300 million lbs of fireworks and 2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.
Yup, that could also be said about music, cinema and any other form of art/entertainment/distraction. It doesn’t produce anything “useful”, but again, what is “useful” varies from one person to another. Some would say the waste of money is the point. You blow fireworks because you can.
Ultimately nothing matters because there is no true meaning of life, so anything that pulls you away from the dark nothingness of existence is good to take.
Eh. Half of that 2.7 billion being put into research into a disease like Myalgic Enceph. (ME) could probably significantly improve the quality of life of 80 million people who have one of the worlds most disabling diseases.
Yeah but none of them are anywhere near as ephemeral as a firework display.
Something like a sunset, a blizzard, or a thunderstorm are the more closely comparable natural equivalent. They’re special because they’re short-lived or rare.
A theater performance is equally ephemeral. Or a concert. Or meeting your favorite celebrity. Or a good meal.
That doesn’t make them more/less worth it.
If your criteria for worthiness is persistence then is a nice looking meal as worth it as equally nutritious goop ?
It’s a nihilist, Donny!
There’s nothing to be afraid of.
BS
I can’t think of other art forms that blow off the hands of so many people, wake up my daughter in terror at 11PM, and make both dogs and veterans suffer for an extended period of time. I’m fine with the large group spectacle that is planned and controlled. What I can’t stand is the widespread uncontrollable nonsense of just anyone buying them and setting them off at any hour on the 4th. Law enforcement can do absolutely nothing about it. I’m just gonna have to deal with it. I’m just surprised we haven’t collectively shifted to something less harmful.
You make a good point. Which can also be made about any form of freedom as soon as it encroaches on someone else’s comfort.
Ignoring the obvious nuance, a loud concert or a horror movie are also not something law enforcement will do anything against but it could terrorize people as well.
If a loud concert or horror movie popped up next door and rattled the houses of an entire neighborhood from 10pm to 2am, I’m pretty sure law enforcement would do something about it.
it would bother you that much even only being once a year? really?
that’s wild
If only it were once a year. This year, people started on the 28th of fucking June, and didn’t stop until the goddamn 6th.
If it actually was contained to the 4th, I would be fine with it, but getting woken up by an explosion every night at 1:30am for a week straight, it gets real old, real fast.
Ah. In my area it was like 3 days but I also don’t get woken up by them so i can’t really understand.
Did you miss the “Ignoring the obvious nuance” ?
Then what value does the comparison have if you nullify the main point of comparing them?
What I can’t stand is the widespread uncontrollable nonsense of just anyone buying them and setting them off at any hour on the 4th. Law enforcement can do absolutely nothing about it.
Do you understand why this is our way of celebrating Independence Day? Fireworks are a loud, visible, symbol and example of freedom from authority.
You mean freedom from british authority, we still have authority.
We also have the freedom to self govern. Laws are on the books to prevent firework usage in my state, it is simply ignored one night a year because it turns out mass lawbreaking is hard to handle. I don’t have the right to conduct a parade in the middle of whichever street I want whenever I want. I participate in the social contract of sacrificing absolute freedom for mutual gain because I live in a country and am not a sovereign citizen claiming complete supremacy over all others. My taxes pay for a small and well moderated fireworks show at a designated location conducted by a local government for which I had a hand in voting for. My freedom is louder, collective, voted for, and more sensible. Not all freedom must be focused soley on the individual.
Not just dogs or other pets, but also farm and wild animals. And it may not only lead to suffering, but also lead to their deaths.
A local icecream place that also had goats and ducks was fucking setting them off right over the goat pen. They were sprinting from shelter to shelter inbetween explosions.
I don’t plan on going back there now. It’s a shame because it’s one of the better shops nearby.
Really?
Yep. With wild animals it may result in the running away in fear without thought and get lost or injured which may result in their death. This technically applies to all animals.
Another aspect which affects all is heart attack from the shock.
I guess ban vehicles of any sort, then. I’d imagine animals dying from fireworks are nearly 0. I’d imagine ones dead from traveling are a thousand an hour in the US.
Great whataboutism. I assume you mean roadkill? That makes one relatively small chance of directly affecting (not necessarily killing) one animal in wider area. One firework has pretty much guaranteed chance of affecting all animals in wide area.
The utility of the firework is also zero compared to a vehicle. In a vehicle you have a chancenof affecting the outcome of potential collision. You can drive more safely when the chance of encountering animals is higher.
And about the nearly 0 chance of death - I don’tbhave statistics but have some examples of pets dying due to shock. There was this village where fireworks got banned because every year a couple of horses died on New Years. A couple of years back there was really eye opening picture (I think from Rome) where a whole square was littered by dead pigeons morning after New Years.
And less not forgey the stress and suffering caused to countless others that don’t die. Discounting them is like saying tortuting is ok because people usually survive it.
And if you don’t care about animals, think about the PTSD of war veterans or other people living through war. Plus the polution and smoke is not good for the health, not mentioning the lost fingers that strain health care for that day.
Is a few pretty explosions really worth others suffering (especially when there are now ways to have light shows without or with considerably less negative effects)?
That’s what I’m saying. One day we’ll look back in amazement that we let the public buy fireworks willy-nilly. Even the “it was good enough for me!” crowd of angry old-timers will have to go “Well, yeah, people blowed they hands off. And it bothered my vet’ren son and the neighbor’s dogs somethin fierce. They’re alright. It’s prolly fer the best.”
Now, I fully admit later today I will be running around in a country field with my friends shooting bottle rockets at each other. But we won’t be bothering SOMEONE ELSE, and that’s my thing.
As someone who generally is in favor of regulating dangerous things, fireworks are fine as-is. They’re basically limited to one night a year, the damage is not very extreme, and the people getting hurt are by and large the people choosing to endanger themselves.
Except fireworks has literally been a part of civilization for 1,000 plus years, so I don’t see that changing anytime soon.
So have horses
One day we’ll look back in amazement that we let people have sex willy nilly and bond with whomever they like on a whim, forming friendships and families without central oversight.
But that doesn’t mean that future we’ll be looking back from in amazement won’t be a dystopian nightmare, or that our perspective won’t be warped by even more decades of infantilization.
I am not worried about their environmental impact, but I hate seeing my dog spending the evening shaking because of the explosions. Even sedatives aren’t enough. If you could have fireworks without the big booms, I wouldn’t care, but the big booms scare the shit out of a lot of animals.
They’re worth it when it’s a sanctioned display, and they’ve spent enough money to make it worthwhile.
I’ll never understand why people set them off in their own garden. Fireworks aren’t cheap, and unless you spend some proper money you’re basically just setting off fireworks for a dick-swinging contest with your neighbourhood.
no i think they are beautiful
A community of ultra redditors must of course be the fun police :(
Nah friend, I spend time, bandwidth, electricity, etc., talking to strangers and morons on the internet, fireworks give me much more bang for my buck.
Fireworks are like. 000000000000001% of a concern for GHG.
You shut down a coal plant for 1 days because you switched to solar temporarily and you probably offset the output.
2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.
… you know that’s not how money works right?
Yes they are. Somebody extracted the ressources. Somebody processed them into materials. Now someone put them together into the pyrotechniques and finally someone set it off.
All of this labor and capital usage went into creating a short display of pretty lights and bangs, of which afterwards nothing but smoke and memories remain. This is the purest consumption in the economic sense.
Compare that with people using that labor to produce cars instead. Those cars take years before needing renewal and they can be used productively, so they are investments in the economic sense.
Finally lets take clothes, while also consumption they address an immediate human need and are reuseable for some time, so while they are also consumption they are quite different form fireworks.
Do food next and don’t skimp on the poo talk
Food is also consumption. But without food people die, so this consumption directly contributes to keeping the value of the economy up by keeping the workforce alive.
As for the poo safely removing it in WWTPs also costs more money than what can be recovered in energy or hopefully phosphate in the near future. Also the capital investments are significant and as they age and need replacement this value is also gone.
However the alternative is people dying of Cholera and other shitty diseases en masse, so both the investments as well as the expenditures are well spent.
Just so we’re clear for anybody else reading since they chose to ignore the easy refutation lol.
That the money is still present in the economy and provides jobs to hundreds of thousands of people in the supply chain both through sales, materials production, assembly, and labor, entertainment, and local economy boons from festivals.
I also wouldn’t mind the 💩 talk lol.
What represents the value of money? What you can buy with it. What determines what you can buy with it? The total capital stock available and the services offered through labor.
This part of the capital stock is gone. Literally into smoke.
Money is not some abstract independent entity. Its value is directly linked to the real production of the real economy.
Yes, but the point of the person you responded to is that work for the sake of work is also a waste.
May as well all just suicide and mulch ourselves so we don’t do anything without purpose.
Just to be clear, I was just saying that the point was ignored, not that I agree.
Although your response isn’t good either, you can advocate for more efficiency so people get to do more rewarding work, such as arts and crafts. Part of these arts and crafts can also be fireworks.
I don’t think the work that’s done to create and use fireworks is without purpose, in the end it’s a celebration and that’s purpose in and of itself.
I think people should get to do them! I don’t enjoy them, but whatever. If we could make louder noises, flashes and colors with environmentally friendly fireworks, that’d be awesome. I think the noise, flash and color of fireworks is what other people enjoy, but we all suffer the poor air quality afterwards. So I just want something that will make other people get what they want out of fireworks while not damaging the air quality
Actually Cities generally do not consolidate funds to have big enough shows, just a bunch of tiny embarrassing shitty shows.
Waste of money? No more so than any other form of entertainment that is temporary.
Environmentally, yeah…they’re pretty bad. Air pollution is a big issue. Some birds get killed when they run into things because they can’t see very well after being scared off by the fireworks. Any large human event is environmentally bad, like a sporting event.
We generate literal tons of plastic and other human waste when we gather for mass entertainment.
Yeah but at the end of the day we’re handing out explosives for people to play with, even kids. Just feels like it’s not the best form of celebration.
Yes. Injury and fires are compounding factors, no denying that.
We already know sterile environments make people allergic.
I am actually concerned about what kind of behavioral “allergies” will arise from a society with no danger. It is not a natural state and it is not something we should be experimenting with lightly.
Not a natural state? Lots of things humans do aren’t natural. Hell you could say playing with explosives is not a natural state. Danger in the wild makes you survive and balance needs vs risk. There is no need to play with explosives and if you need to see a kid lose a few fingers to know that then you’ll face many problems in life. I mean should we let kids play in traffic to learn about danger?
sterile environments make people allergic.
Where’s your science in this?
No allergist or dermatologist I ever met would ever make that claim.
The results are from patient to patient. There’s a whole subset of sensitivities to chemical makeup of the food and another set of sensitivities to the environment the food was grown in. Food and products have dramatically changed and this also creates a lot of reactions. Mass production of food introduced a lot of irritants which we notice now. Then you have a subset of sensitivities that are entirely based on changes in the body with hormone. And then there’s family history.
There isn’t a standard answer with allergies.
We already know what happens.
Anti-vax
Pro-war
Pro-authoritarianism
Anti-education
Etc.
Once you’ve divorced yourself completely from the dangers of watching family and people around you die from preventable diseases all the time, the horrors of actually having to live through your city destroyed and people you know be devastated by war, the crushing oppression and greed of authoritarian regimes, your education controlled specifically to prevent you from you getting any ideas about real freedoms, that’s what you get when you remove real danger from society.
But I think you probably meant something more mundane like kids will start making graffiti or something.
Well, I meant more like the dangers of nature.
Having your whole city get destroyed is an unnatural thing that comes with advanced civilization and armies. I’m totally fine with eliminating that kind of “danger” from the world.
But the danger of riding a motorcycle, or lighting firecrackers, climbing a tree, fighting a beaver, whatever, those are dangers on the level that we evolved to deal with.
Just like in the analogy with sterility, I’m fine with making environments free of bio weapons and meat industry goop full of mega bacteria and the kinds of biological threats that civilization itself creates. But getting rid of the base load of strange micro critters, that yes do pose some danger of sickness and even death, turns out to be taking it too far because it makes people more likely to have allergies and autoimmune problems.
Explosives are actually predictable. Way more predictable than people or animals, for instance. A person can protect themselves when handling explosives by being careful.
But these are just my theories about what the mechanism might be. At the higher level, by analogy it’s just there’s a system we have, that has evolved to protect us, but it’s evolved to learn from encounters with the thing it’s designed to protect us from. If you give ir no encounters, it goes haywire.
I don’t know what the mechanism might be exactly, but I worry our ability to navigate danger might itself be a system that can go haywire.
Ok, I follow. I think we’re already there. Plenty of people are doing stupid things that are dangerous, either out of ignorance, lack of forethought, or nowadays for clout on social media. Pretty sure people have been doing dumb things for a long time, but they were more lethal in the past.
Okay so we generate literal tons of waste. There are also literally hundreds of millions of us, so “tons of waste” would happen if we gathered to eat brownies distributed on napkins.
Well that makes it all right then, doesn’t it?
Yep, typical what-about-ism
No
Fireworks are a funny one because you’re completely right and also not completely right I think. It’s one of those unresolvable dichotomies of life where two opposing ideas are both true at the same time. I’ve often thought fireworks were the most obvious way to set fire to a lot of money that could be better used somewhere else. However, what is also true is that humans have a deep need to celebrate and to come together in large groups and have shared experiences. Fireworks are perfect for that. You can put a million people together and launch a massive firework display and they will all immediately connect with each other through the shared experience of going “Oooooohh” and “Aaaaaaahh” :) Fireworks are awesome and also, personally I feel they remind me that there are bigger things out there than the daily grind of existence.
humans have a deep need to celebrate and to come together in large groups and have shared experiences
Isn’t that what parades are for?
personally I feel they remind me that there are bigger things out there than the daily grind of existence
There are other ways to get that. The universe is huge, look up on a quiet night with little light pollution.
Isn’t that what parades are for?
But parades are boring
There are other ways to get that. The universe is huge, look up on a quiet night with little light pollution.
People need novelty in life, if it’s there every day it’s not special.
That’s fair, I just think there are ways to get that besides blowing things up once a year, especially given that fireworks produce a lot of unnecessary waste and pollution in the environment.
I just think there are ways to get that besides blowing things up once a year
I mean, I think it’s good that people get to safely experience explosions, something most people probably wouldn’t experience in their lives otherwise.
I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily safe, ERs are full of people who almost blew off their hand or other appendages around 4th of July.
Stairs are relatively safe, tens of thousands of people still die from them every year.
Only one of those things is completely optional.
“Your existential fulfillment is wrong, do it my way instead.”
It’s a huge environmental hazard too.
Isn’t that what parades are for?
Kinda. Parades are also for showing off nuclear warheads and how precisely your soldiers can march.
Fireworks are a more non centralized version of it. Everyone can participate in the fireworks, not just stand there and watch.
Also they burst in air, giving them better visibility than something that just flows down the street in front of you.
Everyone can participate in the fireworks, not just stand there and watch.
Don’t we just stand there when we watch fireworks too 🤣
Fair enough, but why does every single person need their own firework? That connection is conpletely lost then
Every single person needs the opportunity to get their own firework and contribute. We’ve never had a rule like “everyone needs their own firework”.
Everyone needs the option. That is important. It’s not important that everyone takes it, but it’s important everyone is given the option.
I just don’t get it. It terrifies people’s pets, and the wildlife outside, it’s incredibly noisy (meaning you can’t get away from it if you live near someone doing it), and it produces tons of waste and pollution. Can’t we just have a big BBQ like we do the rest of the year when we celebrate stuff?
Everyone needs the option.
Why is this important?
I obviously can’t speak for everyone, but whenever we do fireworks on the 4th or New Year’s, it’s with a group of a solid 15-30 people. I don’t think we’d ever set off fireworks by ourselves
Yup, we have a solid 30 people put together a show. It catches on fire every year and it is awesome!
No.
I like them. The big shows are a rare form of artistic expression. And even the stuff you can buy, is a form of fun you cannot get anywhere else.
Drone shows are boring. You can watch them on a screen and lose none of the experience. I mean, the first time you see it it’s interesting, but then you remember it’s just a bunch of drones, and your going to be stuck in traffic just so you can see a pixilated coke can or something. There’s nothing unique or special about the experience I feel. Unlike fireworks, while they can look fine on a screen (if recorded properly) but you can see the difference on someone’s face when you’re there. You see it, feel it, and smell it. It makes sense why humans have been doing this for hundreds of years.
