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Comment by paulproteus | Hacker News Reader

When people wear lipstick and are drinking something, a straw helps keep it on. If society's going to have lipstick and people go out, I think society sorta has to have straws! See e.g. https://stylecaster.com/beauty/makeup/468366/how-to-make-lip...

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I can’t help asking weather do we as a society need lipstick ?

Well, you could mandate that women aren't allowed to use particular types of beauty products to compete for more desirable partners, and hope that the follow-on effects of that lead to lower straw usage. But then you're totalitarian and convoluted.

It’s not more totalitarian than most of the laws, you’re just not used to this one. Someone from another planet may be stunned by the fact you can’t drive your car at the speed you wish, some sexual practice are prohibited and many chemicals used for decades are now forbidden.

We have a lot of things that we don’t need. Abundance and option (rather than bare sustenance) are defining features and goals of a healthy society.

That’s a long way of saying that there are a lot of things we don’t need, but that eliminating them makes relatively little sense. We should instead develop compensating systems based on those needs (such as disincentivizing single-use straws, and normalizing reusable ones in the ways that reusable bottles and bags have been normalized.)

> Abundance and option (rather than bare sustenance) are defining features and goals of a healthy society…

Do you have a source for this claim? It’s not something I’ve read or heard in 36 years.

Out of curiosity, why do you say 36 years specifically?

I think that falls under conventional wisdom.

You’re wrong, it falls under some minority belief. Even the president of France said last year “we’re living the end of abundance” and he’s a liberal productivist. Abundance is clearly at most a target of healthy minority within a non heathy society.

I don't know if this was intentional on your part, but that Macron quote appears to be grossly out of context: he said it in the context of an expected difficult winter due to the war in Ukraine and an ongoing drought in Europe[1]. He ties it more broadly into consumer changes that will need to happen as part of climate change, but he's not talking about an end to the kind of baseline abundance that citizens of modern developed countries expect (around competing products in their stores, etc.).

(And in case it isn't clear: I'm entirely for reducing society's unnecessary forms of consumption, especially when it comes to personal modes of transit, wasteful packaging, and unsustainable residential patterns. But abundance is an independent variable.)

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/aug/24/macron-warns-o...

I see that there might be some cases where a straw can be helpful or necessary. But there are handed out so many straws wh ich aren't needed. I never understood why they put a straw into my whiskey cola or cuba libre. We should get there where we just hand out straws if people ask for them as it is with other extras.

Ah makes sense. I didn't think about that scenario.

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