| ▲ | kardianos 2 hours ago |
| Those are the incorrect choices. You CAN actually do these processes, and still keep the environment clean. I believe in procedural symmetry: if you ACTUALLY care about people and the environment, then you wouldn't let other poorer do these thing. The USA being richer, can afford to do it right and safer, not through regulation, but through process. There is a difference. So what would you do if you ACTUALLY cared about the people and environment? Put high tariffs on dangerous process products, reduce regulation (permits, etc), increase standardization and final safety measurements. Then the products we use, we make, safely. But people don't actually care about the environment. They care about looking like they care about the environment, and sending industrial processes somewhere else. There is a difference. |
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| ▲ | kspacewalk2 42 minutes ago | parent | next [-] |
| The trade-off to safety and caring about people and the environment is very often cost. Caring about the environment is not a binary concept, it is a matter of where your break-even point is between caring about the environment and absorbing higher costs. |
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| ▲ | temp8830 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| USA is already effectively priced out of manufacturing due to high labor costs. Doing things with the "correct choices" simply makes the impossible even more so. |
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| ▲ | rini17 43 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | Central/Eastern European here. Our labor costs are comparable or even lower than China today. And the manufacturing is still struggling. So it's not only that. | | |
| ▲ | kardianos 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-] | | That, and you have to ensure your energy costs (power) are low and you have a secure source of raw materials. I'm not an expert, but from what I've heard, the economic region over there has been doing a poor job on both those fronts. Furthermore, you have to talk about regulation vs safety. The EU has regulation. Maybe too much. There are also network effects. Your plant that is energy intensive is closing? Now other manufactures must increase their cost as transportation is increased and local contracts harder to get. Your chemical plant, which has operated within good bounds for a decade can't get a permit to expand, or is protested? Your intake products now either go up in price or become unable to attain them at all. | |
| ▲ | kspacewalk2 38 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | In Central/Eastern Europe, the problem is increasingly one of demographics. You can sometimes find somewhat cheap labour due to shitty (geo)politics, stagnant economies and poorly trained workers, but big-picture-like, the age of labour abundance is over. These economies have nowhere to go but down, down, down, starved of talent due to the twin cancers of bad demographics and emigration. Some countries are better, some worse, but the overall trend is the same all over the region. Going gentle into that good night. (China's predicament is not much better, with the added wrinkle that there's absolutely nothing whatsoever they can do about bad demographics due to their size, whereas Central/Eastern Europe can import people once we collectively get over ourselves and let go of uppity xenophobia). | | |
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| ▲ | kardianos an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I live in Texas, which is still part of the USA, and we manufacture a great deal. I have a friend who works as an environmental engineer at a chem plant. They work hard to keep things safe and clean, and rigorously monitor their output. I'm sure we could do even more if we weren't competing in meany areas against legal jurisdictions which DON'T care about such things. We aren't "priced out". We are regulated out and out competed by jurisdiction which have many fewer labor laws and much more lax environmental monitoring. If we are out-competed on product, then we deserve to loose, which is where libertarians and free-trade have a point. But if we are out-competed on keeping people and the environment reasonably safe? That's when we enact trade barriers. That is how you actually keep the environment and people safe. |
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| ▲ | danesparza an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| The person you are replying to mentioned their personal experience. Have you seen this work in person? It might help to talk about those facts. Also: I suggest rethinking your opening line. It's not very endearing. |
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| ▲ | palmotea an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > The person you are replying to mentioned their personal experience. Have you seen this work in person? It might help to talk about those facts. The meat of their comment wasn't the personal anecdote, it was actually on government policy: >>> You can sum this up with: Producing stuff without polluting the environment in most cases is impossible. Reducing the pollution costs a lot of money, and can make your product non-competitive. >>> This is why you outsource to other countries and let them do it, because you simply do not care about them living in a polluted environment. Poison Outsourcing. This is 100% about globalization: if some countries let their rivers catch on fire, the externality lets them out-compete anyone who tries to do the process cleanly. So if you let their externality-fueled products into your country, you just can't build similar things. If labor and environmental standards were strong and global, or countries with high standards refused to trade with countries with low standards, we wouldn't have this situation. There would be an economic motivation to develop and implement cleaner processes. | |
| ▲ | grosswait an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | One persons experience with a river 30 years ago doesn’t invalidate a theory about how things could be done differently. | |
| ▲ | lazide an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | In my experience, it’s the conflict of the ‘in theory’ vs
‘In practice’. Practically, ‘in theory’ might actually be doable - if there was a single, overarching regulatory environment. That was enforced. Chances are, that would defacto make a bunch of people starve in poorer countries, and blow a lot of stuff up, so would also likely be worse than ‘the disease’. At least right now. But maybe I’m just being a cynical bastard. |
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| ▲ | Teever 17 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] |
| I’m sure it’s possible to do both in theory but I find it hard to believe that it’s possible in practice. If it was California wouldn’t be covered in superfund sites that originated from industrial activities that took place decades ago. |
