[extropy-chat] Extinctions

[Rik van Riel]

On Sat, 17 Jun 2006, Damien Sullivan wrote:
> On Sat, Jun 17, 2006 at 11:52:05AM -0400, Rik van Riel wrote:
> 
> > > Rich companies don't have the moral case of needing food, though.  They 
> > > also have assets and thus more to lose, if someone enforces the law on 
> > > them.
> > 
> > Rich companies also have deeper pockets than the government,
> > which makes enforcing environmental legislation much much
> > harder.
> 
> The government has much deeper pockets (well, maybe not in the case of
> Brazil).  The environmental part of the gov't may not have much access
> to the pockets, but that's a choice.  As is the law, and the penalties
> for violating it, and for wasting the court's time in a lawsuit you
> should have known you'd lose...

Think of eg. border patrol.  The government spreads out
its forces over 8000 km of border.  Even with a large
number of forces, they end up being spread very thinly.

Smuggling operations only need to outgun (or outsmart)
the government in *one* place.

It's especially difficult when you factor in that most
of the area (1.5 to 2 times the size of Alaska) is
covered by trees and has no roads...

-- 
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are,
by definition, not smart enough to debug it." - Brian W. Kernighan