Fishermen are common characters in economic dramas. Who does the fish belong to? Nobody, until someone catches it.

Let's say that there are only two whales left in the ocean: one male, one female. If they are killed, whales go extinct. It is SENSIBLE to leave them in the ocean so they can repopulate it. Now let's say you're a whaler and you catch these two whales together. It is RATIONAL for you to kill the hell out of them before someone else does.

Sometimes, the rational thing to do just isn't sensible. And that's where market failures come from.

we were arguing that international fishing is not a free market though. since any country can fish basically as much as it wants in its own waters. so there are no property rights over the fish, assuming the fish are moving around. a market usually has all items owned by someone. so if the fish are all just available for anyone to take, it's not really a market, it's a free-for-all.

The fish market happens on the shore. You're talking about fish "production" then.

if fish never moved, all stayed in the same place, and we could put boundaries around people's plot of water, like we do on land, and trespassers on other people's waters were sued. then it would be more like a free market. and in that case you wouldn't usually overfish, since those fish are your fish forever, so why kill them all off?

actually when i said "market" i meant it more as in "free market economy" rather than fish market. sorry about the confusion.

Because fish have to swim around to different places in order to eat and breed and stuff. You can't fence the fish in, man. He's got to be free.

Except farm fish. They are the fish of the future.

au contraire fasces i read the economist to keep me tethered to the center.

they are center right, and im center left.

im a big believer in, like, seeking out and nurturing different views from mine

also the economist is intelligent, and everybody important reads it, and comprehensive so i learn a lot of new things, and not horrible and parochial like american media (so it will cover, you know, senegal or nepal)

AWB you are correct

in the future, all fish will come from fish raised in farms, swimming in fresh water made fresh by desalinization plants powered by solar panels

Ford will be in his flivver and all will be well with the world.

if you can't have property rights over fish based on sea land ownership, then you need something else. just get some kind of radar/sonar/gps technology that tracks schools of fish in the ocean. and individuals each own different schools permanently. just attach some kind of tracking unit to a couple fish in the school to track it. it's like how msnbc owns ed shultz in spite of the fact that he moves around.

"AWB you are correct

in the future, all fish will come from fish raised in farms, swimming in fresh water made fresh by desalinization plants powered by solar panels"

A couple of points to consider : desalinization can be devasting to the local enivronment as it raises the salinity of the seawater within a certain proxomity of the plant creating a deadzone (radiating hundreds of square kilometres, even); farmed fish are often fed fish caught in the wild, thus the issue of of over fishing doesn't necessarily go away; plus fish farming is cruel. That said, maybe in time as technology increases perhaps these issues will be addressed. But it is worthing keeping in mind that as we solve one set of problems we can create new problems.

just so people believing in the bs right/left paradigm, i extend the joke to include all neocons on fox. just can't think of any in particular. my youtube subscriptions seem to include more content from msnbc.

@AWB: You don't need to fence fish in. Its sort of liking hunting, there are some lands permitted to hunt some where your not allowed.

If an animal crosses over into a hunt free zone, its not longer considered game. Why can't it be the same for fish?

Your allowed to fish in, and only in, a certain area. That encourages you to make your area more sustainable...

@Thucy: glad you think so, there is still hope for you :P

@Bolshoi: that is way to expensive, might as well just keep fish farms

About youtube politics, the Liberal Viewer is a youtube channel where this guy just does nothing but attack fox news for bias, using quotes and evidence to support where fox gets the story wrong...

oh christ i hate that guy. and everytime it start with his liberal viewer presents by some kid. that's annoying enough. liberal viewer is like maoist rebel or something like that. i ran into these characters before... i do watch colbert and stewart sometimes though. but they never stay on a single anchor long enough for me to remember a specific one. colbert used to with o'reilly but it seems like he hasn't showed clips from his show recently.

"plus fish farming is cruel. "

lol.

anyway, you can totally farm fish without feeding them wild fish, so, prob solved.

also i'm not aware of that raising salinity thing. i did however know that you get, basically, blocks of sea salt as a waste product. which is fine. just dump it in the world's trash can, the yucca caves in new mexico or whatever.

it's not as though the transportation cost will be environmentally problematic if you load them onto hydrogen powered trucks or trains

or just sell it off as sea salt and stop fucking *mining* for salt

don't get me started on hydrogen powered vehicles. we'll have vehicles able to metabolize sugar directly before hydrogen power makes sense. (slight hyperbole). but there are safer ways to store power than compressed hydrogen. it is a dead technology.

or maybe safety isn't even an issue. it's also just not all that efficient.

who is bloshoi is he new.

@Bolshoi: Its his 10 year old daughter...

In any case your right, he is incredibly bias, but he still makes a lot of factual videos about the news and its interesting to watch. (although he totally ignores MSNBC's dishonesty's) its as Thucy said earlier:
"not horrible and parochial like american media"

Thucy said: "lol"

http://www.peta.org/b/thepetafiles/archive/2011/01/31/factory-farming-cruelty-hurts-fish-too.aspx

This line in particular pulled at my heart strings: "Fish are playful, social animals, much like kittens. "

Seriously though, most people object to battery chicken farming because the conditions are deemed cruel. Why do fish deserve less compassion?

I object to it for health related issues, frankly. Let's not get into animal rights, though, ok?

"Let's not get into animal rights, though, ok?"

Why not?
Now I am curious. Do you not believe in animal rights for any kind of animals? So there is no such thing as animal cruelty in your books?

i think the biggest problem wih fish farming is what you feed the fish...they have to get their dietary protien from somewhere, and this costs something....

also any farming where you are required to feed anti-biotics to the animals to prevent the spread of disease is a bad farming if you axe me. (too much anti-biotic usage causes too much anti-biotic resistance - but this also indicates more disease is spreading due to unhygenic conditions... )

"This line in particular pulled at my heart strings: "Fish are playful, social animals, much like kittens." except that they are not mammals, lack a lymbic system, and don't have emotions the way mammals do. that "playfulness" is strictly mechanical. it's like saying my computer's random number generator is playfully throwing out numbers.

Fish aren't mammals and perhaps they lack a lymbic system (whatever that is) but why does this mean that they don't suffer?

what is your evidence that they do suffer (actually i made a typo, it's limbic). because we suffer and are living, and they are also living, therefore they must suffer as well? do plants also suffer?

actually i read the first paragraph on wikipedia and they say it might be bs, and not real, the whole limbic system idea. i'm not sure. but either way, you can't assume non-mammals "suffer" in the way mammals do.

for one thing, fish don't care at all about their children. so there's one difference. i don't know, i just imagine them as ants or bees. or a computer program. sure they have instincts that drive them to do things. but is that the same as what we consider suffering? because their instinct tells them to run away if they see a shark, does that show emotions or just instinct?