300 million lbs of fireworks and 2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.
The art of it has use. However I think drone shows would be an interesting replacement.
I was surprised and heartbroken to discover my neighborhood did that last night. It’s not as good at all. Now I know to check, and go someplace with real fireworks.
Are drones really less pollution than fireworks?
I’m no expert, but this article covered what I expected: https://en.reset.org/drone-light-shows-could-provide-a-green-alternative-to-dangerous-and-polluting-traditional-fireworks/
Objectively yes.
Objectively, so you have some data to back it up? Do you have the comparative carbon footprint of those shows?
Lmao are you being serious or do you lack basic logic, drones are reusable and put off zero emissions, fireworks are not reusable and put off a shit ton of emissions.
Please stop with such language, we had enough of it on every mainstream platform.
I genuinely call for civility here.
As per the substance, as already mentioned, the production and later disposal of drones does have ecological footprint that is very much not negligible.
How are fireworks better then?
I am not saying they are better. I am questioning if they are. Please don’t mistake my question as veiled disagreement, I am not a Xitter user. Someone claimed an objective opinion, and that supposed to have data and a study to back it, but there likely isn’t any yet. I am open to the possibility, I just want to make sure it is actually more ecological. It is objectively demonstrated for electric cars vs thermic cars, for fireworks vs drone show, it probably isn’t yet.
I wasn’t the one to claim that, and neither was the person who opposed you, from all I could see.
There’s just not enough research/calculation done on drones vs. fireworks, and a lot has to be taken into consideration. How often are the drones used? Are they recycled at the end of life? Which materials are used in their production, and what is their source of energy? etc. etc.
The advantage of fireworks is that they are very simple and use little materials to produce, most of which are safe (but some are not great).
Drones, on the other hand, require a lot of lithium and cadmium, as well as other basic resources like metal/plastic, silicon etc., and some parts of their manufacturing involve high-end facilities that require a lot of resources to maintain correct conditions. All of this leads to high footprint of their manufacturing, and if you use such drone just a few times for some large-scale swarms and then forget about it for a while, this will get way less ecological than fireworks.
Don’t get me wrong, the technology is good and drones can absolutely be a superior option. But this heavily depends on how they’re used.
B-b-but they use batteries!!! Electricity bad! D:
/s
Charging batteries typically loses 20%-40% of energy to heat.
Lol so?
Batteries = genuinely bad.
Also, energy doesn’t always come from clean sources, and even then, they do have footprint of their own.
Zero emission at use, not at fabrication, probably not when recharging and not as electronic waste at the end. Yes, I am being serious, considering only emission during usage is a very limited view of what carbon footprint is. A view that is often used by companies for green washing. Do you also believe electric cars are zero emissions? Considering full life, knowing which one emits more is not trivial.
And ignores the typical 20%-40% of energy lost to heat during charging for most batteries.
There are emissions in the production of fireworks as well. Drones can be recycled at the end of their life cycle, fireworks cannot be recycled. EVs ARE zero emission just like drones, they offset the emissions put out during their production after around 40k miles and are extremely energy efficient unlike combustible engines. An EV running on a coal fired electric grid puts off less emissions than a prius.
Absolutely, fireworks also have emission in their while life cycle, so let’s get the data and compare. EVs are not zero emission and offsetting is not zeroing emission, it’s just compensation, pollution is still being produced and if everyone does that we will not reduce it. In fact EVs sometimes have higher emissions than thermic card at fabrication, but it has been demonstrated that they emit less during their full lifecycle.
Yes, I do. Here you go champ.
No you don’t, that’s for fireworks, now we need the impact of drone shows to answer the problem. Would you have it?
Edit: I was wrong, it does mention drones.
Edit2: After proper reading. It only mentions it as an opening hypothesis in its conclusion. It does not quantify the impact of drones, which is what we need to understand if they are actually more eco-friendly.My brother in christ, drones are all over that paper. Have you read an academic paper before? Do you know how to follow sources in papers? Tell you what, you go find some sources of your own and we can compare. Sitting back and saying “nuh uh” ain’t gonna do it. Put up or shut up.
My mistake, I read the abstract too fast and too late, let me read it and get back to you.
Ok, I got time to read it. Drones are only mentioned in one paragraph of the conclusion. Here it is:
‘Eco-friendly’ fireworks, which do not use perchlorate and have lower levels of heavy metals, do exist (Fan et al. 2021); the problem lies in their higher cost of manufac- turing (Palaneeswari and Muthulakshmi 2012). The future of ‘firework’ displays may lie in the use of drones or unmanned aerial vehicles. Drones and visible-wavelength lasers for light shows have the benefit of being reusable, have no emissions, and are quiet (Daukantas 2010; Zerlenga et al. 2021). Drones come with their own issues for wildlife, however, usually flying at low altitudes where there are most likely to come into contact with wildlife; a review indicated that many taxa react negatively to the presence of a drone (Rebolo-Ifrán et al. 2019). Even so, drone light shows are less likely to disturb animals, wild or domestic, with noise, nor do they deposit large amounts of pollutants.
The use of drones is an opening hypothesis, not the subject of the study. Impact of drones is not quantified, it is hypothesized to be lower. The linked papers that I have also checked also don’t quantify the impact but similarly mention it as a potential eco-friendly alternative.
Would you have a different reading of this article?
Drones wouldn’t scare the shit out of local wildlife and people’s pets at the very least.
They’re not a replacement for fireworks.
Parent comment claims it would, so my questions refers to that.
I absolutely hate them. Birds die because of them, and they terrify my dog.
And noise pollution
Bring back the drones! They were way cooler.
I agree for a multitude of reasons but I much prefer the drone shows. They look much cooler.
Careful, soon there will be Russians having their PTSD triggered by the sound of a drone.
2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.
… you know that’s not how money works right?
Yes they are. Somebody extracted the ressources. Somebody processed them into materials. Now someone put them together into the pyrotechniques and finally someone set it off.
All of this labor and capital usage went into creating a short display of pretty lights and bangs, of which afterwards nothing but smoke and memories remain. This is the purest consumption in the economic sense.
Compare that with people using that labor to produce cars instead. Those cars take years before needing renewal and they can be used productively, so they are investments in the economic sense.
Finally lets take clothes, while also consumption they address an immediate human need and are reuseable for some time, so while they are also consumption they are quite different form fireworks.
Do food next and don’t skimp on the poo talk
Food is also consumption. But without food people die, so this consumption directly contributes to keeping the value of the economy up by keeping the workforce alive.
As for the poo safely removing it in WWTPs also costs more money than what can be recovered in energy or hopefully phosphate in the near future. Also the capital investments are significant and as they age and need replacement this value is also gone.
However the alternative is people dying of Cholera and other shitty diseases en masse, so both the investments as well as the expenditures are well spent.
Just so we’re clear for anybody else reading since they chose to ignore the easy refutation lol.
That the money is still present in the economy and provides jobs to hundreds of thousands of people in the supply chain both through sales, materials production, assembly, and labor, entertainment, and local economy boons from festivals.
I also wouldn’t mind the 💩 talk lol.
What represents the value of money? What you can buy with it. What determines what you can buy with it? The total capital stock available and the services offered through labor.
This part of the capital stock is gone. Literally into smoke.
Money is not some abstract independent entity. Its value is directly linked to the real production of the real economy.
Yes, but the point of the person you responded to is that work for the sake of work is also a waste.
May as well all just suicide and mulch ourselves so we don’t do anything without purpose.
Just to be clear, I was just saying that the point was ignored, not that I agree.
Although your response isn’t good either, you can advocate for more efficiency so people get to do more rewarding work, such as arts and crafts. Part of these arts and crafts can also be fireworks.
I don’t think the work that’s done to create and use fireworks is without purpose, in the end it’s a celebration and that’s purpose in and of itself.
Does anyone else feel like adding salt to food is a complete waste of money?
Yep
For pollution, at least CO2, 300M lb is 136k metric tons. I didn’t know the water to CO2 ratio for solid rocket motors, but I’d guess maybe half is CO2. Cars produce 1.5B tons of CO2 per year in the US, so the CO2 would be about equivalent to about 24 min of driving cars. That doesn’t seem too unreasonable.
But maybe you were taking about the metals? I don’t know how much of an issue those are.
The particulate matter, specifically heavy metals, go through the roof.
There’s also a bunch of paperwork involved in removing those measurements from the pollution data sets with a rule that gives a pass for fireworks.
Sorry, completely off-topic, but your name keeps reminding me of rock-a-doodle. I know his name is completely different, but it has the same flow and a really similar sound. Chanticleer. Prounounced Chant Eclair, a french pun for “sing loud and clear”.
Unfortunately this isn’t complete combustion. There’s a shit ton of PM and everything else. Ever go to a big show? They have to take pauses for the smoke to clear so that you can see the next batch.
deleted by creator
You’re concerned about the smoke rather than the CO2?
You do know that CO, SOx, NOx etc is worse that CO2 right?
Health wise, not global warming wise. The original post sounded like a global warming concern.
You shoud do a calculation and show the expected change in global temperature from a fireworks show.
That number is close to meaningless. Also don’t ask others to do large amounts of research in a lemmy comment, it won’t be accurate.
You could find it by coverting 70k ton CO2 into ppm and multiplying by climate sensitivity.
Acid rain ain’t no problem huh.
Post said “unnecessary pollution”.
That depends on a lot more factors for how dilute it gets. I didn’t know how likely it is for the air currents to dilute the aluminum exhaust over a large enough area before it rains. Maybe someone could do some analysis, but I don’t know how.
Everything is unnecessary. We could just off ourselves and there’d be no more pollution. The only reason our existence matter is the way we feel about it. Which is the same reason fireworks matter.
It’s not worse, it’s different. CO2 kills everything on earth but that takes a lot of it. The toxins you listed can give a community long term health issues without that much exposure. It’s a local problem vs a global problem.
How many fireworks shows does it take to give someone long term health effects from the smoke?
Personally I think it’s important to understand Co2 emissions aren’t the only factors in the pollution of air quality. Like you mentioned, heavy metals are a big factor in climate (for example how private jets still use leaded fuel).
The metals are a big thing. Breathing heavy metals is bad for people and animals.
I agree completely. I could see an argument for one instance that is shown globally via screens or whatnot as each year passes, but other than that it is such an enormous amount of unnecessary wastage.
They also scare the crap out of my dog, and cause a lot of accidents. Though, they can be beautiful…
Same goes for all american flags.
Drone displays are increasingly popular.
He’s one: https://youtube.com/watch?v=LLhkrj1HDNo
The average number of drones for a Sky Elements performance is 300 typically costing $45,000 all included. Though costs have been dropping, they’re still usually higher than for a large fireworks production, which averages about $1,000 a minute and usually lasts about 20 minutes.
deleted by creator
My uncle came back from Vietnam with really bad PTSD (among other problems like alcoholism). Every fourth he would spend the whole day/night in the basement with the curtains drawn (to block out the flashes) and headphones on with the sound turned all the way up (to block out the sounds).
He would also take my cousins to buy fireworks every year.
I don’t mean to minimize your struggle, I just thought the juxtaposition was interesting.
I hope you could work through your struggles. I’m happy to say he was able to. He was able to quit drinking and minimize the effects of his PTSD. By the end of his life he was out there watching us shoot off the fireworks.
Were you drafted?
edit: by the time I got to this comment, I was thinking of this thread as being about “Should fireworks be banned?”
I’d be very opposed to a volunteer soldier arguing people’s freedoms should be taken away on account of their PTSD. I’m not sorry about that.
But I am sorry that I didn’t read this carefully enough to notice this person wasn’t arguing for a ban at all. Just saying their opinion on fireworks.
The military is the only form of upward mobility for large swaths of the population, they are chewed up and spit out by the machine, after being indoctrinated in nationalist propaganda from the time they were able to form memories. Veterans are members of the Prolitariat and should be educated about the system that abused them, not mocked and rediculed for being a victim of it. Yes America has committed mass atrocities, but almost every service member who signed up was completely unaware of that at the time of their enlistment.
It’s not about atrocities at all. It’s a question of whether kids understand that they are signing up for a job that involves using explosives to kill people. It’s kinda hard ignore that aspect of what the military is, no matter how sheltered or propagandized one is. As the propaganda has grown, so has the ability of literally any child to google “what do militaries do?”
Being aware of the atrocities might require someone to have been paying attention at some point in school, but knowing that you’re gonna face bombs and killing in the military, that takes even less awareness.
The human brain is really good at keeping two conflicting ideals “harmonized”. I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to fall to the romanization of the military while also recognizing the killing part of it.
It’s easy to fall to propaganda. Is it the recipients fault? Is it the sender of propagandas fault?
I would argue both to some degree, but mostly I will blame the sender because they are generally older and better at rational thinking when compared to younger people. (I’m grossly generalizing here. I know younger people who can think more critically than some older generations).
Summary: by the time they realize they don’t want to be part of it, it’s too late and they have to serve their time.
So if you blame the older men, would you raise the minimum recruiting age? If so, to what?
No. I don’t that would be a good solution. Maybe create a law that the military has to give informed information. The intention would be to prevent propaganda in the first place. Then age or wisdom would be less impactful because education on the horrors of war would be more universal.
Dude have you seen an American public education?
America is the hero throughout all of history class.
You and I went to different history classes clearly
Gotta tell ya: The atrocities and stress of war doesn’t really seem real until you’re hunkered down in a cab because the truck in front of you took an IED, to use just one scenario. I could throw a few more your way if you like.
Having said that, and here’s the irony, not everyone in the military is “gonna face bombs and killing”. There are huge swaths whose job it is to do anything under the sun that doesn’t involve firing any form of weaponry. Chances are you’d have had to been paying attention at some point in school to know this, or something.
War is shit. The military has good and bad people, and often shit practices. For some people it’s one of the only ways, in the U.S. at least, to stand even a fleeting chance of doing more than becoming a low-rung manager at Walmart.
Do people get to choose whether they face “bombs and shit” in the military? Like can a person say “I don’t want a position where I can get PTSD”?
Having said that, and here’s the irony, not everyone in the military is “gonna face bombs and killing”. There are huge swaths whose job it is to do anything under the sun that doesn’t involve firing any form of weaponry. Chances are you’d have had to been paying attention at some point in school to know this, or something.
Or, I’d have to be aware people can’t just check “No PTSD-inducing positions please”. Or if they can, they are signing up just as equally at the moment they either check or don’t check the box. My point stands. You get PTSD from military service, you signed up for it unless you were drafted.
Now whether an 18 year old is wise enough to be capable of making that decision is one and the same as their being capable of making the decision to join up. If you think an 18 year old is not old enough to sacrifice his mental health for his country, then why not argue to raise the recruiting age?
A low-rung manager at wal-mart
I’ve never held a managerial position. I don’t see myself as entitled to any particular level in the managerial command structure. I don’t think my rights are being violated without any kind of guaranteed path up to there.
I dunno man. I’ve got nothing but compassion and gratitude for vets. But you don’t get to claim the shit is something that just happens to people. Adults join up, take an oath, stone cold sober.
Again, if you think those people aren’t old enough, I’d probably agree with you. I’d be all for raising the age to 30, if you wanted to push for that.
But for whatever age it is, that’s the age because ir’s the age at which it’s no longer a thing happening to someone.
Like if it was “military or die”, that’s a different thing. But if it’s “military or no upper management jobs for you” it just doesn’t move me.
And that’s a good thing. It’s a good thing we have a volunteer army. It’s good for everybody.
I agree and have felt this way for a long time, and is why I have not taken part in firework displays nor been interested in them for years.
It just seems like an excuse to pollute the air on a massive scale, beyond other issues. I would much rather see drone shows today than fireworks.
I dislike when they’re used to excess
