EU agrees on total ban of bee-harming pesticides

The EU decided that having a single standard port to charge a smartphone was a good idea and in the long run, save a little bit of money and a little bit on electronic waste since people would be able to go to any store and purchase for sale 1 Standard Smartphone Charger™ and 1 Standard Smartphone Cable™.

Then they conferred their preference to the Smartphone Industry™ and said "Okay, you guys sort it out. Pick a standard, incorporate it going forward, or we will bring down the regulatory hammer and not even we want to do that."

At that point USB was proving to be more or less a de facto standard anyway, so the industry said okay, settled on that, and somehow Apple got away with being able to just bundle in an adapter for the Standard Smartphone Cable™. The benefit of this approach rather than the EU swinging the regulatory hammer is it leaves the industry free to update it, say from micro-USB to USB-C, as improvements come along, rather than the EU decreeing that all smartphones use micro-USB which would be Terrible. Thus we have a Standard by Agreement, rather than a Standard by Law and life goes on pretty okay.

For good or for ill, the EU has a massive amount of soft power in their lawmaking alone with repercussions that go beyond the 28 (soon to be 27 again) member states. Any smartphone designer is free to take their phone and go home, but that's a lot of money to leave on the table and its not like anybody particularly liked the old crappy connectors of the past.

‘Almost every household is believed to have gathered a number of old chargers – estimated to generate more than 51 000 tons of electronic waste per year in the EU.’ [1]

[1] http://ec.europa.eu/growth/sectors/electrical-engineering/re...

Same with not creating bee-killing pesticides. The markets created them and never stopped despite them being extremely harmful to the environment. But who cares, under capitalism profits matter above all so let's continue producing them.

DDT - May not have been anywhere near as bad as first thought, and replaced in part by these compounds, which themselves are being banned now. Also there's some argument that extensive use of DDT was key to ridding the US of malaria, we banned it worldwide, taking out one of the weapons in mosquito control. One could make an argument that banning DDT has killed people b/c increased incidence of malaria. It's hotly debated, but it's not a bonkers view, and most of those deaths would be in the 3rd world.

Cadmium Paints - Yes and no, artists still say it's not the same, and the replacements in industrial scale aren't always as good on a variety of fronts (https://www.bloomberg.com/features/2018-quest-for-billion-do...). Also not sure they're as affordable.

CFCs (then some HCFCS) - Good thing to ban without a doubt, but replacements are more expensive. The ACs made with the new gasses are more expensive, which has a real human cost: (https://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/business/23cool.html)

I'm not making an argument for or against this particular ban or any of the bans above. I am making an argument that these bans are not without costs, and will almost certainly come with trade-offs. Some of those trade-offs will be overcome, others are much harder, and the short run will likely have some pain in the form of higher prices.

Lets say for example we got rid of all pesticides/herbicides. Could we generate enough food to feed the world? How much more expensive would staples like rice and wheat become? How much more expensive would high-nutrition fruits and veggies become? It's possible that someday get over it, but it's not good to minimize the practical drawbacks.

I think we've gotten to a point as a society where _any_ risk of something bad is too much risk, so we ban anything that presents risk. But we're left with things where either the risk is unknown, or that are bad in other ways. The average popular discussion of environmental/health risks often neglects to ask, "what might be an acceptable risk", I think sometimes the risk is worth it.

Similar hysteria has killed maybe the best hope we have for carbon-free baseline power load (nuclear power) because people were afraid of radiation. Coal power plants kill more people per year than all nuclear accidents to date ever will (http://reason.com/blog/2016/04/26/more-deaths-from-coal-poll...).

We shouldn't do anything as a knee-jerk reaction against things that look bad because there are charismatic harms (bees maybe dying), without considering the larger problems (humans having more expensive food, or in the case of DDT, dying of diseases).

Thanks California!

BTW Most of these compounds ARE tested for safety, just in a far more limited way. Proving things never cause harm is an entirely different bar.

As it stands, male sperm rates have declined by over 50% in the last 30 years, it's only a matter of time until people switch to a more cautious attitude.

In Switzerland 'the right' is very social oriented and partly for legal weed even. In Austria even the left uses phrases like 'immigrant issues' and discusses 'unleft' ways to solve it.

Most of the world doesn't have a 2 party system. So there is not such a strong distinction between the individual parties.

https://www.politicalcompass.org https://8values.github.io

(there’s more)

Classical Liberalism is sometimes considered left wing because it originated as a response to aristocracy, and alongside their preference for free markets (which originally meant markets free from economic rent, not free from regulation) over the rigidly hierarchical model of feudalism with it’s caste system, some founders were broadly socialistic in their thinking.

It’s somewhat ironic capitalism emerged in England where it began as a massive social engineering effort by the central authorities, putting large parts of the population in precariousness and poverty. “Laissez-faire was planned, planning was not.” To quote economic historian Karl Polanyi.

“Capitalism” is nowadays often conflated with “markets”, which can be found in about every agricultural society. Capitalism was coined by Marx and he meant basically a society where the population can be divided in two classes: those who own capital (capital = means of (industrial/mass) production = machines, factories, things-that-make-things, etc) and those who don’t. Those who own capital make their income out of profit, those without have to sell their labor for a wage to the capitalist. Remember that mass production dropped the prices of goods considerably, so artisanal production went out of the window. Basically the inequality in potential to make money resulted in a strong reduction in individual freedom for large parts of the population. This is where the paradoxal dichotomy of liberty and equality becomes clear, where equality in it’s purest sense can be considered the maximum amount of individual liberty for the materially worst off in society — freeing the individual from the constraints put upon him by his environment. That’s the same as saying everyone gets exactly the same. Wonder how well that works in the real world...

Note that “Socialism” is often equated with Marxism, which actually came rather late to the party.

Many new school “Classical Liberals” were created by marginalist economic theory, which was a response to the rising popularity of Marxist justifications for wealth distribution. It’s just as nonsensical, sadly, and it seems we’re stuck with it.

“Keyensianism” is another horribly misunderstood term. Keynesianism as historically known was actually developed by Paul Samuelson, and is based upon economic models that were published by him before Keynes published his major works. Keynes was a classical liberal with a streak of conservatism which despised Marxism. Keynesianism is nowadays equated with “money printing” which is not at all what he argued.

I also recently read Harari’s Sapiens, where at one point he makes the following distinction, which I thought was neat:

* Liberal humanism which holds that the individual, and liberty of the individual, is the most important priority.

* Socialist humanism which holds a notion of humanity as collective and for which equality is the main priority.

* Evolutionary humanism, which holds that Sapiens might either degenerate as a species, or evolve into “super-humans”

Calling Nazi’s “humanist” might seem strange, but in some wicked sense they were, they cared for humanity as some kind of meta organism that could evolve or devolve. Thankfully modern biology put all that to bed.

It’s interesting to note that humanism is based on the notion of “natural rights” which is another way of saying “rights given by God”. People often don’t realize just how religious the axioms of their preferred moral framework are.

(Bit long and tangential probably...)

Sure these websites could just find better solutions for that, however how it was and is that cookie warnung is just to common to even give it a second thought as average user.

This. When I was a kid in California a quick trip in summer and it would be carnage on the window and grill. Now I can drive for hours and not get a single bug. Part of this could be increasing traffic. But it is really dramatic and scary.

But memory is unreliable, and anecdotes are not data

I remember thinking the same last year and the year before, but it gets visibly worse without question.

And yes it's not only bees

Still happening to me every time in Germany :( That's why I usally were glasses (otherwise small flies get in my eyes).

Anecdotes aren't helping anything.

I just heard this in a recent TED podcast that this is what some people were doing :)

(The building and wall looked very British to my British eyes, but a Google image search by the URL brought that article straight up.)

It seems a lot of bee studies only look at honey bees, but there are some 4,000 types of native bees in North America, some of which are better pollinators then the non-native European honey bee and secrete silk instead of honey. Yet our urban spaces don't do a great job of providing good habitats for native species to thrive. So that's a least part of the solution to the bee problem, not just banning a pesticide.

I could go on but just check out this great SciFri episode on this topic: https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/beyond-the-hive-the-w.... And do your part by supporting your local, native bee species.