Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazide | Hacker News Reader

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Or you just have no idea what you’re talking about, because you live in a nice cushy region.

[https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/malaria] - kills over half a million people a year.

[https://science.utah.edu/news/toxic-dust-hot-spots/][https:/...

[https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/chagas-diseas...]

[https://www.un-igrac.org/sites/default/files/resources/files...] ground water arsenic levels, nice maps start on page 5.

[https://sustainability.stanford.edu/news/new-study-allows-re...]

All are driven by these factors, and there are many many more.

And that isn’t even factoring in things like natural ground water Arsenic and Uranium contamination which poisons millions in many areas.

Near as I can tell, you’re just living in areas that are the equivalent of ‘the good side of the tracks’.

If you think Nature works at smaller scales than man, you’ve never spent time in Nature.

Can we make things worse? Sure! But there are also plenty of real, large scale, natural hazards out there.

I don’t know what or who you think you’re arguing against, but it ain’t me.

First your response to “the non-human environment is an astoundingly efficient circular system” was “nuh uh, nature makes things that smell bad and are ugly too!”

Now your response to “nature doesn’t produce refuse of the same type or scale as humans” (clearly referring to the massive amounts of obscenely stable and probably-toxic-to-most-creatures plastic that we produce) is “MALARIA EXISTS, rich guy!”

Take a breath. Try to find where I said “nature works on smaller scales than humans.” When you find a line that looks similar but says something quite different, get curious about that difference! That’s where you’ll find what I’m actually saying.

Same to you, apparently.

Edit: oh, but you had to change your comment completely once you actually read things.

What a ridiculous person.

Swamps naturally breed malaria, among other diseases, similar to how dumps breed Rats. Swamps are where rivers and the like end up washing all the detritus. Malaria (estimated) has killed more humans than any other cause.

Living anywhere near a swamp is the natural equivalent of living near a dump burning tires constantly, but provably more lethal than the dump. Without massive effort to control the vector anyway.

Swamps are as natural as it gets.

How many hundreds of thousands of people are killed by plastic waste in dumps per year again? Zero? Except for maybe some rando who chokes on something?

And again, that is without discussing natural arsenic and uranium water contamination.

Oh, and I forgot about Radon [https://images.app.goo.gl/frMD3KoKXdssTgtM9].

We get worked up about human hazards because humans ‘should know better’, and are at least nominally within our control.

Nature just DGAF, and works at scales we can barely comprehend most of the time. And is often completely outside of our control. So apparently some people seem to think the hazards don’t exist or aren’t clearly far worse in many cases?

After all, how much man made radioactive gas do you need to check if you are breathing in at home?

And yes, all of this is very pertinent to the ‘kumbaya nature is self sustaining and all loving and takes care of everything’ comment.

Nature is, of that there is no question, at least. The rest is up for debate/interpretation. I love nature - but let’s not pretend it can be pretty stabby sometimes.

Worldwide ocean plastic kills vast quantities of marine life. It's an enormous problem that affects entire ecosystems. Malaria is a complete red herring.

"you just have no idea what you’re talking about" is just plain rude. No one comes here for that, so you'll have to stop doing that to avoid being ignored.

So do red tides. Oxygen depletion zones. Population imbalances leading to mass die offs. Huge oil spills. Etc.

[https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK220695/#:~:text=Assumi...).]

which we have records of for all of recorded history (and fossil records of from far before that).

I’m not saying plastic is good to be dumping in the ocean. It isn’t! Oil spills are bad! Dumping massive quantities of fertilizer and making oxygen depleted zones worse is bad!

I’m saying claiming that nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances is just ignorant. That claiming natural hazards don’t exist or aren’t often at least as or more of an hazard is ignorant. And leads to major mistakes on our side, if we think that.

And I wish I could be ignored. Arguing obvious stuff like this is exhausting, but apparently it needs to be done or the BS spreads even further - and causes real problems.

Can you point out where anyone said “nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances?”

Are they in the thread with us now?

You seem a little lost.

This is the thread in response to the comment “You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that is literally beamed in from space with no waste products. Chucking it all in a hole? Not even close.”

Which is why mass human (and non human) deaths from natural processes related to the biosphere and it’s wastes/chemicals is pertinent.

Because throwing stuff in a hole is sometimes actually a pretty good thing to do compared to many natural processes.

We were talking about recycling. You read my comment and thought it said "humans bad, nature good" and went immediately to "humans good, nature bad, because swamps and malaria and uranium". That was a horrible misreading and long series of non sequiturs, mixed in with a lot of rude remarks. In retrospect, we should have ignored your trolling, which I will now do.

Literally never said that.

> I’m saying claiming that nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances is just ignorant.

More than that. Nature balances itself through the massive die-offs. I'm not sure how people imagine this, that animals sit around round tables and negotiate a balanced use of resources? No, everything tries to murder and/or consume everything else, and the equilibrium of death is what we call "natural balance".

Is it wrong that I really can’t stop thinking how awesome of a band name ‘equilibrium of death’ would be?

Uhhhh people get worked up about human hazards because we’ve been producing a mass extinction event buddy. The Anthropocene has seen extinction rates 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate.

Let me know when the mosquitos and radon leaks catch up :)

Sorry to break it to you but you’re not the only person on HN who has heard of malaria or rotting swamps or uranium deposits.

As a side note, it’s telling that the only scoreboard you seem capable of using is which forces have killed more humans. I wonder if there are any other lenses through which one can understand the world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You seem really confused as to what thread we’re in.

You know the one about ‘natural processes are all great, and digging a hole and dumping things in it is terrible’?

Which is why I’m pointing out that many natural processes kill a ton of people and animals? And why digging a hole and dumping things in it may not be so bad after all?

OHHH duh that’s a good point. Things do die in nature. Sometimes at large scale and in horrific ways. Thanks!

my usual go-to here is to observe that cancer is 100% all-natural.

I have been tempted to put it on a T-shirt to be worn at gatherings where I might find myself in the company of people who celebrate or promote "natural" as if it were an axiomatic good.

In reality I could never bring myself to wear it in public out of concern for by-catch side effects: griefing random strangers for whom the miseries of cancer may form a very real part of their daily experience is not something I'd want to be associated with even if it was not the intended result.

Wow, that’s a great argument against some argument that’s not being made here.

Good point. And something similar occurred to me today: all that progress of science and relative safety of modern life made people stop feeling fear of the cosmos. Yes, Cthulhu isn't real - but cancer is. Along with millions other things that will maim or kill you in horrible ways, or just destroy your mind - all of which were here before us. The true cosmic horror, the dread of uncaring universe beyond our comprehension - it isn't out there, it's right here. It's called nature.

Cancer is such a forgotten threat that solving it is probably the single most-funded endeavor in human history.

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