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Comment by Wintamute | Hacker News Reader

The people that felled that tree for its essential raw materials did so under hardships and conditions thankfully many of us will never know, and not in small part due to the toil and labour of previous generations.

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"It would have been the biggest tree alive today had it not been so ignominiously felled in 1890 – reputedly to satisfy a drunken bet about making a table big enough to seat 40 guests from a single slice of tree-trunk."

source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/reborn-the-g...

That makes it sad and horrible.

That does not make it any better for us. Previous generations bought good and bad both and that's the legacy we have to live with or die. We just don't know yet.

My point was its pointless and borderline disrespectful to project modern standards of ethics and concepts of "greed" onto people of the past that had different norms and extreme hardships to contend with. By all means we should discuss what to do about our present predicament and plan for a better future, but we can do that without denigrating those that came before us for failing against an impossible modern standard.

You have got it backwards. These trees were not felled by individuals who were toiling to make a better tomorrow. On the contrary, greedy industralist made them toil and die for their profit. When Queen Victoria and her chronies were filling their pockets by looting the world, London was still a slum. Henry Mayhew documented this in his publication London Labour and the London Poor[1].

Things like 8 hour work week, health benefits etc were achived in blood.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_Labour_and_the_London_P...

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