Comment by regpertom | Hacker News Reader

Comment by regpertom | Hacker News Reader

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Two puzzling things to me having read most of the comments: -‘It’s just a minor inconvenience/ why do you care so much?/…’ ~it’s just manipulation and social shaming ritual with questionable outcomes, that we’re going to eventually ramp up for your own good. It’s meant to be annoying so you do what we want and when you get used to it we’re going to make it painful. Why are you annoyed?

And is it so hard to think: maybe there a lot of nudging going on in all directions and someone fed up with ‘one minor thing’ might have had their camels back broken?

One of my aunties goes neurotic over bags, and every other ‘issue’, so much stress brought to her life trying to do the right thing. ‘It’s just a…’ I don’t read all my memos but I think nudging is everywhere, thousands of little ‘it’s just a little’s’. She’s much like a left version of the Fox News watcher trope.

It’d be like trying to follow all the laws, surely impossible, at least a huge strain. Except it’s cultural shaming, largely manufactured, which makes it worse.

Which is all to say: how can it be sincere: we want to annoy you into change, and cannot perceive that you won’t smile and thank us while we’re doing it. You must answer for your insolence.

Second is the plastic industry having skin in the game: it hardly seems surprising, wouldnt we also expect the yes plastic ban studies to be from environmental/other industry? I see less plastic bags, therefore anything not supporting must be industry lies. Like, huh?

A local news story had a ‘speeding’ cyclist run over and kill an old ladies dog on a walk way. So weird, comments were like bike and cars, cept bikes comments were saying car things and ped comments were saying bike things. So many things are just say what ever fits for now. But we’re just meant to go with it.

Straw anecdote: when the ban came into place, walking past a skip (big dumpster?) at work full of unused plastic straw, easily 50 cartons, making way for the new paper ones. The worlds funny.

That’s what I’ve been thinking about, sorry for dumping it under your comment.

Ah, that's a thing I hear in Germany aswell. "they..." Who is they? It is a very dangerous narrative, somehow implying that a small minority controls everything and its only purpose is to undermine "our" freedom. Even worse, everything that is annoying / dangerous / anti freedom is the result of this one group "they". What a big pile of BS. Yes lobbies exists, but it is not a single entity. Yes, political parties exists but they do not have absolute power. All these annoying things are the result of several parties and lobbies arguing and finding compromise. There is no they. It is the outcome of thousands of people thinking.

The straw anecdote is flawed. It is a one time transition. Why do you not take the plastic straws (which I guess are still sealed) out of the dumpster? We did the same thing. We are using those during private parties since years. When guests come to me asking why we are still using these, the awnser is to save the environment ;).

Tbh I think ‘they’ can still be used to describe what you say. I don’t mean it as a far out thing, just an abstraction. AFAI figure, there’s lot of different people doing lots of different things for lots of different reasons. Rather than the dangerous narrative, is it ok to word it as more like: there are ways to control/direct society, a lot of them have been figured out, various people use them, to various effect. Is that kind of they ok?

For example, there exists people that use addictive strategies such as by casinos to hook people into their app. Leaving at that level of abstraction I feel as though that group can be a ‘they’. It just feels like an easy way to reference a group as long as I’m sincerely not trying to pull a fast one on anyone… which I hope I’m not :s

I would have liked to have taken home the broken escalator too, or the lifetimes of toner from the xerox-Kyocera change, but I worry about becoming a horder always thinking ‘well it’d be a waste to throw it away.’ Poverty trauma I heard it’s called.

I hope the straw thing wasn’t flawed, not as in ‘so why bother’, coz yeah it was a one off thing, more like the priority was to print off a bunch of advertising to get on the straw change goodwill bandwagon. It was just one of those funny such is life moments, walking past all the plastic core-flute signs about doing what’s right for the environment knowing there’s a million straws in the bin out the back you know?

> Yes lobbies exists, but it is not a single entity. Yes, political parties exists but they do not have absolute power. All these annoying things are the result of several parties and lobbies arguing and finding compromise. There is no they. It is the outcome of thousands of people thinking.

Thousands is still a very small number of people to control a country. Yes there are multiple parties and multiple lobbyists. But they're largely from the same handful of cities, the same social class, and representing that class' interests. Politics really has become a lot more centralised, placing a lot more power in the hands of a few people, not necessarily for nefarious reasons (or at least, not any more nefarious than the normal human desire for power), but nevertheless something that urgently needs to be fought against.

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