@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

@hj @LukeAlmighty @alyx @shpuld Nuclear really is the best option. Meltdowns are a spooky media rarity. Take all the waste, bury it in a desert or something.

@blight @LukeAlmighty @alyx @shpuld i mean that's the current solution yeah, but it's still pollution and a problem, just like regular waste.

@hj @alyx @LukeAlmighty @blight @shpuld some types fourth generation nuclear nuclear reactors solve the waste problem by generating as much fissile material as they consume in a closed fuel cycle, so-called breeder reactors. unfortunately gen four nukes are still just lab/pilot scale research reactors. there isn't enough of a push to fully develop the tech

@blight @hj @LukeAlmighty @alyx @shpuld ah yes, because we don't still have radiation from fukushima in the pacific.

@blight
This is the most convoluted Loss comic I've ever seen
@alyx @hj @LukeAlmighty @shpuld

@LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld
Nuclear is far from perfect. I love nuclear energy as a concept, and even I can recognize that waste management is a massive headache. There are some solutions on the horizon to deal with some of that too, but as it stands, it's true that if something goes bad at a nuclear facility, it goes REALLY bad.
If something goes bad at a solar plant, a couple of panels get cracked.

So I wouldn't say nuclear power is anywhere close to "too perfect to be true".

@alyx @hj @shpuld
I get the point about the cracked panel, but when you have to essentially re-build the entire powerplant every 20 years, you have a problem.

@LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld
I know. Photovoltaic panels literally lose a good amount of their efficiency in their first few days or hours of usage.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld eeh they can make the panels from lead-silicon nanotubing and there are some fucky things that happen with group symmetry to make them efficient but i don't know where i put the paper and i haven't seen anyone try to field it

@icedquinn @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld
Yeah, I know a recent potential solution was just released into peer review, but it's gonna take a long time till you actually see it on the market.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld this was already peer reviewed since years but i don't think anything came of it.

i don't know how one goes about making nanocrystals.

@alyx @LukeAlmighty @hj @shpuld >a couple of panels get cracked
leaching heavy metals into the ground,

@hakui @alyx @LukeAlmighty @shpuld classic rock

@hj @LukeAlmighty @alyx @shpuld trap house