81–90 of 147 posts
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I'm not sure I'd call it a scam. It certainly takes advantage of the fact that voters don't seem to really believe (or understand) that money is fungible.
It’s always a scam because money is fungible and unless the underlying asset itself is held by a separate entity, you’re always at the whim of the party in power.
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It’s always a scam because money is fungible and unless the underlying asset itself is held by a separate entity, you’re always at the whim of the party in power.
Are you asserting that raising taxes is always a "scam?"
Aka a scam.
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> The lottery picking up the slack so the general fund doesn’t have to do all of it is the whole point. That’s identical to the lottery just putting money directly into the general fund. Unless the funding source results in an increase in total funding this stuff is pure theatre.
If a person arguing on hackernews can't understand the scam that requires a 3rd grade mathematics education, bthen I don't have a lot for the general public.
Bonus: cut education enough, and it even gets easier to do!
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Everything has externalities though. Don't get me wrong I'm all for a forest going unlogged, but we will replace those resources with something else. We still use lumber, if it isn't locally harvested we buy it from another part of the world, outsourcing those externalities and throwing in all the extra costs of shipping, labor overhead for the various middlemen, customs, etc. My point isn't that we're screwed and sh…
What if America decided to import a lot of Canadian lumber? It's geographically close and the size of the forests are mindbogglingly vast. Could this happen in a way that benefits American construction interests but also Canadian lumber exporting interests? If there's ever some dispute about it could it be mediated somehow? What would the outcome of that possibly be?
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> They do argue that the tree farm is actually better because it is growing. I'm extremely skeptical of that claim. One could measure the tonnage of tree farm wood extracted per day against the estimated tonnage of the trees in a non-farm environment pretty easily I would think. Frankly, the claim, to me, seems incredibly intuitive and your skepticism sounds like stubborn environmentalist thought.
> One could measure the tonnage of tree farm wood extracted per day against the estimated tonnage of the trees in a non-farm environment pretty easily I would think. Old growth has a far deeper and broader root system which is a relatively permanent and ever increasing store of carbon in relation to farmed new growth. Roots and stumps of cut new growth are sometimes extracted and used for biofuel, transferring that c…
Even the best of them it’s less than 6 feet of carbon containing soil.
New growth pulls carbon out of the atmosphere fast - and cutting it down and using it, gives room for more, fast.
It doesn’t look as nice, and isn’t as pleasant to be around, but the math is clear and easy to verify.
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http://talltimbers.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Sloan1998a... I found this, where they do note the number of trees has gone up markedly. They note the critical role of low intensity fire. I doubt selective logging can replace regular burns, but unfortunately there's a great deal of opposition to doing that. Mostly by people living in those fire-prone areas.
lots of the public are very ignorant about ecologically sound forest management, unfortunately. "save the trees" is an effective emotional argument. i was once one of those people, but then i learned
The Federal government made a deal with forrest communities. We will have national forests that you won't get any property tax revenues from, but you will get revenue from the forestry, mining, and other economic activity on that land. Then the federal government shutdown most economic activity, and local communities had to shutdown their schools and other government functions (while at the same time losing their lum…
Outside of cities, the main ways to make a living is using the natural resources. Logging, mining, farming etc. Laws are made by city people, who think of work as something you do sitting by a desk. They see the countryside as a nature reserve to keep beautiful for their vacation trips. So they ban most commercial use of natural resources. This is part of what makes rural communities poor and desperate societies, sur…
I'm in flyover country, in a state with few "cities" and yet the laws reflect the values of a city dweller who uses the countryside as a stop off vacation.
We're dying in the rural part of this country, the towns, the people, all of it. And the arguments that I constantly see are - well just move to a city.
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Which 'deal' specifically, could you provide a link so we can read more?
You could look up the original Bureau of Land Management charter by congress, which does in fact mandate that the BLM's charter[1] is to manage federal lands with the goals of sustained resource yield: > The Congress declares that it is the policy of the United States that goals and objectives be established by law as guidelines for public land use planning, and that management be on the basis of multiple use and sus…
(Same thing with social security btw.)
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Everything has externalities though. Don't get me wrong I'm all for a forest going unlogged, but we will replace those resources with something else. We still use lumber, if it isn't locally harvested we buy it from another part of the world, outsourcing those externalities and throwing in all the extra costs of shipping, labor overhead for the various middlemen, customs, etc. My point isn't that we're screwed and sh…
What if America decided to import a lot of Canadian lumber? It's geographically close and the size of the forests are mindbogglingly vast. Could this happen in a way that benefits American construction interests but also Canadian lumber exporting interests? If there's ever some dispute about it could it be mediated somehow? What would the outcome of that possibly be?
The size of the forests isn't really relevant; compared to lumber demand, they're mostly insignificant. Humans have never had a problem wiping out local forests.
What matters is how much wood a forest can produce per year, not how much has accumulated over the course of the past.
Wow, this just confirmed my lack of knowledge around how national forests are administered. As someone in the PNW, are there any national agencies that govern the use of forests besides National Forest Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Land Management?