3 ms·

Had the same thought once I was looking at a smart system for recovering rain water in a standalone household. Complex and expensive to design, setup, maintain.

Had the same thought once I was looking at a smart system for recovering rain water in a standalone household. Complex and expensive to design, setup, maintain. Pipes, pumps, containers, filters - all these to obtain a miserable couple of hectolitres of undrinkable water. It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind.

dctoedt 9y ago
> It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind. That might be true in some cases. But the motive might be to provide epsilon demand to help develop a market for an embryonic product — in effect, making a small investment in which the hoped-for ROI in the long term is a "better" world — even though in the near term there might be less-costly options available. That's why, for example, for years my household has bought our electricity under Green Mountain's wind-and-solar option, even though it costs a few dollars more per month (although the delta has been dropping). Our choice of electricity providers isn't visible to others, and it's not a subject of everyday conversation for us, so it's difficult to see how there's any virtue-signaling going on. Ditto for why we bought a Prius years ago, even though economically a conventional vehicle made more sense notwithstanding the high gasoline prices back then. While we could be accused of virtue-signaling, I think it's more accurate to characterize it as signaling social acceptability, as in, "you won't be alone if you take the plunge and buy one of these cars instead of the usual [fill in the blank for your neighborhood]." In math terms, you could think of this as trying to help the market to seek a long-term global maximum as opposed to a near-term local one.

3 ms·

Had the same thought once I was looking at a smart system for recovering rain water in a standalone household. Complex and expensive to design, setup, maintain.

by expertentipp 9y ago

dctoedt 9y ago
> It’s basically a system for some filthy rich executive or other to show off, a virtue signalling of some kind. That might be true in some cases. But the motive might be to provide epsilon demand to help develop a market for an embryonic product — in effect, making a small investment in which the hoped-for ROI in the long term is a "better" world — even though in the near term there might be less-costly options available. That's why, for example, for years my household has bought our electricity under Green Mountain's wind-and-solar option, even though it costs a few dollars more per month (although the delta has been dropping). Our choice of electricity providers isn't visible to others, and it's not a subject of everyday conversation for us, so it's difficult to see how there's any virtue-signaling going on. Ditto for why we bought a Prius years ago, even though economically a conventional vehicle made more sense notwithstanding the high gasoline prices back then. While we could be accused of virtue-signaling, I think it's more accurate to characterize it as signaling social acceptability, as in, "you won't be alone if you take the plunge and buy one of these cars instead of the usual [fill in the blank for your neighborhood]." In math terms, you could think of this as trying to help the market to seek a long-term global maximum as opposed to a near-term local one.