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> The alternative to this system would incur mass death for most of the population on the planet Maybe we could produce less plastic waste, like action figures

> The alternative to this system would incur mass death for most of the population on the planet Maybe we could produce less plastic waste, like action figures and other toy junk? Children need/benefit from having toys, sure, but do we need mountains of options, many of which are destined for the landfill without ever leaving their packaging? There's a lot of areas we could cut back on excess without necessarily giving up the life saving medications, air conditioning and high standard of living. Maybe just maybe?

audunw 3mo ago
We don’t need any of those things, but they’re in no way the source of our problems anyway, and eliminating them will do nothing of significance to solve the problems. So it’s pointless to discuss. We have so many plastic toys because plastic is cheap. Plastic is cheap because the feedstocks fall out, practically for free, from the refining of fuel that we absolutely need for society to function at the scale that provides us a healthy and comfortable standard of living. So the main problem we need to solve is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The rest will follow. When the economies of scale for oil and gas extraction go away, the balance will massively tip in the favour of renewable solutions. We will still make lots of useless plastic toys though. But perhaps it’ll be bio plastics and perhaps the scale will diminish a bit as the price increases. And I think they’ll end up in trash burning facilities with district heating rather than landfills. That’s already the trend in Northern Europe, and they’ve started importing trash to burn. Yeah, recycle first. But eventually everything degrades and should be burned.
noduerme 3mo ago
Obviously we can improve the world by having laws and customs that reduce wasteful consumption. I was talking about the alternative to a free market system dictated by people's wants, and the alternative to a natural progression of growth. The alternative is North Korea. It's a system that murders as many people as necessary to maintain what a few people in privileged positions would consider an equilibrium. Whether that's done in the name of self-sustaining, or in the name of ecology, or in the name of keeping bloodlines pure or in the name of preventing overpopulation, it's irrelevant. The alternative reality in which one person's idea of what's good for the world overrides millions of people's means of providing for their families is, by definition, a state of murder and ultimately a state of cannibalism. It is not the salvation state of balance that some fools think it would be.
- zkmon 3mo ago
  > I was talking about the alternative to a free market system dictated by people's wants, and the alternative to a natural progression of growth. The alternative is North Korea None of that is true. Capitalism is not dictated by people's wants, and it's not a natural progression. It's just another new method being tried out for the last few decades or a couple of centuries, which is a tiny time period. Business goals are driven by greed, with utter disregard to good of humanity. Fossil fuels and AI are good examples of this.

audunw 3mo ago

We don’t need any of those things, but they’re in no way the source of our problems anyway, and eliminating them will do nothing of significance to solve the problems. So it’s pointless to discuss. We have so many plastic toys because plastic is cheap. Plastic is cheap because the feedstocks fall out, practically for free, from the refining of fuel that we absolutely need for society to function at the scale that provides us a healthy and comfortable standard of living. So the main problem we need to solve is to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The rest will follow. When the economies of scale for oil and gas extraction go away, the balance will massively tip in the favour of renewable solutions. We will still make lots of useless plastic toys though. But perhaps it’ll be bio plastics and perhaps the scale will diminish a bit as the price increases. And I think they’ll end up in trash burning facilities with district heating rather than landfills. That’s already the trend in Northern Europe, and they’ve started importing trash to burn. Yeah, recycle first. But eventually everything degrades and should be burned.

noduerme 3mo ago

Obviously we can improve the world by having laws and customs that reduce wasteful consumption. I was talking about the alternative to a free market system dictated by people's wants, and the alternative to a natural progression of growth. The alternative is North Korea. It's a system that murders as many people as necessary to maintain what a few people in privileged positions would consider an equilibrium. Whether that's done in the name of self-sustaining, or in the name of ecology, or in the name of keeping bloodlines pure or in the name of preventing overpopulation, it's irrelevant. The alternative reality in which one person's idea of what's good for the world overrides millions of people's means of providing for their families is, by definition, a state of murder and ultimately a state of cannibalism. It is not the salvation state of balance that some fools think it would be.

zkmon 3mo ago
> I was talking about the alternative to a free market system dictated by people's wants, and the alternative to a natural progression of growth. The alternative is North Korea None of that is true. Capitalism is not dictated by people's wants, and it's not a natural progression. It's just another new method being tried out for the last few decades or a couple of centuries, which is a tiny time period. Business goals are driven by greed, with utter disregard to good of humanity. Fossil fuels and AI are good examples of this.