Great Moments in Unintended Consequences: Subsidized Trees, Daycare Fees, NY Alcohol Ban (Vol. 11)
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- Опубліковано 14 чер 2024
- Good intentions, bad results.
Watch the whole series here: • Great Moments in Unint...
For links and sources: reason.com/video/2023/03/17/g...
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Part One: Tree Decree
The year: 2019
The problem: Mexico needs trees!
The solution: the Sowing Life project, a $3.4 billion program that pays farmers to plant fruit and timber trees on barren land. Not only will this help spruce up the environment, but it will fight poverty and inequality by paying the farmers to maintain the new trees.
Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
It turns out poor farmers need money. And since standing trees didn't qualify for the program, the system incentivized farmers to cut down mature trees to make way for new ones.
In one village, two-thirds of the program's participants cut down forests to get that cash.
One study found the program caused the deforestation of more than 280 square miles.
But, you know what they say about best-laid plan…ts.
Part Two: Pay Care
The year: 1998
The problem: Private day care centers in Israel are tired of parents arriving late.
The solution: Fine tardy parents a small fee for every late pickup.
Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
It turns out money isn't the only incentive, and a fine is just a price. To the surprise of the researchers, late arrivals more than doubled! The penalty, it seemed, allowed parents to ease their conscience. The shameful apology that once burdened them shifted to a simpler, legitimate cash transaction-one they were happy to pay.
Because honestly, ask any new parent what they would pay for an extra 10 minutes of free time.
Part Three: Loophole Lunch
The Year: 1896
The Problem: Alcohol is ruining the moral fiber of New York!
The Solution: the Raines Law! It created a bevy of rules that made it harder to open or operate drinking establishments, including a ban on the sale of alcohol on Sundays, except for hotels and lodging houses that served drinks with complimentary meals. I mean, wealthy New Yorkers tend to dine out at ritzy hotel restaurants when their servants have the day off. No need to ruffle their rich, upstanding, virtuous feathers. It's those poor people who are ruining everything! So yeah, stick it to them.
Sounds like a great terrible idea, with the best of puritanical intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
It turns out, people like drinking-even on Sundays! The ban was wildly unpopular.
Almost immediately, "Raines Law Hotels" were born. Basements and attics were converted into barely-furnished "rooms" and proprietors made deals with neighboring lodging houses. In Brooklyn, the number of registered hotels went from 13 to 800 after six months. Prostitutes and unmarried couples found the new rooms especially convenient.
To fulfill the law's food requirement, bar staff invented the "Raines Sandwich"-an easy, simple meal that would be served with a patron's drink but not consumed. The frequently inedible sandwich would be whisked away in seconds and quickly paired with the next order. It was not uncommon for the same sandwich to be reused for weeks. Yum.
Food for naught.
Great moments in unintended consequences: good intentions, bad results.
Do you know a great moment in unintended consequences? Email us at comedy@reason.com. We might steal it! I mean, borrow it. I mean, you know what I mean.
Written and produced by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and John Carter; narrated by Austin Bragg
In South Africa the government mandated that any company tendering for government contracts had to meet stringent affirmative action requirements. As in the company had to have a certain percentage of black ownership. This directly led to the phenomenon of "fronting", whereby a black person with no skills in the relevant industry would tender for government business and then immediately subcontract the work to a company that had experience in the industry but which couldn't meet the AA requirements. The South African government itself estimated that the practice of fronting increased the costs to government by about 10% on all contracts.
The US has a similar incentive, it's not a requirement but factors like woman-owned, veteran-owned, etc can be counted toward the "score" a bid has and let it win out over an equal bid. Similarly I wouldn't be surprised if there are unintended consequences to the Prompt Pay Act.
I have heard of "minority-owned" businesses in the US where the"owner" is barely even a figurehead. The non-minority "manager" has all of the real authority, and effectively started the company, but found a minority friend who would call himself the "owner" of the business for a small fee, so that the business could get affirmative action contracts.
@@jeremykraenzlein5975 We had exactly the same problem here. It got so bad that white business owners were paying semi-literate black workers to become "shareholders" and sign their names on government tender documents. The practice of fronting was eventually outlawed.
Unfortunately fronting is very profitable, so it evolved to a point where politically connected black people would exploit their connections to get contracts they had no right to get. They would then hire white-owned businesses to do the actual work.
Luckily the latest court rulings may mean that the AA requirements for government contracts might be declared illegal. If this happens then fronting will no longer be necessary.
@@Vaelosh466 Just out of curiosity, what's the Prompt Pay Act?
@@marcusmoonstein242 It requires the US government to respond to any invoice from an entity it has a contract with within 30 days or the right to dispute the invoice is waived and the payment has to be disbursed. As I recall this is a big part of why Medicare scams are so common, although it might be a similar requirement in Medicare law. There are so many claims the government can't investigate most of them before time runs out and it has to pay.
We did the "Raines sandwich" bit during Covid. Here in PA, there was a point where restaurants were open, but you couldn't drink at a bar. Hence, when you ordered a beer, you got a "roller dog" to go with it, and (so long as you didn't actually finish the hot dog) you could have as many drinks as you liked.
Yea, same on airplanes. If you were eating (such as peanuts), you didn't need your mask. But when you stopped eating, you would have to put it on. People ate that tiny little bag of peanuts so slowly. ;)
I think this series should be required viewing for every legislative body in the country. If I'm required to go through required sensitivity training every year. Legislators should be required to go through required second and third ordered reasoning training every year.
And a test afterwards
For some of them it would just be a tutorial, not a warning.
Here’s a great moment in unintended consequences: The city of St Paul MN, in roughly 2017 (give or take a couple years) decided that they would stop allowing residents to contract for their own garbage collection services and instead limit garbage hauling to government awarded contracts where haulers would have exclusive rights to neighborhoods. This was supposed to allow for fewer trucks in the allies and it would allow small operators to compete with the big national companies. (Waste Management) With the ability to just concentrate on one neighborhood, haulers would save money and prices would go down and service would improve! Within a year, due to all the bureaucratic nonsense, the number of garbage haulers in St Paul shrunk from 17 to 1. Waste Management. And… wait for it…. Prices went up and service is poorer (for me at least).
Here's a perfect example of a monopoly created by 'capitalism'.
@@kardush qctuqlly it ws created bygovernment just th big haulers just go rich off it
A great example of how the socialist solution to the Tragedy of the Commons problem (a Commons Administrator) is not a solution at all, but a replacement of the Commons with the most corruptible Commons of all, a human administrator.
@@0011peace Hence the quotes around capitalism.
Morons: *give megacorporations a monopoly*
The same morons: capitalism has failed us
Gun buy "backs" are a something that you should throw into one of these vids if you haven't already. Some people started making zip guns that didn't even work with a few bucks worth of materials from hardware stores. The program gave anyone who turned in a gun something like $50 per gun so the sub $50 zip guns were quite profitable.
Another gun-related one that I recall from many years ago (please fact check this since my memory is not reliable!): Belgium outlawed guns in "military calibers" and paid owners of such guns to turn them in. In Europe, the barrel and bolt of a firearm are considered the controlled parts (unlike America where the receiver or frame is) and counted as a "firearm" in and of themselves. Many patriotic Belgians owned FN-FAL rifles in a military caliber, 7.62x51mm NATO, which they took the barrel off of, turned it in for more money than it was worth and then used part of the proceeds to buy a barrel in caliber .308 Winchester, which is not in the inventory of any military but that can shoot 7.62x51mm NATO ammunition safely and reliably. The firearms were essentially unchanged except to get a brand new barrel and the owner made a profit to boot.
the gun control ones are great. you can't stop technology.
@@SeraphsWitness The unintended consequences in both those cases probably numbered in the dozens and amounted to a few thousand dollars in waste. Those were probably quite successful programs.
@@Tysto It depends how you measure "success".
Most of the guns turned in are old rifles and junk weapons that wouldn't even be used in any sort of crime. A lot of them are gun folks turning in their junk so they can go buy better weapons. I know some personally.
And the notion that this somehow helps gun violence is completely absurd.
It's hilarious to think that a mugger or gangsta would sell his primary tool for less than he makes in one day of USING the tool.
They aren't just compatible, a .308 barrel litterally is a 7.62 barrel. There may be some subtly different tolerances within the chamber or head clearance adjustment (neither is part of the barrel of course), but the only difference in barrel and bolt is the label stamped on it.
Really all modern "30 caliber" rifles use the same basic barrel inside diameter, the small numbering differences only designate the specific cartridge and expected chamber pressure range.
The Raines sandwich reminds me of the covid restrictions NY put in place requiring people sitting at a bar to have food in order to be unmasked.
And the airline passengers who took an entire flight to consume a bag of peanuts.
And the UK pubs thinking a 'substantial meal' was covered by a pork pie!
In Idaho they passed a law that prohibited smoking cigarettes in public establishments, but exempted private clubs. Restaurants with a lot of smoking customers had a quick solution. They became private clubs! All one needed to do was sign their name into a registry and pay $1 to join. Since membership came with one free drink (retail value $1) we just kept smoking in our new "private club" without skipping a beat.
In Hong Kong getting a liquor license is an arduous process. The way around it for some establishments is to operate as a private club. Membership is the price of one drink, with the first one free when joining.
@@GeneralThargor In NYS governor Cuomo stated that a plate of chicken wings "did not constitute a substantial meal" and he angered quite a lot of Upstate NY folks, especially those in the Buffalo region, famous for their "Buffalo Wings!"
Considering how often the result is the government getting more money and power without solving the purported problem I think it's less "unintended consequences" and more "unstated intentions with successful results."
Everything they say they mean the opposite. Anti corruption becomes corrupt
Never ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
There's two towns in Victoria Australia that have a very winding road (rather than straight) because there were laws once in place that people couldn't be served alcohol on Sunday unless they were travellers who had travelled more than a certain distance from home (10km I think) and so both towns rebuilt the road to make it just long enough so on Sunday all the men would swap towns so they could drink.
The winding road is still like that today because it was too difficult to change.
That is hilarious 😅. Thanks for sharing.
In Austrailia the road swerves for you when you are drunk
In my neighborhood there was a BEAUTIFUL street lined with big oak trees I used to like to drive down. But they had a problem with speeding so the local council paid millions of dollars to add artificial curves to the street. You have to see it to believe it. It's a perfectly straight, double-wide American residential street, where they've built in big concrete chicanes out of curbs and pointless concrete round-about-islands at every single intersection.
And of course all of this is a HUGE problems (for everyone obviously) but especially for Snow Plow drivers. So they've had to absolutely cover all these artificial obstacles in big flashy road signs so no one crashes into them. There's at least three reflective road signs on every chicane and four on every round-about-island. They didn't even "beautify" any of this, it's just concrete, and they filled the chine's with plain stones.
So now, the street looks like maybe the ugliest street in the valley, it's incredibly dangerous because cars are swerving back and forth, weaving in and out of parked cars and pedestrians (there's literally a dog park on this street), and I've already seen at least one accident of a car crashing into a parked car.
As Beatles sang ...
The long and winding road
That leads to your beer
Will never disappear
I've seen that road before
It always leads me here
Lead me to you beer
😅
5 miles seems accurate
In many places, like Bourbon County Kentucky, it is illegal to throw away tires because they are an environmental problem. People are charged a disposal fee. This has led to people piling them or secretly dumping them causing more damage than going to a landfill.
In France, for a lot of stuff, you get charged when you buy. The disposal price is listed on the sale document but, you are still expected to take it to the appropriate recycling center.
@@PhilJonesIII You need to show the 'unintended consequence' part and how it connect to the 'good intention' law part.
Centrally planned, authoritarian social engineering could never possibly go wrong!
Not sure this fits the theme, but it's definitely an unintended consequence: In the year 2000 most of Israel's doctors went on strike. The result? A 20% drop in mortality rate for the duration of the strike.
Readers digest magazine had an article about medical malpractice in Michigan... ? Ten of thousands of deaths occurred due to human error and botched operations. 😢
Wow, sounds like if there were no doctors, people would live forever! No, wait, wait... It's just that people who'd inevitably die without intervention but could live with one were tossed onto the backburner. Duh.
My pancreas surgery was a success, the problem was they closed me up with a cut somewhere in my gut. I almost died of internal bleeding. Two doctors came up with the idea of sending a scope and a wire up my femoral artery and they found the leak and tied it off. Don't ask me how the heck they do that but I was wide awake and in serious pain for hours, maybe up to three.
Yea, so risky surgeries were temporarily deferred. You can bet the numbers all evened out (or were possibly worse) the following year.
Canada had a doctor's strike with similar results.
Here's one for ya. When Obamacare passed in whatever year, it mandated that employees who work more than 30 hours a week must be provided with healthcare insurance. The intention was to up the number of people with insurance. But employers found that having 2 part-time employees each working 20 hrs per week was cheaper than 1 full-time employee working 40 hrs per week because then the employer is not required to pay for health insurance. Several people I know were let go of full-time jobs and they instead had several part-time jobs to make up the loss of pay, resulting in a more hectic work schedule. I'm a teacher and the school district only pays once a month, so there was an upper limit on the number of times a substitute teacher would work for the month (I think it was 12), so what happened is that when we get to the last week of the month, there are no subs available, so teachers have to give up their prep time to cover other classes.
It should be illegal for employers to pay for healthcare. Shaq and Flo and Jake and a gecko could sell us health insurance instead. Also then very small businesses could hire their first employees without worrying about that stuff.
@@jackdonkey22 If an employer wants to pay for their employees healthcare out of the kindness of their heart, then that's their prerogative. But they shouldn't be mandated to do so.
ayup
@@jackdonkey22 Netherlands made it illegal for employers to pay for their employees' health insurance. Result? Insurance premiums went through the roof because whereas the companies were getting bulk discounts when paying for sometimes hundreds or thousands of insurance policies, the hundreds or thousands of employees now each have to shop around themselves and don't get those discounts.
Many companies ended up upping salaries to part compensate their workers, but that increase mostly disappears into the government's coffers in the form of additional income tax paid.
Result? More workers with insufficient health insurance because they no longer can afford the extras on their plan, higher operating cost for businesses, more financial stress on workers.
Or you could just have universal heathcare like every other developed nation.
"A fine is just a price"
Words to live by
Only if you have the money
Well the day care one in Israel did results in many places realizing they could make a lot of extra money (especially lower paid day care staff) through late penalty fees. Now its standard in many places in Israel. The original idea failed, but a whole new business came around because of it, and people love it today.
Hey look! More unintended consequences! 😂
Though personally, I kind of like the solution of normalizing it. As long as everyone understands that it’s a business transaction, it’s a win-win all around.
@@thewiirocks the kids don't win
@@citrosoda5370 Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t. Certainly we don’t want a situation where the parents are ignoring the kids and just leaving them in daycare longer. The flip side is that the kids stressing out about if their parents are going to arrive on time isn’t good for anyone either. Solving the undesirable aspects require looking at the larger system to understand the drivers rather than focusing on the side effects of late pickup.
@@citrosoda5370, Actually, the kids haven't won since day "care?" became a thing.
@@Jakehava Fair point.
Good job using the tree one from Mexico, I remember seeing that one in the comments from the last Unintended Consequences video. What I’m still waiting on? Unintended Consequences videos that include the unintended consequences of gun control!!
Plz talk about this one.
There’s a Mapo Bridge crosses the Han River in Seoul, South Korea. Between 2007 and 2012, over 100 ppl tried to suicide or suicided by jumping into the river on Mapo Bridge.
In order to alleviate this situation, the government posted many sweet photos about family around the bridge, and the handrails were equipped with motion sensors to sense movement, lighting up with slogans like ‘Are you tired? Did u eat? Does your crush like you? How’s your life going?’, etc.
A year later, however, the number of suicides on Mapo Bridge had increased by six times year-on-year.
You need to show why it backfires. Otherwise, it's just an unhappy coincidence.
Lol, the parents and late pick ups... Everyone knows that a fine simply translates to "legal for a price"!
Yeah, I saw that one coming as soon as they started describing it. Probably any parent who’s used after care or day care is familiar with the problem. 😅
In Australia, voting is COMPULSORY! The penalty for not voting is just a measly $20 fine. Freedom isn't free, but that's a rather underwhelming price tag.
@@mat2000100 I would think another consequence would be uninformed, uncaring voters. Could be why you're losing freedoms at such a fast clip.
The idea that everybody should vote is irresponsible.
@@YSLRD We've managed the same thing in the US without needing to pay morons to vote. USA! USA! 🤣
@@stevenscott2136 the US has the lowest voter turn out in the western world
The second one could actually be a win-win so long as you use the fine money to pay your staff to stay later, or hire someone new to run after daycare daycare.
in what way would it not be win-win? both sides got exactly what they wanted.
Sure, but the study was specifically trying to cut down on the number of parents that were picking their kids up late, so regardless of if it could be viewed as a win, from the study's specific goal, it was a failure.
@@aguyyouneverknew I'm pretty sure the sociologists are the real failures.
The real loss is for the kids who spend less time with their parents.
So, the answer to the "Unintended Consequence" is : Change your intentions to whatever just happened?
Good intentions sure has skyrocketed this last decade, and so has bad results.
Recency Bias
We remember more things that happened recently, and there's a lot more information available on them too
Stage IV metastatic government. Our nation is living on borrowed time. We're living in the time that future history books will refer to as The Fall of the American Empire.
It's also illegal to drink on Indian reservations in New Mexico, so many Native Americans drive to Gallup to consume alcohol, and then drive back to the reservations. If you remove the highway between the two from calculations of drunk driving fatalities, New Mexico falls from number 1 or 2 in drunk driving fatalities to number 48.
Ontario had laws like the Raines Law into the 1980s. Beer parlours were even commonly called hotels. And we had the same sandwich. On Sunday you could only have a drink with a meal, so on Sundays you'd walk into a restaurant and see groups drinking around a single sandwich that had dried out so much its ends curled up. Of course, progressive relaxing of these laws has seen alcohol consumption go down.
I wonder if instead of outright banning alcohol, they simply taxed it, if that would cause people to reduce their drinking.
@@jwil4286 Are you forget about the day care story already?
The EU wanted to prevent hearing loss by loud music, so they regulated the output of headphone jacks in electronic devices from phones to mp3 players. Only problem is that volume is dependable on the resistance of the headphones, some require more power than others for the same volume. This makes electronic devices unusable for many high-impedance headphones, forcing audiophiles to import electronics from other regions.
Here is my favourite - Barber vs GRE 1990. Mr Barber was disgruntled that he had to retire at 65 whereas women could at retire at 60 (this was because men were often older than women in relationships and therefore could retire at the same time). He argued that pension is a form of pay and therefore should be equal and took his case to the European court and they ruled in his favour.
However instead of lowering the age of retirement for men to 60, they raised the retirement age or women to 65, thus achieving equality.
The irony is that he died aged 58.
Guy was completely right! Why should I be treated like a second-class citizen just because I don't have a vagina? Absolute nonsense...
Flathead lake is the largest freshwater lake in Montana it was home to Kokanee salmon and had a thriving ecosystem. Biologists added brine shrimp for them to eat but soon found out that the shrimp were inactive while the salmon were active and it caused trout to eat the shrimp and it killed off the salmon
Seems every time they screw with nature something like this happened
South Africa had a similar "Raines" problem. Up until the late `80s it was illegal for shops to trade on Sunday. This excluded restaurants. Numerous convenience stores (similar to bodegas) set up a few small tables and chairs and served coffee and small snacks, hence changing their designation to cafes, allowing them to trade on Sundays.
We need more of this video series. There's plenty of material.
I agree 100%
There's also plenty of material for successes. They should show both so we can learn what works alongside what doesn't work.
Nice! In Sweden we did have something similar to the Raines Sandwich. Never had prohibition like the states but used to be strict regulations that you had to order food to order a drink, so old sandwiches no one ate came with every drink. Since you could only order one drink per meal a proffession of "sandwich boys" grew up, they just followed drinkers around so he could order two drinks and drink them both himself.
In the early 1920s, it was illegal to mention the word tornado in media (1st ammendment anyone?) to prevent panic. This culminated in the Tri-State Tornado of 1925, the most deadly tornado to date with 695 deaths and 2,027 injuries. The system lasted for 3.5 hours and over 219 miles. Peak winds and groundspeed are estimated to have been 301+ and 73 respectively.
There’s no shortage of material for this series and we’re paying for it.
~New Environmental Protection Agency laws in the east bay of S.F., CA started requiring boat yard customers to sweep their work area at the end of each day, however, that is when the wind is very strong, so all of those toxic particles, like fiberglass, etc., all blew downwind, creating far more pollution, instead of being swept up when there was no wind, earlier in the day, like itd always been done before~
@ReasonTV Great moment in unintended concquences: The Dutch government tries to fix nitrogin pollution by shrinking the farming sector.
Result: After massive farmer protests, the BBB farmer party becomes the largest party in the senate and in the provinces. Due to this the governing coalition is now in the monority.
As much as I enjoy the series I don't like the implication that you won't run out of content for it
IKR? im happy and devastated at the same time with every video
if there was an english word to describe my amuse-frustration?
Excellent LOL
They won't.
Who would be happy at the realization that humanity's capacity for shortsightedness is limitless?
It's only the best of intentions! WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG?
A moment in uninted consequences
Year: 1863
Problem: Not enough people enlisting in the Union Army during the Civil War
Solution: Enrollment Act of 1863, forcing young men between the ages of 20-45 against their will to fight and risk their lives in a war they might not even support. This could be waived if said person paid 300 dollars or paid someone else to take his place.
Consequence: Draft Riots in New York CIty. As it turns out, when you piss a man off and give him nothing to lose, he might not exactly act the way you want him to. The payment of the 300 dollars also paved the way for the slogan "Rich man's war. Poor man's fight".
What resulted was days of chaos without pause, 120 lives lost, thousands injured, 50 buildings ransacked and destroyed, about 1 and 5 million dollars, and troops that ironically enough the solution was trying to reinforce having to march away from the battlefield into New York to stop. There was so much damage that historians liken it to a confederate victory.
And I should metion all monetary figures are not scaled with inflation.
“Do not be so eager to deal out Death in Judgement. Even the very wise cannot see all ends.” - Gandalf the Grey
The No Child Left Behind Act! That needs a video.
Governor Mariam Ferguson of Texas was accused of corruption with the state curriculum. Unintended consequence--- she picked the publisher randomly from a hat so some years the books had worse spelling then the children.😁
Hahaha. "then"
@@nonyadamnbusiness9887 I spent 2nd grade in Texas public school, can you tell?
@@matthewmorrisdon5491 That's really only a valid explanation if you're in third grade now.
Ma Ferguson was the first female governor of a State. Since her husband was in Jail for corruption, she seemed like the perfect successor, a dynasty candidate for the one party State (dems).
@@matthewmorrisdon5491 Your spelling is fine, but you used a comma splice.
The Brazilian favelas were famously built after the government banned cheap housing known as "cortiços", wich were considered unsanitary (thou some people belive it was just an excuse to kick the poor out)
The now homeless people simply started building shacks on the nearby hills instead
This is the 1st of these that I have seen. They should be required viewing by every politician.. Well done Reason
The low income housing tax credit program is a limited program that can only give out so many millions of dollars in credits. So many developers want these valuable credits. The solution? TDHCA give bonus points to projects that get approval from local politicians! The problem? These local politicians approval comes with a price now! And corruption is rampant see Dallas county Mayor Pro-Tem Dwaine Caraway and many others. Cato did a paper on the subject as well.
Please continue this series. This is great!
I seem to remember in florida there was a bounty on iguanas in Miami but then they realized that people were breeding iguanas just for the bounty so they stopped.
I always love how far some unintended consequences can go but also how simple some are
I like how the outcomes are always easily predictable in practice. For example, when you pay people for the heads of {pest animal}, people start intentionally breeding {pest animal}
We are shaping up for a future "Great Moments in Unintended Consequences" here in Colorado with the passage of a law that charges $.10 per plastic shopping bag to encourage... well, not using a plastic bag I guess. Instead, we are supposed to bring our own cloth bag for our grocery shopping. Here we are, a few months in, and already retailers don't want push-back from their customers so it's now on the "honor" system where the bags are set out and you input on the checkout screen how many "provided" bags you need. You can see where this is going. I have also seen plastic bags placed by the door, unmonitored, where anyone can take them. Welcome to mass non-compliance.
*becomes ungovernable with malicious intent*
It's worse in Canada. Plastic bags are going to be illegal to give away in stores pretty soon. Many stores are phasing them out.
Decades ago, most stores begin a policy of charging 10 cents a bag. Of course, nowadays you can't even do that. People, being fallible humans, do occasionally forget their reusable bags. Before, if you forgot your reusable bags, you'd simply purchase a plastic bag for 10c to replace them. Nowadays though, if you forget your bags, you have to buy a reusable one for $1.
Those reusable bags are only good for the environment if they are *actually* reused. A reusable bag that ends up in the garbage wastes far more resources than a plastic bag that ends up in the garbage. To buy a reusable bag, only for the customer to not actually reuse it, completely defeats the purpose and wastes far more resources than a simple thin plastic bag.
in ny state there are no plastic grocery bags . paper is allowed at 5 or 10 cents. but wegmans markets sells great reusable bags for 99 cents that i like better . they can hold way more than the thin bags . i saved the thin bags before the ban ..i got a garbage can stuffed with them thinking i would need them. only use them for garbage now.
That's not an unintended consequence of the law, it's simply a lack of enforcement of it. An unintended consequence would be if, in complying with the change, something is made worse (like the trees cut down to make room for new ones), or in order to not comply with it, something bad happens (like the mass organized crime created by Prohibition).
Keeping the status quo despite the change because there isn't enough enforcement isn't an unintended consequence.
I wonder how the needle exchange program is going?
We had a similar Raines law in the U.K. for real during the great convid madness but this time with a scotch egg instead of a sandwich which worked soo well that the disease was defeated and is just a memory in modern times
That one about the ceremonial sandwich happened elsewhere too. I remember seeing it done in Montreal in the late 1960s.
I always love what comes after, "what could possibly go wrong?"
American government putting restrictions on fuel use and co2 emissions for cars
Sounds like a great idea! With the best of intentions! What could possibly go wrong?
Bigger commercial vehicles are exempted, leading to companies marketing, producing and selling more pickup trucks which to consumers. Those vehicles are bigger in size requiring more infrastructure, they're gas guzzlers, since they weigh more they wear down the roads, because of their high ground clearance are less safe for drivers and especially pedestrians and kids. It also causes a perverse incentive where drivers to feel safer on the road feel the need to buy bigger trucks. We see a massive explosion in sales and 99% of the time truck beds empty because of ridiculous government regulations that pushed the market in a suboptimal direction.
Interesting. There is also a lot of catalytic converter theft going on, and I think they just extract the precious metals from the old cats, which is probably not environmentally friendly, not to mention the environmental impact of manufacturing and installing replacement cats.
The Raines Sandwich one was hilarious!
I'm loving this series. Nothing like concrete examples of unintended consequences.
Governments are great!
So glad to see more of these.
Easy to share with friends.
Ms obama "heath food in school", meaning no salt, or sugar. It lead to me selling salt packits at lunch, and a class mate selling candy bars and cans of soda... and the school quit making money on the vending machine...
Edit, the same happened when trump raised the age for dip, or smokes, alot of people still wanted them, so some of us made some money supplying our younger buddys.
I love capitalism.
I was in school when that was enacted. I remember being SO mad because I had to take the gross, overcooked vegetable side and had no room on my tray for anything from the little salad bar. We were told straight-up that we didn't have to eat it, we just had to take it. So much food waste
@@amethyst_cat9532 The food waste indeed... I remember so many untouched vegetables and fruits going in the waste bin
Idea: During distance learning in the California State University (CSU) system, they wanted recorded lectures to be accessible to students. The solution? Mandate that professors can not delete the recordings. The problem was that recorded lectures took up a massive amount of storage. Tough luck, they can’t be deleted. So, professors stopped recording them entirely. (Please fact check the specifics)
WTF? A consumer grade hard drive can store HUNDREDS of hours of high quality recordings, and you can stretch that to thousands if you're willing to compromise. What the hell sort of cost-cutting measures were these people implementing? If you have money to educate and employ university professors, you should have the money to buy storage...
@@VestinVestin I think the problem come from home video camera usually record in raw data. So it's a normal thing for 15 minutes recording to have several gigabytes of data. For comparison, a security camera system can compress its footage into some tens of megabytes.
That being said, a university should be able to afford several terabytes of storage per professor.
This series could be its own channel.
After the sinking of the titanic, congress passed regulations requiring all ships carry enough lifeboats for all passengers, much to the opposition of shipping companies. The result was the Eastland capsizing because the excess weight on the top of the ship, resulting in even more passengers being killed than died on the titanic (although Titanic lost more people in total due to more staff).
The Raine's Law came back in the UK, briefly, in 2020.
You could only sit in a bar and have a drink if you were eating "a substantial meal".
So we all bought our Scotch eggs, which were put back in the fridge at the end of your drink, ready for the next person to get round the stupid and unnessecary lockdown law.
This is possibly the best channel on UA-cam.
Your voice is PERFECT for this! Nice work!
This is my favorite series of the channel, I look forward to the next one
Best series. This is what got me to subscribe.
Yay it's back.
I love these so much.
The Raines Law, or "why Salt Lake City is not a tourist destination (except for LDS)"
That's not true at all, that's a HUGE ski destination
Thank you for this.
I have seen this video before, I just had to come back for another laugh. Thanks guys.
I seem to recall the Raines Sandwich made a reappearance in 2020-2021 in the guise of food in NYC bars which justified the unconscionable behavior of people leaving their homes to go outside
I love these!
The best one yet
Always enjoyable - thanks.
I love these
Always looking forward to this series
This is the greatest video series of all time.
Probably a urban legend but I have heard from several people that a couple years ago Grants New Mexico passed a law prohibiting the sale of gasoline and alcohol in the same business this meant that the much less profitable gas portion of these stations was shut down and grants didn't have any gas stations for months.
Yes, Moar!
With the whole daycare situation, if the purpose of the fines was to discourage parents from being late, they needed to make it unaffordable. Such a high price that you could hire a 2nd shift of part time caregivers if the parents still insisted on being late. Win win
The purpose was to disuade late pickups which still means their new policy didn't work as intended.
i think if they did that, they would go to another daycare without the draconian fine!
That would have the unintended consequence of increasing car crashes as parents will start speeding on their way there to avoid the high fines.
@@StudioUAC well that would take care of the parents being late problem. Which is what they wanted.
It was supposed to be a punishment, not a permission slip you pay for.
Great series!
Leave it to the government to screw up everything and the entrepreneur to figure a workaround.
I LOVE this series!❤
This is one of my favorite series.
So glad this series keeps going!!!
I wish they would run out of material, but I'm afraid it will be eternal...
New Mexico restricted the number of applicants for optometric licensure by making the exam exceptionally difficult and limiting the number of times one could sit for the exam to once a year. All in an effort to discourage the national chains and “big box” stores from gaining a foothold in the state. All that wound up happening is the large corporate interests found ways around the licensing requirements and new docs opted to go to neighboring states where the economy is better and licensure is much simpler to obtain😢. Now, instead of protecting private practice, it actively discourages it, leaving the corporate interests as the only option in many places, although even they struggle to fill positions many times. So, rather than improve quality of care, it simply reduced the quantity of capable providers.
Thanks for the video.
These videos are critical to see.
It’s wild, there’s evidence shown that if cities invest in trees for city streets to create a natural canopy for the street, it drastically increases property values, which gives the city more money overtime to cover the cost of the tree and then some. Plus, the natural shading saves the homeowner on their cooling bills, and increases street aesthetic!
More of these!!!
This happened in Greece. The problem churches are poor and can't afford property tax. The solution was to enact a law that says if your property has a church on it you get a discount on property tax. The result was that every farm built a small church somewhere on the property. Another problem the government wants to raise more taxes on houses but does not want to discourage home building. The solution tax completed houses and buildings more than unfinished houses and buildings. The result is a bunch of houses and buildings with rebar sticking out because it is not finished construction.
These videos should be required viewing for anyone seeking political office.
The Smokey the Bear effect!
Please due NAFTA next!
These videos should be required course material for any government class.
Love it!
Woe unto the man who ate the Raines sandwich.
He has the Rainea sandwich touch
Amazing.
The second one reminded me of a rumoured problem that happens in London every so often. The parking fines start to become reasonable compared to parking charges. It makes financial sense to just park on the street and get the fine. All the car parks were extortionate and not close to where you wanted to go, so...
I commented on an earlier video but have to repost it - please do bottle deposits encouraging recycling! You end up with homeless people tearing open recycling bags to take bottles and cans out of recycling bags to recycle themselves for the 5 cent deposits!
I heard a story in which people would use SNAP to buy bottled water, immediately dump out all the water, and get the deposits for the empties so they can use the cash for things SNAP won't pay for.
Someone once suggested to me that we should raise the deposits to like 1 or 2 dollars so that people would recycle more. For the life of me, I couldn't get them to understand that if you have a deposit that is higher than it costs to produce, you will just end up with factories making cans just for the deposit. Some people are just impervious to the most basic common sense. That would be an unintended consequence waiting to happen. I wonder if it has already somewhere?
The best
Ideas: Aid for Families with Dependent Children. Obamacare. California energy "deregulation" which fixed rates for consumers but not for suppliers (of course, bankruptcy for PG&E resulted).
Covid lockdowns for public employees. In Houston, for example, the planning and zoning department still works from home today. Costs for everything involving a permit has skyrocketed: every lease involving a permit, every sidewalk extension, and of course, every new project is held up for months.
Its called PERVERSE PRIKKELS in Dutch 😁 perverse incentives. Back at CBN we discovered one fun loophole; do overtime and take the extra compensation in time off.
So you swap a shift with a coworker - on a different day - and get extra pay for both 😁👍
Shouldn't supervisor determine who and why an extra time is needed?
@@gorilladisco9108 well, with shift work (24/7 in Operations) it gets ... messy. Often its hard to get a shift staffed, e.g. when someone calls in sick "last minute" - especially outside office hours.
So its often the same same people who get asked, those usually willing to pick up an extra (half) shift 🤷 and if they offer flexibility, then have a right to receive some flexibility.
We got a new departmenthead who didn't 😁 as he was inflexible with everything, soon nobody wanted to do any overtime (and the only thing that could be *demanded* was staying on for 4 hours after your 8 hour shift) so staffing got almost impossible at times.
I personally had a standard deal; "I'll come in 4 hours early *IF* you let me man the plantlab for that 12 hour shift." - we Operators alternated tasks, field operator, powerplant, controlroom, plantlab; most shift leaders never even visited the lab so there I could just *get on with it* and put on my music.
Part 2 seems like a service the daycare didn't know they had a market for.