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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   24189 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

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When I was a teen, it was called “surfing the web”, which I think was a great metaphor for the free-form movement across websites as you followed whatever path interested you. Nowadays I feel like we are (or at least I am) much more constrained to single sites that are ruthlessly optimized to keep you from venturing away. But I was surfing over the weekend, riding the big wave from the US Supreme Court’s bump stock ruling. About 2/3 of the way through I started turning it into this post due to some culture war implications, but those turned out to be false after digging deeper. So now I’m looking at this long, rambling post, which will soon expire as “old news”, and have decided to share it. Maybe someone else will learn something, at least.

In Sotomayor’s dissent in the recent bump stock case Garland v. Cargill, she writes (on page 26 of the pdf):

When I see a bird that walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, I call that bird a duck. A bump-stock-equipped semiautomatic rifle fires “automatically more than one shot, without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.” §5845(b). Because I, like Congress, call that a machinegun, I respectfully dissent.

A guy on X/Twitter astutely pointed out:

The real irony about Sotomayor's dissent is that US law about ducks is actually incredibly specific. If anything, the adage "if it looks... etc" is the exact opposite of the statute. There is an annually updated list by which protected ducks are classified by 7-8 different parameters. It's over 1100 entries long. There's also a list of explicitly unprotected waterfowl that has hundreds of species, too.

I always had a feeling like the US has some absurd animal protection laws, especially around birds, though I never new the details. I like cats, and when I worked at Google I was part of a cat-lovers group (effectively a mailing list) that was mostly for just sharing pictures of cats but occasionally ventured into cat-activism. I wasn’t in Mountain View, but those who were had set up a catch, neuter, and release program for feral cats nearby. This also included some feeding stations. The Audubon Society got a burr in their bun that people were caring for cats somewhere, and found a few Burrowing Owls that lived near the places where the cats lived. This isn’t an endangered species, but California calls it a species of “special concern”, and that’s enough to get the State to catch and euthanize all the cats in question. Here’s how the New York Times spun the story.

So I had this feeling about stupid bird laws. Seeing the X/Twitter post led to some good ol' fashioned web surfing towards the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, including this article. Choice excerpts:

In 2002, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia declared that members of the military violated the act by unintentionally killing protected birds that flew into a live-fire training area.

In 2011, federal agents from the Fish & Wildlife Service threatened to imprison a Virginia woman because her 11-year-old daughter had rescued a woodpecker from a cat. Following nationwide scrutiny, the Fish & Wildlife Service declared that the mother’s citation had been “processed unintentionally.”

And in 2012, several oil and gas businesses in North Dakota were prosecuted because 28 protected birds had flown into state-sanctioned pools of fluid and oil.

That second one seemed suspicious to me: imprisonment for rescuing a bird? Digging deeper it turns out to be true enough. News story and government release.

According to WUSA, eleven-year-old Skylar came upon a baby woodpecker just before a cat was about to make the bird his next meal. The aspiring veterinarian told the TV station, “I couldn’t stand to watch it be eaten.” So Skylar asked her mother if she could care for the bird and then release it. Mom agreed, and the family went on its way, stopping at a home improvement store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Rather than keeping the bird in the hot car, they brought the woodpecker inside the cool store.

It was there that one of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s undercover (!) agents spotted the mom–daughter crime duo. Nervously, the undercover wildlife woman held up her badge and proceeded to reprimand Alison and Skylar for illegally taking and transporting the bird.

When the Capos got home, they released the woodpecker and notified the Fish and Wildlife Service. Two weeks later that same agent, accompanied by the Virginia state trooper, showed up at the Capo residence and, according to Alison, delivered a citation stating that she violated federal law, owed the federal government a $535 fine, and could be imprisoned.

Incidentally, Politifact rates Republican Congressman Jim Sensenbrenner’s criticism of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s behavior here as mostly-false.

Now, the culture war angle that started me actually typing all this up. I have historically rolled my eyes at complaints that wind turbines kill birds. I don’t care that much about wild birds, and as much as I think “renewable energy” is a scam, the “it kills birds” argument seemed like a desperate attempt to find something bad about wind turbines that environmentalists would care about. Then I saw a post (that I haven’t been able to find again) claiming that enforcement of these bird laws against green energy companies sure has been a lot lighter than against everyone else. So I did some digging. The bird lovers and tree lovers use the same studies for their estimates of yearly bird deaths from turbines: between 140,000-679,000. When oil and gas businesses in North Dakota accidentally killed 28 protected birds, they got taken to court, even though it was eventually thrown out.

The wind turbine companies? Well, actually, they’re getting hit pretty regularly, too. ESIEnergy was prosecuted. Duke Energy Corp was sentenced in 2013 to $1 million in fines and restitution and five years probation following deaths of 14 golden eagles and 149 other birds at two of the company’s wind projects. PacifiCorp Energy was sentenced to pay fines, restitution and community service totaling $2.5 million and was placed on probation for five years... from the discovery of the carcasses of 38 golden eagles and 336 other protected birds.

AP whines that there are fewer criminal cases being brought against bird killers and that The Biden administration on Thursday proposed a new permitting program for wind energy turbines, power lines and other projects that kill eagles although I couldn’t find the actual proposal.

So I guess the US government is pretty consistent in flipping-the-fuck-out if you harm birds. Though there are movements towards giving green energy companies a break on these laws, it doesn’t strike me as different than all the other laws and subsidies and special treatment green companies already get.

Anyways, I’m thinking of buying a bump stock, but really want an FRT. My local Fudd gun range recently changed their rules from a complete ban to allowing automatic and simulated automatic fire as long as one of the chairmen was present “to ensure everyone’s safety”. I think the board just wanted to get to shoot automatic guns, but I’ll take what I can get. The range rules explicitly prohibit shooting birds and other animals that wander into the firing range, which I appreciate a little more now.

The bird lovers and tree lovers use the same studies for their estimates of yearly bird deaths from turbines: between 140,000-679,000.

If we accept that wind energy is indeed mostly a farce, then these birds are getting killed pointlessly. Any society that causes such a massacre for no reason at all other than virtue-signalling should at least examine itself closely.

Given how stupid the COVID-19 response was, I've lost faith that anything with the slightest bit of ambiguity or cost+benefit can be handled reasonably by our society. Wind turbines generate electricity, externalities be damned. Hell, I'd label the entire anti-nuclear movement "virtue-signaling", and we haven't "examined ourselves closely" for the 80 years that's been going on. I blame it on 2 parts conflict theory, 1 part Moloch.

Killing birds is a tragedy of the commons. From my reading of history, nobody has found a good way to actually ensure a proportional response to a tragedy of the commons. We either threaten to jail people for rescuing woodpeckers, write some sad articles that change absolutely nothing, or funnel money into mismanaged non-profits. Even when a fairly simple law by Congress could save tens of millions of otherwise lost books, we can't do that because it might benefit Google.

Take the blackpill and accept that this probably won't get fixed. Ensure you and yours are benefiting from this foreknowledge. When I take my kids to see their grandfather (we're far apart so this is infrequent), we always take a walk into the nearby forest to see the family of bald eagles that have set up a nest there. And they've seen fields of flowers, and we have a huge physical collection of old books. My kids don't fully understand why their weird dad is obsessing about these particular things, but they don't need to.

From my reading of history, nobody has found a good way to actually ensure a proportional response to a tragedy of the commons.

I'm surprised that you are (presumably) at least 35 and can't think of a time when a tragedy of the commons was resolved or largely mitigated effectively. Off the top of my head:

  1. DDT

  2. CFCs

  3. Bald eagles (no longer considered threatened or endangered)

  4. Urban smog (largely due to car exhaust)

Yeah, remember the ozone layer? In elementary school they scared us half to death with tales of skin cancer and whatnot.

Solved by a couple chemists coming up with better alternatives for a few pennies more and an international convention on switching over the course of a decade.

No one talks about solved problems (why would they) and so availability bias minimizes them in our minds.

Solved by a couple chemists coming up with better alternatives for a few pennies more and an international convention on switching over the course of a decade.

And right as DuPont's patent on manufacturing R-12 was at its expiration date. Convenient.

This is the consensus among the HVAC tech community.

R-12 was invented in the 1930s and was long out of patent. I think they DID pull that with some of the replacements -- the whole "Oh yeah we fixed that and it was no problem" story would be a lot more convincing if every few years they didn't decide the replacements are no good and now you have to replace all your equpiment AGAIN.

R-12 was invented in the 1930s and was long out of patent.

But not the [patents on the] processes used to make it, which expired shortly before the ban.

R-12 has been manufactured since the 1940s; manufacturing patents were ALSO expired. Dupont did not have a monopoly on R-12 (or R-22) production by 1996 or shortly before.

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