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by onion2k 169 days ago
It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste.

It's only waste if it's being discarded. If someone wants to keep it and cherish it, even if they're not playing it, then it's not waste.

5 comments

At some point in the future, the owner will pass and their children will have a mass of plastic to manage.

Perhaps their children will cherish it for generations, or perhaps their children will have different musical tastes from their great great great grandpa and the plastic ends up in a landfill, forever un-played.

At that point it becomes waste. That doesn't mean it's waste now.
in the grand scheme of things, this is a very small amount of plastic waste, and as far as resources go, one of the less scarce ones. at some point, the cost of the hand wringing to avoid waste is more of a drag on society than the actual wasted material itself.
It's all waste eventually.
Then buy it used! That's one of the advantages of physical objects!
> It’s a lot of plastic. A lot of waste.

And yet again customer demand and financial gain supercede environmental concerns. There’s no hope for a better, less consumer-oriented culture if even the indie creatives among us acknowledge the problem yet succumb to it.

Less consumer-oriented culture demands brainwashing, totalitarianism and terror, to force people to not do things they naturally want to, when there is a capability for doing that (if there's no capability, a nation will be physically overwhelmed by other nations and cease to exist/replaced)...
>> Less consumer-oriented culture demands brainwashing

It simply requires putting a stop to the constant brainwashing campaigns for inducing demand.

>> do things they naturally want to

collecting Stanley tumblers is not a "natural" tendency.

Well... if we had a constant stream of inventions so that people will always have things they'd love to have but struggle to afford, then there won't be a need to induce demand. But we don't have nearly enough: people have more spare cash than inventions they want, are produced every year.

If we don't induce demand by brainwashing, what will people do? They will keep inflating bubbles buying up stocks (making economy even more unstable, and eventually undermining themselves), houses (making sure new generations can't buy theirs, depressing birth rates and giving rise to political radicalism), and crypto (which is absolute insanity). People need to be given ways to spend their spare cash, and nudged to do it as opposed to "investing" that cash (which is, in the true meanin of this word, mostly impossible because there aren't enough inventions to invest into).

This is a pretty cynical take. It's also possible people would find meaningful things to do with their money.
Stanley tumblers, no, but even magpies like collecting rocks and buttons and things. Seeing a checkmark on an online digital widget just really doesn't scratch the same itch.
> It simply requires putting a stop to the constant brainwashing campaigns for inducing demand.

Unfortunately, there are C-suite level roles for this so it will never stop.

Is this some libertarian/randian take?

There are many things people naturally want to do that we regulate and steer away from via many different means (smoking bans, traffic laws, etc.).

You do realize we don't live in an objectivist society, right?

Technically they could get some paper stating “you own one vinyl” and we would use less plastic and storage (and we’d get an alternative monetary system perhaps).