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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

Making things very expensive is precisely how to motivate people to innovate.

Or just move elsewhere where it isn't a problem. Hell, they shouldn't be built near the housing in the first place but someone probably lobbied their way into it...

It's one of the worst ways. But it is a way.

So what's a better way, when persuasion and appeals to conscience have already failed? Surely you don't suggest that raw force is better.

I was replying to this:

> Making things very expensive is precisely how to motivate people to innovate.

That statement has no caveats around persuasion and appeals to conscience.

If it doesn't then it's drifting off topic, which I don't actually think was your intent, but let's follow along a bit anyway. What does motivate people to innovate? Obviously one motivation is internal, basically curiosity (which someone not trying to be so argumentative might have considered equivalent to persuasion). And another is profit. But what if a innovation in a particular area would only be necessary to maintain profitability, because current methods are already cheaper but damaging (e.g. environment) or otherwise unacceptable (e.g. privacy)? Then we're back to making that activity as it is currently done more expensive.

"That's a bad way to motivate innovation" still begs the question of what would actually be better in the real world for cases where sufficient motivation is currently lacking. The case where no "spur" is needed isn't even interesting in this context.

You're welcome to retroactively apply a test for whether you find something interesting. I wasn't talking in that context, though.

I just took the statement as written and wrote a brief comment on it, without reading anything else into it.

> I wasn't talking in that context, though.

Yes, you were, whether you acknowledge it or not. You can't just ignore the existing context and expect everyone to follow you into a new one that you supposedly created out of nowhere. That's not only the height of hubris, but it's also not how curious conversation works. Please see the guidelines.

Although his rhetorical gymnastics attempting to dodge and avoid answering those obvious questions are certainly telling and amusing, and he helps make your point by ignoring the context and not being willing to address your straightforward questions.

I didn't create a new context; doing so would not have been the height of hubris; and I didn't expect people to follow me, other than in the most basic (or so I thought) comprehension sense. You and DonHopkins are the only ones behaving badly enough to be accused of annihilating curious conversation. My few words cannot be accused of that.

I have seen the guidelines, and nowhere do I see DonHopkins' mouth-frothing or your arbitrary rule-setting there.

I appreciate that now you've read my comment in its correct context (that of the previous comment) you understand it and aren't trying to say anything in response other than some brand new iron laws of conversation and DonHopkins' gossipy nastiness, as that hopefully means you've at least accepted it for what it is. A simple truthful statement, designed to modify the predecessor which was not, in my opinion, sufficiently caveated.

No, it's just shifting the cost of dealing with waste (pollution, sound) back to the producer rather than allowing them to make it someone else's problem. The cost isn't high, it's what it needs to be to run the operation in a way that's agreeable to the everyone in the area.

If you don't want to operate a business that deals with those costs, move or don't build a data center.

I'm not the GP, but I agree with this stance. But the specific policy proposed really matters if this is your goal. Politicians often want to write very narrow regulations which are intended to tweak some small behavior by some specific business they find distasteful (or politically desirable to modify). So they play whack-a-mole with problems like this by writing policies that look like: "in Zone 5, businesses operating as data centers must operate cooling equipment that does not increase ambient noise levels above X decibels within Y meters of their property. "

This kind of policy does not accomplish the cost-shifting you talk about. Rather, a cost-shifting policy looks like: "in Maricopa county, a business may make as much noise as it likes, but must pay fees to the owner of any plot of land which has its ambient noise levels raised in the amount of $X per Y decibels per minute per square meter experiencing increased noise. "

I'm not aware of much regulation in the latter vein, at least not where I live. But it has the advantage of cost shifting, from ANY business, to those affected by the negative externality. That reinternalizes the cost without hampering freedom of businesses to operate in whatever way most efficiently accomplishes their goals, and helps C-suite execs see the true cost of their operations, which incentivizes them to innovate that cost away. It's also not specific to the cause of the noise, so church bells pay the same as the data center which pays the same as the glass factory which pays the same as the concert venue.

My $0.02 anyway.

Vote notdonspaulding 2024!

I think the reason such broad brush stroke laws aren't made is probably partly a lack of system thinking, but also partly a result of it. If you try and monetise church bells, people will oppose it. Easier to monetise the evil corporations.

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