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Coronavirus has convinced me that most of the world (and the USA in particular) totally lack the ability and will to act boldly and collectively in response to an emergency. The Climate Change folks were making this exact point for years but I only started believing it after seeing government after government fail to control the pandemic. Most governments were either too slow or too cowardly to make and enforce major societal behavior changes for the good of everyone.

We should consider ourselves lucky that it was “only” a moderately-deadly disease, and not something worse. I can imagine government’s reaction to a space alien invasion: Day 100, after most cities are destroyed, government is still weighing the pros and cons of taking action, and debating whether or not to write a resolution condemning the alien attack.

It's not just the public health measures thethey were bad at. After more than six months, the US still could not do better than direct payments to individuals and businesses. During that time, a competent organization would have found targeted and efficient ways to stimulate the economy. All the Feds know how to do at this point is dump cash.

The political friction is so high that the political institutions literally produce smoke and fire before doing anything meaningfully useful.

> We should consider ourselves lucky that it was “only” a moderately-deadly disease, and not something worse.

A lot of people think that the governmental reactions are slow and lame because covid isn’t a disease morbid enough to threaten civilization, as something like a full blown ebola pandemic for example could be. Which is probably true to extent.

But I agree 100% with you and people are crazy to think that governments would somehow suddenly be competent in handling a worse disaster than covid, given the complete (almost) worldwide failure to curb this plague. From initial downplaying and silencing scientists and doctors in China, to rise of anti-mask and anti-vaccine crowds and even voices in governments, to our incapability as a global world to handle the production and logistics of the vaccinations... when a disaster worse than covid strikes in the future, it will be the same shitshow, only with higher stakes

> Coronavirus has convinced me that most of the world (and the USA in particular) totally lack the ability and will to act boldly and collectively in response to an emergency.

Hmm. My opinion is that dealing with free agents is difficult and governments don't have enough tools to encourage a free society to act in their best interests (let alone society's). Especially when there are numerous bad actors that have a lot of power.

New Zealand and Australia seem to have done well enough. Though I accept the physical isolation of those countries makes it politically easier to make harder decisions.

Vietnam is a good example of handling the virus in a non island nation.

The government is inept, and will often do symbolic token gestures. Plastic is a big case in point. They are going for useless plastic bag bans, and plastic straw bans instead of the real issues.

Clothes made from recycled plastic bottles (yay recycling(?) are shedding fibers into our waters as they are washed. How is that ok?

Now just to be clear, one thing I saw in the US which I found pretty disturbing, was those small plastic bags used for fruits. Sometimes they were so low quality that they visibly shed little chunks of plastic. I'm fully behind banning those.

But as flawed as government is, I guess it's still better than nothing.

> They are going for useless plastic bag bans

Plastic ban bags have made a huge difference in many countries. In much of the developing world, it used to be the case that discarded plastic bags were lying everywhere, flying along, stuck en masse to any barbed-wire fence, etc. Once the bans came in, the level of such pollution has visibly dropped.

Indeed. Straws were symbolic and their ban has little effect, but the bag bans are amazing and in some countries the plastic cup bans are almost as effective at reducing trash on the street.

There are environmentally beneficial effects to these but there are also significant effects on overall litter. It's like when soda can manufacturers switched their tab system to one that doesn't get discarded.

This! Plastic bag bans have been a massive quality of life improvement in nearly every city I visit regularly.

I am not sure what the impact of plastic straw bans has been. Beyond just the symbolism, however, they would have been a useful step towards reconsidering the use of all single use plastic if COVID hadn’t picked up when it did.

i totally agree. in Ireland we had a lot of grumbling about it at the time but the impact on plastic pollution in the streets and fields and roads has been massive.

plastic straw ban has little impact mostly because people tend to leave their drinks in the fast food restaurant rather than take them home. it't not as obvious that it's helping and aren't the cups coated in plastic?

There should be government regulations (perhaps including more regulation of drinking water). But the torturous political process that is currently required to enact those regulations is a good thing and the gist of your post, "just sweep aside all the nihilistic whiners stonewalling and fix the problem," is the wrong approach. My perspective is liberal: there are no good, simple solutions, there's no such thing as a "general will," people don't agree, have good reasons to not agree, and therefore the political squabbling, as tiring as it is, is healthy.

Buried within your perspective is, I believe, the incorrect and somewhat dangerous idea that there is a way to harmonize society if only we'd grant the right powers to the right people. I think civilization is best thought of as a tragic compromise and attempts to make it something else never end well.

None of that is to say you're wrong to advocate for more and better regulations. Only that there are valid reasons to argue for fewer regulations or to be skeptical about the government's ability to regulate this or that.

In the US at least, buying organic won't necessarily save you. Whether something's actually organic is highly dependent on whether the farmers and grocers actually adhere to the guidelines.

You could theoretically be audited, but I never saw or heard of a single audit in the 4-5 years I worked in produce at a national grocery chain. Granted, this was over 10 years ago. But given the regulatory climate in over those years, I would be shocked if enforcement was made stricter.

That's also ignoring the fact that non-organic farming began in part as a way to more cheaply and efficiently grow food, thereby supporting a larger population. It might be hard to unwind that clock simply because of the food demands of the current human population.

> But if the last year has taught us anything, it is that any government action is likely to be met with equal and opposite reaction (in the west), a reaction that seems to stem in large part and primarily from a section of society that lives by the adage "Après moi, le déluge", and secondarily from the section of the populace that has been spoon-fed conspiracy theories (by the former?) about the government and its nefarious nature.

I think this is perhaps a vast oversimplification, driven by a desire to attribute to nilhilism and idiocy/impressionability what may actually be deeper philosophical differences, held sincerely by intelligent people.

It seems pretty common these days to ascribe people's differing philosophical viewpoints to misinformation, conspiracy theories, foreign influence, or whatever.

It's possible that reasonable, intelligent people, just like you, simply disagree on the best ways to address these problems, and that it's not as simple as that they've been "spoon-fed conspiracy theories".

(Source: I'm one of the people in that camp. Government regulation is one tool in the drawer, but it's not a very good one for causing sweeping societal change, IMO. Tesla, for example, did vastly more for the move to automotive electrification than all of the previous US government attempts up to that point.)

> Government regulation is one tool in the drawer, but it's not a very good one for causing sweeping societal change

So you at least acknowledge a role for the government in this. Just as I acknowledge that private companies can have a positive impact. Maybe what we both need to do is to isolate the hardline extremists in each camp (people that can only see government solutions in one, and people that can only see private solutions in the other), and find rational solutions to the problem. Which is sort of what I want to accomplish with this thread, sorry if it was over the top provocative.

> So you at least acknowledge a role for the government in this.

No.

I mean, "attempt to kill everyone who doesn't agree precisely with me, and take over the whole world and run it precisely the way I see fit" is also a tool in the drawer. Acknowledging the fact that some people choose to take that path, and that it is a tool that this tool-using species uses sometimes, does not in any way signal my acceptance or endorsement of such a choice.

I don't think that everyone that is entirely opposed to government-based solutions to the problem (or even entirely opposed to the concept of a government or a state in general) is a "hardline extremist".

Aha, I see. Well, extremism is a relative term, depending on environment. In certain cryptocurrency circles I'm sure your stance is normal, in society at large it's rather extreme though, as is equating "kill everyone who doesn't agree with me" with government action in any way.

The problem with this line of argument from my point of view is you oppose and obstruct highly needed government action on principle, without providing an alternative solution. The plan to offer billionaires a new start on other planets doesn't count as an alternative, sorry.

But as mentioned before, if you have an alternative solution to the problem of the constantly accumulating toxins in the environment that subtracts government action from the equation up your sleeve, I'm all ears.

I really appreciate that you’re open to a conversation, it made for an interesting thread.

I can offer an alternate solution to accumulating toxins, which may or may not be comprehensive: Property rights.

Pollution is a tragedy of the commons situation. If people owned, not just land, but whatever encompasses the pollution, there would be incentive not to pollute their own property.

So my proposed solution would require defining property in a way that includes ownership of the pollution.

Government enforces property rights, so this does rely partly on government.

Alright, let’s say it was possible to track all pollution to its polluter, and you could assign ownership. Then what? Tax or fine the polluters? Isn’t that basically the same as regulating the polluting industries in the first place?

> Well, extremism is a relative term, depending on environment

Sure, but "hardline extremist" means something in particular, and is not a generic term to refer to any outlying behavior or view.

You can't label someone a "hardline extremist" (with all of the associated connotation that entails) for having reasonable views shared by many millions of others, and then pedal it back with "it's a relative term".

> is you oppose and obstruct highly needed government action

Nobody's obstructing anything, first off, but I absolutely oppose action that's undertaken at gunpoint (or threat of same). There are vastly better ways (from a standpoint of morality, efficiency, and effectiveness) of getting people to act in coordination in their own interests than threatening them with guns and cages, which is the only authority a government has to achieve things.

> I don't think that everyone that is entirely opposed to government-based solutions to the problem (or even entirely opposed to the concept of a government or a state in general) is a "hardline extremist".

It sort of does though... for the purpose of this discussion the spectrum runs from: all-government-regulated to all-individually-accomplished. So basically falling into either extreme of the spectrum (which by definition declines any other mid-point solution) is exactly the definition of “hardline extremist”.

Arguing otherwise seems to me more like you haven’t made your peace with it.

...in my personal opinion such views still have a very valid role to play in the discussion, but any successful solution will lie somewhere in the middle.

> for the purpose of this discussion the spectrum runs from: all-government-regulated to all-individually-accomplished.

I've spotted the issue. This is a false dichotomy. The government is just an abstraction over a group, like any other; literally nobody who is suggesting that government-based solutions aren't good are advocating for individual accomplishment outside of groups.

The government has no hands and no brain; all actions undertaken under color of the state are carried out by "individual" humans.

Nobody's saying that coordination amongst people in large groups isn't required.

If there is a 'spectrum', it's "individuals" vs "groups", or it's "compulsory groups, on threat of violence" (the state) vs "voluntary association" (how almost every other group in our society works - and 100% of the effective ones).

You can't meaningfully threaten world-class, creative, hardworking people into being maximally efficient and effective. You need a carrot, not a stick, and the only solutions the state provides are based on their ability to print cash (already not a problem if you're effective and productive), or a stick.

So what tool would you rather use, rather than our special-purpose tool for collective action?

How is "don't have the government regulate anything and hope that individuals spontaneously organize into a solution with no input" any different than not doing anything at all?

>I don't think that everyone ...entirely opposed to the concept of a government or a state in general is a "hardline extremist".

Oh. Oddly, most people do find anarchy an extreme position.

Government is not an effective tool for societal change in democracies because, by definition, they require society to want those changes. For instance, although homosexuality has been a political issue for decades, gay marriage was never legalized until a majority of the population supported it. Private enterprise provided support for "significant others" long before this happened. Private enterprise is on the leading edge of many changes today: How many genders can you identify as on Facebook? ...how about at the DMV?

Tesla and Apple did everything /s

This giants are building on the back of research done in Universities all over the world and Tesla benefited by government money (so how the f** Tesla gets the praises and the government gets the reverse m the exact funcking thing with God, you get ill blame it on the Devil or yourself, you get saved by doctors and science then go thank God because of the miracle he did)

All companies had the incentives, only Tesla delivered so completely.

Government, and Elon, and our whole system were needed to make it happen. Seems like “both” arguments are mostly right, but overlook key information

Probably both are needed, just makes no sense that Tesla fanboys would try to spin a governments are bad while Tesla is sucking a lot of money from many governments programs around the world and the green electricity was made possible by the green programs and taxes on polution.

Good point. And perhaps government could learn from this that taxes and incentives are their most powerful tools to fight global warming. A carbon tax (which starts small but over the years becomes punitive) would be the most powerful move of all

Government regulation is precisely the thing that accelerates societal change. It's maybe the sharpest tool for that. Remember CFCs and the ozone layer? If you manage to point a government in the right direction it's a juggernaut. The problem is that by design it's hard to steer.

> Tesla, for example, did vastly more for the move to automotive electrification than all of the previous US government attempts up to that point.

A tax on fossil fuels raising the price multiple fold would quickly align everyone’s incentives to create less pollution. The parameters of the world don’t necessarily allow for the time required for market participants to come up with solutions or care about future generations.

The difference is a tax on fossil fuels reduces quality of life for sufficient people that exist now. Therefore it’s unpopular, and not even possible to enact unless in a dictatorship or the populace accepts the idea that they need to reduce their consumption to benefit future generations.

CA has the most expensive gas. It's extremely unpopular, yet everyone in the state pays it.

What does that have to do with anything? Unless consumption is curbed to the levels required to affect environmental change, the tax is too low.

Please tell me when in history it was companies leading the way into better working conditions, equal access to healthcare, better representation in government?

I am also interested how you propose that sweeping societal change can come from something different than a elected representative government by the people, for the people?

Tesla got a large amount of government subsidies and tax incentives, both federally and at the state level. Tesla would have gone bankrupt many years ago without the government.

https://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hy-musk-subsidies-201...

But if the last year has taught us anything, it is that any government action is likely to be met with equal and opposite reaction

We have yet to see government action that was thoughtful, well communicated, consistent, and devoid of politics. If the government could accomplish such a thing I see no reason why it would need to be met with equal and opposite reaction.

There will always be single issue voters and reactionaries who amplify agendas no deeper than a one line slogan.

> Water contamination is one of the main day-to-day sources of health hazards that people face today, the others being air and food contamination.

I'll second this. I'm on the path at spending about $20 per month for fairly clean water and $20 a month for the air. I haven't solved the food contamination problem as I didn't have my sights on it but I'll include it now (I have been trying to cook at home more over the past two years, so maybe I've been taking baby steps here without realizing it).

As for the government, re:regulation, I'm trying to shy away from the politics because (at least for America) it's burdened down by identity politics instead of policy focused discussions.

As for me and my house, we're doing our part to bare the costs of personal responsibility.

You could not bath in the river Rhein in Germany in the 1970s and 1980s. That changed through the political green movement and the institutionalization of their ideas. Now you can bath again in those rivers, and drink water from a tap without being afraid - unfortunately, a lot of producing industries have moved on to greener, cheaper pastures, where ecologic and environmental, let alone human protection is not really at a high standard.

The approach to deal with the "Après moi, le déluge" and conspiracy people is a tricky one. Only partly in can be covered with an economic (private jet tax, rejection of clinic entry/travel to people who are not vaccinated) and educational approach - but we are far from being close to an optimum here. Democracies need educated and politically mature people in order to be stable in the long term, and strong institutions that can bring forward a healthy discourse.

Small nitpick: I think the verb in this context is "bathe", bath is the place. One of those "joys" of learning English as a second language.

Nitpick pile on: Bath (capital B) is a place. A bath is optionally an abbreviation of bath-tub, or some sort of past tense conjugation of bathe 'I had a bath' that I am insufficiently skilled in grammer to identify.

"I had a bath in Bath" is ambiguous as to whether you previously owned a person sized water container, or made use of the city's famous roman bathing facilities.

Baths can be had and also taken. Unfortunately “I took a bath in Bath.” is triply ambiguous in that it might mean that you stole plumbing, that you cleaned yourself via water immersion or that you lost a significant amount of money.

Without further context, people will gravitate towards the commonly used meaning, so it would typically be interpreted as “cleaned yourself via water immersion”.

Past tense and past participle of bathe is bathed.

One of the great things about English (and other languages) is that you don't need to speak or write with perfect grammar and usage in order to be understood.

I understand the irritation with errors though as they read like visual noise.

I like 'nitpick' as a verb though, and also 'go over with a fine-toothed comb' - a method for both literal and figurative nit-picking.

There needs to be a better way to correct a government agency that isn't doing what it's supposed to besides waiting for the next election, because that doesn't seem to work.

Of course there is. Write to your representatives on relevant committees and indicate, in specific ways, how the agency is not representing the interests of your community. Encourage other members of your social group to do the same. There are also meta representatives, like the administrators of political party you identify with. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp4h-3vQafk

I pretty much assume that any letter I would ever write to my representative goes directly to the shredder unread if it doesn’t come with at least a $1000 check.

A letter writing campaign or endorsement from a powerful lobbying civil society group is more likely to get attention.

Oof I think you couldn't be more wrong on this point. I think environmental contamination is the issue that most strongly can unite both left and right.

Believing more in conspiracy is actually a great reason to mistrust the water supply. Given that men's testosterone and sperm rates have been falling for decades (with no cause known, but best hypothesis is chemicals in environment)[1], I particularly expect there to be a common ground.

After all, Alex Jones (right-wing, conspiracy theory nut) has been concerned about a herbicide named atrazine that arguably can change the gender of frogs (he mistakenly said turn them gay). "A 2010 Hayes study concluded that atrazine rendered 75% of male frogs sterile and turned one in 10 into females,"[2] and atrazine is just one of many such man-made "xenoestrogens" [3].

In fact, I'm a bit shocked how slow both sides are to start caring about this issue.

1 - https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/10/sperm-cou... 2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrazine#Amphibians 3 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoestrogen#Common_environmen...