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Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

cnn.com

41–50 of 119 posts

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#41
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It still lost income. That money could have gone to New York, or another city, or another country. Instead it remains with Amazon.

That's only true if somebody else wasn't going to give them a big deal. Your premise requires a scenario where all cities work together to specifically avoid Amazon getting a deal, rather than any of them competing. All it takes is one city to breach that and start offering incentives, then it all folds. Short of implementing a federal law against it, there is no scenario where cities were not going to compete to lur…

> Short of implementing a federal law against it, there is no scenario where cities were not going to compete to lure Amazon. Fortunately no such federal law exists

i would say that's unfortunate rather than fortunate.

Cities competing for businesses is a net loss to the tax payer. If a business is to build a new HQ or invest, they should do it on the merits of their business needs and general condition applicable to all businesses.

If a particular company gets an unfairly good treatment, then it's very anti-competitive for other businesses. Why should tax payer shoulder any burden for a private business specifically, rather than building general infrastructure that benefits all businesses?

> If I'm Detroit and I want to rebuild my collaped city ... offer up incentives such as tax breaks for businesses

that would be great - if it was a general tax break, rather than a tax break targeted at specific companies that others can't gain access to.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#43
post #5

We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know what it was like just a century ago. I’m always surprised by facts like in this story and similar like https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b... And https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-sm...

Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time. If anything, it seems to lead to a combination of despondency in allies and stubbornness in enemies. I’d advise working on solutions to specific problems, calmly and deliberately.

I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#44
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if the project was given the 5 billion tax dollars handed to Jeff Bezos instead of a measly 4.5 million... The $4.5 million is money New York has to spend out of revenue. Spending it lowers the amount of money New York has. Neither of those is true of $5 billion in tax incentives. Look at the cash flow.

We have Bill Gates I think he is probably one of the best chances we have to make some positive real change here on earth. At least I think he genuinely cares. I am remaining cautiously optimistic that some great human somewhere will solve the worlds problems. That some day someone will produce food not for profit but just to help feed the world. And repeat that same sentiment for anything we sell. I do not know how…

Why a single point of failure?

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#47
post #4

So uh, how edible will these billion oysters be considering the crap they’re filtering out of the river..?

My general understanding about bioremediation is the material has to be removed and put in a landfill.

The "natural" process is that e.g. oysters grab the co2 and bad stuff from the water, die, sink to the bottom and get covered in sediment. That's where major carbon sinks ended up anyway, to be turned into oil/coal/gas over millions of years.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Freaking out doesn’t seem to be helping? A lot of people have been freaking out for a long time. If anything, it seems to lead to a combination of despondency in allies and stubbornness in enemies. I’d advise working on solutions to specific problems, calmly and deliberately.

I think op means we should have zero enemies in fixing our environment. If we were truly all on the same page and freaking out, taking meaningful action would be a lot easier.

Freaking out is the opposite of what we need. I am not worried about the consequences being so severe we cant handle them, there are other quite scarier scenarios. Freaking out gives us the opposite of solutions,just a lot of noise and premature solutions such as focusing on inferior solutions such as solar.

This is the right way to do it, deal with the problems you see and can deal with.

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#49
post #19

In the Netherlands we, as hydraulic engineers, are working on something called 'Building with Nature'. This is a perfect example of that. If you guys like this, check out https://www.ecoshape.org/en/ .

As a part of that there are several projects underway trying to get oysters to return, using artificial reefs:

https://www.platteoester.nl/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Overv...

Re: Cleaning New York's harbor with one billion oysters

#50
post #5

We should all be freaking out about what we’ve done to the earth, but nobody seems to really be able to compare it within historical context. We just dont know what it was like just a century ago. I’m always surprised by facts like in this story and similar like https://www.npr.org/sections/krulwich/2014/02/05/257046530/b... And https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/28/nyregion/new-york-city-sm...

Sometimes I think our only options going forward are a world where all natural habitat has been completely decimated, or an eco-fascist regime enforces pollution (and thus effectively population) control on the whole planet.

I’ve seen that called the Garden Earth.
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