Topic: What do you believe is moral? - page 10. (Read 17785 times)

Aaaaactually, this is exactly what pro-government pro-environmentalists suggest when they say "we need more, better, and stronger regulations." Since you apparently missed it, my entire point with the original post was to explain that such a proposed solution to the problem of companies exploiting and polluting nature is misguided at best. Why? Because incentives are wrong (guaranteed personal paycheck v/s personal responsibility and performance-based profits), and because, regulation being an added cost that companies MUST cover, it will always be more profitable for a company to hire those creme de la creme candidates away from the regulatory offices and have them write the regulations (or navigate around them) than to submit to regulations, no matter how much you pay those regulators (up to the point where paying the regulators costs so much that it's cheaper to just fix the land).



Who are those "people who write regulations?" Whom do they work for? I claim they work for the companies being regulated, based on the various news of such "scandals" throughout the years. The other option is, at the least, they would be experts in the field. Experts in a field typically do not go to work for government. They go to work in the field they are experts in. So, either those regulations are very well written, but are written by people working for the companies being regulated (the lawyers I mentioned), or they are written by non-experts, and are likely very sloppy and inadequate regulations.



On the grounds that they either A) are there only to serve the company that wrote them helping it hold monopoly power (Bitcoin is a shining spotlight on this problem, with the banking industry requiring insane amounts of paperwork and money to enter, meaning all the big banks are safe from small competitors) or B) make "legal" what would otherwise be criminal neglegence or damage to the environment. You can spill tons of oil in the gulf, then try to clean it up with possibly even more toxic chemicals, but hey, it was all within regulations, so you didn't break any laws, despite the gulf being all kinds of fucked up. Without regulations saying that what was done was ok, because all the regulations were followed, we'd be able to go after the oil spillers for the actual damages they have done. Likewise for strip mining. If there are regulations for proper methods of strip mining, then strip mining is "legal" regardless of the amount of damage and pollution to the surrounding areas it does. The company doing the strip mining can just show that they followed regulations, and get away with it, claiming that any damage was due to inadequate regulations, not due to their actions. I'm not pulling this out of my ass btw. This has happened again and again and again. Considering I'm an environmentalist myself, I keep tabs of such things.


You totally missed it. Your reasoning, this car is being steered by a blind person and bumps into stuff once in a while. So you're just going to add more padding to the car, until it becomes nearly impossible to steer, or just replace the first blind person with the second blind person, when the first one gets hauled off for killing someone. My reasoning is I'm going to take out that blind person, and stick you in that car. Hopefully you wouldn't want to get banged up by bumping into things, and won't want to get hauled off for running someone over.

Above post pretty much decimates Rassah's reverence for a timber company in Chile.

This is just such idiocy (what anon is saying), that it becomes impossible to have a discussion with these people. If he were willing to educate himself on things he knows nothing about, then it might be worthwhile, but he refuses to believe he needs to know more about land usage.

Changing an ecosystem is a serious matter. It has far reaching consequences, related to water quality, biodiversity, erosion, general ecosystem resources, etc. I pointed out to him a post I wrote a long time ago, but he just closes his ears.

I'll just repeat the post here, for the lazy, such as Anon:

To begin with, many species do not reproduce well in captivity. It took 112 years to yield a successful Sumatran rhino calf. Furthermore, poachers are simply not likely to expend such efforts, even if sanctioned, as it's much more profitable to simply poach, i.e. go out into the wild and kill. One need only look at the case of shark fins to understand the cost dynamics. Secondly, you are failing to acknowledge the public backlash in breeding megafauna for the cruel purpose of maiming (or in the case of pelts) killing the animal.

Before we go on, let's enumerate some well known cases of poaching:

- Gorillas for bushmeat
- Elephants for ivory
- Sumatran rhino for their horns
- Sharks for shark fins
- Tigers (and other big cats) for their pelts

Cattle are not killed for their horns or hooves alone. Cattle is an industry, and it does not analogize well. Most of the public accept the cattle industry. Most of the public do not accept killing animals which are endangered for specific parts, usually decorative. All of a cattle's parts are used when killed. This includes muscle tissue, organs, bones, hides and hooves. As an example, did you know that gummy bears are made from cow hooves?

I can sense that at this point, you might feel poised to counter some of the points I've made, and if you took one or two individually, you might feel that you'd have a case. But we haven't even begun, as I haven't yet shared with you what the real reason is for why I declared your statement to be based on false assumptions.

So let's begin. Some of the following material is derived from posts I have written in the past, but I think it will have greater effect if I merge it together here with a few edits and additions. Please read it through thoroughly.

Ever heard of the Spotted Owl and the controversy surrounding it? What was all that about?

The Spotted Owl is a top level predator in the northwest. It was declared an umbrella species (otherwise known as a keystone or flagship species), and listed as endangered. The timber industry had an issue with this. Here's why. The purpose of listing the Spotted Owl as an umbrella species was because in order to preserve the Spotted Owl population, the old growth forests in the northwest would have to be preserved as well. That meant the timber industry would not be allowed to harvest existing old growth forests.

Why are old growth forests important? Because they offer what are called ecosystem services. Secondary growth forests do not offer all those ecosystem services, nor at the same level that the old growth forests do. And that's it in a nutshell. It has been demonstrated that the Spotted Owl can live in secondary growth forests, but it cannot viably breed in secondary growth forests.

Thus, species such as the Spotted Owl are declared umbrella species to act as a protective umbrella for their respective environments as a way to protect those environments in perpetuity, because once they're all gone, the possibility of regaining all those ecosystem services that those ecosystems provide is pretty much nil.

Biodiversity, it's very definition, implies diversity, which arises from the existence of thousands, tens of thousands of species within any given ecosystem. This then results in the ecosystem being able to provide its services, known collectively as ecosystem services. The goal is to protect biodiversity by protecting ecosystems. A general technique for doing so is to declare a top level species within its respective ecosystem as endangered (because it is endangered or will become extinct if its ecosystem is destroyed) as an umbrella species. The ecosystem is then preserved under the umbrella of the umbrella species. This protects biodiversity.

Myrkul provided an example of relocating the Scimitar Oryx to a Texan hunting preserve as an example of species preservation, but it is not a case of protecting biodiversity.

As long as we don't disrupt natural ecosystems, they will provide everything listed below:

- Freshwater supply and flood control
- Generation and maintenance of soils
- Ocean flood protection
- Natural pest control
- Amelioration of the weather
- The cycling of nutrients
- Pollination of plants

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, published in 2005, breaks it down like this:

Supporting Services:

- Nutrient cycling
- Soil formation
- Primary production
- Preservation of genetic resources

Regulating services:

- Climate amelioration
- Flood control
- Agricultural pest control
- Water purification

Provisioning services:

- Food
- Timber and fiber
- Fresh water
- Fuel

Cultural services:

- Esthetic
- Spiritual
- Educational
- Recreational

Other disruptive effects to the ecosystem services enumerated above include harvesting resources (collateral damage), toxic waste, atmospheric pollution, garbage waste, over harvesting (fish), pesticides, noise, etc.

What disrupts the above?

Reduction in the number of top level predators. Top level predators, such as raptors, wolves, cats, etc. regulate the ecosystem by preventing overgrazing of vegetation, which plays a role in providing habitat to the smaller organisms, all the way down to the microscopic level, which in turn plays a role in nutrient cycling, water purification, soil formation, etc. In other words, top level predators ultimately affect the health of the entire ecosystem. This process, where top level species affect the environment as a cascading effect are known collectively as trophic cascades.

As an example, let's examine the case of wolves. Numerous species of wolves were eradicated in the twentieth century (by cattle ranchers, incidentally). As it turns out, it was determined that they played a role within the dynamics of the ecosystems. Their elimination resulted in a deleterious effect on the ecosystem services, due to the removal of a trophic cascade effect.

When in the presence of wolves, ungulates generally do not browse in riparian zones. Riparian zones are the areas of rich vegetation along the banks of streams, creeks and rivers. The reason ungulates do not browse in such areas when wolves are present is because their escape route is hindered by the slopes of the river bank, the body of water itself, and the denser vegetation. When wolves are removed, ungulates in general decimate the vegetation in these riparian zones, which in turn results in habitat loss for numerous species, typically beginning with rodents, and cascading all the way down to the microscopic level, where numerous species exist within the soil. This loss of habitat within the riparian zones results in a huge loss of ecosystem services, including nutrient cycling, soil formation, flood control and water purification

Edge effects are another disrupting process to ecosystems and the ecosystem services they provide. Typically, property ownership is the cause. The fracturing of an ecosystem disrupts its viability, by inhibiting migration, reducing territorial area needed by top level predators (see above), and this ultimately reduces biodiversity, which reduces genetic information, a resource required for medicine, material science, engineering, computer science, etc.

Edge effects are a direct result of ecosystem fracturing, which will be defined and discussed. There is a whole cascade of effects and interrelated issues that apply here. They are:

- The importance of wildlife corridors
- The dangers of ignorance
- Exploitation via corporations
- Lack of regulation
- Solutions via private enterprise
- Habitat loss
- Information loss
- Bioproductivity loss
- Natural capital
- Water quality
- Trophic cascades
- Policies

The list goes on. And on.

The whole substrate upon which humanity, society, and life depend on begin in the soil and water (essentially our planet), as nourished by the incoming sunlight from above.

Here's a thought for you: the very complex systems which naturally occur within the soil and above the soil define everything we have to support ourselves and they define everything we have available to educate ourselves (outside cosmology and related fields). There is more going on here than you think. Humanity thus far has been built from those systems, but humanity itself is also depleting, fracturing (and thus destroying) the very systems which allowed it to come this far.

Edge effects: What are they? Imagine a parcel of land that is fairly large and of a particular shape, mostly undisturbed. Let's say it's unspoiled rainforest. We'll begin with a circle 100 miles in diameter.

The circle: A circle 100 miles in diameter has an edge that is 314 miles long. It's area is a little more than 7,500 miles. The ratio of area/edge is 7,500/314 which equals about 24.

The fractal shape: A fractal shape with an area of 7,500 miles but with a ragged edge that is 1,000 miles long has a ratio of area/edge of 7,500/1,000 which equals 7.5.

Among the two shapes described above, each say being a rainforest ecosystem, the circle will generally be healthier and more viable. What does this mean? The circle, will in general, be richer in all of the following:

- Number of species
- Lower extinction rate
- More nutrients within the soil
- Lesser vulnerability to drought, heat, cold, etc.
- More information, complexity and potential knowledge to be discovered within
- Greater productivity within: (i.e ability to nourish, support and grow)
- Ability to support larger fauna

A circle was used above as an example. One could just as easily substitute a square instead and get similar results. Therefore, consider a square 100 miles on a side. It has a ratio of area/edge of 10,000/400 which equals 25.

Assuming that square contains rainforest (but it could just as easily be another type of ecosystem), let's now fracture it. We'll turn it into a checkerboard of 64 black and white squares. Black are rainforest squares. White are squares burned to remove the trees, and then tilled for agriculture.

Our total area of rainforest within the checkerboard is now half what it was. The original square contained 10,000 square miles of rainforest. It now contains 5,000 square miles of rainforest. But look at the change in rainforest edges. The original square had only 400 miles of rainforest edge. The checkerboard has 1,600 miles of rainforest edge.

And so we can get a sense of the difference between these two extents of land. Recall that the unspoiled square had 10,000 square miles of rainforest and total edges measuring 400 miles with a ratio of 25. Look at the ratio of the fractured checkerboard to get a sense of how less rich its potential is. It's ratio is 5,000/1,600 which equals 3.125.

Compare the two numbers: 25 vs. 3.125.

What are some cases which cause edge effects?

Repurposing of land: Examples include agriculture, urban and suburban sprawl, etc.

Clearcutting: Clearcutting by the timber industry creates edge effects. Make no mistake about it - the ecosystem has been changed, and replanting of trees will not revert the area back to the original ecosystem in a period equal to the time it takes for the newly planted trees to mature. The original forest was an old growth forest, and when the newly planted trees finally mature, the resulting forest will be a secondary growth forest, which does not provide the same environment as the original old growth forest.

Roads: Going back to the circle example, if a road is placed through the center, then an edge effect is created. Depending on the type of road and how busy it is, the effect is dramatic. Essentially, you end up with two areas, each half the area of the original circle, and each area having an edge length not much less than the original circle. This is one of the reasons (among many) why there is such opposition to the idea of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It's not just the idea of potential damage from oil spills (which is real), but the road systems which would need to be built to access the enterprise.

Fences: Land left in its natural state, but fenced, also creates an edge effect. A very damaging example would be the fence proposed along the U.S./Mexico border by certain politicians.

That's a start. Let me know when you want more, as there is plenty more...

Thank you for a direct & concise reply.


Yes, because your "Oh woes me! We need the regulations to protect out lands and waters and such, because the evil mean corporations will totally destroy them if we don't!" line is a very common misconception about that thing you love to talk about, that being "how things work in the real world." You very obviously and blatantly stated the exact same BS claim that many other pro-regulation pro-environment types state, and I posted, for your benefit, as well as anyone else's who might hold your view (of which, as I mentioned, is many) that in the "real world" government employees are low-paid, low-skilled types who often don't understand what they are regulating (if they did, they'd be working for the company they are trying to regulate),

Fine, I guess I was wrong.



Yes, because your "Oh woes me! We need the regulations to protect out lands and waters and such, because the evil mean corporations will totally destroy them if we don't!" line is a very common misconception about that thing you love to talk about, that being "how things work in the real world." You very obviously and blatantly stated the exact same BS claim that many other pro-regulation pro-environment types state, and I posted, for your benefit, as well as anyone else's who might hold your view (of which, as I mentioned, is many) that in the "real world" government employees are low-paid, low-skilled types who often don't understand what they are regulating (if they did, they'd be working for the company they are trying to regulate), in the "real world" regulations are written by the experts, which happen to be the lawyers working for the companies the regulation is written for, in the "real world" regulatory laws are passed by senators influenced by lobbyists working for the company to be regulated, not by the voting representatives of those senators, and in the "real world" regulations often don't do anything other than help establish the large companies as monopolies, or make the crimes against nature perpetrated by those companies technically "legal."
When was the last time someone(s) at the head of a mining, oil, or hell, even banking industry went to jail, or even had to pay a fine?

If you are paying your landlord for the pool and the doorman, then you get access to the services or use of that pool and doorman.


If you are paying for remote access to the server, you get remote access to the server. If you are paying for physical access to the server, you get physical access to the server. Access, as in you are able to use or get benefit for the things you paid for, which you paid for specifically in order to get that use or benefit.


I don't know what PMBs are. No, I don't want physical access to an army base or a sub. I would like to get the services that they provide in exchange for me paying for them. And I would like the option of not buying their services if I don't need or want them, too.

Access to services. Like  пользоваться. Learn to english.


You're forced to pay for them? So now you don't want to be forced to pay for them either? I mean, if you were ok with it, you wouldn't be being forced, you'd be paying voluntarily...



This country is unjust. Most other countries are like this one. I live here too. So it's much easier for you to move elsewhere that's the same as this country, like Europe, Canada, Brazil, or Australia, and for me to try to change things here, than for me to move to a place that doesn't exist yet. So. i.e. you gtfo.


Remember the robbery/rape/murder thing? Should I explain that again?


Having to show so much fail puts a crack in my monitor.
I go to a computer store, find a monitor just like mine, and start taking it apart -- to get at the LCD panel.
Store clerk walks over and asks WTF
I reply that i don't need the whole thing, i just need teh panel itself.
He patiently tells me they don't sell just the panel, buy the whole thing or GTFO!
I repeat myself.
He repeats himself.
wat do

I can't expect you to do your own readin', so i plucked this out for you


Responsibility to shareholders or private owners to make a profit. You will make much more in profits if you maintain the resale value, and resell the land, recouping your initial costs, than you will if you just screw it up and abandon it. Same thing applies to most machinery and property companies invest in when they start up or expand their operations. That's, like, business 101 (depreciation and resale value). Land is a very scarce resource, and people would be willing to pay a lot for it. Land that is not owned, or publicly owned, again, is the problem here, and not lack of regulations.


FYI, though this was a reply to you, it's just general info for everyone else's use as well. So, not everything in my replies is about you.

From what I understood, Anon136's main issue isn't with land ownership, it's with public land ownership, i.e. government. And although he said it would get messy, I am pretty sure he also said that we already have ways of dealing with that mess, leaving it to experts, and NOT that we shouldn't bother changing things, because they will get messy. I may be wrong, but that's what I got from reading his replies.
And, I guess the root of the problem here then isn't laws or regulation, but public vs private ownership.



Responsibility to shareholders or private owners to make a profit. You will make much more in profits if you maintain the resale value, and resell the land, recouping your initial costs, than you will if you just screw it up and abandon it. Same thing applies to most machinery and property companies invest in when they start up or expand their operations. That's, like, business 101 (depreciation and resale value). Land is a very scarce resource, and people would be willing to pay a lot for it. Land that is not owned, or publicly owned, again, is the problem here, and not lack of regulations.


FYI, though this was a reply to you, it's just general info for everyone else's use as well. So, not everything in my replies is about you.

wat  "Access to them"?  You're getting loopy.  If i'm renting a server in a datacenter halfway around the world, do i have access to it?  If i'm dumb as dirt & own PMBs, do i have access to them?  What are you saying?  You'd like to tour an army base or a sub?  Visit a school?  That sort of hands-on access is what you're looking for?  What frickin difference does it make if i have physical access to cardboard boxen & packing popcorn i DO NOT WANT?  It takes time/money to rid myself of those things, i'd rather *not* have access to them.  I'm forced to pay for things i do not want, and then to *pay again* to dispose of them.  At least you never had to leave a sixpack of beer on top of a Tomahawk missile just to make sure the garbagemen took it away


The reason i explain how IRL works is so you may understand it before trying to fix it -- an approach that i found to work fairly well when dealing with broken things.
The reason i "support" IRL is obvious:  No matter how shitty one way of doing things may be, *it is still the best way* unless a better way is found.  Protip: It's not a better way if it doesn't work, or works only in a child's imagination.  While i don't disagree with the Nietzschean notion that a house & its foundation must be destroyed before a better one could be built, there's no reason for the demolition crew to masquerade as builders.  That's just clownish

People should read more Korzibsky and realize that the map is not the territory, the menu is not the dinner and any word ending in "ism" is just that - a word, a concept a model and nowhere near fully descriptive of reality. Maybe then they would stop falling prey to false dichotomies this easily. You know things are bad, when your peers think you can be either a democrat or a republican and no other options exist. Then you can be certain, that all higher mental activity has ceased and the person(s) in question are simply acting out whatever programs have been input into their emotion-territorial circuit of intelligence. Similarly a political division into "left" and "right" is a joke as well.

More absurdity.  Learn to context.
You're quoting a reply to Anon136, who finds government regulations pertaining to public land morally flawed. Public.  Not private.  The hypothetical logging companies in my example *do not own the land.*  Anon136 feels land as property to be a morally flawed concept, something i happen to agree with on a gut level, though things get messy on a practical level.  I understand your need to be catty, but please, pay attention ffs!  It's not all about you, tiger.


See above, +:
What responsibility?  With 0 resale value (land is not owned in the Anon136 example) & lack of regulations, blast, strip, move on.


Fail.  See what happens when you don't pay attention?

Your family are socialist democrats? I find that surprising, as every family I know that came from USSR, including my parents, are republicans, constantly complaining about taxes, socialism, and excessive government regulation.

Meh, too easy. You are forced to pay for the apartment things, and safe packaging of your belt, and as a result you get access and use to all the apartment things, and get a belt safely delivered. With government, you are forced to pay for things, A LOT of things, but don't get access to them. Do you get subsidies for your apartment? Do you get a free cellphone? Do you get access to people's private data like the NSA? Do you even use libraries and schools? No? Then it's not the same. Point is, you are choosing to pay for things, because you like them, and you are getting the things you paid for. With government, you are forced to pay for things, whether you like/need them or not, and most of the things you paid for you never even get. It's no more complicated than that.


The reason i explain how IRL works is so you may understand it before trying to fix it -- an approach that i found to work fairly well when dealing with broken things.
The reason i "support" IRL is obvious:  No matter how shitty one way of doing things may be, *it is still the best way* unless a better way is found.  Protip: It's not a better way if it doesn't work, or works only in a child's imagination.  While i don't disagree with the Nietzschean notion that a house & its foundation must be destroyed before a better one could be built, there's no reason for the demolition crew to masquerade as builders.  That's just clownish

The questions cited in the OP are underdefined. I think it is moral if there is a rational reason that the taxation is required for a peaceful and productive society.

The modifications to the questions such as "official", "elected" and so forth are irrelevant. In a way, the Nazis were elected. Being elected has little implication as to whether one's decisions are morally acceptable or not.

Also, the word "steal" is misleading as it implies secrecy. "Forcefully taken" would be correct, maybe "robbed" if you want to be dramatic.



In other words, all the cited decisions can be morally wrong. I'm not certain whether any of them must be. If there is no more police and some warlord manages to rob you instead, nothing is gained -- it just trades a vote majority for a weapon majority.

Your government and misinformed environmentalist brainwashing is showing.

Logging companies - The biggest logging company on this side of the planet is in Chille. It has been logging the same land for decades, and understands that if it just cut down all the trees and that's it, it would be out of business in no time. So, it tends the land, making sure to cut in ways that keeps the ground fertile, continuously replants new trees, and even created a species of fir that can grow to adult stage within 8 to 10 years, meaning they can replenish the forest in less then a decade. As new technologies in logging and genetic engineering are developed, they hope to cut that by even more years.

Mining companies - Mining companies strip-mine because they don't own the land. They lease it from the government, strip-mine it, and wash their hands of it, since once they're done, it's no longer their problem. If mining companies were instead required to buy the land, for the full price that it's worth, first, that would immediately cut out any mining company that doesn't know what it's doing, and second, it would impose an enormous cost on the company, one that it will be required to account for and restore. Companies are in it for the profits, and it's more profitable to either be more careful with the land, or to restore it once you're done with it, so you can resell it and recoup your costs. The actual real problem with strip-mining isn't a lack of regulations, it's a lack of company's responsibility/ownership, and the fact that mining regulations are written by the experts working for those mining companies (i.e. they are writing their own regulations).

Developers - Developers would only develop if there are people willing to go and use the areas they develop. If you are worried about sprawl & crawl, look at the issues with subsidized oil, roads, and housing that make it cheaper and more convenient to continue to sprawl out into the wilderness, than to live in tightly packed cities as people do in places without those things. Look at Canada, where gas is expensive, downpayments are required, and mortgage interest isn't deductible. LOTS of open wilderness, yet most people live in tightly packed cities.

Hunters - There are private game reserves. If a huge chunk of land happens to be well suited for supporting wild life, the owner would very likely keep it as such, and just charge for the  privilege of hunting. Since that will be his source of income, he would also make sure that the game isn't all hunted out, and will help the animals survive, by making sure the place is kept clean and safe for the animals (minus the threat of hunters).

Farming - Again, the issue is huge subsidies. It's not profitable to farm. Anyone can start doing it, and can undercut everyone else. Farming is exactly like Bitcoin mining in that way (at least during the GPU era). As a farmer, you have little choice as to how much it costs to grow your food. So, the price of your food has to be at least as much as it cost you to grow it. If not enough people want to pay that price, you go broke. If someone else enters the market, and no one wants to pay their food prices either, they go broke. So farmers won't enter the market. The problem we have now is the huge government subsidies. For example, it currently costs more to grow corn than farmers actually sell it for, but they are sustained by those subsidies. As a result, we have WAY WAY WAY more farming than people would actually want to pay for, if they had a choice in whether to pay for it. But as it stands now, we are all forced to "buy" corn, whether we actually buy it at the store or not.

Believe it or not, a lot of this is actually covered in MBA Finance/Economics classes.

What has been really bothering me is that a lot of those who came from there (including my parents) automatically see anything socialist as wrong, and anything opposite as right, so, in their case, they don't like Democrats, and automatically assume that Republicans are good, no matter what. That wasn't really a problem until Bush came into power, and my parents and their soviet friends basically started to wholeheartedly support all the same fascist borderline-totalitarian BS that Soviet Union was known for. Now they're all slamming Edward Snowden as being a traitor to their new "motherland," are are all super-paranoid about those muslims coming to steal our freedoms, and are supporting near totalitarian expansions of powers and military as a result. I swear, it's as if they don't care about what the government does, as long as it doesn't use the words they don't like 

He sold me the deed for his property in exchange for something of my own. Why didn't he have absolute dominion over his property? A better question, why does some other entity calling itself government claim to have absolute dominion over that property? What gave government that right? It sounds like the right of a king or some other thing we have long decided was illegitimate and immoral.
(P.S. I can supply my own standing armies, or defense/protection systems, if needed).


It's not below, just different. You believe that maintaining land in pristine condition is in the interest of the regulator. I believe maintaining the land in pristine condition is in the interest of the landowner. The regulator's incentive is his paycheck, which doesn't really change much based on how well he regulates, and is only threatened if he does a really bad job. The land owner's incentive is the loss of value of his own property. The owner wants to keep the value up, either because he lives on that land, or wants to sell it later. I believe I mentioned that, as crumbs would say "in the real world," the reason we have so many issues with resource extraction companies ruining the land they mine is because they only get leases for that land, not ownership. So, they can do whatever they want with the land, as long as they stay within the regulations that their own lawyers wrote up and their own lobbyists pushed through congress, and when they are done screwing the place up, they just give it back to the government, and task it with cleaning up their mess. If governments actually sold those companies that land, and even charged them property taxes, then it would be in the company's best interest to either maintain the land, or to clean it up, so that they can resell it, recoup their initial costs, and get rid of the property tax burden. It all really comes down to incentives.



How were they there before, if most of them haven't even been there more than 40 years ago? It's just a group of people forming an organization, and the organization, run and owned by that group of people, is claiming dominion. So all I have to do to claim dominion over your property is just to get hired by that group. No hard work, toil, time, and savings necessary. Doesn't seem very right. As for revolutions, wars cost money. I am really hoping that bitcoin will deprive those organizations that wage war of money needed to sustain them.


So, a group of people, calling themselves government, can arbitrarily claim dominion over things as long as they feel it's worth controlling? So, if I were to create a really awesome and fancy Barbie doll that was really valued, some arbitrary random individuals can just step in and say, "Uh, this is a worthwhile resource. We know we didn't have anything to do with creating it, and haven't had any ownership of it before, but now we do, just because we say so." Why is that even remotely a good thing?


*sigh* You are conflating "I get charged for something, and then that money gets spent on whatever,"  with "I get charged for something, and then also get charged for a lot of other somethings, while only getting the first thing I was charged for." A landlord is forcing you to pay for the property you reside on. Nothing more. What that landlord does with that money afterwards is their business. Your rent bill is "Property Rental + Building Maintenance + Utilities." It's not "Property Rental + Building Maintenance + Utilities + Miss Frederick's Health Bills + Hired guns for that personal war I'm having with a gang in another town + My mom's retirement account + Pool for the folks across town + Extra rent for that poor person who would otherwise be homeless." If your bill included that, it'd be ridiculously high, and no one would pay it, because there would be plenty of other landlords who would only charge for rental, maintenance, and utilities, and nothing more. So, to reiterate, I am not saying that when you are, buying an apple, you are also paying for the apple seller's whatever-the-hell-he-wants-to-spend-that-money-on. I am saying that, if the apple seller was a government, he would charge you for the apple, and then ON TOP OF THAT charge you for a ton of other crap that has nothing to do with the apple, and then give you some of those other things you bought, while giving the rest of the things you bought (besides the apple) to some other people. Or, more precisely, he would FORCE you to buy that apple, charging you for a whole shitton of other things on top of the apple, while only giving you the apple. Put another way, it's like you spending the night at a hotel, and then getting a bill for your room,  and on top of that, a bill for some other random people's porno rental and mini fridge use, which I assume you would have objections to. Does this explain it any better?



I'm fine with land use and FAA regulations, where everything above 6 feet (~2 meters) below the surface, and all airspace below 1000 feet, is my property (to start with, anyway). Yes, I'm fine with government existing. I'm just not fine with it intruding on my property. Just as, if an Anarcho-Capitalist "state" was formed somewhere, it's residents would be fine with governments existing and doing their thing around the rest of the world, just as long as it doesn't intrude on their land.


I'm not looking to buy roads, so that's irrelevant. As for the rest, I'd call it observation. If I do surveys, mapping, and defense on my land too, then do we jointly own it? What if a bunch of other people come in and start doing surveys and mapping? Will they become owners too? Doesn't Google own the entire world then? Why doesn't Google charge property taxes for it's worldwide surveying and mapping?


See my hotel sticking you with a bill that includes other people's expenses example. In the case of a landlord, it would be unethical if you had a rental contract with him, saying that you will rent from him for 12 months at $1,000 per month, and he comes in and tries to get more than that from you for luxuries. If he asks, you can just say no. If he threatens to kick you out, that would technically be extortion and breach of contract. Those two things don't need government to be considered unethical.

...Whose family risked everything for exit visas and came to US, a move better known as "Stop whining, or GTFO & find a better place."  I'm happy to say they found what they came for & haven't regretted the move.

Not even going to ask...

Let's stick to the topic here.