221–230 of 309 posts
How long can we keep giving China, India etc a pass? And ourselves in allowing this level of irresponsible trade to happen? We're busy panicking about "climate change" in terms of something that is going to end the world in a dozen years, it probably isn't... That said, pollution in and of itself should be a goal in terms of not doing it, and not trading with nations that do. As it is, there are cities in the U.S. I…
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i think banning ocean fishing would be a disaster actually. what we need is responsible fishing with proper management of the fishing nets (i.e. huge penalties for mismanaging/dumping/abandoning the fishing nets) also the elephant in the room is that an individual in the US has little to no control over huge sources of pollution apart from feel good activism (look at this! i'm using a paper straw! I saved 2 turtles t…
Plastic straws are such a red herring for climate change. If you want to make an impact on your individual contribution, then you can get an EV (at very least a plug-in hybrid) and (if you own a home) get a solar roof or a heat pump instead of gas (everyone has pretty much replaced their incandescents, which is the cheapest thing to do). The marginal costs of these things are relatively low to neutral (and sometimes…
I spend a day or two every year cleaning up a beach on a island off the coast of China. Its location relative to local sea currents makes it a natural garbage trap. It has been a radicalizing experience but maybe not in the way you would think. Anecdotally about a third of the trash I pick up is fishing related - some nets, some buoys, but mostly thousands of small plastic sardine sized fishing net floats. About a th…
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I sometimes wonder if this "plastic straw" wasn't another of 4Chan's trolling attempts... Like, sure, reduce plastic straw usage, but most bars just replaced them with paper straws. That is obviously a stupidly wrong solution, the vast majority of the population can easily manage without straws entirely, so really it just shows that people don't actually care about the environment, it's all just virtue signalling...
Why are paper straws the wrong solution? Even if they take a little more energy to produce they at least don't leave long-term waste behind.
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Looking at elements loses sight of the system. The boats are there as part of a system driven by growth in GDP and population, externalizing costs, and related goals. We can say it's not us tossing the bottle overboard, but buying things the boats transport supports the system. Among the most important leverage points for changing a system are its goals and values. Changing from growth to enjoying what we have and fr…
> I see avoiding straws like playing scales to learn piano. Scales alone seem like nothing, but they're how you get to Carnegie Hall. That isn't remotely true. The best pianists in the world who play at Carnegie Hall, true virtuosi, are far beyond attributing their skill to scales. Scales are mainly used by great pianists within the context of your work on specific pieces, as that is where pianists will be judged. Wh…
mnemonic
The pointless use of plastic is astounding. Just the other day I was sorting through electronic cables that were individually packaged in their own plastic bags. What the fuck was the point? Even the actual connector pins had their own dedicated plastic covers, and the cable was tied with a plastic tie. Yet the plastic bags were somehow still needed? Jesus fucking Christ.
The reason is that each cable in its own package is a separate SKU, purchased from a separate supplier, and tossed one-per on an assembly line that is filling the box you finally received. I suspect that if, say, samsung or nintendo was told to stop putting bags on every single cable, they'd just add a step to their assembly line for snipping open the existing bags and tossing them in the garbage. The real solution w…
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> we need to focus on the thing that has the bigger impact first Why is this, why wait to solve the fishing net problems before taking other measures? I see this line of thought a lot here in Hacker News, especially in topics related to climate change for example. These things can and should be tackled in parallel at the same time. We can all take responsibility personally, how about trying to use less single-use pla…
Do you have the experience of triaging bugs/features at work? There's always more problems then we can solve at once. There is only so many man hours/money/attention available.
Sometimes it makes sense to fix small obvious issues quickly ("oops, forgot to check for null here") before diving into potentially worse but more complicated problems ("user who signed up on legacy plan reports that some playlists are incomplete in new app").
Sometimes there's such a high impact issue that you have to try to address it immediately, even if you suspect that it will involve a hellish trek through the least-maintained code in the whole company before you can even isolate a reproducible test case.
And if you have multiple developers working on bugs, one person may be doing the first while a different person is handling the second.
This is known. The number I have heard floated around is 45%. So, commercial fishing nets are a big problem when it comes to plastic in the oceans. And here we are "saving the planet", by reducing the plastic straw consumption: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2018/07/18/anti-straw-mo... https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-06-07/plasti... https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/business/plastic-straws-b...…
All the straws and all the 6-pack cartilages that make it into the ocean are nothing compared with lost fishing net detritus--the things that are designed to kill and capture marine life.
I spend a day or two every year cleaning up a beach on a island off the coast of China. Its location relative to local sea currents makes it a natural garbage trap. It has been a radicalizing experience but maybe not in the way you would think. Anecdotally about a third of the trash I pick up is fishing related - some nets, some buoys, but mostly thousands of small plastic sardine sized fishing net floats. About a th…
Straws are completely superfluous. If you take away my straw I can continue drinking the beverage. Chips need a container, sure I'd prefer more bulk bins and recycled containers, but if we banned plastic containers for chips you interfere mightily in someone enjoying their product.
ANYWAYS, the fixation is from the bad actors, the trouble makers, the noisemakers.
I spend a day or two every year cleaning up a beach on a island off the coast of China. Its location relative to local sea currents makes it a natural garbage trap. It has been a radicalizing experience but maybe not in the way you would think. Anecdotally about a third of the trash I pick up is fishing related - some nets, some buoys, but mostly thousands of small plastic sardine sized fishing net floats. About a th…
I seem to remember working for a pharmacy years ago and disposing of packing peanuts by putting them in the sink and dissolving them with hot water. Is that not a thing anymore?