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Comment by bluedevil2k | Hacker News Reader

Moral police alert!! Care to expand on your condemnation of the company? Or is this just a random “big companies are evil” kind of negative comment?

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For many kids, this kind of toy has a short window of novelty and then waits in a closet until its time comes to go to the landfill. We should be extra skeptical of consumerism that targets children. I think that’s what GP was getting at.

Well GP is wrong. I have a 10 year old girl, I’ve bought a dozen of these, and she loved them each time. Yes, she may play with them only for a few hours each, but if it brings a smile to her face & makes her happy for many hours, then I think most parents agree it’s worth it.

What ever works for you man. That stuff is meth, trash, superficial garbage.

That kids can grow out of, it's harmless than actual 'meth' and other 'addictions' adults almost never 'grow out of'.

Do you know where our plastic ends up? Every documentary I’ve seen on the subject shows that our plastic ends up with no oversight in some poor country while children literally sift through it for pennies a day.

Only due to the recent habit of tossing toys and all kinds of junk in recycling bins, where they don't belong. Over-recycling is worse for the planet than simply throwing away garbage responsibly. Most parts of the US have no shortage of landfill space.

Maybe your plastic.

Mine is transported several miles away, where it is buried and can then leech into the river, which is used as our water supply downstream.

But, yeah, who decided to put the water treatment plant next to the landfill?

Unlike the cultured and refined stuff you like, I assume?

And your kids are watching Godard films?

The amount of plastic waste around some of these toys is shocking: https://youtu.be/CZpG032TR5A. It reminds me of the packaging around AMD Threadripper and Intel 9900k packaging - both also very wasteful. If they only make a child happy for a few hours then it's probably not worth it.

One of my friends built a PC into his dad's Threadripper box, inspired by this: https://www.anandtech.com/show/14473/spotted-at-computex-a-r...

Remember, these things are targeted at a subset of an enthusiast market (and some HEDT stuff, too) and are mainly Halo products- and for many people, if they're paying $600 for a CPU, a nice box / unboxing experience is a quite nice touch.

She may have only played with them for a few hours but the plastic waste will outlive her by 100x. You really can't see anything negative here?

> For many kids, this kind of toy has a short window of novelty

This one takes it to the next level. It "hacks" that by selling these toys in an opaque plastic container and they have "rare", "ultra-rare" etc types. So kids get hooked on wanting to collect all the dolls looking for a specific ultra-rare one, and having to buy lots of these things including duplicate ones.

Is that really any different than things like Pokémon or MTG - other than cards have a lower environmental impact when landfilled than toys, due to the smaller volume?

No?

I don't know. I had a bunch of toys growing up that I retained. They're kept in a little glass cupboard in my house. My nephews love playing with them whenever they're over. Something that lasted two generations certainly seems good value to me.

Regulations restricting advertising at children turned Saturday morning cartoons into unboxing videos. I'm glad I grew up in the 80s.

I think I made myself clear. Manufacturing huge volumes of cheap plastic is currently a very ecologically damaging thing. Since my home town is currently engulfed in flames I have been thinking a lot about human impact on the climate. And it feels increasingly shortsighted to read articles that say “wow look at all the money this person made” without addressing the ecological impact of their work. Some toy companies make long lasting toys from 100 percent post consumer recycled plastics with minimal packaging. But this guy who made billions probably did it with big shipments of virgin plastic made from who knows where.

I see no reason why highlighting the effects of such businesses should be condemned here. I wanted to temper some of the euphoria that comes to us Silicon Valley types when billions in revenue comes up.

Have you read the book ‘Natural Capitalism’?

There is a point made that the current costs are not adequately addressed, and instead externalized to the public.

It was written in 1999.

I haven’t! Looks like there’s some lectures on YouTube under that title, I’ll see if any are the original author and listen to those. Don’t get in to many books lately.

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