41–50 of 138 posts
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Is that actually what happens to our recycling? I was just wondering today how all this plastic gets repurposed. Does it get shipped overseas then dumped?
Some plastic is used to make polyester clothing, but the latter can't be recycled any further. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyF9MxlcItw
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America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.
Really not. Spend some time in China. It won't take long (hours to days) before you notice the utter callousness with which people habitually treat strangers and the environment around them. It can't be believed until it's experienced.
Dr. Jordan Peterson:
> "I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian governments whether they're on the Right or the Left for years--decades really. I spent almost all of my free time thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany and in Russia during the Soviet era; but also when Mao was [in] China--there were other places as well. [I was] trying to understand how it was that we could have got off the rails so absolutely terribly. I started studying that at the collectivist level, looking for political or economic reasons. But as I investigated further those levels of analysis [...] weren't providing the answers that I wanted--I think partly because I was really interested in the notion that there's something to learn from what happened, say in Nazi Germany: but there's something to learn at an individual level. That's my estimation. I don't think that there were innocent masses of people led astray by a single malevolent leader. I don't think the fundamental motivations for what happened in Nazi Germany were economic and I don't think they were in the Soviet Union either. As I read more and more about the situation, I realized that the proclivity of individuals to avoid responsibility and to lie, especially about their own lives and about their own experience, were really the reasons that those systems went so far astray."
> "[...] The lessons there for me were psychological and that taught me an awful lot about the role of the individual: people like Viktor Frankl, for example, who wrote Man's Search for Meaning, a perennial classic and a great book--insisted that a large part of the reason that Germany went off the rails so badly was because individual Germans were so willing to falsify their own experience. Alexander Solzhenitsyn who wrote the Gulag Archipelago, the best document on what happened in the Soviet Union, also made exactly the same argument."
> "So I got interested in the psychological causes of catastrophic governance and that taught me a lot. It taught me about responsibility. About the responsibility of the sovereign individual. We have an idea in our [Western] culture, it's a very powerful idea: that each of us is of intrinsic value. But associated with that value is a responsibility: we have a responsibility for our own integrity and for that of our families but also of the state."
This begs the question: are Chinese business men and women willing to falsify their own experience at the expense of the {environment,personal integrity} to make a buck and/or survive?
The business culture of dishonesty (borrowing from HN user docker_up) can't persist forever.
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They're also recycled* in China. *: In this context recycled means shipped to China and then dumped into the ocean.
Which is why it's better to have cellulose/paper straws.
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Likely to change soon. Those areas have stopped buying plastic waste from the rest of the world.
Having seen the trash coming down several of these rivers in person, everything I could identify seemed to be of local origin. I certainly didn't see non-local languages written on plastic bottles, for example.
Perhaps when it gets too full of local trash, some of it gets moved to the ocean?
TFA made me think of Dr. Mehmet Oz' interview of Dr. Jordan Peterson [1] from last year (2018). I've transcribed part of the interview below: Dr. Jordan Peterson: > "I've always been obsessed with totalitarianism and authoritarian governments whether they're on the Right or the Left for years--decades really. I spent almost all of my free time thinking about what happened in Nazi Germany and in Russia during the Sovi…
1: https://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2018/06/07/a-...
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And not to mention dumping radioactive waste into steel/other metal. That's how cadium and lead end up in pencil cases - dump waste into consumer goods, and then ship them to your house. https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/the-growing-global... "India and China were the top sources of radioactive goods shipped to the U.S. through 2008, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Bartley, a metallurgist wh…
A lot of awful things happen because people are just negligent, desperate, and ignorant. Perhaps a lot of the radioactive scrap is being created knowingly, I don't know. When there are well-documented incidents like this, I can imagine this happening in small ways all the time and stuff just entering the supply chain by accident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident Of course when organized crime gets…
Organized crime runs all the way through the system in many places, not just China.
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Which is why it's better to have cellulose/paper straws.
Paper/cellulose straws are inferior and maddening to use. Yes, I need to use a straw.
I used to have a collapsible silicone cup. Downvote me for that too.
I mean, let's be honest here: is this really a surprise? There's a business culture of dishonesty throughout the country that is unprecedented. Their food supply is poisoned by factories that simply don't care about life and only care about money. There have been articles about how cooking oil is recycled from waste, and how fish are fed feces instead of food and packed in ice from polluted waters. Fake milk, fake ba…
America has the same business culture; what's saving (most of) us is our better-functioning regulatory culture.