Sinking 1K NYC subway cars in the Atlantic to create a reef didn’t go as planned
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osborne_Reef
First try a little, see what happens, then maybe do more.
Someone should have dropped 5 subway cars in. Then checked back in a few years.
Worse than scream-and-leap policy making is the utter refusal to do any kind of follow up assessment. (Perhaps you've heard of the opioid crisis? Best intentions leading straight to Hell.)
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Tangent, from the OC:
> ...artificial reefs were designed to boost recreational fishing, which in 2011 generated a whopping $15 billion in state and federal taxes.
We should ban commercial fisheries.
In my state, every salmon caught by a commercial fisherman costs the taxpayers $1.
Whereas anglers make the state money.
If this doesn't make sense to you, you simply don't understand Freedom Markets™.
The point of government is not to extract maximum rent from the tenant/citizens, so if your complaint is that fisherman are not paying the government enough to use common resources which the federal government is managing... you're thinking about the government wrong.
(That salmon, fwiw, produces more than $1 in utility to the downstream consumers, which is the whole point of farming or fishing, or any economic exchange at all.)
Am I?
A fraction of the revenue from anglers are reinvested in the fisheries. My state earns > $6bn year from the outdoors (fishing, hunting, birding, ecotourism).
In my ledger, that's just smart business.
> ...That salmon, fwiw, produces more than $1 in utility to the downstream consumers.
Or you could pay $1 more for that delicious salmon yourself. Why am I bankrolling someone else's decadence?
Let the Invisible Hand work it's magic. Without market distorting subsidies.
Said another way, if BLM, Fish & Wildlife, Mining, etc agencies were run like "businesses", vs cash giveaways to campaign donors, then everyone would benefit, vs just some select corporations.
The government subsidizes commercial fishers.
Add everything up, positive ROI for angelers, negative ROI for commercial.
Ostensibly, we vote on them, but some levies stay in place for 30 years. For example, a levy for a new police station that covers the mortgage for 30 years.
I've long been against any and all usage fees. They just exfiltrate money to cronies, transfer wealth from urban to suburban areas. Witness Bob Moses' innovative manifold money laundering schemes, as detailed in Caro's book The Power Broker, and since replicated every where.
But now I'm open to alternative arrangements that make the bookkeeping painfully clear. Because too many people are hostile to collective action, the greater good.
Maybe radical transparency meets universal basic income. Charge everyone full price in the front, pay as you go. Achieve progressive policies by just giving people cash to cover the cost in the back. In other words, the opposite of suuply side economics.
So if you're a working parent, you just get cash to cover rent, gas, daycare, whatever.
Might be feasible with today's mobile payment systems. Certainly wasn't feasible (logistically) until very recently.
However we can make it work, sign me up. I'm just so sick of all the Freedom Markets™ wankery, err, sophistry.
The BLM was set up to avoid tradgedy-of-the-commons resource extraction. That's it. The land doesn't belong to the government — it belongs to the people. The goal is not a business trying to fleece "consumers" as much as it can get away with.
To the extent that those agencies charge fees, it's to make sure people are efficiently using their permits, which is a healthy dynamic. You're trying to invert this relationship into making people subservient to a corporate government, which is gross.
For "tenants" who are enjoying the view, then subsidization is great.
There are too many business exploiting the federal government for the best of both worlds. They will "lease" land, usually at a step discount to market rate, then still stiff the government. This turns out to be so much cheaper than owning the land, because if they don't pay property taxes, the government will auction off their land to someone who will make sure they get paid. See: people like Ammon Bundy.
Now, people see people using federal land the way it was intended, and complain that the BLM isn't being a cost-effective landlord. And that's true... because that's a terrible thing for the BLM to become.
I don't know about cost-effectiveness, or what that even means.
In the case of BLM, they're just expediting the plunder of our natural resources for the benefit of a select few. (To say nothing of betraying their charter.)
I don't expect BLM to be revenue positive. But I do expect them to charge fair prices in the open market.
Because fair is fair.
> To say nothing of betraying their charter
Their charter is absolutely to enable the extraction of resources from federal lands. It's a wild reinterpretation of history to claim otherwise.
> But I do expect them to charge fair prices in the open market
There is no "open market" for land; the BLM owns, for example 65% of Nevada, and huge amounts of Utah, Montana etc. If the US government was a telecom company, everyone here would be up in arms about monopoly price gouging if they tried to charge "market" rates, because consumers have no alternative!
If BLM actually ever did that, I'd be completely onboard.
Also, we the people are the government, are the state. As we see every day, bad things happen when that tether is severed.
It's not arguing that commercial revenue should be deducted from the fisheries as if they were working for the government (and I'm not sure if the 1$ figure is ammortized by taxes payed from this industry or if the taxes are already included in it).
One consequence would be to eat less fish and go get one if you really want it. Of course this would again create a market and it's a slippery sloap with regards to small scale commercial fishers.
So, in a sense that's a gross calculation, if that's what you mean.
I imagine they didn't have anywhere to store the remaining nine hundred and ninety five subway cars.
"the project failed for two reasons: first, because the trains’ envelopes were spot-welded, which formed a thin layer between the two metals that led to corrosion. Second, because the corrugated pattern made it easier for undercurrent waves to “grab on to” and further pull the stainless skin apart"
A thousand cars seems like a large number so I just went to check how many subway cars does NYC has in operation. Here is what Wikipedia says "As of November 2016, the New York City Subway has 6418 cars on the roster."[1].
Maybe I'm out of the loop, but in Europe I sometimes see people recreational fishing on the piers at the beach for example and I can't imagine how this activity could generate 15 billion in taxes.
If the 3 mentioned states together have 20.4 million people, then every inhabitant on average is paying $700 in taxes for recreational fishing. What's going on there, how many people have this hobby and how much are they paying for it?
I don't quite buy the full $15 billion/year amount but quite a few billion per year seems immediately reasonable.
Edit: I said "seemed to be" because I was proud to have found that page on my own. But as another poster pointed out, that page is directly linked from the article so there is no doubt it is the source.
Apparently the rule of thumb is %10 of the boats value for the cost per year on maintenance, https://www.unitedyacht.com/Yacht-News/how-much-does-it-cost....
'The MTA had good reason to believe the program would succeed. Just a few years prior, it had dropped more than 1,000 Redbird trains in the ocean. They remain on the ocean floor to this day, in part because they were made of carbon steel, which helps prevent corrosion.
By comparison, Brightliners were made of stainless steel. When the subway cars debuted in 1964, they were a mechanical and aesthetic innovation. The stainless steel made the train cars lighter on the tracks, but this worked against them underwater.'
Few questions here. First, isn't carbon steel ... steel? Steel is primarily iron and carbon, so my understanding is that carbon steel is mostly just a marketing term to have at least an adjective of some sort, just like 'aircraft grade aluminium', which is in fact one of the cheapest, bulk types of aluminium (hence use in bulk in aircraft)
Second, how does regular steel fare better than stainless steel in a corrosive environment? The article says the stainless steel started to corrode from the welds, which is fair enough, but wouldn't regular steel just corrode wholesale?
[1] https://www.moviequotedb.com/movies/titanic/quote_23821.html [2] "The 2,000 hull plates were single pieces of rolled steel plate" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titanic#Building_and_preparing...
And w.r.t. the SS thing, i think the carbon steel got to be thicker because of expected corrosion while the SS (that still can oxidize, albeit at a much slower rate) is significantly thinner, therefore getting disintegrated more easily.
It really isn't worded very well in TFA tho, i may be misunderstanding.
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/what-is-the-embodied-energy-...
Various industrial metals are recycled all the time at scrapyards across the world. For example, school buses in USA are commonly reprocessed at end of life.
The problem is that it's a low-margin business in most places and it quickly can become economically unfeasible. 1,000 subway cars is a tall order for any scrap yard with a lot of 'overhead' involving specialized disassembly that would eat that margin real quick, I presume.
I hope every single person involved is deeply ashamed
> It is important that we learn from these mistakes and improve the process
What process? For dumping trash in the ocean?