[butchkass]

People in a few decades will think we were crazy for packaging 100% of our food in plastic, the same way we think putting asbestos everywhere was crazy back then.

The amount of strokes and aneurysms that are gonna happen in 20~50 years is gonna be truly fantastic.

[lm28469]

Try to wipe your mind and walk in a supermarket as if you've never been in one, nothing makes sense whatsoever. Same for roads in the cities, endless streams of 2000kg+ hunk of steel, plastic and glass, 95% of them transport about 80kg of human, 95% of the time they're just parked taking space for no reason.

Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane, humans are very adaptable and if you're born in this mess it just seems normal

[macspoofing]

>Most things we designed are just so fucking inefficient and borderline insane,

Are they though? We're quite good (and dare I say it: 'efficient') at feeding, housing and transporting huge populations. Almost all the inefficiencies you mentioned are preference and/or comfort based. Society is not separated from laws of physics and economics. Everything is balanced against the cost of those services - when/if costs go up, you do tend to see corresponding change, typically in efficiency increase (e.g. smaller more efficient cars as gas prices go up).

>endless streams of 2000kg+ hunk of steel, plastic and glass, 95% of them transport about 80kg of human, 95% of the time they're just parked taking space for no reason.

That's true ... kind of ... there is a cost for car ownership and use that is different in different regions. If you're in New York, you're probably not driving to work.

The human part of car ownership is freedom. It's not ultra efficient to own a car, but there is something about it that is liberating for many people of all economic statuses. Most likely, in the future, car ownership will go away for the vast majority of people, and it will be sad when it does.

[globular-toast]

> The human part of car ownership is freedom.

I'm sure the car marketing department agrees with you. Unfortunately, the reality for most people is not about freedom, it's about necessity. A car is simply the only way to get around; there are no other options. Freedom can't exist without choice. If you actually observe daily car users you'll find they are angry and frustrated. I find these daily frustrations occupy a vastly disproportionate space in their heads as well. How many times have you heard about the asshole on the road today? Or how bad the traffic was? These are signs that things aren't right, but people just can't see a way around it. If you realised something you were eating was unpleasant you'd just stop eating it, but people aren't able to stop driving.

You're clinging to the past where maybe the top 10% of society could own a car. Those people had freedom. Nowadays those people have private jets.

[userbinator]

You're clinging to the past where maybe the top 10% of society could own a car.

You mean the early 20th century? In the mid-20th century far more than 10% of the population owned a car.

On the other hand you appear to have swallowed the WEF propaganda about increasing density to factory-farm levels and making the population truly own nothing, because then they'll be easier to observe and control. That's not freedom.

[Ekaros]

Generally living in massive empty spaces. On which energy is spend to heat and cool... And these empty spaces increase distances that we must travel...

[youniverse]

Anyone up for raising some money, going to some state that we can convince to give us a permit for a new town a little outside some big city. Or we can just like get support of a smaller town so we have some base to start from, building a ton of housing and infra isn't easy. But maybe in 5 years with robots it will be?? Minimal cars, preferably only for utilies. We can have just bike lanes and maybe dedicated electric scooter lanes. Everyone gets fresh organic food delivered to them every couple days, wrapped in no plastic. No supermarkets in town. Just an app you can order things with and some biker will bring it to you or something lol. Just have some general stores for immediate things people need.

There would be so much demand for this I feel like from people who could fund this experiment. Give the rest of the world a model to follow.

[swatcoder]

Yes, that's essentially what's now called an "intentional community" and is a timeless migration and settlement practice that continues around the world today.

They usually start as modest settlements of like-minded people, drawing in more members as they thrive and bleeding off members if/when politics and drama spoil the relationships among the people that live in them. Many collapse, others transform and sustain, and others eventually integrate back into a world that moves closer to them. Along the way, in their isolation and because of their strict rejection of prevailing norms, they naturally get kind of incestuous and weird in terms of ideology, practice, etc.

While you're free to try to start a new one on your own, if you're inspired to do so, you can also probably find some that are more or less practicing the kind of lifestyle you have mind. But it probably won't be an exact match for your dream, as no two people have quite the same vision of escape or prosperity, which is something that would apply to your hypothetical community as well.

[sympil]

It is the era of extreme inefficiency and waste. We are local min/max machines and need government to direct us to the global min/max but it doesn’t do that.

[macspoofing]

>We are local min/max machines and need government to direct us to the global min/max but it doesn’t do that.

What is an example of that, because I governments do a reasonable of moving towards a global min/max. Where we haven't gone towards a global max/min is because it's actually hard. In many cases, the global min/max either isn't well defined, or if it is, you have to contend with existing infrastructure and huge costs to get there. For example, upgrading the electric grid to support massive amount of solar and wind power, is a multi-decade/multi-trillion dollar initiative (and this assumes solar and wind is even a 'global max/min' for carbon reduction .. and it isn't clear it is) ...

[sympil]

Vehicles in the U.S. should be much smaller and town/cities should be much more dense and walkable.

[short_sells_poo]

That's because the at best, the government can be a penalty condition in the objective function, and recently it's effect has been almost completely eclipsed by the near term gains. I believe what we'd need is education. The more educated the masses are, the more likely it is that they vote for governments that have the long term interests in mind, and the more likely it is that the government itself will then prevent swings to short term thinking.

There are many feedback loops in the system, and we are so far down the short term maximization route that it'll be mighty difficult to swing it back.

[pocketarc]

> I believe what we'd need is education.

> The more educated the masses are, the more likely it is that they vote for governments that have the long term interests in mind

Consider: Globally, the masses are more and better educated than at any other point in history. More people than ever have a higher-level education, and people have access to more information than ever before, more easily than ever before, and for free! There has never been a better time to be a thinking human, we're surrounded by knowledge and education.

If that's still not enough, it might be worth considering that maybe it's not an education thing. Maybe it really is just human nature to think short term, and not some bad government maximization route. Consider how that short-term thinking shows up everywhere: In people's diets, in people's elected governments, in people's finances, and so on.

Maybe it's not something we can just wish away with education. Maybe it's just... humans being human.

You can -dictate- long-term thinking and long-term policies. But from a democratic perspective, the candidate that promises short-term wins will obviously beat the candidate that says "endure now for long-term gain".

[short_sells_poo]

Fair points, but perhaps let's look at it closer. Perhaps education has to be commensurate to people's access to information and the ability of power blocks to project influence. I agree that we are surrounded by knowledge and education, but we are also surrounded by disinformation, propaganda, marketing, adtech, etc...

I agree that people have never been as educated as today, but it was also much more difficult to project power over distances. Today, a fool in power can travel to the other side of the world in half a day and bully countries there into submission. More to the point, the fool doesn't even need to travel, they can do the bullying over a zoom call instantaneously. An extremely connected world with a vast number of feedback loops would need a proportionally more educated populace with much more robust foresight, no?

For what it's worth, I agree with your fundamental thesis that a lot of these issues are basic human nature, and unless that changes, anything we do will be highly ineffective. But we have to start somewhere, right? And it's much easier to sell a populist agenda to an uneducated populace who can only think forward 8 hours.

Consider this: people have been known to vote for increased taxes to pay for various public good projects. It can be done. Perhaps not necessarily on very large scales, because it's difficult to feel unity with people a 1000 miles away who are completely foreign to local concerns, but perhaps that's an argument for direct democracy. But direct democracy requires a population who is educated - at least in civil matters - and can put the long term goals in front of the short term pain.

[cowfriend]

> the government can be a penalty condition in the objective function, and recently it's effect has been almost completely eclipsed by the near term gains.

You are forgetting about the influence of government subsidies. What would the housing market be like if home mortgage interest payments were not, and had never been deductible? Think back to the 70s, when mortgages had double-digit rates.

Would the US be swamped in HFCS, would we be producing ethanol, were it not for subsidies?

I agree with you on the importance of education. However, incentives matter, and government can incentivize both to the positive and negative.

[cheschire]

The success of future education efforts is highly dependent on variables directly related to the success of past education efforts. We're talking multi-generational efforts necessary to overcome the inertia.

Consider the ongoing racism and marginalism against a large portion of the population and the resistance it has to ongoing public education efforts.

Consider the topic of evolution. Or vaccinations.

Sure, we should ensure that those ready to learn are provided with the opportunity to do so, but we have to accept that not everyone is ready, and that is where government comes in.

[BenFranklin100]

Devils advocate here: food has been packaged in plastics for decades and plastic containers have been around longer than that. If plastics were as damaging as you claim, wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

[butchkass]

That’a fair point and I might be overpanicking. I could argue that it might be happening and we just don’t know about it, but from what I gathered, yes strokes are on the rise, but experts seem to believe it’s related to blood pressure. Although there probably weren’t as much microplastics when the last generation was born ; it’s now ubiquitous to the point of being found in the blood of fetuses. If gen Z and Alpha don’t die from aneurysms at 45, then yeah, I guess we could assume it isn’t dangerous.

I’m just tired of this kind of things : conglomerates are putting X everywhere, and then we have to prove that X is indeed dangerous, when they should be the ones proving that it isn’t. All the while they’re lobbying billions of dollars to try and make the research as slow as possible so that they can get every last cent of profit before X gets banned.

[myrmidon]

> If gen Z and Alpha don’t die from aneurysms at 45, then yeah, I guess we could assume it isn’t dangerous.

I think this is still overly alarmist. Plastic production basically started really ramping up in the 1950s in industrialized nations-- thats 75 years ago.

Yes, you can argue that exposure might have increased significantly since (+ bioaccumulation etc.), but excess mortality should've been roughly proportional, and I'd argue that it's implausible for "plastic lethality" to stay hidden for so long (I fully agree that it's not pretty that the stuff is everywhere nowadays, but I think "next generation is all gonna die from this before they get 50" is just not reasonable to assume, and we arguably cause much bigger problems for the next generations already anyway).

> I’m just tired of this kind of things : conglomerates are putting X everywhere, and then we have to prove that X is indeed dangerous, when they should be the ones proving that it isn’t.

I think this is a luxury problem-- you might be very willing to forego all remotely risky innovations/technologies now-- but you are rich compared to a person 75 years ago (and we reaped lots of benefits from that risk already!).

De-risking everything might look attractive in hindsight, but it is unclear what you would have lost to such a policy: Possibly a big chunk of modern material science, electronics, communication technology, ...

It is easy to downplay all that today, and pretend we never really wanted smartphones anyway, but I'm skeptical that the average person a hundred years ago would have seen this in the same way.

[swatcoder]

> wouldn’t we have already seen this in the epidemiology?

What's your control group for a study that might confidently determine that one way or another? Where are food-plastics held off but everything else about modernity and its potential blights adopted?

Ultimately, there are numerous terrible trends in health and wellness that we see accumulate over the course of the 20th century, consistently echoed in developing communities as they join into modern practices. Some causes of death go way down, some experience of luxury goes way up, but misery and previously uncommon forms chronic illness seem sweep across each and every such community.

We don't have a good, scientific handle on what the specific causes are because there are so many simultaneous radical changes that are introduced into a community as it "modernizes", and while we can sort of flail about and speculate about individual mechanisms and test them individually, as in this study, it's consistently a limited and almost blind search among the innumerable unknown unknowns that we don't have the capability, finances, or will to explore at population scale or over decades-long periods of time.

We'll presumably catch up on some of our horrifically dumb mistakes, as the GP noted for things like asbestos, and plastics may or may not prove to be among them, but right now we mostly just know that we face huge new problems and most of us will probably be gone by the time society learns what it did to cause many of them.

[myrmidon]

Very simplified-- looking at incidents over time is a good sanity check.

If you expect microplastics to cause problems with blood flow in brains, you would expect stroke rates to go up with "microplastics exposure".

But they don't; so either the effect is nonexistent, small enough to be drowned by noise or completely compensated by another product of progress, and, frankly, all those scenarios sound rather unconcerning to me compared to well known environmental problems (e.g. atmospheric CO2).

You are absolutely right that there are a plethora of other negative effects to look at, but I will trust the young scientists yearning for a Nature publication to do their job, and will focus my political vote and personal efforts on know big problems until science shows this to be one as well.

[fallinditch]

Yes, I wondered this myself. I guess it's simply that it's taken a long time for the amount of micro plastics to become problematic. Some types of micro plastics come from disintegration of plastic materials, which takes time.

[trgn]

maybe it's more the accumulation. less the plastic wrap rubbing off on the fruit, but the plastic wrapper getting thrown away and ending up breaking apart in the water.

[9283409232]

It does make me wonder how many strokes or aneurysms in otherwise healthy people can be attributed to plastics. We don't have the data for that but maybe random aneurysms aren't so random after all?

[awestroke]

People in a few decades may have too much microplastics in their brain for such thoughts

[ImHereToVote]

We didn't. The experts did.

[bilbo0s]

Not even the experts, the MBAs did. Then the JDs did the lobbying to make sure government agencies were powerless to stop them.

In reality, there was not a single "expert" in the room. In fact, if you were "expert" in any field other than business or law, you were very likely removed as a candidate to even be one of the people chosen to be in the room long ago.