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Comment by vorpalhex | Hacker News Reader

One of the issues this has missed is whether consent is needed.

Put another way:

Bob lives on 200 acres and wants to construct an apartment building on that land. Nobody can really see it, he has agreed to provide parking and services, etc.

Sally owns a small residential house in a historic neighborhood. She wants to tear down her house and make a narrow four-story apartment building. She can't provide any room for parking and depends fully on city utilities.

Sally has more impact on her neighbors than Bob does. It's reasonable for Bob to merely have a question of general freedom. Sally on the other hand is clearly impacting her neighbors - and not every neighbor could do what Sally wants to do.

Some freedoms can impact the freedoms of other people, and that is when the consent of those other people is needed.

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Funny how we interpret these situations differently: Bob is going to destroy wildlife habitat, which we should treat as a public good. Sally is going to provide additional housing in a dense urban area, which we should also treat as a public good.

My ideal would be significantly less interference and oversight for Sally than Bob.

Who says the 200 acres isn't farm land which already doesn't support wildlife?

And Sally may be providing more housing, but she is also making significantly more income and can do so subsidized by her neighbors. Her housing is also likely to go to higher income residents as it would be new housing in an expensive area - and those residents will have less space and no yard.

> And Sally may be providing more housing, but she is also making significantly more income and can do so subsidized by her neighbors. Her housing is also likely to go to higher income residents as it would be new housing in an expensive area - and those residents will have less space and no yard.

That sounds like a completely backwards way of thinking to me. Sally is increasing the community's prosperity (and tax revenue) while consuming a small amount of a limited public resource (land); if her actions mean people are willing to live in a smaller space that's something to encourage, and the opposite being subsidized by her neighbours. Meanwhile Bob is consuming 200 acres and not giving the community much to show for it.

Choosing to recognize the causal impact of one's actions of one type on another's freedom of some type is itself a political decision. Being able to argue a causal chain of one action to another impact does not make it the sole narrative -- only a more likely narrative than some other non-coherent chain.

Your choice of raising your child under one religion directly impacts the cultural environment my child enters into at a minimum, if not the outright practices my child would be forced to participate in. The US government recognizes a freedom of religion and therefore does not recognize any impact from that freedom as an infringement on others.

1. Have all these limitations been known to Sally when she bought her house?

2. Do Bob's rights change if someone builds a historic house next to his lot? Or it would be fair to say that Bob came here first so everyone else may just gtfo?

That was sort of the purpose of making his lot so large in the hypothetical.

But let's change it. Let's say Bob is running a rather large nuclear reactor. Initially this is fine - nobody is around him and nuclear power is very environmentally friendly. However, time goes on, and after a few years Bob and his large homemade nuclear reactor are surrounded by hundreds of brand new but very full preschools all bordering his property.

Do we have a right to ask Bob to stop running his nuclear reactor? Situations change, risk models change. What was originally fine is now a hazard to other people.

The ever-evading part of the brain responsible for ethics tells me that if safety models have changed - like they did for lead, for example - then yes, it's up to Bob to comply.

If, on the other hand, I've built my house next to his plant and now started to complain about the proximity of a potentially dangerous thing next to me - well, in this case Bob was there first.

And then there are all these questions for extra credit like what's gonna happen if Bob wants to put a second plant right next to his current one?

I think that's a great extra credit question.

A real-life version is, Bob's reactor was scheduled to be shut down in a few years, but now he's applied to extend its lifespan by another 20 years. Should that be allowed? If so, are there any conditions under which he should NOT be allowed further extensions?

The other set of questions we need to ask for this extension:

1. How many people depend on Bob's reactor for power?

2. If Bob shuts down, is the replacement something like solar or a coal plant?

3. Design/safety/longevity.

Do we have a right to ask Bob to stop running his nuclear reactor?

If it's the same entity that allowed those preschools to be built next to a nuclear reactor, then absolutely not.

There's a version of this which has actual played out several times in the US: Many motor racing tracks were built decades ago in what was at the time the middle of nowhere. Over time new developments sprung up around these tracks and their residents companied about the noise coming from the race cars. In practice the "we were here first" defense has proven rather weak as many such tracks have been forced to shut down.

RIP to the Polaris Amphitheatre as well.

But now we have Top Golf!

This seems like something that the market could address.

The new neighbors could come together and buy out the racetrack. Take out a mortgage to turn it into an apartment building or something, then sell the building to pay off the mortgage.

If the value to the neighbors of not having a racetrack there is at least as much as the value to the rest of the market of having a racetrack instead of an apartment building, this should be economically viable. If it isn't, isn't that a solid case for leaving the racetrack there?

Value and access to cash. I might value the end of the racetrack at $1million, but only be able to put up $20,000.

What you're really getting at is that the end of the racetrack might increase property values by quite a lot, even if the existing residents don't have the money to make the investment.

But then someone else could do it. Rich investor goes around to everyone in the neighborhood and offers to buy their house for $25,000 over market, contingent on enough people (including the racetrack) agreeing to sell to make it worth their while. Then if that many people sign up, they resell all the properties for a profit now that the racetrack is gone and all the property values have gone up by $50,000 each.

The result is that the people who live there now might not be able to live there after, but that's only because the racetrack is the reason they can afford to live there now. Otherwise the property would have been more than they can afford from the start.

No, what I was getting at was your incorrect statement that the market will make sure whoever values it more wins.

But they do win. They just win by selling their house at a premium to someone else who can resell it for even more once they buy out the racetrack.

Hmmm it's interesting to think about how we'd consider these examples if we had a more relational worldview. Bob's apartment building on that land might not affect any humans. But we live in a more-than-human world. What of the impact on the environment, the diversity of the soil organisms, or the ecological impact? Maybe some rare bird species would have an advocate for them in the form of some ornithology conservationist expert, but what about the endemic soil organism that hasn't yet been described by science?

Ultimately, you could argue, that those things eventually have some level of impact on other humans since we live in such an interconnected world. But why do we have to make the wellbeing of those creatures only justified as valuable by how they impact humans? Isn't the centering of humans in our value system ultimately a political ideology? Why do we take that for granted and prioritize that ideology and not others?

I think the insight I get from practices like the OP article is that all of these axes just capture a little bit more. But there's always gonna be things left out. The risk with political compasses is our tendency to mistake the Map for the Territory

Why do people who live in Sally's city need cars?

It seems like the choice to impose parking minimums on apartment and home owners instead of building train tracks is one that should be weighed according to its externalities.

The problem is: If I build and sell a home with no parking, there's no legal mechanism that can stop the new owner from buying a car anyway, and parking it on the street.

That might be OK if there's physically no on-street parking within walking distance - this is the case in central London, for example. Or if I can convince someone on the council to pass a new law specific to my building.

Roads are a public resource paid for with public money. The idea that you should be able to block housing around you so that you can monopolize a public resource seems disgusting to me - imagine someone wanting to block housing (or public transport) because it would make the nearby publicly-funded pool or art gallery more crowded. (Though I'm sure that does happen).

What if Bob is in a country where people have the freedom to wander around most of Bob's 200 acres?

How does it change the original question?

I admit its not a major point - but I guess I reacted to the idea that "Nobody can really see it".

They don't see it unless they choose to go look at it. I can stand on a step ladder and look over my neighbor's fence. But if I do that then start complaining that the grass in his back yard is too dry and ugly, then who's the asshole? My neighbor for having ugly grass, or me, who went out of my way to look at it?

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