Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lm28469 | Hacker News Reader

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That's the price of running after (technological) progress at all cost.

Nothing in our day to day life makes sense on an ecological level, nothing at all. Food, all our useless tech gadgets, ICE vehicles right next to where we live / sleep, being able to take the plane to go 1000km away for the price of a lunch in a restaurant, mass tourism, iot shit, 90% of startups, &c.

But we're comfy and warm, plus at the end of the day we get to watch the new junk netflix produced this week on our 4k tablet. The very same tablet we'll have to dump in 18 months when the battery dies and it'll cost more to replace it than to buy the next iteration. We can even go on internet places like HN and Twitter to virtue signal about how bad we're treating the planet (as I'm doing right now) while sending 0s and 1s to servers all around the world, you know, the same servers used to share picture of cats and fake news while consuming terawatts of electricity. But I get my daily costa rican banana, my japanese tea, I can eat meat at every meal, my smart light bulbs know my location and switches on when I arrive home, my company sponsored laptop costs 5 time the annual age of a Chadian, everything's fine.

We sacrificed the future for instant convenience and comfort, we more than deserve what's coming to us.

https://www.spiegel.de/international/tomorrow/electronic-was...

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06610-y

https://www.boredpanda.com/award-winning-chinese-photographe...

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/12/your-kitchen-and-the-...

https://news.vice.com/en_us/article/43jgdn/you-can-blame-ins...

You've shifted responsibility from the large scale producers of industrial waste to the individual consumer. Consumers do bear some responsibility for the current state of things, but the slow rogue AIs we've built called "corporations" bear the brunt of the responsibility. Trying to convince individuals to stop using single-use plastic bags is a losing battle. Creating a regulatory environment that makes the manufacturing and distribution of single use plastic bags difficult could actually help.

Corporations have done a pretty good job of misleading and distracting consumers, but it's not like the information isn't out there. I'm inclined to put at least half the blame on the people voting with their wallets here.

Most people don't have reasonable alternatives or any way to override the instinctual social mechanisms that drive their behavior.

Not to mention monopolies/oligopolies prevent real choice with most products.

No one can DIY everything.

> No one can DIY everything.

Well, technically they can, it's just that that sort of lifestyle is unrecognizable to us today, and would basically take all your time. They would be totally left behind by modern society, ie hermits.

I mean you're right in a unabomber type sense (i.e. living in a log cabin trapping small animals), but if I wanted to build my own smartphone from scratch, my whole lifetime is spent extracting materials to build the equipment required for making the smartphone. Even if I somehow made the smartphone, I would have immediately violated some patent law.

Even if I were a globe trotting immortal, I cannot legally DIY most common electronics because of patent law.

Sure you can. You just can’t sell the item.

That is true, but it is also true that most people who do have reasonable alternatives still don't take advantage of them. This could be due to laziness, inertia but mostly I'd guess comfort level. We live in a society where people yell at McDonalds employees if their stupid chicken nuggets isn't available one day, out of 5,000 days they've eaten there. Point being, most of us have become too comfortable and expect too much, while not doing enough ourselves at the same time.

Most of these things are very hard to analyze. Let me give you a real-life example.

This winter, my driveway developed some major cracks from the snow melt. How can I solve this problem responsibly?

Not fix it? Then I have to park on the street and drive my car unnecessarily to keep it out of the way of the plow. I will end up with craters and mud slide in my yard, a useless garage, and I'll probably have to fix it anyway if I want to use/resell my property.

Move to a warmer climate? Then someone else moves into my house and we've wasted resources just shuffling people about.

So what I will probably do is go to a company that does driveway repair and have them fix it, because then the space is usable and I don't have to change my whole life or live with a dangerous/ugly pit in my yard. But I can't tell you if they will do it efficiently. They're the experts, so obviously they know more than I do.

What would you do? What would anybody do? How am I supposed to both identify an environmentally-friendly alternative and muster the courage to act on it?

What would you do? What would anybody do?

I don't have an answer to this specific scenario that you described. That said, I wasn't saying we should all suddenly become 100% socially responsible overnight - it is just not practical.

There are lots of things that are super easy to do, and yet have positive influence on the environment, society etc. We can keep a handful of cloth bags handy, when we go grocery shopping. This isn't hard to do, and will help reduce plastic bags. We don't have to wait for legislation to act on this. We don't have to replace our perfectly working phone, every other year (or every year) and throw it in the landfill. And so on.

These are definitely small compared to the pollution caused by corporations. But corporations exist to sell to consumers. Plus, change has to start somewhere. Why not start at home?

>We can keep a handful of cloth bags handy, when we go grocery shopping.

That probably doesn't help. A cotton bag requires about 130x more resources to produce than a standard HDPE carrier bag. If you re-use a plastic bag three times, you'd need to use your cotton bag nearly 400 times to break even. The cotton bag is likely to wear out substantially sooner than that. The plastic bag can be disposed of responsibly by recycling, incineration or as a container for non-recyclable domestic waste.

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

Isn't that hypocritical though? You want to assign blame to me for not bringing cloth bags, yet you want to coddle me for making that mistake by offering me free plastic bags when I forget? Perhaps I would be more incentivized to bring cloth bags if I had to suffer some for not doing so. Make me buy some at the register, run to my car to retrieve them, or make multiple trips. (Point in fact, I have cloth bags in my car, but I have not once remembered to bring them into a store. Habits are not easy to form. And I'll be thought rude to run to my car after dumping groceries on the checkout line rather than using the provided bags.)

It doesn't really matter who you blame in this case, because the solution is the same either way: stop allowing stores to offer free plastic bags.

And if anyone would accuse my of rationalizing my inefficiencies, then that is just one more reason why you cannot trust individuals to make the right choices.

You are expecting someone to say "do this, do that"? This is the opposite of responsibility. One possible responsible way is to learn how the natural biotope in your area looks like and then apply it to your problem. This does not mean to leave some ugly "natural" pit unusable for you there. Instead, recognize ways how nature fights erosion, and then combine stones or permeable pavement with the same plants that do it naturally.

How to muster the courage... I don't know, that's very personal. But it's encouraging to know humans communicated in this manner with their natural environment for thousands of years.

The driveway problem isn't a major problem in my life. It's practically already solved. I cannot go around turning every minor problem into a mountain of effort, and it'd be stupid to think that everybody doing this is going to fix the environment. I won't do it. And nobody else will either.

If they were going to do it, it would already be done. The reason we haven't done it yet is the same reason we won't ever do it. Individual responsibility is not a solution here, so I'd rather we not bet the future of humanity on it being one.

> I'm inclined to put at least half the blame on the people voting with their wallets here.

I don't agree. The sheer volume of information that's available in the public space and the size and scope of large corporations makes "voting with their wallets" impractical.

There's a huge proportion of the population that doesn't even have the luxury of voting with their wallets because the only thing they can afford is the cheapest possible. Cost of living has gone significantly up in the last two or three decades.

Also a bunch of companies out there are actually under some megacorp. Have fun completely cutting off Nestle or Unilever out of your life[0], for example. The information is there, but it's delusional to think everyone can manage to avoid all these brands altogether for various reasons (access to alternatives, price vs. income, etc.).

[0] https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/companies-control-e...

Easy to tell people to vote with their wallet, harder to provide them with real alternatives.

I understand your point, though I think the single-use plastic bag argument isn't a great one [1]

[1] https://qz.com/1585027/when-it-comes-to-climate-change-cotto...

This article explicitly says:

> This assessment does not take marine litter into account—so as far as that gigantic problem is concerned, plastics are almost certainly the worst

Financial progress - where progress is often change for change's sake - at all cost.

Cheaper wins, more profitable wins, regardless of whether good or not. Frequently when we already knew it's not (leaded petrol, radium on watch dials etc). Far more quickly since the changes of the 1980s - deregulation, privatisation, and so forth. If it wasn't deregulated enough, move it out of sight and offshore it somewhere with weaker standards.

So I would tend to say we sacrificed the future for an extra 0.5c on the dollar.

Yeah I think you are right about shaving costs. From the business perspective, you shave off 5 cents, times 10 million sales.. you got some serious $$$ there

Yep. Most people don't even seem to admit to themselves that they're doing a lot of harmful activities.

A lot of people like to say they're worried about the environment, but very few change their life in significant ways to help it.

How will any individual's actions counteract the approval of a single fracking or tar sand site? Or the choice by a supermarket to package everything in plastic, and continue to add to this in 2019? Or any other multi-national?

Starbucks straw-free solution was a plastic lid that uses more plastic than the straw.

Family made major changes, but it feels increasingly pointless, and increasingly like spiting ourselves for no reason. Every shop brings home more plastic, used in ever more profligate ways, and mostly impossible to avoid. What was the point changing?

It’s cumulative. Single use plastic should be highly taxed.

> Starbucks straw-free solution was a plastic lid that uses more plastic than the straw.

This may be true, but it was still a worthwhile initiative. The new lids can be recycled, whereas the straws couldn't[0], and their new policy has drawn a considerable amount of attention to the issue of single use plastics.

0: https://mic.com/articles/190171/starbucks-will-ban-plastic-s...

That's because it's hard. I've done it but I would be lying if I said it was easy or didn't have an impact on my life. Just this morning I had to fix a puncture on my bike before I could go to the shop, it's only ten minutes to fix but there are a lot of these frictions if you want to have a low impact lifestyle.

> very few change their life in significant ways to help it.

I did it, and it is really worth the effort.

What I changed:

- buy liquids in glass only -> healthier and reduced container garbage to 2/5

- use soda stream for mineral water

- buy fresh food -> healthier and reduces plastics packing

- buy used devices (where it makes sense) -> cars, phones, pc's etc. -> much cheaper, reduces waste -> don't be beta tester for newest products

- use rechargable batteries with smart recharger (to benefit the life cycle)

- avoid unfixable devices in general

- use grandma's household remedy, e.g. baking powder and vinegar instead of chemicals (packed in big one-way plastic bottles) to clean your house drains

There are many more tips in the Internet. For instance:

7 Ways to Support the Environment in 2018

https://www.care2.com/greenliving/7-ways-to-support-the-envi...

Further recommendations are appreciated.

Eh. Plastic packaging is unnecessary for progress. Paper was and is always an option for packaging. This specific case seems more like an arbitrary screw up here rather than a price for progress.

> we more than deserve what's coming to us

But do our children

Not having any seems more reasonable every day.

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