It's providing a single geographic data point to you, for free. You're welcome to do your own research if you want a complete picture.
I like that your vague response to the question is either “this provides no value without context” or “the value it provides without context is a secret that only I know” but phrased in a silly way
Fair point. My actual conclusion: California has made it structurally impossible to manufacture things it consumes, and has exported the environmental burden to places with fewer protections.
There is a reason these kind of things are no longer possible in much of the western world and especially Europe-like US states like California: After the deindustrialization people started to enjoy healthy air and clear water. As always when it comes to "the good old times" or "make great again", your brain will remember very selectively. I used to live next to a large river for about 35 years. As a kid, it was forb…
There a lot of processes like those done in other states and in europe. PCB etching, cnc milling, allumunium anodizing are some of the ones that I order on a regular basis from european manufacturers.
One thing is to regulate the industrial sector to be cleaner if waaaay more expensive and another is to just forbid stuff that can be reasonably be done cleanly (but again, waaaay more expensive than in asia, for example)
There are some scenarios where it’s a coordination problem. People could drive light fuel efficient vehicles if so many other people weren’t driving large, heavy, dangerous ones, for example.
Those large heavy vehicles are incentivized by loopholes in regulations because politicians were afraid of affecting "domestic jobs" as US automakers weren't even trying to compete with JP fuel-efficient imports.
Yeah, apparently it was originally to try to stop the rules from killing Jeep, which was having a hard time. New ones that allow more emissions for bigger vehicle footprints are also a big issue since it encourages larger vehicles.
One of the big reasons we have no universal healthcare is because we socialized defense for other countries like your country. You guys are years if not decades away from being able to defense yourselves.
Defend against who? You?
I am in Canada, and the USA recently threatened to invade us, basically.
So we need to buy weapons from the USA in order to defend ourselves from the USA?
I’m married to a Brit and she is constantly in awe of how much better our healthcare is here in the US. And she paid for private insurance there too. Quality of facilities, low wait times, quality of staff interactions, organization, etc. She even freaks out about how we have free parking at our doctors and hospitals here! We’re on corporate insurance.
What is the 'INSERTNAME' law that explains how all conversations on HN, which is ostensibly focused on tech, devolve (evolve) into the realm of the humanities?
I’m married to a Brit and she is constantly in awe of how much better our healthcare is here in the US. And she paid for private insurance there too. Quality of facilities, low wait times, quality of staff interactions, organization, etc. She even freaks out about how we have free parking at our doctors and hospitals here! We’re on corporate insurance.
UK isn't EU, especially when it comes to health system. I lived in the US for quite some time (from Fr), the healthcare is great... if you can afford an expensive health insurance AND pay some extra money when required. The avg US people can not pay and when you can not pay the experience is just far worth than terrible.
It's not just for politics but fairness. You can't just one day up and decide to make something illegal that others depending on for livelyhood. It's good enough that it limits growth of the banned thing.
Sure you can. It just takes backbone, which is rarely found in the political class. If I, as a voter, voted for a politician who promised to ban dumping mercury in the local river, I don't expect them to say "Oh, but any company already dumping mercury in the river can keep doing so, because we don't want to hurt people's livelihood." That's not what I voted for.
Ok, but if you are investing capital in some sort of production line or industrialization you are not going to want to do that in an area where you might just lose your entire investment instantly; instead, you're just going to invest it in Texas or China. Of course with more extreme examples like yours you do have to put some cost on the existing companies to get it fixed, but it would be something with a smaller cost like having to dispose of the mercury properly (whereas in this article's examples they just flat out ban these things, which you can't do to existing factories).
I’m married to a Brit and she is constantly in awe of how much better our healthcare is here in the US. And she paid for private insurance there too. Quality of facilities, low wait times, quality of staff interactions, organization, etc. She even freaks out about how we have free parking at our doctors and hospitals here! We’re on corporate insurance.
So why are so many of your citizens without even basic affordable healthcare?
Define "so many". Most people have health insurance through their job, which translates to them having basic affordable healthcare. Not everyone has this, so I'm not saying it's perfect, but it's not some abysmal state of affairs where most of the country is suffering.
> What would be your choice? Less stuff and less pollution everywhere.
It’s an inconvenient truth that the better off don’t want to face up to. Your environmental impact is going to be correlated to your consumption. More spending == more damage. Something to bear in mind when you are being told environmental damage is being caused by the poor or some foreign country.
There's not much point in being better off if you don't use that money for a holiday to Japan.
After all most of us work hard so that we can buy things.
USA is already effectively priced out of manufacturing due to high labor costs. Doing things with the "correct choices" simply makes the impossible even more so.
This is false, patently incorrect. With a good manufacturing line workers are not priced out by "cheap labor" they are priced out by almost zero cost labor, Robots are basically a rounding error compared to human's wages.
Robots bring very different tradeoffs on the table. But they are not built and maintained autonomously by the all mighty benevolent skynet, all working 100% on renewable energies abundant at geological scale.
Plus scaling industrial production is one thing, but if proletarians are unable to afford them because wealth distribution is exponentially concentrated, what is the point?