“Just ban everything I don’t like as long as it won’t impact anything I do like” is a frequent take on HN these days.
Then when states start doing things like adding ID requirements for websites it’s shock and rage as the consequences of banning things (even for under 18s) encounter the realities of what happens when you “just ban” things.
I think we can separate the banning of things which affect personal freedom from the rest. Like if oil were "banned", I'm imagining it's not illegal to possess oil, but rather oil companies wouldn't be able to drill it up and sell it anymore. A bit like fazing out asbestos. The ordinary people with asbestos tiles in their basement don't get into trouble, but new house builds can't/won't use that tile anymore.
ID requirements seem like the main burden is being put on ordinary people instead of corporations, and by extension seems clearly bad.
> Like if oil were "banned", I'm imagining it's not illegal to possess oil, but rather oil companies wouldn't be able to drill it up and sell it anymore.
What does that have to do with anything?
It doesn’t matter where you ban it, if you turn off oil overnight a lot of people are left stranded from their jobs, sectors of the economy collapse, unemployment becomes out of control.
Banning things like this is just fantasy talk that only makes sense to people who can’t imagine consequences or think they don’t care. I guarantee you would change your mind very quickly about banning oil overnight as soon as the consequence became obvious.
I'm curious: Where do you put the line? For example, leaded gas improved car performance and arguably key to economic performance. But it was also incredibly neurotoxic and damaging to society. Do you believe banning it was a bad idea because it resulted in a lot of people losing their jobs?
>For example, leaded gas improved car performance and arguably key to economic performance
This is not true. We currently use ethanol to boost octane, and that additive was known at the time by the company that invented TEL, and they did not use it because they did not control the market for ethanol like they could control the market of a new and patented chemical.
TEL was never actually necessary, and we poisoned ourselves for most of a decade to enrich a corporation. Large scale ethanol (as beer) production was one of humanity's earliest industries.
Indeed, after we banned leaded gas, we tried using yet another stupid poison additive, MTBE, for a decade or so, and that continued to poison people because gas tanks leak and that chemical was toxic. Most of Asia actually still uses MTBE, to their detriment.
Ethanol has never had this problem. Arguably, when Bush required all US gasoline to include 10-20% ethanol, he wasn't even trying to fix the poison problem of MTBE, he might have just been greenwashing and kicking more subsidies to corn growers, but it definitely solved the poisonous additive problem for octane boosters.
Indeed, zero additives for octane are "required" at all. You can produce high octane gasoline just by choosing different refined components but this results in less gasoline produced per barrel of oil.
The Ethyl Corporation primarily, they had to quickly diversify and adjust their business model as a result of the US phase out of tetraethyllead. They managed to stem some of the bleeding by simply just...selling the rest to other countries before they instituted their own restrictions on leaded gas (which tells you how ethically sound said business was) but this was a massive change at the time considering just about every vehicle used leaded gas even if it was a slow rollout.
Who suggested "turning oil off overnight"? What does that even mean?
GP (and I) have given you several examples of stuff society learned was harmful and then phased out with regulations/legislation. No, it didn't and does not happen overnight.
Why are you acting in such bad faith, trying to disregard people you don't agree with as "not being able to imagine consequences"?
I was on board until the end. If we don't have kids, we're wiping ourselves out even faster than with climate change. I also wonder with oil if we'd need it for some things still, though maybe it's fine if it's made from something else. Gasoline has some obvious alternatives in most areas, but oil seems to be more than fuel. It's also a lubricant.
