“In a major blow to America's seafood industry…” - says it all about how incredibly messed up our priorities are.
Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
351–360 of 425 posts
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#352Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, in response to equally violent acts by fishing boats.
People's actions do not need to be violent in order for the governments to respond with violence. Disobedience is enough. You know it very well. This is just how it works.
Violence takes many forms, from gentle to deadly.
What the key difference here is, between a democracy and a totalitarian government, is just who decides when violence will be employed.
In democratic states, violence is allowed by specific actors, such as the police, in specific situations, such as when other forms of mediation fail, under specific guidelines.
This means that democracy attempts to replace the mob (anarchy), and the totalitarian (no law, power vested in one), with a more structured form of violence.
Note that absolutely no system will work perfectly, at all. There will be flaws, issues, but from where I sit, most western democracies do a fairly good job of this.
That's because the truth is, violence absolutely will occur, no matter what, no matter the form of government (or lack of) in place. Humanity always has individuals which will prey upon itself, and the only response in such cases is violence of some sort.
So how do you want your violence?
The anarchistic mob? Emotionally run, able to fly out of control, meting out punishment on emotion and adrenaline?
The totalitarian, deciding rule of law on whim, then meting out punishment in any way chosen?
Or the democratic approach, with laws debated, considered, and meted out by democratic choice, in a controlled way?
Again, democracy is not perfect, but it is the best we currently have.
And yes, it is violent at times, for humanity is violent at times.
We always have been, and will be, else we will no longer be human.
You may be thinking, "No! Democracy let thing $x happen to person/group $y. It has failed us!"
The thing is, most democracies attempt to constantly improve upon this.
Take the US, for example. Compare racism in the 50s, to now.
If you think racism, and police brutality connected to it is bad now, your head would spin, and probably explode, if transported to the 50s.
What you really need to consider, is what happens under alternative forms of governement.
Do you believe a totalitarian would do better at the above? Anarchy?
Hardly.
So how do you want your violence?
Pick carefully.
If you pick democracy, as I have, then the next step is to work on improving how that violence is meted out.
Help steer it, to make it as fair, as gentle as possible.
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#353Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tragedy of the Commons is a fallacy. 1. Postulate the Commons 2. Also postulate private interests 3. Let private interests have unfettered access to the Commons 4. Problems! The tragedy is supposedly Commons, but clearly the problem is private interests having unregulated access to the Commons. Tragedy of Private Interests? In any case this seems like more of a climate change issue (again…)
How is it a fallacy? Isn't the whole idea behind it exactly what you said? The tragedy is not the commons itself, it's the tragedy of what happens to the commons. After all, the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is what happens to Romeo and Juliet.
Fallacy in the sense that it is supposed to demonstrate a problem with the Commons while ignoring the context in which it is used. Maybe because privatization is taken as a given, a thing to not even be questioned, thus the Commons has to fit in to the world of private property as we know it today or else be deemed flawed. (Private property as we know it cannot be flawed: it is axiomatic.)
From Wikipedia:
> Faced with evidence of historical and existing commons, Hardin later retracted his original thesis, stating that the title should have been "The Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons".
It is telling that it retains its original name. We teach it speficially as “the problem” with “the commons”.
Why does everyone—including in this thread—think of “the tragedy of the commons” in terms of “the commons” instead of “private property” as we know it? Why is that the knee-jerk response?
Also from Wikipedia:
> Although taken as a hypothetical example by Lloyd, the historical demise of the commons of Britain and Europe resulted not from misuse of long-held rights of usage by the commoners, but from the commons' owners enclosing and appropriating the land, abrogating the commoners' rights.[1]
This theory might be right or wrong. But why is it never even mentioned that enclosure of the Commons happened at some point, and that apparently use of the Commons by commoners might have worked (just might)? Because private property as we know it today is axiomatic. Hence the question is merely about regulating or not regulating the access to the Commons from such private interests; the last part about private interests cannot be questioned.
A third problem/point is that it is just a hypothetical. People just take a thought experiment at face value as something-that-always-happens! But such dynamics do not always come about:
> Elinor Ostrom was awarded the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for demonstrating this concept in her book Governing the Commons, which included examples of how local communities were able to do this without top-down regulations or privatization.[2]
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> Romeo and Juliet
Deaths are tragedies in the sense of bad things that happened. How would you prevent a future double-suicide? Not by naming it after some irrelevancy, like the Tragedy of the Efficacy of Oral Poisoning. You learn from the story and don’t poison yourself just because you think someone that you love has died. (I think that’s what it is about?)
The supposed “tragedy” of the Commons is a recurring thing. Not merely a thing that happened but something that can happen again. So how do you prevent that? By focusing on whatever caused the tragedy and fixing that. Not by focusing on the victim.
[1] https://www.newyorker.com/culture/essay/the-theft-of-the-com...
[2] https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/la...
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#354My current employer was just talking about how the cost of seafood is rising because of things like this. Don't expect your plate of crab or lobster to be cheap these next few years folks. And if it is cheap somehow, stop eating there. They are probably part of the problem.
Yeah the price of seafood is the real problem here, the canary is dead but lets keep digging deeper, things are bound to improve.
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#355Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not just that, practically every petrochemical (plastic, fertilizer, synthetic rubber, etc) is derived from oil and/or natural gas. We need more fossil fuels to make the green tech in the first place (in the form of mines, powering factories, and producing petrochemicals). To convert the entire globe, we actually need to be producing a lot more than we currently are! Sure a day may come when there's enough solar/wind…
This is actually why I'm buying an ICE truck rather than an EV. We need fossil fuels for so much, including fertilizer. It feels irresponsible to buy an electric.
What? This makes no sense. If fossil fuels are important, we should be saving it for where it is needed.
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#356Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, but this is most likely not cause by over-fishing. Snow crab fishing is relatively strictly regulated since a long time, and while there are always many ways this might be side stepped the amount of missing crabs is way to high in a too short amount of time to just because of over fishing AFIK. More likely it is a combination of multiple factors putting strain on the population leading to a collapse event. One m…
Picking on you, sorry, but what do you mean when you say 'climate change'. I don't think you're saying anything, it's like saying 'bad thing'. What caused what exactly. Eg, if day warmer waters mean there is less habitat that the crabs can live in, I get that. Or if the deep, cold ocean temperatures have not changed, then that's not it. Or if the crabs have been poisoned by fertiliser, then say that. I do resent the…
I think it’s pretty clear from context that “climate change” in this case is shorthand for “human-caused warming and carbonization of oceans,” even if that’s not explicit.
“Climate change” is an overly broad term, true, but it’s also very easy to understand what is meant by it in 90% of situations.
If I tell you I got into a car accident “because of bad weather,” you should assume that I don’t mean that it was too hot outside.
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#357Overfishing is a classic problem of "Tragedy of the Commons". The oceans are the commons. For example, nobody is predicting a catastrophic decline in the population of pigs, chickens, and cattle. Fish farming is the future.
Unfortunately, there are numerous problems with fish farming.
For one, predatory farmed fish, such as salmon, are often fed from fish meal made from wild fish, which means there's no net benefit.
Fish are farmed intensively, in much denser populations than found in the wild. In this type of environment, water pollution and animal welfare are serious concerns — disease and parasites such as lice are a big problem. It's not hard to find reports of farmed fish in horrifying condition and conditions.
As a side note, intensive farming of pigs, chickens and cattle is a major source of pollution of inland waterways. This is a direct cause of the dramatic decline of freshwater fish populations in many parts of the world.
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#358Something similar happened to the cod fishing industry in Newfoundland and other parts of eastern Canada 30 years ago. The reason: overfishing, due in large part to technological advances. Here's what happened: Canada and NAFO continued to overestimate the abundance of cod in the Atlantic Ocean and therefore continued to set dangerously high [Total Allowable Catches]. This was in large part due to the widespread prac…
I work in the Alaska fishery and am typing this while sat in one of the largest fish processing facilities in the western hemisphere. I have the spare time because, well, there's no crabs coming in and everything else is mostly out of season. About half of the boats on Discovery belong to the company I work for, the largest in the US. So I'll take the opportunity to share some on-the-ground observations. Overfishing:…
This happened two years ago, do you recon it could be related?
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/07/asia/russia-kamchatka-tox...
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#359Earlier quoted context omitted.
If the world doesn't get over fossil fuel addiction and allowing oil companies to push us to near extinction for their profits, really soon, the worse is yet to come.
Talk to a European about that evil addiction to fossil fuel this winter.
I mean yeah, using gas to heat homes is dumb. Electrically powered heat pumps seem like the way to go.
Re: Alaska snow crab season canceled after disappearance of an estimated 1B crabs
#360Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, how about we shut down large swaths of national economies. That's produced nothing but positive effects for all involved over the last couple of years.
Keep in mind, there are a (relatively) small number of ecomonies and peoples causing the majority of the damage / side effects. The others can continue as they have been. The current model isn't sustainable. Something *must* change. There can be no actual change without change. The point is, the economies in question (i.e., the over-contributors) need to change and all we're talking about is getting back to normal. I…
Something people don't seem to understand is that when it comes to externalities there are economic activities whose benefits exceed the downsides of the negative externality and activities whose negative externality by far exceeds its benefits. The latter makes everyone poorer except the person doing it but that person isn't even getting a reward that is worth the effort, he is just not losing out.
If you internalize a negative externality everyone will get wealthier simply because people only ruin the environment when it is actually worth it. People always say how fossil fuels were necessary for the industrial revolution but that only means that its benefits exceeded its negative externalities and therefore a pigovian tax would actually help it.