Yeah, no.

Beyond the parental obligation arguments and regulating companies manipulating algorithms, you do have to question why so many places are choosing this particular approach to keeping kids safe. I mean it's not like kids can't access unregulated parts of the web and see far more heinous shit.

And much like other moral panics, I contend this has nothing to do with any concern for the yougins and everything to do with control. Any type of censorship regime always starts with those who can't vote against it as new justifications are found to remove even boarder categories of materials.

As far as the quality of the discourse, I've begun to suspect something more fundamental is at play- commercialization.

The early web didn't have vertically integrated billion dollar companies monopolizing most aspects of the web. Nor did it have influencers making multi-million dollar deals behind the scenes.

And that will be a much, much bigger problem to defang.

What this really tells us is that the number of people that can get by on their own income is decreasing while the cost of things is increasing. Overall, inequality in the US is rapidly increasing.

Greed is never satiated.

After exports start, they will have established the basis that their product is not a threat to national security. This will give them all the leverage they need to file a suit against the US government.

No because greed is never satiated.

Yeah, they are but not in the way you think. They don't really back up your claims, I mean this is the strongest claim in all of them and depending on the meaning of "drastic" it's not an automatic given that reducing the size of cattle herds and operations is a bad thing at all.

Considering the externalizes beef should probably cost more than it does in my opinion. Why would a decrease in beef consumption be a bad thing at all? A higher floor price on beef means we could regulate out some of those worst types of operations, they only exist to hit the cheapest costs.

Bitcoin does have some small intrinsic value. But it would be around the value of a ticket to the 1933 world's fair. Or an old newspaper with the headline "Dewey Wins".

Communism is not a workable system for more than Dunbar's number of people, and no country on earth uses it.
I really don't think it would work as an economic system, either, for the same reasons.

For groups smaller than Dunbar's number, that also have a charismatic leader, it can work quite well. But when that leader fails or retires, they tend to adopt a different system...or just fall apart.

In a similar vein I can't help but feel the argument over climate change for 30 years has been just a variation of this:

This War Will Destabilize The Entire Mideast Region And Set Off A Global Shockwave Of Anti-Americanism vs. No It Won’t

That's not quite true. Occasionally some people in government do want to reduce the power of the government. For some reason they never end up making the decisions. This is because "power" is an instrumental goal that even an anarchist would desire if they wished to further their belief.

Every one dimensional metric oversimplifies things. But "fascism" is not well defined enough to use as a metric. And "statism" is the wrong term, if you're going to contrast against "individual freedom" the opposite pole should be "authoritarianism". E.g. many small communities traditionally didn't have any central government (i.e. no state), but they insisted on strict conformance to their rules via social pressure. (In that case the "authority" wouldn't be a person, but a set of social rules.)

You brought up amenities

I agree, that's not a college specific issue though, it effects every aspect of our economy and college costs have way way way outpaced inflation over other sectors the last 50 years. Something else is happening. I was mainly using it as a parallel in that they both suffer from the same fundamental economic problem (how can you have market forces for something people *have* to have. You can't, it requires intervention)

Agree, these are all inter-related though, but again, not college specific. This increases drag on the entire economy.

Oh yeah, well not now obviously. But like healthcare it will probably have to happen eventually, there's nowhere else to go. We have to eventually accept these things. Right now, again like healthcare, we already subsidize it to the tune of billions if not trillions. We just do it in an entirely ass-backward way because we've been infected with Chicago-school economics ghouls for 50 years and we do economically illiterate things like private health-insurance and 6-figure unsecured loans for 18 year olds.

Crossed wires maybe, it read like "i dont think these things are problems at all".

See I think we have to operate with a little bit of courtesy to at least hear them out and not someones caricature of their positions. I mean lets even look through your links for these unstated meanings;

The first, with cattles, the only change called for is "It asked for the removal of livestock from public lands that are Herd Management Areas (HMAs). " I don't think that's objectionable.

The article about steel is about those very technologies to reduce impact and the government investment into them; I would say exactly what we should be doing!

The article about mining was two groups, first nations who objected to rules about their land and environmental about species protection. Ok, maybe a bit too nosy. But oh wait, it didn't mean jack shit in the end because the bill in Canada passed anyway.

The only prescription the car article makes is more autonomous vehicles and better urban planning. Nothing at all objectionable to me. It may not feel nice as a car owner to read all the ways the culture harms us but that doesn't make it not true.

So where's the green washing rent seeking that requires the harshest possible outlook?

Oh I can't expect you to care, I wouldn't if it were me, this is just the internet so reputation is both meaningless and also all that matters here.

From where I stand I have a bunch of environmentalists who acknowledge the problems but have what I feel might sometimes have overly onerous solutions but opposite them are folks who won't even say the problems exist and promote things that would make it worse. I can work with one of these.

This is a fundamental problem with the business model then.

So it's somewhat pointless if neither of us can be specific. Are you saying there are no amenities to be cut?

If we are calling those "amenities" then we have a definition problem. Put all those things together and you have "a campus". Talking about things besides those.

Did you look at the list though? We are more expensive by a long shot than similarly developed nations. Same problem with healthcare, nations with similar GDP/capita and we spend far and and away more per-capita. So something is fundamentally broken in our higher education system. My opinion it's the same thing, we expect it to operate like a market but refuse to acknowledge how we've created a wildly distorted market.

To be fair I did forget the key aspect of my plan: community colleges at that point are subsidized education, IE, government supported and basically we would do away with most of the federal loan programs.

I don't have a perfect plan either but we can't have a discussion about the value proposition of college in the US without discussing the costs because the costs are out of control.

Again, just like health care, if most Americans could keep everything about the healthcare in America but the cost per-capita was $7k like Finland, Australia, France, Canada, etc instead of close to $15k then we are having a much much different discussion. Gotta solve that first, it's pretty much the primary issue.

"Et tu"

Cool.

You realize why this is frustrating right, because earlier you claimed "I do not, because most of such claims presuppose that the environment is static and pristine." in regards to those claims, now everything is much more nuanced...

But we can't give that nuance to environmental groups or their issues of course, we have to paint those with a big broad brush and your strawman of them makes you seem like a run-of-the-mill science denier. Again, quite bad faith to just claim they "want to get rid of all cattle, steel and cars" to paraphrase up your earlier point.

Hah! The secret is in the sequence of events.

Try a ball out for a couple of weeks. If that's suits you, pickup one of the condemned pooches at the local Pound.