i thought they were gonna do the unemployment thing, after you lost your job "you qualify for cobra (health insurance) for __$2536___ a month" like anyone would pay that
True, and can't ignore the propensity for abuse, as if a politician won't go help push through a spending bill after buying stock in a beneficiary to that bill.
On the bounty thing, there was a highly successful program to reduce the feral goat population in Arkaroola, South Australia. The difference was that because the people running the place didn't have a bottomless bucket of taxpayer money to draw from, they actually paid attention to what the hunters were doing and made sensible decisions regarding bounty payouts. Within two years the program had been discontinued; not because it was a failure, but because the hunters kept complaining that they couldn't find any feral goats to shoot.
When it's your own money, or at least you treat it as such, these programs can work. This is why outsourcing our personal responsibility to people that we can't reasonably monitor and funded by theft (tax) is a bad idea!
@@katieandkevinsears7724 The problem: Emu overpopulation damaging farmer's crops and overtaxing the native habitat. The solution: Send two army privates out with a car and a single machinegun to take care of the problem. Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions!
I live in Northern Ireland and had no idea this was going on until a friend told me all about it. I'm glad our incompetent government made it onto ReasonTV :)
Everyone sucks at problem solving, the government just takes longer to fix problems they make and have an unlimited budget to keep dumping into new problems.
The Place: Arizona The year: 2000 The Problem: Not enough alternative fuel being used. The Solution: Subsidize 50% of vehicles which are bi-fuel and can burn natural gas. The result, tens of thousands of people buy fully loaded luxury SUVs converted to run on both gasoline and natural gas. And simply run them using gas instead of LNG. Costing the state $800 million and increasing gas consumption. (and a previously popular governor losing reelection)
Dude, Arizona has the largest CO2 free power plant in the country, Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station. If they really wanted to do something green, it would be adding the 3 more reactors to the plant which were originally planned.
In fairness, if Arizona is anything like Florida there aren’t a lot of Natural Gas fueling stations. You gotta have the infrastructure in place if you expect people to switch. If enough people have flex fuel vehicles, then adding more fueling stations could get some to make the switch especially if regular gas is rising in cost.
@@lq7777.... They did an episode on this. I believe they said that a lot of the vehicles were outfitted with ONE gallon tanks for the alt fuel. And most never used the alternative fuel anyway.
I wish there was a Reason: Unintended Consequences version of Sim City where every time you try to control your population something unintended and worse happens.
@@kalburgy2114 I don't know about that. Unless you mean literally sit. Cause the legislature doesn't do the job that they're supposed to do (actually telling the executive branch how to run the country).
There literally exists an investment fund called the 'Congressional Effect Fund' that divests itself when Congress is in session and buys up everything when Congress is not in session. The theory is that the mere existence of Congress creates uncertainty in business because the rules might change at any moment, and this is reflected in much more conservative business strategy, while simply letting business do what it does allows it to truly grow. I'm told they get a fairly reasonable return every year.
Sometimes the rat tail bounty hunter starts a superpac that funds the politicians campaigns and spends millions to "lobby" members of Congress so they keep passing the legislation
@@fearthehoneybadger Which is why we need to elect just random every day people and stop voting for anyone attached to the system at all. Elect me, I fix ACs and I don't know shit about shit but I can hire people that do. I won't deliberately undermine our Republic and I will push campaign finance reform. Elect your grandma I don't care. Anybody really just not Democrats, Republicans or anyone who ever took a dollar from the system
@@RoyArrowood I honestly don't get the obsession with political outsiders. Democratic elections around the world show populist politicians claiming to be political outsiders and outside of the system but end up mingling with the corrupt or being even bigger pieces of trash than the incumbents they replace. On top of that, having less experience and wisdom that comes with the complex job of governing entire countries, states, provinces, cities whatever you name it. No but seriously though, governing in democratic governments is tough business and you can't always rely on your advisors. I do get it though, americans, my self included are tired of ineffective governance and leaders that care more about their corporate overlords than the people
Great moments in unintended consequences! The year: 2020 The problem: The government shut down the economy and told people they can't work The solution: Give everyone thousands of dollars Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?
Covid stimulus boosted consumer spending by a crap ton, child tax credits cut child poverty in half, and workers have far more bargaing power due to the workers shortage. I wouldnt say inflation nor the working shortage was a good think but I think the stimulus had more benefits than detriments. Also we wouldn't have had to shut down the freaking economy if governments just shut down earlier, the quicker we could've went back to the outside world!
The train track thing is a classic AI problem. You tell the agent to build it long hoping it will cover a lot of distance. The agent builds a spiral or a zig zag because it's the longest track it can make and doesn't require it to transport materials or move far from its start location. You always get what you ask for so be specific!
The Transcontinental Railroads were even worse than that. The meeting point was not laid down in a contact, so when the two railroads got to each other, they kept on building past each other! You can look on the aerial photo now near Promontory Point and see both railbeds. Look east and west of Promontory Summit. The wye at that point cuts through the other railroad's grade, very obviously. In addition, the track was so poorly built that it had to be completely reconstructed within a year of completion.
There was no meeting point designated, and the two competing rail companies worked to get as many dedicated miles as possible. By the time the bureaucrats finally decided that Promontory was the most logical meeting point, the UP surveyors were in Nevada and the CP had iron all the way to Ogden. Much of the roadbeds seen in modern overhead photos are actually from the 1890 - 1910 era, as the lines were improved and relocated (even after the Lucin Cutoff opened in 1902). Repairs continued until the "Promontory Branch" was abandoned, the tracks pulled up for the iron during WWII. The old rail route is popular with off-roaders during summer. Only a few sections of the track needed to be rebuilt, and those had been put in with the intent of opening the line as rapidly as possible. The repairs were expensive, but the trade-off was considered necessary, as opposed to waiting for Michigan trees to be cut, floated to mills, cut into ties, seasoned, treated, hauled to Omaha and run out to the construction camps -- a process which was underway before the UP laid its first rail, and continued for decades.
I will never forget Barry Obama's "cash for clunkers" destroying cars that could have been fixed, recycled, and re-used. Very green indeed. Those used cars would be worth double today.
We sold a minivan we didn't need in the wake of that and the young family we sold it to were amazingly happy because they were having trouble finding a vehicle to get their family around in. I'd actually considered trading it in on the program to get a new car for my mother-in-law but fuck that wasteful bullshit.
I have seen bounties work when the bounty A) specifically required the whole corpse and B) was not an easily bred animal. Specifically magpies (a kind of bird) in rural Idaho. I'm not aware of anyone successfully breeding them for the purpose of exploiting the bounty in that instance. I am aware of stories of teenagers figuring out that certain kinds of guns don't leave enough of a corpse to be able to collect the bounty. The bounty was specifically intended to help farmers whose crops were being harmed by said birds and it has occurred to me it didn't have to be the government to run it. An independent farmer's association or even an insurance company that insures some of the farmers' crops could implement such as long as the government didn't find an excuse to prohibit it.
Another trick is to make the program limited to one generation of the animal's lifespan, which would only work if the animal takes more than a year to age up to bounty standards.
I love these episodes!!! It shows how history repeats itself because we don't learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others. Especially, when we want to do the "right thing". Like Democrats love to say "let's spend more money to solve the problem" with an unspecified plan. And it illustrates why we shouldn't rely on government so much for things we can do for ourselves.
Paved with good intentions. Must have done a good job for once. A whole lot of people going down there thinking "24 hour Fire Pit Weanie Roast" is great....
Sure! Who wants to stay home all comfy cozy, making hundreds of dollars more than they have before? Especially when they can go work a job, they hate, for a smaller amount of money and possibly catch a disease that every SCIENCE(!) person tells them has a 99.9% chance of killing them!
Here in Brazil something like the cobras problem really happened, the government payd for every rat you kill, than people started rats farms in Rio de Janeiro, then the government stops the program and the rats farmers just release the rats, the result? Rio was even more infested
It's encouraging and inspiring that they have to go back so far in history and to other countries to find unintended consequences. Must mean that things work out well the majority of the time. Great!
Wouldn't that be comforting to believe! The fact of the matter, Mr S, is that these examples are the "best" & most fascinating of government's folly, ignorance & incompetence. Please note that I don't believe that all, or even most, of government's activities end with such an extraordinary waste of resources, but it's much more that most people might believe.
The northern ireland thing was a near carbon copy of a policy which worked as intended elsewhere. They just decided to delete one little clause for some unknown reason and it all went haywire.
Great moments in unintended consequences The affordable care act aka Obama Care The year: 2010 The problem: No affordable coverage for preexisting conditions The solution: Raise insurance rates for everyone else and let the health care companies write the bill Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?
2:39, the best thing to do in that instance really would be to warn people about the bounty stopping, or reducing it to be less that raising a cobra, so at least they don't release even more snakes
