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U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke said on Thursday he has sent recommendations from his review of more than two dozen national monuments to President Donald Trump, indicating that some could be scaled back to allow for more hunting and fishing and economic development.
The recommendations follow a 120-day study of 27 national monuments across the country, created by presidents since 1996, that Trump ordered in April as part of his broader effort to increase development on federal lands.
The review has cheered energy, mining, ranching and timber advocates but has drawn widespread criticism and threats of lawsuits from conservation groups and the outdoor recreation industry.
There were fears that Zinke would recommend the outright elimination of some of the monuments on the list, but on Thursday, speaking to the Associated Press in Billings, Montana, he said he will not recommend eliminating any.
Zinke said in a statement that the recommendations would "provide a much needed change for the local communities who border and rely on these lands for hunting and fishing, economic development, traditional uses, and recreation." He did not specify which monuments he plans to recommend be scaled back.
The Associated Press reported that Zinke said he would recommend changing the boundaries for a "handful" of sites.
If you're taking millions of acres off the table for one site, you fail at knowing the definition of a monument.
Source: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-interior-monuments-idUSKCN1B41YA
Also at RT, CNN, The Washington Post and The Hill.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @02:06PM (19 children)
Wow, just wow. Profit is everything, profit is life? I understand your point but it is so wrong. Explain nonprofits! Explain charities! Explain the mitary!
I'm sure you can do some mental gymnastics to frame those activities as some derivative of profit seeking but that would be disingenuous. Instead try admitting you were wrong and profit doesn't fit into every human activity.
It is only a dirty word when people make profit more important than everything else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @02:22PM (13 children)
None of those things is unprofitable—with the exception of the military, which is a humongous waste of society's resources; as usual, the government is a parasite on productive society, skimming resources from its host.
If a thing merely breaks even, then it's not likely to survive in the long-term.
If a thing is cannot even break even, then it will disappear.
That is the nature of living in a Universe of finitely accessible resources.
What is so difficult to grasp about that fact? It's virtually an axiom.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @02:49PM (12 children)
You're conflating conservation of energy with an economic model. Just that fact right there makes you incompetent to continue this little debate. Are you a robot? Cause you seem to have lost your humanity somewhere along the way.
Yes that is a mean dig, but it is incredibly relevant. Only robots would view all human activity as something that must be monetized. Time to grow as an individual, your axiom is flawed.
Here, I'll give you an example to highlight and in a sense agree with your flawed logic. The Sun will run out of fuel someday so it IS a finite resource, but the time frame is so long as to be irrelevant to humanity. It is possible for our limited resources to be re-used indefinitely if we're smart about our society building and don't let our population explode further out of control. So the axiom of finite resources is flawed for the next few million years at least. Oh! Also, finite resources precludes the concept of profit, how can you create profit once the resource is gone? What about selling digital music? The supply is infinite, yet many people are able to make a profit selling their music.
Simply put you are narrow minded and have put your faith in a simple idea which lets you stop worrying about the details. No need to think further, just apply the profit test!
1. Is the thing privately owned? No? BAD! Yes? GOOD!
2. Does the thing require taxes? Yes? BAD! No? GOOD!
So the space race was bad? Oh lemme guess, it was worth it because we later privatized things? There are many things that are better off without a profit motive, the logic you are using is simply an excuse for the ownership class to get their hands on every piece of human activity so they can extract money from people.
This is the bullshit I expected form Trump, selling out the people for the benefit of corporations. And we have intellectual powerhouses like yourself ready to hop in with simple logic that sways the ignorant.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @02:56PM (8 children)
This guy just said the OP is a humanity-less robot. Where are the down-moderations for this guy?
Oh, space race again? How about "Redundant"; it's already been discussed in this very thread! Talk about Eternal September... man... "space race". What's next? "Move to Somalia!"??
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @03:10PM (7 children)
Oh yes, lets get out the burn cream! That shit was wicked hot!
Are you the violently imposed monopoly guy? Won't budge in your viewpoints even when many many people show you the flaws in your thinking? The human experience entails more than profit motivated activity. Art, beauty, love, excitement, fun, adventure, compassion, altruism.
Not only is your profit based ideology flawed, but it is incorrect as well. You presume that everything should be privately owned, but that is not even a requirement for something to be a benefit to humanity!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @03:23PM (6 children)
It takes resources to manifest "art, beauty, love, excitement, fun, adventure, compassion, altruism". Stop trying to ignore that fact.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @03:32PM (3 children)
Not ignoring that fact, you are under the mistaken impression that no one here understands your argument. Quite they opposite, your arguments are understood and found to be limited and flawed. You're mixing up the general definition of profit with the capitalistic idea of privatized profits. Enough examples and arguments have already been put forth, continue with your persecution complex if you want.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @03:38PM (2 children)
Those "examples" provide no damage to the argument that I've put forward.
With regard to "mixing up" the meaning of profit, please see here. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @04:46PM (1 child)
No, go troll somewhere else.
(Score: 4, Funny) by aristarchus on Friday September 01 2017, @06:43PM
One cannot "go troll somewhere else"! SoylentNews is the only place left! The green site, Rivendell, all of then have been privatized, and now for some reason there are not enough resources to troll, and most functions have been taken over by mindless, souless, amoral and incontinent robots. And it is starting even here! First they came for Bear's Ears, and then they came for Soylent, and then there was nowhere to troll at all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Friday September 01 2017, @06:53PM (1 child)
not even the high-quality paint that Artistes use.
Therefore the Mona Lisa is worth about seventy-five clams.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 02 2017, @04:04AM
"Mona Lisa is worth about seventy-five clams"
That's the start of a good clam bake, but just the start. I'll meet you out on the mudflats, and we'll get serious about clamming.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @05:40PM (2 children)
Sorry, that's bogus. Let us note that "energy" was not mentioned at all and even if it were, no such conflation actually took place.
Second, if the economic model doesn't follow laws of physics (eg, infinite energy generators and the like for conservation of energy), then it's a bad model. If your model of economics ignores that a vast amount of resources (there's a lot more conserved quantities out there than energy!) is conserved or nearly so (with high cost to create or remove said resources), then it's going to have a lot of built in fail to it. There is no conflation here, it's recognizing that activities consume scarce, mostly conserved resources and if they can't sustain themselves directly, then they need to have a means by which they can insure the transfer of resources in perpetuality say via trade or the support of enduring sponsors.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @06:19PM (1 child)
Physics fail: That is the nature of living in a Universe of finitely accessible resources.
Everything is energy, AC brought in the finite universe as support for their argument so blame them.
You want economic models that include human activity to be on par with physical laws of the universe? Drink some more coffee, your brain is still dreaming.
(Score: 1, Informative) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @06:51PM
[...]
These are straw man arguments. No one has expressed anything that is relevant to your claims. In particular, economics models don't need to be as rigorous as physical law in order to work.
And the fact of the finite universe is support for the AC's argument. As to everything being energy, you do realize that it takes considerable effort to transform between various forms of matter and energy? For example, we could transform sunlight directly into gold by particle-anti-particle creation, assembling the resulting simple particles into gold nuclei eventually. But no one will do that because the cost of doing so would be huge. Even using nuclear reactions to generate gold nuclei is grotesquely inefficient. Thus, the amount of gold in the present world is effectively conserved even though we can think of a variety of hard paths for creating or removing it.
(Score: 2, Informative) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @05:26PM (4 children)
Speaking of disingenuous, we have a beauty here. Asking a question that you already know the answer to and then ruling out the answer without cause because it requires imaginary mental gymnastics and is disingenuous from a disingenuous point of view. Profit in the general sense is merely getting out more than you put in. Another word for it is sustainable. It doesn't require huge external inputs to keep going because the value of the thing or activity pays for itself either directly or through contributions of resources from concerned citizens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @06:24PM (3 children)
Another physics failure!
That is actually NOT sustainable, the only way that could possibly be true is if you ignore the Sun's input and even then we still don't have matter/energy conversion so we're restricted by the physical matter available to us.
You're making the same mistake as the AC, profit can be defined as a general "net benefit" or a specific economic term. Using both interchangeably is the mental gymnastics part.
Generally everything can be viewed as profit, but economically there are many ways to achieve that general goal. Capitalistic profit models that rely on private ownership are NOT required. They make sense for some areas of human activity but not all. If you believe everything should be privatized then go make your own country and take your anarcho-libertarian friends with you.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday September 01 2017, @06:32PM (2 children)
Sustainable on the time scale of hundreds of millions of years. Come up with a better argument.
And you're making the mistake of thinking we are. Plus, I agree that the two uses of the term are not equivalent, but there is considerable overlap.
The thing that gets ignored here is that government ventures routinely have huge inputs of public funding. When that goes away (say because the opponents get into office with solid political support), then you have that funding dry up and the activity stopped. Hence, the emphasis on sustainable activity that isn't so dependent on capricious political sources for support.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @10:16PM (1 child)
Then mark the areas as public land forever and be done with it. If public funding disappears then the land is still there, but no rangers to oversee it or budget to fix parking lots, and big signs saying "Enter at your own risk!"
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday September 02 2017, @07:15PM