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Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Are you familiar with the concept of trade-offs?

Sure. Do you see glassware not being in use at any point in the next 100 years though?

Maybe they current style of glassware. The Superfest glasses already look outdated and retro to me, I wouldn’t want to decide which glasses I use in 50 years now.

Fashion is a huge driver of waste.

As pointed out in my original comment in the thread. The question is, do you want to moralize and tell people to not behave as they behave, or do you recognize that "fashion" is associated to inherent human traits and design the world to have a good middle ground between doing what people want and not messing up everything super fast. In the end the only way to protect everything is to kill all humans, so if we agree that is not a solution, we should understand that the concept of fashion or changing preferences is not going to go away and not design products forever.

We moralize about all sorts of important things like washing hands, putting rubbish in the bin etc.

Fashion benefits from morals - like the idea of showering daily benefits the cosmetics/body care industry. I have a relative in one of the big French companies who saw a huge drop-off in shampoo/bathing products during covid when people were working at home. If we all decided that fresh water was too precious to waste we might materially impact this person's business - so they are eager to convince everyone that it's morally right to wash umpteen times a day.

Similarly clothing is marketed and that marketing works on us.

Other than telling such people to f-off, how do we get out of the negative loop they are only too eager to drive us into?

I mean nobody is forcing you to buy anything. I wear shoes that are 5-10 years old often and clothes that are 15 or 20 years old. And for most normal people they look "disheveled", my mom would gasp if she saw it. Yet I've been to work offsites with holes in my 8 year old shoes meeting with C-levels. But whenever I feel like buying something that you think is superfluous I also don't want anyone telling me what to do.

We all accept some telling what to do - like the law, tax and so on. Ideally it's meant to be for the general good.

So if some activity were to be negative for everyone - e.g. if it generated a lot of waste that was hard to handle and caused large unnecessary carbon emissions .... then we could end up needing laws to limit that damage.

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