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Comment by franga2000 | Hacker News Reader

franga2000

European law is a patchwork of suboptimal solutions to hard (but often self-imposed) problems. The US meanwhile doesn't try to solve them at all.

Yes, the bottle caps annoy me, but if the beverage companies stuck to the much more recyclable glass bottles we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.

Yes, the GDPR popups annoy me, but the law also punishes companies for being creepy exploitative bastards. If they had any morals, we wouldn't have the popups either.

So yes, Europe is sometimes frustrating, but at least it does some government. The US simply doesn't. It's a free-for-all hellscape and I'd much rather be lightly scraped on the face by a little plastic cap that one time a month I need to drink from a disposable plastic bottle than live in...that...

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The bottle caps certainly don't annoy me, I find them very useful.

The popups are there for companies that ignore basic data sovereignty of "don't use my personal data until I say you can"

I don't dismiss the problem, I dismiss the solution.

Yes, plastic bottles (and caps) are likely a major environmental disaster.

The alternative to regulation is innovation: force bottle makers to invest x% of their profit or revenue into actual research on plastic recycling or capture.

Another alternative is anticonsumption; stop or reduce use of disposable packaging if possible.

>The alternative to regulation is innovation

That's a very easy but hand-wavy thing to say.

How exactly would your suggestion work? Are the companies supposed to share their findings from this forced research with the world? What happens if they happen to discover something that doesn't help with the plastic problem but does improve their bottom line somehow? I can't see this functioning in any way whatsoever.

You don’t need to impose R&D to them. You can tax them and funnel that money into R&D labs/companies tackling recycling.

GDPR and Cookie acceptance popups are separate regulations.

For the cookie popups this is a great add-on:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/consent-o-mat...

It will click no no no no no to all cookie prompts for you, and hide the popup. It's sad that we need to do this, the companies could just not track you at all. But I haven't had a need to manually click these popups for quite a some time now.

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