Great Moments in Unintended Consequences: Bird Nets, CA Prop 65, & Carbon Credit Loophole (Vol. 12)
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- Опубліковано 15 жов 2024
- Good intentions, bad results.
Watch the whole series: • Great Moments in Unint...
Do you know a great moment in unintended consequences? Leave a comment or email us at comedy@reason.com.
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Part One: Net Benefits
The year: 2012
The problem: Birds are congregating on the Texas Medical Center campus and doing…bird things.
The solution: Attach nets to the large oak trees on campus, forcing birds to take their business elsewhere.
Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
Turns out, birds eat bugs. With the birds gone, the trees became a haven for cute furry-looking critters that happen to be North America's most venomous caterpillar. Contact with these toxic misery tribbles can cause intense radiating pain, vomiting, fever, convulsions, paralysis, and even death. With nets up and apex predators gone, researchers determined the population of these comb-over pain merchants increased by a whopping 7,300 percent. Bad news for anyone, but especially a vulnerable population seeking health care at, say, oh, I don't know, a medical center campus.
You know what they say: Flock around and find out.
Part Two: Prop Comedy
The year: 1986
The problem: toxins in California!
The solution: Proposition 65! A ballot initiative that included a provision making it illegal for businesses to "expose individuals to chemicals known to cause cancer or reproductive toxicity without first giving clear and reasonable warning."
Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
When the warning requirements were established in 1988, 235 chemicals made the cut. Today there are over 900 compounds on the Proposition 65 list, including alcoholic drinks, Chinese-style salted fish, and wood dust. Even cocaine is on the list, so if your eight ball doesn't have a warning label, your dealer is breaking the law.
With penalties for noncompliance including fines of up to $2,500 per violation per day and overzealous litigators looking for their cut, business owners came to the rational conclusion that the cost of a label was less than the cost of litigation. The result? Warning labels everywhere regardless of the severity of risk or degree of exposure. In bars, restaurants, hotels, spas, ski resorts, schools, and Disneyland. On golf clubs, lamps, toasters, kids toys, sunglasses, potato chips, pancakes, pumpkin puree, and even trees. These signs have become so common that one study found Californians have learned simply to ignore them.
But, we don't wanna get sued either, so…
Warning: This video contains information on Prop. 65, known to the state of California to cause ambiguity between things that are dangerous and things that are harmless. For more information, go to holycrapthisisreallynotworkingoutthewaywehadplanned.ca.gov
Part Three: Cold Hard Cash
The year: 2005
The problem: Greenhouse gases are destroying the planet!
The solution: A system devised by the United Nations (U.N.) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change rewards companies disposing polluting gasses with carbon credits, which can later be turned into cash. The more harmful the gas being disposed, the more credits are awarded.
Sounds like a great idea, with the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
Hydrofluorocarbon-23 (HFC-23), a manufacturing byproduct of the common coolant hydrochlorofluorocarbon-22 (HCFC-22), was seen as particularly harmful, allowing a large number of credits when destroyed. So manufacturers-predominantly in India and China-ramped up production of the coolant, creating more of the dangerous byproduct, which they immediately destroyed. The system netted the manufacturers tens of millions of dollars a year. Some producers made twice as much from the tax credit than from sales of the actual refrigerant.
Increased manufacturing of the coolant, itself a contributor to global warming, kept the market price competitively low, discouraging air conditioning and refrigeration companies from switching to less harmful alternatives.
When the U.N. announced a plan to stop the scheme, Chinese producers threatened to vent their huge stockpile of the gas directly into the atmosphere-what some activists labeled environmental extortion.
Nice climate you got there.
Great moments in unintended consequences: good intentions, bad results.
Do you know a great moment in unintended consequences? Email us at comedy@reason.com.
Photo credit: Carterhawk/Wikimedia; Judy Gallagher/Flickr
Here's one that just happened: Canada passed a law requiring social media companies to pay for news content they feature on their platform, and rather than paying out, Google and Meta just blocked all Canadian news from their social media. 😂
That’s a good one
Well considering the intended consequence was to prevent Canadians from receiving news so they could be indoctrinated by marxist globalist propaganda and prevent pesky news organizations from reporting on real things, does that really count as an unintended consequence?
That's a feature; not a bug.
Same happened in Asutralia. Unfortunately facebook caved and pays the fee to host the shitty news corp content
@@dancing4bears That's what I said but it went unseen. :(
In much of the rest of the United States you also see Prop 65 labels on things because manufacturers dont want to make multiple labels for different states. We joke that such products only cause cancer or reproductive harm in California, but not anywhere else.
i always joke that it is CA itself that causes the cancer, the joke being that the test is done in CA (probably not the case) and that's why everything has that warning.
my favorite so far is load securement bars, they are just metal bars with some sort of ratchet to push against trailer walls to help keep cargo from skidding around in the trailer.
the prop 65 rules are punitive, even if you put a label not to be sold in california if the item finds it's way into california a lawyer can sue to collect those crazy high damages.
The State of California is known to the State of California to cause cancer and reproductive harm.
I joke that that label goes on everything except weed.
You can find those Prop 65 labels on products in other countries as well, I was very confused when I've seen it on a harmless product
Do the Afghan poppy farmers. In 2002 British officials in Afghanistan offered Afghan poppy farmers $700 an acre in return for destroying their poppy crops. This ignited a poppy-growing frenzy among Afghan farmers who sought to plant as many poppies as they could in order to collect payouts from the cash-for-poppies program. Some farmers harvested the sap before destroying the plants, getting paid twice for the same crop
A program like that would have to be introduced and concluded all over the country in the same week, with absolutely no notice. Then it could possibly work.
@@jasondashney
Or just map out where the current poppy farms are, then only pay farmers when that land is used to grow something else instead.
intended consequences
Here's a better one, you know why Afghanistan become a poppy growing paradise? Because of a U.S. Government program in the 1950s that meant to fight the cold War by building infrastructure projects in "at risk" countries. Well, the program built dams in Afghanistan that, when the area behind the dams became flooded, raised the water table and changed the ph of the soil to be literally perfect for opium poppies! Who'd have thought that a cold War operation would have adverse consequences?
already covered
The Prop 65 labels are nearly invisible to me at this point. I remember walking into the lumber section of Home Depot and seeing the warning there about wood dust and shaking my head. If you are scared of wood dust, you might as well stop living on this planet.
Well i mean if you get anything into your lungs that isn't air could cause damage. just don't be inhaling sawdust. wear a mask.
Just remember, it only causes cancer if you're in California. 😏
I remember the first time I saw a building, an entire building, labeled. What the...? Cheaper than determining what in the building, if anything, might fall under the law and label each of those, I guess. Absolutely useless law.
I wouldn't want wood dust to mix with air and an open flame unless I'm building a homemade flamethrower though 😅
@@chrisusher1356 Warning: The state of California causes cancer.
If your 8 ball doesn’t have a warning label, your dealer is breaking the law. Legendary
In addition to the law he was already breaking, of course. But we all know criminals always obey they law.
@@troodon1096 yep that is why more gun laws are going to work and while we are at it would should make murder triple illegal.
The year, 1944.
The problem, forest fires are destroying sections of the forest
The solution: introduce a mascot named smokey bear to increase awareness and have people prevent fires.
It turns out, occasional fires are a vital part of maintaining forest health. The fires get rid of tinder and brush and help maintain space in the ecosystem. With no fires to get rid of all that built up tinder, the usually small and manageable fires turned into uncontrollable conflagrations that would destroy everything in their path.
Canada can tell you all about this. I just wish they could
keep the smoke to themselves.
california won't let homeowners and communities cut down trees to prevent their homes being in forest fires. same with the power company not allowed to trim trees away.
Australian eucalyptus forests have evolved to use fire to survive. Just don’t build houses in forests 😘
Fire ecology
@@derek6579 Also! Eucalyptus does not just burn; it EXPLODES.
whenever I see a label that says something like "California warning: product may cause cancer", I think to myself, I'm safe because I live in new jersey.
My condolences
Why does New Jersey have so many toxic waste dumps and California have so many lawyers? New Jersey got first pick.
I counted my Prop 65 exposure the other day. I gave up after being up an hour and a half and getting exposed >50 times. I'm lucky to be alive!
Best comment on here!
As soon as they said they want to get rid of birds, I immediately thought, 'And you'll trade them for an infestation of bugs.' How did they not think that through?
Ignorance, mostly. People forget things like the ecosystem and how they don’t adhere to what humans prefer
They're doctors, not gardeners like you. We can't expect them to be as smart as you.
Why bother thinking when you get credit for merely doing something, anything. Example: climate activists get praise for shutting down roads, which actually releases more pollutants into the atmosphere.
They went to the Mao Zedong school of pest control policy
Thinking through requires thinking in the first place.
Kane county, ut about 1934: Joel McCrea was xreating a series of western movies. In one movie a force of 300 native americans were to be filmed in a battle scene. The movie makers invited all the local natives to participate. About 30 of the riders were required to fall off their horses and were being offered an extra dollar for doing so. But these extras leaked to the others about the extra pay. When the director yelled "action" all 300 riders promptly fell off their horses.
I heard that story from a native American in Montana, and thought: really? I was a little skeptical, but this was an honest man. I would love to see that footage, it would be hilarious, but it was probably left on the cutting room floor. Thankyou for mentioning this in the comments.
😁😊😊😅😅
The Prop 65 thing is SO true. Here in California those stupid warning labels are EVERYWHERE and nobody cares. What a waste of time.
Those labels are on a lot of products sold throughout the country. I just figured the warning doesn't apply if I live outside of California 😅
@@the_rubbish_bin The best part is the passive-aggressive phrasing, "known *to the state of California* to cause cancer."
Like mockingly pretending California has some special cancer diagnosing knowledge.
It's not just a problem in California. CA is such a big market, that any manufacturer that wants to sell there must include the warning on all their products so they won't be banned in California. I've worked in retail health food stores and boat/marine stores, and in both places we have to deal with the prop 65 labeling. A couple years ago we had to go through our database to make sure certain products were individually tagged for prop 65 in case they sold online in California. Their stupid policies warp markets for the whole rest of the country.
@@JWar-
Means there's more pollution because of the labels.
Pretty much. I moved to CA from CT when I was 9 (I'm 41 now) and when I first got here all those Prop 65 labels scared the crap out of me. Once I learned what and why they were everywhere, they just became part of the scenery, like wheels on cars or windows on buildings.
I heard this 2nd hand concerning Prop.65. A company that prints Prop 65 warning stickers prints the stickers outside of California because the ink and adhesive are banned in the state.
yo dawg i heard you like warning stickers. so we put warning stickers on your warning stickers.
OMG if that's true, it's almost funnier than the rest of the story.
I guess the sticker is self labeled and gets away with it. Or the box of stickers needs a sticker.
Hahaha 😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁😁
The irony probably went unnoticed.
In December 1966, the FDA received numerous complaints about Patti Playpal dolls made by Ideal Toy Company easily bursting into flames. The dolls, made of cellulose nitrate plastic, a highly flammable synthetic polymer that ignites easily and burns intensely due to its high oxygen content, were suspected of causing multiple house fires. The FDA pressured Ideal Toy Company to recall over 200,000 dolls before Christmas, but an estimated 500,000 were already in homes. When my wife was a few years old the local Fire Dept came to pick up the doll. To show them the danger they ignited the doll in the driveway. Historically, cellulose nitrate is one of the first man-made explosives, widely used as a propellant in firearms and artillery, known as guncotton. So there's likely 2 UCs here. One is obvious. Using guncotton to make a doll. less obvious making a 4 year old girl watch her 'baby' be burned alive.
that is messed up.
The second reminds of a time someone called into a call center for Samsung phones I was working at, asking what the warning label meant. No one really knew and I just gave her a literal explanation "California identified a material may or may not be linked to cancer and requires the label." and that somehow satisfied her.
its a well drafted idea, but the government took it and spun it around ridiculing the citizens desire to avoid chronically decaying synthetic materials
As is the common joke, "Please do not visit California while holding the phone and you'll be fine."
The interesting thing is that you pretty much told her EXACTLY what the label already said, and yet she felt she had gained knowledge.
@@stevenscott2136 The knowledge she gained was that the label didn't mean anything more than it explicitly told you it meant, which was useful knowledge because people generally assume that if someone bothered to make a warning, it's probably useful to someone in some way.
Sounds like the important thing she learned there was "California requires the label", so the warning was _not_ actually put on the product by the manufacturer as a warning not to use it in certain (non-obvious) dangerous ways.
I live in California. No one pays attention to Prop 65 warnings. They are useless.
They're so ubiquitous it's insane. They truly are meaningless at this point.
I tell my Californian customers I would never visit California. Everything there causes cancer. Which probably explains the state it is in.
Wouldnt want any contaminents coming home.
"Everything causes cancer.... in California"
It's not just California, those labels are on everything, everywhere. I think the hazardous material is in the label. ;)
@@oldsguy354 They are only dangerous in California.
NEVER mess with the birds. The Chinese know best.
Unless you have a bird gun. Then you're fine, provide you still have ammo.
@@whyjnot420Well, in California, that better be lead-free bird-shot!
@@roybiv7018 Good thing that is in "not my problem" territory as I am almost as far away from California as you can get and still be in the lower 48. My condolences to those of you who are not so lucky.
edit: also, if you are thinking shotgun, you missed the joke. look up libertarian horror movies.
I think you mean "The Chinese 'fucked around and found out.'"
To be fair, the most humiliating defeat suffered by men at the hands of birds was the catastrophic loss of the Aussies during their first offensive in The Great Emu War.
Anytime you put government, the environment, and money together, I have to admit that the results are interesting.
You guys need to figure out a way to make this a weekly thing. There are more than enough cases like this for that kind of schedule.
Yes, but producing so many videos will have the unintended consequence of causing people to lose interest, just because there would be so much to watch.
Sounds like a great idea. With the best of intentions. What could possibly go wrong?
@@cdevidal
TURNS OUT-
As someone who has worked in the food and beverage industry, prop 65 is a huge pain in the ass. The thresholds for the things that require warning labels basically make it impossible for some products to not have to post a warning label, like peas or cocoa ingredients. Cautious consumers outside of California see these warning labels and think you're trying to poison them.
😂 Another ringer!
Do the Smokey Bear effect where forest fires that used to help keep the forest healthy now cause more deforestation than what previous practices.
I’m guessing Smokey The Bear is older than you think. He was a symbol of the 1950s used to discourage arson, not fire management. Our forests started burning after Federal policy to manage forest for fire was rescinded in the early 90s.
@@SpruceOaks The abundance of flammable fuel that caused the forests to burn hot enough to destroy the forest rather than mitigate them didn't appear overnight after the fire management policies were rescinded. They had been growing more and more out-of-control for a long time because of the U.S. Forest Service's activities, even preceding their actual Smokey Bear campaign despite the name of the effect being deemed the Smokey Bear Effect.
It also didn't help that our ability to fight forest fires got a quantum surge so when fires did start we got them out before they could cleanse the forest floor of that fuel.
Basically, the U.S. Forest Service has caused the very thing it was formed to prevent because of the arrogance of mankind.
I'm not saying that I would have known better had I been the President forming the forest service, but I think as time goes on we need to abandon our arrogance as much as possible and humbly acknowledge that we will never be able to care for the environment better than nature itself can without our aid.
Hand the fire prevention/control back to the Native Americans, the forest seemed fine (wilderness ?) before we took over....
@henrysieverling6952 Their control was not any control, and you're correct, it worked fine. Sure, villages were lost occasionally, but the forest stayed healthy. However, as mankind advanced in technology, our desire to safeguard life has become an arrogance of believing we can control, destroy, or save nature itself, we can do none of these things, and most of our pitiable efforts, no matter how well intentioned, have a tendency to backfire. We can help on a small scale, but in the grand scheme, there is very little we can do.
The HFC tax credit is a repeat of the British cobra reward in India and the French rat reward in Indochina. What amazes me the most is how people still trust government even after learning of governments' failure to learn. But that just means statists failed to learn from the governments' failure to learn, which is fitting.
Well, a vast majority of people just don't want to think. Explains _so much!_
If you can't understand the government doesn't fix problems but rather is the problem, you're willfully stupid or have dealings with the government.
Well, those were problems worth fixing. It's just that the solutions made thing's even worse. Normally, you expect the wisdom of the masses to prevent those types of policy's. I guess all the libertarians where either suffering from amnesia, didn't say something, didn't care enough or weren't listened to. Could we all agree that we won't do this the next time the government comes up with another stupid idea. You can write emails to politicans now. Even if you aren't able to prevent something like that again, at least you can joke about it afterwards.
the first one is a repeat of mao and the sparrows. it's like people keep forgetting that birds eat insects.
Most people have a sort of instinctive respect for raw power, which leads them to assume that asking power to solve a problem is going to work better than solving it themselves or simply living with it.
A few ideas for future episodes:
1. California’s 2008 8th Grade algebra requirement which led to further declines in math performance in public school.
2. Probably beating a dead horse at this point but the DARE Program would also work.
I DARE you to try this vast array of narcotics offered by this extensive network of criminal organizations! Staaaaaay away, children!!
Yep most of those kids would have never even heard of drugs without DARE.
As a Californian, I can vouch that those Prop 65 labels are everywhere and on practically everything. They’re meaningless.
This series is fantastic. Please produce more!
As a California resident, yes, we've learned to just ignore those warnings. I still wonder, when I'm buying a food product with those labels, if I'm maybe making a mistake... but they're so ubiquitous that you can't get through the day without ignoring them. So some of my food probably has lead in it. I wish it didn't, but there's no way to tell.
That Joke URL for prop 65 should honestly just be California's official state website at this point.
In the early 2000's the destruction of wolf habitats by rapid housing development in Maryland caused an explosion in the deer population. Rather than just let hunter bag more, the state government decided it was better to introduce coyotes to replace the wolves. Not only did it not work, but several children were attacked and even killed in their own yards by coyotes.
Chairman Mao had a similar thought many years ago. 'Birds eat grain so we'll kill all the sparrows!' and caused a famine because of the locust plague that followed.
Omaha Nebraska--No one is riding the metro busses. Solution. Make the busses twice as big and requiring custom bus stops at a cost of $2 Million per. Result. Old buses that were previously 10% full were replaced with massively expensive double size busses and bus stops that are 5% full.
This series is hilarious and this trio was the best one yet. Keep up the great work 👍
I was on vacation in Panama and spent a day sailing through the canal and our guide had an interesting story. In an effort to combat erosion the canal authority planted saw grass along the banks. The saw grass really took hold and grew into the canal to the point it was interfering with shipping. The solution was to bring in manatees to eat the grass. This worked well enough, but without any predators the manatee population exploded to the point where they were interfering with shipping. So the solution to the solution to the solution was to introduce crocodiles to eat the manatees. Again this worked well until it didn't. As the apex predator the croc population exploded and now Panama has a crocodile problem. Can't wait to see what the next "solution" will be.
That's the beauty of it; when winter rolls around, the gorillas will simply freeze to death! (Quote from the Simpsons in case someone didn't get the reference.)
Leather purses 👛😅
Sounds like when Australia introduced Cane Toads to keep the insect population in check around the Sugar Cane farms...... Cane Toads became such a success that they are now the issue and have hardly any predators due to their poisonous nature. They can even kill freshwater Crocs if consumed!!!
Seems like manatee hunting quotas would've been a better solution that crocodiles...
I'm still waiting for the farmers in the central valley to figure out how to plan their crops to form a prop-65 warning that can be read from space.
Oh my. I so needed this channel in my life.
I live in Portland Oregon and the unintended consequences from so many of our well intended laws are bearing fruit right now.
I always love seeing a new one of these
It's amazing what you can't buy in California because of restrictions. I wanted a new faucet head for my kitchen. One half couldn't be sold because of low flow standards so I took the restrictor out of my current one.
I immediately take them out of my showerheads. It's unbearable without doing that.
I bought a bathroom faucet in Arizona. Arizona has a 2.5 gpm limit. The faucet came with a 1.2 gpm (California) restrictor. Completely. Useless. So I drilled a few small holes in the restrictor and it now works much better. Initially, I just removed the restrictor but it was like a fire hose.
OMG... I laughed out loud at your PROP 65 video warning label and especially the "website" link at the bottom. Priceless!!!! Thank you for the laugh.
"Flock around and find out."
Its such a horrible pun, but it made me totally lose it.
This is one of the rare cases where the unintended consequences are actually unintended. Usually they're the intended consequences they just don't want you to know about.
0:35 "Toxic misery tribbles" sounds like something out of Casual Geographic
At least the nets were removable and the problem wasn't as easily foreseeable as most on this list
The problem: Social workers are overworked.
The solution: Pass welfare laws that entitle households with Elderly, Newborn, Infant, and Toddler residents to free essential utilities so that poverty is no longer a reason to fail minimum care standards and involve social workers.
Turns out: People do not like paying their bills. People began moving in with romantic partners they barely knew and their elderly relatives to qualify for the exemption. Women who could not find roommates began having children they did not want every nine months to qualify. These toxic environments led to an increase in cases of domestic abuse and child neglect, many of which went unreported until the situation became a tragedy. There were also documented cases of people not reporting deaths of these residents to ensure they continued to qualify, which had the added benefit of continued child support and social security checks. When the truth came out, the result was an overall _increase_ of cases for social workers.
Where did this happen?
This is pure bullshit. No one takes on the expense of caring for a child to get free utilities. 🙄
Prison Disaster Dominoes:
Problem: Prisons are underfunded and people do not trust the elected officials with a tax increase or programming cuts to cover the difference.
The solution: Use the prisoners as a labor force for jobs outside the prison.
Turns out: Prisons are inherently failing ventures. No prison ever makes money, so Wardens frequently spend their own money from different ventures to keep it solvent. When the prison actually is profitable, they recover their own prior loses first rather than use those profits to fund the prison. Also, since prisoners are not entitled to a wage, the wardens can undercut legitimate businesses to snatch more jobs to make money faster, and overwork the prisoners.
Problem: Prison wardens are using prisoners for cheap labor to undercut legitimate businesses to personally profit rather than aid the prison.
Solution: Ban outsourcing to prisons.
Turns out: Prisons still need money. Though the corruption of the wardens is rampant, some of that money was going to the prisons. The budget cuts passed by the elected officials based on the revenue generation alongside these bans now puts prisons in even worse positions than they were previously.
Problem: Prisons are even more underfunded and people still do not trust the elected officials with a tax increase or programming cuts to cover the difference.
The solution: Do nothing and force the prisons to redo their own budgets.
Turns out: The most costly programs are oriented towards rehabilitation, education, and trade. Cutting these programs lets the prisons break even at the cost of people who are not given a path back into society. Another major drain is the prison guards, so they reduced the number of guards. The guards monitor things that can detail criminal activity like phone calls and mail. Reducing guard numbers means prisons have to reduce the number of phones available for use and the mail searching operations move more slowly. This leads to higher tensions among people with documented histories of violence. Finally, due to the low minimum standard of cleanliness, the prisons also reduce their cleaning budget. This is facilitated by giving prisoners the minimum soap necessary for personal cleanliness and diluting the detergents for clothing and area cleaning. All of this combined does the opposite of rehabilitation and makes it more likely for prisoners to reoffend, which helps keeps prisons heavily populated and the costs high.
The problem: Prisoners have high odds of reoffending, often times escalating.
The solution: Turn one large charge into multiple smaller chargers for trial to increase sentences and possibly trigger a three strikes law for immediate life sentences. For example, rather than a single "drug possession with intent to sell" for a backpack of various drugs, do separate charges for each drug.
Turns out: Prosecutors are overworked by the large number of reoffenders who predate this trick or have not yet triggered an automatic life sentence. The increased charges led to higher odds of taking a deal, which is much less time and money consuming than a trial. Prosecutors looking to save time and clear their desks faster stopped using this tactic solely on reoffenders and hard criminals, adding in juvenile and first-time offenders. Also, the deals based on these increased charges often earn more prison time than the true charge was actually worth, but not an automatic life sentence, and turning the juvenile and non-violent offenders into hard criminals. All of this led to an increase in prison populations and reoffending, and has made the judgements responsible for this outcome are no longer matters of public record.
The problem: Prosecutorial shortcuts are resulting in overcharging good, destitute people, and prisons are turning them into hard criminals.
The solution: Only charge theft above high dollar values to protect the poor, and claim crimes are only "violent" if someone other than a police officer gets attacked by the offender to reduce the number of cases landing on prosecutors' desks.
Turns out: People like free things. When the law says they can steal up to a certain amount and get away with it, they go out with trash bags and calculators rather than wallets. This also allows them to menace people and swing clubs through the air with no consequences, making people afraid to go outside. The business owners lose revenue and product, and their insurance premiums go up due to the increase in crime in their neighborhood. Assuming these businesses do not close, their prices go up considerably and they start firing staff due to the increased costs of business. Greater unemployment and increased costs creates additional incentives to steal and continue the death spiral.
Even worse this leads to a low-trust society where people are even less likely to trust elected officials with tax increases to fix the broken prison system. Is there a way out of this devil's spiral?
Problem: lawlessness is rampant in the streets because it's not dealt with by courts, cops, and prisons. Solution: citizens arm themselves and public gunfights become common as the US reverts back to the 1870's
Wonder when the solution will finally revolve around to removing all firearm restrictions nationwide (even if you have to drag commiefornia kicking and screaming), universal castle doctrine/stand your ground rules, and just legalizing illicit substances?
@@LynyrdSkynyrd.4Ever Public gunfights are only common among the very same people who SHOULD have been in prison in the first place, as they squabble over drug-dealing revenue.
And they have to do that violently, because the option of peaceful dispute-resolution in an impartial courtroom has been removed by the arbitrary banning of some psychoactive substances, in order to protect the profits of the large corporations who manufacture OTHER psychoactive substances (alcohol & tobacco).
So we actually have drug-dealer shootouts so that Phillip-Morris and Budweiser can keep making money.
I opened this and said, "Good grief, I'm not gonna read all this!" Read the first one just to scratch my initial itch... and now I'm here having read through the whole thing.
Can’t wait to see the episode about blocking out the sun, and releasing GMO mosquitoes!
Prop 65 teaches us one important thing: If you want to live a long healthy life, don't eat, drink, or breathe.
Moral of this series: Never pay people to stop doing things that they can start doing on a whim
pretty much everything ever proposed by any governmental agency
Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it!
After seeing so many of these videos, you can predict the consequences.
We never learn.
Here is one that just happened. California gives you 5-10 cents per can or bottle you buy in California when you recycle but also add it on to the price of the drink. People have begun importing used cans and bottles from other states and recycling them in California to get money
Truckloads of imported aluminum cans.
Firstly, since when is a bottle/can deposit new?
Secondly, that isn't exactly a bad consequence. Oh no, more bottles are being recycled now! Okay, yes, California is paying monetarily for it, but it's still resulting in more bottles and cans being recycled rather than thrown away, assuming people aren't creating cans for the sole purpose of redeeming them.
@@gimmethegepgun its called unintended consequences. Not bad ones. The consequence is unintended
@gimmethegepgun you are assuming that all those bottles and cans actually get recycled. If they don't and end up in a landfill, that's another unintended condequence.
*Welfare! The safety-net that become a 'hammock' to millions.*
I wonder if the prop 65 warning label needs a prop 65 warning label.
My favorite unintended consequences story: my mom always worry about me eating too much when I'm on vacation. Funny thing is, her making noise short-circuits my enjoyment of the food and the result is I end up wanting to eat more. When I go on vacation alone I actually find I get what I want quickly out of a meal and move on to better things.
I would like to see a segment regarding a shift from plastic straws to paper straws. One of my biggest pain points and I think it has more unintended consequences than good.
Similar to getting rid of the birds, cities didn't like all the mess trees made on the streets, so they figured out they could solve the problem by planting only male elm trees because they don't produce seeds and don't drop as much stuff. Sounds likes a great idea...
With so many male trees giving off pollen that would normally be caught from the breeze by female trees, the pollen count went thru the roof, causing way more allergies. But to remedy the problem, they would have to cut down a bunch of large trees and start over. Both expensive and not "eco friendly"
This year. China. Problem: Too many motorcycles, electric bikes and scooters allegedly causing congestion on motoroways. Solution: Enact new standards and confiscate all nonconforming aforementioned vehicles(then sell them to other countries! - you didn't hear that from me...). What could possibly go wrong? A carve out for the newly enacted policy was the use of electric disability wheelchairs. Chinese young and old are now moving about the city in electric wheelchairs - a huge step back for activity and physical health of its citizens. I saw this on the China Observer UA-cam channel.
you mean caveat?
@@StudioUAC no, carveout is the correct term here, it's a purposeful exemption in a rule or law.
caveat wouldn't fit, that is a more like a warning.
It's clearer to say "exception" or "exemption".
Wall-e in a nutshell
Do how Congressional meddling in the auto industry has caused vehicle MPG to drop over the last 30+ years. Back in the 80's we had cars that would get up to 40 MPG. Since then, MPG has dropped to the point that where people are happy to get 25-30 MPG and sometimes that requires a hybrid motor to achieve.
Thank you for another great video. Please keep making more of these.
I'm beginning to think the government needs to force you guys to make more of these videos!
How about one on how the EPA mandates fuel efficiency based on truck size, creating impossible to meet standards for small trucks, so Americans are forced to buy very large trucks?
Just saw that video yesterday
I have a small truck from the 1990s. The thing's beat to crap, but hardly a month goes by when someone doesn't approach me, unsolicited, to buy it.
‘Forced’. You mean ‘avoiding the consequences for their life choices’.
‘Forced’, what a joke.
@@lateformyownbirthno
"Nice climate you have there..." I doubled over laughing.
Great job, thanks for making these! Although these would be much funnier if I wasn't having to pay for those unintended consequences!
Ah yes, my favorite reason series.
The band, "Green Day" long ago became preachy and obnoxious. But, before that, they wrote the song "Warning" and advised that we "live without warning". A solid message from the '90s. Right up there with the moment from "PCU" in which our protagonist gets hundreds of angry protesters to chant, "We're not gonna protest!"
I knew immediately what was coming with the California one.
The problem: Not enough water in the southwestern US
The solution: Let every state that touches the Colorado River draw from the Lake Mead reservoir at the head of the river
The Unintended Consequence: California barely touches the Colorado river and has a fairly nice climate. However, they do have a booming agriculture industry. The farmers tapped into all the now readily-available, stockpiled water and drained the lake dry. Needy states are left high and dry. Talk about a Watergate!
reason TV thank goodness you exist I feel so much better folks like you are around
Laws in the UK says that leased company cars must be electric or hybrid, the hybrid cars which are more popular will only get 30-40 miles on battery then will need to run on fuel resulting in about 20-25 MPG.
Instead of a Diesel which would get 40-60 MPG, most of these cars are doing hundreds of miles each day.
I was at a Starbucks in CA a few years ago. They had Prop 65 labels, for coffee.
That one actually went to court and California finally drew a line. Coffee no longer requires a 65 label. Google "coffee prop 65 ruling."
About the last one:
I heard that limits were introduced on how much of the HFC-23 they could be paid to destroy. So at least one factory, I believe it was in Mexico, shut down production for the year when they had reached their maximum allowance. Clearly showing that it's the destruction of HFC-23 they made money from. Not selling the HFC-22.
Remember, if your 8ball doesn’t have a warning label, your dealer is breaking the law.
You're basically saying why bother trying. 😂🤣😂🤣😂😂
Those little cancer tags are on items sold across the country.
Can you just put the entire UN as a great moment in unintended consequences?
One of the best series ever. Of all time.
The reason that this amazing series of videos only gets installments every few months is not because they are expensive to make or that good examples don't abound, but because it takes Reason that long to come up with two high-quality puns for each example
I can't wait for the episode on DEF. I've heard that California is already talking about banning it. Of course they are also talking about banning internal combustion engines so it may be a moot point.
OO! OO! Do the cheese bunkers, PLEASE, the cheese bunkers!
"What could possibly go wrong ?" LOL
This may be my favorite one. Great stuff.
LOL I have a Prop 65 t-shirt.
"That's a nice atmosphere ya got there"
Prop 65 warnings on EVERYTHING!!!
That's why my bicycle look causes cancer in California...which I bought in Germany btw.
So glad we got another one of these videos! I’m still waiting on you to include something on gun control in these!!! To those who see this comment, please reply with an unintended consequences story revolving around gun control!!!
The intentions of gun control are always to take away more freedom. I don't think any of the consequences are unintended, unless they result in more freedom.
Remember that diner shooting in Texas around 30 years ago? (Luby's, I think the name was.) There was a woman in there who had left her gun in her car, per Texas law at the time. She was a competitive shooter, seemed fairly tough-minded, and several times had a clear shot on the back of the guy's head from an easy distance. Her parents were among the people killed there, which she could have easily prevented with one round... if her gun hadn't been in her car.
(I'm thinking her name was Suzanna Gratia-Hupp, but I could be thinking of another case.)
Let’s have an episode on leaded gasoline. Probably the largest negative impact on humanity of all time.
"comb-over pain merchant". HA!
Lol. Now I know why there are carcinogens warnings from CA
On EVERYTHING 😂. I love this series.
I LOVE THESE! There's nothing more dangerous than centralized government with *INSANE POWER* making decision *"FOR THE GREATER GOOD!"*
One of my favorite series.
Our politicians use the force of law as a substitute for thinking and follow through.
Those stupid Prop. 65 labels are EVERYWHERE!, even the front doors of supermarkets. Nobody sees them any more.
Never stop making these
Pretty much anytime someone tries moving animals around, it messes up the balance of the macrcobiome
I didn't see the twitter files in good intentions bad results yet. love this idea. and we need more of these
The Problem: "Misinformation"
The Solution: Make social media platforms become unofficial arms of the government!
Very niave of you to assume good intentiond
@@dogg-paws And now we know thanks to the treasonous FBI/DOJ the Ukrainian government was using it's brute force on US social media to cancel our Free Speech. Thanks to every treasonous POS in the FBI/DOJ.
I hope you mean the governments side, and not Elon musk releasing the info
Probably because they were bad intentions and good results for the regime…
Good lord, can you imagine how much is on that "didn't work as we planned" website. You'd have weeks of reading just for the last 5 years alone.
2:15 i live in Canada and i see these labels EVERYWHERE. "This product is known to cause cancer in the state of California"
climate blackmail was subconsciously the initial reason why i choose to immediately discard any climate-catastrophe propaganda
I love seeing bullets with "may cause cancer", like yeah, thats the dangerous thing about bullets, not getting shot or something, haha!
Making this video last 4:20 was a huge editing win
To assume that the intentions were good in the first place is to believe that which is not in evidence.
We need more of these to remind people that:
Government demonstrates that none of us is as dumb as all of us.
Government is the reason we can't have nice things.
Governments have always killed more people than anything. Warning! A government is KNOWN to be deadly.
In just the 20th century big leftist governments KILLED/STARVED to death over 100 Million of their own people. Yeah MORE government is the answer.