One regulatory perspective is that environmentalism has played a much greater role than people think. It induced a deep skepticism about anything involving the manipulation of nature or material objects in the real world. The response to environmentalism was to prohibit scientists from experimenting with stuff and only allow them to do so with bits. So computer science and finance were legal, and what they have in common is that they involve the manipulation of bits rather than stuff. They both did well in those forty years, but all the other engineering disciplines were stymied. Electric engineering, civil engineering, aeronautical, nuclear, petroleum—these were all held back, and attracted fewer talented students at university as the years went on. When people wonder why all the rocket scientists went to work on Wall Street, well, they were no longer able to build rockets. It’s some combination of an ossified, Weberian bureaucracy and the increasingly hostile regulation of technology.
I just read this passage in an interesting article which you have to take with a grain of salt cause the guy's a dumbass right-libertarian who talks about blind spots but is remarkably blind himself.
BUT this part seems true, especially about scientists and engineers being brutally prohibited from playing with nuclear bombs. Think about what could have been done!
Nuclear cannons to launch huge amounts of supplies into orbit cheaply. A nuclear Orion starship. Nuclear bombs as demolition charges for mining / quarrying / canal digging.
Think about it: what kind of a dirty bastard would play on the stock market if they had even a slim chance of playing with LIVE NUKES! It's not even a contest, there is just no fucking way!
So it's clear, the enviros did wreck the world! They wrecked it by causing the financial collapse. And they caused THAT by causing the financialization of the world in the first place. Enviros hate industrial economies with a passion and they quite gleefully destroyed the First World's industrial economies "by accident".
Now if only the criminal justice system could see to it that causing widespread poverty (and thus mass death) was a crime so that it was okay to kill environmentalists in self-defense. But that will never happen because judges are middle upper class and they interpret laws (which being contradictory can be used to logically conclude anything) in a typically middle upper class way.
Posts
