KnitWit @ KnitWit @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It isn’t a different problem set though, just a different flavor of the same issue: over-consumption and overexploitation. It is also something that can be addressed through legislation, as the article this discussion originated from is an article about how legislating bag bans is effective.

People do need to take responsibility. That’s the whole issue. People at the bottom do not take responsibility, they do not push for people above them to take responsibility, and they will actively curtail measures to improve things because ‘it’s the big guys we need to worry about.’ No, we all need to make efforts. And in the example of bags, I am asking you to make a trivial change to your lifestyle, that you would all but forget about once you had made the change.

Let me try to use a different example. Cigarette butts on the ground are fucking gross right? Major ecological concern as well. Nobody should be throwing cigarette butts on the ground, I think we can all agree. You throw a cigarette butt on the ground? No big deal, coal plants are worse. Same energy.

I appreciate the multiple attempts to diffuse with the bag handles, and I fully agree that we have to draw the line somewhere. My issue is that if people are unwilling to do something a simple as bringing a bag into a grocery store, then there is absolutely zero chance that we will change the more difficult but more necessary problems. How are you going to convince Bezos to reduce his footprint when you can’t even get people to stop using a straw? Who the fuck even uses straws? How am I going to convince people to buy less, when everytime they want to buy something, they buy a thing to carry they thing they want to buy? (Insert xzibit meme)

Yes, it is something as dumb as bags, and even if we did switch it may not have much of an impact. But so what? Far more important to me is the mere fact that bringing in a bag to carry items in is too much of a hurdle for people to help the planet? Doomed I say.

Bringing in a bag to store that I know I am going to be bringing items out of is not self-flagellation. Refusing to bring a bag into a store because I’ll just use a single use item instead is shitty behavior. It’s that simple. Minor shitty behavior? Sure. If you’re cool with that behavior, well obviously this isn’t going to change that opinion. It is a trivial behavior for you to change.

I live in a state that has banned the use of them, so no, most people I know don’t use them. The people that said the same thing as you complained for all of a month before they acclimated to a simple fucking task. All parts of our system are fucked, but if it is a trivial matter to unfuck one small part of the system, then we should do that. And then fix the next trivial fucking thing that people say they would rather spend a dollar per bag on and argue for twelve hours about whether or not chopping just 14 million trees per year on top of the other billion trees we chop is all that bad.

This is exactly why I say I have no faith in humanity, your dollar a bag comment says more to how fucked we are than anything. People absolutely will not change. They will literally hurt themselves just so they can hurt the environment because ‘haha, I forget sometimes so I don’t want to try.’ Even when presented with the evidence they ask for on the environmental impacts, they will say ‘worse than I expected, but not that bad when everything else is shit.’ I’m tired of everything being shit. And I’m tired of people saying, oh it’s a just a little shit. Quit accepting shit people. And don’t buy starbucks, because it’s shit coffee from a shit company.

Again, I want to point out this is a minor change that you can make that if everyone did, would have a positive impact in this world. Huge impact, maybe not. But when our entire society is built to destroy the planet that we require for life, we need to remove as many cuts as possible.

I hope this doesn’t come across as rude, but conversations like this one are the reason that I have zero faith in humanity. It’s easy to point fingers as the obvious evil we have going on in the world, which clearly has more of a direct threat. But even if we were somehow able to rid the world of the truly despicable, we’d still be left with a world full of ‘its more of an impact than I thought, but still not so bad’ people. And our planet cannot continue on like that. It absolutely amazes me how many people (including good friends of mine) who think the same way. And there is no way to change this mindset, its as ingrained as any of the bigotry and hate on the other side. We just have no chance against this.

My quick search keeps popping up the statistic of 14 million trees for 10 billion paper bags used annually in the US, but in 1999 so I’m sure that is higher. You’ve also got to consider the high energy usage and large environmental concerns of paper mills. I don’t know if you’ve ever been near a paper mill, but they’re known for their air pollution, they make entire towns stink.

This stat taken from http://www.forestecologynetwork.org/climate_change/plastic_or_paper.html

ENERGY TO PRODUCE BAG ORIGINALLY (BTUs) Safeway Plastic Bags: 594 BTUs Safeway Paper Bags: 2511 BTUs (Source: 1989 Plastic Recycling Directory, Society of Plastics Industry.)

Yeah, that’s why plastic shouldn’t be an option. Paper bag tax for last resort only in my opinion.

Damn, that hurts me to read haha. Like, I get the absent mindedness thing, but it’s a ridiculously easy step that if all 330 million people in the US (I assume that is also where you are from, sorry if I’m wrong) were to stop then it would actually have a tangible effect on resource consumption. Obviously that isn’t going to solve all of our problems, but the whole idea of ‘whatever, this is slightly more convenient’ should instead be ‘eh, it’s not that much of a hassle.’ I think that’s fully the fault of 100 years of that mindset being pushed down our throats in the form of CONSUME, but we’ve got to break free of it if there’s ever going to be a chance.

Reusable bags. Bonus that you can find something that checks all your boxes and its all yours. Paper bags should be last resort and they should charge 10c to discourage their use.

Well, perhaps I’m just wrong then. But for me, I see twenty tears of MS buying up studios, sitting on them, and closing them with some sort of excuse about changed plans. It’s always the same though, studio performs well, gets bought, makes no games or games out of their genre, and closes. Call it whatever you want, I call it business as usual.

It’s how these large corporations operate though. Ignore, buy, or bury, that’s how they all operate. They may have ‘plans’ to use the studio, but for them if all they get are the assets and a less of a threat from the old ip, then that’s enough. I don’t think it makes any sense either, but it also absolutely something microsoft has done for years in their larger business model.

The amount of 1 day accounts blasting that one ‘retruth’ yesterday.. my blocklist grew, that’s for sure.

They know exactly what they are doing, they are reducing competition.

Uh, my time to shine? Back in grad school I used to clone paddlefish (gynogenesis) by heat shocking freshly fertilized paddlefish eggs at the right time so that the egg is activated but the males dna is never incorporated. Paddlefish and sturgeon, while looking totally different, are actually fairly closely related (they had a common ancestor like 200 mya) and so the chemical reactions take place to get everything going. But they are also distinct enough that if the timing isn’t right and the father’s dna accidentally gets incorporated, they create these hybrids. The hybrids are important because its the only way to identify males, which this whole process is designed to exclude. The reason you’d want to do this is the production of caviar in which males are of no value and cannot be easily identified for years.

Now, I was in Kentucky, and we were breeding paddlefish (the colbert report had a segment on ‘kentucky tuna’ that the economics professor terribly tried to promote if you can find it) for the non-existent paddlefish caviar market as opposed to breeding sturgeon like they did in this study, but its the same general principle at play. The inly real difference is that unlike these hybrids that could apparently grow to juvenile or adult status, the paddlefish mother hybrids were very much dead within a week of hatching and were obviously deformed at hatching.

Time for some of them to publicly do so. Ireland maybe?

I’m definitely pessimistic about all of this as well. I think we’re on the same page on a lot of things, or at least in the same chapter. The tearing down is absolutely an issue, and one I am afraid is never going to be solved. I think some of that stems from the fact that the democratic party is comprised of two groups that really don’t want the same thing. So while they both agree that they are against what the conservatives are doing, they are constantly taking potshots at each other.

This gets exacerbated by the fact that the upper levels of the DNC are fully removed from even the liberal side of the party, and are fully captured by the moneyed interests. This means that while the Republican party can move forward as a monolith, on the other side you never get a true fortified position on anything. Which is further degraded because there are always enough captured dems to reach across the aisle when it serves the moneyed interests. This also works the other way, and stops any real progressive momentum so that even if the left succeeds, they will be hamstrung by their own party. Look for this to happen to Zoran Mamdani if NYC succeeds in electing him.

It all gets amplified by the media, who are fully corporate here. Kind of going back to your point in the first post about liberals also being an echo chamber, I definitely see it as well. You’ll get your ‘watch this space’ folks who fall into the same trap, an example to me is all this TACO nonsense. He doesn’t chicken out, he’s a bullshitter and there is a huge difference. And when you call a narcissist a chicken while he’s deciding whether or not he should start an international conflict for now reason, well maybe you are part of the problem. (Obviously not you haha, just the general ‘you’). I do believe that this group is a big reason we can’t have nice things though, because they are also the one’s who will see that Bill Clinton endorsed Cuomo and somehow thing all of that is a good thing.

As for the ‘joe rogan of the left’ I keep hearing about, that’s a pass for me. My problem with him is not that he is conservative. It’s that he is a piece of shit that will push anything to make a dollar. And the money will absolutely pay a POS to spread their propaganda. Anyone on the left doing so will absolutely fall into that trap, it just may take longer for everyone to catch on. And to get to that level of market saturation, you absolutely need the money to be pushing you.

So, where do we go from here? Personally, I’m a doomer. I do my best not to tear things down or spread ‘thought-terminating cliches’ when all of this horror shows up, but I honestly don’t see a way forward from this. More and more I’m coming to realize this is what people want. Obviously not all of them, but like with the brainwashing thing, these people are doing it to themselves. While options may be limited, no one is actually forcing anyone to consume all of this. So why do we do it? (Hopefully all of that didn’t bounce around too much)

When the tariffs first started up a few months ago, I heard multiple conservatives who had never met each claim that ‘yeah these tariffs hurt, but it’s about respect, and the world needs to learn to respect us again.’ So no, I do not think they are more informed than me, just that they learn talking points through rote memorization and repetition (the only thing taught by our US education system these days).

Does it get oversimplified, sure. But most of that is because I don’t feel like writing an entire essay explaining the nuance of how these people think that they are actually saving our economy by removing all of these ‘freeloaders and jobstealers’ while in reality they are being fucking racists.

Those top comments linking to posts are the talking points being disseminated. That’s the response you’ll get whenever you try to push against their narrative. If you look into most of them, they are just grievance politics and often rely on partial information to force the wrong conclusion. If you ever manage to get past these talking points with real people, that’s when the conversation ends.

These people cannot be changed. I am tired of engaging with them or about them as n the premise that ‘we just need to figure out where they are coming from.’ They may not realize they are bigots, but that sure as fuck is what motivates them.

It’s because they are all being brainwashed by conservative media. Seeds get planted early so that when the time comes, they can think to themselves ‘this has been a long time coming.’ Traveling all around the country and interacting with conservatives is wild. People three thousand miles apart will go through the exact same talking points like its lockstep for them. I think people really underestimate how much conservative media drills itself into the thought-space of people who consume it.

I swear, this country has one party of ‘no regerts’ and one party of ‘in hindsight it was the wrong choice.’ Really great that you see the mistake, but you keep making it.

I’m just filling in the details, no opinion as I don’t personally use it (or facebook, etc).