I want to hate your comment so much but reality is reality.
Plastics just don’t really get recycled. Despite the efforts made (the company I work for included), recycling is such a joke because it’s hard to even FIND sources that WILL recycle certain things because at the end of the day it likely doesn’t exist because it’s more expensive and sometimes has an even greater impact on the environment to recycle than to just keep buggering on.
That said, I don’t like you burning plastics. I grew up burning paper trash in barrels but we were still mindful of not releasing toxic fumes into the local environment. So, fuck you for that one.
Oh, I’m sorry. Well, I could put the trash into a landfill where it’s going to stay for millions of years, or I could burn it up and get a nice smoky smell in here and let that smoke go into the sky where it turns into stars.
I hate Apple so god damned much. When I got started in 2003 with the cohort I was in for my elementary education degree, the university required us to get an Apple MacBook G4. We weren’t allowed to choose any other laptop, just that one, and we had to get it from the campus computer store (so of course the school was getting a kickback 🖕).
The power cord on those had a weird round dongle on the end that plugged into the computer. In the center of the dongle was a very thin pin. So, of course, I accidentally tripped on it, and the pin snapped off inside the computer. Easy enough to remove, but it meant I had to buy a brand new adapter to do my coursework.
$80.
Eighty fucking dollars. And there were no third-party adapters at the time (at least when I looked). Oh, and that replacement adapter? CAUGHT ON FUCKING FIRE.
I have not spend a dime on anything Apple touches since then. I’ve been issued iPads by school districts for which I’ve worked in the past, but those pretty much stay locked up in my cabinet. Nope…no Apple Music, no Apple TV, not even a covered-by-the-district $1.99 app for my school iPad.
Luckily, as teacher, I’ve either been issued a Dell or at the very least a MacBook Air with Windows 10 bootcamped every year since. Unfortunately, I am in a new district in Oregon this year (had been in Texas), and my device this year is a non-bootcampable MacBook Air. 🤬
When I was in nursing school I saw all my classmates typing on the brand new Mac’s . And I was sitting there typing on a Toshiba then I gave up the computer and just started writing because I knew ahead of time I would have to prove myself in the field more than getting an A. I got out with a B in all my classes. But somewhere there are many nurses who got D and can barely do field work. I was lucky to have a mom as a nurse. But when I go to a doctors office and a PRN is asking me questions I always ask where did you go to school and so forth. They usually get pissed but I do not care because they relay shit to the doctor. And 90 percent of the time when you go to rural doctors they just read the shit on the screen and go by that. I can say this as a traveling nurse and an ex opiod addict.
The most insane thing about Mac chargers is their lack of a strain relief, solely because the designers didn’t like how they look. So of course they fucking break all the time.
If it helps, you can at least use any USBC charger you want now. I love my M1 air, but have some similar ranty feelings about the older models from 10-15 years ago. I hope you at least give it a chance. I don’t think I could ever go back to Windows. It is Mac or Linux for me.
Well, since you may be forced to use it, here are some utilities to make it better: Rectangle Pro - 200% necessary. $10. Worth every penny. Cleanshot X Homebrew AltTab iTerm2 Oh My Zsh Karabiner Elements may be useful if you need macros/key bindings.
Also, this is cross platform, but giving a shout-out to Obsidian. With a couple plugins, it is a fantastic notes app that is markdown based.
There are plenty of things that are irritating in OSX, but there is a lot I like after using it for a while. Most of the irritations are gone with the above utilities. Unlike Windows, I didn’t have to spend a whole bunch of time debloating the OS and advertisements are not shoved in my face. I probably turned it off, but I don’t have a damn digital assistant shoved in my face either. Both Linux and OSX (which is Unix) have very clean interfaces. As someone with severe ADHD, an overly distracting UI will stress me out. A lot.
I do have some rather strong feelings about what they are doing with permissions in the Sequoia beta, but I also get what they are trying to achieve. iOS though is torture. I will say that for my iPad that it has improved a lot in 18, but I have 0 desire to ever have an iPhone. iPad is still ultimately hindered by the OS. The iPad Pro has an absurd amount of power, but the restrictions in iPad OS hobble what it is truly capable of.
Oh no…there’s no modifying of a school district’s technology allowed. That’s just not a thing, at least not that I’ve heard of in the US. Thanks for the recommendations, though, maybe it’ll help someone else.
The recycling symbol for plastics was a great bit of marketing for the plastics industry. ‘Just buy a new thing and no worries you can just recycle it.’
Future geologists are going to see a marine deposit of plastic and be able to date exactly the age of the rock layer.
You see that “Pleistocene” vertical bar? And you see that tiny sliver of “Holocene” at the top. Yeah, the Anthropocene folks were basically arguing that so many riveting things happened in the Holocene already, that we need to declare a new epoch for what’s happening now.
Besides, if we do continue to irrevocably fuck Earth and the current mass extinction event continues to wipe out a big chunk of life on Earth, then a future sentient species might declare our entire existence as just the geological event that ended the current era (Cenozoic).
This is absolutely correct but still not the whole story. Recycling for glass and aluminum and steel can be done essentially infinitely creating a largely closed loop (though for glass in particular we really need to return to our old reuse practices). By using the same language for plastic as we do for better recycling methods we still make plastic recycling sound better than it is, even when reduction and reuse are emphasized.
I imagine that goes the other way, too: by conflating the scam of plastics recycling with recycling in general, some people are probably discouraged from recycling anything at all, including aluminum.
Plus the whole system was created with the idea of getting people used to recycling so when better, more efficient forms of recycling came into use, people would already be recycling.
Too bad that whole “better, more efficient” part never really happened.
For anyone interested in increasing that number in any way they can, check out earth911.com for hundreds of ideas and ways to help recycle, reduce, and reuse things in your everyday life.
Here’s a link to learn about how to properly recycle or dispose of things. Categorized into nine kinds of materials.
And here’s a link to their Recycling Solution Search, where you can select the thing you desire to recycle and then enter a zip code.
As a cybersecurity specialist even using my phone kind of give me the creeps. Anyone anytime can access your camera easily, BUT if the item was issued by a third party always assume they are spying. I’ve seen this happend in huge corporations that you would not believe do that. Also a 20 something IT support guy have access to it for sure.
Be safe, if you cant format or disable the driver for microphone and camera just turn it off when naked please
After I had turned off the webcam in my system settings, my boss twice commented on the shirt I was wearing while WFH. So then I glued two layers of duct tape over the entire upper rim of the laptop, and it never happened again. They did, however, seem inexplicably distraught when we had the next Teams call.
Can’t find for total glass but just current rates for glass: “US’s roughly 33% glass-recycling rate” “90% recycling rate in Switzerland, Germany, and other European countries”
In my area they don’t recycle glass. I was so surprised when I moved here and learned that. Glass and aluminum are the two most worth it/possible afaik.
In my area you have to pay a lot extra for a recycling bin, and they only accept two kinds of plastic.
Then it came out they were just shipping it overseas to be recycled but sometimes it was ending up in landfills anyway. There are only a few houses on our street with a recycling bin out each week.
I worked at a university at one point in my life, and they were quite proud about their recycling plan. The janitors though, would just take the trash and the recycling and put the two bags together and throw them both away. I never really lived anywhere that recycled outside of the West Coast. But is it actually being recycled here? Is this the 9%?
I feel like the bulk of the plastic that gets recycled is done in other developed countries that spend significant money on doing it. Like when I lived in Japan they were very stringent about separating your trash, same thing in Germany, and not for nothing those economies that do recycling at scale generally prefer glass over plastic because recycling glass is more efficient.
custodian checking in: if your university is anything like the school i work in, custodians are dumping it in the trash because nobody seems to know what can be recycled and the staff fill their recycle cans with trash. it’s not worth the time picking through it to salvage what you can.
most of the stuff in the recycle bins in the rooms i clean cannot be recycled. food wrappers, Kleenex, etc. it’s a sham meant to make people feel better about themselves
I am absolutely not terribly invested here. But I wanted to kick something around (I opened the wiki and just decided I don't care that much to invest time into this but it is a thought kicking around my brain so I figured I'll express it here) - I am wondering if the school that did this is relatively wealthy. As Macbooks aren't cheap, and I think most schools were tossing around chromebooks instead right? So perhaps the reason why nobody ultimately got in the appropriate amount of trouble for this crime is because they themselves were people of a certain status. Or knew how to grease the right palms.
Yeah, see. I've seen some schools in my travels that make me want to slap someone. Because I am astonished at how far the haves and the have nots are apart. But also, I'd say in general whenever the sentence never seems to align with the punishment you can bet there's some classist mechanisms in the works.
Probably a terrible idea, but melting the plastic and extruding the plastic in underground abandoned mines, filling up the empty spaces like icing on a cake from floor to ceiling. There are abandoned lead mines in Oklahoma, where the town was vacated because of the toxicity and the ground collapsing underneath. A place like that seems ideal.
In Finland one mine had broken the law and dumped all their waste in the back of the mine and they were ordered to clean it up and they raised their hands up and said they couldn’t because it was too dangerous to work there. Govenment’s mining superviser dude turned out to be paid by the mining company, surprise!
That assumes the plastic is already being collected, so why not just make new products from it instead of dumping it into the ground and then using even more oil to make new plastic?
Part of my reasoning is that it’s also a form of carbon sequestering. Most plastic comes from petroleum, from the ground, and then they would be just putting it back in the ground. The deeper the better.
en.wikipedia.org
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