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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did you miss the “Ignoring the obvious nuance” ?
Then what value does the comparison have if you nullify the main point of comparing them?
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.
Yeah but none of them are anywhere near as ephemeral as a firework display.
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 ?
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.
It’s a nihilist, Donny!
There’s nothing to be afraid of.
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.
BS
Fireworks are a cool spectacle, imagine never seeing a fireworks show. Also the money isnt gone, its just changed hands.
They probably shouldnt be how they are now though, where every individual family wants to fire their own, thats a waste and really obnoxious when its in the middle of neighborhoods. Keep it to one centralized show, away from residential areas, and everyone gets to watch a bigger show.
3/4 of the fun is doing it yourself.
For you. Its obnoxious for others.
Technically it’s 2.999…/4 of the fun
So technically 3 again?
I think I will fight that math forever. Getting infinitely closer does not count as actually getting there.
Fireworks are a cool spectacle, imagine never seeing a fireworks show.
Completely agree!
Also the money isnt gone, its just changed hands.
Not with this though. A portion of the money has changed hands, the portion that goes to paying workers and investors. Another portion of the money was used to extract, refine, and process something that just burned up and no longer exists.
While money as an abstraction is made up, what it represents, the underlying value of society’s resources, is not, and that is unfortunately finite. So it’s also important to consider opportunity cost. That money could have been spent on other things, when you spend it on something wasteful and unnecessary that means it can’t be spent on more useful or productive things.
All that being said, I still think fireworks are rad and worth it, but they are a waste.
Money was used to pay workers to extract, refine, and process resources. Absolutely none of the money is gone.
Wait, are we not supposed to tie $100 bills to our mortars?
Cost saving tip! Use $20 bills and cut your holiday expenses in half!
It’s just not the same…
The money itself? Sure. But that’s not what people talk about when they talk about money, they are usually referring to what the money represents, i.e. resources, which were all burnt up and used to create that fire work when they could have gone to something else.
i.e. if we spent some huge proportion of our money on fireworks every year, we would still have the same amount of money on paper in the economy, but absolutely everything else would cost far more. From our actual lived perspective we would be poorer.
Thats just not how money works. We did spend a huge amount of our money on fireworks, things didnt become more expensive.
That is absolutely just how money works, if that same money had gone to say, healthcare companies instead of fireworks companies, we would have the same amount of paper money, and we wouldn’t have fireworks, but we’d have lower healthcare costs since we already paid some of them.
You’re bringing up a lot of examples that literally happen in reality and do not have the results you are claiming. Healthcare companies have been both steadily receiving more money and increasing their prices.
Assuming you’re talking about American healthcare companies, thats because you have a broken nonsensical healthcare system filled with middlemen who will suck up profits.
That has nothing to do with the concept of opportunity cost. Pick a different industry, like agriculture / food then. If you spend $20 on food every month instead of fireworks, then feeding yourself the rest of the food you need is $20 cheaper.
That’s like saying vacations or going to the movies are a waste. It’s entertainment and it stays in part as a memory. By your argument the only thing you should purchase is a large decorative rock for the front yard, because it will last longer than you do.
Money isn’t gone, resources are gone.
Money was literally invented to be an abstraction of resources. When people talk about money they usually mean resources.
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My uncle came back from Vietnam with really bad PTSD (among other problems like alcoholism). Every fourth he would spend the whole day/night in the basement with the curtains drawn (to block out the flashes) and headphones on with the sound turned all the way up (to block out the sounds).
He would also take my cousins to buy fireworks every year.
I don’t mean to minimize your struggle, I just thought the juxtaposition was interesting.
I hope you could work through your struggles. I’m happy to say he was able to. He was able to quit drinking and minimize the effects of his PTSD. By the end of his life he was out there watching us shoot off the fireworks.
Were you drafted?
edit: by the time I got to this comment, I was thinking of this thread as being about “Should fireworks be banned?”
I’d be very opposed to a volunteer soldier arguing people’s freedoms should be taken away on account of their PTSD. I’m not sorry about that.
But I am sorry that I didn’t read this carefully enough to notice this person wasn’t arguing for a ban at all. Just saying their opinion on fireworks.
The military is the only form of upward mobility for large swaths of the population, they are chewed up and spit out by the machine, after being indoctrinated in nationalist propaganda from the time they were able to form memories. Veterans are members of the Prolitariat and should be educated about the system that abused them, not mocked and rediculed for being a victim of it. Yes America has committed mass atrocities, but almost every service member who signed up was completely unaware of that at the time of their enlistment.
It’s not about atrocities at all. It’s a question of whether kids understand that they are signing up for a job that involves using explosives to kill people. It’s kinda hard ignore that aspect of what the military is, no matter how sheltered or propagandized one is. As the propaganda has grown, so has the ability of literally any child to google “what do militaries do?”
Being aware of the atrocities might require someone to have been paying attention at some point in school, but knowing that you’re gonna face bombs and killing in the military, that takes even less awareness.
Gotta tell ya: The atrocities and stress of war doesn’t really seem real until you’re hunkered down in a cab because the truck in front of you took an IED, to use just one scenario. I could throw a few more your way if you like.
Having said that, and here’s the irony, not everyone in the military is “gonna face bombs and killing”. There are huge swaths whose job it is to do anything under the sun that doesn’t involve firing any form of weaponry. Chances are you’d have had to been paying attention at some point in school to know this, or something.
War is shit. The military has good and bad people, and often shit practices. For some people it’s one of the only ways, in the U.S. at least, to stand even a fleeting chance of doing more than becoming a low-rung manager at Walmart.
Do people get to choose whether they face “bombs and shit” in the military? Like can a person say “I don’t want a position where I can get PTSD”?
Having said that, and here’s the irony, not everyone in the military is “gonna face bombs and killing”. There are huge swaths whose job it is to do anything under the sun that doesn’t involve firing any form of weaponry. Chances are you’d have had to been paying attention at some point in school to know this, or something.
Or, I’d have to be aware people can’t just check “No PTSD-inducing positions please”. Or if they can, they are signing up just as equally at the moment they either check or don’t check the box. My point stands. You get PTSD from military service, you signed up for it unless you were drafted.
Now whether an 18 year old is wise enough to be capable of making that decision is one and the same as their being capable of making the decision to join up. If you think an 18 year old is not old enough to sacrifice his mental health for his country, then why not argue to raise the recruiting age?
A low-rung manager at wal-mart
I’ve never held a managerial position. I don’t see myself as entitled to any particular level in the managerial command structure. I don’t think my rights are being violated without any kind of guaranteed path up to there.
I dunno man. I’ve got nothing but compassion and gratitude for vets. But you don’t get to claim the shit is something that just happens to people. Adults join up, take an oath, stone cold sober.
Again, if you think those people aren’t old enough, I’d probably agree with you. I’d be all for raising the age to 30, if you wanted to push for that.
But for whatever age it is, that’s the age because ir’s the age at which it’s no longer a thing happening to someone.
Like if it was “military or die”, that’s a different thing. But if it’s “military or no upper management jobs for you” it just doesn’t move me.
And that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing we have a volunteer army. It’s good for everybody.
The human brain is really good at keeping two conflicting ideals “harmonized”. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to fall to the romanization of the military while also recognizing the killing part of it.
It’s easy to fall to propaganda. Is it the recipients fault? Is it the sender of propagandas fault?
I would argue both to some degree, but mostly I will blame the sender because they are generally older and better at rational thinking when compared to younger people. (I’m grossly generalizing here. I know younger people who can think more critically than some older generations).
Summary: by the time they realize they don’t want to be part of it, it’s too late and they have to serve their time.
So if you blame the older men, would you raise the minimum recruiting age? If so, to what?
No. I don’t that would be a good solution. Maybe create a law that the military has to give informed information. The intention would be to prevent propaganda in the first place. Then age or wisdom would be less impactful because education on the horrors of war would be more universal.
Dude have you seen an American public education?
America is the hero throughout all of history class.
You and I went to different history classes clearly
The long and the short of it is that we live in a society of different people who enjoy different things. Nearly everything is a trade off of some sort. Some people value the enjoyment they get from fireworks more than others. Some hate it. That is true of litterally everything. I strongly dislike the keeping of pets on anything smaller than a farm. But I don’t tell people they shouldn’t have pets. Being part of a society means living with a mix of things you like and don’t. And the society determines what is so commonly disliked that it should be not allowed by the law. Now many will say the fireworks are illegal in a lot of places. Yes so is speeding. Our system has three parts, the laws, the enforcement, and the penalties. Enforcement of fireworks laws are often pretty lax, same with speeding. And the penalties are almost always purely monetary. So society has said it doesn’t really care that much about fireworks. And the large number of people who use them and who show up to fireworks shows backs that up.
I have a dog who would agree. If he could speak English (he’s from Mexico).
That’s fucking hilarious. What is that from?
I’m old.
Anchorman
Ohhh. Well shit now I might watch that.
My girl only speaks limited English. She is currently in a panic attack and we’re about 8 miles away from the fireworks. She agrees.
Honest question: have you considered getting him desensitized to the sound? It’s totally doable; hunters teach their dogs to not be afraid of the bang from their guns after all.
Highly unlikely. He was heavily abused and clearly has trauma, as any kind of sudden noise makes him jump.
Fireworks are a celebration of peace. They’re made from the same ingredients as bullets but they make something beautiful instead of death. I’ve always found this a profoundly meaningful thing.
instead of death
Unless you count birds that abandon their nests, and other animals that flee their homes. Or the heavy metals and other chemicals that are added to the environment. Or the significant increases in particulate matter in the air.
“they make something beautiful instead of death” Agreed, but your neighbor’s kid’s fingers might not agree after that M-80
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Can’t you say the same about virtually any form of entertainment? The electricity that runs the server you used to post this doesn’t come from nowhere.
I don’t think this is a fair comparison. Fireworks launch a lot of nanoparticles, metals, and other harmful chemicals in the sky and directly worsen air quality while many Lemmy servers (
lemmy.worldincluded) use renewable energy.I think a fairer comparison in entertainment would be sport. On paper it doesn’t produce anything to better humanity, there’s a ridiculous amount of fuel used by teams and fans to travel especially when it comes to something like a World Cup because it’s on a global scale.
In reality, the world absolutely needs it because that’s what people use to entertain themselves. People can’t be mindless drones fucking about; they won’t just read books all the time or go camping every day. There’s something primal that just comes out when it comes to sport and most people can’t live without it.
The materials to make the servers don’t come from nowhere. And the processes to get those materials are often very polluting.
Bruh we dont have to blow up servers everytime we post and all the materials they are made of are valuable recyclable.
You would be surprised how often parts need to be replaced in a data center. There is a lot more than severs in there to make all this happen. Then you need the device to read it on, and the infrastructure to get the bits to you… a lot of plastic in all that which won’t break down for a very line time too.
That’s a good point
It’s a totally valid point. Both waste your time and money to distract for a brief moment. You can use all the renewables you want but in the end the consumer is the product and the product needs you to keep consuming it to justify its existence. We need pyrotechnics to excercise ghost as much as we need another season of that marveldisneyfox show to survive. Or the steam summersale to make us think we are saving money by buying more games. Unsub, unfollow, smash the bellbutton and block shit more often.
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.
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.
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.
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
A local, professional display uses about 80lb of gunpowder (NEQ). When combusted this will produce about 40lb of CO2. To put this in context, most new internal combustion engines will produce about 190gm of CO2 per mile.
Therefore a single car would need to travel 88 miles to emit the equivalent amount of CO2 of your typical fireworks display. If you consider the a round trip distance for the entire audience to watch a single fireworks display, gunpowder is a fraction of the CO2 footprint.
The problem is pollution, not GHG emissions. Particles, NOx, Plastic debris…
On top of that your local fauna is not at all prepared for the nosie and light pollution.
Again, probably more particles, NOx, Plastic debris etc. from the audience.
Any football game with a flyover is multiple times more polluting.
i am quite certain that people do not emit particles or NOx like this. In particular nobody is just exhaling heavy metals.
Here is a map for New Years in Germany with a nice slider. Particle concentration increases up to 1000x the base-value of that day (which already includes people setting off fireworks earlier)
https://gis.uba.de/website/silvester/
Unless it is normal for people at football games to ignite pyrotechniques, or they all smoke 5 packs of cigarettes each during the game, there is nothing that would make a comparable pollution.
I think he’s talking about everyone driving to the game and idling in the parking lot in addition to the jets
Again looking at the map of Germany as well as the article from the BBC stating an increase of Microplastic by over 1000% compared to the baseline shows that fireworks are a very strong additional pollutant.
People in the US drive their cars all the time. During rush hour more cars are emitting in traffic jams than are driving to a football match. Yet we see these huge spikes in pollution when there is fireworks.
Think about it: Everything form a firewokr that does not turn into CO2 will stay dispersed in the air or fall down as debris. This is most of it, as the op pointed out himself the GHGs to be only a small part. Meanwhile for cars the vast vast vast majority of its emissions in quantitative terms are CO2 emissions, with particles, NOX and Microplastics being much less. They also pose a massive problem, but because of hundreds of millions of cars on the road every day.
i am quite certain that people do not emit particles or NOx like this.
Car tyres, naked flames, trash, waste disposal.
In particular nobody is just exhaling heavy metals.
Yeah. I can’t shoehorn heavy metals into this scenario. Soda cans?
Do people take their waste to a football match and burn it there?
This guy maths
Nice.
Now do the calculation that includes all of the direct suffering to humans, pets, and wild life, and then quantify all of the solid and liqueous waste associated with generation, transportation, and utilization, the latter including all of the waste associated with spectators attending the phenomenon.
What I think we’ll all discover is that private transportation and the lack of robust recycling infrastructure and waste recovery the world over sucks. We should all do something about it.
Reddit forces me to use their app and Lemmy forces me to recognize the bad in everything. The internet is basically trash now.
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.
Love them. There are tons on unnecessary things we do.
It’s only a waste if you don’t enjoy it. Just like some people think painting a bunch of nonsensical images is a waste of time and money but you might thoroughly enjoy it
I wouldn’t say it’s ridiculous if it’s once a year. If we did it every night…yeah. But people spend more money on a lot dumber stuff, like expensive purses and giant luxury trucks.
I think they’re amazing. The chemistry of colored flame has fascinated me since I was young, and there’s nothing quite like being close to explosions. If I had more time and lived in the US I’d be a hobby pyrotechnician.
I hate fireworks and always have. I get people like them, but I wish they didn’t go all night from every direction. If each area had a central park/spot where they did a big firework show for everyone for a little bit I wouldn’t mind it as much, but now every street has they’re own fireworks that go off randomly through the night.
Also something I don’t think a lot of people think about. In my old neighborhood a lot of us had varying forms on PTSD and couldn’t deal with the loud bangs. Holidays where fireworks were heavy were treated as a ceasefire/peace day for the most part since basically everyone who had been involved in a shooting was a mess, which was almost everyone. Others took the chance to disrespect that and use the fireworks as cover, they weren’t treated well.
I’m sure most veterans feel the same or worse.
It’s not just dogs who lose it at fireworks.
I’ll disagree on the “most veterans” part. The people who I know who fire off the most and biggest fireworks are vets. They seem to be more comfortable around explosives, or just more used to it. I don’t know which.
wish they didn’t go all night from every direction
Sooo, what you really hate are your neighbors. Not the fireworks :D
Welcome to the misanthropy club. We have cookies. But we’re not sharing.
I look forward to missing you at next months meeting.
