Bird populations declining fast across North America

The actionable suggestions of a carbon tax and land-value tax have been proposed to deal with our largest environmental problems since decades ago and the progress has been agonizingly small. It's not surprising people are frustrated [1].

You can't preserve the atmosphere, oceans [2] and wilderness -- which by their nature are not owned -- within the legal-economic framework of ownership and exchange. Even if something happens to be both profitable and climate-friendly (like electric cars), the benefit to emissions is accidental, and this kind of coincidence does not provide a path to a general solution to the problem, because we cannot simply hope that happy accidents will occur whenever we want them to. It's a textbook tragedy of the commons, but there's no practical way to "de-commonize" and sell shares of ownership in the atmosphere, and anyway exercising control over those shares would just turn into a second government, because practically nobody does anything that doesn't involve the atmosphere.

There are all sorts of interesting innovations that might replace contemporary technologies in a more sustainable future, but since the market price of those technologies does not reflect the environmental benefits they offer, there is no guarantee they will be successful in the present economic system.

I think one misleading historical phenomenon was that around the '70s a bunch of left-wing activists started to raise alarms about running out of various resources: hazards which would fail to materialize. But capitalism is pretty good at managing resources when the availability of those resources follows a smooth price-supply curve, which is true of almost all natural resources which are not byproducts of other resources. However, the same was not true with ozone, it wasn't true with sulfur dioxide, and it won't be true with carbon dioxide either. Even Hayek admitted air pollution was a problem.

[1] These are the wonkish eco-capitalist approaches, which earn the ire of populists because they can sometimes put pressure on people who are sympathetic, or seem to be unfair when contrasting a few anecdotal experiences. But if you are going to talk about "hacker spirit" and "realistic, productive tradeoffs", these are precisely the kind of ideas you asked for, and you are precisely the kind of person who should be advocating for them. Obviously the crunchy crowd wants green jobs or whatever.

[2] The absence of a corresponding tax (cf. carbon, land-value) suggests a new Pigouvian tax: some kind of liquid efflux tax. But this is extraordinarily hard to quantify.

There isn’t an infinite carrying capacity to any planet, nor is it reasonable to have excess of a singular species for it is at the expense of others.

Some may have hurt feelings if you explain that more than 2 kids increases the population, but then “go forth and multiply” is probably not currently sound guidance, given what we now know, vs what we knew, say, 5 thousand years ago. It was arguably bad judgment to completely finish the great grazing herds and the Mastodons but try telling that to a hungry lot of humans.

The more we come to grips with the human as another animal species, one of many on earth, the easier it is to see how our own hubris is the issue everytime.

To the person above who thought 7 billion humans above wasn’t pushing any planetary limits: while no individual human wants to feel like excess, and certainly homicide is never what is being suggested, the fact remains that a wise human race that wishes to have a healthy planet and lots of resources per capita will steer their population over generations to be healthy.

I’m rather convinced that the same way a rabbit population without predators will suffer disease if it blooms too much, that this is what we are starting to encounter as we brush with the limits of our host in terms of our reckless dominance and destruction on the only known home to life so far…

No one wants to hear about limits or rules but hey, reality called…

How would the system I'm describing make inequality and the resulting conflict worse?

> you have to count the communication between the nodes as part of the computation.

But surely the nodes themselves must be the ones to perform the physical computation in the end? If the computing power of distributed systems scales exponentially with the number of nodes, why doesn't the computing power of a supercomputer scale exponentially with its number of cores?

> Every time socialism fails, socialist ideologues say it's because it wasn't true socialism.

Don't be ridiculous. There are plenty of countries with much better safety nets than the U.S. The U.S. government is just especially dysfunctional.

> I am not saying that governments never do beneficial things. I am saying that governments, on net, will do worse than a free market would do.

I guess we just disagree about this.

> in many situations there may simply be no way of achieving an optimal result

If you take "optimal result" to mean "best possible result," then there is, by definition, always a way of achieving an optimal result.

This makes no sense to grow exponentially then. Information channels grow exponentially in a peer-to-peer network but only linearly in a centralised one. You can trivially see this in computer networks. One server with eight clients will have 8 connections. Eight peers will have 64 connections. Adding one more node will make the centralised solution add one more connection. Adding one more node to the peer-to-peer solution adds 17.