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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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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.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.
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.
We can come up with that laundry list of environmental impacts for a lot of things. Should we start with the electronic device you used to type your comment?
If you’re thinking to argue that your phone is essential while fireworks are mere entertainment, all I can say to you is “bread and roses.”
Are you saying “Whatabout…”?
No, you’re reaching for that word to try to categorically dismiss an argument you have no response to.
“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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About 41,000 Americans die in fatal car accidents, with another 289,000 injured in 2022 alone, from distracted driving. If we are going to be banning dangerous things, heavy consumer cars and trucks should probably be right up there.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-deaths-2023-early-estimates
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I know, but now that we have a chance to shit on cars I’m running with it.
Did you know that in Barcelona, the public transportation can…
No, but as a general rule in society we think that explosives are dangerous things, yet we happily sell them to teenagers who blow out stuff or light them horizontally pointed at other people.
I don’t like fireworks, but when it’s done by professionals I at least know that no one will be intentionally hurt by it. I don’t think they should be entirely banned, but I think that they should be regulated, anything even remotely as dangerous as most fireworks already is.
I swear I didn’t give that kid the M80.
I don’t believe fireworks should be retailed to the public in any form. They’re a very different story from an aeriel display put on by professionals.
I have a dog who would agree. If he could speak English (he’s from Mexico).
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.
That’s fucking hilarious. What is that from?
Anchorman
Ohhh. Well shit now I might watch that.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
This guy maths
Of course they are a waste of money, and the plastic packaging is incredibly bad for the environment. And they are fun and I will buy them again next year.
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.
The impact on nature goes beyond climate gases. At least here in Germany fireworks produce 1% of the yearly pm10 particulates. That’s not nothing.
It’s not nothing, but 1% goes to show just how much is no5 made by the giant 1 day full of sky explosions, and how likely 70-80% is from transport and energy sector.
Eliminating all fireworks from earth and banning them tomorrow would have a near 0 impact on anything, and be completely erased if a coal plant runs an extra day or two.
Assuming there would be a single source responsible for the remaining 99% of yearly pm10 particulates, let’s say a giant coal power plant, then it would take 4 days of it running to have the same impact as fireworks.
https://londonair.org.uk/LondonAir/Guide/Fireworks.aspx
Inner-city long-term effects, right there.
Giant ceremonial bonfires /= fireworks, for one. Tons of random shit can go into bonfires beyond just wood, the wood is of incredibly differing quality and chemical treatments, and bonfires by their nature a low to the ground and intended to last for at minimum an hour or they’re not worth making.
This is not the same discussion as fireworks. It’s also still not long term effects, as the site warns of poor air quality in the days that follow the giant bonfires if there is no wind or weather, but it does dissipate either way, not that this event gives everyone cancer or something.
The question was about fireworks. And yea, fireworks are an afterthought still. Compared to Guy Fawkes Night maybe even more of an afterthought. Guy Fawkes Night and 4th of July still hardly register on the global scale of CO2 and GHG outputs.
I was pointing out that fireworks were being used in a way that lowers the local air pollution for residents, for days, not just the evening. You can say ‘barely registered’ but I’ve shown you a clear case of it very much registering in terms of effects on local populous.
Bonfires are not fireworks. Guy Fawkes Night is infamously filled with tons of bonfires.
Yeah but no one ever actually does that.
Love them. There are tons on unnecessary things we do.
Exactly. Movies, the Internet, traveling.
As a life form, the 4 key aspects of life are:
1). Eat 2). Sleep 3). Defecate 4). Reproduce
Literally everything else you do is irrelevant or secondary to the core mission of life.
Reproduction is not nor has it ever been proven as a core mission of life and shouldn’t exist in that list. It has nothing to do with your core basis of life. It’s only to continue a life line or a cell decision reliant on environment. But it is not a core requirement in life.
It may be continuing a line but it is not proven as a core ‘mission’ of anything. It’s a bias decision and much of that relies on environment in which the cell lives in. It’s as much a ‘core mission’ as the effort of immortality should an environmental condition not be met. Some species continue their strain of life by cloning and some if even just one has achieved immortality and has no necessary core mission to reproduce.
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.
Yeah, the places that do it every night like Disneyland should get in some real trouble for it.
if it’s once a year. If we did it every night…
Around here (MidWest city), fireworks go off every night for a month before, and then a month after the fourth. And I don’t mean a small amount, either. More like some version of the Vietnam War. It’s nuts.
Basically, most of summer is devoted to fireworks play, with the fourth being a deluxe version of the “fun.”
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.
