How It Happens

[Fife]

Yeah wtf did you just post?

@fife:

There is a little bit of rent seeking going on with the EPA involving things like soot catchers but tbh, if somebody didn't do it, nobody will. I've worked with too many companies that treat hazmat recovery like a joke. In one case they literally just payed the commissioner off and let the people down stream deal with it.

The reason they treat hazmat recovery as a joke is that their opposition is utterly monopolized. And it is monopolized by an "opponent" they control.

[Speaker to Animals]

All externalities are negative.

Who among you will show me a "positive" externality (to other than a rent-seeker)?

And, yes, if coal did not have the power of the state helping it to point a gun at everyone's head to stay in business, the market could have already addressed this.

On-the-job training and certification.

Most major corporations pay for their employees to go to graduate school part-time. If those employees move on to other careers, they brought the training, education, and skills the previous employers paid to provide them to the new employer. That's a positive externality.

Uh, but not an "externality," positive, negative, or otherwise.

That's just a wage function, and a damned good one, IMNSHO.

No, that's literally an example of a positive externality. It's a cost of production that the company actually pays but people other than the company can benefit from it without paying that cost. That was actually one of the examples I remember from macroeconomics 101.

Job training in general is a positive externality. If I train nukedog how to fabricate aluminum pipes, that's a cost I have to pay to train him to do the job I want him to do. But if he moves to another employer, he can continue fabricating aluminum pipes for another employer who doesn't have to pay those training costs.

[TheReal_ND]

Lest I look like a low information poster I will just relate a few of my industrial experiences. In all cases there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

In a steel mill in California all of our air had to be treated with a ventilation and filter system because the metal particles that are put off through all the processes I won't bother to list is immense. They gripes about the EPA fining them unreasonable amounts of money if their filters weren't changed and logged.

In Texas I worked at a fracking waste water disposal facility where the water was supposed to be properly treated and filtered and pumped back into a well but they got payed by the truck load so they didn't care if it took to long to properly treat the water and just let it run into a nearby stream if the pit got too full. They payed off the Texas Rail Road Commissioner in charge of monitoring the nearby water.

In Texas I worked in a cement transfer facility where we would unload it from rail cars and pipe it into our silos to be unloaded into trucks and delivered wherever. In the process of using pressure to do so cement particles would fly all over the place but we put filters on to catch them and if we didn't, the entire surrounding town would know of it. Sometimes we had accidents like overfills and cement would just go everywhere.


Long story short, there is not in my experience a way to practice industry that can't be safely mitiagated. Imo anyone complaining about externalities or whatever is just ill informed.

[Speaker to Animals]

Lest I look like a low information poster I will just relate a few of my industrial experiences. In all cases there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

In a steel mill in California all of our air had to be treated with a ventilation and filter system because the metal particles that are put off through all the processes I won't bother to list is immense. They gripes about the EPA fining them unreasonable amounts of money if their filters weren't changed and logged.

In Texas I worked at a fracking waste water disposal facility where the water was supposed to be properly treated and filtered and pumped back into a well but they got payed by the truck load so they didn't care if it took to long to properly treat the water and just let it run into a nearby stream if the pit got too full. They payed off the Texas Rail Road Commissioner in charge of monitoring the nearby water.

In Texas I worked in a cement transfer facility where we would unload it from rail cars and pipe it into our silos to be unloaded into trucks and delivered wherever. In the process of using pressure to do so cement particles would fly all over the place but we put filters on to catch them and if we didn't, the entire surrounding town would know of it. Sometimes we had accidents like overfills and cement would just go everywhere.


Long story short, there is not in my experience a way to practice industry that can't be safely mitiagated. Imo anyone complaining about externalities or whatever is just ill informed.

We didn't say there existed no ways for the coal industry to pay for their negative externalities. We said they weren't paying those externalities in the first place. If they did, they'd go out of business because natural gas and nuclear would be cheaper.

[Fife]

On-the-job training and certification.

Most major corporations pay for their employees to go to graduate school part-time. If those employees move on to other careers, they brought the training, education, and skills the previous employers paid to provide them to the new employer. That's a positive externality.

Uh, but not an "externality," positive, negative, or otherwise.

That's just a wage function, and a damned good one, IMNSHO.

No, that's literally an example of a positive externality. It's a cost of production that the company actually pays but people other than the company can benefit from it without paying that cost. That was actually one of the examples I remember from macroeconomics 101.

OK, but how are paid internships/scholarships/training, &c., paid for by a firm and not by the state, an externality? I don't get how it would be. Firms spend a shitload on recruiting; it takes many shapes.

[TheReal_ND]

Yeah wtf did you just post?

@fife:

There is a little bit of rent seeking going on with the EPA involving things like soot catchers but tbh, if somebody didn't do it, nobody will. I've worked with too many companies that treat hazmat recovery like a joke. In one case they literally just payed the commissioner off and let the people down stream deal with it.

The reason they treat hazmat recovery as a joke is that their opposition is utterly monopolized. And it is monopolized by an "opponent" they control.

Eh.... maybe. Maybe you're on to something there

[TheReal_ND]

Lest I look like a low information poster I will just relate a few of my industrial experiences. In all cases there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

In a steel mill in California all of our air had to be treated with a ventilation and filter system because the metal particles that are put off through all the processes I won't bother to list is immense. They gripes about the EPA fining them unreasonable amounts of money if their filters weren't changed and logged.

In Texas I worked at a fracking waste water disposal facility where the water was supposed to be properly treated and filtered and pumped back into a well but they got payed by the truck load so they didn't care if it took to long to properly treat the water and just let it run into a nearby stream if the pit got too full. They payed off the Texas Rail Road Commissioner in charge of monitoring the nearby water.

In Texas I worked in a cement transfer facility where we would unload it from rail cars and pipe it into our silos to be unloaded into trucks and delivered wherever. In the process of using pressure to do so cement particles would fly all over the place but we put filters on to catch them and if we didn't, the entire surrounding town would know of it. Sometimes we had accidents like overfills and cement would just go everywhere.


Long story short, there is not in my experience a way to practice industry that can't be safely mitiagated. Imo anyone complaining about externalities or whatever is just ill informed.

We didn't say there existed no ways for the coal industry to pay for their negative externalities. We said they weren't paying those externalities in the first place. If they did, they'd go out of business because natural gas and nuclear would be cheaper.

Perhaps. Not sure about that. I do know most of our coal comes from China where it's like dude whatever.

[Speaker to Animals]

Uh, but not an "externality," positive, negative, or otherwise.

That's just a wage function, and a damned good one, IMNSHO.

No, that's literally an example of a positive externality. It's a cost of production that the company actually pays but people other than the company can benefit from it without paying that cost. That was actually one of the examples I remember from macroeconomics 101.

OK, but how are paid internships/scholarships/training, &c., paid for by a firm and not by the state, an externality? I don't get how it would be. Firms spend a shitload on recruiting; it takes many shapes.

Anything that the firm spends money on that can be transferred to other firms without other firms paying for it is a positive externality. Job training and skill acquisition is just the obvious example. There exist others that are not so obvious.

[Speaker to Animals]

Lest I look like a low information poster I will just relate a few of my industrial experiences. In all cases there is a right way and a wrong way to do it.

In a steel mill in California all of our air had to be treated with a ventilation and filter system because the metal particles that are put off through all the processes I won't bother to list is immense. They gripes about the EPA fining them unreasonable amounts of money if their filters weren't changed and logged.

In Texas I worked at a fracking waste water disposal facility where the water was supposed to be properly treated and filtered and pumped back into a well but they got payed by the truck load so they didn't care if it took to long to properly treat the water and just let it run into a nearby stream if the pit got too full. They payed off the Texas Rail Road Commissioner in charge of monitoring the nearby water.

In Texas I worked in a cement transfer facility where we would unload it from rail cars and pipe it into our silos to be unloaded into trucks and delivered wherever. In the process of using pressure to do so cement particles would fly all over the place but we put filters on to catch them and if we didn't, the entire surrounding town would know of it. Sometimes we had accidents like overfills and cement would just go everywhere.


Long story short, there is not in my experience a way to practice industry that can't be safely mitiagated. Imo anyone complaining about externalities or whatever is just ill informed.

We didn't say there existed no ways for the coal industry to pay for their negative externalities. We said they weren't paying those externalities in the first place. If they did, they'd go out of business because natural gas and nuclear would be cheaper.

Perhaps. Not sure about that. I do know most of our coal comes from China where it's like dude whatever.

I think most of our coal comes from Appalachia still, though I am not certain of that. Even if we imported all the coal from China, we'd still burn it here and the utilities that run those coalfire plants would continue to pay for ZERO of the costs of the twenty plus thousand fatalities they cause in the American population each year from lung cancer. If the negative externalities of coal were paid for by the industries mining and burning coal, then coal would no longer be profitable for them. They would transition to natural gas or nuclear (which also have negative externalities, but nothing nearly as bad as coal). Instead they just mine and burn this shit, and the additional costs of this activity are picked up by individual Americans and by tax payers.

It's actually a failure of capitalism to provide an efficient market because you need somebody to force these firms to pay for their negative externalities. There really exists no such mechanism for that in our society. We just regulate them, but that doesn't really solve the problem. At best, regulation can reduce the negative externalities or maybe eliminate them, but in cases where such negative externalities still exist, you have an inefficient market that is not properly weeding out poor industry practices (like coal).

[Okeefenokee]

You're just too blinded by your MSM propaganda-fueled hatred of Trump to see that his election was an example of Americans resisting the very kinds of totalitarianism described in this essay.

I understand it completely. And in a blind frenzy, they elected the most idiotic candidate in modern history, who has accomplished exactly nothing, save to publicly humiliate the country, in the eyes of all but his most ardent supporters.

Trump is not Hitler. The machine of government is rolling toward totality, regardless of a blathering figurehead in front of it.

exactly nothing, everyone.\

you're dumb.