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Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

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Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#131

Post by AnthonyMouse »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #80
elmomle wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not a linear relationship where you trade one for the other. You don't just get a more competent government by giving up freedoms.

There is a relationship here. It is not a perfect one, but it is real, and pretending otherwise just avoids the tradeoff. Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory. The result is predictable. I will never see a functioning high speed rail sy…

> Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory.

If there was actually freedom and you wanted to build high speed rail, you would solicit investors, go negotiate for some land -- the power company has a bunch of transmission lines up the coast that run approximately parallel to the highways, maybe get that land, your trains were going to need power anyway -- and then you hire some people and start laying tracks.

"Everyone gets a veto" is the thing where you can't do it because the government won't let you even when you have the wherewithal and inclination to do it. That's the opposite of freedom.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#132

Post by AnthonyMouse »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #124
eli_gottlieb wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Take California’s high speed rail. Every individual has the right to object. No one wants an eyesore in their backyard. Everyone gets a hearing. Everyone gets a lawsuit. Everyone gets a veto in practice, if not in theory. That has absolutely nothing to do with civil liberties and everything to do with the adversarial legalism of the Common Law code and with property rights, which are quite a different matter. There…

Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom. I agree there's things like eminent domain. I'm just saying China leans more in the direction of less rights overall which in turn leads to a more productive society.

> Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom.

Suppose there is one city where everyone has the right to build new housing on any piece of land they own and another city where everyone has the right to prevent anyone else from building new housing. These things are the opposite of one another, so they can't both be increasing the "freedom" of the public at large.

Now which city actually has more freedom?

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#133

Post by nothrabannosir »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #87
tosapple wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exercise like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests... Right?

Yes, the event is Tiananmen Square. And on the moral axis, there is no ambiguity. It was a tragedy. People were killed for demanding political change. History does not need softening there, and I am not interested in doing that. But morality alone does not explain how the world actually unfolds. And using morality as a trump card to end the discussion only works if we pretend the world is clean, fair, and reversible.…

I love the opening of this comment, very poignant. I’m not convinced however that the conclusion follows from the setup. “The West” is more than just America. And America is very easy to condemn from a distance. Actually everything is easy to condemn from a distance.

There’s more to disagree with in the second half, but I’ll stick to my biggest gripe: America’s founding is steeped in moral principles, from its very founding document. In fact it is a two and a half century experiment on building a society around transparency, with the question of what is Right and what is Just at its core, and how does a society follow from that. And compared to where the world was when it was conceived, the experiment has certainly yielded vastly more results than your comment gives it credit for, by only looking at San Francisco today. It is evidence that the dichotomy between morality and building a society is a false one.

Meanwhile, tian an men square was in 1989, and the tension of “moral debt” is ever present, evidenced by its persistent censoring. When will it be paid off? And will the Chinese then say, “ok, we get it, that’s the price we had to pay”? Because if the ball suddenly drops and they rebel after all, as soon as censorship is lifted, you didn’t buy anything for that debt. So what then—keep taking out more moral debt? Forever?

China’s moral debt feels much like America’s national debt :)

Anyway like I said I loved the opening half of your comment though.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#134

Post by AnthonyMouse »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #42
Waterluvian wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno. The Americans stuck their hand in a blender for four years and then four years later needed to try it again. Alas, Stumpy McNubs remains long on limbs but short on memory.

I have similar concerns, but the evidence so far is encouraging. https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1puwkpj/democrats... https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1qu6vyu/trump_cal... https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/5716988-democrats-scor... https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695678/democrat-taylor...

"The President's party loses seats in the midterms" is a long-term trend and it seems pretty likely to hold this time.

The real question is, once the Democrats are back in control of at least one house of Congress, are they going to be sane or are they going to spend two years making such fools of themselves that we end up with another Republican President in 2028?

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#135

Post by eclipticplane »

WatchDog wrote: post #122

> ...the Department of the Interior settled on a single justification for blocking turbine installation: a classified national security risk. To speculate on what this risk is, the two obvious risk I can think of would be: - Susceptibility to seabed warfare[0]. A rival nation can sabotage the infrastructure and maintain deniability, like we have seen with the Nord Stream sabotage[1]. - Potential interference with pas…

If the latter were true, the permits would have never been granted. The permits took years of back and forth, public and government commentary.

The former is a threat vector but one that can be priced into the ongoing maintenance costs.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#136

Post by igorramazanov »

If a country changes course every four years, how can the success of a long-term project be ensured?

And what of its negotiating credibility? How can the other side trust that an agreement will hold in the future?

This is not a critique, but a genuine curiosity, because there's an obvious drawback with a system with opposing world views.

Unless, of course, something still unites them in the first place, with acceptable disparity on each side turning it into an advantage of flexibility and adaptability while keeping the focus on long-term ideas and plans.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#138

Post by threethirtytwo »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #132
threethirtytwo wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom. I agree there's things like eminent domain. I'm just saying China leans more in the direction of less rights overall which in turn leads to a more productive society.

> Every additional "right" you have is a "freedom" you can choose to execute or not execute on. A right is an additional freedom. If you have no rights, you have no freedom, if you have unlimited rights, you have unlimited freedom. Suppose there is one city where everyone has the right to build new housing on any piece of land they own and another city where everyone has the right to prevent anyone else from building…

I guess the keyword is "individual freedom." Technically, freedom can be expanded in the way you're implying but usually in common parlance they are referring to individual freedoms. That is what people mean when they say the US is "more free" than China. Under your expanded definition it's not clear which one is more free.

Extreme individual freedom is often called anarchy.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#139

Post by jfengel »

PaulHoule wrote: post #129
bmitc wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sad truth is that it's millions of people. These people just want to see the world burn due to nothing but narcissism and hate of the imaginary "other side".

There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.

That's how parties work, of necessity. They are all uneasy alliances of people who can barely tolerate each other. People find the one that supports their most important issues and hopefully few things they really detest. Then they have to pay at least lip service to all of it. By getting everyone else's support, at least one or two of your favorite issues get worked on.

In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.

Re: Court orders restart of all US offshore wind power construction

#140

Post by maxdo »

People mix up freedom and dicatorship here:

1. Freedom — free markets, minimal regulation Early USA had both political and economic freedom. Modern China has only economic freedom (plus heavy protectionism).

2. Dictatorship of a certain group Modern USA and the Western world have a dictatorship of lawyers, regulators, and ideological enforcement. Communist China has straightforward political dictatorship. As you can see, it's not black and white. China struggled when they had both economic and political dictatorship, but thrived once they introduced economic freedom.

3. It's always a race, freedom of the past is not enough. What the West should do is focus on better planning, less politics, more economic freedom, and a dictatorship of data-driven decisions instead.

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