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EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

washingtonpost.com

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Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#181

Post by estearum »

mothballed wrote: post #180
estearum wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why are you ignoring what I just said? You can go buy land anywhere you want (i.e. where there are no public roads) and your private roads can compete just fine. Anyone has always been free to do this since this nation was created. What's the problem?

Alright, lets imagine what you say. I build a private interstate next to a public interstate. Lets say it costs me $0.20 / mi per honda civic that travels on it, and the public road costs $0.30 / mi per honda civic that travels on it in amortized costs. At the point of use, the user sees my toll of say, $.25 / mi with some profit, and at point of use the user sees $0.00 for the public highway. Who on earth would both…

Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.

It's not the public's job to provide customers for your toll road.

You can build your toll road and have unencumbered competition elsewhere.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#182

Post by mothballed »

estearum wrote: post #181
mothballed wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alright, lets imagine what you say. I build a private interstate next to a public interstate. Lets say it costs me $0.20 / mi per honda civic that travels on it, and the public road costs $0.30 / mi per honda civic that travels on it in amortized costs. At the point of use, the user sees my toll of say, $.25 / mi with some profit, and at point of use the user sees $0.00 for the public highway. Who on earth would both…

Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for. It's not the public's job to provide customers for your toll road. You can build your toll road and have unencumbered competition elsewhere.

>Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for.

No I'm talking about using infrastructure a private entity has paid for as competition.

Would you call it "unencumbered" competition if I started stealing a few bucks from everybody that goes to the gas station, then paid people to take my road with the ill-gotten gains instead of the public interstate, then declared that the government is free to compete unencumbered? Of course you wouldn't, I can't just take money from everyone at the gas pump, but the government can so that their public "toll" is already paid and I can't compete even if my road is cheaper.

The end result is public roads have a mobster-type clamp on the encumbered market. You can't compete with them because they have a monopoly on violence and use it to prepay the toll to game the price at the point of use.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#183

Post by estearum »

mothballed wrote: post #182
estearum wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for. It's not the public's job to provide customers for your toll road. You can build your toll road and have unencumbered competition elsewhere.

>Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for. No I'm talking about using infrastructure a private entity has paid for as competition. Would you call it "unencumbered" competition if I started stealing a few bucks from everybody that goes to the gas station, then paid people to take my road with the ill-gotten gains instead of the public interstate, then d…

Huh?

What hypothetical car has the option to use your road or use the public road, but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?

Agreed, when a public road provides your customer, it's hard to win that competition.

But again: you can just build your roads away from public roads, find your own customers, and then you don't need to compete with them.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#184

Post by mothballed »

estearum wrote: post #183
mothballed wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Again, you keep suggesting that you're going to benefit from existing infrastructure someone else paid for. No I'm talking about using infrastructure a private entity has paid for as competition. Would you call it "unencumbered" competition if I started stealing a few bucks from everybody that goes to the gas station, then paid people to take my road with the ill-gotten gains instead of the public interstate, then d…

Huh? What hypothetical car has the option to use your road or use the public road, but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road? Agreed, when a public road provides your customer, it's hard to win that competition. But again: you can just build your roads away from public roads, find your own customers, and then you don't need to compete with them.

>but wasn't provided to you as a potential customer by the public road?

Mine, where I live the roads for miles and miles are all private with public easements and are privately funded. Of course by your definition that would make the public road illegitimate, because it has unfairly poached a private road user (not sure I agree with that).

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#185

Post by zebomon »

LexiMax wrote: post #176
zebomon wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a combination of never having learned the basics of science and now seeing the falsehoods they've been fed as equivalent to science. Take the Tylenol thing. You can explain to one of them the scientific method, what a survey of studies is, why correlation often appears when there is no causation, etc. I experienced this last week: at the end of my explanation, the person (a 45-year-old) replied that he "simply d…

I think it's simpler than that. They believe in what they believe specifically because it contradicts the views of people they dislike. I guarantee you that the person you were talking to got a real kick out of you wasting so much of your time trying to explain a position. However, these people do have a weakness. They feel good when they win the attention economy and the emotion economy, and those are actually reall…

My experience has been very different from the one you're describing.

The person I was talking to is someone who cares deeply for me (and whom I care for deeply too), someone I've known for almost my whole life. He wasn't having fun contradicting me. In fact, it was making him visibly uncomfortable to do so. He was engaging in the conversation in good faith. He just doesn't have the foundation to understand what he doesn't understand. I'm optimistic that even though he came away still disagreeing with me irrationally, there is a chance that by exposing him to a fuller explanation, he'll seek out more information for himself at some point in the future.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#186

Post by rsynnott »

reval wrote: post #65
softwaredoug wrote: post #28

It feels like in the US we need collective, civic organizations independent of the Federal government. I would like to see the Democratic party and other left-leaning / governance institutions / activists on specific issues work to make priorities resilient of the government. Especially since working on many of these issues is popular and not particularly partisan. And many people in upper-middle class would rather d…

Out of curiosity, why does this have to be a left-leaning initiative? I personally don’t use these political labels as I’m often confused by how they are used.

In the context of the US in 2025 specifically, anything opposing Dear Leader's agenda will likely be tagged as left-wing, regardless of what it actually is.

This is rather silly, but then it is a rather silly regime.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#187

Post by tempodox »

doctor_radium wrote: post #120
layer8 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It stands in the way of them making money, and making (lots of) money is psychologically fundamental to their identity, to them feeling superior, maybe because they don’t have much else to show for, or more charitably because they haven’t been taught more healthy values as children. Anything that limits their ability to make money is hard for them to reconcile with their self-image. It’s much easier to play down, dis…

I've begun wondering recently to what degree the American Psychiatric Association adding "the pursuit of money at all costs" to their book "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" would be both accurate, and a benefit to society: https://www.psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm

I’d assume it would just fall under psychopathy.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#188

Post by tempodox »

Cheer2171 wrote: post #2

And Trump said this would be "the most transparent administration in history" [1]. What a disgrace. [1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/videos/the-most-transparent-admin...

It’s transparently corrupt, anti-science and totalitarian. They take every opportunity to make all of this abundantly clear.

Re: EPA tells some scientists to stop publishing studies

#189

Post by notahacker »

mothballed wrote: post #174
notahacker wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, if we're in agreement that it'd be more efficient to have socialized healthcare than the non-socialized healthcare the US has, I'm not sure why you started off with the insistence that the private and charitable sector made everything so much more efficient it could provide all the actual benefits of the US government for a third of the cost. Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't private hospitals entirely free…

I've never claimed I thought totally private healthcare might be 1/3 the cost of universal healthcare. I postulated the functions of our government as currently implemented might be able to achieve for 1/3 the cost if privatized. You invented some straw-man that argued I was arguing vs something else, something our government isn't even offering, so I'm unsure how you even got to the point you got to. If you truly th…

Paying for the inefficiencies of private healthcare is about half of US govt spend on providing services (the only larger spend is transfer payments, and you can't pay $4b in annuities to senior citizens from a private insurance scheme that takes in significantly less than that. So probably you need to cut healthcare by more than a third...). I actually believe the US could stay safe on a much lower military budget (though god knows what a private donor funded military would look like) but that's not getting the overall budget cut by a third even if you zero it out.

Mathematically impossible to achieve the functions of the US government for a third of the cost without cutting healthcare spend. Which has been demonstrated to be entirely possible by other countries, but only by choosing to let more people die or, ironically, removing some of the dependence on inefficient private companies for provision...

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