Comment by toomuchtodo

Comment by toomuchtodo a day ago

54 replies

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Greenpeace used to drop boulders into the ocean to prevent bottom trawling circa 2021-2022. Unsure if they still do. Fairly straightforward to solve for if you’re willing to drop chunks of rock (granite, non reactive) or concrete in the ocean at the right spots.

Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though. Hard to take the selfish out of the human, so you have to engineer systems accordingly.

https://www.greenpeace.org.uk/news/live-greenpeace-boulders-...

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-the-marin...

pyrale 16 hours ago

> Bans are nice, destructive force against adversaries works better though.

The ocean is large, and the effort required to cover significant areas in boulders is ridiculously high.

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  • hermitcrab 14 hours ago

    Just the possibility of boulders that might destroy your very expensive dredge might be enough.

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    • chatmasta 13 hours ago

      Won’t they be visible on sonar?

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      • hermitcrab 13 hours ago

        Not sure. But even if they were, do you want to have to survey the path of your dredge before every trawl?

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        • chatmasta 11 hours ago

          I’d assume it’s pretty standard practice already. Your average Florida Man with a boat has a sonar showing the surface before dropping anchor or throwing fishing line… surely industrial fishing groups would know the area before they start exploiting it. But maybe that’s hoping too much!

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noisy_boy 21 hours ago

I think it would be a great PR idea for a billionaire to buy a few old ships and use them to drop rocks over the most popular/vulnerable fishing grounds. What happened to rich people who were all not evil?

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  • borski 5 hours ago

    They still exist. You just don’t hear about them in the news, because good news doesn’t sell ads.

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  • TeMPOraL 17 hours ago

    > What happened to rich people who were all not evil?

    Public opinion drove them crazy and turned them evil anyways.

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  • closewith 16 hours ago

    The truth is that only the evil remain ultra-rich as the rest use their money in ways that depletes there fortunes.

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  • Grimblewald 21 hours ago

    How do you think billionaires became billionaires? How can you extract a billion dollars of wealth in your life time, or even several generations? Certainly not by creating value. Almost certainly by destroying something else, privatising the profits and socialising the losses. E.g. mining, commercial fishing. Etc.

    We will never see billionairs act as a force for good because the current system only allows for evil to create such a level of private capital. I would go as far as to argue such wealth disparity is not natural and is only possible through severe perversion of the natural order.

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    • ds_ 18 hours ago

      Not sure why you're being downvoted, because you're absolutely right.

      Reply View 13 replies
      • adastra22 17 hours ago

        The current top-10 billionaires on Forbes' list all got rich by creating value, though some like Larry Ellison certainly did both.

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    • koonsolo 17 hours ago

      I would say billionaires create value just like any other entrepreneur, but billionaires take their profitability to the extreme. So in that sense, I agree they start to lean over to exploitation.

      It's up to political structures and laws to keep billionaires under control.

      Since wealth naturally accumulates to those who already have wealth and power, I would say it's a natural process. Look at history and how many elites had huge power and wealth. Just compare the richest man now, Musk, with Augustus Caesar, Genghis Khan, etc... . Musk is a nobody.

      It's not up to the billionaires to keep themselves under control, it's up to us to create political structures to keep it under control. Which we are already doing (some countries better than others), and we could still improve.

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    • ninetyninenine 20 hours ago

      It is natural. Unfairness is the basis of civilization.

      In order to mobilize a group of humans for the common good they must be artificially incentivized to do it as the tragedy of the commons usually prevents people from doing these things collectively. Look up the tragedy of the commons.

      But in order for a group of humans to be incentivized like that there must exist an authority with enough wealth to incentivize humans to work collectively like that. That means one authority needs to get unfairly rich. And additionally there must be incentive itself for such an authority to conduct that action in itself. So basically there must be some unfair distribution of wealth for any of this to happen AND there must exist strategies that can be exploited for someone to gain that wealth.

      I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories about why certain places developed into advanced civilizations or not literally relied on whether or not the currency of the habitat could be used to accumulate wealth. For example fruits in Hawaii didn’t last long enough for someone to become a billionaire but grain in Europe does.

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      • marcus_holmes 18 hours ago

        This is very "theory X" - the theory that people only work or do anything if someone in authority forces them to.

        The other theory, "Theory Y" says that people work because that's what people do, and the function of authority is more about guidance and removal of blockages.

        I'm a Theory Y believer, and believe that people work together to improve their lives without needing an authority or any compulsion. I believe that the incentive for people to work together for the common good, is the common good. That alone is enough incentive. I believe that authority tends to enrich itself and work against the common good. Less authority is better.

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      • sho 18 hours ago

        Has it occurred to you that the narrative you're repeating here is awfully convenient for the elite? Don't question their wealth - don't you know civilization itself depends on it!

        > I’m not making this shit up. Literally in anthropology one of the theories

        It's a theory, yes. And there's another theory which says that's all BS invented by the ruling classes over time - the church and kings back in the day, the billionaires these days - to justify their otherwise quite unjustifiable positions, cloak them in mumbo-jumbo about natural law or what not, with the goal of discouraging questioning of the status quo.

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      • croes 19 hours ago

        Unfairness maybe be natural but billionaires are artificial.

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  • ljsprague 6 hours ago

    Bill Gates promotes vaccination which is in some ways the opposite of "protecting nature".

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  • GuinansEyebrows 7 hours ago

    > What happened to rich people who were all not evil?

    probably the same thing that happened to dragons and unicorns :) can anything happen to something that has never existed?

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  • easyThrowaway 16 hours ago

    In a terminally capitalistic age (or whatever we should call the last 30 years, we are actually "capitalistic" the same way the URSS was "communist" in the '80s) being rich and being ethical are mutually exclusive.

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