6 ms·

> Yet everyone seems to be caring about straws. Yeah, I'm not really a believer in conspiracies, but the whole straw thing feels like a distraction campaign.

pjc50 7y ago
I don't think it's deliberate, but it's the kind of "distraction" that can very easily arise organically. "We must do something, this is something we can do, therefore we must do this". Straw bans are something completely trivial that can be done for the environment with almost no pushback (apart from disabled people!). People can then get back in the SUVs while feeling like they've done their Good Deed For The Environment.
- viraptor 7y ago
  I don't understand the mocking. If they would get back in the SUVs anyway, then yes, they did something. Maybe tiny, but at least a part of a wider change. For some that straw, plastic bag, and a keep cup may be the way to start thinking of something bigger. If not, they saved a straw, a bag and a plastic cup - I'm happy they did. (just acknowledge it's a tiny part and move on)
  - hyperman1 7y ago
    I like this way of thinking. I started using Linux as a better and free system than win95, and only after a while thought about the bigger software freedom issues. Before linux, microsoft was just a random company for me. I am not alone in this respect. And look how far open source has come. In the same way, straw banning can be a 'gateway drug' to environmental awareness. You've done your bit. So you acknowledged there was something to do. Then you dont want that small bit to be meaningless, so you do a tiny bit more All the while advocating to other people this is a worthy cause. Then you find how bigcorps are flagrantly violating the good cause. Of course this cant be right. And drip by drip you wear down a mountain.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    If, in an attempt to lose weight, I drink a can of diet coke instead of regular coke when I eat my daily Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese and Large Fries, some would say either I'm not really trying to lose weight, or I've grievously misunderstood the whole enterprise.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Retric 7y ago
      Keeping everything else the same someone who drinks a 24oz Diet Coke vs regular every day ends up ~25 lbs lighter. That’s less obvious if their baseline is 300lbs, but it’s still meaningful 8% of their body weight and a great first step. Keeping everything else the same is hard with diets, but just cutting soda does seem to have a real impact.
    - viraptor 7y ago
      Some others would say they understand the challenge of losing weight and the diet coke habit is a great first step! Do you know what you'd like to tackle as the next one?
      - cannonedhamster 7y ago
        I lost 10lbs just switching to diet soda. It's definitely not a small change if you're drinking soda often like I was. I eventually moved off of soda entirely.
    - kemayo 7y ago
      Your point would work better if you said "eat healthily" rather than "lose weight". Because just dropping sugared soda from an already-unhealthy diet is a fantastic weight loss method. :D
      - Dylan16807 7y ago
        Yep. Bad analogy. A better analogy for the straw is skipping one fry in each meal. Technically that's an improvement, but the amount is negligible and if you act like it made a difference you're more likely to skip opportunities to actually force meaningful change.
  - SkyBelow 7y ago
    >I don't understand the mocking. Try swapping out the 'wrong' and 'good' with something else and the reasoning seems far clearer. "Hey, I've done my two hours of volunteering at the orphanage, now let me go back to running my child sweat shop." If you feel the scaling is unequal, change it. At any scaling I can imagine the initial reaction to someone seriously holding that view is disbelief and then mocking.
- donkeyd 7y ago
  Why is the straw inherently a problem though? If properly exposed of, there's no issue with them. People who are buying expensive metal straws wouldn't just throw them out in nature anyway, so I'm not seeing how those things solve any problems. Sure, a ban, like you mentioned would keep assholes from littering, so that would help independently. Edit: Did some googling, and this article sums up my concern nicely: "Banning straws may confer 'moral license' – allowing companies and their customers to feel they have done their part. The crucial challenge is to ensure that these bans are just a first step." https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-make-difference#gs.vqdzxo https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-mak...
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Any single-use non-degradable object is an issue. It's not as much about throwing individual straws out in nature, but loads of bars/restaurants/cafes, each throwing out hundreds of them a day, every day. Next, we can grab another single-use plastic thing...
- falcolas 7y ago
  Straws are also recommended by dentists, since it reduces the exposure of your front teeth to sugary drinks. For what it’s worth.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  Switching to eating a cheese pizza a week in place of a meat meal would do far more for the environment overall and be almost negligible for most people yet no one really does it because it's hard to virtue signal that.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
I think most people imagine straws are a trivial and completely unnecessary luxury item that everyone can give up painlessly -- aside from seriously disabled people, whose voices don't count for much to most people, in part because I think most people imagine disabled people are some trivial percentage of the population. Reality: most stats cite 15-20% of the population as disabled and one study found that if you don't use stigmatizing language -- like disabled or handicapped -- then 60% of people admit to having varying degrees of difficulties with various tasks of day-to-day life. Comment with more details and a link to the study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811988#19815635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811988#19815635
- esotericn 7y ago
  Isn't take-out food and drink in general a trivial and completely unnecessary luxury item, with single-use items (including straws) being a subset of that? I can think of populations for which it's more necessary (e.g. the homeless) but as I think you've posted about before - the solution to that is to, well, fix the root issue, no? Maybe it's an artifact of my upbringing - I literally couldn't afford takeaway food apart from the odd cone of chips (wrapped in paper) or whatever, a McDonalds meal with a straw etc is still something I think of as being absurdly expensive (it's like an hour at minimum wage). Even middle class families in the UK often just don't eat out like this because it's both bloody expensive and usually crap food. It's weird to me that people treat this luxury, and of fast food at that, as something that absolutely has to be protected?
  - DoreenMichele 7y ago
    I'm guessing you aren't American. Forgive me if that's incorrect. When I was a homemaker, workers at grocery stores where I shopped would joke about getting me to talk to their wife do I could convince her to cook as much as I did. They could tell by the frequency of my visits to the store and the contents of my cart that most of our dinners were home cooked. A lot of modern Americans don't really know how to cook. One expression for a woman who can't cook is "Microwave queen." I hate microwave food and seldom eat it. I think most stuff that comes out of a microwave is pretty revolting. In recent years, it has been my observation that grocery stores are simply mobbed in the days before a big holiday when the stores expect to close and a big home cooked meal is thw norm. I also routinely see comments on the internet about how impossible it is to cook for one person or how impossible it is to stay on budget and eat healthy when you don't have time or energy for anything but takeout. I strongly suspect a lot of Americans don't do all that much cooking. Fast food seems to be basic survival for many Americans. They don't have the money or time for fancier restaurants and they don't have the skills or time to cook from scratch.

pjc50 7y ago

I don't think it's deliberate, but it's the kind of "distraction" that can very easily arise organically. "We must do something, this is something we can do, therefore we must do this". Straw bans are something completely trivial that can be done for the environment with almost no pushback (apart from disabled people!). People can then get back in the SUVs while feeling like they've done their Good Deed For The Environment.

viraptor 7y ago
I don't understand the mocking. If they would get back in the SUVs anyway, then yes, they did something. Maybe tiny, but at least a part of a wider change. For some that straw, plastic bag, and a keep cup may be the way to start thinking of something bigger. If not, they saved a straw, a bag and a plastic cup - I'm happy they did. (just acknowledge it's a tiny part and move on)
- hyperman1 7y ago
  I like this way of thinking. I started using Linux as a better and free system than win95, and only after a while thought about the bigger software freedom issues. Before linux, microsoft was just a random company for me. I am not alone in this respect. And look how far open source has come. In the same way, straw banning can be a 'gateway drug' to environmental awareness. You've done your bit. So you acknowledged there was something to do. Then you dont want that small bit to be meaningless, so you do a tiny bit more All the while advocating to other people this is a worthy cause. Then you find how bigcorps are flagrantly violating the good cause. Of course this cant be right. And drip by drip you wear down a mountain.
- michaelt 7y ago
  If, in an attempt to lose weight, I drink a can of diet coke instead of regular coke when I eat my daily Double Quarter Pounder With Cheese and Large Fries, some would say either I'm not really trying to lose weight, or I've grievously misunderstood the whole enterprise.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - Retric 7y ago
    Keeping everything else the same someone who drinks a 24oz Diet Coke vs regular every day ends up ~25 lbs lighter. That’s less obvious if their baseline is 300lbs, but it’s still meaningful 8% of their body weight and a great first step. Keeping everything else the same is hard with diets, but just cutting soda does seem to have a real impact.
  - viraptor 7y ago
    Some others would say they understand the challenge of losing weight and the diet coke habit is a great first step! Do you know what you'd like to tackle as the next one?
    - cannonedhamster 7y ago
      I lost 10lbs just switching to diet soda. It's definitely not a small change if you're drinking soda often like I was. I eventually moved off of soda entirely.
  - kemayo 7y ago
    Your point would work better if you said "eat healthily" rather than "lose weight". Because just dropping sugared soda from an already-unhealthy diet is a fantastic weight loss method. :D
    - Dylan16807 7y ago
      Yep. Bad analogy. A better analogy for the straw is skipping one fry in each meal. Technically that's an improvement, but the amount is negligible and if you act like it made a difference you're more likely to skip opportunities to actually force meaningful change.
- SkyBelow 7y ago
  >I don't understand the mocking. Try swapping out the 'wrong' and 'good' with something else and the reasoning seems far clearer. "Hey, I've done my two hours of volunteering at the orphanage, now let me go back to running my child sweat shop." If you feel the scaling is unequal, change it. At any scaling I can imagine the initial reaction to someone seriously holding that view is disbelief and then mocking.
donkeyd 7y ago
Why is the straw inherently a problem though? If properly exposed of, there's no issue with them. People who are buying expensive metal straws wouldn't just throw them out in nature anyway, so I'm not seeing how those things solve any problems. Sure, a ban, like you mentioned would keep assholes from littering, so that would help independently. Edit: Did some googling, and this article sums up my concern nicely: "Banning straws may confer 'moral license' – allowing companies and their customers to feel they have done their part. The crucial challenge is to ensure that these bans are just a first step." https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-make-difference#gs.vqdzxo https://earth.stanford.edu/news/do-plastic-straws-really-mak...
- viraptor 7y ago
  Any single-use non-degradable object is an issue. It's not as much about throwing individual straws out in nature, but loads of bars/restaurants/cafes, each throwing out hundreds of them a day, every day. Next, we can grab another single-use plastic thing...
falcolas 7y ago
Straws are also recommended by dentists, since it reduces the exposure of your front teeth to sugary drinks. For what it’s worth.
cannonedhamster 7y ago
Switching to eating a cheese pizza a week in place of a meat meal would do far more for the environment overall and be almost negligible for most people yet no one really does it because it's hard to virtue signal that.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

I think most people imagine straws are a trivial and completely unnecessary luxury item that everyone can give up painlessly -- aside from seriously disabled people, whose voices don't count for much to most people, in part because I think most people imagine disabled people are some trivial percentage of the population. Reality: most stats cite 15-20% of the population as disabled and one study found that if you don't use stigmatizing language -- like disabled or handicapped -- then 60% of people admit to having varying degrees of difficulties with various tasks of day-to-day life. Comment with more details and a link to the study: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811988#19815635 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19811988#19815635

esotericn 7y ago
Isn't take-out food and drink in general a trivial and completely unnecessary luxury item, with single-use items (including straws) being a subset of that? I can think of populations for which it's more necessary (e.g. the homeless) but as I think you've posted about before - the solution to that is to, well, fix the root issue, no? Maybe it's an artifact of my upbringing - I literally couldn't afford takeaway food apart from the odd cone of chips (wrapped in paper) or whatever, a McDonalds meal with a straw etc is still something I think of as being absurdly expensive (it's like an hour at minimum wage). Even middle class families in the UK often just don't eat out like this because it's both bloody expensive and usually crap food. It's weird to me that people treat this luxury, and of fast food at that, as something that absolutely has to be protected?
- DoreenMichele 7y ago
  I'm guessing you aren't American. Forgive me if that's incorrect. When I was a homemaker, workers at grocery stores where I shopped would joke about getting me to talk to their wife do I could convince her to cook as much as I did. They could tell by the frequency of my visits to the store and the contents of my cart that most of our dinners were home cooked. A lot of modern Americans don't really know how to cook. One expression for a woman who can't cook is "Microwave queen." I hate microwave food and seldom eat it. I think most stuff that comes out of a microwave is pretty revolting. In recent years, it has been my observation that grocery stores are simply mobbed in the days before a big holiday when the stores expect to close and a big home cooked meal is thw norm. I also routinely see comments on the internet about how impossible it is to cook for one person or how impossible it is to stay on budget and eat healthy when you don't have time or energy for anything but takeout. I strongly suspect a lot of Americans don't do all that much cooking. Fast food seems to be basic survival for many Americans. They don't have the money or time for fancier restaurants and they don't have the skills or time to cook from scratch.