Before getting back to Econ 101, I won't keep you in suspense. Aaliyah Edwards didn't play yesterday, so Auriemma had only 7 players suited up, which meant that Ice Brady had to play 40 minutes. The most minutes she has played in any game previously is 14. Ashlyn Shade also played 40 minutes, while Bueckers and Muhl played the entire game until Geno pulled them in garbage time. No problem. Marquette scored zero points in the last 14 minutes of the game, which means the box score shows a bagel for the fourth quarter. UCONN won 58-29. Apparently there's precedent for zero points in a quarter in women's college basketball, but I seriously doubt it's ever happened in the Big East tournament.
The most ridiculous -- and perhaps consequential -- of all the non-existent can openers is the assumption of zero externalities. It is in fact difficult to imagine a transaction without externalities. Let's say you want to buy some tomatoes. You drive to the supermarket spewing CO2 and PM2.5 out of your tailpipe, contributing to congestion and delay for other drivers, and risking a crash. (Riding in a motor vehicle is probably the most dangerous thing you will ever do.) In order to grow the tomatoes you buy, a beautiful wilderness was destroyed to make farmland. Onto the farmland was spread pesticides that kill beneficial insects, and nitrogen that ran off into the river and caused a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. You put the tomatoes in a plastic bag that ends up in the landfill. I could go on.
The reason the disciples of the Free Market™ have so stubbornly and vociferously denied the reality of anthropogenic climate change is that if proves their religion is false. That's it. There's no escape. As Karl Polanyi wrote back in 1947, when we didn't know about climate change but the truth was already obvious:
[T]he idea of a self-adjusting market implied a stark utopia. Such an institution could not exist for any length of time without annihilating the human and natural substance of society; it would have physically destroyed man and transformed his surroundings into a wilderness.
Yep.
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2 comments:
Oh, we knew about anthropogenic climate change before 1947. Not widely. But it was know about. People still deny it today; others say, "Yeah, it's happening, but it's just part of a natural cycle" ... as I've mentioned, I saw climate models at the Ontario Science Centre in the early 70s and found them shocking. A twelve-year-old could understand it. But Shitler is too busy making fun of people who stutter. May he die, the nasty evil fucker, and all his ilk.
https://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/
There is a recent cartoon on the site XKCD which points out that our understanding that CO2 warms the atmosphere occurred closer in time to the very beginning of the Industrial Revolution than it did to now.
I also find it ironic that one of the talking points used by corporate shills to cast doubt on predictions by climate scientists that global warming was happening and that it could lead to catastrophic consequences was that they were based on computer models of climate that were unproven and could easily be wrong. It turns out that they were actually right about that claim. The only problem was that the models missed unforeseen side effects of changes, like the effect of higher waves in a more open polar ocean on the breakup of even more ice. So the models actually tended to underestimate the damage caused.
It seems that the corporations behind this campaign need to be held accountable for the immense damage their efforts inflicted on most of the world by impeding its response to the problem.
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