When I was a kid almost everything was recycled. People took your metals, glass, paper, peelings, wood and so on off your hands and frequently paid for it. Now you have to do the sorting yourself and you have to pay for the privilege. The large conglomerates that then take your pre-sorted scrap sell this for the market rate. And they're sitting pretty on decades long contracts with municipalities.
This is the opposite of my experience. When I was a kid (80s and 90s) every place I lived made you separate your recyclables. It's only been relatively recently (maybe 10ish years or so?) that I've seen single-stream recycling become the norm. I'd also point out that a ton of plastics recycling and e-waste was never really recycled - we just shipped it to China to sort-of-recycle it, but they stopped being the world's dumping ground a few years ago.
I think its less anti-competitive corporations and more that recycling most things just isnt cost effective. I find it hard to believe someone in the supply chain is making a killing by amassing large quantities of cheap plastic or lithium batteries.
It's because they saw short term gains. Corruption, maybe, but not that I'm aware of.
The big haulers here were all established parties that got to bid on these contracts and they played a very smart game but given the various downsides for society and the municipalities themselves in the longer term I can't rule it out either. It certainly doesn't make a whole pile of sense. One day glass was a valuable resource, the next you had to pay someone to get rid of it. Likewise for paper, compostables etc. This all happened in the 80's or so and recycling was the nominal driver. It outright ignored that we were already recycling. The big killer was to package everything in plastic and with plastic liners, even things that look like paper are often coated with plastic on the inside. So now we have two problems: the valuables are recycled and create a profit twice for the haulers and they charge real money for the ever increasing mountain of plastic.
People harp a lot on the straw ban, I get it, it is symbolic. But I would have gone much further: anything perishable that can be packaged in paper should be packaged in paper, and the paper industry should be incentivized to recycle as much as possible with the least energy as possible. Because right now recycling paper often gets skipped on account of the energy requirements (because we like our paper to be white). Instead it gets lumped in with the compostables or biomass and burned for electricity.
There is a ton of information on all this and it is obviously very variable from one locality to another but in the end resource extraction, energy use and leftover waste are the killers, those need to be curbed and far more drastically than we are doing right now. So much stuff is single use it is just terrible, and there are no real alternatives either. If you shop at a normal supermarket for a family of four at the end of the week you'll have a small mountain of packaging.
I've often wondered how different things would be if producers and manufacturers were required to pay for any waste they generated from their products, at no additional cost to the consumer.
Individually wrapped candies in a plastic sleeve? Landfills will send you a invoice based on the volume that enters their site.
Phones designed to be replaced every two-years? You might be able to save money by making the original container a prepaid shipping box to cut back on sending out new ones for proper disposal.
Fruits and vegetables? That's bio-degradable and people will pay to have it in their soil. Make a deal with some local group to set up compost bins charging $1/scoop, and its like a built-in subsidy for farmers.
Have a novel solution that's 100% re-useable/recyclable? Enjoy the good times while entrepreneurs offer to pick that up for you to sell back to recyclers themselves.
EPA discovers that by "recycle" you meant "throw it in the ocean when no one's looking"? If you can't pivot quickly enough to cover both the new disposal fees and clean-up fines you'll be a good case-study for others who want to take shortcuts.
Sure, companies would absolutely pass the cost straight into the purchase price, but a company that wraps your sandwich in plastic and adds a $5 disposal markup won't last long when someone starts wrapping theirs in paper and only charging $1 more.
I know it's not that simple, but a man can dream, eh?
I agree with you on a lot of this, but I don't think it matters if we get better at recycling paper because paper is renewable and the more paper we need, the more trees are farmed, that wouldn't be farmed otherwise. It seems like people believe that paper comes from unspoiled ancient rainforests, when really it comes from rotated tree farms in Canada as far as I know. If we recycled paper so well that our demand halved, a lot of those tree farms wouldn't be planted anymore. It seems to me like if paper is dumped in the landfill the carbon those trees capture gets buried underground. Big win.
Also, I'm maybe a monster environmentally thinks utility needs to factor in. Straws are made of plastic because straws are useful and because plastic makes a very good straw. Paper makes a useless one, so they're pointless to even make. So many things use a lot more plastic than straws do, so I sincerely think straws should be the last to go after we've ended plastic water bottles, takeout clamshells, milk cartons, etc. Put all that crap in reusable glass or recyclable aluminum.
The problem with reusable glass is that it's heavy and transporting it back to the factory to be washed and refilled takes a lot of effort and energy on it's own.
Those multiples only work if you are growing so fast that you start to become a threat to an incumbent. Otherwise, you can halve that easily, it all depends on what you do as a business and how hard it is to copy what you are doing. High multiples require strong growth, strong IP and a shortcut compared to redevelopment.
I have installed plug-ins that totally strip all recommendations, shorts and other stuff from youtube to the point where it only displays the one video that I was interested in. This probably saved me more hours than I care to admit.
'unhook' and 'hide youtube shorts' are the main ingredients.
Not defending Twitter per se but I’ve seen partial to full nudity in YT recommendations after watching fairly innocuous but popular videos.
For lack of a better term to describe it if you watch enough “normie” videos it seems to start showing you anything with a high view count. Watch 100 silly cat videos and it will start recommending you celebrities and football and ofc naked girls. YMMV but that’s what I’ve seen. Worse if you aren’t logged in.
At least it’s better than Instagram where softcore porn is the rule rather than the exception
As opposed to the violence done to them by the wealthy? In comparison it was quite surgical. That Napoleon managed to run off with it is an error but that wasn't the only possible outcome and even today France has some of the strongest social fabrics that traces its threads straight back to those guillotine ropes.
100% agreement, it's a complete mess. I think the big mistake is that this was all built on hope and hope is a fantastic way of getting to disappointment. But now what? That's the hard question. It looks like a whole bunch of politicians in the West are in Putin's pocket or at least useful idiots, the populace doesn't give two shits as long as they can watch TV and there is bread and meanwhile the fuse is burning.
It's pretty sad that the EU now has to look to Lithuania for their moral compass because they seem to have lost their own.
The same move could have had a completely different outcome so it is hard to lay the blame with the USA and Britain. A unified Germany unlocked Poland and the Baltics as well as the Balkans, Romania and even Bulgaria. It did not work out quite as planned because Putin went mad but it could have worked if Russia focused on creation rather than destruction for a while. But with people that power hungry ratio goes right out the window.
Nothing will go "as planned" in that part of the world for as long as individual states like Germany will be signing agreements with Russia without consultation or participation of the Eastern European states. The problem of Western Europe is that they look at Eastern European countries as "lesser", former dependencies and haven't accepted them as equal partners.
Yes, that's a very valid point, the Western countries in the EU do not properly value the input from their Eastern colleagues on these matters. It's a very annoying thing. I have spent a good chunk of my life East of Berlin both before and after the wall came down and I have zero illusions about the situation at the moment. The question is how long it will take the rest of Europe to wake up to the new reality and it is incredible how lax the response has been so far. You'd think that they would get the message by now but all we get is half-assed measures.
It will be difficult. Germany is a state with a massive parasitic infiltration by Russian agents and "useful idiots" at all levels of the government, the industry, and the media. Watching German response to war in Ukraine has been embarrassing and a good argument for the countries of Eastern Europe to arm themselves to the teeth and not wait for the Western Allies to come to their support.
Agreed on all counts. This is a turning point in history and I'm really wondering if we aren't about to lose 80 years of progress in Europe, for Ukraine, on a shorter timescale, that is already a reality. And all because we keep making the same dumb mistakes.
Absolutely each and every one of those is far right, borderline fascist and getting more so by the day. There is plenty of evidence of Russian funds bankrolling these (and others), no need to suggest this is a conspiracy. What you believe doesn't really matter.
You're hilarious. Geert Wilders is a populist, not a politician. The party objectives are Geert Wilders' dog whistles and promises to the gullible, it isn't a serious political party even though it has attracted the largest voting bloc simply because there is no governance structure in place, the party is Geert Wilders, the rest is just window dressing. The idea that 'even in the west[sic] you can fell[sic] victim to propoganda[sic]' is true but it has nothing to do with my view of Wilders, the PVV or the general Dutch political situation. And as for state media, guess what GW wants to get rid of?
