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Comment by spodek | Hacker News Reader

That picture is horrifying, as are the ones in the article's first link https://www.forbes.com/sites/trevornace/2017/10/27/idyllic-c....

I hope all of our needless plastic bottles, food packaging, and trinkets bring us joy greater than the centuries of destruction they bring.

Oh wait, they're mostly needless since humans lived without plastic for hundreds of thousands of years.

Regulation and pollution taxes can help, but right here right now we can each cut our plastic consumption by 90% without changing our lives at all beyond saving money.

EDIT: Thanks barrad0s for pointing out the picture is a "representation," which I find counterproductive, though it doesn't change the situation or images in the other link.

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That's not a real picture. Kinda screws up the article a bit in my opinion, no need for that. Says right below the pic "A Greenpeace Philippines representation of a dead whale from ingestion of plastic. The representation is increasingly becoming a reality."

Ignore the Greenpeace rubbish. There's a picture in the video of what was actually extracted from the whale.

That picture really is counterproductive.

All it will do is support the people who say the problem is exaggerated.

> Oh wait, they're mostly needless since humans lived without plastic for hundreds of thousands of years.

I don't think this is a convincing argument. There are lots of things that we lived without (e.g. antibiotics) that we wouldn't now give up.

> Oh wait, they're mostly needless since humans lived without plastic for hundreds of thousands of years.

This kind of moral excoriation is not persuasive. You're claiming the moral authority to dictate which things people need, or whether an activity is permissible. You don't have that authority, none of us do, and that you feel passionately about the subject doesn't grant it to you.

Many people, especially artists, engineers, etc. work quite hard at producing such "trinkets" or their livelihoods depend on them. You're not going to persuade them by denigrating them or their work as mere consumerism.

If everyone stopped buying plastic crap today, those people would find other jobs.

Effort != value.

Personally, I try to buy as little physical stuff as possible, and I try to use what I buy for as long as possible, fixing things instead of throwing them out when they break.

We should all do the same, really.

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