Government planned it 7 years, beavers built a dam in 2 days and saved $1M
57 comments
·February 4, 2025black_puppydog
buzzy_hacker
Sort of like open source AI model destroys $600B in market cap
gmerc
Don’t worry; the current wave is going to hit hope source hard. Likely with Facts.
ggm
Want to laugh, but this is classic bad economics take. SMBC-Comics could do this one.
The $1m can be spent fixing potholes. Massive waste of time, but if the next $1m is used to make potholes, a self-sustaining cycle of making and filling potholes can boost the local economy for just a small dribble of $1m per year input, to the alternating cycle.
tantalor
AKA broken window fallacy
HideousKojima
And they create hundreds of jobs in the process!
null
zugi
> The reason they build dams is to create deep water that gives them protection from predators.
How do they know the reasons beavers build dams? Did these reporters fact-check this by asking the beavers?
ncallaway
Because we can make a reasonable inference based on the consequences of their actions
FloorEgg
This is what I think every time I see a headline claiming a company stock, or the market as a whole, went up or down because of a single reason. Did the people writing the article ask all the people who bought or sold, or decided not to buy or sell, the stock(s)? Of course not.
Correlation does not mean causation.
Naked beaver logic.
tantalor
The reason beavers build dams is because that's what beavers do.
quanto
The real surprise is that the quoted budget was only $1.2m. Fixing potholes in my neighborhood is quoted more than that.
philipwhiuk
It's quite cheap to buy beavers.
darth_avocado
San Francisco and Czech Republic budgets are hard to compare 1:1 without accounting for PPP.
teekert
I suddenly found myself to be a consultant, part of the assignment was to construct a governance model. I found it such a vague unsticky term that I developed the mantra: “Governance: How decisions are being made”. And it opened my eyes because in so many places there is no process for how decisions are being made, and they are just not being made.
Yeah I know, but I’m just a molecular biologist, it’s easy to see how a bacterium decides to move up a food gradient. But Humans… oh boy.
Galatians4_16
Enabling people to make individual decisions, ensures the soundest decisions to be made in aggregate. (1) This is not unlike the spontaneous order occuring in all natural systems.
This process can be subverted, but only to great detriment of the whole.
wongarsu
This comment perfectly summarizes the rise and fall of capitalism
david_allison
Any reliable sources on this?
kseistrup
There's a Czech source that some seems to refer to: https://english.radio.cz/beavers-build-planned-dams-protecte...
westurner
According to "Leave It to Beavers" (2018) PBS Nature [53m], beavers are attracted to the sound of running water played back from a cassette tape. [1]
anotherhue
Are these undocumented beavers?
pkaye
Depends if it is a north american beaver or eurasian beaver.
stainablesteel
inter species competition is really ramping up, I wonder if the Europeans will continue to survive this century
karaterobot
Yeah, but the beavers didn't do environmental impact studies, and don't care about safety. They also made a temporary dam, and have no legal liability if it breaks apart. People could pile logs together in two days if that's all they had to do, but if you believe in environmental and safety regulations, the consequence is that it adds cost and takes longer to build stuff.
HomeDeLaPot
Let's hope the beavers allocate sufficient funding to maintain the dam.
ggm
The dam you get for $1m is also a temporary, or very small dam. Real construction costs for a permanent structure at scale exceed this by one or two orders of magnitude. If the dam required was a $1m dam, then getting beavers to make it is an entirely sensible decision or outcome, even if not decided.
dyauspitr
Is there a way to direct or coax beavers into building exactly where you want?
pavel_lishin
Sort of! Beavers build dams as an instinctive response to the sound of running water.
If you have pet beavers in your house, and down put a phone playing the sound of running water, they'll start dragging stuff over to where the phone is.
teruakohatu
How common are beavers as indoor pets ?
thatguy0900
In the US at least I don't think it's legal anywhere without a permit. I've seen videos like op has posted, it's usually rescue animals being looked after not actual housepets
Ancalagon
Dam building as an instinctive response is kind of insane the more I think about it. What evolutionary pathway led to that behavior?
stubish
Attempted rationalization: Some proto-beavers with sensitive hearing disliked the sound of running water, and discovered they could shut it up by dropping stuff into the stream to plug it up. As an unexpected side effect (evolution cannot expect anything), the deeper water created gave them an increased chance of survival and the behavior spread as they out competed other proto-beavers.
rorylawless
The ones that didn’t do that tended to die before they could pass on their genes.
basementcat
Relevant video https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-ImdlZtOU80
chmod775
You could try to airdop them to wherever they are needed.
Worked for Idaho: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_drop
This article has a video: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/22/idaho-histor...
FaridIO
You'd probably have to go through a similar set of bureaucratic steps to get that done.
Iwan-Zotow
Citing Naked Gun: Nice Beaver!
Undocumented beavers destroy $1M of GDP doing construction without permit.