Signaling
A couple times a month I crew aboard Renegade (pictured) in races in and around Long Beach Harbor. Earlier this month, the owner held a "work day", which means cleaning and oiling the winches, scrubbing the hull, swabbing the decks, etc. This really isn't much fun; there's a reason why swabbing the decks is the archetypical example of drudgery. Still, I woke up at 7:45 on a Saturday morning and hauled myself down to Long Beach. Why did I do this? Let's consider the response my pre econ-blogosphere-reading self might have given.
"I just wanted to help out, be *a team player*, you know? I have a lot of fun racing out there, and helping Ben out with boat maintenance is the right thing to do."
Now let's consider what I actually found myself thinking, despite efforts to the contrary:"By spending my Saturday performing somewhat unpleasant physical labor, I am signaling my commitment to sailing aboard the vessel. Hopefully, this will increase my relative status among members of the crew."
Clearly, my moral fiber is weakening. Incidentally, I was upgraded from lowly grinder to working the foredeck in the following weekend's race.
Posted by lawson 2009-10-22 21:32:08Comments(0)
Steven Chu, Carbon Taxes and "Framing"
Steven Chu was interviewed a few months ago in the New York Times magazine. Deborah Solomon's interviews are geared towards fast-paced, snappy exchanges, and aren't really the venue for articulating Big Ideas. Still, I found this exchange illuminating:
What can the government do to provide incentives for innovation in clean energy?In the case of a more mature technology like wind, what the government can best do is provide some stability so the companies can make long-term investments that will develop the wind industry and the wind turbines. That is what happened in Europe.
What do you mean by stability?For instance, in wind, there would be production tax credits. What we want is stability, so the investors know that the investment tax credit can be in place for a decade instead of two years.
Many environmentalists believe that a permanent carbon tax would be the most efficient means of spurring carbon-reducing technologies.Well, we're not talking about a carbon tax. President Obama and I are not talking about a carbon tax.
Got it? They ARE NOT TALKING ABOUT A CARBON TAX! OK?!? This is frustrating on multiple levels. There is no question that a carbon tax is a more efficient policy choice than an unholy kludge of tax credits, subsidies, and the like. It's also less subject to manipulation, political favoritism, and other tomfoolery. I have no doubt that Dr Chu is entirely familiar with these points and understands them well. But of course, if he were even to whisper the word "tax", hordes of rampaging Republicans would descend upon him, jaws quivering with fury, eyes fiery with blood-lust.
In recent years a great deal has been made of Republicans' superiority in framing the terms of public policy debates. Whether or not this is true in general, the carbon tax is a clear example of the importance of framing. Despite the word "tax", a carbon tax is by far the more free-market oriented approach to encouraging non-carbon based energy sources. The reputation of markets has taken quite a beating in the past year, but as a bottom-up, distributed system for picking the best technologies, there's still nothing better. The idea is to send a strong price signal via a tax on carbon, and let the market sort out the winners. Contrast this with the top-down solution Chu describes above, in which funding agencies are responsible for picking winners.
If Democrats could manage to brand a carbon tax as the free market approach, to frame the debate a little more effectively, they might no longer find the need to tuck tail between their legs at the slightest hint of a whisper of the idea. Never gonna happen, I know. All Republicans need to do is put fingers in their ears and yell "TAX! TAX! TAX! TAX!" and that'll be the end of it, actual analysis be damned. One day, perhaps, the quality of public discourse will not be so despicably low that the best policy choices are dismissed out of hand, simply because they're vulnerable to cheap attacks. Until then, I guess we have to hope for some clever pollster to dream up an alternative to "carbon tax".
Posted by lawson 2009-10-15 12:45:07Comments(1)
Please Pass (on) the Tuna
By now, most people have read or heard about Fast Food Nation, an indictment of the modern factory farm, where cheap meat is produced at an all-too-high, hidden environmental cost. The recent emergence of swine flu has once again put the spotlight on factory farming and how the industry encourages the proliferation of disease. With that in mind, I began investigating the complementary industries of fishing and aquaculture. Taras Grescoe's Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood provides an eye-opening, informative guide to the state of the world's seafood supply, and is a must-read for anyone who eats seafood, if only for reasons of self-protection.
The oceans have long been credited with inexhaustible supplies of seafood, but a combination of industrial-age fishing techniques and a burgeoning human population has wiped out many fish stocks to levels of commercial extinction. Bottom-trawling, or dragging a net across the seafloor, essentially destroys and levels hundreds of square miles of seabed each day. Dynamite and cyanide are commonly used to stun reef fish (grouper, Napoleon wrasse); it is estimated that a square meter of coral reef is killed for every reef fish caught. Meanwhile, people have been consuming more and more seafood, from the newly affluent Chinese to the explosion of all-you-can-eat shrimp and crab specials at American chains like Red Lobster.
Grescoe introduces the concept of trophic numbers, a way to classify levels of the food chain, ranging from 1 for plankton and plants to 5 for large predators like lions or humans. Generally, eating closer to the bottom of the trophic scale is better for the environment. In a whirlwind tour around the world, Grescoe follows the supply chains of the globe's most popular seafood dishes. The bad news is, once you know the story behind that plate of pan-roasted monkfish, you will feel compelled to never eat it again. The good news is, there are plenty of alternative seafood choices which are both better for the environment and better for your health. Some of the species highlighted follow below.
Bluefin Tuna (trophic level 4.4)
Though the word "tuna" tends to evoke cans emblazoned with "chicken of the sea," the bluefin tuna could not be further from that image. A ferocious torpedo-shaped hunting machine, the bluefin can grow up to 15' in length and sprint at 50 mph. Unfortunately, the bluefin tuna is now the ocean's ultimate cash cow. Once plentiful, Atlantic bluefin stocks have declined by 90% over the past four decades to feed the demand for bluefin sushi. And despite efforts by conservationists to limit the number of bluefin caught, you can still pick up a bluefin nigiri breakfast (including the prized toro) for a mere $15 in Tokyo. Meanwhile, the long-lived tuna species (yellowfin, albacore and bluefin) tend to be dangerously high in mercury. Tuna is also commonly caught using longlining, which snags sharks, swordfish, seabirds and turtles as bycatch.
With that knowledge, I would rather cross tuna off my list of things to consume. Another option: non-longline-caught skipjack tuna (marketed as "light tuna") is low in mercury and relatively plentiful in oceans.
Shrimp (2.6)
Shrimp farming takes place in some of the world's poorest countries, and the industry has left indelible destruction on the scale of the 2004 Asian Tsunami. Like large poultry and swine operations, shrimp ponds are treated with heavy-duty chemicals including antibiotics (to prevent disease) and piscicides (to kill any competing aquatic life). The resultant pollution causes disease in natives, destroys groundwater and wipes out the livelihoods of neighboring farmers and small-scale fishermen. The effects extend to distant consumers as well; some people who believe they have allergies to shellfish are in fact reacting to antibiotic residues in farmed seafood. Wild shrimp, on the other hand, are usually caught with bottom-trawlers. For every pound of shrimp caught, another ten pounds of unwanted, dead fish are thrown overboard.
What, then, is the conscientious shrimp-lover to do? Examine your purchases very, very carefully. If the shrimp on display glisten unnaturally or taste soapy after cooking, they have probably been treated with sodium tripolyphosphate, a suspected neurotoxicant. Wild-caught shrimp are undoubtedly better for your health, but exert a huge environmental cost. That leaves only a few stocks of northern shrimp, pink shrimp and spot prawns in Canadian and northern US waters which are considered sustainable choices.
Other Good Alternatives:
Oysters and mussels (2.0) are farmed without chemicals and help clean the oceans. Small schooling fish like herring (3.2) and sardines (2.6) are low in toxins and relatively abundant. Jellyfish (2.0) have proliferated in recent years due to climate change and overfishing of top-level predators. Trout (4.4), arctic char (4.3) and barramundi (4.4) are farmed in non-polluting, contained inland systems. Farmed tilapia (2.0) and catfish (3.8) are herbivores, so they do not diminish the net supply of protein, and buying domestic products reduces the risk of antiotic residues.
When buying seafood, you should be able to make an informed choice with 3 questions. Was the fish farmed or wild-caught? If wild, what ocean did it come from and what port did it land in? How was it caught (trawl net, hook and line)? If farmed, was it farmed domestically or overseas? If overseas, in which country? Shedd Aquarium provides a handy, wallet-size card that lists recommendations for purchasing seafood. I've printed one out to carry as a reference guide. But in the end, all the knowledge in the world won't help you if your grocer, fishmonger or server does not know the source of their products. If you find someone knowledgeable and willing to answer your questions, support their business with your purchases. Posted by crystal 2009-05-03 13:43:52
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On "On Internet Comments": A Comment
I'll second the "embracing the rough and tumble" approach. To do otherwise seems somehow to violate the spirit of the internet, if such a thing can be said to exist. But there is a problem: many (most?) comments will be irrelevant, uninformed, and just plain inane. This difficulty tends to be inversely proportional to a site's degree of specialization. Thus, one might expect YouTube to represent the nadir of comments, a hypothesis well supported by empirical investigation.
So what's a webmaster to do? Crystal mentioned a few of the options. Strict moderation is time-consuming and destroys much of the charm of comment sections. What's the Internet without trolls and flame wars? Worse, it's a convenient rationale for blog owners to simply delete critical comments, creating a pallid echo chamber (yes, this happened to me recently, and yes, I'm peeved). The best solution I've encountered is Slashdot's: an extremely high threshold for deletion (i.e., blatant illegality), coupled with a distributed moderation system. Each comment has a starting score of +1, and can be "modded up" or down between -1 and +5. Users browsing the site can set a threshold score below which comments will not be displayed. Moderation is by the site's registered users, who are randomly assigned "mod points" that can be used to increment or decrement a comment's score. Mod points are assigned more frequently to users who have previously made high-scoring comments.
This system is quite effective. It allows for robust debate and discussion, but can filter out a lot of the noise. It is democratic in that moderation is distributed rather than top down. At the same time, one's influence as a moderator is weighted by one's own contributions, so it is meritocratic as well. It does, however, require a large and active user community. Since obscure sites don't have to worry about bad comments in the first place, this isn't a huge drawback.
I've noticed that other prominent sites (nytimes.com, youtube.com, economist.com) have implemented lite versions of this scheme, where readers can "recommend" comments and sort comments by "most recommended". Slashdot has best approach I've seen to taming the wilds of the comment threads; it'll be interesting to see if the rest of the web catches on.
Posted by lawson 2009-04-17 23:47:57Comments(0)
On Internet Comments
As an amateur blogger, I don't claim to have any great expertise in how to moderate comments, but I have read enough comments to gain insight on when they add value to blog posts. After a certain point, it is no longer particularly amusing or useful to see "FIRST!!!!" (posted as the first comment). And even intelligent comments can quickly spiral into personal attacks upon commentators or the author. The fact is that the anonymity of the internet tends to encourage less than civil behavior, which may or may not be a desirable goal for your blog. For a more explicit demonstration of this phenomenon, please see the excellent College Humor video "We Didn't Start the Flame War."
So then, the natural response is for blogs to introduce rules and guidelines for posting comments. Of course, the most reasonable guidelines in the world won't matter if your moderators are not enforcing them properly. Above all, consistency in moderating is key if you want to keep your reading community happy. How to go about implementing rules when there will inevitably be shades of grey? One solution is to ban all comments entirely. Another is to allow free reign in the comments section and moderate only items of questionable legality.
Websites oftentimes adopt strict comment policies, but when it really comes down to it, there is no way to fully control the rabble of internet commenters. Requiring registration? Let me dig up one of my half dozen pseudonyms. Banning accounts? I'll just set up a new one with another email address. In my opinion, the best approach is simply to embrace the rough and tumble, unpoliced nature of the internet. As Michael Malone writes:
Still, you can get used to just about everything, even howling mobs of commenters wishing for your early death. Then, something interesting happens: you write that column or blog entry that receives zero comments. Then you start missing all of those angry notes - why don’t they hate me anymore? - and wondering what you’ve got to write next time to get them back. Pretty soon, in a feedback loop between writer and reader never possible in the print world, you find yourself writing on those topics, and in that style, that will provoke the most reader response. It may be craven, but it’s a more reader-responsive form of writing than anything I ever had to face back in my newsroom days.
As an additional aside, I recently had my first negative comment in response to a blog post. My blood immediately began boiling. Then just as quickly, I calmed down and wrote a snarky remark back.
Posted by crystal 2009-04-16 16:23:07
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