TariffDude’s Recent Comments

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  typo?

  6th paragraph, coal tax = gas tax?On Learning from the gas tax episode, Obama could treat rural whites like adults posted 1 year, 6 months ago 13 Responses

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  ugh

  Why do tie-dyed shirts always come up when someone makes this point?  Is it because people have to badmouth hippies so they aren't perceived as hippies themselves?  If tie-dyed shirts and clean energy no longer have anything to do with each other, why bring it up?  

  Let's examine this asinine quote more closely.  Gov. Strickland is clearly using the idea of tie-dyed shirts in a pejorative sense.  Yet at the same time he's implying that tie-dyed shirts, a synecdoche for counter-culture in the 60's, and clean energy were at one point connected.  Doesn't that mean tie-dyed shirts have a better track record on this than suits?  Energy efficiency and not polluting the environment never actually made bad economic sense.  Tie-dye got it right and business suits got it wrong.  No one has ever said, "Not giving a shit that your employees work 20-hour days and are miserably poor and hungry is no longer just a business suit kind of idea, it's, like, totally far out, man."
  On Notable quotable posted 1 year, 8 months ago 3 Responses

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  trains

  I know what you mean and I feel the same way.  I think to a certain extent it's because the bus shares infrastructure with cars, so people perceive it as essentially a lower-class car.  

  A streetcar on the other hand, even if the tracks are on the road, seems more distinct from other modes and therefore less marginal than the bus.  It has a more exclusive right of way and the technology is just more appealing.  

  However if you look at the history of the rise of buses in the place of streetcars it's largely because people acquiesced to huge auto subsidies that had the effect of making buses cheaper to operate, instead of a conspiracy. (see e.g. http://lava.net/cslater/TQOrigin.pdf)    

  So even if people like trains (in the same way that they like, say, hot air balloons), when it comes to getting where they're going that's Serious Business.On Transportation planning with people in mind posted 1 year, 11 months ago 20 Responses

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  Baggage

  Exactly, I've always felt that economics was a red herring.  Bjorn Lomborg says we get more benefit just using the oil, the Stern review says it will end up costing us more.  But the monetary cost doesn't intrinsically mean anything, since it's tied to subjective assessments of value.  The best way to look at it is in terms of physical reality and our maximum potential.  If all human agency were directed towards solving a problem, at arriving at an ideal state, for example where we don't get any energy from fossil fuels, that could probably be achieved in purely physical terms in a matter of years.  That's why WWII is such a popular point of comparison when climate change is discussed - because that much mental consonance directed benevolently eliminates problems efficiently.  If it were cheaper to kill someone than not to, (say a rich guy whose money you could steal and flee the country never to get caught, guaranteed) most people wouldn't do it because it's wrong.  It doesn't really matter how much it costs to drive an SUV, it's just not the right thing to do to overconsume.  Same with famine as you mentioned.  There's more than enough food in the world to feed everyone, yet such is not the case.  How is economics not the problem, much less the solution?  It's time to remove arbitrary "costs" from our thinking about solving problems in the world.On Our challenge: surviving the rule of economists posted 1 year, 11 months ago 9 Responses

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  American hypocrisy: stranger than fiction

  I recently biked out to see Jimmy Carter speak.  I had never been to the arena before, so I just followed the line of cars into the parking lot, where a rent-a-cop was barking row numbers.  When it was my turn, the bejowled man just stared at me for a few seconds.  Then he said, "Uhh...Yeah."  Not hesitantly, but in a tone intended to imply competency, with a little head nod at the end.  Yeah? Seriously?  So I said, "Are there any bike racks?" and believe it or not, he said, "You could just lock it to that tree right there," gesturing to a tiny sapling in an island in the parking lot.  I said, "I'm pretty sure that's illegal," which it is (here anyway).  "Um, just wherever."  Awesome.  Eventually I found a fifteen-slot bike rack amid the vast sea of cars.  

  The biggest applause line in the whole speech was about foreign oil.  Then everyone took off in their cars (on what was quite possibly the nicest day of the year).  They didn't get it in 1979 and they don't get it now.  On Bike racks in rain, smokers under cover posted 2 years, 6 months ago 14 Responses