jay pettitt on 20/9/2008 at 22:00
Damn, I didn't think of that :(
(but you agree in principle?)
heywood on 20/9/2008 at 22:34
Quote Posted by Theif13x
The Coast Guard can't even keep track of who has a fishing license how are they supposed to keep track of how much fish they are catching?
Just to be clear, you enforce quotas by weighing the catch upon return to port, not on the seas.
The only role the Coast Guard has is keeping others out of our territorial waters.
Starrfall on 20/9/2008 at 22:45
I was joking anyways you ninnies!
If you can't catch everyone the solution is to make sure that the fines you lay on those who are caught are heavy enough to have a deterrent effect. You'll still never stop every poacher but such appears to be the nature of crime.
Thief13x on 20/9/2008 at 23:05
Quote Posted by heywood
The only role the Coast Guard has is keeping others out of our territorial waters.
They actually have a lot of duties besides just that (enforcing equipment, certification, and inspection standards, mitigating drug trafficking, search and rescue, etc)
Quote Posted by jay pettitt
Damn, I didn't think of that :(
(but you agree in principle?)
in 95% of the cases, no because it's just plain stupid to expect supply and demand to work and to encourage entrepreneurship when the whole process is being taxed and regulated to death.
that said, I'm not expert by any means in biology, but if what is being said is true (edible sea life will be pretty much gone by 2050) then I think it's a real crisis that needs intervention.
heywood on 20/9/2008 at 23:09
Quote Posted by Thief13x
They actually have a lot of duties besides just that (enforcing equipment, certification, and inspection standards, mitigating drug trafficking, search and rescue, etc)
Yeah, I know that. I was referring to their role in fishery management.
jay pettitt on 21/9/2008 at 00:27
Quote Posted by Thief13x
in 95% of the cases, no because it's just plain stupid to expect supply and demand to work and to encourage entrepreneurship when the whole process is being taxed and regulated to death.
See, this is where you and I disagree. I don't doubt that it is possible to over regulate, but the assumption that regulation kills entrepreneurship and innovation is faulty. The (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreal_Protocol) Montreal Protocol would be a classic example of regulation stimulating innovation and opening new markets. Insufficient regulation can also stifle desirable progress; weak building regulations ensure that new homes only meet the barest minimum standards for thermal efficiency because without a level playing field building better homes risks placing developers at a competitive disadvantage compared to their peers. Opportunities to develop better building materials and methods that would benefit home owners, businesses and the environment go unrealised.
The upshot is that considering only potential negative effects of regulation and ignoring potential benefits leads to bias and skewed thinking.
Zygoptera on 21/9/2008 at 03:15
Quote Posted by Starrfall
If you can't catch everyone the solution is to make sure that the fines you lay on those who are caught are heavy enough to have a deterrent effect. You'll still never stop every poacher but such appears to be the nature of crime.
If you get caught poaching or black marketing here you get done by the same law they use against drug dealers, so it is taken fairly seriously. You will lose your boat and or car and or house and or whatever other assets you cannot account for,
and get fined and 5 years at Queen Liz's pleasure
and you will lose whatever quota entitlement you may have had. And they are perfectly happy to do it to non NZ ships as well, I know that Japanese and Russian trawlers have been seized in the past.
I can't really imagine that the US would have too much problem with quota enforcement. I'd be surprised if Hawaii alone didn't have more resources available for enforcement than we have in total. Of course, it's generally our military which does a lot of the blue water enforcement rather than a specialist agency and I don't know how that would go down in the US.
demagogue on 21/9/2008 at 05:18
You have this backwards ... sort of. The Montreal Protocol is the classic example of industry innovating on its own and then flipping to push the treaty, once the handwriting of regulation is on the wall (you could understand your sentence to be saying this, though). The stroke of fortune was that CFC substitutes were actually cheaper and more efficient, on top of being better for the ozone layer; so front-runners had a strong incentive to codify hard-standards to cut off lagging competition in a classic Baptist-Bootlegger kind of deal. The fact the satellite tech advanced at exactly the same time this huge hole appeared over Antarctica (as good as gold for political capital) is another stroke of uncanny fortune.
If every environmental problem had the same uncanny combination of fortunate economics, politics, and science of the ozone layer problem, what a much nicer world we'd have... Unfortunately, commons problems like carbon emissions and fish don't have that lucky feature of having substitutes both non-damaging and cheaper, there's no "gaping hole" to put on tv (although some hurricanes and depleted fish stocks are working on that), the science is fuzzier, and industry doesn't want to play ball as much.
scumble on 21/9/2008 at 07:41
Quote Posted by Starrfall
I think the idea is that catch-sharing helps prevent the waste of going over-quota. (And thus the socialism)
Alternatively, it might be like some kind of co-operative.
I still think on the whole that the tendency for humans to want to stuff their faces a lot is part of the root problem. Agriculture has led to a huge food source that the unfarmed fish population can't keep up with. Quotas may in some way be slowing the decline, but I have a pessimistic feeling that fish are just suffering from the fact that humans simply displace other species in one way or another.
heywood on 21/9/2008 at 13:19
Quote Posted by demagogue
If every environmental problem had the same uncanny combination of fortunate economics, politics, and science of the ozone layer problem, what a much nicer world we'd have... Unfortunately, commons problems like carbon emissions and fish don't have that lucky feature of having substitutes both non-damaging and cheaper, there's no "gaping hole" to put on tv (although some hurricanes and depleted fish stocks are working on that), the science is fuzzier, and industry doesn't want to play ball as much.
Well, regarding CO2, we do have retreating glaciers and breaking ice shelfs to put on TV.
And I kinda disagree about industry. For every industry opposed to cutting emissions, there's another fledgling industry waiting to take off. The green technology revolution could be like the internet revolution of the 1990s.
