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Comment by BenoitEssiambre | Hacker News Reader

It's hard not to be cynical reading these discussions. Avoiding plastic or recycling it does near zero for the environment. Reducing travelling, reducing goods consumption, reducing construction, reusing things and protecting land are the real effective solutions but require sacrifice. Yet people refuse to go beyond performing ridiculous plastic straw theatre.

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Is this comment supposed to be attached to "machine learning in uk financial services"?

No. I'm sorry. I don't know what happened.

Well this is not the way. We don't want or need to improve environment by 'reducing travel, consumption or construction' i.e. destroying the economy and going back to stone age. Goal is to optimize resource use to improve environment while INCREASING all of that steadily.

Hypothetically, if you had to choose, which would you choose — the economy or the environment?

Those aren't mutually exclusive.

Learn to read.

Of course economy. Environment is just one of the externalities. Also, environmental issues are mostly just a pretext for geopolitics right? Say, real deal about global warming isn't saving some turtles or some Pacific islands from sinking, but crippling bad guys such as Russians and Arabs who export oil, right? It's a way of putting liberals, unknowable to them, in the same directions as conservatives are.

Ah, glad to know you think global warming is solely a partisan issue.

Not at all. I believe in reality of global warming. But, political reality is different from physical reality: it exists in political reality and in public perception only for the reasons i cited. Otherwise, ofc it would still exist, but we wouldn't know or care.

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