too late to remove them completely, sure. too late to reduce their abundance, probably not. thank god everyone doesn't have such a short-sighted, nihilistic outlook that makes them immediately give up when presented with a difficult problem

nobody's giving up, but the priority must be in mitigation / removal not prevention (since for the reasons outlined prevention is going to be a steeper hill.) Mitigation isn't a replacement for eventual prevention though...

i agree with you, but certainly you can appreciate that what you just said is very different from expressing doomsaying sentiments like "it's too late" with no mention of pursuing a solution

How is it “giving up” to disagree with the suggestion of trying to shut the barn door after the horse has bolted rather than trying to chase it down? If we never polluted the water ever again we’d still be left with contaminated water.

> How is it “giving up” to disagree with the suggestion of trying to shut the barn door after...

the submission is about engineers filtering forever chemicals from the water. the response was "it's too late." that's giving up. if you want to be intellectually dishonest and pretend it's not, that's your choice.

> If we never polluted the water ever again we’d still be left with contaminated water.

sometimes in life you find yourself in a position where there's a mess and you need to clean it up. i don't know what else to tell you.

The post I was replying to said "That should be the number one goal - to stop it at it's source instead of dealing with it after the fact." Who's being dishonest here? The gratuitous condescension seems rather unwarranted if you're not going to figure out the context of my post before attacking it.