BraveSirZaphod

Well, this is Brown we’re talking about. The students probably got too high and just accepted whatever deal was thrown at them without thinking about it.

Okay, so imagine you just ban plastic soda bottles. Now plastic bottles cannot be used in any circumstances, no matter how genuinely warranted, even if a user is willing to pay all costs to ensure its environmental impacts are offset. Also, all soda is now significantly more expensive, so “the poors” still have less access to it.

And by definition the amount you would have to tax to achieve this has to be so much that it destabilizes the market.

Potentially, yes. The entire point is that these artificial low prices are only possible because the negative externalities are being inflicted on other people in the form of pollution. By actually factoring this impact into the cost of the good, its true cost emerges and the market will settle into whatever the equilibrium is. If the only thing enabling mass access to cheap soda is a ton of pollution, then you either accept mass pollution or you lose the mass access to cheap soda. There’s not really any way around that fundamental trade-off.

The spot where you charge it really doesn’t matter much except to the accountants; it’ll always just be factored into the price of the product. There’s no real difference between the company increasing the price by ten cents or a ten cent tax being levied at the register.

I really wouldn’t call it an indulgence tax though. There are plenty of uses for single-use plastics that aren’t sodas or indulgences.

You frame this as a ‘there is no solution i can see that’s worth it so why bother’ and this tells me you are not interested in a solution.

That is the exact opposite of what I’m saying. I’m saying that an externality tax to capture the actual cost of single-use plastics would do a lot to reduce their use without distorting markets and causing unintended side effects while likely being more effective than blanket bans.

Regulation is fine, but people need to realize that there are always downstream effects that often result in a less efficient version of the same outcome.

For instance, say you just pass a blanket ban on plastic soda bottles and mandate glass. Production costs immediately go up (not to mention transportation and logistics), and those costs are naturally passed onto the consumer, so the prices of all sodas go up.

Has this really improved things? There are real questions about the environment impact of glass, since they’re significantly heavier and thus require more carbon emissions to transport. Glass is better if it’s reused, but there are situations where it’s unlikely to be reused. Soda is now more expensive, just as it would have been under a plastic tax (and because lower income people tend to drink more soda, you’ve hit them extra hard relatively), but now you’ve also eliminated the ability for plastic bottles to be used in situations where they truly are called for; for instance, you probably don’t want to be selling glass bottles at a music festival, so an organizer will need to instead purchase extra plastic cups instead, resulting in the consumption of extra glass and plastic.

I know people have this idea that the only factor that goes into a price is how greedy the CEO happens to feel that morning, but that’s simply not the case. Prices are set by market circumstances, not greed. It’s not like NYC landlords suddenly got less greedy in 2020; the market radically changed. They’re already charging the most that the market will bear. In terms of regulation, it’s almost always more effective to go after the market incentives - that is, price signals - instead of just taking a hammer to the thing you don’t like and hoping it doesn’t have any bad effects.

That’s what’s always a bit maddening about these conversations. It’s not like companies are just shredding plastic into the atmosphere because they’re cartoon villains who love evil.

They’re making cheap plastic shit because we love cheap plastic shit. They’re making this stuff in response to explicit consumer prioritization of low costs above all other factors. If consumers broadly demanded soda in glass bottles and expressed a willingness to pay the extra cost that this entails, every soda company would use glass.

I’m not saying that you individually should be blamed for all environmental pollution, but we have to realize that companies are responding to the exact same incentives that we do. They’re obviously operating at a much larger scale, but they use cheap plastic shit for the exact same reason we do. If you’re looking for policy solutions, a great option would be to introduce an externality tax on plastic so that this environmental cost is actually factored into the production and end price and can fund remediate the damage, similar to carbon taxes. Of course though, the moment you say the word ‘tax’ people’s brains completely shut off, so this is probably a non-starter.

This isn’t even true though. The vast majority will agree that a little bit of inflation is good, deflation is very bad, and hyperinflation is essentially cataclysmic.

That’s the infuriating thing about this whole mess that feels impossible to solve.

Rhetoric like this directly radicalizes Israelis and pushes them towards violent escalation, which then radicalizes Palestinians into violence as well, further inspiring more Israeli violence, and on and on the cycle goes.

And then anyone who advocates for any amount of moderation will simultaneously get called a terrorist sympathizer for not wanting to nuke Gaza and a genocide accomplice for not wanting to forcibly remove or kill every Israeli.

I certainly hope you’re not an American and have never been to the United States, because I’ve got some unfortunate news about who that land properly belongs to.

I’d love to see your thoughts if you’d been in the area to experience Hamas’ “peace” on October 7th.

Austerity does not tend to foster economic growth

I mean, that’s precisely the point. Growth isn’t really the priority right now, because that also tends to increase inflation. The loose aim of Milei’s plan is to return things to an actually accurate economic baseline by cutting extremely distortionary government spending and subsidies and allowing the peso to fall to its true actual value, and only then pivoting to focus on real and sustainable growth that’s actually backed by legitimate increases in efficiency and production rather than government money printers and IMF loans that only make the problem worse.

I won’t pretend that this approach doesn’t have some harsh consequences on people that will be disproportionately born by the poor or that there aren’t any other options, but there is a legitimate economic basis for the idea. Whether it’s worth it or is fair and just is another question.

I can imagine a non-zero amount of people would consent to a deep-fake porn video of themselves having sex with some generic hot woman, just as one example.

That’s proven to be both unpopular and often having unintended side effects.

The biggest issue involves the logistics on the ground, and in places with extremely high food insecurity, there tends to be little to no legitimate government, and so getting anything done involves dealing with local gangs and warlords. It doesn’t matter how much money you have if every shipment you send will just be stolen at gunpoint and sold to fund the local thug’s next golden toilet. This is not a problem that can really be solved by throwing money at it.

Just for the sake of completeness, the actual history here is that Ancient Greek has the latter Phi Φ which, during the classical Greek era of around the 5th century BC, was pronounced as a particularly strong /p/ sound that produced a noticeable puff of air, as opposed to the letter Pi π which was a weaker /p/ sound. It’s the exact same story with Greek Theta θ vs Greek Tau Τ and Greek Chi Χ vs Greek Kappa Κ. This distinction is called ‘aspiration’.

The Romans obviously had quite a lot of contact with the Greeks and took a lot of Greek words into Latin. However, the issues is that Latin did not have these aspirated sounds natively, and so they didn’t have an simple way to transliterate those letters into the Latin alphabet. The clever solution they came up with was to add an <h> after the aspirated sounds to represent that characteristic puff of air. So, they could easily transcribe the distinction between πι and φι as “pi” and “phi”. Thus begins a long tradition of transcribing these Greek letters as ‘Ph’, ‘Th’ and ‘Ch’.

The awkward issue is that languages tend to change over time, and by the 4th century AD or so, the pronunciation of all the aspirated consonants had dramatically shifted, with Phi Φ becoming /f/, Theta θ becoming the English <th> sound, and Chi Χ becoming something like the <ch> of German or Scottish “Loch”. This was generally noticed by the rest of Europe, and other European languages tended to adopt these new pronunciations to the extent that their languages allowed, though some languages also changed the spelling (see French ‘phonétique’ vs Spanish ‘fonético’). Plenty of languages kept the original Latin transcription spellings though, and thus we have the kinda goofy situation of ‘ph’ being a regular spelling of the /f/ sound in English.

So, tl;dr: Ph was just a clever transcription of a unique Greek sound that basically was a P plus an H. Then the Greeks started pronouncing it as an F, and so did everyone else, but we kept the original spelling.

It’s just amusing that these people know that they can’t openly say “I think all Israelis should be either removed or murdered”, so they’ll just heavily imply it without having the balls to actually own up to their position.

Speaking as someone who would not at all be upset to see a rocket happen to fall on Netanyahu and Ben Gvir.

You’re the one who seems to be incapable of actually stating a concrete desire that isn’t the violent removal or murder of all Israeli citizens, but by all means, tell me how I’m the genocidal one.

Okay, so who are the people responsible? A handful of leaders? Most of the original Zionists have been dead for a long time. Is it literally every single Israeli? What exactly does this freedom and justice look like? I don’t think locking up Netanyahu and Ben Gvir would exactly satisfy the Palestinian cause, so ultimately, you have the situation of millions of Israelis, most of which were born there, who do not want to leave and will only do so by force.

So, what do you want? The forced removal of all Israelis? That’s not an inconsistent position given your general perspective, but if that’s the case, come out and actually say it.

You’ve said a lot of nice abstract things about wanting freedom and justice, and very little actual concrete info about the situation on the ground.

Jews conquered large parts of Palestine (not all of it AFAIK)

This isn’t really true to the historical record, not that it’s significantly relevant to the modern conflict. Contrary to the Biblical Exodus account, from what the archeological and linguistic record seems to show, a unique Jewish culture seems to organically emerge from a particular group of Canaanites who were not otherwise previously distinct from any of their neighbors. There certainly was no mass migration and conquest from Egypt. Over time, the Jews/Israelites developed a distinct cultural identity, possibly with some amount of external influence, and later developed individual minor kingdoms before being subjugated by the Egyptian New Kingdom, the Assyrians (thus the Lost Tribes of Israel), the Babylonians (thus the first Exile and the destruction of the first Temple), the Persians (who returned the previously exiled Jews), Alexander the Great, and lastly the Romans, who destroyed the Second Temple and began the Diaspora.

Again though, none of this should really be seen as being particularly relevant to the modern issue any more than Roman territorial claims are to the modern borders of Italy.

Oh, come on now. And what, exactly, do you want to happen the evil Zionists?

Sure, it’d be nice if there was a cute kumbaya moment, but absent that, if Israelis have no desire to leave, what do you want to happen to them?