8 ms·

I'm reading the comments and I get confused. I kinda think this is a good idea and it is not like the government is purely making it a 3rd party problem only. T

• lp4v4n 8mo ago
  >Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary. > The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold. What country do you live in if you don't mind telling us?
  • code4life 8mo ago
    > It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary. I have lived in the same place my whole life. The weather and seasons are effectively the same, from the day i was born until now. Both observationally and by way of looking at average daily temperatures.
    • wizzwizz4 8mo ago
      Where I currently live has about the same climate as it did 20 years ago. More variability, I think (people started complaining about weird harvest times about 10 years ago, and we're now all used to chaotic year-on-year yields), but roughly the same averages. Flood infrastructure needs maintenance, but not a redesign. However, the behaviour of the migratory wildlife has changed, and you only have to travel a few dozen miles before you reach somewhere that has needed to make significant changes to their traditional climate-related infrastructure. "A lot" doesn't mean all, and "my home isn't an example!" doesn't disprove the claim.
    • birdsongs 8mo ago
      Your anecdote may be true, but doesn't hold at a global scale, and science is not on your side: https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/ https://science.nasa.gov/climate-change/evidence/ I can't believe I'm debating climate change on HackerNews. What happened here?
      • deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
    • DANmode 8mo ago
      Where’s that, out of curiosity?
  • ErroneousBosh 8mo ago
    > It's like this in a lot of places now. We're seeing climate change in the interval of a generation. It's absolutely scary. You're seeing the first detectable solar maximum in 40 years. If you were born before the late 70s, you will not have experienced climate like this, or solar activity like this. The past few 11-year sunspot cycles have been an absolute bust. This is what weather patterns were like in the early 80s.
• ericmcer 8mo ago
  It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more. You should check out "Ascension" (it is on Paramount unfortunately). It gives a pretty close up look at China and factory culture and how their entire country is mobilized to push maximum consumption. The corporation's don't view Americans high per-capita consumption as a problem but instead wonder how to drive the rest of the world to consume the same absurd amount. It gives you a sort of fly on the wall view of the whole thing and it really makes you question what kind of psychotic road we are barreling down. I agree with you about food though. I care about food and healthcare, very occasionally transportation. Can we focus on those instead of all the bullshit "amenities" corporations are churning out, are we really gonna decimate the planet for clothes, cosmetics and plastic conveniences?
  • elzbardico 8mo ago
    It is ok companies think like that. It is not ok we let them do it without any limits or regulations. We just need to be careful with unintended side effects and tighten the controls carefully
  • throwaw12 8mo ago
    > It would not be a good idea because the goal of companies are not to get you to consume only what you need, they want you to consume more. It's good exactly because of this. Every company is pushing us to consume more, and Wall Street is at the top of this, growth at all costs (including human lives, mental health, just anything) Only way to save Earth is to stop the Wall Street greed machine. We should be making shoes which lasts 4 years, clothes which last at least 2 years with no "fashion" industry pushing us to change it every 2 days.
    • lotsofpulp 8mo ago
      Where are the 8% annual returns going to come from to pay for all the defined benefit pensions and retiree healthcare plans?
    • cronin101 8mo ago
• cm2012 8mo ago
  Essentially: unsold clothing is worth less than zero and recycling most clothing creates more emissions than it saves. So the law is forcing headache for nothing.
  • binarymax 8mo ago
    Or rather, since we know fast fashion is horrible because of the things you just said - it forces a more thoughtful approach to production.
  • teraflop 8mo ago
    If companies are taking raw materials worth more than zero, and turning them into clothing worth less than zero, then I think deterring them from doing that is beneficial to society overall.
    • cperciva 8mo ago
      If they knew in advance that the clothing wouldn't sell, they would never have made it! But companies stockpile goods in anticipation of potential demand. For example, they'll "overproduce" winter coats because some winters are colder than average. This sort of anti-overproduction law means that the next time there's an unexpected need -- for example an unusually cold winter -- there will be a shortage because there won't be any warehouses full of "just in case" inventory.
      • Swenrekcah 8mo ago
        It seems to me that is exactly what could be enabled by this law. It is forbidding the destruction of last year’s winter coats.
      • Nition 8mo ago
        Could they overproduce and keep unsold stock for next winter, and if unsold stock gets too high, stop producing more until it reduces?
        • 8mo ago
• wackget 8mo ago
  I think some people here on Hacker News are semi-deluded free market fundamentalists who believe they're going to be future billionaires, so they naturally gravitate towards protecting the rights of big business to do whatever it wants, even if it hurts people and the planet. The only people who think that destroying useful items is a good idea are those who would stand to lose money from it; either by having to pay a tiny fraction of their massive annual revenue for responsible recycling services, or by having their brand's reputation diluted by having their wares sold or (even worse) donated to the needy.
  • graemep 8mo ago
    Personally I am surprised how anti-billionaire HN is given its run by a venture capital company and its aim is (indirectly, through reputation building and PR), to get wanna be billionaires to raise capital from them.
    • dandanua 8mo ago
      I don't think this forum has significant costs of running, especially considering it is not in development.
      • shakna 8mo ago
        They switched the backend to Common Lisp in 2019, and at the time had two seperate Arc-to-JS compilers in development. [0] The site may feel less changeable than many, but I would be very surprised if it is not "in-development". [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21550123
      • direwolf20 8mo ago
        It employs two full–time moderators.
    • bluebarbet 8mo ago
      It's partly explained by all the non-US contributors here. That's my theory. Of course, billionaires are unpopular even in the US. Yet, as sparsely attended at that (earnest!) pro-billionaire protest in San Francisco was, I find it totally unimaginable that that could happen anywhere outside the US.
• babybjornborg 8mo ago
  Apparel firms exist not to clothe people as common sense would suggest but to make a profit, and this practice of erring on the side of overproduction is more profitable than under production. The perfect solution would be to produce exactly the number of goods they will sell, but forecasts aren't perfect so they overproduce. Firms are already incentivised by profit to not waste, so this adds another incentive and removes the pollution externality they have been enjoying. So now either they err closer to under-production and risk missing out on sales or secondary market supply of their goods increases leading to possible brand dilution. So in the end the value of these companies ends up lower than before, less pollution, and apparel is cheaper. I'd like to know more about the equity and carbon effects of the process they will need to now follow. So they trade destruction with shipping a crate to Africa. What is the difference? Firms will be less profitable, manufacturing is reduced, who is impacted by that?
  • Uvix 8mo ago
    How will apparel be cheaper? When they lower production runs, it'll be less available, which will mean prices will go up.
    • fn-mote 8mo ago
      The only error in the whole post. I think it's more productive to ignore that and focus on the important stuff... which is about why this kind of market interference isn't going to work out the way a naive optimist would hope.
      • babybjornborg 8mo ago
        [dead]
    • deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
    • usefulcat 8mo ago
      Economically, producing less to start with is not very different from what is currently done, destroying excess inventory. Therefore I don't think it's at all a given that prices will go up.
• cosmic_cheese 8mo ago
  > Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. In my inland US east coast hometown there’s been a big shift in winters. It used to be that it consistently got quite cold after late September to mid October, winters consistently came with several feet of snow, and spring hadn’t fully arrived until well into April. For the past several years winter has almost disappeared — many years there’s almost no snow and it sometimes doesn’t even get that cold. It’s kind of an indistinct smudge in between fall and spring. Things have changed where I live now on the northern half of the west coast too, though I wasn’t here to witness the change. Most houses weren’t equipped with AC when they were built because it was rarely needed. Now it’s a must for between good third and half of the summer depending on exactly where you’re at. Serious change is afoot, that much is undeniable.
  • InsideOutSanta 8mo ago
    People used to ice skate on the lake near my house during Winters up until the 70s. Now they're swimming there throughout the winter. We had a ski lift fifteen minutes from my house 20 years ago. Now in a good winter, we have a week where there's enough snow for kids to go sledding.
    • cogman10 8mo ago
      As a kid (I was born in the 80s), my home town would get 3ft of snow almost every winter. We even saw 10ft some winters. By the time I hit highschool, seeing a 3ft snow in the winter was pretty rare. Over the last 4 years, there's never any snow on the ground. They are lucky if 1 inch sticks around.
      • zrm 8mo ago
        https://xkcd.com/1321/ https://xkcd.com/1321/
    • flir 8mo ago
      Very similar pattern here (UK): circa 1900, ice skating on the local pond every winter. The ice was thick enough to walk on the pond twice in the 1980s. For the last decade, the pond hasn't completely frozen over once. We got about two days of 30% coverage this Jan.
• LorenPechtel 8mo ago
  You have already gotten two answers showing why this causes the manufacturer to lose money. A third: I hike, enough that pretty much all my gear out there is the good stuff. I do not care one bit about brands and would prefer not to be an ad for the outdoor companies--but I am anyway because it's not just a name. Suppose Big Brand X fails to sell all of this year's design and offloads them as discount brand Y. People like me don't want that big X on our stuff, if we learn Y is the same thing we are going to buy Y. And next year their sales of X drop because people like me waiting for the secondary stuff. Thus even if you do not consider brand dilution it's still in their interest to not sell the technical stuff in the secondary channels. When you produce quality a policy of not having sales or setting limits on sales makes a lot of sense.
  • dollylambda 8mo ago
    This feels like the argument for why not deflationary currency. Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money.
    • Ekaros 8mo ago
      That is inflationary. Goods costing more monetary units is inflation. In deflation same amount of monetary units buys more goods. So you would want to sell your house now if you have other options and then next year you could buy similar house and still have monetary units left over...
    • imtringued 8mo ago
      Deflationary currency is like a highway that you're allowed to park on. People will park their car on the highways and then charge you a fee to let you through. >Said another way, I have a property worth X, but next year it will be worth more because money is deflationary. Uhm, if money is deflationary, your house will be worth less than X denominated in the deflationary currency. This means if the money grows in value faster you'd sell all your assets as quickly as possible and replace it with a useless scrap of paper. >Why would I want to sell my house this year when I can wait until next year to sell my house and get more money. Again, if money is deflationary, you'd hold onto money and wait for house prices to drop with the aforementioned mechanic. You might say this is appealing, but the problem is that your income depends on other people's spending and they have the same incentive as you do, which is to earn more than you spend. That's something that is not possible in aggregate, where total aggregate spending and total aggregate income must always be equal. This is a zero sum game purely mathematically and this is not a moral judgement but an explanation how the rules work. When people follow the rules of the game, something weird happens. The promised outcome of a wealthy society from everyone being prudent savers doesn't emerge. The reason is as follows: If you have 1 million paper notes that represent the wealth of the entire nation and the value of the paper notes goes up, the represented wealth of the entire nation goes up, but the nation still has the same 1 million paper notes. No matter how much value people try to save in the form of money, they will still only have paper notes. Those paper notes do not have intrinsic value and that is for a good reason. Giving the paper notes intrinsic value doesn't change the fundamentals, it just makes the tokens more expensive to produce. It's like having a golden toilet. If money is worthless, then trying to give it non-transient value is a fools errand. Trying to say that a house is equally as valuable as a small bundle of cotton fabric is only acceptable for the purposes of accounting, but saying that the same bundle of cotton fabric (whose value is decreed) ought to buy more house next year is batshit insane. You couldn't come up with a better system to reward laziness and idleness.
• jesse__ 8mo ago
  > Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. I was in the bar in Revelstoke (where I lived, at the time) chatting with an old-timer the other year, and I asked him "is it just me, or did it used to snow more?" He laughed, and told me that when he was a kid growing up, they weren't allowed to play on the tops of snowbanks because you'd get electrocuted by the high tension power lines. At the time, mid-winter, it was raining outside with a sad pile of slush maybe 1 foot deep. Even when I was a kid in Revy, snowbanks were 10' deep mid-winter, every winter. It's been raining in town for the last 5 years, all winter. Winter's over. Time to start surfing, I guess.
• 0xbadcafebee 8mo ago
  > most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare. It shouldn't be cheap. The world got used to the luxury of cheap meat by being unethical and harmful to the environment (humans' environment) and animals. Cows are insanely resource-intensive to farm, bad for the air, bad for the water, bad for the land. Factory-farmed chicken meat is infamously inhumane, using genetic mutants to produce more meat faster, as well as being bad for the environment. They require more land and water use just to produce the feed for the animals. Both produce toxic runoff that goes into our water and land. Drugs pumped into animals land in us or our water, causing cancer or breeding superbugs. And we accept all these negatives so we can buy a cheap burger we don't need (we have plenty of other food). Pigs are actually pretty sustainable, as are rabbits, goats, and venison. We used to eat a lot more of them, before the factory animal farms changed our diets to prefer cow and chicken.
  • catlikesshrimp 8mo ago
    How are pigs, rabbits, goats and venison more sustainable? Unless you mean eating meat twice a year. I live in a farmer family; our cattle needs around one hectare each, because we don't feed them processed food, only grass; because concentrated food is even less sustainable, and more importantly, more expensive than letting them roam (fenced areas) Rabbit is not sustainable. There were some people trying to commercially rise and sell them and it didn't work. They would need concentrated food, which is expensive. Goat meat is much more expensive than cows because they are less efficient than cows and pigs and chicken. I know two people who rise goats to sell them, and it doesn't make them money; really, they do it because they kind of like the critters as a pet project. Only pigs and chickens are more sustainable, precisely because of theirinhumane(?) short life and their genetics. They are very efficient meat producers. I know poor people who rise chickens and pigs; those animals take longer to reach "maturity", and the meat is not tender; but since the animals are eating whatever they scavenge, it can't be done at scale; again, we would eat meat like twice a year (This might be an exageration, but chicken pig and cow farms really produce all the meat we eat; of those only cows eat grass under the sun)
    • 8mo ago
• miki123211 8mo ago
  Here's how this law is actually going to work. Instead of destroying the unsold clothes in Europe, manufacturers are going to sell them to "resale" companies in countries with little respect for the rule of law, mostly in Africa or Asia. Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. So instead of destroying those clothes in Europe, we'll just add an unnecessary shipping step to the process, producing tons of unnecessary CO2. The disclosure paperwork and the s/contracts/bribes/ needed to do this will also serve as a nice deterrent for anybody trying to compete with H&M.
  • pydry 8mo ago
    >Those companies will then destroy those clothes, reporting them as sold to consumers. Until one of them gets the bright idea to resell the clothes, which should take all of 30 seconds. Your theory presumes the existence of a sketchy african company which will nonetheless remain scrupulously honest.
  • hnlmorg 8mo ago
    Why wouldn’t these non-EU then just sell the goods in those countries? It would mean they turn a cost (destroying) into revenue (sales). It’s not like there isn’t already a massive industry selling counterfeit goods. So in your hypothetical scenario, if those companies are already shady then I could easily see them selling those surplus stock in the same shady markets.
    • Sleaker 8mo ago
      Because the cost of doing business in those markets is probably more than what they could get for the product. And if they lower the price in that market, it might devalue the product line as whole and potentially causes brand damage.
      • hnlmorg 8mo ago
        The brand isn’t the one doing the business. It’s the 3rd party who we’ve already established is unscrupulous. So why should they care about the brand value?
• giantg2 8mo ago
  "Prices went up and most of people can't afford cow's meat anymore. Most people are living on pasta and eggs, eventually they eat pig and chicken but that's getting rare." What an over exaggeration.
• NedF 8mo ago
  [dead]
• suggala 8mo ago
  This is a big blow to High-end Luxury Branded Companies, Many of these companies willfully destroy unsold inventory to not devalue their Brand. Manufacturing costs are just 1/20th of the marketed price. Most probably, the returned items just sit in the warehouse of the companies than selling to ordinary customers. Golden times for warehouse companies.
• yodsanklai 8mo ago
  I'm guessing EU bashing
• zby 8mo ago
  I think these rules should have a pre-determined shelf life. They are not bad at the current state of the world - they push in the right direction - but they complicated law, and I bet there will be many second-level outcomes that are hard to predict now. Besides that - once the capabilities for reuse are built - they should be sustainable - so the second level outcomes will actually dominate.
• nonethewiser 8mo ago
  Italy? >Here, we don't have winter, fall or anything anymore. The acid rain from the 90s destroyed most of green on adjacent cities and when it is hot it gets in unbearably hot and when it is cold it gets stupidly cold. How is it you dont have winter anymore but when it gets cold it gets stupidly cold?
• imperfect_blue 8mo ago
  It's a terrible idea because approximately 90% of the cost of clothing is not in producing it, but in the supply chain - keeping it in stock, transporting it to and from warehouses, the manpower needed to organize and sorting and inspect it. So by saving the 10% of the cost of the clothing, you end up wasting way more in labor and transport and inventory costs. All of which ends up way worse for the environment than had you just shredded it and treated it as compost.
  • sehansen 8mo ago
    The clothing that ends up in the landfill also needed to be transported, stored and organized. So if you don't produce those clothes to begin with you not only save the pollution and resource usage that would come from producing it, but also the pollution and resource usage from transporting, etc. It may _cost_ the company more, but only producing what can be sold will be strictly less polluting.
    • imperfect_blue 8mo ago
      There's no way to perfectly forecast demand; all things equal I'd prefer that companies overproduce and we live in an age of plenty with a bit of waste (which companies are already incentivized to avoid), rather than face shortages in goods.