Americans' love of billiards paved the way for synthetic plastics

Re:Americans' love of billiards paved the way for synthetic ... by sudobash1 on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @02:31PM (#45596651)

I was reflecting on this a week ago when discussing how ubiquitous plastic is now. There are rightfully many health and environmental concerns about plastic, but it's nice to remember many of the positive impacts it has had. If celluloid had not been invented when it was, humans would have absolutely hunted elephants to extinction for something as trivial as pool balls.

I like the promotional quote at the end. It ties in petroleum too. Again, our dependence on petroleum is coming back to haunt us, but at the time, it averted extinction for whales. Mass adoption of technologies always comes with tradeoffs.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Americans' love of billiards paved the way for synthetic ... by dylan604 on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @04:50PM (#45598248)

at this point though, we have seen enough of these tradeoffs that as a society we should be able to start seeing the downsides in advance before the new becomes ubiquitous.

then again, it didn't stop us from glomming onto GPTs after seeing what we did with socials.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Americans' love of billiards paved the way for synthetic ... by conductr on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @05:54PM (#45598781)

> then again, it didn't stop us from glomming onto GPTs after seeing what we did with socials.

I usually phrase similar in context of energy usage and how any improvement we can make in our personal lives (renewables, EV>ICE, efficient appliances, etc) is basically dwarfed by crypto and now AI. Seems we will continue inventing & promoting rather unnecessary technology that do exactly the opposite of what We, as a species, need to do from an energy use perspective

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Americans' love of billiards paved the way for synthetic ... by MichaelZuo on Wednesday October 15, 2025 @09:02PM (#45600353)

It doesn’t matter if there are millions downsides, if there are also millions of upsides, then it clearly could still be net positive.

Just saving elephants from extinction alone is probably worth an enormous amount.

[ Parent | on HN ]