out there preventing it from happening again."
Because most people don't want to know. Cognitive dissonance keeps many people from realizing the inconvenient truth that modern life requires accidents like this. We have stats or projections about how many people earth can support, but none about how many people it can sustainably support. People want their plastic items and cars to be cheap, even if it results in occasional accidents of this scale (not to mention the minor accidents that occur frequently and don't make the news).
You said something interesting: "... modern life requires accidents like this."
This is a completely baseless claim. It is entirely possible to have both a technologically advanced civilization and simultaneously one that doesn't have catastrophic industrial mistakes like this.
Is it? Because at the very least, modern life involves the mass production of plastics, mining of various minerals, and the use of copious amounts of energy. That last one is only kind of solved (as long as everything works and nothing breaks), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that there is any feasible substitute for the first two.
The solution to the first two is reuse. With enough energy, some form of recycling of becomes feasible for pretty much anything. No oil? Just make plastic from atmospheric CO2!
Is it a solution if the masses refuse to trade cheap convenience for more expensive and burdensome products/processes? Theoretically yes, but realistically no.
How would we know such a society is possible? There's zero proof of that to date. Errors and inevitable catastrophes are part of the cost of a highly complex technically advanced society run by humans.
Scale matters. When you have the scale that we do, you will have accidents because of the sheer number and the lack of oversight due to cost pressures. These accidents aren't going anywhere. They have been around since industrial times and will continue to be so. Please tell me how you would ensure 0 accidents - the world would be interested to know since it hasn't been discovered yet. Now please explain who's position is baseless.
Perhaps the costs of an accident should be increased to the point that it makes sense to have the oversight.
It's true, you can't ever ensure 0 accidents. But you can do things to reduce the rate of accidents and try to limit the peripheral impact of the ones that remain.
Interesting to see people are still having issues with and are hating on Siri after this newest update. So far I have not been having problems and it works better for me than before. I've even found a few new use cases that have worked wonderfully, like creating Reminders lists or calendar events based on what's on the screen. I still treat Siri like it's dumb though, so perhaps that's the difference.
> I cannot think that you have a lot of experience with all social classes if you think this.
Yeah I really can't take this share by OP seriously and can't help but wonder if the post is on some level clickbait. I keep my circle pretty diverse and have had a few jobs where I interact with people outside of my norm... I've met some people that truly lack in areas that are clearly identifiers of "intelligence": critical thinking, problem solving, memory, communication and social skills... Intelligence can be defined as a lot and yet I still have met some people who are clearly an idiot - and I don't really consider myself to be super intelligent either. After getting into the workforce, I would maybe describe myself as above average but that's only because of the people I've met bringing down the average to below my level.
The comment makes perfect sense, especially given the current political climate of the US and what Republicans are clearly indicating they want... Not sure what you are on about.
Republicans have campaigned on discrimination, bigotry, sexism, establishing a dictatorship and punishing dissenters for the last 10~ years minimum - definitely longer than that considering the last century. If someone votes for a candidate campaigning on those things the voter is complicit in those things gaining strength. Stop writing off that behavior and hold them accountable for who they are clearly signaling they are.
Cue a "free speech" court case that the current SCOTUS would happily let slide for a few mil and a yacht ride. Really hope the incoming US gov can pass some regulation putting a leash on SCOTUS's corrupt behavior.
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