We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked. There are some areas where it could obviously be better, but also some areas where regulation is too strict (blocking housing, renewables, transit) and the system is evolving to address those.

I think the loss of local media has made it harder for misdeeds to come to light, but I don't want to throw up my hands and cede everything to commercial interests et al.

> We live in a much, much cleaner world than we did 50 years ago. Legislation and environmental rules have worked.

I think prevention of pollution is one area where very tight regulation is absolutely needed, and this seems to be an argument for that.

Of course regulation can be weaponized and used as a tool to serve entrenched interests as well - but this is then more a problem with the overall political system. Also, I think a proof that this is the case is necessary instead of assuming it by default.

or unsustainably: e.g.: PFAS. For bonus points you can do internal research and hide the reports detailing the effects accurately.

I guess as a contrived example your breath releases 40k PPM Co2. Have you tried aiming for no pollution?

The reality is we make things which involve pollutants, which we create laws to govern the safe disposal of. Engineers optimise for these constraints the same way you do. You wouldn’t have one k8s pod per request to ‘strive to keep the response times as low as possible’.

Are you actually suggesting that we rely on the good will of a for profit corp? When has that ever worked?

Your car, heating, toilet and soap and all the rest release zero pollution, right?

I don't care to argue semantics, just pointing out your reply was as hollow as your criticism to the person saying legal doesn't mean safe. It's a pretty reasonable thing to draw attention to methinks...

It might be news to you, but the laws don't dictate what's fine, and what isn't.

Aside from things like slavery being legal and homosexuality being illegal in the past, I'll note that it's perfectly legal for you to drink bleach, but it wouldn't really be fine for you to do that.

(I hope we can agree that advising people to do something "fine" isn't rude, but telling someone to go drink bleach would be) .

> So if we don't think something is fine, we can make it illegal (and we often do).

So, to boot, "it's fine as long as it's legal" doesn't apply to those things, youthinks.

Also, "we" is a peculiar pronoun that needs a lot of expansion, considering that the "we" negatively affected by "not fine" things isn't the same "we" that benefits from them, and it's the latter "we" that has direct influence on legislation.

Some interesting terms to read up on include "negative externality" and "corruption" (assuming youreads).

>It's a pretty good way of thinking methinks, what's your alternative?

If we turn to historical examples, the French Revolution certainly provides an example for alternative ways to resolve disparities between what's legal and what's fine.

There are plenty of others, but that question wasn't asked in good faith, methinks, and so doesn't deserve a more in-depth answer.