That’s a bit cynical take. In many countries, including mine, there are dedicate bins for plastic waste which is the majority of waste from your typical household. It’s all being recycled into new products, not being shipped anywhere. Also, when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles. I’ve got a tiny-ass bin for the stuff that ends up in landfill because I separate and recycle it all as does most other people.
EDIT: Nevermind then. It’s all apparently dumped into the ocean. Sorry about the attempt in some positivity.
Seems far more likely that the recycling rate is low because not every piece of plastic waste is put into recycling. Not that they simply don’t recycle it.
The problem is that there are quite some different sorts of plastics and that plastic containers are not standardized. If you mix different kinds of plastics or plastics with other materials you can’t use it anymore in an automated processing and it usually gets burned. Also mostly recycling is a downgrade, so usually if you recycle some packaging, it is not made into packaging again but into things like pallets or construction fence bases.
In my country (Aus), last I heard our recycling was mostly shipped off to Indo or somewhere else in SEA (previously China before China banned it).
I suspect very little ever sees recycling, but the neoliberal model means privatised companies paid by government, so they’re out to cut expenses to maximise profits and shipping it off to someone else to do the illegal thing where it’s not illegal isn’t illegal.
Haha… yeah I live in the Netherlands. And my city started separately collecting plastics.
Here’s the kicker: because there is no more plastic in our waste, the energy value of the waste went down. The city sold these waste “rights” to an incineration plant that reclaims heat and energy who now cannot use the waste. So to avoid contractual fines, our city now imports plastic waste from elsewhere in Europe to be mixed in with the waste and then incinerated.
Well fuck me!
This is more expensive for the city (separate bins, separate collection, separate processing, buying plastics from elsewhere and getting it here)
All the extra transport and shipping movements is worse for the environment.
I’m stuck with an extra fucking bin, and with both a greens bin and the rest bin that are collected once every 3 weeks instead of 2… stinking up the place even worse.
I’m afraid its not. There are many plastics that don’t have any method of recycling, and plently more that require specific machinery for their “one time” recycling that just isn’t being used.commercially.
when it comes to plastic bottles for example, close to 100% of them are returned and recycled into new bottles
Even the PET bottles can only go through the process once or twice before becoming too degraded. That’s not even taking into account that most manufacturers want white or clear plastic, and recycled does not work that way.
The separation and recycling that you do is mostly gaslighting and green washing.
It’s because you can’t recycle plastic really. Each time you heat it up to melt it it loses its properties. A recyclable material is for instance aluminium, which keeps on being awesome. I tried various recycled plastics for a business I run, none of it was strong enough. Recycled lego, recycled car bumpers, nada. And then the question is - why would I buy the recycled plastic that doesn’t work when it’s like 30 cents cheaper. Pellets are so cheap in fact, that I could buy a tonne, use up 100kgs, throw the rest away and still be fine.
Once they touch the factory floor’s floor, plastics become filthy and cannot be used for high-quality applications - food wrappers, anything with body contact. Oils and heavy metals are the biggest contaminants, a plastics-producing company I used to work for concluded. They either sent it all to a recycling factory or used it for very low-quality stuff like trash bags.
Now with post-consumer plastics, not only are they extremely heterogeneous, they will also have even worse contaminants like mold which proved to be very resistant to cleaning, a EU study concluded. So you might want to pyrolyze them like you do with crude oil, but there’s just too much O, N, S and halogens, so the output will be too corrosive, but also too heterogeneous for it to make economic sense.
Maybe there is something, but tbh why bother when virgin pellets are better. The best plastic recycling strategy is to not make it in the first place. Or just use other types of packaging - alu cans, glass bottles, paper containers, whatever.
Also additives soak water like crazy. Moisture is a huge problem when making parts - you need to dry some types of plastic pellets in industrial dryers, which eats up a ton of electricity - since they are often running off of compressed air out of a compressor. Most plastic comes in natural colors to which you add additives to change to the color you want. Simply doing that (2% by weight) is a difference between not having to dry at all (since some plastics just don’t absorb water - i.e. polyolefins - which high density variant is what bottles for shower gel, shampoos are made of) and having to dry it for like 6 hours before use.
It’s just a bad material that’s cheap to make things out of.
Once used, to my knowledge, it can’t be reused as the same thing, so they “recycle” it into road surfacing etc, which I’m sure doesn’t end up fragmenting into tiny bits over the years and ending up in water sources…
And I’m not sure there’s a good way to get away from it completely. Even drink cans have a small layer of plastic inside to stop it reacting with the metal. Glass is probably the most environmentally friendly (if you just wash and reuse), but a bitch to get it back in one piece.
Time to tax the ever loving shit out of plastic tbh. And yes, prices will go up, but you know what? They go up anyway. They can only take as much as we have, and they’re already taking it.
I read somewhere that because recycling plastic isn’t profitable, under the capitalist system there’s no incentive to do so.
Not just unprofitable in a capitalist sense, but inefficient. A typical plastic beverage container can be recycled two or three times before the plastic degrades too much to be usable.
Socialism won’t save you here. Unless said socialism bans plastic products.
For sure. There will also be a shit ton of other one-hundred-year old short films that were available, but you never watched that you also won’t give a shit about.
Well if you’re born in 1877 in a world of telegraphs and steam engines and got to live a hundred years and see Star Wars I in the cinema I think you’d have a bit of an epiphany about how much the ability to fantasize about the future has grown over your lifetime.
This is one of those things, like acupuncture, that I will not fault anyone else for engaging in. There’s no hard evidence that they are effective, but if it helps you with your problem (even if it’s all in your head), then it was worth it, was it not?
I know people who have had their lives improved and their mobility restored thanks to chiropractors. I also know one or two who swear they got scammed for years because the pain always comes back really quickly.
I may not personally recommend a chiro to someone as a solution to their back or neck pain, but I won’t discourage them from going if they are considering it.
There’s a difference though. Doctors are trained professionals so when they kill someone it’s by accident (hopefully), but quack doctors are not professionals, when they kill someone it’s 3rd degree murder.
There’s a difference between making stuff up and an unsuccessful medical procedure, but the only way to tell the difference is if the person has a reasonable chance of actually being successful I.e. a medical professional.
That’s why surgeons don’t commit assault. But some random person coming at me with a knife does even if the end result is still my chest cavity being opened up.
I guess my point is that it doesn’t really matter if their practice is backed up by hard science or not if some people still experience tangible benefit from doing it. Is it still a scam if the scammer provided you the product that you paid for?
Like I said, I would never advocate for someone to go see a chiropractor, an acupuncturist, a homeopath, a shaman, or whatever alternative treatments that might be out there over going to a real doctor or therapist, but if they’re already going to one and claiming that it’s working for them, why bother trying to convince them otherwise? You can tell them it’s pseudoscience until the cows come home, they’re not going to be inclined to listen.
This was news to me too not long ago, but acupuncture is legit and used in western medicine. I found this out because a friend of mine in the military received acupuncture to treat his back pain. Like a white dude named Brad that went to med school put 3 or 4 pins in his ear and his back pain was gone for the day.
Acupuncture is quackery too. At the very least it should not be part of any public health service, or insurance policy, and people gullible enough to go for it should have to pay out of their own pocket.
Do you mean the network of collagen fibers and fluid-filled spaces that underlies the skin and surrounds the gut, muscles, and blood vessels? Calling that an “organ” is a ginormous stretch.
It makes up 20% of your body weight, that doesn’t seem inconsequential. It has signaling functions, and that’s just the start of what we know about it. We also discovered it’s how cancer can end up so far away after it’s undergone metastasis.
Ok, I’ll admit that I learned something today - so that’s a win - but did you even read the article you linked?
The researchers are calling this network of fluid-filled spaces an organ—the interstitium. However, this is an unofficial distinction; for a body part to officially become an organ, a consensus would need to develop around the idea as more researchers study it, Theise told Live Science. The presence of these fluid-filled spaces should also be confirmed by other groups, he added."
So, ya know, it’s not being called an organ by anyone but this group of researchers…
I am glad you read it, this subject matter fascinates me.
It’s essentially almost like a new discovery from only 5 years ago. I think we are about to learn much more about the different roles this system (organ) plays.
I am not going to debate about whether some groups have declared it an organ or not. I believe it will be in time anyway.
The research surrounding this is interesting because you have so many people jumping into it that some people are simultaneously saying things like “I think this could be a way cancer moves around the body” and another being like “Yeah, I basically proved that already. I am attempting to figure out how to stop it”
I remember changing values in gorillas.bas as a kid to make the bananas go faster or slower or changing the sky from blue to red. I thought I was a little hacker man for sure.
QBasic kinda fucked me later in life though when I had to basically unlearn all the shit programming techniques I picked up on it when learning C++.
Elon wants to build a city from scratch in Texas, basically a Tesla company town. He’s reportedly purchased 6,000 acres 35 miles from Austin and already there’s a factory and some cheap housing plopped down in “Snailbrook, TX”
edit for additional context, the land is in Bastrop county, which is between Austin and Houston (but much closer to Austin). I35 from San Antonio to Austin to Dallas is quickly becoming one giant strip of consumerism, and Austin to Houston will eventually go the same way. He’s getting rural land just outside booming Austin and 1.5 hours from Katy in the Houston metroplex. Unfortunately it looks like an amazing business move
This is vaguely a thing in Japan, but let’s not fall into the eastern mysticism trap, where Asian things are completely divorced from what goes on in the West. It’s sort of like saying America has the “fuck it, good enough” aesthetic worldview of accepting the imperfect things about the world.
The real trap is assuming anything from a culture applies to everyone, or even the majority, of the culture.
America definitely has a “fuck it, good enough” worldview for a lot of things and institutions. It isn’t universal, but it does apply where you see a bunch of half assed infrastructure or shelves upon shelves of cheap low quality products that a ton of people spend money on knowing it is poor quality.
No it’s not. Time zones are a source of incredible confusion for programmers and are the cause of countless computer bugs that affect billions of people.
If we all used UTC time, you’d get used to it. You’d simply get up at xx:00 and have lunch at yy:00, etc. The numbers we use now (like 6 or 12) are completely arbitrary. You would get used to your day cycle using different numbers and the next generation would think literally nothing of it.
It would be a mess talking to anyone about time where you do not live.
Say that you wake up at 06:00, everyone understands. Remove all time zones and now you wake up at 14:53. Anyone not native to your location would have no clue where in the sky the sun is relative to you and what that actually means for your day.
Would 14:53 for you post removal be compared to 06:00 or 09:00 pre removal? What if oyu are porned post removal and do not have the frame of reference for the old system. How would you go about it then?
Could you imagine traveling without time zones? It would be actual hell.
Normally you wake up at 1300, but then you travel to japan, you don’t know when they wake up. So maybe you ask the hotel staff or maybe people will start putting signs up “Japan wakes up at 0300”. I mean it’s cool you don’t need to change your watch or wait for your phone time to update when the plane lands, but how do you know when lunch is? When do you go to sleep? If a meeting you’re having is at 1000, is that way late in the day meeting? Or is that a super early meeting and maybe you should get to bed early the night before. You would have no clue unless you do it on the regular.
Now, you could just download an app that tells you what time it is where you’re at currently relative to what you normally use (so in Japan while they think it’s 0300, your phone says 1300) so this would make these way easier for you since all the times are just normal. Every time you move around you just tell the app where you’re at and it adjusts the time is displays annnndddd…oh wait I just re-invited time zones.
How is it not a technical problem? It sure as hell has been a problem for me more than once when implementing things, especially once timezone definitions between two systems drift apart.
Why does it matter whether it’s a technical problem? Neither you nor I have been talking about technical problems thus far.
Solving technical problem is what an engineer does. Asking people to do things differently so that the engineer doesn’t have to solve the problem is what exactly?
Timezone make sense because it makes time mean something in real life. Midday is the time when you lunch, and the middle of the day. 7 or 8 pm is the evening, you get your dinner. Etc. Time is a tool used by people because it’s useful.
Now you are an engineer and you need to deal with timezones. Well, fucking do your job I’d say.
The problem with programmer is that they always try to change user habits rather than simply doing their job.
Because it’s what make the time have a meaning. The time when you eat, when you go to sleep or wake up, when you go to work,…
In fact, you’re looking at it the wrong way. The time is localised because that’s how it make sense for people. And that’s how it make sense for physics too. Relativity means each place has its own time.
The question should be why do you want to change this?
I most recently encountered this fact from the game, Stray! You know, the recent game with the cat and all the robots. Apparently their city design was heavily inspired by the Kowloon Walled City.
Chrome book my kid had was sending regular traffic out to some address that belonged to a scholastic vendor. Even when the device was idle. I blocked that site at the router. Thanks pfBlockerng. A few days later he had another chrome book needing our WiFI password. That is when the chrome book got its own VLAN and SSID. The SSID name was compromised. I also tightened the screws on google workspace. They tried one more time with a another chrome book before they gave up on whatever they were after. I have no doubt they wasted some time trying to overcome it. I still treated it like a wiretap. None of my precautions stopped me from putting tape over the mic and camera.
I was a little disappointed they never inquired about it. The fact they didn’t pretty much guarantees what ever they were doing wasn’t required.
I remember spending entire days trying to break the horrible ROM protect on those pieces of garbage when they first started popping up at every school district. Google got wise fast and separated write protect into its own software only flag inside the organizational stuff for any Chromebooks linked to a domain.
I did a nicer one recently which was a samsung chromebook which involved completely disassembling the entire thing and removing the heatsink just to be able to remove a tiny ass piece of conducting electric tape to disable write protect.
Even after that I had to very carefully rewrite the shitty google bootloader with libreboot if I wanted to run literally anything else without making a google approved kpart file which would only run on google’s compiled kernel.
Wow! Now I have a cool name to this phenomenon. Doesn’t happen every night and there are also times I can ignore it because it’s typically not scary, just disruptive. I also see the flashes of light and that can be scary sometimes. I’ll think somebody tried to come in while I’m sleeping or that a nuclear bomb just went off. Or that a cosmic ray hit my eyeball.
Now, is there a phenomenon about seeing random faces in my head while falling asleep as well?
I used to have all this as a chronic weed user, if you’re the same maybe try stopping and see if they go away. The only one I still have is the flashing lights, but it’s rarer.
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