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Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

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Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#61

Post by chrisbennet »

Some data points in no particular order:

- The Secret Life of Lobsters, I highly recommend this book about lobsters, science and lobstering industry. It was a best seller so don't let the title turn you off.

- Lobsters enter the trap, eat the bait - and leave. (This is a relatively recent discovery.) Lobsterman it turns out, have been feeding the lobsters all this time. This might explain the consistently large catch.

- There were laws at one point that limited the # of days a week you could serve lobster to your hired help.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#62

Post by droithomme »

> On average, it takes about a pound of herring to catch a pound of lobster.

That is very interesting and something I didn't know. I like herring more than lobster. It has greater nutritional value. It's kosher. And it is not a giant sea insect fed to prisoners. What is not to like.

I wonder whether similar actions to protect herrings are being taken as once were taken to protect lobsters.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#63

Post by justavoice »

scrollbar wrote: post #3

I'm in the middle of reading Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly, which talks extensively about Maine lobster fishery rights. Along the sensitive areas of the coast, only owner-operated boats are allowed to fish, and these people must all have certified lobster fishing licenses. Their licensure also gives them voting rights around regulations for lobstering- in a sense, they own the…

I think this gets at something that's been bugging me for a while: corporations used to be restricted in the amount of time that they were allowed to operate. They were of limited duration. At some point, the rules were relaxed. That gave rise to the mega-corps we have that now have no limits but what they can get away with. If we could put the genie back in the bottle we would have a much more competitive group of companies, and rent-seeking would be minimized.

Of course,the devil is in the details: no one benefiting from the status quo will go along with the scheme. And they're the ones in control (no matter who is in the White House).

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#64

Post by Double_Cast »

51stpage wrote: post #56
erikpukinskis wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's interesting to think about the way such a system is a hybrid of different political systems. At the fishery level it's not communistic... But it's also not capitalistic. The fishery isn't owned by a single profit driven entity, it's a democracy or a beurocrasy, or however they have it set up. At the boat level it's a single profit driven entity, which is purely capitalistic On the boat itself you have a…

I really appreciate your insight that different political structures work better for different scales and different situations. I suppose that's intuitively obvious but I hadn't ever considered it.

You might wanna check out the story of Edward Lampert (the CEO of Sears). Ayn Rand inspired him to pit departments against one another. Sears devolved into a battle royale and profits dropped like a rock.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#65

Post by pcmaffey »

celias wrote: post #29

I remember reading about how abundant lobsters were on a historical plaque in Cape Breton. From travel Canada - "There was a time when these crustaceans were so plentiful and underappreciated that only the poorest children took lobster sandwiches in their lunches while the rich kids ate bologna." http://www.torontosun.com/2016/07/27/learning-about-lobster-...

Mud bugs

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#66

Post by scrollbar »

mikeyouse wrote: post #12
scrollbar wrote: post #3

I'm in the middle of reading Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly, which talks extensively about Maine lobster fishery rights. Along the sensitive areas of the coast, only owner-operated boats are allowed to fish, and these people must all have certified lobster fishing licenses. Their licensure also gives them voting rights around regulations for lobstering- in a sense, they own the…

The article mentions it prominently.. including references to an earlier book about the same subject; > As University of Maine anthropologist James M. Acheson put it in his 2003 book "Capturing the Commons: Devising Institutions to Manage the Maine Lobster Industry: > While scientists do not agree on the reason for these high catches, there is a growing consensus that they are due, in some measure, to the long histor…

Eek- my scanning wasn't quite efficient enough! Thanks for correcting me.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#68

Post by shoover »

scrollbar wrote: post #3

I'm in the middle of reading Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly, which talks extensively about Maine lobster fishery rights. Along the sensitive areas of the coast, only owner-operated boats are allowed to fish, and these people must all have certified lobster fishing licenses. Their licensure also gives them voting rights around regulations for lobstering- in a sense, they own the…

Great point about the owner/captain regulation. It seems incredible that the little guys won in this one.

Also, chrisbennet's comment reminded me of another piece of the sustainable fishing regulations, which is that the traps are regulated to be inefficient and let the lobsters walk out. As an engineer that is just about more than my mind can handle.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#69

Post by sitkack »

shoover wrote: post #68
scrollbar wrote: post #3

I'm in the middle of reading Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution by Marjorie Kelly, which talks extensively about Maine lobster fishery rights. Along the sensitive areas of the coast, only owner-operated boats are allowed to fish, and these people must all have certified lobster fishing licenses. Their licensure also gives them voting rights around regulations for lobstering- in a sense, they own the…

Great point about the owner/captain regulation. It seems incredible that the little guys won in this one. Also, chrisbennet's comment reminded me of another piece of the sustainable fishing regulations, which is that the traps are regulated to be inefficient and let the lobsters walk out. As an engineer that is just about more than my mind can handle.

That is awesome, only catch the slow ones.

Re: Maine Is Drowning in Lobsters

#70

Post by pash »

zz01234 wrote: post #49
pash wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Kelly argues that this ownership of the lobstering commons, in a cooperative-like structure, leads to greater sustainability. >> Large corporate boats can operate only in designated areas. Instead of permitting limitless liberty to absentee owners for the seeking of wealth -- by hired hands indifferent to local custom -- Maine set spinning a new governing pattern…. That the right to make a living comes before the r…

> another way to prevent a tragedy of the commons is to get rid of the commons: grant exclusive use of the former commons to a single party, who then has an incentive for good stewardship. There is a single party, and it is The State of Maine. > And quite contrary to Kelly's characterization of it, Maine's solution to managing its lobster rights can be seen as an instance of favoring the few over the many I fail to s…

> There is a single party, and it is The State of Maine.

That's an interesting way of looking at it, but it doesn't strike me as one that contributes much to understanding the phenomenon. Individual licensed lobstermen, not the State of Maine, bear the costs and reap the rewards of their catch. The role of the State of Maine is to set rules about how and how much they catch (to their collective benefit), but the state is not in any meaningful sense catching lobsters.

> I fail to see your reasoning here. A single corporate entity would would prefer to employ the smallest number of people possible.

I'm not sure what reasoning you think you're failing to see. I did not say anything about how many people unitary ownership would employ, nor did I express any opinion about the merits and demerits of unitary ownership as a solution to the tragedy of the commons; I only noted that it is one, to illustrate my point that Kelly's characterization of the problem and its solution in terms of "fairness for the many" versus "maximizing for the few" exhibits no understanding of either the problem or the solution and seems to express nothing beyond her sympathies.

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