#incentives matter

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Greenwashing set Canada on fire

On September 22, I'm (virtually) presenting at the DIG Festival in Modena, Italy. On September 27, I'll be at Chevalier's Books in Los Angeles with Brian Merchant for a joint launch for my new book The Internet Con and his new book, Blood in the Machine.

As a teenager growing up in Ontario, I always envied the kids who spent their summers tree planting; they'd come back from the bush in September, insect-chewed and leathery, with new muscle, incredible stories, thousands of dollars, and a glow imparted by the knowledge that they'd made a new forest with their own blistered hands.

I was too unathletic to follow them into the bush, but I spent my summers doing my bit, ringing doorbells for Greenpeace to get my neighbours fired up about the Canadian pulp-and-paper industry, which wasn't merely clear-cutting our old-growth forests – it was also poisoning the Great Lakes system with PCBs, threatening us all.

At the time, I thought of tree-planting as a small victory – sure, our homegrown, rapacious, extractive industry was able to pollute with impunity, but at least the government had reined them in on forests, forcing them to pay my pals to spend their summers replacing the forests they'd fed into their mills.

I was wrong. Last summer's Canadian wildfires blanketed the whole east coast and midwest in choking smoke as millions of trees burned and millions of tons of CO2 were sent into the atmosphere. Those wildfires weren't just an effect of the climate emergency: they were made far worse by all those trees planted by my pals in the eighties and nineties.

Writing in the New York Times, novelist Claire Cameron describes her own teen years working in the bush, planting row after row of black spruces, precisely spaced at six-foot intervals:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/wildfires-treeplanting-timebomb.html

Cameron's summer job was funded by the logging industry, whose self-pegulated, self-assigned "penalty" for clearcutting diverse forests of spruce, pine and aspen was to pay teenagers to create a tree farm, at nine cents per sapling (minus camp costs).

Black spruces are made to burn, filled with flammable sap and equipped with resin-filled cones that rely on fire, only opening and dropping seeds when they're heated. They're so flammable that firefighters call them "gas on a stick."

Cameron and her friends planted under brutal conditions: working long hours in blowlamp heat and dripping wet bulb humidity, amidst clouds of stinging insects, fingers blistered and muscles aching. But when they hit rock bottom and were ready to quit, they'd encourage one another with a rallying cry: "Let's go make a forest!"

Planting neat rows of black spruces was great for the logging industry: the even spacing guaranteed that when the trees matured, they could be easily reaped, with ample space between each near-identical tree for massive shears to operate. But that same monocropped, evenly spaced "forest" was also optimized to burn.

It burned.

The climate emergency's frequent droughts turn black spruces into "something closer to a blowtorch." The "pines in lines" approach to reforesting was an act of sabotage, not remediation. Black spruces are thirsty, and they absorb the water that moss needs to thrive, producing "kindling in the place of fire retardant."

Cameron's column concludes with this heartbreaking line: "Now when I think of that summer, I don’t think that I was planting trees at all. I was planting thousands of blowtorches a day."

The logging industry committed a triple crime. First, they stole our old-growth forests. Next, they (literally) planted a time-bomb across Ontario's north. Finally, they stole the idealism of people who genuinely cared about the environment. They taught a generation that resistance is futile, that anything you do to make a better future is a scam, and you're a sucker for falling for it. They planted nihilism with every tree.

That scam never ended. Today, we're sold carbon offsets, a modern Papal indulgence. We are told that if we pay the finance sector, they can absolve us for our climate sins. Carbon offsets are a scam, a market for lemons. The "offset" you buy might be a generated by a fake charity like the Nature Conservancy, who use well-intentioned donations to buy up wildlife reserves that can't be logged, which are then converted into carbon credits by promising not to log them:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/12/fairy-use-tale/#greenwashing

The credit-card company that promises to plant trees every time you use your card? They combine false promises, deceptive advertising, and legal threats against critics to convince you that you're saving the planet by shopping:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/11/17/do-well-do-good-do-nothing/#greenwashing

The carbon offset world is full of scams. The carbon offset that made the thing you bought into a "net zero" product? It might be a forest that already burned:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/11/a-market-for-flaming-lemons/#money-for-nothing

The only reason we have carbon offsets is that market cultists have spent forty years convincing us that actual regulation is impossible. In the neoliberal learned helplessness mind-palace, there's no way to simply say, "You may not log old-growth forests." Rather, we have to say, "We will 'align your incentives' by making you replace those forests."

The Climate Ad Project's "Murder Offsets" video deftly punctures this bubble. In it, a detective points his finger at the man who committed the locked-room murder in the isolated mansion. The murderer cheerfully admits that he did it, but produces a "murder offset," which allowed him to pay someone else not to commit a murder, using market-based price-discovery mechanisms to put a dollar-figure on the true worth of a murder, which he duly paid, making his kill absolutely fine:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/14/for-sale-green-indulgences/#killer-analogy

What's the alternative to murder offsets/carbon credits? We could ask our expert regulators to decide which carbon intensive activities are necessary and which ones aren't, and ban the unnecessary ones. We could ask those regulators to devise remediation programs that actually work. After all, there are plenty of forests that have already been clearcut, plenty that have burned. It would be nice to know how we can plant new forests there that aren't "thousands of blowtorches."

If that sounds implausible to you, then you've gotten trapped in the neoliberal mind-palace.

The term "regulatory capture" was popularized by far-right Chicago School economists who were promoting "public choice theory." In their telling, regulatory capture is inevitable, because companies will spend whatever it takes to get the government to pass laws making what they do legal, and making competing with them into a crime:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/06/13/public-choice/#ajit-pai-still-terrible

This is true, as far as it goes. Capitalists hate capitalism, and if an "entrepreneur" can make it illegal to compete with him, he will. But while this is a reasonable starting-point, the place that Public Choice Theory weirdos get to next is bonkers. They say that since corporations will always seek to capture their regulators, we should abolish regulators.

They say that it's impossible for good regulations to exist, and therefore the only regulation that is even possible is to let businesses do whatever they want and wait for the invisible hand to sweep away the bad companies. Rather than creating hand-washing rules for restaurant kitchens, we should let restaurateurs decide whether it's economically rational to make us shit ourselves to death. The ones that choose poorly will get bad online reviews and people will "vote with their dollars" for the good restaurants.

And if the online review site decides to sell "reputation management" to restaurants that get bad reviews? Well, soon the public will learn that the review site can't be trusted and they'll take their business elsewhere. No regulation needed! Unleash the innovators! Set the job-creators free!

This is the Ur-nihilism from which all the other nihilism springs. It contends that the regulations we have – the ones that keep our buildings from falling down on our heads, that keep our groceries from poisoning us, that keep our cars from exploding on impact – are either illusory, or perhaps the forgotten art of a lost civilization. Making good regulations is like embalming Pharaohs, something the ancients practiced in mist-shrouded, unrecoverable antiquity – and that may not have happened at all.

Regulation is corruptible, but it need not be corrupt. Regulation, like science, is a process of neutrally adjudicated, adversarial peer-review. In a robust regulatory process, multiple parties respond to a fact-intensive question – "what alloys and other properties make a reinforced steel joist structurally sound?" – with a mix of robust evidence and self-serving bullshit and then proceed to sort the two by pantsing each other, pointing out one another's lies.

The regulator, an independent expert with no conflicts of interest, sorts through the claims and counterclaims and makes a rule, showing their workings and leaving the door open to revisiting the rule based on new evidence or challenges to the evidence presented.

But when an industry becomes concentrated, it becomes unregulatable. 100 small and medium-sized companies will squabble. They'll struggle to come up with a common lie. There will always be defectors in their midst. Their conduct will be legible to external experts, who will be able to spot the self-serving BS.

But let that industry dwindle to a handful of giant companies, let them shrink to a number that will fit around a boardroom table, and they will sit down at a table and agree on a cozy arrangement that fucks us all over to their benefit. They will become so inbred that the only people who understand how they work will be their own insiders, and so top regulators will be drawn from their own number and be hopelessly conflicted.

When the corporate sector takes over, regulatory capture is inevitable. But corporate takeover isn't inevitable. We can – and have, and will again – fight corporate power, with antitrust law, with unions, and with consumer rights groups. Knowing things is possible. It simply requires that we keep the entities that profit by our confusion poor and thus weak.

The thing is, corporations don't always lie about regulations. Take the fight over working encryption, which – once again – the UK government is trying to ban:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/feb/24/signal-app-warns-it-will-quit-uk-if-law-weakens-end-to-end-encryption

Advocates for criminalising working encryption insist that the claims that this is impossible are the same kind of self-serving nonsense as claims that banning clearcutting of old-growth forests is impossible:

https://twitter.com/JimBethell/status/1699339739042599276

They say that when technologists say, "We can't make an encryption system that keeps bad guys out but lets good guys in," that they are being lazy and unimaginative. "I have faith in you geeks," they said. "Go nerd harder! You'll figure it out."

Google and Apple and Meta say that selectively breakable encryption is impossible. But they also claim that a bunch of eminently possible things are impossible. Apple claims that it's impossible to have a secure device where you get to decide which software you want to use and where publishers aren't deprive of 30 cents on every dollar you spend. Google says it's impossible to search the web without being comprehensively, nonconsensually spied upon from asshole to appetite. Meta insists that it's impossible to have digital social relationship without having your friendships surveilled and commodified.

While they're not lying about encryption, they are lying about these other things, and sorting out the lies from the truth is the job of regulators, but that job is nearly impossible thanks to the fact that everyone who runs a large online service tells the same lies – and the regulators themselves are alumni of the industry's upper eschelons.

Logging companies know a lot about forests. When we ask, "What is the best way to remediate our forests," the companies may well have useful things to say. But those useful things will be mixed with actively harmful lies. The carefully cultivated incompetence of our regulators means that they can't tell the difference.

Conspiratorialism is characterized as a problem of what people believe, but the true roots of conspiracy belief isn't what we believe, it's how we decide what to believe. It's not beliefs, it's epistemology.

Because most of us aren't qualified to sort good reforesting programs from bad ones. And even if we are, we're probably not also well-versed enough in cryptography to sort credible claims about encryption from wishful thinking. And even if we're capable of making that determination, we're not experts in food hygiene or structural engineering.

Daily life in the 21st century means resolving a thousand life-or-death technical questions every day. Our regulators – corrupted by literally out-of-control corporations – are no longer reliable sources of ground truth on these questions. The resulting epistemological chaos is a cancer that gnaws away at our resolve to do anything about it. It is a festering pool where nihilism outbreaks are incubated.

The liberal response to conspiratorialism is mockery. In her new book Doppelganger, Naomi Klein tells of how right-wing surveillance fearmongering about QR-code "vaccine passports" was dismissed with a glib, "Wait until they hear about cellphones!"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

But as Klein points out, it's not good that our cellphones invade our privacy in the way that right-wing conspiracists thought that vaccine passports might. The nihilism of liberalism – which insists that things can't be changed except through market "solutions" – leads us to despair.

By contrast, leftism – a muscular belief in democratic, publicly run planning and action – offers a tonic to nihilism. We don't have to let logging companies decide whether a forest can be cut, or what should be planted when it is. We can have nice things. The art of finding out what's true or prudent didn't die with the Reagan Revolution (or the discount Canadian version, the Mulroney Malaise). The truth is knowable. Doing stuff is possible. Things don't have to be on fire.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/16/murder-offsets/#pulped-and-papered

[under-lore]

Do you have any thoughts on darkmarxsoul's attempt at debunking Narrachara?

Little bit of story time :

I was actually online on Reddit back when this was posted, and saw it in "new" on the r/Undertale subreddit & quickly read through it just a couple hours after it was published.

Funnily enough, every single point made in that post was something that i had already addressed and disproven in UNAP a few months prior. (UNAP is an analysis project of mine regarding the UT narrator, currently 300+ pages of pure text long, still unpublished.) To be blunt, Dark's post didn't bring up any new points to the table at all as far as NarraChara theory is concerned, it was really just regurgitating older remarks from other people over the years in a more formatted way. So it was never much of a 'debunk' there anyways...

I actually remember sitting there in front of my computer for a good 5-10 minutes, wondering wether or not i should copy paste all of the relevant parts of UNAP into the comment section since well, i had already written out everything so that wouldn't take more than 20 seconds to do.

But at the time, i had just gotten done with a big UT lore related argument already, and you could clearly see from the comment section that OP was an extremely stubborn (and honestly kinda toxic ?) person. Meaning that given the sheer size of what i would be pasting, i might be signing myself into at least 10h of Reddit arguing before they'd be convinced which didn't sound very fun for me at the time.

Since at that point, i checked their profile history and saw that OP had barely just recently gotten back into Undertale a few weeks prior & that i also didn't really wanna spoil contents that were to be part of UNAP that early, i eventually figured that it wasn't worth the effort and just let it be instead. In other words, i got lazy, imagining that this person would either eventually realise the problems with their post by themself or (more likely) just lose interest in the topic altogether.

Unfortunately, as it turned out, i was wrong about that last part.

Dark later on went out to become an active, but also one of the most insulting and toxic (& often confidently-stating-openly-incorrect-things-in-a-lot-of-topics) member of the UT theorist community on not only just Reddit, but also a few other media like Twitter as well. (Although never quite reaching the toxicity level of a certain other person either.) I don't intend to be rude to Dark's nor to sound entitled here, but they are frankly just not a good theorist neither by game knowledge nor by their behavior with others and i would be being dishonest if i pretended otherwise here or just ignored the "toxic behavior" part of them altogether.

Frankly, now, i kinda regret that i didn't prevent all that from happening when i had the chance... Maybe if i hadn't gotten lazy that day and pasted a response as soon as it was posted, things could have turned out a bit different for them.

Honestly, I sort of blame myself for letting darkmarxsoul become what they are now.

But well...

[time-slink]

ok wait. im curious

there is more nuance than this, obviously, but there are tradeoffs and i want to see whether people think it was worth it

[tearlessrain]

okay the way gods/the afterlife are handled in forgotten realms lore is bleak as fuck. like. the mortal realm basically being a prayer-powered generator and source of fodder for the gods to throw at each other in their constant conflicts and if you don't like that and refuse to participate, fuck you you're Going In The Wall. they may or may not be interested in helping you but you're still gonna have to pick one to grovel at if you don't want to spend your afterlife getting Pink Floyd-ed into oblivion and/or shanghaid into being a demon.

like. what the fuck. this is a dystopia and even dying won't get you out of it.

[vinyls-and-valentines]

Battery City does not have sidewalks— what good would they be, anyways? Space is a crucial component in urban design, and when confined within armed concrete walls meant to protect as much as conceal, one can only really ever build upwards.

And so, upwards the City went. Roads once left as relics of the automobile age turned slick sheets of light meant to guide hover-cars along invisible paths, high above the ground. Catwalks hung upon walls alongside planters full of artificial plants and monorail tracks secured with the claw-like grip of steel anchors.

Like a vine, the City grew upwards, and like a vine, it tried to snuff out any life below it.

Humans, however, are far more resilient than plants— quite resourceful too, when push come to shove— so in the shadows of towering spires they've built their own paths. Along rivers of radiance there are stepping stones in the shape of broken down cars left to be claimed by decay, far enough out of sight to create an inconspicuous road network of its own.

After all, why look down when all your aspirations dangle above your head, barely out of grasp?

[dutybcrne]

Kaeya is rather touch averse, cringing away from casual contact people give him under the guise of being distracted or idle movement. He's used to it, the Ragnvindrs and Adenlinde got him used to frequent affectionate physical contact, but it can still be entirely Uncomfortable if he's touched by someone outside those he is close to or someone he's otherwise Allowed to touch him.

[turianmailman]

Hey I just wanted to tell you that I’m really uncomfortable with the fact you draw nsfw of duck and fakir, I really wish you wouldn’t cause even though their aged up in the drawings it’s still very icky to think to draw nsfw of those characters when they are minors in the show :( I don’t want to unfollow because your honestly such a huge inspiration to me as an artist so I just hope you’ll take this into consideration

Some things to consider:

It is perfectly understandable, and 100% okay, to be uncomfortable, with ANYTHING I create. How you feel about my art is valid and you should only ever follow me if you are comfortable interacting with what you see on this blog.

To follow up on number 1, I have no problems with you unfollowing my account for ANY reason. This is the internet. You set your boundaries. I would never want you to compromise your personal safety over my blog.

NSFW art will ONLY ever be shared on this account as a link to a locked twitter account that is NOT safe for minors. If the age of an account is not shared, I will assume you are a minor and block you. Any images shared are cropped and safe to share on this blog. I will also always tag these pieces with NSFT (Not Safe For Tumblr) so you can block the tags on these posts and avoid them.

It is also perfectly understandable, and 100% okay, for me to post whatever content I like about whatever I am interested in, regardless of how that makes YOU feel. Number 1 and number 4 CAN and DO coexist and both have validity.

Yes, they are minors in the show. No, the pieces I make are NOT of them during the canon timeline of the show.

"Aging up" a character happens in real life - its called "aging", alternatively, "time passing" which happens, to all of us, regardless of our current age. This is also a show about talking animals. We don't HAVE to obey reality and law, but I choose to in this context.

That out of the way, some personal thoughts:

The way I engage with these two characters, in particular, is very, very personal. I often inject what I did not get (a loving relationship with someone I can trust, the freedom to explore the relationship both romantically and sexually and be safe, fundamental milestones and experiences for first-time relationships) into their dynamics because that's how art works. We put ourselves into everything, stories do not happen in a vacuum. As a queer writer with a difficult-to-admit, traumatic experience with sexuality and romance, I think it would be incredibly cruel to ban both myself, and artists like me, from exploring what was denied us through characters that make us feel safe. Not to mention, for me at least, the media we consume grows WITH us. I was a minor when the show aired, and when I consumed it. They were minors with me. Now, they are consenting adults with me.

I do not share this with you, or anyone else, for pity reasons, but for context. I take character exploration very seriously, and try to help characters grow while honoring where they came from in canon. But even if I didn't, that would not stop me, nor anyone else, from having access to a basic right as an artist.

Tl;Dr -- I want you to feel safe, and I will install measures to make things that make you feel unsafe as optional as possible, above hiding what makes me feel safe. If that results in an unfollow, please honor both our boundaries.

EDIT: I will not answer any more asks expanding on this topic, as I think it’s redundant and I’m not interested in discussing the topic further - I appreciate your thoughts and concerns regardless 🙏🏻

[eeunwoo]

I know I haven’t been posting very consistently but I’m still kinda trying to figure out a good working schedule for school first I’m sorry 🫣

[usergrantaire]

i don’t know how to explain to americans that they should also care about foreign policy

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Let’s start with how hard it is to not use Google. Google spends fifty billion dollars per year on deals to be the default search engine for Apple, Samsung, Firefox and elsewhere. Google spends a whole-ass Twitter, every single year, just to make sure you never accidentally try another search engine.

Small wonder there are so few search alternatives — and small wonder that the most promising ones are suffocated for lack of market oxygen.

Google Search is as big as it could possibly be. The sub-ten-percent of the search market that Google doesn’t own isn’t ever going to voluntarily come into the Google fold. Those brave iconoclasts are intimately familiar with Google Search and have had to override one or more defaults in order to get shut of it. They aren’t customers-in-waiting who just need a little more persuading.

That means that Google Search can’t grow by adding new customers. It can only grow by squeezing its existing customers harder.

For Google Search to increase its profits, it must shift value from web publishers, advertisers and/or users to itself.

/The only way for Google Search to grow is to make itself worse./

- Microincentives and Enshittification: How the Curse of Bigness wrecked Google Search

[themathomhouse]

as a lawyer I almost feel bad for people who are just learning that international law is basically fake, but I also know they'll be obnoxious and Loudly Wrong until they come back around to thinking it's still important that we do it

like, yeah no there are kind of no consequences for ignoring it if you're powerful enough. no there's no enforcement mechanism, not really. yeah it's basically entirely run on international shaming and wanting to be able to criticise other people if they later do exactly what you're doing right now. weirdly that does kind of sort of work - not every time, but broadly speaking yeah

[misskamelie]

Fantasy high ep 5 be like: acab

[jvzebel-x]

🦋

[prettyboysdontlookatexplosions]

i think we should all be blaming corporations less and feeling uncomfortable about our lifestyles more climate-wise and every little bit counts and also that private jets should like probably be banned and it’s fine to cyberbully celebrities about their private jets. however! this post bugs me partly because i think it’s an unfair characterization of OP’s thread (which you can agree with or not but came across pretty clearly to me as being about their climate opinions and not a defense of taylor swift), but mostly because i think it shows kind of a failure to grapple with scale. like, it can both be true that taylor swift is responsible for 2000 times the emissions of the average american… and that 2000 times the emissions of the average american is also actually by itself in the absence of other factors a borderline meaningless drop in the bucket re: emissions overall. here are two math situations to illustrate this:

(1) i’m using stats from different years and varied sources because whatever this isn’t a paper and also i’m not linking anything because it’s a fucking pain to do it on a tablet but if anyone cares about my sources i will provide them but also this is unrebloggable because that stupid medieval peasants post is STILL haunting my notes so like whatever. but. in the US aircraft are responsible for ~3% of total emissions. private jets as per one study are responsible for ~4% of all aviation emissions. putting those together, private jets are responsible for (approximately) 0.12% of US emissions. just over a tenth of one percent. i mean, that’s a lot for a thing that no one actually needs and that is stupid and should be illegal. but it is absolutely not on the scale of “meaningfully move the needle on climate change in either direction,” except insofar as every little bit counts, which it does.

(2) a new york times article from 2016 posited that if americans as a whole drove 10% fewer miles per year (assuming of course we are not replacing driving with private jets, lol), we could save 110 million tons of emissions. this would take, as per their estimate, an average reduction per american driver of 1350 miles per year. if taylor swift’s jet has produced ~8000 tons of emissions so far this year let’s say we’re about halfway through the year and it therefore produces ~16,000 tons fo emissions a year. i ran the numbers (and, again, will justify this mathematically for anyone who cares, but like, i doubt anyone does), and taylor swift abandoning all private jet usage for a year would save the equivalent emissions of the average american driver reducing their mileage that year by….. two tenths of one single mile. across the entire year. like. think about that. if you saw a headline that was like “we can meaningfully impact climate change by parking a block earlier than we arrive at our destination for a single week,” you’d be like, well that sounds fucking stupid. but that’s the max capacity of climate-improvement lying in the potential of taylor swift not using her jet.

and like, it’s totally bananas that an individual could theoretically make a choice that would be equivalent to something undertaken by ALL AMERICAN DRIVERS, no matter how small, and, again, private jets are bad, rich people are bad, they are excessively harmful to the planet and that’s bad, etc. but again: all that can be true, and it can still be absoutely 100% the case that “rich people doing dumb rich people shit” is in no way a major force propelling forward anthropogenic climate change, because there are numerically actually very few rich people. if all rich people tomorrow started living like average middle class americans and nothing else changed ever, we would still be completely and totally fucked! that’s what “taylor swift and kylie jenner are not driving climate change” means. it means that even if they got their act together, environmentally speaking, that would not be enough to set us firmly on the course to a less catastrophic future. which is like… true!

[calamitydaze]

seems like more and more people in the community are talking about feeling how you do. i hope you feel more comfortable here again soon!

yes i’ve been getting that impression too! i saw dwter’s post go around the other day and so many people agreeing with it (deserved, it’s very well verbalized and put together) and it felt so refreshing after being in the goddamn trenches for a week straight LMAO