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Related: While Government Officials Spent 5 Years Planning, Beavers Built their Dam for Free in 48 Hours: https://boingboing.net/2025/02/05/while-government-o
by hedora 2y ago
Related: While Government Officials Spent 5 Years Planning, Beavers Built their Dam for Free in 48 Hours:
https://boingboing.net/2025/02/05/while-government-officials-spent-5-years-planning-beavers-built-their-dam-for-free-in-48-hours.html https://boingboing.net/2025/02/05/while-government-officials...
Now, if we could just train beavers to build affordable housing...
- FirmwareBurner 2y agoWhat do we do about the nimbyi beavers?
- Zigurd 2y agoNimbeavers went extinct for obvious reasons.
- 0xbadcafebee 2y agoI think you need an apex predator / mammal to solve affordable housing... Contractors' quotes 5x higher than for private buildings? Send a brown bear to talk to 'em. Limited government funding? Send a wild boar to budget meetings. Restrictive zoning laws? Put a mountain lion in the room at the next zoning review. NIMBYs don't want affordable housing? Wolves roam their neighborhood until NIMBYs agree to allow new housing. Lengthy approval process? A honey badger asks for approval. Economic disparity between rising housing costs and stagnant wages? Moose roams around in businesses until wages raise.
- hyperion2010 2y agoI love the idea of pricing all externalities as time required to be around dangerous animal. I think it would really help make the cost of externalities viscerally real in a way that helps stimulation the imagination :)
- whyenot 2y agoI was afraid you would suggest giving all the regulators malaria.
- ethbr1 2y agoI am sad the American|European bison didn't get a call out. 800+ kg of stubborn disagreement.
- squigz 2y agoI asked before when that post came up here: what is the point?
- hedora 2y agoI live in an area where basic infrastructure like this is safety critical. It was installed 50-100 years ago over a weekend for ~ $10Ks of 2025 money, with no environmental impact and lasted half a century with zero upkeep. Now, with modern permits, etc, these projects take 5-10 years, $10M’s and have significant environmental impact. As a direct result, every few years, people around here burn to death or lose their homes or whatever. So, everyone is less safe, and the environment suffers. Also, I make jokes about beavers, because it’s better than crying.
- ethbr1 2y agoPermitting processes need reverse pressure: 'must reply or issue in ___ days' or it's granted by default.
- BobaFloutist 2y agoOk, this is hacker news, so let me put this in terms legible to a hacker: If "dropped queries" are forced to "grant permissions," you're establishing a system that rewards a targeted "dos attack." That could potentially lead to some downsides.
- ethbr1 2y agoThe status quo also has downsides: no disincentives to making building orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive via permit delay.
- trhway 2y agowell, you can imagine that happens to the beaver who instead of building a dam insists on calling meetings and getting approvals... Natural selection so to speak. In the human population though the natural selection (i.e. whose children are going to be more successful?) seems in the current environment to favor the strategy of hoarding resources to yourself and denying them to the others.
- grg0 2y agoThis is absolutely hilarious. Original story: https://www.voxnews.al/english/kosovabota/qeveria-po-e-planifikonte-prej-7-vitesh-kastoret-ndertojne-brenda-dy--i84652 https://www.voxnews.al/english/kosovabota/qeveria-po-e-plani...