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Comment by sitkack | Hacker News Reader

Don't worry, CA can't do it forever as that water is coming out of a giant underground sea that is collapsing, it will never fill up again.

https://energyskeptic.com/2021/aquifer-decline-in-california...

https://www.usgs.gov/mission-areas/water-resources/science/c...

https://revealnews.org/article/9-sobering-facts-about-califo...

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The profits that went to a few human owners of that agribusiness should be clawed back

But everyone will die with happy thoughts of making those few rich.

That won't put the water back. Revenge is just the final form of prioritizing the comfort (or discomfort) of a handful of bad actors over the well-being of the other 99.9999% of the world.

There's no answer except functioning government and the general eradication of solipsistic liberal/libertarian fantasies, and that's never going to happen.

> That won't put the water back.

No, but it will partially compensate for impacted communities' subsequent economic precarity.

> That won't put the water back. Revenge is just the final form of prioritizing the comfort (or discomfort) of a handful of bad actors over the well-being of the other 99.9999% of the world.

Punishing the perpetrators won’t put the water back in the same way punishing a murderer won’t bring the victim back. We don’t punish to make right. We punish to deter.

And in 20 years time, it will be your turn to be retroactively punished for currently belonging to a society that is burning the world?

1) It's not group membership, it's targetted

2) I try to live in such a way that I'm not a wasteful glutton who misuses communal resources.

it might be that you get punished despite trying to live properly as you claim in 2).

Punishment doesn't work in this context, since it's not a repeated game. Murder is punished because everyone has the chance to do murder - it's a "repeated" game. Destroying the environment isn't.

Destroying various environmental resources is completely a repeated game (for example, look at superfund sites).

If in the future it's decided that I made my money unethically and it needs to be redistributed, I guess I'm fine with that so long as the same standard is applied to everyone's money. I think it'll be close to a great reset, but whatever. I'm not thrilled by the idea, but it might have to happen.

Exploiting and destroying the commons is a repeated game.

Moreover the spoils of doing it once make it easier to do so again.

What possible reason is there not to take those spoils and return them to the commons from whence they were stolen?

If the people who are destroying our biosphere thought they would face appropriate consequences, they would behave very differently.

Bad motives will find their way.

Punishment is not a sustainable measure, it only fosters more bad motives, and rules used to justify the punishment inform malicious actors on how to not get caught (a.k.a. how to follow the letter but not the spirit).

To address the root cause, work out why bad motives exist (what compels people to violate the spirit in the first place) and eliminate those.

Eliminating the gains from theft and destruction isn't some cruel and unusual eye for an eye punishment.

I agree that punishment != punishment, and there seem to be many cases where evidence of intentional harm appears to be substantial enough that the majority would support if something was done about it legally, yet unfortunately nothing is done. That aside, I still doubt it would be a fundamental deterrent (it’ll deter some from doing this particular thing, but they’ll find another workaround).

Well then the key is to align incentives.

If the powerful bear consequences when something bad happens regardless of fault, then power will be wielded to prevent those outcomes rather than enact them. Anyone who does not wish to take that risk can dispose of their power.

There’s a hint of the idea that “power should be exceedingly inconvenient, not lucrative, and attract people who ‘irrationally’ want to make the world better as opposed to abusing it”, which I don’t disagree with.

However, there’s another big concept, and that is “do not fire an employee who just learned a big and expensive, to you, lesson”. Punishing people simply because they failed, especially in a complex environment with slow onboarding process, is unproductive.

Furthermore, it can sow fear, resentment and distrust. Take China, where a local official risks unpredictable punishment, up to losing their job (or worse), if they fail—such as by allowing COVID cases to happen in their locality. Unfortunately, the side-effect of it is that officials are incentivized to lie up, meaning the government may think the country is COVID-free and be unable to make informed decisions.

This is also why I think COVID lab leak event, if confirmed, should not lead to any repercussions for China in particular. Fear of said repercussions seems likely half of the reason the research is being obscured in the first place, as a result preventing the global community from making informed decisions.

So, if you don’t want such shenanigans to take place in your government (I wouldn’t), you have to agree that whichever human being you elected should be able to make mistakes to learn from them, and thus another measure of their performance should be used.

For example, repeat trend of malicious intent supported by concrete evidence could be a good one.

(And to be make things even trickier, they do not deserve the whole credit in case of any success either. The success or failure of a measure to large extent depends on the whole country and the larger context it exists in. There are situations where one can only win, and situations where losing the least is the best outcome.)

Incentives should be aligned, but I don’t think punishment is the instrument for that.

I agree with your perspectives with regard to civil servants, but the people with power I was referring to are the wealthy.

No state actor (other than arguably putin, but I'd characterise his power as individual and not derived from his role as a government agent) is as powerful as eg. rupert murdoch or peter thiel individually, and in aggregate (and in spite of not working together) the 0.01% are vastly more powerful than any state.

If 10% of the fortune 500 were confiscated and redistributed equally every time there's a pandemic or 5% of the amazon is burnt down or there is an unchecked oil spill, then the wealthy would ensure these things do not happen.

Yeah, somehow I mistakenly read your “powerful” to mean elected government.

I suppose the main thing that makes rich powerful is the ability to influence government, which is only because power converts to money. If elected officials could not be influenced by rich malicious actors, those actors would lose much leverage.

The second thing is the ability to use money to secure popular support, which can hardly be eliminated unless people stop putting personal gain above true value… which is realistic in post-scarcity.

Notice the stark difference between “a few human owners of that agribusiness” and “belong to a society.”

If you have power and are wielding it to make things worse in order to gain more power, then yes. Stripping you of all of your power later is morally and strategically right.

Are you suggesting the farmers are criminal? Unless they subverted the democratic institutions to benefit from bedrock water, punishing them IS the crime.

> Are you suggesting the farmers are criminal?

Yes! Enthusiastically, with vigor!

under that definition the upper echelons of nestle are pretty certain to be criminals, so yes

You're right about executives of large firms, but you're wrong about farmers. Focusing on punishment for random small powerless people, most of whom are not still alive, while not assassinating every billionaire is what they want you to do.

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