#externalities — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #externalities, aggregated by home.social.
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A quotation from Samuel Johnson
He who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
Essay (1750-04-07), The Rambler, No. 6More about this quote: wist.info/johnson-samuel/35246…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #samueljohnson #attitude #externalities #grief #happiness #humannature #humanity #misery #pursuitofhappiness #reform #selfawareness #selfchange #unhappiness #wasteoftime #humancondition
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A quotation from Samuel Johnson
He who has so little knowledge of human nature, as to seek happiness by changing any thing but his own dispositions, will waste his life in fruitless efforts, and multiply the griefs which he purposes to remove.
Samuel Johnson (1709–1784) English writer, lexicographer, critic
Essay (1750-04-07), The Rambler, No. 6More about this quote: wist.info/johnson-samuel/35246…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #samueljohnson #attitude #externalities #grief #happiness #humannature #humanity #misery #pursuitofhappiness #reform #selfawareness #selfchange #unhappiness #wasteoftime #humancondition
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This is a "could," but as Thoreau once journaled, "I find some evidence very strong, as when there is a trout in the milk." >>
Carbon footprint of metal production could be more than 10 times higher than estimated | University of St Andrews news
https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/carbon-footprint-of-metal-production-could-be-more-than-10-times-higher-than-estimated/ #emissions #climate #externalities
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This is a "could," but as Thoreau once journaled, "I find some evidence very strong, as when there is a trout in the milk." >>
Carbon footprint of metal production could be more than 10 times higher than estimated | University of St Andrews news
https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/carbon-footprint-of-metal-production-could-be-more-than-10-times-higher-than-estimated/ #emissions #climate #externalities
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The bill we never see: #Externalities of #electricity generation power sources compared.
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The bill we never see: #Externalities of #electricity generation power sources compared.
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@h4ckernews
Resonates & glad this is being tested: “… agents working on cleaner code use 7 to 8% fewer tokens and reduce file revisitations by 34%. Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents.”🙂Good to see if these findings can be replicated by others. Instead of being so profligate with energy maybe efficiency could be more highly valued. Internalisng the externalities could be part of this. 🫤
#AI #coding #usingFewerTokens #efficiencyOfCodingAgents #profligate #Energy #Efficiency #Externalities
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@h4ckernews
Resonates & glad this is being tested: “… agents working on cleaner code use 7 to 8% fewer tokens and reduce file revisitations by 34%. Our findings suggest that traditional maintainability principles remain highly relevant in the era of AI-driven development, shaping the computational cost and navigational efficiency of coding agents.”🙂Good to see if these findings can be replicated by others. Instead of being so profligate with energy maybe efficiency could be more highly valued. Internalisng the externalities could be part of this. 🫤
#AI #coding #usingFewerTokens #efficiencyOfCodingAgents #profligate #Energy #Efficiency #Externalities
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“Water; The essence of wetness.”
#AI / #externalities / #constraints -
“Water; The essence of wetness.”
#AI / #externalities / #constraints -
“Microsoft is in the middle of a ‘hardware component crisis.’”
“Earlier this year it was reported that the #PlayStation 6 and the new #Xbox consoles could be delayed to 2029 due to #RAMmageddon, which is what some are calling the #scarcity and subsequent #price increase of #memory #chips that are being used in AI data centres.”
“When I joined as #CEO in February, the price we paid for #ConsoleStorage #components was over 2x as high as we paid last fall. These #costs have since doubled again. And as we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, taking us over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier. #Memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory,” said Sharma.
“While the entire industry is facing a components crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers due to the choices we made over the last half decade.”
Think of finance as the slosh of water 🌊 in a very slow bath. The shortages occur when money has been moved deliberately to another industry. Guess which one?
#Microsoft / #AshaSharma / #manufacturing / #AI / #Computing / #externalities <https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/xbox-project-helix-affordable-hardware-crisis-release-date-3950204>
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“Microsoft is in the middle of a ‘hardware component crisis.’”
“Earlier this year it was reported that the #PlayStation 6 and the new #Xbox consoles could be delayed to 2029 due to #RAMmageddon, which is what some are calling the #scarcity and subsequent #price increase of #memory #chips that are being used in AI data centres.”
“When I joined as #CEO in February, the price we paid for #ConsoleStorage #components was over 2x as high as we paid last fall. These #costs have since doubled again. And as we plan for the 2027 holiday season, we expect another significant increase, taking us over 5x the prices we paid only two years earlier. #Memory costs have followed a broadly similar trajectory,” said Sharma.
“While the entire industry is facing a components crisis, we believe we have been impacted more greatly than many of our peers due to the choices we made over the last half decade.”
Think of finance as the slosh of water 🌊 in a very slow bath. The shortages occur when money has been moved deliberately to another industry. Guess which one?
#Microsoft / #AshaSharma / #manufacturing / #AI / #Computing / #externalities <https://www.nme.com/news/gaming-news/xbox-project-helix-affordable-hardware-crisis-release-date-3950204>
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@bencurthoys/116645222472436837
Yes, well said. It’s long past time for standard accounting practices to modernise by incorporating externalities as part of costs to be assessed against benefits. 🙏🏻
Whatever happened to the project to push that integration along? It was all the go & being talked about (along with triple bottom line accounting) back in ?2006 & even before that I think (initiated by the IMF or some other global economics player)… 🤔
So much outstanding work needs to be done to “standard” accounting practices.#standardAccountingPractices #externalities #ModernisingAccounting #costBenefit #IncorporatingExternalities #holisticCosting
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RE: https://mastodon.social/@bencurthoys/116645222472436837
Yes, well said. It’s long past time for standard accounting practices to modernise by incorporating externalities as part of costs to be assessed against benefits. 🙏🏻
Whatever happened to the project to push that integration along? It was all the go & being talked about (along with triple bottom line accounting) back in ?2006 & even before that I think (initiated by the IMF or some other global economics player)… 🤔
So much outstanding work needs to be done to “standard” accounting practices.#standardAccountingPractices #externalities #ModernisingAccounting #costBenefit #IncorporatingExternalities #holisticCosting
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Now imagine a company that said, «yes, after 5 years of intensive in-house use, we can assert with confidence that this is a good laptop. We are now pushing it out into production, is available for purchase.»
Now imagine that was mandated by law as part of both repairability and durability requirements, sending "planned obsolescence" into oblivion.
Frankly, that's how it should be. For clothes, washing machines, cars, anything that is manufactured and has a limited lifetime, yet shouldn't, or, its lifetime should be counted in decades, even in generations. Consumer society is only consuming ourselves and the planet we so dearly depend on.
Would the cost raise? On paper, no: would only be pushed some years into the future. In practice, the lack of a short-term incentive would prevent any laptop from being manufactured at all, so the cost might as well be infinite.
One wonders what can be done that is practical and implementable now to tame the madness and bring into the cost all the externalities – the latter should be the only source of additional costs, and would be minimized the longer the lifetime of a product is.
#ConsumerSociety #PlannedObsolescence #ConsumerMarket #externalities
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Now imagine a company that said, «yes, after 5 years of intensive in-house use, we can assert with confidence that this is a good laptop. We are now pushing it out into production, is available for purchase.»
Now imagine that was mandated by law as part of both repairability and durability requirements, sending "planned obsolescence" into oblivion.
Frankly, that's how it should be. For clothes, washing machines, cars, anything that is manufactured and has a limited lifetime, yet shouldn't, or, its lifetime should be counted in decades, even in generations. Consumer society is only consuming ourselves and the planet we so dearly depend on.
Would the cost raise? On paper, no: would only be pushed some years into the future. In practice, the lack of a short-term incentive would prevent any laptop from being manufactured at all, so the cost might as well be infinite.
One wonders what can be done that is practical and implementable now to tame the madness and bring into the cost all the externalities – the latter should be the only source of additional costs, and would be minimized the longer the lifetime of a product is.
#ConsumerSociety #PlannedObsolescence #ConsumerMarket #externalities
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A quotation from Bertrand Russell
In fact the whole antithesis between self and the rest of the world, which is implied in the doctrine of self-denial, disappears as soon as we have any genuine interest in persons or things outside ourselves. Through such interests a man comes to feel himself part of the stream of life, not a hard separate entity like a billiard-ball, which can have no relation with other such entities except that of collision.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Conquest of Happiness, Part 2, ch. 17 “The Happy Man” (1930)More about this quote: wist.info/russell-bertrand/819…
#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #bertrandrussell #body #engagement #externalities #interest #life #living #meaningoflife #relationship #self #selfabsorption #selfcenteredness #selfdenial #selfsufficiency #separation #spirit #worldliness
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Let's cover the Mid North Coast of NSW in plastic..
Image:
"Surrounding the town of El Ejido, Almeria Province, southern Spain is a sea of greenhouses, stretching for tens of kilometers. Millions of tons of vegetables are exported to other European countries and other parts of the world. The image covers an area of 19 x 30.5 km, was acquired July 20, 2008, and is located at 36.75 degrees north latitude, 2.75 degrees west longitude."
https://science.nasa.gov/photojournal/almeria-spain/NSW - Traumatic landscapes of plastic, pollution and exploitation
https://mastodon.au/@Bellingen/115991606657243814
#NSW #industrialisation #SeaOfPlastic #plastic #MidNorthCoast #blueberries #agribusiness #plantations #externalities #EcologicalViolence -
Let's cover the Mid North Coast of NSW in plastic..
Image:
"Surrounding the town of El Ejido, Almeria Province, southern Spain is a sea of greenhouses, stretching for tens of kilometers. Millions of tons of vegetables are exported to other European countries and other parts of the world. The image covers an area of 19 x 30.5 km, was acquired July 20, 2008, and is located at 36.75 degrees north latitude, 2.75 degrees west longitude."
https://science.nasa.gov/photojournal/almeria-spain/NSW - Traumatic landscapes of plastic, pollution and exploitation
https://mastodon.au/@Bellingen/115991606657243814
#NSW #industrialisation #SeaOfPlastic #plastic #MidNorthCoast #blueberries #agribusiness #plantations #externalities #EcologicalViolence -
@Susan60
Also true. The fetish for the private sector!! 🤑Why can’t we move on? Time & time again we learn through bad experience that the private sector provision of essential goods & especially services, has to be regulated, monitored, & experience consequences when it does the wrong thing. Perhaps when all that is added together, in some ‘Social Economics’ or ‘cost benefit analysis’ that actually includes all the externalities, it will be found to be a more effective use of public monies to offer services through public sector structures. 🤔Oooo now I feel I’m ranting!!
#SocialEconomics #PrivateSector #PublicSector #essentialGoods #essentialServices # CostBenefitAnalysis #externalities #PublicMonies #Taxation
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@Susan60
Also true. The fetish for the private sector!! 🤑Why can’t we move on? Time & time again we learn through bad experience that the private sector provision of essential goods & especially services, has to be regulated, monitored, & experience consequences when it does the wrong thing. Perhaps when all that is added together, in some ‘Social Economics’ or ‘cost benefit analysis’ that actually includes all the externalities, it will be found to be a more effective use of public monies to offer services through public sector structures. 🤔Oooo now I feel I’m ranting!!
#SocialEconomics #PrivateSector #PublicSector #essentialGoods #essentialServices # CostBenefitAnalysis #externalities #PublicMonies #Taxation
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"Lemon Socialism" just like American Healthcare!
Actually, most (all?) "extractive" industries are socialized in this way. They "lease" access to public lands or resources like water... do their extractive thing... produce toxins and/or environmental damage... then move on and the public (taxpayers) either have to pay for clean up or live with the degradation. 😠
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"Lemon Socialism" just like American Healthcare!
Actually, most (all?) "extractive" industries are socialized in this way. They "lease" access to public lands or resources like water... do their extractive thing... produce toxins and/or environmental damage... then move on and the public (taxpayers) either have to pay for clean up or live with the degradation. 😠
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#PR move or not, this is the right thing to do
Not taking into account #externalities just distorts the true #economics anyway
#AI #energy
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/microsoft-vows-to-cover-full-power-costs-for-energy-hungry-ai-data-centers/ -
#PR move or not, this is the right thing to do
Not taking into account #externalities just distorts the true #economics anyway
#AI #energy
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/01/microsoft-vows-to-cover-full-power-costs-for-energy-hungry-ai-data-centers/ -
“No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.”*…
Individualism has been been a growing force in cultures around the world since the Enlightenment; it picked up momentum in the 20th century (c.f., e.g., Adam Curtis’ masterful Century of Self [and here]); and has become a– if not the— foundational concept in liberalism. But, Nils Gilman argues, the biological discovery of the holobiont gives the lie to “the autonomous individual” in a way that has massive implications not only for how we think about, but also how we govern ourselves…
We like to believe we end at our skin. This is the primary hallucination of modern political philosophy in the West, the foundational axiom upon which we have erected our laws, our economics, and our sense of self-worth. Philosophical liberalism imagines human individuals as discrete, bounded entities — monads moving through space, contained entirely within a fleshy envelope that separates “self” from “other.” This architectural model of the human being underpins the political concept of the autonomous liberal subject, just as it grounds the social scientific commitment to methodological individualism. It asserts that the basic unit of human reality is the singular actor, the “I” that thinks, chooses, and owns.
However, this model is a biological fiction. It is a map that corresponds to no territory found in nature. Over the last three decades the life sciences have undergone a quiet revolution that renders the classical liberal view of the subject not merely philosophical debatable, yet factually incorrect. The concept of the holobiont, coined by Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1943 but popularized in the anglophone world by Lynn Margulis in the 1990s, has shattered the idea of the unitary organism. We now know that every macro-organism is actually a dynamic ecosystem, a chimera composed of a host and billions of symbiotic microbes that function as a distinct, integrated biological unit. You are not a single entity. You are a walking coral reef, a plural assemblage of human and non-human cells negotiating a fragile, continuous existence. Roughly half the cells in your body are not human; they are bacterial, fungal, and viral. They do not merely hitch a ride. They digest your food, regulate your immune system, modulate your mood, and structure the development of your brain.
The implications of this biological reality for political theory are cataclysmic. The entire edifice of Liberalism, from Hobbes and Locke to modern libertarianism, rests on the assumption of the “atomic individual” — a sovereign state of one. This core concept of liberal political theory posits a world of separate, self-governing agents who enter into contracts and demand rights to protect their private sphere from intrusion. The liberal subject claims (and demands) to be walled off, protected, and kept clean of the influence of others.
Biology exposes this desire for total autonomy as not just false, but a death wish. In the logic of the holobiont, absolute immunity is not health; it is starvation. A body hermetically sealed against the “other” dies. Our physical existence requires constant contamination and collaboration with foreign agents. We cannot be “self-made” because we are constitutively “made-with.” Donna Haraway describes this shift as moving from autopoiesis (self-making) to sympoiesis (making-with). We do not precede our relationships; our relationships constitute us. If the political subject is physically constituted by “others,” the concept of self-sovereignty collapses. One cannot be the sole monarch of a kingdom occupied by foreign powers that provide the essential infrastructure for the kingdom’s survival…
[Gilman elaborates on the implications both for our political and management systems and for the social sciences that study them. And he explores why this new perspective is hard to internalize and embrace…]
The resistance to this holobiontic perspective is fierce because it is terrifying. As Rudyard Kipling observed (in a quote often misattributed to Nietzsche), “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” The autonomous liberal subject offers psychological safety. It promises control. It tells us that we are captains of our souls. Embracing the holobiont requires admitting that we are porous, vulnerable, and inextricably entangled with things we cannot control. It demands that we surrender the fantasy of the impermeable border. The skin is not a wall; it is a heavily trafficked interface. The state is not a fortress; it is a metabolic node in a planetary flow.
We are living through the friction between our laws and our biology. We legislate for individuals, yet we live as assemblages. We worship independence while our bodies are grounded in interdependence. The future of political theory cannot simply be an adjustment of liberal categories. It requires a fundamental ontological revision that starts with relation rather than separation. We must stop trying to protect the self from the world and begin understanding the self as a spatially intensified instantiation of the world.
Clinging to the myth of the autonomous subject is a massive act of collective denial. It represents a refusal to look at the microscope and see the legions teeming inside us. We construct our societies around a myth of being that does not correspond to biogeochemical reality. The cost of this error is everywhere apparent — in the degradation of our ecology, the polarization of our politics, and the isolation of our private lives. We try to seal ourselves off, creating sterile environments that make us sick, physically and politically. The holobiont offers a different path, one that acknowledges that to be one is always to be many. We are not solitary thinkers looking out at nature. We are nature looking at itself, through a lens made of billions of other lives. The sovereign is dead. Long live the swarm…
“The Sovereign Individual Does Not Exist,” from @nilsgilman.bsky.social.
Further complicating the issue: “Externalities, Rights, and the Problem of Knowledge,” from Cyril Hédoin:
Very short summary: This essay explains how the knowledge problem [the challenge of a central authority having the information needed to make rational decisions for a complex system like a society] applies to the definition of jurisdictional rights. Jurisdictional rights define spheres of individual sovereignty. Rights are appropriately defined if they internalize all potential externalities. However, individuals may disagree about what counts as an externality. This disagreement stems from individuals’ preferences, which are typically dispersed and local. I discuss various solutions to this problem, including the use of polycentricity...
[Image above: source]
* John Donne
###
As we incorporate the interconnected, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that our perspective was shifted in a different kind of way: Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Actually, on that day he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the title was shortened to the one we know with the sixth edition in 1872.
Title page of the 1859 edition#charlesDarwin #culture #darwin #externalities #history #holobiont #individualism #individuality #interconnection #interdependence #philosophy #politics #reason #rights #society #theOriginOfTheSpecies
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“No man is an island, / Entire of itself; / Every man is a piece of the continent, / A part of the main.”*…
Individualism has been been a growing force in cultures around the world since the Enlightenment; it picked up momentum in the 20th century (c.f., e.g., Adam Curtis’ masterful Century of Self [and here]); and has become a– if not the— foundational concept in liberalism. But, Nils Gilman argues, the biological discovery of the holobiont gives the lie to “the autonomous individual” in a way that has massive implications not only for how we think about, but also how we govern ourselves…
We like to believe we end at our skin. This is the primary hallucination of modern political philosophy in the West, the foundational axiom upon which we have erected our laws, our economics, and our sense of self-worth. Philosophical liberalism imagines human individuals as discrete, bounded entities — monads moving through space, contained entirely within a fleshy envelope that separates “self” from “other.” This architectural model of the human being underpins the political concept of the autonomous liberal subject, just as it grounds the social scientific commitment to methodological individualism. It asserts that the basic unit of human reality is the singular actor, the “I” that thinks, chooses, and owns.
However, this model is a biological fiction. It is a map that corresponds to no territory found in nature. Over the last three decades the life sciences have undergone a quiet revolution that renders the classical liberal view of the subject not merely philosophical debatable, yet factually incorrect. The concept of the holobiont, coined by Adolf Meyer-Abich in 1943 but popularized in the anglophone world by Lynn Margulis in the 1990s, has shattered the idea of the unitary organism. We now know that every macro-organism is actually a dynamic ecosystem, a chimera composed of a host and billions of symbiotic microbes that function as a distinct, integrated biological unit. You are not a single entity. You are a walking coral reef, a plural assemblage of human and non-human cells negotiating a fragile, continuous existence. Roughly half the cells in your body are not human; they are bacterial, fungal, and viral. They do not merely hitch a ride. They digest your food, regulate your immune system, modulate your mood, and structure the development of your brain.
The implications of this biological reality for political theory are cataclysmic. The entire edifice of Liberalism, from Hobbes and Locke to modern libertarianism, rests on the assumption of the “atomic individual” — a sovereign state of one. This core concept of liberal political theory posits a world of separate, self-governing agents who enter into contracts and demand rights to protect their private sphere from intrusion. The liberal subject claims (and demands) to be walled off, protected, and kept clean of the influence of others.
Biology exposes this desire for total autonomy as not just false, but a death wish. In the logic of the holobiont, absolute immunity is not health; it is starvation. A body hermetically sealed against the “other” dies. Our physical existence requires constant contamination and collaboration with foreign agents. We cannot be “self-made” because we are constitutively “made-with.” Donna Haraway describes this shift as moving from autopoiesis (self-making) to sympoiesis (making-with). We do not precede our relationships; our relationships constitute us. If the political subject is physically constituted by “others,” the concept of self-sovereignty collapses. One cannot be the sole monarch of a kingdom occupied by foreign powers that provide the essential infrastructure for the kingdom’s survival…
[Gilman elaborates on the implications both for our political and management systems and for the social sciences that study them. And he explores why this new perspective is hard to internalize and embrace…]
The resistance to this holobiontic perspective is fierce because it is terrifying. As Rudyard Kipling observed (in a quote often misattributed to Nietzsche), “The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. If you try it, you will be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” The autonomous liberal subject offers psychological safety. It promises control. It tells us that we are captains of our souls. Embracing the holobiont requires admitting that we are porous, vulnerable, and inextricably entangled with things we cannot control. It demands that we surrender the fantasy of the impermeable border. The skin is not a wall; it is a heavily trafficked interface. The state is not a fortress; it is a metabolic node in a planetary flow.
We are living through the friction between our laws and our biology. We legislate for individuals, yet we live as assemblages. We worship independence while our bodies are grounded in interdependence. The future of political theory cannot simply be an adjustment of liberal categories. It requires a fundamental ontological revision that starts with relation rather than separation. We must stop trying to protect the self from the world and begin understanding the self as a spatially intensified instantiation of the world.
Clinging to the myth of the autonomous subject is a massive act of collective denial. It represents a refusal to look at the microscope and see the legions teeming inside us. We construct our societies around a myth of being that does not correspond to biogeochemical reality. The cost of this error is everywhere apparent — in the degradation of our ecology, the polarization of our politics, and the isolation of our private lives. We try to seal ourselves off, creating sterile environments that make us sick, physically and politically. The holobiont offers a different path, one that acknowledges that to be one is always to be many. We are not solitary thinkers looking out at nature. We are nature looking at itself, through a lens made of billions of other lives. The sovereign is dead. Long live the swarm…
“The Sovereign Individual Does Not Exist,” from @nilsgilman.bsky.social.
Further complicating the issue: “Externalities, Rights, and the Problem of Knowledge,” from Cyril Hédoin:
Very short summary: This essay explains how the knowledge problem [the challenge of a central authority having the information needed to make rational decisions for a complex system like a society] applies to the definition of jurisdictional rights. Jurisdictional rights define spheres of individual sovereignty. Rights are appropriately defined if they internalize all potential externalities. However, individuals may disagree about what counts as an externality. This disagreement stems from individuals’ preferences, which are typically dispersed and local. I discuss various solutions to this problem, including the use of polycentricity...
[Image above: source]
* John Donne
###
As we incorporate the interconnected, we might recall that it was on this date in 1859 that our perspective was shifted in a different kind of way: Charles Darwin published The Origin of the Species. Actually, on that day he published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life; the title was shortened to the one we know with the sixth edition in 1872.
Title page of the 1859 edition#charlesDarwin #culture #darwin #externalities #history #holobiont #individualism #individuality #interconnection #interdependence #philosophy #politics #reason #rights #society #theOriginOfTheSpecies
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Rare Earth Elements and Mining Externalities
"For every tonne of rare-earth oxide produced, roughly 2,000 tonnes of acidic wastewater are left behind." >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-15/australia-refining-rare-earths-environmental-challenges/105969994The new Australian-American $US8.5bn critical minerals deal. >>
Push to reopen old mines in The Dorrigo Plateau ,NSW in global race for critical minerals >>
Not So “Green” Technology: The Complicated Legacy of Rare Earth Mining
"But as much as technology is hailed as the panacea of the future, most of these innovations have a dirty underside: production of these new technologies requires companies to dig up what are referred to as rare earth elements (REEs). " >>
https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complicated-legacy-of-rare-earth-mining/
#mining #RareEarth #externalities #water #waste #pollution #CriticalMinerals #ICT #cars #ElectricVehicles #EV #energy #transition #panacea #weapons #REEs #MiningExternalities #regulations #Dorrigo #NSW -
Rare Earth Elements and Mining Externalities
"For every tonne of rare-earth oxide produced, roughly 2,000 tonnes of acidic wastewater are left behind." >>
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-15/australia-refining-rare-earths-environmental-challenges/105969994The new Australian-American $US8.5bn critical minerals deal. >>
Push to reopen old mines in The Dorrigo Plateau ,NSW in global race for critical minerals >>
Not So “Green” Technology: The Complicated Legacy of Rare Earth Mining
"But as much as technology is hailed as the panacea of the future, most of these innovations have a dirty underside: production of these new technologies requires companies to dig up what are referred to as rare earth elements (REEs). " >>
https://hir.harvard.edu/not-so-green-technology-the-complicated-legacy-of-rare-earth-mining/
#mining #RareEarth #externalities #water #waste #pollution #CriticalMinerals #ICT #cars #ElectricVehicles #EV #energy #transition #panacea #weapons #REEs #MiningExternalities #regulations #Dorrigo #NSW -
The heart of our #economic #system, economic accounting, has a similar congenital defect that stifled the #Soviet #economy: It does not use real prices and costs. #Externalities are routinely ignored. Over time, the difference between what is profitable on paper and in reality tends to increase.
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vovinwhtulbsx4mwfw26r5ni/post/3m4wyll72rs2f -
The heart of our #economic #system, economic accounting, has a similar congenital defect that stifled the #Soviet #economy: It does not use real prices and costs. #Externalities are routinely ignored. Over time, the difference between what is profitable on paper and in reality tends to increase.
RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:vovinwhtulbsx4mwfw26r5ni/post/3m4wyll72rs2f -
Artificial intelligence, distributional #fairness, and pivotality https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05165240&r=&r=ain
"#AI training introduces a significant shift – individual decisions no longer terminate with the present but… influence the future behavior of scalable algorithms. This amplifies the impact of individual actions, creating lasting #externalities. Yet, the aggregation of data from many individuals may lead to diffused #responsibility, weakening the sense of pivotality. … leading to less prosocial behavior compared to a situation with high perceived pivotality for algorithmic outcomes.
… removing pivotality led to increased #selfishness in how humans trained the algorithm. Importantly, this change in revealed #socialPreferences was driven by a shift in individual responsibility (the power over one’s own or others’ fate) rather than the incentive structures (the expected additional payoff of one’s current decisions through the AI’s training).
… findings reveal a positive correlation between participants’ beliefs about others’ revealed preferences in generating training data and their own AI training choices when they were pivotal for others’ payoffs. This pattern points to a potential #falseConsensus effect or belief distortion mechanism, where participants justify selfish behavior by assuming others are also selfish, rather than attempting to offset others’ selfishness through prosocial actions."
#ExperimentalEcon -
Artificial intelligence, distributional #fairness, and pivotality https://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05165240&r=&r=ain
"#AI training introduces a significant shift – individual decisions no longer terminate with the present but… influence the future behavior of scalable algorithms. This amplifies the impact of individual actions, creating lasting #externalities. Yet, the aggregation of data from many individuals may lead to diffused #responsibility, weakening the sense of pivotality. … leading to less prosocial behavior compared to a situation with high perceived pivotality for algorithmic outcomes.
… removing pivotality led to increased #selfishness in how humans trained the algorithm. Importantly, this change in revealed #socialPreferences was driven by a shift in individual responsibility (the power over one’s own or others’ fate) rather than the incentive structures (the expected additional payoff of one’s current decisions through the AI’s training).
… findings reveal a positive correlation between participants’ beliefs about others’ revealed preferences in generating training data and their own AI training choices when they were pivotal for others’ payoffs. This pattern points to a potential #falseConsensus effect or belief distortion mechanism, where participants justify selfish behavior by assuming others are also selfish, rather than attempting to offset others’ selfishness through prosocial actions."
#ExperimentalEcon -
Cars wreck lives, roads and the planet
" Motor vehicles are a major cause of air pollution. Air pollution is causally linked to six diseases:
coronary heart disease
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
stroke
type 2 diabetes
lung cancer
lower respiratory infections.Estimates of the deaths associated with air pollution in Australia range from 3,200 to more than 4,200 a year.
Even the lower end of that range is far more than the roughly 1,200 lives lost in car crashes annually.
University of Melbourne analysis in 2023 landed at an even higher figure. It suggested vehicle emissions alone may be responsible for more than 11,000 premature deaths in adults in Australia a year. "
"Payment (for the constant rebuilding of roads) should be based on a combination of vehicle mass and distance travelled. That’s because damage to roads is overwhelmingly caused by heavy vehicles. "
https://theconversation.com/stop-the-free-ride-all-motorists-should-pay-their-way-whatever-vehicle-they-drive-262950
#cars #pollution #MobilityDesign #roads #killzone #Bellingen #Suvs #trucks #fossilfuel #externalities -
Cars wreck lives, roads and the planet
" Motor vehicles are a major cause of air pollution. Air pollution is causally linked to six diseases:
coronary heart disease
chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
stroke
type 2 diabetes
lung cancer
lower respiratory infections.Estimates of the deaths associated with air pollution in Australia range from 3,200 to more than 4,200 a year.
Even the lower end of that range is far more than the roughly 1,200 lives lost in car crashes annually.
University of Melbourne analysis in 2023 landed at an even higher figure. It suggested vehicle emissions alone may be responsible for more than 11,000 premature deaths in adults in Australia a year. "
"Payment (for the constant rebuilding of roads) should be based on a combination of vehicle mass and distance travelled. That’s because damage to roads is overwhelmingly caused by heavy vehicles. "
https://theconversation.com/stop-the-free-ride-all-motorists-should-pay-their-way-whatever-vehicle-they-drive-262950
#cars #pollution #MobilityDesign #roads #killzone #Bellingen #Suvs #trucks #fossilfuel #externalities -
I wonder if I'm missing something, here.
If tariffs put the brakes on global trade, resulting in inefficient markets with reduced sales and less transport of goods, isn't that a favorable outcome? An outcome that better avoids pollution and other unjust external costs?
In the long run, of course, such costs are best addressed by tough environmental, labor, and safety regulations. Yet aren't Mr. Trump's tariff games a suitable temporary remedy? In light of how hard it is to get nations to fully implement tough regulations—?
Regardless of Mr. Trump maybe neither wanting it nor considering it, market contractions always decrease externalities, right? If so, then by blocking commerce, Mr. Trump necessarily would block external harms too. Which have kind of been out of control for a long time.
Unfettered trade and consumerism are bad. And tariffs prevent unfettered trade and consumerism, however clumsily and impermanently. Heh. Likewise, I imagine Mother Nature is elated whenever we humans propose or engage in trade wars. ☺️
Therefore, I don't think I'll be complaining about any current tariff fiascos (cf. the article provided below) since a depression is not imminent, as of now; and slowing down our global economy would likely improve our world overall.
#economics
#externalities
#holism
#sacrificehttps://reason.com/2025/04/24/over-1500-economists-agree-trumps-tariffs-are-terrible/
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I wonder if I'm missing something, here.
If tariffs put the brakes on global trade, resulting in inefficient markets with reduced sales and less transport of goods, isn't that a favorable outcome? An outcome that better avoids pollution and other unjust external costs?
In the long run, of course, such costs are best addressed by tough environmental, labor, and safety regulations. Yet aren't Mr. Trump's tariff games a suitable temporary remedy? In light of how hard it is to get nations to fully implement tough regulations—?
Regardless of Mr. Trump maybe neither wanting it nor considering it, market contractions always decrease externalities, right? If so, then by blocking commerce, Mr. Trump necessarily would block external harms too. Which have kind of been out of control for a long time.
Unfettered trade and consumerism are bad. And tariffs prevent unfettered trade and consumerism, however clumsily and impermanently. Heh. Likewise, I imagine Mother Nature is elated whenever we humans propose or engage in trade wars. ☺️
Therefore, I don't think I'll be complaining about any current tariff fiascos (cf. the article provided below) since a depression is not imminent, as of now; and slowing down our global economy would likely improve our world overall.
#economics
#externalities
#holism
#sacrificehttps://reason.com/2025/04/24/over-1500-economists-agree-trumps-tariffs-are-terrible/
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De-Amazonification update: ordered an item we buy monthly directly from the manufacturer instead of from Amazon. It was two dollars cheaper, but I had to pay $4.99 for shipping.
On the other hand: do I want to pay for shipping, or do I want to pay for fascism?
#DeAmazonification #externalities -
De-Amazonification update: ordered an item we buy monthly directly from the manufacturer instead of from Amazon. It was two dollars cheaper, but I had to pay $4.99 for shipping.
On the other hand: do I want to pay for shipping, or do I want to pay for fascism?
#DeAmazonification #externalities -
A quotation from Nassim Nicholas Taleb
The epic poet did not judge his heroes by the result: Heroes won and lost battles in a manner that was totally independent of their own valor; their fate depended upon totally external forces, generally the explicit agency of the scheming gods (not devoid of nepotism(. Heroes are heroes because they are heroic in behavior, not because they won or loss.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (b. 1960) Lebanese-American essayist, statistician, risk analyst, aphorist
Sourcing, notes: wist.info/taleb-nassim-nichola…
#quote #quotes #quotation #behavior #character #externalities #fate #heroism #success #winning
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A quotation from Bertrand Russell
I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire — such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other — as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself — no doubt justly — a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Conquest of Happiness, Part 1, ch. 1 “What Makes People Unhappy?” (1930)Sourcing, notes: wist.info/russell-bertrand/755…
#quote #quotes #quotation #BertrandRussell #puritanism #acquisitions #attention #desire #enjoyment #externalities #focus #happiness #life #living #selfabsorption #selfcriticism #selfdeprecation #selfloathing
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A quotation from Bertrand Russell
I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more. This is due partly to having discovered what were the things that I most desired, and having gradually acquired many of these things. Partly it is due to having successfully dismissed certain objects of desire — such as the acquisition of indubitable knowledge about something or other — as essentially unattainable. But very largely it is due to a diminishing preoccupation with myself. Like others who had a Puritan education, I had the habit of meditating on my sins, follies, and shortcomings. I seemed to myself — no doubt justly — a miserable specimen. Gradually I learned to be indifferent to myself and my deficiencies; I came to centre my attention increasingly upon external objects: the state of the world, various branches of knowledge, individuals for whom I felt affection.
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) English mathematician and philosopher
Conquest of Happiness, Part 1, ch. 1 “What Makes People Unhappy?” (1930)Sourcing, notes: wist.info/russell-bertrand/755…
#quote #quotes #quotation #BertrandRussell #puritanism #acquisitions #attention #desire #enjoyment #externalities #focus #happiness #life #living #selfabsorption #selfcriticism #selfdeprecation #selfloathing
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Unchecked growth in computer data centers for “#AI” is headed towards a tragedy of the commons scenario as they starve others who need reliable (and stable) electricity. Those who came first are bearing a cost.
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Unchecked growth in computer data centers for “#AI” is headed towards a tragedy of the commons scenario as they starve others who need reliable (and stable) electricity. Those who came first are bearing a cost.
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Environment Minister #Tanya_Plibersek and the #ALP government approve four more #CoalMine expansions in these lands now called Australia.
They claim that as these four coal mines are (mainly) extracting #MetallurgicalCoal, that they are unavoidable and necessary, as there is not a currently viable alternative to metallurgical coal in steel-making.
But there are alternatives. They are only considered 'non-viable' because under current economic practices they are not yet as cheap as metallurgical coal. And they only seem to be more expensive than coal due to coal not having to pay its true costs. And coal doesn't have a price anywhere near reflective of its myriad actual harms (immediate and long-term, local and planetary) since the Australian government joins a globally dominant delusion that #externalities don't need to be considered when there's masses of short-term profit to be had by burning our collective future.
If the #CoalIndustry were held responsible for the toxic and climate-disrupting rubbish it dumps (for free!) into the global atmosphere, then it would rapidly become apparent that burning more coal, whether in thermal energy production or in making steel, is utterly unaffordable.
#ClimateCrisis #CoalChokesOurFuture #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics #Auspol
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Environment Minister #Tanya_Plibersek and the #ALP government approve four more #CoalMine expansions in these lands now called Australia.
They claim that as these four coal mines are (mainly) extracting #MetallurgicalCoal, that they are unavoidable and necessary, as there is not a currently viable alternative to metallurgical coal in steel-making.
But there are alternatives. They are only considered 'non-viable' because under current economic practices they are not yet as cheap as metallurgical coal. And they only seem to be more expensive than coal due to coal not having to pay its true costs. And coal doesn't have a price anywhere near reflective of its myriad actual harms (immediate and long-term, local and planetary) since the Australian government joins a globally dominant delusion that #externalities don't need to be considered when there's masses of short-term profit to be had by burning our collective future.
If the #CoalIndustry were held responsible for the toxic and climate-disrupting rubbish it dumps (for free!) into the global atmosphere, then it would rapidly become apparent that burning more coal, whether in thermal energy production or in making steel, is utterly unaffordable.
#ClimateCrisis #CoalChokesOurFuture #DirtyEnergyDirtyPolitics #Auspol
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Australia leads the world in arresting climate and environment protesters
Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests"More than 20 per cent of all climate and environment protests in Australia involve arrests, which is more than three times the global average (6.3 per cent)...Australia's arrest rate was the highest of 14 countries in the global study.It's higher than policing efforts in the United Kingdom (17.2 per cent), Norway (14.5 per cent), and the United States (10 per cent)." >>
"Australia's political leaders have joined the "rapid escalation" of efforts to criminalise and repress climate and environmental protest."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-15/australia-leads-world-in-arresting-climate-environment-activists/104721294Study: Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests, University of Bristol >>
https://bpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.bristol.ac.uk/dist/f/1182/files/2024/12/Criminalisation-and-Repression-of-Climate-and-Environmental-Protests.pdfThe Global Warning Report: The Threat to Climate Defenders in Australia
"That EDO report warned of "a worrying proliferation of anti-protest legislation in Australia," The "systemic repression faced by climate activists across the country," and the "unregulated political influence of the fossil fuel industry driving that repression." >>
https://www.edo.org.au/publication/global-warning-report-the-threat-to-climate-defenders-in-australia/#:~:text=The%20Global%20Warning%20Report%3A%20The,fuel%20industry%20driving%20that%20repression."A 2024 position paper from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders that warned of the growing urgency of the "triple environmental crisis of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change and the global increase in civil disobedience in environmental activism in response to those crises."
https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/UNSR_EnvDefenders_Aarhus_Position_Paper_Civil_Disobedience_EN.pdf
#HumanRights #ProtectProtest #CivilDisobedience #rights #law #HumanRights #democracy #criminalisation #Australia #FossilFuels #Indusrty #LoggingIndustry #externalities #harm #NSWLogging #biodiversity #ClimateBreakdown #EDO -
Australia leads the world in arresting climate and environment protesters
Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests"More than 20 per cent of all climate and environment protests in Australia involve arrests, which is more than three times the global average (6.3 per cent)...Australia's arrest rate was the highest of 14 countries in the global study.It's higher than policing efforts in the United Kingdom (17.2 per cent), Norway (14.5 per cent), and the United States (10 per cent)." >>
"Australia's political leaders have joined the "rapid escalation" of efforts to criminalise and repress climate and environmental protest."
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-12-15/australia-leads-world-in-arresting-climate-environment-activists/104721294Study: Criminalisation and Repression of Climate and Environmental Protests, University of Bristol >>
https://bpb-eu-w2.wpmucdn.com/blogs.bristol.ac.uk/dist/f/1182/files/2024/12/Criminalisation-and-Repression-of-Climate-and-Environmental-Protests.pdfThe Global Warning Report: The Threat to Climate Defenders in Australia
"That EDO report warned of "a worrying proliferation of anti-protest legislation in Australia," The "systemic repression faced by climate activists across the country," and the "unregulated political influence of the fossil fuel industry driving that repression." >>
https://www.edo.org.au/publication/global-warning-report-the-threat-to-climate-defenders-in-australia/#:~:text=The%20Global%20Warning%20Report%3A%20The,fuel%20industry%20driving%20that%20repression."A 2024 position paper from the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Environmental Defenders that warned of the growing urgency of the "triple environmental crisis of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate change and the global increase in civil disobedience in environmental activism in response to those crises."
https://unece.org/sites/default/files/2024-02/UNSR_EnvDefenders_Aarhus_Position_Paper_Civil_Disobedience_EN.pdf
#HumanRights #ProtectProtest #CivilDisobedience #rights #law #HumanRights #democracy #criminalisation #Australia #FossilFuels #Indusrty #LoggingIndustry #externalities #harm #NSWLogging #biodiversity #ClimateBreakdown #EDO -
“Not a single speaker addressed where the training data for current large language models comes from (it comes from scraping other people’s copyrighted creative works).
Not a single speaker addressed the energy requirements for current large language models (the requirements are absolutely mahoosive—not just for the training, but for each and every query).”
#ai #ux #externalities https://mastodon.social/@adactio/113412996954724395
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The tyranny of automobility and sprawl
While the Bellingen /Gleniffer area is transitioning from an ‘idyllic tourist town’ into a ‘normal Aussie suburb’ (of Coffs Harbour), road congestion gets everyone stuck in traffic.
Car dependent motorists in their SUVs and bloated oversized trucks demand more and wider roads, larger car parking and a right to pothole-free roads for their 'sports utility vehicles’.
Extreme commuting for the necessaries of life are conducted in big private vehicles powered by fossil fuel. An aggregate of ugly big-box stores (large format retail, Coffs) with hostile giant car parks deliver what consumers desire. These consumption hubs are mostly inaccessible to pedestrians and can be dangerous ‘non-places’ (Marc Augé).
The mobility design of old school traffic engineers responds to the sprawling expansion with more of the same: more roads, wider roads and bypassing the last bypass. They call it ‘upgrades’.
As the latest $2.2 billion highway or forest road ‘upgrade/s’ are blasting their way through the landscape, they are silent about the ‘public bads’: the destroyed biodiversity habitat, the downgraded neighbourhoods, the violence and the polluted biosphere.
The ‘normality’ of automobility, or the 'car in the head' in petromodernity together with regulatory inertia make a transition to alternative land uses, energy systems, mobilities and ways of being a challenge.
#sprawl #suburbia #mobility #cars #roads #JevonsParadox #externalities #automobility #pollution #biodiversity #ClimateExtremes #FossilFuels #Petromodernity #GlenifferRoad #CoffsHarbour #Bellingen #SettlerSociety #liveability
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Whenever I see pieces by Nnimmo Bassey go by, I know there's going to be something of importance within.
Take note of the fact that the referenced page has two tabs, a "Full Article" and a "Quick Read". If you're in a hurry, go for the latter. But the Full Article is full of useful detail.
There's lots of good information in the full article that is not commonly discussed, so I recommend that. But I'll just grab a few excerpts here that illustrate the breadth of discussion:
«The corporate extractive sector, in particular, has been looking for new territories to extract minerals such as manganese, cobalt, copper, nickel, and rare earth elements. This has become increasingly problematic due to the risks involved in resource extraction. Though the ocean may seem like an unlimited expanse that profiteers exploit purely for financial gain, it has natural limits.
“[A]lthough scientists and campaigners have been warning of the consequences of our rampant exploitation for decades, time is now running out to protect our oceans,” Hugo Tagholm, executive director of Oceana in the UK, and Callum Roberts, a professor of marine conservation at the Center for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter, wrote in EuroNews in November 2023. “We like to think of our ocean as infinite, but the truth is, it cannot stand this industrial-scale exploitation.”»
and later
«When governments and corporations decide what should be done, they often ignore the people closest to the water and the fact that they know more about what is necessary to protect it. It gets more troubling when the uninhabited deep sea is discussed. For example, in Nigeria, Shell Oil is selling off its onshore oil fields and moving operations to the deep sea, where there is limited oversight on the damage being done. Even if the harm being done in the deep sea stays out of sight, its results still affect everyone onshore. This is a major reason for the concern anywhere in the world that is near the water.»
The ‘Blue Economy’ Myth: We Have to Stop Thinking the Ocean Can Be Run Like a Business
https://observatory.wiki/The_%E2%80%98Blue_Economy%E2%80%99_Myth:_We_Have_to_Stop_Thinking_Like_the_Ocean_Can_Be_Run_Like_a_Business#BlueEconomy #OceanConservation #MarineEcosystems #ocean #fishing #mining #pollution #capitalism #extractivism #externalities #oil #OilSpills
#BlueWashing #environment -
To follow up on this...
#Neoclassical #economics, jumping off from #Marx, conflated #economic #rent and #profit in order to justify this kind of behavior.
TP=NSV+ER+Ext+M
Where:TP = Total Profit, or Neoclassical profit, or #Marxist Returns to #Capital.
NSV = Natural Surplus Value (difference between the natural price and the cost of production). This is Classical Profit.
ER = Economic Rent (surplus due to privileged control over a scarce factor of production)
Ext = #Externalities (surplus generated by offloading production costs onto others) AKA #Pollution
M = #Monopoly (surplus generated by manipulating #supply and #demand, typically through control of the #market)
Only NSV is what you would call "legitimate", as the #producer #surplus is paired with a #consumer surplus - their ratio relative to the supply curves.
Now, all the others _reduce_ the consumer surplus and are therefore #theft.
Every single #technology #company (#TechCompany) - no... every single #company #profitable enough to be widely known, and many that aren't widely known, is _only_ profitable because of theft.
What's more, every action of #tech companies this millennia (including offering services for #free) has been designed to engage in this theft.
