The ocean is broken | Hacker News Reader

The ocean is broken

smh.com.au

30 pointsra13 comments

Maybe the most underestimated problem today.

Some startup opportunities:

  Fish farms [1]
  Ocean surface cleaning [2]

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overfishing [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

I was thinking the same. Someone needs to collect and monetize the garbage. Sweden is already short of garbage for energy production, so there has to be a value in the garbage.

Not sure if there is still value in the garbage if extracting it from the ocean costs a lot.

It'd be cheaper to get garbage by mining old garbage dumps in other countries - say, India or China - and ship the garbage back than it would be to mine the ocean. The ocean garbage is really spread out thinly.

Much of the garbage mentioned in the article is only out there because of the tsunami and will presumably clean itself up over time.

We saw one whale, sort of rolling helplessly on the surface with what looked like a big tumour on its head.

Pure fear mongering crap.

We don't have to listen to their editorializing to address the claims of the source. Just make a simple market-based thought experiment. Fishing vessels will continue to expand their abilities to catch fish because it results in higher revenue. More ships, larger catches, extracting from a finite resource. It's nice to think of the ocean as infinitely bountiful, but it's definitely limited. So are you refuting their claim that ocean stocks are in decline and that the tsunami caused a serious pollution problem?

Uhm, perhaps my English is slipping but that just seems like a description of what they saw.

The way it is written implies there is a connection between the trash they saw and the whale's tumour. I believe this is what the "fear mongering" is referring to, as there is no evidence to support that link.

The environment may be damaged but the state of journalism is so poor that sometimes it's hard to tell if the story is based in fact or just a boat load of feelings.

The whale is dying! [All whales will die.] Won't somebody please think of the children?

It does have a whiff of sensationalism, but perhaps that's the old cognitive dissonance in action, because thia article is scary.

Wasn't this on the front page yesterday? I remember a huge discussion, but HNSearch doesn't work on this mobile, so I can't check.

It was actually posted twice yesterday:

https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/submissions&q=the+oc...

Thought so - thanks. Can you post the links? HNSearch doesn't work on this browser. I get furniture, but no results.

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