Just wanted to prove that political diversity ain’t dead. Remember, don’t downvote for disagreements.

  • @[email protected]OP
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    9 hours ago

    The tragedy of the commons is a general-purpose game theory concept. It applies any time there is a communal resource exploitable by multiple participants. In the abstract: any time you can do something for personal gain but for the detriment of everyone overall. Admittedly, in the case of unsafe dumping, the resource must be unintuitively defined as the cleanliness of the river or something like that, but the same principle applies as in the more clear-cut (heh) example of foresting.

    (Wikipedia claims pollution is a “negative commons”; the theory still applies, but the resource is defined strangely.)