World is Falling Apart Thread (Locked forever)

[MrPopo]

People could just stop being so whiney about nuclear power.

[Sarge]

That's definitely a solution I can get behind. Nuclear power solves the issues both sides are concerned with. Even if I believe emissions in this case aren't the problem they're being made out to be, nuclear would significantly cut them while also generating the energy we need as an economy.

[marurun]

Nuclear is a very expensive technology due the the various safety mechanisms which must be built in. Further, plant maintenance is an issue. That said, it's far more environmentally friendly (not just for global climate change) than coal. Coal is nasty, nasty power. It produces toxic, radioactive waste, has a pretty potent affect on air quality if not managed with expensive scrubbers, and the mining of coal is extremely environmentally destructive.

Thing is, green energy technology is getting cheaper all the time. It won't be but a decade or so before it's price competitive without subsidies. The real problem is that it requires a lot of investment, as does any power technology, to get started. You have to build new facilities and equipment and get it on-line. And green power is much more heavily dependent upon smart grid technology, which is expensive to manufacture and install in a nation as large as ours, but would have a vast effect even on areas that don't go green.

In short, the most affordable, sustainable, and green (in both immediate and long-term environmental impact) power network would be lots of solar and wind farms, some nuclear plants to provide low-level base power, and a modern smart grid to route power where it is needed and help nuclear plants to regulate their power generation capacity.

Also, private/public partnership is the key. Profit sours basic societal requirements quickly.

[Sarge]

I dunno, I don't know many government-run services that work anywhere near efficiently. I'd rather keep the profit motive in, and keep the government out of it other than some necessary regulatory oversight.

[MrPopo]

I dunno, I don't know many government-run services that work anywhere near efficiently. I'd rather keep the profit motive in, and keep the government out of it other than some necessary regulatory oversight.

Hoover Dam.

[Sarge]

That's why I said many, not any.

Seriously, I don't like their track record very much when it comes to these things. I'd rather have them play referee than I would directly involved.

[marurun]

That's why I said many, not any.

Seriously, I don't like their track record very much when it comes to these things. I'd rather have them play referee than I would directly involved.

The biggest failures of government typically involve contracts with commercial entities (I'm excluding deliberate evils of the sort all governments, including our own, are guilty of). And for-profit examples of profit motive negating everything else, including safety, human life, etc... abound.

[Luke]

Nuclear is a very expensive technology due the the various safety mechanisms which must be built in. Further, plant maintenance is an issue. That said, it's far more environmentally friendly (not just for global climate change) than coal. Coal is nasty, nasty power. It produces toxic, radioactive waste, has a pretty potent affect on air quality if not managed with expensive scrubbers, and the mining of coal is extremely environmentally destructive.

I learned all of this by playing SimCity.

The same game taught me the importance of public transportation in large city, and that roads for cars weren't necessary.

[Ack]

Nuclear is a very expensive technology due the the various safety mechanisms which must be built in. Further, plant maintenance is an issue. That said, it's far more environmentally friendly (not just for global climate change) than coal. Coal is nasty, nasty power. It produces toxic, radioactive waste, has a pretty potent affect on air quality if not managed with expensive scrubbers, and the mining of coal is extremely environmentally destructive.

I learned all of this by playing SimCity.

The same game taught me the importance of public transportation in large city, and that roads for cars weren't necessary.

Admittedly it also taught me to use a flat tax, police and fire departments are perpetually underfunded, and government officials demand mansions the size of city blocks.

[Ivo]

That's why I said many, not any.

Seriously, I don't like their track record very much when it comes to these things. I'd rather have them play referee than I would directly involved.

The biggest failures of government typically involve contracts with commercial entities (I'm excluding deliberate evils of the sort all governments, including our own, are guilty of). And for-profit examples of profit motive negating everything else, including safety, human life, etc... abound.

As an European, I usually stay out of US centric discussions, but this applies globally.

Sarge: simplifying things, you are advocating profit as a motivator to try to ensure an objective of quality and efficiency. The implicit assumption is that companies that want to remain profitable (motivation) will compete to achieve quality of efficiency (desired behaviour).
You already know this inherently requires a referee. Indeed it will require not just a referee but sufficiently unprofitable penalties when undesirable behaviour is caught, and then you need to worry about it being more profitable to corrupt the referee etc.
I currently don't think this is the best system.

The reason is essentially pointed out by Marurun: if you directly or indirectly make the rules about profit, what you end up ensuring is an objective of profit above all else. The actual rule (increase profit) encourages the players to break the "rules" (like "don't pollute too much"), up to and including corrupting the referee.

Past experience seems to teach us that even with regulation, we can not reasonably expect private sector to play by other rules.
This is why private/public partnership is advocated by some of us.

In this forum we play games, which are basically systems of rules, so most of us understand this very well. Lots of games abound where there is a game mechanic that attempts to imitate some aspect of real life but it turns out it is more efficient to just game the system rather than to behave in-game whatever way the developers may have intended players to behave.

tl,dr: Don't blame the "player", blame the set of rules. If you want certain type of behaviour, the rules probably should reward it directly rather than relying on referees to enforce it.