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Government planned it 7 years, beavers built a dam in 2 days and saved $1M (voxnews.al)
229 points by croes 14 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 129 comments



Undocumented beavers destroy $1M of GDP doing construction without permit.


Sort of like open source AI model destroys $600B in market cap


I don't understand this take. If compute-restricted China develops algorithmic improvements to AI, they will just be integrated with the American AI data centres and will push the SOTA forward. It doesn't remove the value of American AI infrastructure investment nor the economic potential of future SOTA models able to do billions of dollars worth of work.


Market cap is just (no of shares) x (share price) and fluctuates all over in ways largely unrelated to fundamentals. Share price = whatever the idiots buying and selling that day happen to agree on and can depend as much on their mood as anything else.

Don’t worry; the current wave is going to hit hope source hard. Likely with Facts.


It's a failure of GDP calculations not to include unpaid work.

The good was produced.


You have to include the beavers in your population in order to have proper per capita figures.


Including animals in economic estimates is famously difficult. After all, how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?

It would be tricky to calculate though. How much do you put down for unpaid work by trees producing oxygen for example?

What would be the cost to do it artificially?

Italy, Spain and UK include some shadow economy


If it was in the US, maybe Faux news would have framed it this way, "why are these illegal beavers being allowed to steal American jobs?" and maybe blame Mexico for that.


"Faux news", good one


Want to laugh, but this is classic bad economics take. SMBC-Comics could do this one.

The $1m can be spent fixing potholes. Massive waste of time, but if the next $1m is used to make potholes, a self-sustaining cycle of making and filling potholes can boost the local economy for just a small dribble of $1m per year input, to the alternating cycle.


AKA broken window fallacy


What animals can we use to fill potholes?


Moles, obviously. They make heaps, precisely filling the potholes, but they do this by tunnelling, weakening the ground and over time creating more potholes.

It’s a prime example of a circular economy and sustainability



This gave me laugh, thanks for sharing it!

Actively or passively?


And they create hundreds of jobs in the process!


I mean that is how GDP works. Wasting billions on something stupid counts just as much as spending the same amount on sound investments.

Estimated beaver populations was around 200 million before "beaver hats" became a craze of Europeans that led to populations being hunted down to less than 10 million. We have no idea how radically different the landscape actually was when beavers roamed. Now that we're finally allowing numbers to rebound we're realizing how much of our infrastructure is built around the assumption of a beaver-less landscape


My brothers house is near a stream. Beavers showed up about 10 years ago. The change wasn’t bad and pretty minor, but it did change things. He did protect some of his trees. They’re pretty voracious.

The town made him move the “hobit hole” shed he got his daughters but the Beavers get free rein. (As did the golf club in the back, but that’s another story)


They only time I've seen a beaver hat was in old times comics with Davy Crockett (fun times)... when was that European fashion craze?


You are thinking of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coonskin_cap , which is made from a racoon.

The hat which was made from beaver is more familiar to most people as the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_hat , which was made from beaver before the more modern silk versions became popular.


According to the Wikipedia article, 1550-1850.


You can always count on Europeans to do what they are best at


> realizing how much of our infrastructure is built around the assumption of a beaver-less landscape

That goes for both kinds of beavers. Europe is often a bit better, but access to public toilets in Canada where they went to feed their hat frenzy, is appalling; those without beavs can deal with it a little easier, but more toilets would still be helpful.


It's a slippery slope, considering that they're also known for building houses without getting shadow assessments done, going through years of permitting approvals, or ensuring it matches the character of the neighborhood. Criminals.


And do you know how much traffic those houses will cause?!


What about the parking!? My human rights!!


The real surprise is that the quoted budget was only $1.2m. Fixing potholes in my neighborhood is quoted more than that.


It's quite cheap to buy beavers.


San Francisco and Czech Republic budgets are hard to compare 1:1 without accounting for PPP.


Any reliable sources on this?


There's a Czech source that some seems to refer to: https://english.radio.cz/beavers-build-planned-dams-protecte...


This is a much better article, thanks!


Unfair title. How do they know the beavers didn’t take even longer to plan it?


I know you’re being facetious but we do know thanks to the article as it says that beavers were (re)introduced to this area in 2020.

Yes, we must ask the beavers spoke person for more info


Is there a way to direct or coax beavers into building exactly where you want?


Sort of! Beavers build dams as an instinctive response to the sound of running water.

If you have pet beavers in your house, and down put a phone playing the sound of running water, they'll start dragging stuff over to where the phone is.


How common are beavers as indoor pets ?


In the US at least I don't think it's legal anywhere without a permit. I've seen videos like op has posted, it's usually rescue animals being looked after not actual housepets


Never going to be common if their fate is to be like Peanut the Squirrel or Fred the Raccoon out of NY.



Adorable critter with strong opinions on the arrangement of blankets and stuffies in a hallway. Side-recommended videos also lead me to Ze Frank's "True facts about Beavers" which is always a hoot. :)


Somewhat unrelated but maybe not.

https://www.hundredsofbeavers.com


Dam building as an instinctive response is kind of insane the more I think about it. What evolutionary pathway led to that behavior?


Attempted rationalization: Some proto-beavers with sensitive hearing disliked the sound of running water, and discovered they could shut it up by dropping stuff into the stream to plug it up. As an unexpected side effect (evolution cannot expect anything), the deeper water created gave them an increased chance of survival and the behavior spread as they out competed other proto-beavers.


The ones that didn’t do that tended to die before they could pass on their genes.


Tongue in cheek, the instinctive response of government institution employees used to be also to produce a lot of cellulose (here: paper) and pile it together.


You could try to airdop them to wherever they are needed.

Worked for Idaho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_drop

This article has a video: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/22/idaho-histor...


There are various methods. A lot more around preventing dam building where it would be problematic. Things that block preferred locations either become part of the new dam, beavers destroy them, or sometimes a dam is created elsewhere.

It's probably not worth it if you want a specific dam location though. For general water retention we already trap and relocate beavers and just let them do their thing in the new place.

https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fsm9_032447.p... - Working with Beavers


You're thinking backwards! Environmentalists doing restoration work on former wetlands will often look for historical signs of where beaver dams had previously been and rebuild them. Beavers have a very keen sense for the ideal location to build dams.

Estimated beaver populations was around 200 million before "beaver hats" became a craze of Europeans that led to populations being hunted down to less than 10 million. It's hard to understate how deeply landscapes in North America were shaped by beavers


You'd probably have to go through a similar set of bureaucratic steps to get that done.


I suddenly found myself to be a consultant, part of the assignment was to construct a governance model. I found it such a vague unsticky term that I developed the mantra: “Governance: How decisions are being made”. And it opened my eyes because in so many places there is no process for how decisions are being made, and they are just not being made.

Yeah I know, but I’m just a molecular biologist, it’s easy to see how a bacterium decides to move up a food gradient. But Humans… oh boy.


Enabling people to make individual decisions, ensures the soundest decisions to be made in aggregate. (1) This is not unlike the spontaneous order occuring in all natural systems.

This process can be subverted, but only to great detriment of the whole.

1) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HNQ3GccCAI0


As a biologist I really like the idea and feel it to be true. I'd say it is even a guiding principle in my life. But most people don't like it as it is very Ayn Rand/Margaret Thatcher-ish: "There is no such thing as society!", "Society is made up of individuals exercising their rational self-interest."


I think the original purpose of g̶o̶v̶e̶r̶n̶m̶e̶n̶t̶ *parliament was to discuss problems thoroughly (3) before deciding what to do.

Sadly this process is subverted by party tribalism and bills written in advance by lobbyists.

3) https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/uHYYA32CKgKT3FagE/hold-off-o...

(edited, happy?)


Assyriologists would tell you that the original purpose of government was to account for and distribute wages to laborers on major construction projects.


One benefits of startup culture is someone can think say I think the world needs a supersonic jet and go ahead and try to make it happen without government planning, a bit like the beavers and their dam. You can like that without being a Rand nut.

You can like Rand without being a nut.

Yeah, but the beavers didn't do environmental impact studies, and don't care about safety. They also made a temporary dam, and have no legal liability if it breaks apart. People could pile logs together in two days if that's all they had to do, but if you believe in environmental and safety regulations, the consequence is that it adds cost and takes longer to build stuff.


Let's hope the beavers allocate sufficient funding to maintain the dam.


This is why it's important to keep the beavers happy so they don't strike or unionize.


The dam you get for $1m is also a temporary, or very small dam. Real construction costs for a permanent structure at scale exceed this by one or two orders of magnitude. If the dam required was a $1m dam, then getting beavers to make it is an entirely sensible decision or outcome, even if not decided.


That's another thing: nobody got the beavers to make this dam, they just happened to do it coincidentally. You might as well say that waiting for a landslide to block the river is better than hiring human engineers and builders. In most cases, a landslide is not going to come along at just the right spot, but if does, you can say "see? we saved money"


Yes, but also .. kinda-no. Rewilding is a thing. You get to put beavers to work inside a specified area. Exactly where, thats on them. Which is a bit of a bummer for planning and risk assessment but you go for net-upside overall, and the specific farmer rage bait outcome settles with some of the $1m you saved.

I have concerns with the economics behind rewilding, and green upside monetising. A lot of carbon credits monetize things which were going to happen anyway, and don't reflect real re-wilding or carbon sink activity. Like, if you had been clearing land for decades, and left it alone, you get to claim amazing carbon sink benefits from the wood which grows, even on the land you never intended trying to make productive. Somehow, that feels wrong.

Beavers are also cost avoidance on other people than the land holder. Overground water flows generally don't stop at the farm boundary. Somebody 100km away doesn't get flooded, and its a benefit, but to them, or their insurer, or their town council, or .. who exactly isn't clear. "I didn't have to remediate all this flood damage" has undefined, but treated as uncountable/low dollar value where 'I did spend $200m remediating' has very clear value. (I want to say negative but there's bad economics coming back in. A giant flood potlach is jobs, and spend, and boosts the rural economy. Albiet at the expense of somewhere else not getting that spend. Money is wierd. we need more wars! they're good for the economy.. kinda)


Re-wilding beavers is a thing, but that's not what the article says happened here. This was some native beavers who came along and happened to build dams in the right spots.


yes. good point. shouldn't argue for helping nature from nature helping itself. I mean I do think we should help nature but we can't claim this was because we helped.


Also have they considered diversity? Have they tried to include LBGT beavers?

I love beavers!! They don’t just build the dams, but the also change the rivers into special types of ponds that their favorite food grows in (green leafy shoots). So they don’t just build a house but also a farm! So cool!!!


Beavers get it. You can just do things.


According to "Leave It to Beavers" (2018) PBS Nature [53m], beavers are attracted to the sound of running water played back from a cassette tape. [1]

[1] https://g.co/kgs/5yA9R5


Are these undocumented beavers?


Depends if it is a north american beaver or eurasian beaver.


No, these are environmentalist volunteers doing guerrilla gardening.

Well yeah, why do you think they were quoted so low!


Given that they were busy beavers, I’m surprised they finished so quickly


> The reason they build dams is to create deep water that gives them protection from predators.

How do they know the reasons beavers build dams? Did these reporters fact-check this by asking the beavers?


How do they know the reasons beavers build dams?

Obviously it's a shorthand, but the interesting thing here is that different biologists come up with different implicit reasons. To an evolutionary biologist, the reason for a behaviour is how it grants an evolutionary advantage, so to them the reason for building dams is to create deep water which provides protection from predation.

But behavioural biologists look at what triggers particular behaviours, and we actually know this one thanks to experiments: Beavers hate the sound of running water. If you set up a speaker and have it play running water sounds, beavers will pile sticks on top of it! There's no grand dam-building plan; just mindlessly placing sticks wherever the noise is coming from.


> we actually know this one thanks to experiments: Beavers hate the sound of running water. If you set up a speaker and have it play running water sounds, beavers will pile sticks on top of it

That isn't actually evidence that they don't like the sound. They might like placing sticks where they hear it.


One has to wonder what our "hate running water" thing is - ie something we feel compelled to do which seems perfectly sensible to us but is really just an evolutionary gimmick that some other species would think is weird.

Being predisposed to distrust people who look different is one example from the recent past. Back when people lived in frequently-warring tribes, someone who looked different (either due to genetic differences or cultural differences) was far more likely to kill you.

As far as I'm aware, cats don't care at all what colour fur other cats have.


Actually in hunter-gatherer societies inter-tribal violence is extremely rare, with intra-tribal violence being way more common. One has to remember that in hunter gatherer societies concepts like territory and property are not as important as in settled societies, and population densities are incredibly low. It's a very rare occasion when you interact with anyone outside your immediate community, and when you do it's almost certainly an interaction with a neighboring community that you've been collectively living near and interbreeding with for longer than anyone can remember. Violence in these societies tends to be part of personal feuds between individuals.

Encountering someone from far enough away that they would be part of a distinct genetic or cultural group was basically unheard of. That's not to say it didn't happen at all, there would be migrations and smaller groups would potentially travel long distances out of necessity, but it simply was not a part of normal life. The idea that a fear of different looking people provided any meaningful benefit in the past simply does not pass the sniff test.


Right, when I said warring tribes I meant the period around 4-8 kya where valuable territories were being settled.

That would not have an affect on human evolution. The time period was too short, too recent, and that was a series of independent local events.

Further, wars were almost always between regional neighbors then as well.


I'm not convinced. The black death had an effect on human evolution -- a single event with high mortality can be all it takes to shift the genome.

But that is directly due to the level of death. We have no evidence that half of the tribes in an area were wiped out.

I can see how that is a mechanism for fixing leaks, but not for building a dam from scratch.


The noisiest spot in the absence of a dam is going to be where water is moving the fastest -- which is the spot with the smallest flow cross section, which is also the best place to drop sticks to impede the flow.


ya but why do they hate the sound of running water


Because the beavers who didn't were more likely to die.

And they were more likely to die because there wasn't a body of water and pile of sticks nearby to hide and live in.


maybe it sounds like no protection from predation?


Because we can make a reasonable inference based on the consequences of their actions


Beavers build dams to corner the stick and bark supply while driving up the price.


If you really want to get reductive about it, beavers build dams to stop a certain kind of water-flowing noise. It's instinctive (not learned) and they'll try even when the it's coming from a speaker and the floor is dry concrete.

Some types of anti-beaver-damn measures work by eliminating the sounds and vibrations.

https://gsas.harvard.edu/news/dammed-if-they-do


Depoly the noise-cancellation PA systems!



This is what I think every time I see a headline claiming a company stock, or the market as a whole, went up or down because of a single reason. Did the people writing the article ask all the people who bought or sold, or decided not to buy or sell, the stock(s)? Of course not.

Correlation does not mean causation.

Naked beaver logic.


The reason beavers build dams is because that's what beavers do.


They wanted an outdoor pool but didn't want to pay contractors


How busy are those beavers such that they can build a dam in 2 days?


inter species competition is really ramping up, I wonder if the Europeans will continue to survive this century


[flagged]


and even more quickly fall apart


Citing Naked Gun: Nice Beaver!


I think this is the most beautiful example I have ever seen of how inefficient, wasteful and unnecessary is almost all of the government.

If the beavers built it in two days, it means that half a dozen men could have easily built it at an extremely low cost in a week.

Instead, they were planning it, fighting bureocracy and wasting money for years.


Friction in government is a good thing, otherwise the will of the few would outweigh the many and catastrophic projects would be allowed all of the time. Yes men could have done it but they wouldn’t maintain it like the beavers and they certainly wouldn’t have done it in a way that fits with natural cycles like the beavers did. This is more of a case for fewer nature altering projects and more restoration of ecosystems


> they wouldn’t maintain it like the beavers

What makes you think the beavers will maintain this dam? Beavers may maintain this for multiple generations, or they may move on next year due to predator pressure or lack of food.


True if the process of selection favors projects that produce the greatest social value, which is far from certain. Specifically in the case of projects with significant environmental impacts, I suspect you are right -- because Earth doesn't usually get a chance to present its counter-argument.


Yo, we decided to build a dam in the creek behind your house. We're not sure what the impact will be on your house and backyard, so watch out. You've got three days, construction has already started.


It was gonna cost 1 million of your tax dollars to build the levee protecting your house, but we're saving you money by building it out of sticks. We'll send a dude out to throw a few more on every few days.


7 years to estimate the impact? I'm guessing it would take a professional an afternoon.


About the same time it'd take me to build Twitter.

>If the beavers built it in two days, it means that half a dozen men could have easily built it at an extremely low cost in a week.

Not at all.


Judging from the article, the intentions of the beavers aligned with the intentions of people. Yet that is not to say that the requirements are the same. Even if you ignore things like environmental assessments and safety (both during construction and during its lifespan), neither of which are codified by beavers, you still have things like maintenance. Beavers will only maintain a dam for as long as it serves a purpose to them. Once it does not, it is left to decay.

Human society just doesn't live like that anymore. There are both short term and long term costs to consider. That wasteful government will likely mitigate some of those costs.


I challenge you to build a beaver dam in 30 days.


"Start with two beavers..."


Beavers don't have to worry about regulations, don't care how long the dam lasts or what the downstream impacts of it might be.


I dont know, this is literally what beavers do. I think you are really selling the beavers short here.

I mean they've been evolving and being naturally selected to optimize for this specific activity for eons.

You wouldn't expect the government to be better at making honey than bees? Better at swimming and catching fish than a dolphin? Better at making silk than silk worms?

If I was going to be #2 at Dam building I'd want to be #2,to beavers.


Id hope they are better at catching fish than a dolphin, yes.


Personally? Like with their mouth or hands?


Yeah. You could argue that nature has been planning this dam for 2.4 million years. (Though, granted, it spent no money doing so.)


Nature's currency is blood.


It’s time, actually. Natures currency is a butt ton of time.


It’s true that our governments are quite inefficient. Large cities were built from scratch in China in fewer than 7 years.


My take-away from this story is almost the opposite of yours. Nature provides a lot of valuable resources, and this story is a beautiful example of how failing to properly steward our natural environment can be extremely expensive.

> Instead, they were planning it, fighting bureocracy and wasting money for years.

I do not know anything about CZ or about this project, but jumping to "waste" seems excessively pessimistic.

It could just be that the agency's budget is finite and this project is low priority in the organization's capital projects prioritization. Just because they first planned this project 7 years ago doesn't mean they have been actively working on it continuously for the last 7 years...

This is common even in tiny economic units. E.g., I planned out our family's new furnace setup a couple of years ago, but probably won't actually allocate capital to that upgrade for another few years. In the meantime, I promise I am not spending all day every day thinking about our furnace. Just because a project takes 7 years from start of planning to finished project doesn't mean that there were 7 years of work there :)

> If the beavers built it in two days, it means that half a dozen men could have easily built it at an extremely low cost in a week.

That really depends on what you mean by "it".

I got to watch a beaver dam go up recently. Not the active work, but regular snapshots of the build site, as it were. I will use that as a case study.

If the goal here is to literally build a beaver dam, then probably you're correct. The dam I saw go up is small and built out of pretty small trees. Maybe 3-5 inch diameter. Softer wood. I think a small group of humans with very cheap tools could make quick cheap work of felling and moving the trees.

As for the dam itself, they'd figure something out. But I am skeptical that most teams would be able to build a like-quality dam out of felled trees and found materials. Beavers are dam good at what they do.

More importantly, though, building a more typical modern human dam in that same location would not be cheap or fast. You would easily spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on cutting and blasting a path before you could even get concrete to the worksite. There's no way the entire project would be done in a week. It definitely wouldn't be low cost no matter the schedule. Getting it done in a few weeks would be... probably possible, but a logistical tour de force and astronomically expensive. This is all just talking about the actual work, ignoring government permitting entirely.




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