We’ve known how to very effectively recycle batteries for a long time now, it’s just been far cheaper to mine new materials than to recycle existing ones
This article unfortunately doesn’t really go into the economics of this process
Cheaper or carbon efficient (or both)? The problem we’ve run into is that the cheapest solution (therefore most profitable) has been our go-to solution. In the short term at least, reducing our carbon emissions will be expensive.
I mean I agree we need to reduce usage even more than we need to recycle, but it’s falling for the Nirvana fallacy to ignore the fact that recycling improvements still have enormous potential to help reduce the environmental impact.
The world doesn’t run on fallacies. It finds on human attention. If everyone is sharing and posting about one thing then they aren’t sharing and posting about another. There’s only so much time in a day
But you said there was a presupposition to recycling INSTEAD of reuse. They aren’t exclusive. You can rightly say “I wish we talked more about reduction instead of recycling” but there was no presupposition.
When did this all or nothing way of thinking start in American culture? Has it always been like this and I’m just now noticing it, or is it much more prevalent now because it’s a side effect of a lack of critical thinking skills
We are trying to reduce usage as well, it’s just not as obvious.
Like sure, if you wanna say no more cars, it’s not happening at that level, but all the chemistry improvements that increase the efficiency of the batteries is still a reduction.
We’ve reduced our need for Cobalt, some battery chemistries don’t even use it anymore.
I think we’re still settling in on what is the ideal range of a car for cost vs range, but we’ll reach a point where an increase in performance leads to a reduction in cells used.
Solid state batteries will be a huge jump on that front sometime in the next decade probably.
I’m still baffled by the quantity of non rechargeable replaceable batteries out there. I have an automatic soap dispenser, it uses rechargable AA. But you know there are people out there still buying single use ones and swapping them multiple times a year.
Yeah and that’s all fair. I just wish people cared enough to make the more effective method the primary one is all. No one really talks about or discusses reduction we’re always hearing and learning about recycling
And also, if you think planet earth is going to all agree to stop having road transport and get rid of any battery devices, you’re living in a fantasy world - batteries are needed, and they should be reused and recycled.
Reminds me of the great ‘Helium’ crisis that poofed out of existence once MSM realized that half the comments in every article were like ‘No, it’s just never been worth to capture it from fracking’ lmfao.
It actually is. I think the DoD required it at some point, it became apparent with destabilizing aging explosives and nuclear power and weapons that it was vital, as well as dismantling anything that the enemy could gain knowledge from.
However, like most good things, it’s rarely implemented where it’s not required.
DoD calls it life cycle engineering, and it’s basically standard for anything but software. Problem is that corporations aren’t required to do anything like that.
I think transforming “it’s possible to think without language” into “language is not a tool for thought” is an overreach. Definitely a lot of our internal voice is post-thought, but crystalizing those thoughts into words can provide footholds for further thought. Some would argue it’s not possible to think through a complex issue without writing:
All cases? No. Building something with LEGO. Sketching out the perspective in a drawing. Picking the next chords in your song. Manoeuvring the big couch down the hallway. Playing Tetris. There are many things requiring thought that do not use the common idea of language.
Perhaps with this new technology it will no longer be necessary for the “Empire” aka USA to stage a coup d’état in a poor country in Latin America to steal its lithium. No, capitalism doesn’t work this way coups are much easier cheaper and faster.
And it’s not unreasonable to expect that well-spoken, articulate individuals are also clear thinkers.
Yeah no. Aren’t there some workshops for CEO’s and managers & co. who try to learn the creative thinking of neurodiverses? Because we usually think without words, we “translate” afterwards.
Thinking is actually more efficient without language. I don’t know of any neurotypicals who think about deep physics for fun.
This is interesting work, but I don’t think it justifies the plain-English summary. If you’re going to claim that language is not a tool for thought, I would expect you to demonstrate that a difference in language does not lead to a difference in thought. To answer that, you shouldn’t just look at whether language-focused brain regions are activated during non-language-based activity, but also whether a lifetime of using Language A leads to differences outside of those regions compared to a lifetime of using Language B. Isn’t that the crux of linguistic relativity? That different languages encourage and train different modes of thought?
Any chess player will tell you that they apply their “chess brain” to all sorts of things outside of chess. It’s not that we literally view life as a chessboard, but rather that a lifetime of playing chess has honed a set of mental skills that are broadly applicable. The fundamental logic applies everywhere.
In particular, some deaf children who are born to hearing parents grow up with little or no exposure to language, sometimes for years, because they cannot hear speech and their parents or caregivers do not know sign language. Lack of access to language has harmful consequences for many aspects of cognition, which is to be expected given that language provides a critical source of information for learning about the world. Nevertheless, individuals who experience language deprivation unquestionably exhibit a capacity for complex cognitive function: they can still learn to do mathematics, to engage in relational reasoning, to build causal chains, and to acquire rich and sophisticated knowledge of the world
It seems like they are using a narrower definition of “language” than is appropriate. e.g. I don’t think it’s controversial to include body language under the umbrella of “language”, so I am very skeptical of the claim that any of those deaf children had “no exposure to language”.
There have been studies suggesting prefrontal synthesis (the ability to consciously construct novel mental images) doesn’t develop in humans unless they learn a language before the age of five or so.
That’s pretty easy to hypothesize. People generally don’t think in complete sentences, for example. Children raised without language, while often developmentally delayed, learn and exhibit plenty of thought process faster than they do language.
I don’t really believe in those of articles. Many of them exaggerate things, if they weren’t we had cured aids, cancer a decade ago, we are running on clean and renewable energy. I see a lot of articles like that but years after nothing have really changed and our situation is much worse.
We do have a lot of really cool technologies that could revolutionize how we generate power, clean water, and generally live.
But they are expensive, so they don’t get done.
We could have been running the world off of nuclear reactors for the last 60 years, but they’re more expensive than coal and gas, so we haven’t.
We could also have potentially had a giant solar array in orbit that beamed power down to the planet, which would have been built in the 80s and 90s. But we got the space shuttle instead, because it was cheaper and more feasible. Now the space shuttle was awesome, but it’s competing project was truly a leap ahead in space flight.
There are a few people that, according to blood panels, have been cured of HIV. But it’s a very expensive and painful procedure, as it involves a bone marrow transplant from a person that is genetically immune to HIV and is a match for the person that has HIV.
The technology is occasionally there, but it’s just so impractical to implement it at scale that it never happens.
This is pretty interesting. I mean I’ve seen dogs dream vividly and am not quite sure how much I believe all them Babe the Pig-alike movies. :)
But I think the definition of a thought is a problem here. Everything we say (or contemplate of saying or trying to remember) is also a thought which precedes our verbal output. Those thoughts will inevitably be in a language of our preference. And actually in process of learning a new language that is often times the pivotal point - once your thoughts switch to a new language, you know you adapted it.
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