300 million lbs of fireworks and 2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.

  • Xantar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    Yup, that could also be said about music, cinema and any other form of art/entertainment. 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.

    • rodbiren@midwest.social
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • illi@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        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.

          • illi@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            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.

            • ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de
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              5 months ago

              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.

      • A_Union_of_Kobolds@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • ramble81@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          Except fireworks has literally been a part of civilization for 1,000 plus years, so I don’t see that changing anytime soon.

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          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.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        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.

      • Xantar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        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.

    • Grayox@lemmy.mlOP
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      5 months ago

      Yeah but none of them are anywhere near as ephemeral as a firework display.

      • Xantar@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        5 months ago

        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 ?

  • blazera@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • blazera@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Money was used to pay workers to extract, refine, and process resources. Absolutely none of the money is gone.

        • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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          5 months ago

          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. yeah, if we spent half our GDP on fireworks every year, we would still have the same amount of money on paper but absolutely everything else would cost far more.

  • YaBoyMax@programming.dev
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • qaz@lemmy.world
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      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 lemmy.world’s servers use renewable energy.

      However, I don’t think fireworks are a priority in terms of pollution especially when it comes to politics.

      • baatliwala@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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.

      • quafeinum@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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.

  • FellowEnt@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • person420@lemmynsfw.com
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • Grayox@lemmy.mlOP
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        5 months ago

        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.

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • Ergo42@discuss.online
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            5 months ago

            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.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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      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.

    • Lightor@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

        • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          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.

          • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            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.

  • StrawberryPigtails@lemmy.sdf.org
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    5 months ago

    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.

  • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    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.

  • neomachino@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • Modern_medicine_isnt@lemmy.world
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      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.

    • deafboy@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

  • Feathercrown@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Several other people feel this way and you’re all wrong. Is good food wasted because after you eat it it’s gone? Are vacations stupid because once it’s over nothing has materially changed? No? So why are fireworks pointless simply because they’re temporary?

    • WeebLife@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The major difference between fireworks and those other examples, is that fireworks directly affect others around you. In my city, people go out and buy the big fireworks that are illegal here because they go into the sky and make lots of sparks and they shoot them off in the city. Fireworks majorly affect all the animals in a pretty wide radius. Which is why I hate them, because the people have no respect for how much they are traumatizing the animals or how much they are affecting their neighbors. And don’t forget they are a fire hazard.

      This becomes more of an argument about peoples’ irresponsible use of fireworks rather just the use of fireworks at this point.

  • Novamdomum@kbin.run
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    5 months ago

    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.

    • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        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.

    • thisfro@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      Fair enough, but why does every single person need their own firework? That connection is conpletely lost then

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        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.

      • protist@mander.xyz
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        5 months ago

        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

  • daniskarma@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    5 months ago

    I’m ok with professional firework shows.

    I’m not ok for every kid in the neighborhood having access to little explosives.

  • Swedneck@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    i think fireworks are nice but they’re to a large degree something from a different age and at this point we should only really be using smaller volcano-style ones, and like holy shit we have drone technology, why aren’t drone displays standard in any vaguely populated area?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lnBmYAiduo
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyEWcfn7rT0

    look at this shit, it’s so cool! can we please push for this to be the standard?