I'm at a loss here. Why is this authoritarian decree being cheerleaded on this site?
If I start dumping my soda cans in the trash bin, the City of Seattle will fine me. Instead of complaining about authoritarians, I put them in the recycling bin. No, you won't be personally rewarded for every correct decision you make. Society doesn't owe anyone a gold star for not doing the wrong thing.
http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/judge-seat...
That aside, I think a smarter solution is taxing the actual thing you don't want (carbon in the air via a carbon tax) rather than second order things (gasoline cars).
It's much more effective. For example, if your Tesla is being powered by coal, you're doing almost nothing for the environment by switching to electric. So we need to set up the incentives thoughtfully, rather than being reactionary.
This is a peculiarity of Washington state. In much of the US, and the world, once your garbage is on the curb, there is zero expectation of privacy.
(And yes, I agree that we want to punish the real externality, which can be done by taxing, or banning coal, petroleum...)
However, forcing a switch to electric, without banning fossil fuels would still be a net gain - an electric vehicle powered by fossil fuels produces fewer GHGs per mile driven then a gasoline one.
In general, an externality is something which happens to an unrelated third party due to some activity. An example of a positive externality is if someone waters their grass using a sprinkler, and there's enough excess spray from that sprinkler to keep your flowers sufficiently watered as well. A negative externality is, well, pollution: A truck drives by, belching toxic gasses, and you get to breathe them.
The problem with externalities is that they're not priced into the activity, because the cost is not borne by the person doing the thing which causes the externality. The owner of the truck which belched fumes near you isn't going to pay for your next asthma attack. Therefore, there's no incentive to stop doing those externality-causing activities, so they continue to happen.
The other half of the market failure at the heart of pollution is game theory, in this case a Prisoners' Dilemma: Say a company wants to stop polluting, but it can't be the only one, because not polluting is more expensive than polluting, so if it's the only one to stop, it gets out-competed. Thus we have the cooperate-defect choice: Cooperation means agreeing to not pollute as much, and then taking the steps to reduce pollution, and defection means agreeing with your fingers crossed, and then not reducing pollution at all. The best strategy for any individual actor in this system is to defect while everyone else cooperates, so you get to be the big economic winner in a cleaner environment because all the other suckers cooperated and reduced their pollution.
So. What's the solution? We need an entity which can make the polluters internalize the costs of pollution, so they're more likely to want to stop polluting for real, and can punish defectors who say they want to stop polluting and then don't. That entity, something which can levy and enforce punishments to pursue a policy, is a government, no matter what else it's called, and it can do those things because it's not bound to the same incentive structures which caused the market failure.
That clearing price has absolutely nothing to do with the cost to produce a good - especially if that cost is borne by someone not involved in the transaction.
The only people who think otherwise are Marxists - who believe that, on an equal playing field, the cost of a good is solely determined by the costs to produce it.
My point is, these things are unknowable and uncertain and the state should stop issuing these authoritarian decrees and let the technology catch up and work itself out and then maybe we can collectively as a democratic society vote on and decide what we want the laws to be in 2040.
How is this any different? The government is not blind, they can make projections and at this point the must have concluded that alternatives are likely to be ready in time.
Plus cities are moving to ban ICE cars anyway due to particulate pollution instead of CO2.
If in 20 years battery-powered cars are still not feasible for most people, do you think the French government will forget that they have power to modify or repeal the law?
If the goal looks more and more impossible as time goes on it can be adjusted, the more important aspect is making it a national goal in the first place. It's not much different than the US and CAFE standards, there's something quite powerful about a far off mandate that can make the impossible gradually doable.
Upon which the regulations will be adjusted accordingly.
> My point is, these things are unknowable and uncertain and the state should stop issuing these authoritarian decrees and let the technology catch up and work itself out and then maybe we can collectively as a democratic society vote on and decide what we want the laws to be in 2040.
You mean like by the election they just had?
So you seem to be advocating for wide, sweeping bans and regulations, and then working backwards if the technology doesn't pan out.
I'm advocating the opposite: tax credits, incentives, etc. to move the technology forward and when it's ready, perhaps make the big shift to all electric.
> You mean like by the election they just had?
I guess we differ on the authority that elections that for out should have. But that is a more ideological issue, so I'll concede the point.
If people are pissed about the upcoming regulations, they can vote in a new government that'll revoke it. They've got several five year periods in which to do so. From what I know of French politics, this ban shouldn't be very controversial.
> Please stop perpetuating this myth- started by Eric Raymond and happily encouraged by SV "thought leaders"- that hackers must, by definition, be laissez-faire capitalists who love Ayn Rand and treat breaking laws as a noble goal in and of itself. I do none of those things, because I recognize that many times regulations are vital for ensuring human health and happiness, and think that free-for-all capitalism leads mostly to misery for all but a few in the plutocracy. "We can do beter" implies not settling for a world like that.
> Other people don't have to agree with my politics, but if they want to say I'm "not a hacker" because of that, they can take their very-politically-motivated prescriptivism and... well, I got told by dang the other day and I'm trying to cut down on the angry HN posts because of it, but you get the idea.
I implied none of the above. It's not because you believe in bottom to top action that it means you are an anarchist, and not many libertarians want to see the actual State gone, so don't caricature things either.
There's a lot of ground to cover between "the State banning stuff on a whim" and "Doing things in the dark by breaking the law". Let's not pretend every action is binary.
So yeah, I'd say that historically, many (albeit not all) hackers have felt like we can do better than a system built on force/violence.
The problem is, too many people assume that seeking such a model rules out any kind of collective / communal action or coordination. That's just a strawman though. People can, and do, collaborate on a voluntary basis all the time. What is needed is to encourage and facilitate more of that, not seek more application of Ultimate State powers.
And I would think that somebody who considers themselves a hacker would look at a problem like that and think "Yeah, let's get too it and find a way to do this", not think "meh, let's just put up some huge State apparatus and call it good".
The transition to Electric vehicles is progressively happening already, it's not like nobody is working on it. There are still numerous problems with electric cars that won't be solved in any reasonable timeframe unless there are major breakthroughs. So a "ban" is easy to do, but it does not make the technical challenges go away by itself.
It wasn't always like this. At one time there were a LOT more of traditional hacker-mindset types here, the ones who held to ideals like:
Mistrust authority.
Always yield to the Hands-On Imperative.
Promote decentralization.
I'd go as far as to say that "left" and "right" don't even really mean anything anymore. Those terms now are just pejoratives that refer to a perceived group that "doesn't agree with me". I mean, who in this day and age has a strong stake in the preservation of the French monarchy?
I can see that being the case in the US, and in other countries with de jure or de facto bipartidism. But left and right still retain their economic meaning.
For instance, see ESR's rewrite of the Jargon File, which was condemned and disavowed by the actual old-school hackers precisely because it injected so much libertarian thinking where previously there was none.
Nobody is saying that all "old-skool hackers" were libertarians, or that the "hacker ethic" is composed of nothing but those three things. But as long as I've been involved in what you could call "the hacker community" - a period of time that dates back more than 20 years now - I've observed that many self-described "hackers" did, indeed, adopt somewhat (albeit not exclusively) libertarian attitudes, and did adhere to principles like the ones mentioned above.
Whether the mind-set of self-described "hackers" has changed over the years, or whether this site is simply made up of a lower percentage of "hackers" now is a question I can't really answer. Or maybe it's a combination of both. But in either case, it seems clear to me that there has been a shift in the overall tone of the community here, towards more acceptance of authoritarian approaches.
And frankly I find that disturbing, but what can ya do?
20 years isn't nearly long enough to cover the phenomenon I'm describing. Part of my thesis is that, starting in the 80's, a vocal minority began attempting to redefine the "hacker ethos" to conform with their specific libertarian views, and that in the 90s, venture capitalists and SV "thought leaders" eagerly co-opted and encouraged this redefinition so that their drones would oppose any regulations that might get in the way of profit. So the fact that you've seen lots of libertarians in hacker spaces from the 90's onward doesn't disprove my point.
> And frankly I find that disturbing, but what can ya do?
You could start by realizing that calling your opponent's views "disturbing" does not automatically give you any moral weight. For example, I find it disturbing that people
- equate "banning plastic bags" with tyranny
- refuse to accept that coordination problems and externalities are a real thing and that not only is government the most efficient way to fix these issues, but, empirically, the only one that reliably works at all
- are fine with widespread environmental destruction, for the sake of avoiding things they think are tyranny but really aren't
but I just have to accept that you don't care about any of that.
Or you may be mis-understanding the positions that actual libertarian leaning people hold, or at least painting with an overly broad brush. That is, there probably is at least one self-identified "libertarian" who represents each of those positions, but I will argue that none of those is an accurate depiction of what it means to hold libertarian ideals in any general sense.
Part of my thesis is that, starting in the 80's, a vocal minority began attempting to redefine the "hacker ethos" to conform with their specific libertarian views,
May be. But at least some of the anti-authority stuff as part of the hacker ethos dates back to the 1960's and the origins of this "scene", at least if I'm remembering some bits of Levy's Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution correctly.