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Comment by aptj | Hacker News Reader

Wrong. It's not about morality (or "main character"), it's about caring for your own and your beloved ones current and future. Ignorance, apathy and indifference keep the buyers/consumers/followers encouraging the unhealthy yet very "focused and efficient" morons (big and small) to ruin the world for everyone while they accumulate enormous power to further abuse the rest.

__If you buy gold from someone who poisons a river (to extract the gold more "efficiently"), soon your whole forest will suffer from deceases and degradation.__

You may feel tiny and powerless but it's sane and healthy to care for the whole ecosystem and think about aftereffects of everyone's actions.

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wrong about wrong. if you go down that path, you are powerless. we live in a society that is imperfect. but you cannot live on a pedestal alone and be perfect either.

you should shop at "walmart" or where-ever your dollar is the most effective. and that gives you the most stability and and position to challenge whether the current Walton regime's love of China is a good thing or not. but cutting your nose off to spite your face does nothing useful.

Right, and you posted this reply because you do care that others in the forest know that you deem something "wrong" (actions or ideas) and maybe there's a healthier way to pursue (while reminding to have realistic expectations). The river starts with many single drops gravitating to go somewhere )

We have a government to enforce laws to protect the commons. If someone is poisoning the river, the government should fine them and shut them down. They should be inspecting gold producers to make sure they are complying with regulations so that all gold is produced in a sustainable way that doesn't destroy the environment.

If that's not happening, then we need to fix the government so it does happen. Expecting each individual person to be their own EPA and research how every single item they consume is produced idiotic and doomed to failure.

Governments are pushed to do things to protect people by the people. Seat belts were not a thing (i.e., required by law) until there was sufficient public pressure to make them so. Heard of Ralph Nader? Food is made in unsafe conditions and governments are fine with it until there is pressure - have you ever heard of "The Jungle"?

Yeah, you'll notice that we didn't get seat belts in cars by boycotting car companies until they promised to add them.

Your point being? There are multiple levers we can pull, sometimes this one, sometimes that one. That is no surprise.

Some levers are effective and some are meaningless posturing.

Yeah, that's the theory, and by any mean we definitely need to pursue that as well. I wish we had the luxury of making it work on its own. But since we do not, we need to pull all the levers we have, not just one.

> Expecting each individual person to be their own EPA and research how every single item they consume is produced idiotic and doomed to failure.

That's a false dichotomy. There are many middle grounds between researching every single item you buy and dropping the problem as a whole. You can focus on items which are most likely to bring negative impact, you can draw information from journalistic reports and material produced from dedicated associations. There are many ways to be sensitive to economic externalities of the things you buy without getting insane and without considering the whole problem moot on general phylosophycal principles.

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