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Maybe if we mandated that everyone buy a hula hoop, people would find creative uses for them. That's not a great way to steer public policy.

• ericmay 4y ago
  Sure but that's also a bad way of thinking about it, because hula hoops aren't useful infrastructure
  • whimsicalism 4y ago
    Maybe if everyone had hula hoops people would figure out ways of making it useful infrastructure? Like attachments that turn them into umbrellas
    • ericmay 4y ago
      No we wouldn't so that's a bad idea. I get where you and others are trying to go with this, but it's just not a good argument and it doesn't translate at all into discussions about public policy. A more appropriate argument would be showing that it wouldn't be worth the cost or potential upside versus awful analogies. For example, you can talk in abstract about infrastructure resilience for example with decentralized networks or enabling internet services via fast connections. You can't make such an argument about hula hoops. Unfortunately this "I hate everything and everything sucks" mentality is becoming more prevalent.