300 million lbs of fireworks and 2.7 billion dollars gone in a cloud of smoke.

  • blazera@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Fireworks are a cool spectacle, imagine never seeing a fireworks show. Also the money isnt gone, its just changed hands.

    They probably shouldnt be how they are now though, where every individual family wants to fire their own, thats a waste and really obnoxious when its in the middle of neighborhoods. Keep it to one centralized show, away from residential areas, and everyone gets to watch a bigger show.

    • masterspace
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      5 months ago

      Fireworks are a cool spectacle, imagine never seeing a fireworks show.

      Completely agree!

      Also the money isnt gone, its just changed hands.

      Not with this though. A portion of the money has changed hands, the portion that goes to paying workers and investors. Another portion of the money was used to extract, refine, and process something that just burned up and no longer exists.

      While money as an abstraction is made up, what it represents, the underlying value of society’s resources, is not, and that is unfortunately finite. So it’s also important to consider opportunity cost. That money could have been spent on other things, when you spend it on something wasteful and unnecessary that means it can’t be spent on more useful or productive things.

      All that being said, I still think fireworks are rad and worth it, but they are a waste.

      • blazera@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Money was used to pay workers to extract, refine, and process resources. Absolutely none of the money is gone.

        • masterspace
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          5 months ago

          The money itself? Sure. But that’s not what people talk about when they talk about money, they are usually referring to what the money represents, i.e. resources, which were all burnt up and used to create that fire work when they could have gone to something else.

          i.e. if we spent some huge proportion of our money on fireworks every year, we would still have the same amount of money on paper in the economy, but absolutely everything else would cost far more. From our actual lived perspective we would be poorer.

          • blazera@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Thats just not how money works. We did spend a huge amount of our money on fireworks, things didnt become more expensive.

            • masterspace
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              5 months ago

              That is absolutely just how money works, if that same money had gone to say, healthcare companies instead of fireworks companies, we would have the same amount of paper money, and we wouldn’t have fireworks, but we’d have lower healthcare costs since we already paid some of them.

              • blazera@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                You’re bringing up a lot of examples that literally happen in reality and do not have the results you are claiming. Healthcare companies have been both steadily receiving more money and increasing their prices.

                • masterspace
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                  5 months ago

                  Assuming you’re talking about American healthcare companies, thats because you have a broken nonsensical healthcare system filled with middlemen who will suck up profits.

                  That has nothing to do with the concept of opportunity cost. Pick a different industry, like agriculture / food then. If you spend $20 on food every month instead of fireworks, then feeding yourself the rest of the food you need is $20 cheaper.

        • masterspace
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          5 months ago

          Money was literally invented to be an abstraction of resources. When people talk about money they usually mean resources.