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Except that this isn't the Government doing anything - it's an externality of industry operating in the area. The Government would have to do something to preve

Except that this isn't the Government doing anything - it's an externality of industry operating in the area. The Government would have to do something to prevent people from seeing the issue, which is the moral opposite of what you're suggesting - it's the Government tricking people into failing to see the results of industry.

jessriedel 10y ago
Are you really trying to exploit the distinction between government action vs. inaction here? It's trivial to modify my example: just replace "executing 1,000 people per day" with "purposefully not pursue safety standards that would save 1,000 lives per day". The position is insane.
- vertex-four 10y ago
  Except that they're not implementing safety standards - they're just making the problem less visible. It's like if, instead of implementing a reasonable Health & Safety organisation with teeth, they forced companies to hire people not related to the local community to kill by negligence instead, making the deaths less hurtful as they're mostly happening to "somebody else".
  - jessriedel 10y ago
    "Blow the deadly smog away from people who are dying" is the safety standard, which we can implement or not implement. This isn't just people's ability to notice, this is a huge, deadly, quality-of-life destroying phenomenon. The deaths don't happen to someone else! As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the number of death reduced by this policy is greater by many orders of magnitude than the number of deaths caused.
    - vertex-four 10y ago
      I don't see where elsewhere in the thread this is stated, especially not with references to studies on similar ideas. Destroying the atmosphere by messing with it on a large scale kills people over time - implementing a solution to the problem of creating smog in the first place kills nobody. Perhaps this could be useful short term to prevent deaths now long enough to implement a better solution - but the fear is that it's not going to be short term at all.
      - jessriedel 10y ago
        You're conflating smog and CO2! CO2 is invisible and a free molecular gas. Smog is mesoscopic particulate matter.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]

jessriedel 10y ago

Are you really trying to exploit the distinction between government action vs. inaction here? It's trivial to modify my example: just replace "executing 1,000 people per day" with "purposefully not pursue safety standards that would save 1,000 lives per day". The position is insane.

vertex-four 10y ago
Except that they're not implementing safety standards - they're just making the problem less visible. It's like if, instead of implementing a reasonable Health & Safety organisation with teeth, they forced companies to hire people not related to the local community to kill by negligence instead, making the deaths less hurtful as they're mostly happening to "somebody else".
- jessriedel 10y ago
  "Blow the deadly smog away from people who are dying" is the safety standard, which we can implement or not implement. This isn't just people's ability to notice, this is a huge, deadly, quality-of-life destroying phenomenon. The deaths don't happen to someone else! As discussed elsewhere in this thread, the number of death reduced by this policy is greater by many orders of magnitude than the number of deaths caused.
  - vertex-four 10y ago
    I don't see where elsewhere in the thread this is stated, especially not with references to studies on similar ideas. Destroying the atmosphere by messing with it on a large scale kills people over time - implementing a solution to the problem of creating smog in the first place kills nobody. Perhaps this could be useful short term to prevent deaths now long enough to implement a better solution - but the fear is that it's not going to be short term at all.
    - jessriedel 10y ago
      You're conflating smog and CO2! CO2 is invisible and a free molecular gas. Smog is mesoscopic particulate matter.
deleted 10y ago
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