no_moms_no_hugs

The challenge is that those costs were not understood when these extractive heavy industries were stood up, and large parts of our legal and governance systems were set up to ensure that those industries could exist, presumably to enrich all of us (e.g., the mineral rights system). By the time the costs were understood, the owners of those industries had accrued enough capital from their operation to actively fight off challenges to them for decades.

The tragedy is obvious, but I think it's an important example as we move forward with other dramatic and potentially disastrous technological changes. What happens if we discover conclusively in 15 years that observing recommendation-algorithm driven social media for more than an hour a day causes dementia? Would we move quickly to ban it, or would we endure a protracted fight with Meta, TikTok et. al. about our "right to scroll" while the damages accrue?

Plastics are largely cheap because they're bi-products of natural gas, gasoline and diesel fuel manufacturing. As demand for those fuels declines, plastics will necessarily become more expensive.

They certainly have a lot of inherent utility, but given the emerging risks to the planet's ecology and our own health, I think it's hard to see a future where we extensively use plastics to the same extent we do now.

If this was true, you would expect to see high rates of homelessness correlate with high rates of drug and alcohol use, no? It seems like in the US, states with high rates of overdose deaths [0] don't seem to have correspondingly high rates of homelessness [1], but do have much cheaper housing [2]. It's obviously a contributor, but I really don't think it's a silver bullet - you could 'solve' drug addiction today and you'd still have a homelessness crisis.

Obviously both are problems - but I think there are many people who would remain housed in spite of their addictions if housing was, on the whole, much cheaper.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/pressroom/sosmap/drug_poisoning_mor...

[1] https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-...

[2] https://www.bankrate.com/real-estate/median-home-price/#medi...

This comment reminds me of the central thesis of Red Plenty [0] - that all the mathematical or algorithmic sorcery in the world frequently fails on contact with actual human beliefs and desires. We seldom have simple enough utility functions to meaningfully optimize in real life - all of our philosophies, theologies, and other cultural debris have evolved to manage those complexities (often imperfectly).

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/aug/08/red-plenty-fra...