I have to disagree. I think the "everyone's a winner" group is a substantial subset of the masochistic side of the authoritarian crowd.

Always willing to provide.

That would be the smart money bet.

I notice that hasn't actually resulted in legalization at the federal level - even though the last three presidents all admit to illegal drug use.

Or maybe none of these things happens and he achieves the goal.

I guess you haven't been paying attention. Lot of varieties of cancer are already curable - if caught in time.

The most successful pirate, Ragnar DanneskjÃld was a founding member of Galt's Gulch. You just make sure the people with the guns are on board and that they aren't all under a single point of control.

Sounds like you ought to read the book sometime. You could alternate it with something like Das Kapital, if you're afraid of picking up Rand cooties.

I'm sure they a) didn't care and b) didn't think about it. The two go hand in hand.

You think freedom sucks for the environment? Try its absence for something even worse. Free people care about the environment far more than slaves.Classic example is the difference between the West and Communism during the Cold War. The Aral Sea is just about gone because way back when, some central planning group decided to turn a bunch of desert into farmland without considering the consequences. Bad stuff happens in the developed world too, but you can't be stopped from caring about it. And as a result, those sort of decisions have a lot more push back and don't go as far.

The US-equivalent is the Salton Sea which was made by an epic mistake, the accidental redirecting of the entire Colorado River into Imperial Valley for a couple of years at the beginning of the 20th Century. Neither the US or Mexican governments (the flooding actually originated on the Mexican side of the border) contributed much to the effort of restoring the previous state. It took the regional railroad (which was greatly impaired by the flood waters to stop the flooding.

Freedom kept the Imperial Valley from just being the Salton Sea. Lack of freedom damned the Aral Sea.

If a couple of off-roaders can set you back to square one, then you are doing it wrong. Nature is not all-enduring, but it can take a beating (such as the forest fire, which was much worse). I also see this sort of flawed thinking in environmental science fiction all the time where there is some fragile terraforming ecosystem that requires constant human attention. Bonus cliche points, if their animal companion/mascot looks on as they toil away desperately trying to save the gimpy tree for the future of their new world.

My view is that this is not ecosystem restoration or the terraforming equivalent, but landscaping. Its private property and if you want to make it look pretty, that's fine with me. Off roaders in that situation were committing a variety of crimes in trespassing on the property and vandalizing it. Too bad you didn't catch them. But it would have taken more than that to derail a proper land restoration project. Sorry.

And people dump all kinds of crap in those pools too. The problem isn't that humanity is evil, though obviously that is a seductive narrative for the occasion, but simply that there's so many people visiting.

If you were to drop a bison in, it would quickly, over the course of a few days be rendered down (in the original sense of the word) to at most a few tens of kilograms of bone. Further, they aren't the smartest animals in the Park, but they're smart enough to avoid Grand Prismatic. So on the animal side you're left with things like hapless ducks who didn't get the memo.

On the plant side, you basically have wind-blown leaves (wood is durable, but it doesn't grow in hot springs for some reason) which don't last either. The spring happens to be set back from the hillside behind it so you're not getting a lot of silt. There's not a lot of natural mass going into Grand Prismatic.

On the other hand, if a hundred thousand tourists per year (of the many more visitors who actually walk by the hot spring) each toss a penny into the spring (which isn't hard to do since the boardwalk goes up to the edge of the spring), then you're adding 200 kg of copper and zinc to that spring every year. And those coins tend to stick around even in weakly acidic waters of Grand Prismatic. I think the National Park Service has been successful at keeping people from dumping a lot of junk in the spring, but it is a never ending battle. Evil humanity has been kept at bay, yay. But if they stopped doing it, human litter would probably plug up the spring (third largest in the world) in a few decades.

A much smaller spring is far more susceptible to this sort of problem. The popular Morning Glory Pool has changed its colors over the years due to human litter (coins, beer cans, etc). And they're pretty sure it's human because they dredge up the debris in the pool every so often to keep it active (and there apparently is a noticeable difference before and after).

Where is this weak, possibly confounded evidence? Just because you assert something doesn't make it true. There are too many orders of magnitude of difference to explain with such platitudes.

At this point, I really don't see the point of continuing this argument. Ignoring a several orders of magnitude bit of evidence just because it doesn't complete a certain ritual is disingenuous.

There's no evidence that now is different from the past few centuries. We still have both comparative advantage and Jevons paradox. We also have a massive global increase in employment with employees still finding new jobs when the old ones get obsoleted.

Completely explains the internet.

I missed the memo where entitled snowflakes have a clue how to prevent that. My bet is that when the dastardly Poles attack that radio station everyone will fall in line as planned.

How many people do you know that actually do that? Small number right? How many people do you know that just go along with that and don't question anything? Large number right? That last group is the "everyone's a winner" crowd.