How It Happens

[Okeefenokee]

Oh good. You have some more examples of how Trump has made us Great Again?

suck it

And how’s that worked out for ya so far?

Splendid,

Democrats fume over early Gorsuch rulings
A string of decidedly conservative rulings from new Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch has Democratic senators grumbling: We told you so.

During the less than three months he has occupied the late Justice Antonin Scalia's seat on the high court, Gorsuch is sending signals that he could be one of its most conservative jurists. He has often aligned himself with the judicial stalwarts of the right, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

Gorsuch publicly disagreed with his colleagues' decision to pass up a challenge to the McCain-Feingold law's ban on so-called soft money. He dissented from a ruling enforcing same-sex couple's rights to have their names on their children's birth certificates. He lamented the court's refusal to hear a case about the right to carry a weapon in public. He took a strong stand in favor of churches' right to public subsidies. And he signed an opinion saying he would have allowed President Donald Trump's travel ban to go into effect now, in full.http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/2 ... ngs-240030

[TheReal_ND]

Nah, we have more coal than anyone, except maybe Russia. We export it to China, not import.

:suspicious:

That actually checks out I think

[Speaker to Animals]

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.

I don't understand what you mean by "anything that the firm spends money on that can be transferred to other firms without other firms paying for it is a positive externality." And I'm not being obtuse about it, not intentionally, anyway. I really don't grok it. Can you dumb it down for me?

If I train some kid off the street how to fabricate sheet metal for automobile manufacturing, and he later takes those skills to start a sheet metal shop of his own somewhere, then cost of my doing business (building automobiles) includes a positive externality that was enjoyed by one of my former employees who took the skills I trained him to start a new small business of his own. For him to have started that business before I trained him in sheet metal fabrication would require him to pay money to some trade school to learn the necessary skills. It's literally a benefit from the cost of production that somebody else can enjoy while not having to pay for it.

A positive externality is the inverse of a negative externality. In a negative externality, the firm does NOT pay the cost of production but that cost is picked up by third parties (who usually have no choice and have to pay indirectly). In a positive externality, I have to pay for something that can be used by other firms to produce goods and services without their having to pay for it.

[Fife]

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.

I don't understand what you mean by "anything that the firm spends money on that can be transferred to other firms without other firms paying for it is a positive externality." And I'm not being obtuse about it, not intentionally, anyway. I really don't grok it. Can you dumb it down for me?

If I train some kid off the street how to fabricate sheet metal for automobile manufacturing, and he later takes those skills to start a sheet metal shop of his own somewhere, then cost of my doing business (building automobiles) includes a positive externality that was enjoyed by one of my former employees who took the skills I trained him to start a new small business of his own. For him to have started that business before I trained him in sheet metal fabrication would require him to pay money to some trade school to learn the necessary skills. It's literally a benefit from the cost of production that somebody else can enjoy while not having to pay for it.

A positive externality is the inverse of a negative externality. In a negative externality, the firm does NOT pay the cost of production but that cost is picked up by third parties (who usually have no choice and have to pay indirectly). In a positive externality, I have to pay for something that can be used by other firms to produce goods and services without their having to pay for it.

OK, I get what you are saying. I think I just might have a different term of art to describe what you are talking about.

[Speaker to Animals]

That article I linked early had an interesting thought experiment that illustrated the property rights angle of negative externalities.

Imagine if the people in the surrounding community affected by a coal-fire plant would have to pay the utility to *not* burn as much or any coal to preserve their air from pollutants. How much would it cost the people affected to pay off the company to stop burning coal, thus polluting the air, and killing x number of residents every few years?

That amount is about how much the utility should be paying the community (if they are willing) to burn coal there.

The question here is about who owns the air and personal health. The way these utilities operate now, they just pollute your air and rob you of your life if you one of the unlucky people to get lung cancer as a result of the utility's business. But if everybody had a choice in the matter, and they could put a price tag on their air being clean and their not having to roll the dice each year with their lives, that would be the cost of the negative externality.

Now, obviously, most of us want electricity. So the problem here is what source of electric energy would we use when all the costs are paid by the consumers (because that's exactly what would happen if the power plant had to pay the surrounding community the cost of their negative externalities, the costs would get transferred to price). The answer here is that we would choose the cheapest source which, if all the costs are accounted for, would likely be the safest. But that's not what happens because nobody bothers to deal with externalities other than regulations (which really don't do as much to stop them as many people think).

There are no easy answers for this problem. The obvious answer is to just tax companies for their externalities, but how do you even calculate them accurately and how do you do that without the process becoming corrupted by lobbyists and special interests?

[Fife]

I think we are 100% agreeing that example is a "negative" externality.

I'm struggling to understand the definition of a different kind of externality; a "positive" externality.

[Speaker to Animals]

https://www.economicshelp.org/micro-eco ... ternality/

[Fife]

That's not the way I was taught (as to terminology), but I'm checking that page out. I'm always open to changes in language, so long as we are all on the same page.

[de officiis]

An excellent first-hand account of Nazi Germany from the inside, and how things change. It's not difficult to sympathize.

http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.

So let's set aside Trump and Obama and all that shit for a minute and talk about the federal government. The article is about the obligation of ordinary citizens to perceive when a government is slipping incrementally out of control, and taking action to stop it. You seem resigned to the idea that the Government has somehow done just that since 9/11, but you haven't really attempted to explain what aspect of the Government has spun or is spinning outside the control of the people, and whether there is anything that could be done about it. So what, exactly, are you on about?

[SuburbanFarmer]

An excellent first-hand account of Nazi Germany from the inside, and how things change. It's not difficult to sympathize.

http://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if the people could not understand it, it could not be released because of national security.

So let's set aside Trump and Obama and all that shit for a minute and talk about the federal government. The article is about the obligation of ordinary citizens to perceive when a government is slipping incrementally out of control, and taking action to stop it. You seem resigned to the idea that the Government has somehow done just that since 9/11, but you haven't really attempted to explain what aspect of the Government has spun or is spinning outside the control of the people, and whether there is anything that could be done about it. So what, exactly, are you on about?

Mainly, the IC and police state taking control. The 4th is history, and the 1st is going fast. People are anxious, isolated, and unhappy.
Meanwhile, the MIC continues 3-5 wars around the globe, and is flirting with WW3.
The Fed is completing the greatest financial heist in history, and most of the government statistics are completely misleading.
Now, we're being led by a complete buffoon, with no concept of history, and no desire to unite anyone.

Ya know, modern US government.