4 ms·
Breathing air ?
by thehappypm 5y ago
Breathing air ?
- syshum 5y ago
- ralfd 5y agoWe used the atmosphere as a free dump for CO2 and look where that brought us. See also smog and other air pollution.
- e2le 5y agoBreathing air and burning fossil fuels in industrial processes are two different things. Humans are not producing CO2 on those scales that we should worry about attaching costs to the use of such an abundant resource. What are we going do? Incentivise people to hold their breath?
- WalterBright 5y agoThere's a significant cost we pay to keep the air clean enough to breathe.
- quadrangle 5y agoThis was not true for almost all of human history. So, are you just saying "there's no LONGER such a thing as a free lunch"?
- WalterBright 5y agoThere are a lot of compromises in our body design to support breathing air. One is the risk of aspirating food, which kills lots of people.
- quadrangle 5y agoDoes "no free lunch" mean that if lunch is normally $10 and today it's $0, it's because someone is paying the price some other way (like it's externalized)? Or does "no free lunch" mean the drastically broader (and perhaps unfalsifiable) claim everything in the world has ramifications? Maybe it depends on the context. But like if someone who enjoys doing programming happens to find and fixe a bug in some software and then everyone can get the bugfix with the next update and the update was going to happen anyway, then the bugfix can be free. It can be 100% improvement, no compromise, no cost, nothing externalized. If you want to argue otherwise, you end up with the same form of argument that is the same logic as the reductio ad absurdem point that we had to have all the costs of the world existing in order for that programmer to be there and do the bugfix.
- WalterBright 5y agoEven free bug fixes come with a risk of introducing other bugs.
- quadrangle 5y agoYeah, but eating lunch always comes with some risks. At some point, that's not within the frame of saying "no free lunch".