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.
Personally I hate them and I think they are more harm than good.
Let's do some clarification: I can appreciate the high in the sky fireworks, while I simply hate those you fire by hand in between the legs of other bystanders.
Overall I think they are dangerous and should not be freely sold, while keep doing the big ones in the sky.
But, honestly, a form of art that harms so many people and animals maybe should be banned after all.
“For my next masterpiece, I am going to murder several hundreds of birds, a dozen small woodland critters, 2 cats and 4 poodles! The pollution cloud will take weeks to clear completely! Biodiversity, several hectares around, will be decimated, it will take decades to recover and I will do it in only 15 minutes! Your grandpa will have a mental breakdown thinking he is back in 'nam!”
It’s incredible all the constant dead animals all around Disney from the fireworks they constantly set off and on yeah, you are just as bad as the MAGA people only looking for sources that agree with your agenda.
Oh cool a personal attack, that means you've definitely got your sources down and are arguing in good faith instead of becoming a whining 5 year old /s
in this part of the world, we are blessed with stray dogs who are also protected by our supreme court. it's quite literally against the law, for example, to prohibit the feeding of strays by animal lovers.
i once saw one of them shudder and whine at the sound of fireworks. its tail scrunched under and it pissed itself in fear and confusion. its plaintive moans were drowned out by the incessant blasts of the "mala" crackers (a literal garland of 10,000 or so crackers strung out in sequence that goes on bursting for an hour or so). the poor thing just did not know what was happening and it became a shivering ball of anxiety until the blasts stopped.
anyone who sees an innocent animal suffer like that will never, ever, want to light a firecracker again.
I hate fourth of july because of this. Fuck your declaration of independence, i piss on it. My dog hid under the bed. I fed her some chicken hearts to calm her down, and received many belly rubs.
I wouldn't say it's ridiculous if it's once a year. If we did it every night...yeah. But people spend more money on a lot dumber stuff, like expensive purses and giant luxury trucks.
Fireworks are a celebration of peace. They’re made from the same ingredients as bullets but they make something beautiful instead of death. I’ve always found this a profoundly meaningful thing.
About 41,000 Americans die in fatal car accidents, with another 289,000 injured in 2022 alone, from distracted driving. If we are going to be banning dangerous things, heavy consumer cars and trucks should probably be right up there.
Unless you count birds that abandon their nests, and other animals that flee their homes. Or the heavy metals and other chemicals that are added to the environment. Or the significant increases in particulate matter in the air.
A local, professional display uses about 80lb of gunpowder (NEQ). When combusted this will produce about 40lb of CO2. To put this in context, most new internal combustion engines will produce about 190gm of CO2 per mile.
Therefore a single car would need to travel 88 miles to emit the equivalent amount of CO2 of your typical fireworks display. If you consider the a round trip distance for the entire audience to watch a single fireworks display, gunpowder is a fraction of the CO2 footprint.
Here is a map for New Years in Germany with a nice slider. Particle concentration increases up to 1000x the base-value of that day (which already includes people setting off fireworks earlier)
Unless it is normal for people at football games to ignite pyrotechniques, or they all smoke 5 packs of cigarettes each during the game, there is nothing that would make a comparable pollution.
Again looking at the map of Germany as well as the article from the BBC stating an increase of Microplastic by over 1000% compared to the baseline shows that fireworks are a very strong additional pollutant.
People in the US drive their cars all the time. During rush hour more cars are emitting in traffic jams than are driving to a football match. Yet we see these huge spikes in pollution when there is fireworks.
Think about it: Everything form a firewokr that does not turn into CO2 will stay dispersed in the air or fall down as debris. This is most of it, as the op pointed out himself the GHGs to be only a small part. Meanwhile for cars the vast vast vast majority of its emissions in quantitative terms are CO2 emissions, with particles, NOX and Microplastics being much less. They also pose a massive problem, but because of hundreds of millions of cars on the road every day.
Now do the calculation that includes all of the direct suffering to humans, pets, and wild life, and then quantify all of the solid and liqueous waste associated with generation, transportation, and utilization, the latter including all of the waste associated with spectators attending the phenomenon.
What I think we'll all discover is that private transportation and the lack of robust recycling infrastructure and waste recovery the world over sucks. We should all do something about it.
The long and the short of it is that we live in a society of different people who enjoy different things. Nearly everything is a trade off of some sort. Some people value the enjoyment they get from fireworks more than others. Some hate it. That is true of litterally everything. I strongly dislike the keeping of pets on anything smaller than a farm. But I don't tell people they shouldn't have pets.
Being part of a society means living with a mix of things you like and don't. And the society determines what is so commonly disliked that it should be not allowed by the law. Now many will say the fireworks are illegal in a lot of places. Yes so is speeding. Our system has three parts, the laws, the enforcement, and the penalties. Enforcement of fireworks laws are often pretty lax, same with speeding. And the penalties are almost always purely monetary. So society has said it doesn't really care that much about fireworks. And the large number of people who use them and who show up to fireworks shows backs that up.
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.
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.
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.
i think fireworks are nice but they're to a large degree something from a different age and at this point we should only really be using smaller volcano-style ones, and like holy shit we have drone technology, why aren't drone displays standard in any vaguely populated area?
Cities like Napa, Calif., and Salt Lake City, Utah, have opted out of traditional pyrotechnics this year. They say they're worried about pollution and the risk of wildfires, so instead, they'll create a tribute to America with a light show made by drones.