southsamurai

Abso-freakin-lutely

The drive for not just profit, but ever increasing stock values is dead at the center of most environmental issues, and a damn big slice of general issues. The environmental ones it isn’t the core of, it ain’t far from center, and it amplified any other factors far more than it would have with a people focused system.

The problem is compounded by the fact that plastics do a lot of jobs better than other materials, , and even when it isn’t better, it’s cheaper.

In order to do away with plastics, something else has to take their place.

That isn’t a task that’s easy to get rolling, and it’s one that risks making the same mistakes. If new materials receive as little testing as the more common plastics did when they came on the market, even stuff that tests out as short term viable won’t have long term data available until and after they’re on the market.

Going back to previous materials can work when they’re known to be safer on an environmental level, but nothing is without impact at all. Switch to glass, you not only increase shipping weights which drives up the output of whatever fuel source is driving that, but you run into needing fresh materials at some points in the process of making new glass.

If you just reuse, you now have added fuel costs getting the glas to where it can be changed and processed. You have whatever impact that cleaning process causes (if any).

And that’s just scraping the surface of what it would take to switch back to glass for food and drinks.

I’m not saying it wouldn’t be worth it, I’m just saying that blindly switching any given plastic use to something else isn’t guaranteed to be better just because it isn’t plastic. It could end up being a roughly equal proposition, or one where it’s just bad in different ways.

Woods, metals, stone and minerals, paper, none of them are without environmental cost. There’s no magic wand here, no magic bullet to kill environmental harm just by shooting plastic.

The reduce,reuse,recycle mantra decreases impact. And it’s really only applicable if there’s infrastructure to support it.

It’s a giant fucking mess, and plastics are a symptom of it all. But without materials usage, we lose the good parts of industry and manufacturing. So even if we all decided it was worth an immediate change, how long would that consensus last when heart monitors and refrigerators go away? You get rid of fridges, and you open a giant hole in food storage and management that was never solved by root cellars, ice boxes, and preservation methods. They could get close, but nothing preserves food like freezing. Even a bad refrigerator beats an ice box, and there are still people alive that have used both to back that up.

It’s all a giant snowball ramping up speed. And until we solve it, even terraforming other planets would only kick the can down the road.

But, good luck working on it seriously, over decades and centuries when greed and outright malice get in the way

I’d also worry about flammability. I’m not up on the various insulators like Styrofoam when it comes to its flash point, or if shorts could set it off when improvised like that.

Fucking brutal

Looks like water down a bathtub drain. Which is really cool. Something that huge looking that small because of perspective via the camera.

I think there’s a translation barrier, maybe.

When I said “it doesn’t matter”, I meant that none of the arguments about it matter in a real way. I then explained why I don’t think it matters.

English is a pain in the ass language sometimes.

In this instance, I think perhaps “the subject is moot”, or “the debate is without relevance beyond conversation for the sake of conversation.” would have been better.

For most Americans, you’ll find that “it doesn’t matter” isn’t the same as “I don’t care”, unless they say “it doesn’t matter to me”. Depends on where they grew up, or where they’ve lived long enough to change their use of casual english, though.

Secondary to that, what I wrote was a fairly small bit. Less than most op-ed pieces in newspapers, less than most other articles too. I get that the internet, and texting, have driven down our collective patience with longer writing, but still. If it can fit on the screen of a tablet, with the paragraph breaks included, it really isn’t that long.

Really?

How many countries have “of America” in their names?

When you actually think about it, it isn’t offensive. Matter of fact, if you’ve been around the internet long enough, you could remember when it first started, and it wasn’t people in the Americas doing the complaining.

Are Mexicans being offended when we get called the US? It’s in the same place in the name for their country, the United States of Mexico. Or would they prefer being called the EU? Oh, that’s right, if they use the words in Spanish, they’re screwed because europe got there first.

Come the think of it, what do Mexicans call the US? The ones I know call it “el Norte”, which is offensive to Canadians by the same way of thinking, since the USA isn’t the only country in the north of north america.

The whole thing is stupid. The only time being “american” and not talking about the US matters is if you’re referring to everyone in South and/or Central America as a group. Which isn’t exactly a common thing. And, guess what, you’d still have to apply the term North Americans to people from the USA if you wanted to lump them in with Canada and Mexico.

Brazilians aren’t called Americans because their country is Brazil, and that’s a much bigger component of their national “vibe” than being south American. Hell, you talk to some Brazilians, and they’ll argue that their entire culture is separate from the rest of South America. And, btw, they’re called Brazilians, not FRians, despite being the federative republic of Brazil in English, (which is republica federativa in Portuguese, which is missing some accent marks, but there’s a limit to typing on screen and hunting down the right ones when you’re dyslexic).

People from the US have been called Americans by other people in the Americas way longer than this whiny trend has existed. Mind you, us citizens aren’t always called Americans, there’s other terms used here and there in both Spanish and Portuguese speakers for sure, and likely in indigenous languages. So, calling us citizens “Americans” is really only an English thing, there’s variants in other languages that are the dominant term in that languages, even compared to other terms.

Hell, there’s even an argument to be made that the U.S. got the name first, so anyone else can bugger off, but I’ve always found that argument both specious and rude.

Besides, let’s be real here, when it comes down to it, it doesn’t matter. You might get some people to switch over, but when every news source in the world has to get on board, and every person around the world is expected to care, it isn’t going to change, even in English.

The whole argument is a nothing burger anyway. It’s dumb. And there’s a thousand things ahead of it on the list of things to change.

Hey, don’t be so glum. You know you’re loved. Isn’t your pet earthworm always glas to see you?

They don’t really harbor bacteria well. Most of the woods uses are anti-bacterial, they actually kill off a whole host of pathogens.

But, if you’re taking care of the cutting board, you can sanitize easily anyway. A mild vinegar or bleach solution, an inexpensive cloth towel, and you just wipe down between things. If you’re really paranoid, you can wash a smaller board in a sink, but it isn’t really necessary.

If you keep the board oiled and waxed, nothing is going to soak in at all.

Now, I’m not saying you can just chop up a bunch of dripping chicken and leave it sitting there for hours. But you can safely wipe down after meats, and have no fear of contamination, or cross-contamination. It just isn’t a good place for bacteria to thrive at all, and good cleaning takes care of the rest. Hell, I’d trust that over a plastic board that’s run through a dishwasher, which is pretty much as clean as things get.

No bullshit, there’s been testing done on wood cutting boards. They don’t absorb much of anything, and don’t harbor bacteria. Even if you leave something wet on them, it won’t soak in much at all, and will dry completely given time. That’s not the kind of environment pathogens like.

At least it’s pretty!

Yeah, that’s my thought too