@hj @alyx maybe it was the fancy new metal straws

@shpuld @alyx i actually have those, they are very nice.

Probably even easier to recycle since all you have to do is smelt them.

I'm more concerned with cleaning equipment - they came with this tiny brush to clean the inside, but i don't think you could get one like that without buying more straws.

@shpuld @alyx actually maybe i should buy more of them and with help of some electrical tape and ice container make a remote beer drinking tube with intercooling w

@hj @shpuld
I've seen them, never tried buying any. I'm guessing they're steel? Would be easy enough to recycle, because you can easily separate them from other metals via magnets.

But as a daily use, cleaning them would be hard, and I wouldn't trust to drink with one in any kind of restaurant. Maybe specialized automatic straw cleaning equipment will appear at some point, but for now I don't trust reusable straws being hygienic.

@alyx @shpuld yeah, a pack of 4 straws at clas ohlson comes with a tiny brush to clean those from inside, the only problem is that those are angled, makes it a tiny bit harder to clean the bend. I imagine that for restaurants they could use fatter and staraight pipes instead, with automation just pulling similar brush to and fro or just running hot water through them idk. it's solvable imo.

but yeah i think those are stainless steel, there are even brass/gold-colored ones but i think those are also stainless steel with extra coating.

for home use those are probably the best option.

@hj @alyx @shpuld i use stainless steel straws, bent or no. they have little mouth cushions for them too.

i stopped liking the angled straws because they're more likely to have carbonated stuff escape and drip everywhere.

@icedquinn @alyx @shpuld better use some plumbing tape or something to fix that.

@hj @alyx @shpuld won't help. carbonation wants to escape and if the straw is angled then instead of it just escaping in to the atmosphere it ends up bringing fizzy beverage in to the bend which then escapes on to your shit instead.

@hj @alyx @shpuld straight stainless steel straws with the little cozy on them doesn't do this as much though its comfy

@hj @shpuld
Just running hot water is probably not enough to meet safety standards. Even if it's close to boiling water, it would have to have some significant pressure behind it (if you want fast cleaning).
If you're ok with the process taking a long time, you could probably adapt the same tech normal washing machines use, and make something smaller just for straws.

@alyx @shpuld i mean for restaurants they usually wash dishes in bulk and for quite long time so taking long time doesn't matter. High pressure is also not out of ordinary.

I still remember the enormous industrial conveyor dishwasher of soviet era at my school's cafeteria.

maybe fast food restaurants want to avoid dishwashers at all. Only thing i remember from mcd is manually cleaning the trays with some cloth.

@hj @shpuld
Most fast food places are tiny, and don't have the space for washing facilities. It's why you've got a removable paper layer over the plastic trays (at least that's how it is here), to avoid having to wash anything.

@alyx @hj @shpuld I used to work in fast food. They're washed after every use, but that doesn't mean they're that clean by the time they get back to circulation, if you know what I mean.

@alyx @shpuld yeah but they still wash them, clean with cloth and wash under a stream if it's really dirty.

but yeah, i can't imagine where they'd put an industrial dishwasher in there.

as i mentioned before they should just sell cans/bottles. most of them here do already when doing delivery (except for hesburger which STILL uses cups when doing deliveres, literally why??)

@hj @shpuld @alyx Metal straws are shit. There's been several occasions where they've tugged on my clothes and deposited my drink all over the floor

@kakol @alyx @shpuld wtf, how??

@hj @shpuld @alyx couldn't you clean them with pipecleaners?

@izaya @alyx @shpuld dunno

>metal straws

NO!!!!!! 😡

@hj @shpuld @alyx

@GrungeQueef @alyx @shpuld finally

@hj @shpuld
Ideally you'd want to reuse paper straws to make other paper/cardboard products. Compost is the last thing you want to do with paper/cardboard stuff. Technically you can, but it's not the easiest thing to compost, and it's a waste.

But from the discussions I've heard when this entire mess started, the issue is that straws are too narrow/small to throw into the normal paper shredders, so they currently can't actually be processed.

Places like McDonald's apparently invested money into custom infrastructure to handle plastic straws, precisely because of their small size leaves them harder to deal with. And now they're forced to do it all over again because some stupid politicians behind a desk that have no idea how the world works.

@alyx @shpuld ideally yes. But if paper/cardboard is too dirty (i.e. greasy paper wrapper for a burger) it should probably go into bio.

Yeah I get that straws can be too tiny to shred, makes plastic straws somewhat better alternative i imagine since you just smelt/dissolve those(?).

I think real problem and real reason why people switched to paper straw is littering and people not sorting the trash.

I still don't understand why don't they just serve bottles/cans.

@hj @shpuld
>and real reason why people switched to paper straw is littering and people not sorting the trash
Here's the thing though, most straw use is in restaurants, not random people at home. It's much easier to get restaurants to sort trash, a lot of them do it already, and it's much easier accomplished.

The idiocy of the paper straw "solution", is that it focuses at 1% of the straw problem, that come from domestic usage, when with traditional plastic straws you had solutions ready and available to fix 99% of the problem.

But this is what dipshit "green" advocacy does. It ignores good enough solutions, because they're "just" 99% instead of 100%, and they literally advocate against them, and leaves you into a spot where you're struggling to even get back at where you were previously.

Another sign of "green" advocacy doing this is with the decline in nuclear energy. It's not 100% "clean&renewable" so they're trowing away this solution when we didn't even manage to phase out coal yet.
Instead of pushing for nuclear and solar/wind/etc. until we phase out coal, and only after that trying to phase out unsafe nuclear too; instead they're slowly pushing out nuclear while we're literally still relying on fossil fuels.

@alyx @shpuld last time i worked at mcd they didn't do diddly-dick about sorting trash, it's all same container and everything gets compressed in an industrial trash compactor, but it was in a shitty country and 10 years ago. Nowadays I only see two types of sorting at restaurants - in actual cafeterias where you have to put your dishes back there's usually biowaste/energy waste containers; in fast-food joints there's a place to put liquids/ice in and bag for everything else. I can't imagine restaurants digging through the trash to sort unfinished burgers from paper straws. And this is Finland, where people seem to care about sorting trash and recycling. I can imagine in america most people would think recycling is "buncha commie shit", and asking customers to sort their trash would be impolite.


>because they're "just" 99% instead of 100%

oh hey, like technology connection guy would say, " "but sometimes" ". Fear is easy to manipulate, it's very powerful and fear mongering is a very real thing.


two of retarded things related to recycling that i see here are:
- hand soap bottles that say "reuse your pump" but they don't sell refills, i.e. same thing without the pump.
- clothes conditioner in a plastic bottle with a plastic label that you should remove before recycling for whatever reason.

@hj @alyx @shpuld it is made very hard for most regular people to recycle

@tn5421 @alyx @shpuld unironically, recycling is bad UX by design.

@hj @alyx @shpuld yeah idk how it is anywhere else but in america they went out of their way to make recycling as confusing and difficult as possible

@tn5421 @hj @shpuld
And it's probably not even close to how confusing and complicated it should be.

Technically, you're supposed to separate the different kinds of plastics, metal should be separated at least between aluminium cans and everything else, and so on. For an actual good recycling system, you'd probably have close to a dozen different trash bins.

@tn5421 @hj @alyx depends where you live, where I live you get proper different categories for different trash in the nearest trash collection point. only excuse is laziness

@shpuld @tn5421 @alyx real talk tho, "energy waste" bin at my place is really small, it's almost always overflowing and perhaps taken out once a year or something.

and also it took me quite a long time to figure out the difference between cardboard and paper (since those are essentially the same material).

oh and cardboard bin(s) are also overflowing quite often.

@hj @shpuld @alyx yeah cardboard is the only thing simple enough that even most of us americans can figure it out w/ how dumb the system is

@hj @alyx @tn5421 they have detailed explanations for different categories, the information is out there

although if it's in finnish only then it might be a tricky

@shpuld @alyx @tn5421 more like the information often doesn't list everything or isn't specific enough. Or just my dumb ass being unable to read/understand.

Still, the only remaining problem is multi-material stuff like candy wrappers or foiled wrappers etc. Also unmarked plastic that I usually assume isn't PVC.

@hj @shpuld
There are retarded shit about recycling everywhere, all the time. It gets really fucked up when you start to thing about it.

Take milk cartons. They're supposedly recyclable, but god only knows how they actually separate all the different layers that make up the "cardboard" box. That's usually actually a sandwich of cardboard, plastic, and sometimes aluminium too.

>technology connection viewer
Nice.

@alyx @shpuld i imagine it's doable, like use use chemicals to strip the plastic, then grind the sucker and use magnets to separate metal foil from paper? Oh and remove the caps manually beforehand?

@hj @shpuld
Except you can't use magnets, cause it's aluminium metal, not steel. I know technically all metal is magnetic to some degree, but to use magnets strong enough to attract aluminium is unfeasible because it would mess with the machinery itself.

If it's just a cardboard/plastic sandwich, and you're not expecting to get high qualify cardboard after the recycling, you can just shred the thing as is. The plastic is not a large proportion, so the impurities would be acceptable. But for the life of me, I can't figure out what they'd do for the ones that also include the foil.

@alyx @shpuld you could also make differently-sized nets to filter out smaller (paper) dust from bigger (metal) dust, or put both in a container and shake it for a long while to make heavier filings drop at the bottom and lighter to come out on top, then dump container through a hole with proper timing.

I mean i don't think it's impossible to do, maybe just impossible to make perfect separation.

@hj @shpuld
Actually, the shaking bit might work, but do it in water. Metal would drop, paper would likely float. I think they do something like this when recycling plastics, to both clean the plastic flakes after shredding, and make sure any metal that could have gotten in is separated.

@alyx @hj @shpuld
I am not a big believer in "one true solution". Solar panels have livetime of a hamster and wind power seems to be causing climate irregularities that we're not used to dealing with yet. On the other hand, no matter how I look at it, nuclear power seems almost too perfect to be true.

@LukeAlmighty @alyx @shpuld nuclear is the best, yes. There's also geothermal, but like all the renewable sources it's always affecting the source. I.e. if you build a hydroelectric plant you'll slow down the river and cause it to go out of banks and also affect the flora/fauna of said river. Same thing with wind power, essentially.

Nuclear only has two real downsides - the scarcity of fuel and the highly-dangerous waste.

@hj @LukeAlmighty @shpuld
Fission fuel is not that scarce. Not to mention that things like thorium-salt reactors could actually reuse some of the previous nuclear waste as fuel. So there are potential solutions to extend the fuel as much as possible.
But it doesn't even need to last forever anyway. Just enough till you get fusion reactor going. After that, you really wouldn't have much to worry about regarding fuel.

@alyx @hj @LukeAlmighty @shpuld ah yes, palladium reactors

@icedquinn @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld
Haven't heard about palladium reactors. Might look into it.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld Fleishman-Ponz is the only fusion reaction to ever generate a positive wattage and it's some Polonium-Hydrogen setup you're not supposed to talk about anymore and also even when it does work you only get like 10W from it.

@icedquinn @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld
Ooooohh that thing.... heard about that recently. The effect is not really well understood, but if I understood correctly, it's not actually fusion that's the underlying effect.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld you put in palladium (it has to have some specific atomic alignment too; some sticks just don't work) in to water and do somesth, they detected deuterium out of it.

i think they assumed it was fusion because how else do you get the deuterium

then MIT shat all over them with fake graphs and nobody talks about it anymore

@icedquinn @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld
I think Michael Shermer had a podcast episode recently that touched on it. I'll try to find it again.

@icedquinn @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld
I only managed to find a short reference to the thing here:
https://youtu.be/p8ls1oSQvc0?t=3755

But I know I've either heard it somewhere else, or maybe read about it recently, and it definitely wasn't fusion what they found there. From what I remembered, it was something to do with a poorly understood quantum effect or something closer to that. It was something to do with how the palladium lattice was made it created a kind of resonance effect. Can't say I understood more of it than that.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld well if a quantum lattice is going to generate ten net watts

@alyx @LukeAlmighty @shpuld i mean, compared to oil, metal, wood, coal, nuclear fuel is somewhat scarce.

t. factorio player

@hj @alyx @LukeAlmighty @shpuld nuclear has the problem that governments always want to co-opt it to make bombs so they don't ever actually build molten salt or thorium reactors.

@hj @LukeAlmighty @shpuld
Sure, but pound for pound, you get a lot more out of uranium, so it balances out.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty @shpuld sure, but eventually we'll run out of that, too. And we're nowhere near space exploitation.

And you know how humanity works, right? Oh we only have little coal and a tiny bit of power? Better not waste it! Oh now we have tons of power now? Fuck it, let's run AC at 100% 24/7, let's waste it on mining bitcoins, let's forget to turn off the heater etc etc etc.

We can't really tell if nuclear will last us until we start building dyson spheres, if we ever get there.

But then again, it's not like we have many options...

@hj @alyx @shpuld
That is where we have a strange difference in world view.

Yes, we have a limited time and yes, we have limited resources.
That means we have to use them NOW, before our civilization does collapse, because we cannot afford to loose another 500 years for a new empire to be built.

we are soooooo close to greatness.

@LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld
Kinda true. If we force a dark age for the sake of "muh environment" advocates, not only are we stopping progress, but the society is likely to lose our knowledge and understanding of how to do these things.

Did you know that because NASA hasn't been to the moon for half a century, they no longer have any idea how to rebuild the rockets they used in the 60s-70s?

We're definitely better off using these resources now, even if only a fraction of them gets put into researching and developing better sources of energy.

As for uranium running out, sure eventually it will. But it's gonna be a long while before it does. And if we manage to make fusion in that time, you've basically reached the end goal.

@alyx @hj @shpuld
Not only because of environmentalism.

It could be covid, social justice, nuclear war... All I know is that 2 years ago, I could not even immagine the entire economy collapsing because of common cold.

@LukeAlmighty @alyx @shpuld >social justice nuclear war

can't wait for america to implode