I mean one thing does not take away from the other, it's necessary to stop wasting so many fish nets, AND reduce single-use plastics, AND fish less, etc. It's not OR it's AND.
This leads to reasoning like "it's fishing nets the actual issue, I might as well continue throwing a full trash can full of packages every 3 days".
It's not true, fishing nets is actually only 45%, the other 55% we can still work on that's a lot, it's the majority. Another way is to just stop eating fish.
In my local supermarket, if I want to buy 4 peaches they come in a plastic container wrapped in a transparent plastic sheet, not kidding.
agree that we have to work on multiple things, but the point was that a disproportionate amount of resources are placed behind getting rid of something that is a drop in the bucket. it's not "should we get rid of A or B?" We agree it's A and B, but we need to focus on the thing that has the bigger impact first.
> we need to focus on the thing that has the bigger impact first
Why is this, why wait to solve the fishing net problems before taking other measures?
I see this line of thought a lot here in Hacker News, especially in topics related to climate change for example.
These things can and should be tackled in parallel at the same time. We can all take responsibility personally, how about trying to use less single-use plastics, buy in local grocery shops more with reusable bags, and stop eating fish?
We can all do that, we don't need to wait for some international fishing committee to decide for years on what is the best way to change the rules on how nets can be made or handled.
Everyone everywhere could change thousands of things about their daily lives and things would be perfect. This has been true since the dawn of time. It's never happened and most don't think it's realistic for it to suddenly happen now. This is why people want to focus change on the things that matter the most first, they know not everything is going to change.
That being said if anyone is up for the challenge personally go for it! That's completely different than wondering why society as a whole focuses on impactful problems first.
I think that thought is removing responsibility from the individual, the thought of "I don't have to do anything, someone else will fix it".
Society is not an abstract entity, its all of us, we are the society. The responsibility is of each and every individual and not governments.
Governments are elected by individuals to represent their viewpoints. Governments will not act on these issues unless there are enough individual voters supporting these views, politicians, as usual, will only do and say what is popular and gets them elected.
Governments are a reflection of the thoughts and beliefs of the people that vote for them. The real responsibility is of the individual.
If people are so worried about the impact of fishing nets, then stop eating fish and directly supporting that industry. Its completely a matter of personal choice, fish is optional for a healthy diet and nobody is flushing it down people's throats.
Do you have the experience of triaging bugs/features at work? There's always more problems then we can solve at once. There is only so many man hours/money/attention available.
I'm not sure which approach this analogy supports.
Sometimes it makes sense to fix small obvious issues quickly ("oops, forgot to check for null here") before diving into potentially worse but more complicated problems ("user who signed up on legacy plan reports that some playlists are incomplete in new app").
Sometimes there's such a high impact issue that you have to try to address it immediately, even if you suspect that it will involve a hellish trek through the least-maintained code in the whole company before you can even isolate a reproducible test case.
And if you have multiple developers working on bugs, one person may be doing the first while a different person is handling the second.
There are different ways/philosophies to triage; but the fact remains that you have to triage. That's all I wanted to argue. You have to pick and choose what to work on, so, in the context of environmental-protections, it's worth arguing the merits of different problems/solutions IMO.
This leads to reasoning like "it's fishing nets the actual issue, I might as well continue throwing a full trash can full of packages every 3 days".
It's not true, fishing nets is actually only 45%, the other 55% we can still work on that's a lot, it's the majority. Another way is to just stop eating fish.
In my local supermarket, if I want to buy 4 peaches they come in a plastic container wrapped in a transparent plastic sheet, not kidding.