> > The Georgia data center is only using ~2% of the county’s water. For comparison, a pharmaceutical manufacturing plant is using ~4% of the county’s water. A construction plant for Rivian cars is using about the same amount of water as Meta’s data center. The data center is functioning like any other normal industry in the county.
How much employment and localized value/tax revenue is created by the pharma plant compared to the data center to offset the environmental effect?
The downstream portion isn't proven, and more importantly, even if it was, it's not localized to where the data center is built (and its effect on the local population).
The sellers are in practice anonymous, and the consumer facing Temu (or Shein, or Aliexpress, etc) very much markets to consumers, yet shirk any responsibility. They are Walmart but ignore the little accountability Walmart faces.
Of course Temu is responsible for things I buy in the Temu app, and pay Temu for, which then Temu ships to me.
> The sellers are in practice anonymous, and the consumer facing Temu (or Shein, or Aliexpress, etc) very much markets to consumers, yet shirk any responsibility. They are Walmart but ignore the little accountability Walmart faces.
They are not Walmart.
> Of course Temu is responsible for things I buy in the Temu app, and pay Temu for, which then Temu ships to me.
If you send money to someone in the PayPal app, are they responsible for what you bought? Not just for giving you a refund; for having liability if your house burns down. If the seller keeps their inventory in a rented space, should you be able to sue their landlord? If FedEx delivers a package to you, are they responsible for the regulatory compliance of what's inside?
Consider what would happen if you did that. Could a normal person buy or sell something or rent space or send packages, if the intermediary had to take on liability for anything you do with it?
We've already tried the third one in the US before the FDA. A ton of people kept dying.
Milk was filled with borax and formaldehyde, coffee was cut with sawdust/charred bone/lead, spices were often 100% counterfeit.
The market (heavily) incentivized fraud.
In New York, in one year (1857), 8000 infants died to "swill milk" [0].
The second option (FDA and regulation) wasn't lobbied for, and the Food Bill of 1902 actually failed through heavy (counter)lobbying initially [1], until the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 [2] passed.
Invoking 1857 is not a valid argument really, cause consumer priorities were different. Cheaper with some level of risk (which today's American, or German would consider excessive) was preferred option hence the market response as it was - at least it's a reasonable guess.
In less rich countries it is how things work right now.
Industries dump toxic waste into waterways if they can get away with it in the US today (literally today [0]). I agree that I might not be specifically worried about borax milk if FDA was reversed, but I would absolutely expect risky shortcuts in food offerings.
The incentives in the market has never changed. That's what regulation is for, shifting market incentives/forces to favor consumers/society.
Pollution is an externality. If Alice hires a company to do "Hydro Excavation" and they pollute Bob's water, even if Bob knows all about it and is entirely opposed, he can't prevent it by not patronizing them because he isn't a party to the transaction. So the solution to this has to be to prohibit pollution.
Product safety is about information. When Bob knows that a particular brand of milk is adulterated with chalk, he doesn't buy it. Which means that all you need for this is product labeling and liability. If the ingredients list chalk, the customer who doesn't want chalk doesn't buy it. If the ingredients don't list chalk then the seller is not in compliance if the product contains it. If the battery is unsafe then you can both not purchase it because the reviews concluded it was unsafe or sue them if your house burns down. And the compliance process is simple: You list the actual ingredients on the label and have responsibility for damages caused by your product. No massive regulatory bureaucracy with thousands of pages of rules, just liability for fraud and harm.
The problem for all of these is that the perpetrator has to be in your jurisdiction. If companies in China are emitting copious amounts of CO2, regulations in Europe can't do much about it. If those companies are making unsafe products that end up on the world market, you can't sue them in the US because they have no real presence in the US. But complex product regulations don't solve that either, because they too are subject to the same problem; foreign companies drop ship things that don't comply. Nor does putting the liability in the wrong place, because generic transportation or payments intermediaries are in a worse position than the government itself to be the ones evaluating things that come over the border.
Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.
> Product safety is about information. When Bob knows that a particular brand of milk is adulterated with chalk, he doesn't buy it. Which means that all you need for this is product labeling and liability.
This is regulation, and it's only as good as enforcement. Meaning it requires government inspections and labs. Again, we've already proven this in history.
> sue them if your house burns down
Sure, if you only care about compensation and not prevention. Also I don't think you've considered the practicalities of your example, in that no regular person will 1. determine the battery cause. 2. prove it. 3. bring a successful suit against a corporation.
> Consider it this way: Why doesn't US customs exclude unsafe products from being imported from other countries? Consider what they would have to do to actually accomplish that.
Well... they do seize millions of products yearly. It's generally sub-$800 packages getting through. Your original point of incumbents targetting upstarts and thus forcing "burner" companies is the wrong causality. Burner companies are incentivized to specifically skirt liability and reputation. Regulating the frontend incentivizes self-policing against sub-companies designed to be dissolved.
Tron 3 would be fine if not for the main character. Every other character/performance is great IMO, and the Trent Reznor soundtrack. The main performance was just incredibly bad, which sinks the whole movie.
> Most things suck when someone shitty is running it. This is the worst argument of all time.
I actually think it is the only argument.
As Churchill mused:
"Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…"
Company towns, communism, etc are bad specifically because of their ease of abuse, which is why our best (least worst) systems of governing are focused on transparency, accountability and minimizing abuse. It sucks that all that friction makes it less efficient, but alas we need to plan for the/humanities worst, because it continually crops up.
> But either way if you disable "unsafe content" you'll end up disabling almost everything, specifically including the huge amount of "safe" content which isn't tagged as safe because accurately classifying it is uneconomical.
I think that's okay. The need for regulation is incentivizing capitalism in its amoralism to favor your regulated morality.
Corporations very much like targetting impressionable kids with content to sell stuff. If that adds a liability cost to moderate and make sure that content is "safe" (whatever that means in your jurisdiction), then isn't that what you would want?
I've never let my kids out on youtube, or the internet without either of us parents (yet at least). I hear you can now whitelist channels on youtube premium for child accounts, which sounds exactly like I want, but of course that doesn't scale. While I'd want to curate the entire internet for them until we've instilled enough judgment/their brains have developed enough to do it themselves, it's obviously impossible. Adding a liability risk or moderation cost to target kids seems like a fairly aligned incentive.
I struggle with this daily. If two comments state the opposite, and one is "constructive" in framing, and one is antagonistic, I agree it's easier to carry the conversation with the former. But if the latter is the factually correct one, I'm not sure it's the one "hurting America", at least comparatively. This is an assumption made by me in service of the hypothetical.
In general, I think debates (the school competition kind/internet spectacle kind) focuses entirely to much on perception, and very little on content, in that whoever wins is completely disjoint from who if any is actually right. Though I suppose it's easier to police/moderate the presentation than the veracity.
TL;DR: I agree with you in general, all else being equal, but that's not always the case.
How much employment and localized value/tax revenue is created by the pharma plant compared to the data center to offset the environmental effect?
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