Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
We need to transition from a culture that implicitly believes that infinite waste is not a problem. According to a story I read in the NYT this morning, more than 10 million tons of office furniture in the United States end up in a landfill every year. Ten million tons! And it's all just handled by people doing their jobs, nobody able to stop the cogs and ask if we've lost our minds.
The guy who invented Keurig, with its disposable plastic pods, later said that he regretted it after seeing how much waste it created. I think if we had a healthy culture, Keurig couldn't have been invented as it was because the inventor would've foreseen the waste and found it totally a nonstarter.
Bingo.
When you stop treating negative externalities as though they don't exist, you can start to properly account for their cost in economic models. A lot of industries exist that wouldn't if they were to have to actually pay to remediate the problems they cause rather than getting to offload the problem onto the greater community.