@shpuld
This is why "green" advocacy is retarded. This is what "green" advocacy brings you, along with shitty straws that are no longer recyclable and now get to rot in your landfill.

@alyx just dont use straws at all lmao

@shpuld
Life without straws isn't worth living.

@alyx @shpuld well, paper straws are bio-degradable, aren't they? I bet you can sort them into biowaste for them to become compost or cardboard/paper for recycling if they aren't too soggy.

Staws themselves aren't terribly useful tho, their main use is complicated coctails and sodas (since you avoid washing your teeth in goga-gola :DDDD)

but real solution was with us all along - drink more water

@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 @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