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Comment by kitwalker12 | Hacker News Reader

I recently saw Daniel Craig on the Late Show. He's the "United Nations Global Advocate for the Elimination of Mines and Explosive Hazards"

UNMAS (http://www.mineaction.org/unmas) helps with war clean-up in the few cases where peace eventually breaks out as apart from the dead-bodies, mines & IEDs are also painful remnants

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The countries and companies that make mines found in war zones should be required to clean them up.

How do you plan to force them to do that clean up work? In particular, Iraqi Insurgents were planting roadside bombs and land-mines throughout the totality of the 2000 through 2010 decade.

We can't even get them to surrender properly (they just transformed into ISIS). How do you expect us to "force" them to stop planting IEDs?

Iraqi IEDs are a tiny drop in the bucket that is 'deployed landmines'. Most landmines are mass-produced by munitions companies. Start there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Treaty

It has already started. But not everyone is on board with this. So now what? We go to war about it?

You're totally right, it's too hard. And companies in first world countries are completely unaffected by law, so lobbying your representative would have zero effect. As would public awareness campaigns to help push the issue politically. And god knows that countries should only pressure each other for important things, like forcing extensions to copyrights for movies and music.

Let's just give up and go home, since apparently the only option is war.

"Well everything is fucked so we might as well not bother."

Oh we do "something" about it. But I just gotta point out that "forcing other people to do something" is typically a non-scalable solution. As soon as someone disagrees with you, you become deadlocked.

Its not enough to just say "force those other guys to clean it up". If you actually want to say that, you need an action plan (ie: how you plan to force those other guys to do stuff). If you're saying "pass a law", we can pass a law of course, but its not going to affect other countries.

This is a United Nations issue, and it needs to be solved globally.

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