Oil refineries in particular are interesting because the sources for the blend of gasoline California requires[0] are either in CA itself or are few and far away. This means that gasoline prices are susceptible to greater supply shocks and so on. Many US regulations follow from California exercising its large market to induce companies to change their policies (electronic one-click cancel, CCPA, No Surprises in healthcare billing) but this one hasn't quite had the same effect.
One can hope that most Californians switch to BEVs from ICE vehicles before this becomes more of a constraint.
Gasoline usage externalities are poorly priced-in so the resulting increase in cost of gasoline here is probably overall a good thing. If we had appropriate carbon/sulphur/etc pricing on the outputs, I think it would be less justifiable since then the externalities would be priced in.
I do not care to try to make things ethically fair for oil refineries. Call me a hypocrite, I do not care, as these companies similarly do not care. "Ya got me!", yup, moving on, I am still glad oil refineries are effectively banned.
My point wasn't about fairness towards oil refinery companies, it was that supporting a ban on refineries in your local area while still benefiting from the downstream outputs of oil refineries is hypocritical nimbyism.
If oil refineries are bad in California, they're bad everywhere, and if they're bad everywhere, we ought to stop using them altogether, which will make for some unwelcome lifestyle changes.
> If oil refineries are bad in California, they're bad everywhere
That doesn't follow. It only follows that they are bad everywhere with circumstances similar to California. A place differing in distribution of population, distribution of agricultural land, weather patterns, and/or water flows might be able to have refineries without causing the harms that makes them difficult to place in California.
Would it be hypocritical nimbyism if I wanted to use semiconductors containing arsenic, but didn't want my living room to be an arsenic warehouse? Or how far away does the arsenic warehouse have to be before it starts being hypocritical nimbyism for me to not like it there?
I'm fine if other states want to ban them too. I'm also fine if ultimately running oil refineries is uneconomical. I do not care if this is nimbyism; other communities are free to set their own rules.
I think the things you are describing would make running a refinery economical, and I am sure at some price some community would be thrilled to have a refinery. Good for them, still glad its not here.
I think if we consolidate those operations the better, and then we can improve an regulate legislative or as a market more easily than if everyone is spread all over.
If we consolidate them you wind up with the same situation we have for everything already. The big megacorps who's paid for experts and lawyers (and ability to donate to politics) to tell you why the river glowing is safe get to do what they want and the upstart who may challenge that bigCo to do better never gets off the ground. But I guess if the goal is simply to declare everything "fixed" because the government has agreed it's compliant then consolidation is fine.
Paint VOCs sounds fine, until it's done at industrial scale, and it's also your neighbor, and also all the children in the neighborhood have asthma, and also healthcare is a lot more expensive...
This list isn't things you "cant do in california" but "polluting things you can't do in highly populated cities".
I'm not sure what the conclusion here is other than health is not important.
Most of this stuff could be done in compliance with the laws but it’s just cheaper to do it somewhere else where you allowed to vent poison in the air rather than having to filter it out.
Are they only banned in the cities, or are they banned in the state, which -- even in California, should have rural areas far enough away from cities to be tenable?
It's an interesting conundrum though, because in many cases, the cities could not exist without the things that are being banned in the cities. It's a curious goal of populations to centralize, then ostracize all the things that enabled that centralization
Everywhere in California that isn't a giant population center is growing food for the rest of the country, or is a mountain where these things can't be built anyway.
They're probably "not banned" only in the "basically lying" sense that they per rule won't approve you in certain cities and if you do happen to be rural the process is hostile and expensive enough that it's not worth it for the value such a facility would generate. That's how that sort of stuff is in my state.
That's the thing, often when people say stuff like "its banned" what they really mean is:
- the cost of mitigating the human health risk is too high
- competitors in low-environmental regulation places don't pay for those costs
- ongoing verification is expensive
I mean, let's face it, "self-regulation" of industries isn't really working that great. And for things that are health hazards that are basically borne by someone else, why should a local government make it easy to cheat and lie about this stuff?
The people arguing against this seem to assume that their right to have a business, make a profit, whatever, is a self-evident Good Thing, and rarely provide any additional arguments beyond "but the jobs". If they were at the VERY LEAST saying "we can make X safe" then maybe it'd be interesting. But as it is, the argument is basically asking us to mortgage the health and safety.
Nobody here wants to just let big business do whatever and turn the rivers weird colors again or go back to smog but it's very clear that the current regulatory system is not suitable and is hurting us.
It boggles the mind that someone could honestly (by which I mean dishonestly and malice are far simpler explanations) step into this conversation and be like "no, this is all fine and well, god forbid someone start spraying cars in a shop in the desert without jumping through all most of the same expensive hoops that make it not worth it down town (and would make it doubly not worth it out in the desert).
And it's not just autobody work. There's all manner of necessary economic activity that's being kept out or made artificially expensive in this manner.
Do you think that AI has magic guardrails that force it to obey the laws everywhere, anywhere, all the time? How would this even be possible for laws that conflict with eachother?
I have found paradox games to have uneven game mechanics; some run miles wide, some of them run deep, and many others are just very superficial, and there is no reliable indication which will be which when you are playing fresh.
You are getting downvoted, but this is a cool idea. Diplomacy has historically been a weak part of the series, and being able to shore that up may be a lot of fun to play against.
I would say diplomacy is the most misunderstood feature of the series. Players constantly say they want a stronger AI that's smarter at diplomacy. But whenever they have built an AI like that, their play testers complained that it doesn't behave like a real world leader (too ruthless).
This experience led Soren Johnson (co-designer of Civ III and lead designer of Civ IV) to the realization that Civ AIs are supposed to "play to lose" [1].
I am so tired of game designers/developers being so pathetically wrong about stuff like this. Modders have to CONSTANTLY fix these boneheaded, user hostile decisions in nearly every game. A lot of game developers are not the people actually loving/playing their games in the same way that the cello maker is usually not the cello player.
Even many popular mods fuck this up! DEI in Total War Rome 2 needs submods to make the AI play by the same rules as the player!!! This is top of the most subscribed list right now FOR A REASON!!! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=36258...
Make the AI play by the exact same rules as the player. Make a scaling AI difficulty slider which goes from "piss easy" to "insane grandmaster" but without cheats. It's not that hard to do this, the chess engine crowd figured it out back in 2001. FEAR figured it out in 2004. Game AI has straight up not improved and at many times gotten worse in the ensuing two decades.
It's not that hard to do this, the chess engine crowd figured it out back in 2001.
They really didn't. No one likes playing against weaker chess engines. They play perfectly like a higher-rated engine and then randomly make an obvious blunder. They don't play naturally like a human player of that rating.
The weaker AIs in Civ games do a far better job at "playing to lose" than low rated chess engines. It's not even close!
That makes sense, but at the end of the day, it may be more fun to play around with opponents that act more relatedly. This could take the form of in-game/session-appropriate diplomatic responses that don't read like pre-canned text, or, having explanatory text for why the AI is acting perhaps in goofy ways (which comes up a lot).
It is _rough_. People say it has gotten better since release, but if you have not played it before, and were to play it fresh right now, it is not great. The UI is both dense and vapid at the same time, UI glitches/bugs, jarring all-or-nothing lock-step advancement of ages, etc.
I have found that a hybrid viewport screenshot + textual 'semantic snapshot' approach leads to the best outcomes, though sometimes text-only can be fine if the underlying page is not made of a complete mess of frameworks that would otherwise confuse normal click handlers, etc.
I think using a logical diff to do pass/fail checking is clever, though I wonder if there are failure modes there that may confuse things, such as verifying highly dynamic webpages that change their content even without active user interactions.
Totally agree - hybrid approaches can work well, especially on messy pages. We’ve seen the same tradeoff.
On the verification side though, dynamic pages are exactly the reason why we scope assertions narrowly (specific predicates, bounded retries using eventually() function) instead of diffing the whole page. If the expected condition can’t be proven within that window, we fail fast rather than guessing.
How was this flamebait? It is an example of how bad programming choices/assumptions/guardrails costs lives, a counterargument to the statement of 'And yet, it never does'. Splitting hairs if the language is C or assembly is missing the spirit of the argument, as both those languages share the linguistic footguns that made this horrible situation happen (but hey, it _was_ the 80s and choices of languages was limited!). Though, even allowing the "well ackuacally" cop-out argument, it is trivial to find examples of code in C causing failures due to out-of-bounds usage of memory; these bugs are found constantly (and reported here, on HN!). Now, you would need to argue, "well _none_ of those programs are used in life-saving tech" or "well _none_ of those failures would, could, or did cause injury", to which I call shenanigans. The link drop was meant to do just that.
We need to agree to disagree on this one; the claim that C is fine and does not cause harm due to its multitude of foot-guns, I think, is an egregious and false claim. So don't make false claims and don't post toxic positivity, I guess?
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