The best part is it works no matter who posts it, even Enemy Politics Blog.
There’s also this weird assumption that the market is infinitely wide and infinitely deep and people have perfect information with which to price risk, so that absent regulation everyone ends up living in an apartment with exactly the chance of being burned to death that they wanted.
The “efficient market hypothesis” is bad, it begs the question.
Surely if it was bad it would have been replaced by a better hypothesis in the discourse, since this has not yet happened-
In which the Discourse Monk Argumate demonstrates the difference between truth and virality.
essentially privatising the FAA and NTSB, although the NTSB already seems to do really good work and it’s unlikely quality would improve with privatisation.
Though really, I wanted to use aircraft to talk about building safety. The field of aircraft is already pretty safe in general.
What I’m thinking with this building materials issue is that in addition to the Executive Todd Problem being worse (because the real estate will change hands more often than the aircraft and the builders will too), and there being no insurance requirement, a lot of problems (like asbestos, or that cladding) were either known beforehand, or would not have been that difficult to figure out if someone had bothered to check first.
Additionally, the insurance company, the builder, or the owner would be losing money for every month that problem was not repaired. So instead of fighting a long legal battle and not fixing it, it’s more likely at least one of them would fix it now, then have the long legal battle about who finally gets compensated.
That would be the plan, anyway. I have other insurance-based plans to distort the markets as well.
The thing I like about the idea of mandatory safety insurance is that it introduces a new actor with new incentives into the problem.
Let us return to aircraft.
The State has determined that every airline company must carry two million dollars in insurance per passenger per flight, to be paid out in the event that the plane is destroyed and they die. It has set certain rules, for instance that the insurance company must be sufficiently well-capitalized and it can’t just waive paying out because the company did something stupid.
Executive Todd has plans to reduce the maintenance on Tumblr Airlines aircraft. He will be at the company for five years. There is a 90% chance that if he does this, there will be no crash, and he gets a million dollar bonus and leaves. There is a 10% chance that a plane will crash before he leaves and he’ll only have a personal fortune of ten million dollars and a mansion on Hawaii left, which he can retire to.
So Todd orders that the maintenance should be cut.
However, Blue Hellsite Insurance, Inc., Tumblr Airlines’ insurance company, depends for its funding entirely on carefully calculating risk and then charging a bit more than that, on an ongoing basis. To do so, as part of their contract (and thanks to provisions passed in law by the State), they can set insurance agents out to inspect processes, planes, and so on.
BHI’s reaction to a plan that results in a 10% chance of a plane crash is “you WHAT?!” Whereas the risk isn’t necessarily quite so visible or quantified to all others in the organization, or else they may have motivations to ignore it for the same reason as Executive Todd.
So BHI come back and say that either Todd’s plan isn’t going to fly, or the insurance rates are going to go up.
So what was an invisible cost that could have gotten kicked down the road to a successor is transmuted into a stubborn operating cost right now.
Tumblr Airlines makes less profit (upsetting shareholders), raises ticket prices to compensate (thus pricing the risk into the market and making them less competitive), or else doesn’t go through with the plan.
The State could even require that the portion of the cost which is the risk premium is printed on the ticket, informing consumers of roughly how dangerous a given flight is. This is actually an enormous information gain by consumers, who as non-experts find it very difficult to not only judge airline safety, but obtain inside information about aircraft maintenance procedures.
Anonymous asked:
diarrheaworldstarhiphop answered:
why the egyptians and not, say, the aksumites.. songhai, the malian empire or great zimbabwe? nubia, even..
There’s a rich history of dynasties and great empires throughouit that continent but why is there a particular focus on egypt?
There are many amazing societies and civilizations that never get the appreciation and attention they deserve because egypt constantly gets white and black washed.
Self-perpetuating cycle, is it not?
No one learns about those empires in school, so they fight over Egypt instead. So, spending political will fighting over Egypt, they don’t go back and put them in the school curriculum.
some kinds of common knowledge are a massively valuable public good, and a centralised authority is typically the most efficient way of providing it.
It’s related to that idea that we all have time and love to comparison shop between everything. It’s basically saying “you’re going to get screwed by that crucial detail you didn’t know was important beforehand.“
and that you have the time and resources and are still alive to pursue damages through the court system against those with deep pockets who have screwed you over.
I’d be interested to learn more about different models for decentralized accreditation services – consumer safety, etc. You see a little of this with professional guilds and etc I guess? But I’m not sure how much money you’d need to throw at meta accreditation to get good trust levels, or how much duplication of work you get in a free market of accreditation services, etc. It really does seem like a central authority is a good way to go…?
I think the tricky part is enforcement and incentives. Structural engineers were complaining about the cladding long before buildings started burning down, and fire fighters were shocked when they tried to put out the fires, but in order for that to translate into it not being sold, purchased, and installed on buildings there needs to be someone who says “no” when the architect says “cheap!”
The thing that gets me with the Libertarianism thing and safety regs is that, precisely because of all the losses of information in the process and limited information resources available to buyers, I feel the regulation process really does have to bottom out somewhere with “men with guns come and say no, you can’t do that.”
And I know they hate that, but their plans often effectively give out huge subsidies in the form of unaccounted-for externalities, information asymmetry, and so on, to capital.
“Make them all buy insurance” requires a strong state to come through and force the issue and also make sure that that insurance will pay out. But if you don’t do at least that, then you allow people to engage in arbitrage against peoples’ lives (more than they do now). One could argue, even, about smoothing out lifetime earnings with loans to help pay for safety, but financial markets are waaaaaay too frictional for that and the future is too unknown.
So I don’t feel too bad about the building safety codes.
And some of the Asian countries prove you can have the building safety codes and even earthquake standards without the part that causes housing prices to quintuple.
some kinds of common knowledge are a massively valuable public good, and a centralised authority is typically the most efficient way of providing it.
It’s related to that idea that we all have time and love to comparison shop between everything. It’s basically saying “you’re going to get screwed by that crucial detail you didn’t know was important beforehand.“
Explore vs. Exploit strikes again.
The aircraft engine maintenance example is instructive for other reasons: airlines have strong financial, legal, and moral incentives not to kill hundreds of people, and their passengers obviously agree with this, as do the crew of the aircraft, so all the incentives should be aligned. But they still fucked up.
It turned out that some airlines took shortcuts that did not actually harm the integrity of the engine mounting, while American Airlines and some others did dangerously crack the mounting and leave it vulnerable to failure on take off, as eventually happened.
But this damage could have been noticed with regular inspections! They used a shortcut procedure – despite warnings from the aircraft manufacturer – and did not check to ensure that the shortcut was safe.
Once again if people actually did their damn jobs we wouldn’t need regulation, but believing that the market will accurately price risk in its absence is just silly.
Ah, but here’s the trick: Corporations are not unified agents. While Tumblr Airlines might have incentive not to destroy aircraft through negligence, killing hundreds, and customers of Tumblr Airlines might have incentive not to die horribly due to lack of maintenance, Executive Todd does not personally lose $400 million when the aircraft is destroyed and can effectively extract the money ‘saved’ by cutting maintenance and move on before the consequences can catch up to him. Also, each additional dollar he earns feels less real, and its loss will hurt him less dearly than the dollar before it.
Also he’s not fully rational because he’s still human.
All the NTSB recommendations are technically trade offs that have costs; consider American Airlines Flight 191 which crashed on take off killing everyone on board and two people on the ground after an engine separated from the wing due to improper maintenance procedures had cracked the pylon.
While 273 people may have died, the improper shortcuts taken during engine maintenance saved 200 man hours per aircraft! Why, the meddling FAA banning this procedure may have done more harm than the original crash!
Nah it’s alright fam,
If we assume that the GDP per capita is $55,000, and that the typical passenger has 35 working years remaining, we can just have the state bill the company and its shareholders $525,525,000 and put them into debt bondage and sell off their assets if they are unwilling or unable to pay.
Now you may object to the state rolling around and charging huge sums of money as payment for accidental deaths, but I have it on good authority that everyone signed over their trusteeship to the state rather than get kicked into the ocean, entirely of their own free will. Quite remarkable, really. So I assure that this plan is entirely Capitalist.
Happy Father’s Day to this dad especially
disowning your kid because of a differing political opinion, what a good dad :)
Shut up bitch
LMFAO
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This is why bigotry is still alive become some of you fucks like @discourse-proof-vest think you should keep fucking with assholes just because you’re family.
Shoutout to this Dad and fuck anybody who thinks racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, women’s safety, you-name-it are just “political opinion.” Shut the entire fuck up.
Family over Politics: Continuing to support your gay kid even though you’re against homosexuality instead of kicking them out because they’re your kid, and that means you have a duty that goes beyond that belief.
Politics over Family: Kicking out your gay kid because you’re against homosexuality and “we don’t compromise with our opponents.”
I would suggest being very careful about which of these norms you support, because the kids on the other side that do or don’t kicked out are going to remember what happened when they get older and have kids of their own.
Failing to use social power to suppress ideological rivals is not why bigotry is still alive. Social power is a weapon, it doesn’t care whether it’s wielded for a righteous cause. The same calls for mass social ostracism in the infamous Bad Old Days were used to reinforce the very bigotry you say you despise.
