#extrapolating

That is a perfect segue into the next lesson: predictions. When most everyone believes a trend to be true, expect a change.

"Nineteenth-century cities depended on thousands of horses for their daily functioning. All transport, whether of goods or people, was drawn by horses. London in 1900 had 11,000 cabs, all horse-powered. There were also several thousand buses, each of which required 12 horses per day, a total of more than 50,000 horses. In addition, there were countless carts, drays, and wains, all working constantly to deliver the goods needed by the rapidly growing population of what was then the largest city in the world. Similar figures could be produced for any great city of the time.*

The problem of course was that all these horses produced huge amounts of manure. A horse will on average produce between 15 and 35 pounds of manure per day. Consequently, the streets of nineteenth-century cities were covered by horse manure. This in turn attracted huge numbers of flies, and the dried and ground-up manure was blown everywhere. In New York in 1900, the population of 100,000 horses produced 2.5 million pounds of horse manure per day, which all had to be swept up and disposed of.

In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.

The larger and richer that cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894 one writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be buried under NINE feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food for people), and this had to be brought into cities and distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban civilization was doomed.

Of course, urban civilization was not buried in manure. The great crisis vanished when millions of horses were replaced by motor vehicles. This was possible because of the ingenuity of inventors and entrepreneurs such as Gottlieb Daimler and Henry Ford, and a system that gave them the freedom to put their ideas into practice.

Even more important, however, was the existence of the price mechanism. The problems described earlier meant that the price of horse-drawn transport rose steadily as the cost of feeding and housing horses increased. This created strong incentives for people to find alternatives.

The great horse-manure crisis, that everyone knew was going to happen, never came to pass.

What this misses is that in a competitive market economy, as any resource becomes more costly, human ingenuity WILL find alternatives. We should draw two lessons from this. First, human beings, left to their own devices, will usually find solutions to problems, but only if they are allowed to; that is, if they have economic institutions, such as property rights and free exchange, that create the right incentives and give them the freedom to respond. If these are absent or are replaced by political mechanisms, problems will not be solved.  

Second, the sheer difficulty of predicting the future, and in particular of foreseeing the outcome of human creativity, is yet another reason for rejecting the planning or controlling of people’s choices. Above all, we should reject the currently fashionable “precautionary principle,” which would forbid the use of any technology until proved absolutely harmless.

Left to themselves, our grandparents solved the great horse-manure problem. If things had been left to the urban planners, they would almost certainly have turned out worse.

There are lots of predictions going around. This is human nature. 

nice! you’re so good man!

Oh my gosh... Thanks so much!! The title for that one is confusing because it's either "That Day When It Rained" or "When It Rained That Day." I keep messing up so both are official titles.

Ugh. 

It's not just this, unfortunately, that I dislike, seeing as she's pretty much got her sticky, poison-covered fingers all over everything interesting about this season. But she's not interesting, or exciting, or even really new. She's pretty much a mix between 'pardon my tits' and lumen, who was, by far, way more awesome. It's not a good mix, too. After all, Lumen was burdened just like him, and though she got rid of her dark passenger, she needed him just as much as he needed her. 

But this chick. I feel like she was honestly thrown in because people like seeing Dexter caring about something. Like that fatherly instinct he has towards Harrison, or back when he had his family, he loved them wholeheartedly and protected them wholeheartedly. A huge reason why I miss Rita for all her issues and her never knowing exactly what he was. 

And Deb. Yes, I totally ship Deb and Dex, mostly because its weird and strange and probably one of the weirdest and strangest things that have been thrown at us, yet at the same time it really is 'logical', but more so, she doesn't have a dark passenger and still manages to find enough good in him to not back down when he needs her. She is actually, in some strange way, good for him, which, as of right now, we don't see. Lumen was good for him in certain ways, but she couldn't love him when she was better. Hannah can 'love' him because of his dark passenger. She may love him only for his dark passenger. 

But Deb finds a way to love him and doesn't take his excuses for shit. She just deals with it, and dislikes it, but doesn't deny it. Yes, she tried to fix him, and yes, to a certain degree, she failed, but she realized this and still finds a way to accept it. 

Hannah is only going to hurt him. There's no denying the fact that, at some point, she's going to find out that Argentina is not with him, and she'll move past it. Kill him if she has to. Because she doesn't have a dark passenger. 

Which brings me to my main point. I dislike Hannah not because she doesn't have a dark passenger like Dexter, but because she is one. She was Wayne's dark passenger. The Robin to his Batman. And, of course, now she's trying to be the reason and the need that Dexter has for killing. 

Ugh. Ugh fucking Ugh.