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Comment by planetsprite | Hacker News Reader

Those goals being: No poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, quality education, gender equality, clean water and sanitation, affordable and clean energy, decent work and economic growth, industry, innovation and infrastructure, Reduced Inequality, Sustainable Cities and Communities, Responsible Consumption and Production, Climate Action, Life Below Water, Life On Land, Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, Partnerships for the Goals.

All agreeable prospects, but all too vague and hard to define. They're more a wish-list than goals.

For example, what defines poverty? Wages vs the median, or quality of life factors? What makes work "decent"? What does inequality mean in this context, economic, judicial, racial?

Vague aspirational goals sound nice but are rarely met without considering the real decisions that have to be made to meet them. These things are things everyone wants, but what are we willing to sacrifice to meet them?

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> All agreeable prospects, but all too vague and hard to define. They're more a wish-list than goals.

> For example, what defines poverty? Wages vs the median, or quality of life factors? What makes work "decent"? What does inequality mean in this context, economic, judicial, racial?

They're actually defined in far more detail: https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/2125...

(The details of the goals start around half way through)

Japan consistently ranks the last of the developed countries on gender equality[1], and they kill hundreds of dolphins a year in a frowned-upon manner[2], so are there any specific measures Japan is taking or is it all posturing?

[1] https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14668828

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiji_dolphin_drive_hunt

They're also one of 3 nations still hunting whales. Iceland and Norway are the others.

UK also.

is this a wales/whales joke? Everything I can see has the UK abandoning whaling in the 60s.

My mistake. Is Denmark, not UK.

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/11/europe/faroe-islands-whal...

Japan emits 8.5t CO2 per capita (2019), much less than the US (14.7t), though it's still worse than the UK (5.2t) or France (4.5t).

And they’ve been hovering around that and on a trajectory of slow decrease long before this SDG thing is “suddenly everywhere”, so I doubt SDG has anything to do with it. This vacuous SDG thing sounds like bureaucrats and corporatists finding something to do to justify their jobs. It’s like trying to refactor working code into using abstract class factory factories.

You're probably right about that, but I'm just saying that "They kill dolphins!" is a low-effort remark, when America is doing much more damage to the ocean via CO2 emission.

There are many axis of taking care of the environment, and CO2 emissions is fairly (but not completely) independent from killing dolphins in a cruel way. This unfortunately makes it so that comparing how environmentally friendly one country is from another is very tricky.

To be fair it's a resource poor (having only modest coal deposits) nation for electricity generation that idled most of their nuclear reactors after Fukushima. That greatly increases their carbon output.

It's actually renewable-heavy, I don't know the details (which might be important here) but Japan is very rich in wind and water resources, so solar, eolic and hydro could be major players. If only there weren't usual typhoons and floods and earthquakes that could make those nonviable (that's why details might be important).

I don’t know. The train I take sometimes have SDG wrapping, the ads on TV always mention SDG and the Starbucks have been asking me whether I want my coffee without lid (futa nashi), so they must really care about it /s

Why the random mention of dolphins? The ones being hunted aren’t at risk of extinction.

It’s not as bad as cattle farming, which is straight up destroying the environment in several ways, from clear cutting rainforests to feed them to filling the air with methane.

And dolphin tastes pretty good, too.

Eating dolphinidae has proven to cause brain impairment in human children and babies, so will affect the public health, one of the objectives of this thing. Because cetaceans will typically bioaccumulate heavy metals and toxic products in its fat.

> The ones being hunted aren’t at risk of extinction.

Cetaceans travel huge distances so... how much are "too much" dolphins? 1000 dolphins in a bay can seem a lot but, what if is 1000 for the entire Mediterranean?

If a machine comes with 30 screws, you just don't remove 20 screws randomly and expect the machine work as well as before. Is clearly a bad idea. Top predators provide environmental services for free, that are extremely expensive or impossible to replace. When we broke it, is broken for a long, long time, at least the rest of our lives.

Scientists say this since ages. Nobody listen.

Worth noting this is "ranked" by the "you will own nothing", "lockdowns are quietly improving cities" World Economic Forum.

On the contrary, the fact that SDGs became buzzwords is likely tied to the fact that Japan does well or can market itself as doing well in most of these indicators. Obviously gender equality is a glaring problem, but you'll notice they rebranded whaling (and possibly dolphin hunting if we dig into it) as controlling the fish population as per the article. Their systemic issues such as a greying population are not in the SDGs because Japan is essentially a snapshot of what awaits developed economies in the future rather than anything to do with the struggles of development.

Those are just the names of the high level goals!

If you go here: https://sdgs.un.org/goals#goals then click on each goal, its expanded in more detail, including implementation targets, of which there are over 150.

> For example, what defines poverty?

Many, especially governments, have definitions of poverty which are statistical, either percentile or a proportion of median income which makes it either actually impossible (there will always be a bottom n percent) or practically impossible (nobody earning less than half median wages).

They assume all these goals are mutually compatible. I see clean energy and climate action vs. everything else. Look at Sri Lanka for example.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/05/sri-lanka-organic-farmi...

> For example, what defines poverty?

I think we can all agree that homelessness is a problem we should address. If we could somehow tackle that one our country would be in a better place.

No need to kill the idea because we can't precisely describe what the definition is.

We can't even seem to agree on that. Many people - perhaps the majority - believe that homelessness is a deserved punishment for laziness etc.

Wow.

I won't be surprised if those in the upper/ruling class considers maintaining a certain level of homelessness and unemployment as appropriate motivation to keep the working class in line.

That would seem ill advised. Having the whole cake should make you worry a bit about a growing population of people with nothing to lose.

Not sure about "the ruling class", but it's necessary for our economic system to work, yes.

Look at the central bank inflation/unemployment dilemma.

Aim for best possible outcomes in each category, and be satisfied failing but pushing the overton window up.

> All agreeable prospects

Complete gender equality but otherwise only reduced inequality? I find that disagreeable.

And also whales. They eat them. And these goals say to eat more, to save the fish.

PS: I'm not even sure whales eat fish that much. Either plankton or squid.

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