https://www.gov.uk/government/news/government-proposes-to-ex...
Don't know how much of that was due to the film.
Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordingly.
https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/live-greenpeace-boulders-...
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-marin...
https://www.wired.com/story/underwater-sculptures-stopping-t...
The ocean is large, and the effort required to cover significant areas in boulders is ridiculously high.
Public opinion drove them crazy and turned them evil anyways.
We will never see billionairs act as a force for good because the current system only allows for evil to create such a level of private capital. I would go as far as to argue such wealth disparity is not natural and is only possible through severe perversion of the natural order.
It's up to political structures and laws to keep billionaires under control.
Since wealth naturally accumulates to those who already have wealth and power, I would say it's a natural process. Look at history and how many elites had huge power and wealth. Just compare the richest man now, Musk, with Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan, etc... . Musk is a nobody.
It's not up to the billionaires to keep themselves under control, it's up to us to create political structures to keep it under control. Which we are already doing (some countries better than others), and we could still improve.
I would also argue that they don't create the value themselves, but their workers do. Just like that joke: a worker is admiring the boss's Ferrari, and the boss tells him "if you continue working hard, next year I'll have 2"
So do I fall in the category of being exploited, or do I fall into keeping all the value for myself?
Odd to contradict yourself with only a period separating the contradictory statements.
> I would also argue that they don't create the value themselves, but their workers do.
Sure, that’s fair - but those workers also have jobs and salaries because of risk the founders took to de-risk the company before the employees joined.
The level of risk required is not everyone’s cup of tea.
Yes, I’m all for co-op structures, but there is a big difference between “created no value” and “created lots of value but kept the majority of profits for themselves.”
If they’ve created 1000 jobs; is that value? Surely to those 1000 employed people, it is.
Do not treat it like the real list of world's richest people
In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons.
But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize humans to work collectively like that. That means one authority needs to get unfairly rich. And additionally there must be incentive itself for such an authority to conduct that action in itself. So basically there must be some unfair distribution of wealth for any of this to happen AND there must exist strategies that can be exploited for someone to gain that wealth.
I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories about why certain places developed into advanced civilizations or not literally relied on whether or not the currency of the habitat could be used to accumulate wealth. For example fruits in Hawaii didn’t last long enough for someone to become a billionaire but grain in Europe does.
The other theory, "Theory Y" says that people work because that's what people do, and the function of authority is more about guidance and removal of blockages.
I'm a Theory Y believer, and believe that people work together to improve their lives without needing an authority or any compulsion. I believe that the incentive for people to work together for the common good, is the common good. That alone is enough incentive. I believe that authority tends to enrich itself and work against the common good. Less authority is better.
The tragedy of the commons is a paradox in which individually rational behavior leads to a collectively irrational and destructive outcome. It is not a story about bad people doing bad things. It is a story about good people doing exactly what makes sense—and still destroying something vital in the process.
Imagine a shared resource: a pasture open to all local herders. Each herder faces a choice:
1. Add another animal and gain the full benefit of that animal’s growth.
2. The cost? Slightly more wear on the pasture, but that cost is shared by everyone.
But now every herder thinks this way. They all add more animals. Soon, the pasture is overgrazed. The grass dies. The system collapses. Everyone loses—including the ones who were just “doing what made sense.”
Let’s be crystal clear:
1. Individually: Adding another animal is logical. The gain is personal.
2. Collectively: If everyone does it, the shared resource is destroyed.
3. Result: Rational behavior by all leads to a guaranteed catastrophe.
The tragedy of the commons is not a flaw in people. It is a flaw in unregulated systems.
It is inescapable unless external mechanisms change the incentives. And that is what makes it truly tragic: it unfolds from reason itself.
That external MECHANISM is what I mean by AUTHORITY. You need some law to control it. The tragedy of the commons is the reason to almost all the environmental problems we face on earth today. Overfishing, global warming, pollution. Why do you drive a car when you know it harms the earth? What exactly is being DONE to make it so you don't harm the earth. Is it your individual choice, or are people in positions of AUTHORITY pushing for it and trying to save the earth by changing the law and changing the underlying infrastructure. I assure you, if authority wasn't part of the equation there's no hope of stopping global warming.
You and I are exactly talking about theory Y.
Now. That being said. What happens when you let theory Y run rampant? That's pre-civilization anarchy. Hunter-Gatherer groups because of: No authority. Make sense? I mean think about it. What group in all of human civilization has Zero authority? Hunter-Gather groups. Groups that were NEVER part of civilization in the first place.
If you have authority you can start controlling people and making people build things that kick start civilization. Canals, public works, all things that they wouldn't build on their own because of the tragedy of the commons.
This isn't even a personal opinion I'm talking about here. This is academic opinion. People who study these things say what I'm saying and all I'm doing is regurgitating it. But, of course arm chair expert marcus_holmes knows best and can trump all of academia with theory Y.
I’m not interested in your reply because I think it’s dishonest. You clearly didn’t know what was going on and now you’re just trying to defend a position. You’re not charitably exploring a concept or idea.
more authority doesn't help in those situations, it is the root of the problem.
> I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories
It's a theory, yes. And there's another theory which says that's all BS invented by the ruling classes over time - the church and kings back in the day, the billionaires these days - to justify their otherwise quite unjustifiable positions, cloak them in mumbo-jumbo about natural law or what not, with the goal of discouraging questioning of the status quo.
I hate billionaires. I think it's unfair. But I'm also scientific. That means if unfair and unequal distribution of wealth is what resulted in civilization we need to admit it.
But that doesn't mean we need to worship billionaires. Civilization is built off of blood and corruption. That doesn't make the blood and corruption justified.
If you want to deal with wealth inequality then why don't we just fight for communism? Communism is the ideal theory for fair wealth distribution. But what happens when we go for the ideal? Reality hits. Communism works in theory BUT not in reality. It's an idealist fantasy concept.
The big question here is that how do we meet our ideals WHILE NOT ignoring REALITY. Like ok, so a billionaire loves what I'm saying. I don't give a shit. To hell with him. We need to attack problems with the truth. Not some fantasy witch hunt bs trying to build a utopia that isn't inline with reality.
So maybe something in between works right? Not communism, you need a bit of inequality. But maybe not too much. What system like that has worked? Do we have examples? I mean Elon is a billionaire ass hole, that much is true, but the allowance of the existence of such billionaire ass holes in the United States has also allowed the existence of rocket catching technology never seen before by the likes of mankind. What's the tradeoff? Do we know? Are we examining the full reality of it? Maybe if we taxed billionaires like crazy and reduced them to millionaires... maybe the rocket catching technology would've still existed... Do we know? No. We don't But let's not blind ourselves to reality before we know.
One thing is for sure: wealth inequality is RESPONSIBLE for civilization. Are you rational enough to be impartial about this or are you so against wealth inequality that you can't even look at the good parts of it.
Edit: So in that sense, I'm also on the side that billionaires are created naturally. When you already have a lot of wealth, the odds are in your favor to create even more wealth. So if you would just keep the system running without much interference, wealth will naturally accumulate to those who already have a lot. Therefore, we need political structures to keep that under control.
Only From the perspective of civilization, of course, which is only a small fraction of human existence.
From the perspective humanity overall, not only are billionaires unnatural, but civilization in itself is unnatural. Hence all the declining birth rates we see today.
Unfairness or billionaires might be natural or not - that doesn’t mean we have to accept their existence.
You know what else is natural? To die at 30 from dysentery or a broken leg.
Natural is a nonsense category
No mention of billionaires.
Show me one billionaires in nature beside mankind. Billionaires now and then are artificially created by the systems mankind creates. They are an anomaly
Billionaires are an extreme example of unfairness not the definition. Otherwise most unfair things would be unfair at all compared to the unfairness of billionaires.
probably the same thing that happened to dragons and unicorns :) can anything happen to something that has never existed?
There are some before and after scenes of the sea bed, which are pretty shocking as well.
I'm not sure how that got that footage. Surely fisherman would not want that to be seen?
"Technically, probably the hardest thing was trying to film bottom trawling because it's never been filmed before and we didn't know if it was possible. You have to film the wonder but you also have to film the destruction. Capturing that was absolutely essential and it took a lot of research to find some scientists planning bottom trawling experiments who decided that adding cameras would help their research and also help to share it with the world."
At:
https://www.arksen.com/blogs/news/ocean-with-david-attenboro...
I interact with fishermen as part of a marine SAR role and there's a significant subset who treat the sea with contempt. Not usual to see them dump rubbish overboard in littoral areas, flicking cigarettes butts into the sea, etc.
It becomes self-defence to emotionally detach and distance from the whole ocean at some point. With that, it can be easy to relativize and individuals cigarette butts.
You can only control your actions.
Also taking the action of starting to organise some collective action is a good thing. But don't continue eating fish until everyone else agrees not to, because that becomes self-defeating.
We're inviting you to join the collective of people who don't eat fish.
Our main activity is finding and encouraging others to not eat fish. If you'd like to organize more collective action, we will probably be interested!
But the baseline is actually inaction. First, do no harm.
Mobilizing people to act irrationally is challenging unless they are forced to do it by law.
>For rainbow trout, an estimated 10 (1.9–21.7) minutes of moderate to extreme pain (Hurtful, Disabling and Excruciating pain combined) are endured by each trout due to air asphyxia (Fig. 1).
I am a freshwater fisherman myself, and I do it on any fish I intend to keep, and release them very quickly otherwise.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omega-3_fatty_acid
Be aware of pharma propaganda that for sure support any narrations that would make benefit for them, like making any kind of natural sources good for humans as threat, like sunshine or.. Fishes?
It's the massive industrial trawlers that scoop up entire ecosystems that we need to stop.
Companies usually offer products that are much cheaper to make than individuals would make individually. Which mean lower source consumption.
True question is balance between quality and quantity. But economically it is broken when fiat money does not store value and governments decided to make own citizens to live on debts.
I think the EU planned to ban bottom trawling completely by 2030 and that got nowhere, but it still upholds a ban on bottom trawling in marine protected areas[0][1], in addition to national ruling (e.g. Italy bans it near the coast and in shallow waters).
[0] https://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/2025/05/22/eu-court-uph...
[1] https://www.bairdmaritime.com/fishing/regulation-enforcement...
Le plus ca change…
What do you mean?
> A marine protected area (MPA) is a protected area of the world's seas, oceans, estuaries or in the US, the Great Lakes. These marine areas can come in many forms ranging from wildlife refuges to research facilities. MPAs restrict human activity for a conservation purpose, typically to protect natural or cultural resources. Such marine resources are protected by local, state, territorial, native, regional, national, or international authorities and differ substantially among and between nations. This variation includes different limitations on development, fishing practices, fishing seasons and catch limits, moorings and bans on removing or disrupting marine life. MPAs can provide economic benefits by supporting the fishing industry through the revival of fish stocks, as well as job creation and other market benefits via ecotourism. The value of MPA to mobile species is unknown.
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanplh/article/PIIS2542-5...
"A wealth of studies also show that bottom trawling generates significant amounts of CO2 emissions and is fuelled by government subsidies."
https://www.bluemarinefoundation.com/2025/05/07/thebottomlin...
While the core ideas may be right, it's basically a propaganda piece.