4 ms·

Gp said they know about these other factors but doesn't know how to price them. Do you know a way?

jordanb 2y ago
"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.
- bigstrat2003 2y ago
  Nobody said that. But if you're gonna spend the public money, you need some way of determining "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing".
  - jordanb 2y ago
    Who's "we"? The public is mostly not made up of consultants and do not appreciate consultant logic being applied to everything. People would prefer to define values and then act on those values.
    - kurthr 2y ago
      So you would be good with spending more money and even increasing total carbon footprint, if it just felt good? Seriously, if you're not going to measure anything or use logic, I'm not sure how you can even call them "defined" or "values". It sounds like, "I saw it on TV/internet/billboard so it must be true".
      - jordanb 2y ago
        I didn't say that. The OP argued "Actually this is bad because the cost per ton of carbon saved is higher than some other way to save carbon." The original replyer pointed out that "ways to save carbon" are not necessarily fungible and there are other benefits to subsidized rail travel. The followon dismissal was to throw back and come up with a way to "price" those other benefits. What I am objecting to is the entire chain of thinking that starts with trying to do simplistic, reductionist price comparisons and then refusing to consider other factors that don't fit in the pricing exercise.
      - sedansesame 2y ago
        Yes, because that is exactly how American cities are currently built today -- expensive carbon-intensive roads paved out to sprawling suburbs, the independent financial upkeep of which is not sustainable long-term. [0] The costs for car-based infrastructure are also sky high: $1+ million per mile of new road, excluding constant maintenance in repavings, potholes, and drainage systems. [1] From an economic lens, transportation infrastructure is a net gain to the economy. To me, there is no reason why public transit subsidies should be scrutinized on financials above and beyond how public roads are scrutinized. If we recognize roads are useful, then public transit should be an even more efficient use of taxpayer dollars on mobility per infrastructure footprint costs alone -- even before carbon reductions are considered at all. --- [0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/12/6-principles-for-building-a-strong-town https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/12/6-principles-f... [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-a-mile-of-road-actually-cost https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...
        bluGill 2y ago
        Strong towns is a terrible source of numbers and has been debunked many times. Streetcar suburbs have been sustaining themselves for 140 years - rebuilding their infrastructure. Infrastructure is a tiny % of any government budget (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-about-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...) and so infrastructure spending could go up a lot.
    - bigstrat2003 2y ago
      That isn't "consultant logic", that's the way the world works. Resources are finite. We can't do everything everyone wants to do, so we need some means of prioritizing which things we are to do. You can call names all you want, but this is an unavoidable reality of existence.
      - Tade0 2y ago
        Here's an alternative proposition then: try those things and if there's demand - stick to them. No need for estimations, especially that they're typically wildly off, as the world is too complicated to summarise it on a spreadsheet.
  - bastawhiz 2y ago
    We spend public money on things that are almost impossible to put a concrete value on all the time. Parks. NASA. University subsidies. Animal welfare. The list goes on. "How much are we willing to pay" is entirely subjective and can't be produced by a nice clean spreadsheet.
    - akoboldfrying 2y ago
      If you could make a park for 5 million dollars, or the same park for 3 million, you would do the latter, would you not? Then you'd have 2 million left to do something else with. Because that is the comparison being drawn here. A valid objection would be that there are other axes that are material but are not being considered when we reduce the question to dollars per ton of CO2 -- but arguing that we ought not even try to put a value on how we spend public money will not be a reasonable stance until public money is infinite.
      - komali2 2y ago
        The park to park comparison is the opposite of what's being discussed. That's comparing the value of apple to another from the same tree - there are many subjective elements to compare but given that they're both nearly identical it's quite easy. Still doesn't fit on a spreadsheet e.g. bitterness, likelihood of having a worm inside, prettiness, whatever. What is being suggested is comparing a train subsidy to... Unknown. Other modes of transportation? The money being spent on other carbon reduction efforts? I don't understand why carbon reduction is the primary topic for discussion when trying to put a dollar value on the thing. Two apples are still a little difficult to compare but you at least can agree that the bigger tastier one is probably better value (unless the smaller is cheaper and you need to do gram for dollar value, idk, good luck). A train vs other things though is imo essentially impossible to compare, a genuine apples to oranges comparison. For carbon reduction, I challenge the OP estimate. It assumes everyone drives if no train, as I understand it. So that's the carbon reduction comparison - wow great so many people not driving. But it's not just that. Less parking lots need to be constructed. Less concrete, less carbon. Less roads need re paving every 10 years or whatever - let's compare the carbon of rail maintenance to an asphalt road. Less car accidents, less cars needing to be recycled at plants. Maybe city designs start accommodating the train subsidy, less car centric design, more vertical and dense, less car travel that wouldn't have been served by the train but is now served by walking. On and on and on. You can't compare these two on carbon alone, and that's not even considering the fact that I find it kinda ridiculous to focus on just carbon as a measure of worth-to-humans. There's so many other factors at play that I genuinely think it's impossible to put a dollar value on. Reduction in road noise for people near the highway. Reduction in smog and thus a reduction in lung cancer and related medical costs. Reduction in human deaths from car accidents. Increase in psychological happiness in commuters not exposed to daily road rage and also suddenly having more time to read or play games. Endless, endless comparisons. Dollars are a bad way to measure value. We either need a new way to describe value-for-dollars or a new way to describe actual value. Conflating the two was capitalism's ultimate coup and this thread is a great example of why.
  - realusername 2y ago
    > "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing" We don't even do that for cars. We shifted most of the transport cost to the individuals without any calculation. Nowadays, cars are the most costly item in a household besides the house itself, is that okay? I'm not so sure.
    - carlosjobim 2y ago
      A car is an incredibly complex and incredibly useful machine. In a non-feudal banker run economy, a car would cost 5 times as much as a house. Or rather the house would be 5 times cheaper than the car.
      - bluGill 2y ago
        The cost of something is not related to what it is worth to life. In any case the real measure is what someone is willing to pay. I'm driving a 25 year old car because I choose to buy a more expensive house, and put my kids in various activities - as a result I don't have enough money left over to pay for a new car. I do have enough money to pay for a used car when the current one breaks and is unfixable, but I have choosen to spend elsewhere - those used cars provide exactly as much value to me as a new car and save me money. (I save even more money by riding my bike where possible so I rarely drive)
        carlosjobim 2y ago
        A 25 year old car is still several orders of magnitude more complex than a house. Any man can build a house for himself and his family if he sets his mind to it. Almost no man can build an even semi-modern car. They depend on huge supply chains and thousands of specialized workers. The house is artificially made more expensive than the car, as a vehicle for inflationary money making.
        consteval 2y ago
        The house is "made more expensive" because land and materials are scarce. You can, right now, build your own house. And it won't be cheap if it's anywhere that matters. Also we have standards and regulations. Turns out burning down entire cities because of some cost cutting sucks, so we did away with that.
  - Iulioh 2y ago
    The concept is called "measurability bias" These incentive is not permanent or has to be. You try it, if thing gets better you keep it or you stop it.
  - chomskyole 2y ago
    Yes, that is right. Opinion building is a thing in a democracy. The problem with op is that he attaches a strong value statement ("isn't good value") to an incomplete assessment. Now that's doing politics! Isn't that what we want to get away from? Don't we want to have it all objective and fact based? So here is the question: How should we make decisions? Is it possible to use $ as a neutral decision making data point? Or do we have to discuss things broadly, and include elements that haven't been broken down to the cent, to reach a consensus about how we want to organise society?
- fsh 2y ago
  I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.
  - okr 2y ago
    If Germany wants to be a militarized state again, the infrastructure will be fixed again. You have to transport things around. Tbh, i think, germany has too much not needed but costly infrastructure maintained only for a few people.
    - staunton 2y ago
      > germany has too much not needed but costly infrastructure maintained only for a few people What infrastructure do you mean? Can you give an example?
- chii 2y ago
  so how do you propose the limited public money ought to be spent on which project? Perhaps just feel good vibes?
  - im3w1l 2y ago
    I agree with you that it's important to avoid using such a bad strategy as feel good vibes, which could easily happen if one is careless. However it might suffice to find a strong justification, rather than a pure quantification. One way to build such a justification is to consider rail transport as a part of a coherent whole, as part of a broader vision. Indeed I think such a strategy can result in a better outcome than the one arising from optimizing everything in isolation; the latter risks leading to a local optimum. However it is key that the vision is feasible and correctly evaluated. If one were to bet everything on one vision and that vision failed, if say one important factor was forgotten and not accounted for, the result might be rather unfortunate. So concretely, making local public transport cheaps could fit into a vision of "where will people live, where will they work, and how will they commute from the first place to the second". Whereas including intercity rail and bus is harder to understand maybe it would fit into a vision of "how people will keep in contact with old friends and relatives after moving cities". Maybe "how people will spend their vaction, or go on business trips"? Let's focus on the former one. It could then go hand in hand with zoning regulation, public-private partnership of building housing+utilities etc. Trying to encourage certain industries to provide jobs.
bagels 2y ago
Road building and maintenance avoided?
bluejekyll 2y ago
Ok, the GP is only using carbon offsets, but the economic one are just as good. Forgoing car ownership allows for that money to then go other economic uses. Forgoing fuel costs, $20 for electric, $100 for gas, again allows that to go into the other areas of the economy. These are easy to calculate, why not use them?
com2kid 2y ago
Asthma from air pollution is calculatable. Cancer reduction, road repairs, reduction in vehicle costs for tax payers, reduction in road fatalities, all of these can be added up.
hackeraccount 2y ago
I know a way. Politics.

"These things aren't important unless you can wedge them into my spreadsheet" is the time of consultant-brained nonsense that got us the world we're living in.

bigstrat2003 2y ago
Nobody said that. But if you're gonna spend the public money, you need some way of determining "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing".
- jordanb 2y ago
  Who's "we"? The public is mostly not made up of consultants and do not appreciate consultant logic being applied to everything. People would prefer to define values and then act on those values.
  - kurthr 2y ago
    So you would be good with spending more money and even increasing total carbon footprint, if it just felt good? Seriously, if you're not going to measure anything or use logic, I'm not sure how you can even call them "defined" or "values". It sounds like, "I saw it on TV/internet/billboard so it must be true".
    - jordanb 2y ago
      I didn't say that. The OP argued "Actually this is bad because the cost per ton of carbon saved is higher than some other way to save carbon." The original replyer pointed out that "ways to save carbon" are not necessarily fungible and there are other benefits to subsidized rail travel. The followon dismissal was to throw back and come up with a way to "price" those other benefits. What I am objecting to is the entire chain of thinking that starts with trying to do simplistic, reductionist price comparisons and then refusing to consider other factors that don't fit in the pricing exercise.
    - sedansesame 2y ago
      Yes, because that is exactly how American cities are currently built today -- expensive carbon-intensive roads paved out to sprawling suburbs, the independent financial upkeep of which is not sustainable long-term. [0] The costs for car-based infrastructure are also sky high: $1+ million per mile of new road, excluding constant maintenance in repavings, potholes, and drainage systems. [1] From an economic lens, transportation infrastructure is a net gain to the economy. To me, there is no reason why public transit subsidies should be scrutinized on financials above and beyond how public roads are scrutinized. If we recognize roads are useful, then public transit should be an even more efficient use of taxpayer dollars on mobility per infrastructure footprint costs alone -- even before carbon reductions are considered at all. --- [0] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/12/6-principles-for-building-a-strong-town https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/5/12/6-principles-f... [1] https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-a-mile-of-road-actually-cost https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/1/27/how-much-does-...
      - bluGill 2y ago
        Strong towns is a terrible source of numbers and has been debunked many times. Streetcar suburbs have been sustaining themselves for 140 years - rebuilding their infrastructure. Infrastructure is a tiny % of any government budget (https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-about-urbanism/ https://pedestrianobservations.com/2024/10/07/taxes-are-not-...) and so infrastructure spending could go up a lot.
  - bigstrat2003 2y ago
    That isn't "consultant logic", that's the way the world works. Resources are finite. We can't do everything everyone wants to do, so we need some means of prioritizing which things we are to do. You can call names all you want, but this is an unavoidable reality of existence.
    - Tade0 2y ago
      Here's an alternative proposition then: try those things and if there's demand - stick to them. No need for estimations, especially that they're typically wildly off, as the world is too complicated to summarise it on a spreadsheet.
- bastawhiz 2y ago
  We spend public money on things that are almost impossible to put a concrete value on all the time. Parks. NASA. University subsidies. Animal welfare. The list goes on. "How much are we willing to pay" is entirely subjective and can't be produced by a nice clean spreadsheet.
  - akoboldfrying 2y ago
    If you could make a park for 5 million dollars, or the same park for 3 million, you would do the latter, would you not? Then you'd have 2 million left to do something else with. Because that is the comparison being drawn here. A valid objection would be that there are other axes that are material but are not being considered when we reduce the question to dollars per ton of CO2 -- but arguing that we ought not even try to put a value on how we spend public money will not be a reasonable stance until public money is infinite.
    - komali2 2y ago
      The park to park comparison is the opposite of what's being discussed. That's comparing the value of apple to another from the same tree - there are many subjective elements to compare but given that they're both nearly identical it's quite easy. Still doesn't fit on a spreadsheet e.g. bitterness, likelihood of having a worm inside, prettiness, whatever. What is being suggested is comparing a train subsidy to... Unknown. Other modes of transportation? The money being spent on other carbon reduction efforts? I don't understand why carbon reduction is the primary topic for discussion when trying to put a dollar value on the thing. Two apples are still a little difficult to compare but you at least can agree that the bigger tastier one is probably better value (unless the smaller is cheaper and you need to do gram for dollar value, idk, good luck). A train vs other things though is imo essentially impossible to compare, a genuine apples to oranges comparison. For carbon reduction, I challenge the OP estimate. It assumes everyone drives if no train, as I understand it. So that's the carbon reduction comparison - wow great so many people not driving. But it's not just that. Less parking lots need to be constructed. Less concrete, less carbon. Less roads need re paving every 10 years or whatever - let's compare the carbon of rail maintenance to an asphalt road. Less car accidents, less cars needing to be recycled at plants. Maybe city designs start accommodating the train subsidy, less car centric design, more vertical and dense, less car travel that wouldn't have been served by the train but is now served by walking. On and on and on. You can't compare these two on carbon alone, and that's not even considering the fact that I find it kinda ridiculous to focus on just carbon as a measure of worth-to-humans. There's so many other factors at play that I genuinely think it's impossible to put a dollar value on. Reduction in road noise for people near the highway. Reduction in smog and thus a reduction in lung cancer and related medical costs. Reduction in human deaths from car accidents. Increase in psychological happiness in commuters not exposed to daily road rage and also suddenly having more time to read or play games. Endless, endless comparisons. Dollars are a bad way to measure value. We either need a new way to describe value-for-dollars or a new way to describe actual value. Conflating the two was capitalism's ultimate coup and this thread is a great example of why.
- realusername 2y ago
  > "how much are we willing to pay for this good thing" We don't even do that for cars. We shifted most of the transport cost to the individuals without any calculation. Nowadays, cars are the most costly item in a household besides the house itself, is that okay? I'm not so sure.
  - carlosjobim 2y ago
    A car is an incredibly complex and incredibly useful machine. In a non-feudal banker run economy, a car would cost 5 times as much as a house. Or rather the house would be 5 times cheaper than the car.
    - bluGill 2y ago
      The cost of something is not related to what it is worth to life. In any case the real measure is what someone is willing to pay. I'm driving a 25 year old car because I choose to buy a more expensive house, and put my kids in various activities - as a result I don't have enough money left over to pay for a new car. I do have enough money to pay for a used car when the current one breaks and is unfixable, but I have choosen to spend elsewhere - those used cars provide exactly as much value to me as a new car and save me money. (I save even more money by riding my bike where possible so I rarely drive)
      - carlosjobim 2y ago
        A 25 year old car is still several orders of magnitude more complex than a house. Any man can build a house for himself and his family if he sets his mind to it. Almost no man can build an even semi-modern car. They depend on huge supply chains and thousands of specialized workers. The house is artificially made more expensive than the car, as a vehicle for inflationary money making.
        consteval 2y ago
        The house is "made more expensive" because land and materials are scarce. You can, right now, build your own house. And it won't be cheap if it's anywhere that matters. Also we have standards and regulations. Turns out burning down entire cities because of some cost cutting sucks, so we did away with that.
- Iulioh 2y ago
  The concept is called "measurability bias" These incentive is not permanent or has to be. You try it, if thing gets better you keep it or you stop it.
- chomskyole 2y ago
  Yes, that is right. Opinion building is a thing in a democracy. The problem with op is that he attaches a strong value statement ("isn't good value") to an incomplete assessment. Now that's doing politics! Isn't that what we want to get away from? Don't we want to have it all objective and fact based? So here is the question: How should we make decisions? Is it possible to use $ as a neutral decision making data point? Or do we have to discuss things broadly, and include elements that haven't been broken down to the cent, to reach a consensus about how we want to organise society?
fsh 2y ago
I believe that this idiotic short-sighted minmaxing (mainly due to the conservative party) has led to many of Germany's current infrastructure issues. Laying fiber? VDSL is cheap and has been good enough so far. Renewable energies? Importing Russian gas halves CO2 emissions compared to coal and is way cheaper (surely Russia would never think of abusing the dependence). Maintaining the railway network? That would cost money, and it wasn't broken yet.
- okr 2y ago
  If Germany wants to be a militarized state again, the infrastructure will be fixed again. You have to transport things around. Tbh, i think, germany has too much not needed but costly infrastructure maintained only for a few people.
  - staunton 2y ago
    > germany has too much not needed but costly infrastructure maintained only for a few people What infrastructure do you mean? Can you give an example?
chii 2y ago
so how do you propose the limited public money ought to be spent on which project? Perhaps just feel good vibes?
- im3w1l 2y ago
  I agree with you that it's important to avoid using such a bad strategy as feel good vibes, which could easily happen if one is careless. However it might suffice to find a strong justification, rather than a pure quantification. One way to build such a justification is to consider rail transport as a part of a coherent whole, as part of a broader vision. Indeed I think such a strategy can result in a better outcome than the one arising from optimizing everything in isolation; the latter risks leading to a local optimum. However it is key that the vision is feasible and correctly evaluated. If one were to bet everything on one vision and that vision failed, if say one important factor was forgotten and not accounted for, the result might be rather unfortunate. So concretely, making local public transport cheaps could fit into a vision of "where will people live, where will they work, and how will they commute from the first place to the second". Whereas including intercity rail and bus is harder to understand maybe it would fit into a vision of "how people will keep in contact with old friends and relatives after moving cities". Maybe "how people will spend their vaction, or go on business trips"? Let's focus on the former one. It could then go hand in hand with zoning regulation, public-private partnership of building housing+utilities etc. Trying to encourage certain industries to provide jobs.

bagels 2y ago

Road building and maintenance avoided?

bluejekyll 2y ago

Ok, the GP is only using carbon offsets, but the economic one are just as good. Forgoing car ownership allows for that money to then go other economic uses. Forgoing fuel costs, $20 for electric, $100 for gas, again allows that to go into the other areas of the economy. These are easy to calculate, why not use them?

com2kid 2y ago

Asthma from air pollution is calculatable. Cancer reduction, road repairs, reduction in vehicle costs for tax payers, reduction in road fatalities, all of these can be added up.

hackeraccount 2y ago

I know a way. Politics.