and consequently there is a greater awareness that if you slack off in life, you may find yourself in a very uncomfortable situation very quickly.

The welfare state hides this from you. It promises to have your back if you fall, but implicit in that promise is that the welfare state will also have your back if you don't bother to try in the first place.

Yes, it is more cruel in its own way. But it is more honest. And the effect seems to be a net positive if measured along the cold hard axis of productivity and material wealth.

When I was a kid in elementary school, a 15 minute recess on the playground lasted forever. Now...not so much.

Some people obviously have every brain cell blazing at every waking moment, but others don't. No sense in insinuating people should envy the subjective experience of other people, or try to emulate it with cheap brain hacks or One Weird Tricks.

Fun and excitement is fun for some people some of the time, routine is a comfort for other people at other times. Be comfortable in your own skin and in your own skull.

A protest at work prevents others from working. Maybe you don't take pride in your work, but many people do, and preventing them from doing their jobs because of *your* subjective opinions is at the very least, bad for esprit de corps, and something not just management may object to.

And I don't agree with it one damn bit.

But you know what, my coworkers don't bother me and the paychecks clear, so I refrain from staging a Trump rally at the front door every morning.

Checkmate!

Yeah. The other guys are subhuman and incapable of rational thought. That means we can do stuff to them for our own amusement without feeling guilty later. Great way to live.

Lead pipes for sewer would leach into the soil, even if it didn't go straight into your drinking water.

Handling lead pipes as opposed to plastic during installation would be more expensive and more hazardous.

So what's the dollar/environmental/fire hazard cost increase from having to mine copper and solder it in places where now you can just glue PVC?

There's a real answer to that question. Perhaps it's negligible (or not, copper or steel pipe wide enough for sewer or drains *is* pretty fucking expensive), but you never know if you don't even acknowledge the question in your zeal to be green at all costs.

Good for you. Perhaps at some point you'll switch to the "I don't get spooked just because the control freaks and used car salesmen of the world tell me I should be afraid" ideology.

That one frees you to consider the benefits of banning $scary_chemical versus the costs of banning it in terms of both the immediate costs to install expensive and energy-intensive filtration systems and the indirect costs of not being able to have the stuff that that chemical was used to make.

Some idiots wanted to ban the VC in PVC after that train derailment in Ohio last year. As if excising all of PVC from the world wouldn't have any negative consequences. Should we all go back to lead pipes for our sewer lines?

Old joke:

Did you hear the news about Frank in IT?

What about him?

He's "Francine" now, so everyone's gotta be on their best behavior.

What are you all down about? Now we only have to pay him 73%!

You can't control getting old, but you can control whether or not you indulge in bullshit, or at the very least, act on it during business hours.

No need to go full Hobbesian state just yet.

Because if, despite their conspicuous bullshit, their technical output adds to our strength and/or prosperity more than the bullshit subtracts from it, good statecraft would entail nothing more than a slap on the wrist for trespassing and good citizenship would entail nothing other than "I disagree with what you have to say, but will defend to the death your right to say it."

But if their bullshit subtracts more than their technical talents add, some of those decidedly more grim options bubble up into the realm of reasonableness, accompanied by their loyal companions: the question of survival, the doubt of mistaking inconsequential nonsense for an existential threat, and the spectre of rocking the boat too hard without a good way to right it.

These are weighty questions, whether they are asked or allowed to exist unmentioned in the background of life. It's good to stay aware of them, lest they catch you in a stupor of complacency.

Only possible to hold that kind of attitude from behind a heavily armed military holding the savages at bay.

Open question whether these people are a net plus or a net minus.

And your eyes still sting from the smog the moment you get off the subway in downtown Shanghai. At least mine did. Maybe I was holding my eyeball wrong. /sarc

Your solution requires our competitors to willingly raise their operating costs in order to be less competitive with us.

This is unrealistic.

The only way it could be realistic is if you imagine that they care about being green as much as our greenies do. This is a false assumption. Green is a luxury belief. In China, Vietnam, or any other place where they make our stuff for us because we won't do it ourselves, they don't give two fucks about being green. The fact that they make money not giving a fuck is just icing on the cake.

You can't project your own value system on other countries with vastly different histories, belief systems, and economic circumstances, and then predicate your whole public policy on the assumption that China is just America with a different language.