>All of these problems have been solved on the web
Have they? The solution to IP addresses is basically "use a VPN", which you could do also on a phone. SNI leaks have been around since forever, and despite eSNI, still isn't close to being widely fixed. There's MAC address randomization, but only because LANs and wifi networks are basically an unregulated free for all, so spoofing doesn't really matter. It's far less viable with controlled access networks like cellular. Some countries even have regulations banning spoofing/changing IMEIs.
This subreddit is a great one and if you read the announcement they are taking a very sensitive approach.
HN is obviously very pro-ai and many top-level comments mention that blocking AI submissions will leave r/selfhosted in the digital stone age. That's not at all what they are doing.
The vast majority of vibe-coded apps submitted lately have been simply either very low quality, inferior clones of existing apps, or just incomplete non-sense with a good readme. Redditors are rightfully rejecting that but the trend has been to reject it because it is vibe coded and not for the right reason: the low quality.
In a sense they are protecting ai assisted apps from being lumped in all the crap and auto-rejected by the community.
If you rephrase the announcement as Limiting low-quality/low-effort submissions instead of vibe coded, nobody would object.
I've noticed many posts hitting the hn front page in the last few years trending first on r/selfhosted so there's a good overlap between the communities. Before judging I'd encourage you to take a look. I've discovered many apps I use daily through it (immich, jellyfin, frigate-nvr for examples).
Why stop there? I think more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly. Trash is an enormous externality. I'm talking about plastic clamshells, container lids, "disposable" storage containers, the lot.
"Why stop there" is often a reason why nothing gets done. Why do small if you can go big right away? Because going big right away is costly (in social cost, in convincing, in how much people need to change behavior, ...) and that prevents people from doing it in the first place because the threshold is high. Apathy is the result. Better to take a small step first, then get used to the measure / the cost, then have a next phase where you do more.
Everybody makes fun of paper straws. Or they made fun of wind power when it was barely 0.1% of energy production. Why not immediately demand 20 years ago that all single use plastic is banned? Or that only wind and solar are allowed? Because the step is too big, it would not be accepted. You need to take one step at a time.
That's even a viable strategy against procrastination. There is this big daunting task. So much to do! Oh my, better scroll a little tiktok first. No, just take a small first step of the task. Very small, no big commitment. Then maybe do some tiktok, but the little first step won't be too much. Result is, you have an immediate sense of accomplishment and actually made progress, maybe even stay hooked with more steps of the ultimately big task.
You're missing the fact that this sort of infrastructure requires a robust business case. That's why scale is critical.
Recycling bottles and cans has a solid business case. Glass and aluminium are straight forward to recycle at an industrial scale, but would be pointless if they were kept at an artisanal scale.
Any moralistic argument is pointless if you can't put together a coherent business plan. The people you need to work and the energy you need to spend to gather and process whatever you want to process needs to come from somewhere. How many vape pens do you need to recycle per month to support employing a single person? Guilt trips from random people online don't pay that person's rent, do they?
> Everybody makes fun of paper straws.
This is specious reasoning. The core issue are tradeoffs, and what you have to tolerate or abdicate. Paper straws are a red herring because the main criticism was that, at the start, they failed to work as straws. So you were left with an industrial demand to produce a product that failed to work and was still disposable.
If you look at food packaging and containers, you are faced with more thought-provoking tradeoffs. Paper containers don't help preserve food as well as plastic ones. Packaging deteriorates if exposed to any form of moisture, and contaminates food so quickly tk the point you can taste cardboard if you leave them overnight. This leads to shorter shelf life and more food waste. Is food waste not an ecological problem? How do you manage those tradeoffs?
In theory plastic food 'waste' could be far more recyclable if it were standardized on plastics that were recyclable and we had a deposit system.
Needless to say the food and drink industry has spent an epic fuckton on lobbying to ensure that doesn't happen. Remember to give a proper fuck you to the Coca-cola corp about this.
Yeah, because they suck. Uh, pun not intended. Paper straws get somewhat soggy and feel bad in your mouth. They are inferior to the plastic straws they purport to replace, so people resist them as much as they can.
If you want to actually make a difference with an environmental effort, you need to make something superior. Nobody makes fun of LED light bulbs because (up front cost aside) they are wildly superior to incandescent. People actually like having LED bulbs and seek them out. The same cannot be said, and likely never will be said, of paper straws.
Most paper straws use PFAS, meaning we’re actively composting PFAS in a fantasy effort to feel good about our waste without actually giving anything up
paper straws do not make any sense any way you look at it. Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
Nope, that's a myth. Plastic is essentially unrecyclable. Some types of plastic can be made into "lower" quality types with lots of effort, but there is no circular reuse. The oil and plastic industries want to make you believe that this is all a solved problem, but it very much is not.
In contrast, paper and wood products just rot away at the end of their life, and a new tree grows in their place.
It's not a myth, you can make new items using recycled plastics. Of course, the recycled plastic doesn't have the same properties, but it doesn't mean that it can't be useful to reduce plastic production. Most plastic items do not require pristine materials anyway.
It's the same for paper and cardboard, and it's much better to reuse it as much as possible to avoid cutting a tree. Letting it rot releases the same amount of CO2 than burning it, by the way.
The vast majority of paper products made from farmed trees (because if you're pulping it anyway you can use really fast growing wood), meaning the CO2 you release from burning/composting paper straws is offset by the next tree planted to replace it.
Excess CO2 in the atmosphere is driven by burning fuels that aren't being actively produced via recaptured atmospheric CO2, such as petroleum.
And the fundamental issue with recycling plastic is that the raw ingredients for virgin plastic are basically free as a byproduct of fuel petroleum extraction. If I want octane, hexane, methane, propane, etc. for fuel, I'm also going to be pulling up and separating out ethane, which is a very quick steam crack and catalyzed polymerization away from polyethylene.
Tree farming has a major environmental impact and degrades natural environments, wildlife and soils. A tree farm is not a forest at all.
Some products such as cotton are even more destructive, which is why the cotton tote bag is an environmental absurdity and the plastic equivalent is much better.
I'd argue it's kinda a myth, because I used to believe we could create a perfectly closed loop (you know, like the one the recycling symbol suggests) if only we could cleanly separate the materials (which in my imagination requires consumers to vigilantly separate the waste into dozens of different bins). I'm beginning to think I was wrong.
If 1kg of "recycled" plastics allow to reduce the production of 1kg of pristine plastics, it's already a big win, even if it's downcycling. No need to throw away the baby with the bathwater.
It is probably the only argument in favor of recycling.
After the last six months exploring the recycling process what I get is this:
Reduce, reuse, recycle.
The order matter, recycling is useful but should be the last step when something has to be trashed away. In the case of our straws, buying a metal one would reduce and reuse much better than the two others solutions.
A problem is that we tend to only talk about recycling while forgetting the two others. It is easy to talk about how many tons has been recycled while it's very difficult to quantify the reduce reuse practice and not very appealing for sellers either.
Plastic does not have to be 100% recyclable for it to be economically viable.
However, plastic straws are so small that I'd think most of them get tossed anyway.
> Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
It’s more okay to make things out of paper than plastic, yes. Plastic waste and microplastics are a huge problem. Trees are a renewable resource.
> Moreover, paper straws are not even recyclable due to water content which makes them soggy. Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
Plastic straws are almost never (literally never?) recycled. Paper straws are supposed to be fully biodegradable.
> Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
But yes, this and the usability issue make the other points moot (n.b. leaching harmful chemicals is a concern that also applies to plastic straws and paper cups). The vast majority of existing straws should be replaced with no straw, and most beyond that with reusable straws.
Isn't this a bit like "paper" cups for coffee / water? We switched to these at work a few years ago, and it's an all-round horrible experience.
I swear every other one leaks right away, and those that don't can only be refilled once or twice before they do. So you end up going through like 10 of those a day. I also don't know how "eco-friendly" they actually are, since there's a picture of a dead turtle on them under a text to the effect of "don't throw out in nature".
I guess on the plus-side, our company at least provides ceramic cups to their internal employees. But since it's the employees' responsibility to clean them, not everybody is off the disposable cup train.
> I swear every other one leaks right away, and those that don't can only be refilled once or twice before they do. So you end up going through like 10 of those a day
Yeah, if you're using that many, the solution is, and always has been, to get a proper reusable cup (ceramic, glass, whatever).
Right, but this just shows why these policies don't work in practice. People will just use 10 paper cups which are free, rather than cart around a big ceramic one.
Especially in situations where people don't even have an assigned spot in the office anymore, it's not exactly shocking that many will choose the easier route.
My company told everyone to bring their own mug, which they were expected to wash from time to time. Then they give mugs for "thanks for working here" awards once in a while so they can be sure everyone has one. Soap and a sink are provided near the coffee makers.
Paper cups are still provided, but it is intended visitors not people who work in the building.
> Are we saying that we are okay to cut trees to make straws when we could make them out of petroleum ?
Uhh.. yes? Trees can be grown, just like any agriculture product.
> Plastic ones are almost 100% recyclable
In theory. However that rarely works out in practice, due to the complications of mixing various types of plastic in a single stream of garbage.
> Most importantly, unlike plastic straws, they are laced with glue and other chemicals which gets ingested.
The glue for paper straws will be a biodegradable water-based adhesive. It may be finished with natural wax. And that's it. I think you are intentionally spreading FUD saying glue and chemicals.
That being said, I hate paper straws. I like bamboo straws though.
Maybe. Safe of ingestion means we have to know what happens in the body. Some plastics just pass right through and are safe; some biodegradable things are good food for the body. Some biodegradable things degrade to something harmful, and some plastics do get absored into the body and are harmful.
But usually paper and cardboard that has been in contact with food is not recyclable because it contaminates the batch. That's why pizza boxes also cannot go into the cardboard/paper fraction.
The point of paper fast food boxes is not to recycle them but to have no trash in the end as they just burn or rot, all in a sustainable way. In contrast to plastic.
The frequencies that they claim affect them are disputable but the flickering in some cheap LED lights is real. Badly/cheaply designed electronics can have flicker as bad as 50 Hz if they use half bridge diode rectification only (e.g. that time I was passing through Geneva airport and the Christmas lights flickered in my peripheral vision)
No it's to punish us when it isn't us causing the alleged plastic problem. When the orders went out all the western media took holidays to the far east to film garbage filled rivers in india, the philippines, indonesia. Your disposable plastic straw wasn't ending up there. Your plastic bottle might have been but that's only because of the recycling scam. It should have been burned like the oil it is.
I don't understand the moaning and bellyaching about straws. Are people that bad at drinking from cups? If you aren't a toddler or bed-ridden patient in a hospital (EDIT: or anyone else with physical conditions that necessitate a straw) you should be able to drink without a straw.
Mouth cancer. I can live a normal life EXCEPT I can't allow liquids to touch my lips. Without straws I have to go through agony just to be minimally hydrated. Paper straws get stuck to my necrotic flesh and tear it off.
There are a variety of conditions that straws are helpful for. A lot of people have health issues that make it difficult to swallow. A lot of people have mouth and lip conditions.
What I don't understand is all the moaning and groaning about the smallest piece of plastic that helps a LOT of disabled people have a semblance of normalcy, when here are much larger plastic fish to fry. We use plastic for basically everything but people have tunnel visioned on a minor piece that actually helps people. It's myopic.
I thought "bed-ridden patient" covered everyone who is physically unable to drink without straws due to disabilities or other conditions. I guess that wasn't clear enough though. My apologies. I've edited my comment now.
> What I don't understand is all the moaning and groaning about the smallest piece of plastic that helps a LOT of disabled people have a semblance of normalcy
You have to admit it's been turned into a culture war point by people who mostly don't need straws. They just need boogeymen to rile up people against environmentalism in general.
It's exactly the same as for reducing cars in city centers, suddenly almost everyone driving a car is a crippled old lady with 3 children to drop off. When the reality is roughly 1.2 heathly humans per car on average doing a 4km trip for which a convenient alternative exists.
If a straw is a necessary tool for someone to function, I bet you they carry a metal one in their bag.
Good that they suck, people might realize that they may as well refuse the straw, drink from the glass and that their life is exactly as comfortable as before the ban.
> more or less every non-durable product manufacturer (say, lifespan less than 5 years) should be required to take the product back at end of life and dispose of it properly
Yeah, we had that. Glass milk bottles and coke bottles and bulk goods sold out of barrels by the lb rather than in plastic bags.
But then plastic took off and soon after Big Sugar paid a PR/lobbying firm to run a campaign with a fake Indian crying a single tear and calling every Tom Dick and Harry a “litterbug” and now the pile of garbage is our fault, not the manufacturers.
Nowadays the homeless or other less-than-living-wage earners do that for us. You can see them everywhere in cities all over north america and europe if you pay attention.
As European that is not spread everywhere, while you can get some money back in Germany and Greece, there is none to be had in Portugal.
In Germany, it is such a big issue with people not having other source of income, that there is a culture where and how to leave the bottles around so that they are easier to collect.
My neighborhood recycling occurs on Thursday night, so I take all my empty cans and put them in a clear plastic back and put them next to my trash. I do not think that the garbage people have ever gotten the cans; there is always a homeless person that will walk around and pick up the bag of empties, presumably to redeem them somewhere.
I don’t have an issue with it, if they want to do what I am too lazy to do, more power to them.
To play devils advocate I'm old enough to remember when glass bottles and cans were what was around and there are a number of problems there that manufactures would fight...
Glass is heavy as shit. For as much plastic waste as we create, we've saved a ton in fuel costs that would be in the atmosphere otherwise.
Glass likes to break and become a dangerous object/weapon. How much less glass litter is around is amazing. Always fun when you went to the lake, then the hospital because some dipshit broke their coke. It still can happen with liquor, but it's massively reduced the problem.
Also, glass likes to break and cause product inventory shrinkage, which the manufactures and retailers hate.
Same with bulk goods. Never underestimate how fucking dumb your fellow citizens are in their ability to screw up and ruin bulk product displays.
Also, when something in bulk is polluted/one piece goes bad, typically the entire container is a loss.
What we have to force manufactures to do is use plastics that are recyclable and put deposits on them. And then force recycling on the items they collect. This would massively reduce waste by incentivizing the public to gather any they see.
Switzerland has something like this for "eWaste", it's called the ARC [1] (Advance Recycling Contribution). For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate.
The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices, you don't have to return them to the exact store where it was purchased, as long as they sell similar devices they cannot refuse to take it back (without paying anything more). It works pretty well, even if shop owners/workers aren't always pleasant when you return something.
Same here in the Netherlands. But only for larger appliances. Washing machines for instance. Smaller ones you have to be able to send for free but there are too many exceptions. My internet provider switched out the modems and simply said "it's yours now, for free!" Meaning: we don't want to pay for disposing of our inventory. I send it to their free postage address they use for broken items with a brick, since they are charged per kg.
We have it in California, just for monitors for some reason, but on Jan 1 a new law covering battery-embedded devices took effect. That new one specifically doesn't tax vapes (???)
> For any electronic device you purchase a small tax is collected and used for the recycling and collection of the future waste it will generate.
I call bullshit on these initiatives. It is a tax, period. The government collects money and it does... stuff. It is not a deposit, so it doesn't incentivize people to return the thing, and it is too general to de-incentivize particularly bad products like disposable vapes.
The tax can be used on recycling efforts, and it probably is, however you don't need a specific tax for that. These investments can come from other sources of government income: VAT, income tax, tariffs, etc... I don't think people are paying a "presidential private jet tax" and yet, the president has his jet, and hopefully, all government effort for the environment is not just financed by a small, specific tax. Saying a tax is for this or that is little more than a PR move, they could do the same by increasing VAT, and I believe it would work better, but that's unpopular.
> The collection mandatorily happens in the shops that sell electronic devices
You're thinking disposable vapes, but this will apply to quality of life appliances like washing machines as well, right?
Do you want to live in a world where only the rich can afford washing machines?
Incidentally, I don't know what you do, but once in a while I throw (carefully, li-ion batteries) my broken electronics in the trunk and bring them to the local collection center.
Thinking for a moment what "recycling" a washing machine would look like and it's very obvious it would just mean paying a 3rd party to dump it in the 3rd world somewhere to be stripped if at all. Hard to imagine it's not causing more environmental damage by having this policy.
A washing machine has a decent amount of metal in it, that's definitely going to be recycled, as it has value. A policy like this could cause environmental damage, but saying that it's inevitable is just defeatist. In fact the manufacturer is the one with the knowledge to recycle stuff properly as they know what went into it. This is actually a way to work with the market. Any other option, other than just giving up, involves more government intervention.
There's also Stewart Brand style cradle-to-cradle design, where you build in features that allow recycling to be easy, that's really my goal when I say manufacturers should be responsible - change the design
The scrap metal yard near me definitely pays to take washing machines and dryers. There's a lot of steel scrap, some circuit boards, and a motor in there.
Heh. I am in the EU. For washing machines specifically, I get a tiny discount when I buy a new one for having them pick up the old one for recycling. Possibly for freezers too, but for some reason my washers break but the freezer doesn't.
Not all stores do that though, if I buy from one that doesn't I can call my local recycling center and they'll eventually get around to picking up the old appliance from your home.
However, this is not done by the manufacturer or importer, as the OP suggested. There are separate organizations and it's paid for via a tax on new device purchases.
Which means a new washing machine manufacturer doesn't need to worry about having their own recycling infrastructure. And I move that the recycling tax I pay for national level recycling adds less to the price than $NEW_COMPANY building their own, just for their models.
The amount of completely useless plastic garbage that we would be sending back east would be mind-numbing. They don’t have anywhere to put that trash either.
So maybe if you make the cost high enough (which is currently just externalized) then they might start disappearing by not being produced in the first place by lack of demand.
People don't buy this because it's crap. They buy it because it's cheap.
2. Importers of cheap plastic crap are not on the hook of the eventual disposal. So the cost isn’t seen by the consumer at point of purchase but instead indirectly seen in increased taxes for garbage disposal
But if you think it through, it's intractable. You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products (it will cost more to get them back for multiple reasons, including products not being as neatly packaged and often going from many-to-one transportation to many-to-many). Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies; you basically make it impossible for small companies to make complicated products. And are we including food products, the majority of trash? It makes a lot more sense to centralize waste repurposing and benefit from economies of scale.
Waste management is already a very profitable industry. Of course, it's wasteful, just burying stuff, and environmentally harmful. But I'm of the opinion that it will soon be economically viable to start mining landfills for different types of enriched materials, and government subsidies could bridge the gap for things that are of greater public interest to recycle.
I've been working on the software side of the technology needed to do this in my spare time for a couple years, waiting for some hardware advancements.
> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products
As with all economics, it's not a one-way street. A change in conditions causes a change in behavior. Increased costs will cause a change in how products are designed, manufactured, used. If one-time use cost goes through the roof, suddenly all vapes will be multi-use. Plastic bottles will disappear in favor of dispensers and multi-use bottles. Not all of them, but most of.
It's about incentives in a dynamic system, not spot bans in an otherwise static world.
Why would 2x the transportation cost be intractable, but ruining the environment, killing life in the oceans, destroying the basis of our future food production, etc, be tractable?
> You need to 2x+ the transportation cost of all products... Companies also need to double their specializations and adopt recycling processes that will largely be redundant with other companies
I think 3rd parties would spring up to deal with that stuff
Maybe they could use big trucks that just collect all refuse from the curb. And maybe that is something that the city should do so that we don’t have a dozen trucks collecting a dozen different trash cans from every house.
That was tried, and what ultimately occured was disgusting.
The world was full of new computers popping up and every middle class or above person buying new ones like they do with iphones now. Companies started recycling programs, and many immediately went the route of corruption. They would pack up shipping containers full of ewaste, with 40-50% reusable items, and the rest junk, allowing them to skirt the rules. These containers would end up in 3rd world countries, with people standing over a burning pile of ewaste, filtering out reusable metals. There was, at one point, even images of children doing this work. The usable items were sold dirt cheap, with no data erasing, leading to large amounts of data theft, and being able to buy pages of active credit card numbers for a dollar.
We are talking about less critical things now, like vape pens, but its not a far throw for it to instantly become an actually bad idea to let other companies do the recycling. Make the manufacturer deal with it, or even the city/state, via public intake locations (like was mentioned of switzerland in another part of this thread)
As far as i know a large portion of what i described shutdown after it came to light, although i would not be the least bit surprised if it was still happening in some capacity, or even in full under the disguise of something else
If people had to pay the true cost of their decisions up-front, we'd make a lot of different decisions.
That said, I got quite into this stuff a few years back, and determining "true" cost can be harder than it sounds. Externalities, positive or negative, have to be measured against a baseline, and deciding on where that sits is subject to opinion and bias.
All petroleum products come from the fossilized remains of the first trees to evolve lignin, which was tough and durable enough to allow trees to grow taller, but also too tough and durable for any other living things to decompose it. At the time, fallen trees would not rot, and the resulting buildup of wood all over the place caused all sorts of ecological problems. Many of those trees ended up buried deep underground before microbes could evolve the means to eat them, where they became fossilized and turned into coal and petroleum, which we eventually turned into plastic.
Now, that plastic is too tough and durable for any modern microbes to decompose it, and it's starting to build up too. It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.
I'm not pro-pollution, but this is far from the first ecological disaster that the global ecosystem can probably adapt to.
Ah, yep. Did conflate coal with oil. I guess my nice analogy doesn't quite hold, but the point stands that plastic originally came from organic matter and is technically biodegradable.
> It stands to reason that microbes will eventually evolve the means to digest it and make use of this abundant, under-used energy source. In fact, some already have [1], but it's still early days.
That’s a hell of a way to kick the can down the road.
I don’t have sea views, but if I wait, sea views are coming.
> Even if the retailer took it back it would still be... trash.
Yes, but making them deal with it would create a massive incentive to either reduce the amount of rubbish they make, or to make it recyclable/processable.
It's an externality because the entity that sold it to you doesn't have to pay the consequences of dealing with the trash. OP said "dispose of it properly," which could mean a lot of things, all of which are better than leaving it on a beach.
Trash disposal (to regulated landfills, not beaches) is enormously inexpensive and increasing the cost of every item through a laborious return program doesn't improve anything.
> Nearly all the plastic humans have made still exists.
And it just doesn't matter. It's a tiny amount of mass / volume.
> The great garbage patch in the Pacific is growing fast.
Ocean plastics are almost entirely a consequence of (particularly Indonesian) fishing net waste, not Western consumer products disposed of in managed landfills. The "great garbage patch" is also very much overstating the scale of the problem; it's a slightly higher plastic density region of ocean.
The main thing about plastic is that it’s made from oil, and oil already exists in the ground. Putting it back into the ground is basically neutral minus the pollution involved in manufacturing.
Geological strata vs shallow landfill sitting above aquifers and subject to near-term erosion.
Disposing of this stuff in deep mines seems like it'd be fine, unfortunately we haven't yet, at a society/economy level, found the discipline to do so. Presumably after a few mya of heat and pressure it'll be indistinguishable from other petrochemicals (which aren't particularly nice to begin with).
I don't think disposing of stuff deep in mines would be a good idea as it would be easy to contaminate the ground water. Modern landfills are generally well engineered and don't contaminate the surroundings too badly.
It doesn't go "back in the ground" though, does it? It gets scattered all over the ecology. When you take something that was buried deep and scatter it all over the surface - especially when that something is oil - that's usually considered an ecological disaster. Deepwater Horizon, the worst oil spill in history, has had catastrophic effects on the local wildlife, and it is still dwarfed in scale by the amount of plastic annually strewn to the four corners of the Earth.
7 billion kg at the density of water would fit in a cube 200 m on each side.
All the plastic ever produced could be stuffed back into one medium size coal mine. There are thousands of such mines and they are already ecologically disruptive.
It's a large amount when you think about the logistics to move it around the world, but a small amount compared to the total amount of stuff we take out of the earth.
As mentioned in the other thread, ocean plastics have nothing to do with landfill-disposed trash. They're mostly fishing nets waste, and at that, mostly from mismanagement by a handful of poor countries.
I'll assume good faith here and that you were simply unaware of the origins of the so-called great garbage patch, but in future discussions I think it would do your arguments some credence not to bring up ocean plastics in response to discussion about landfills.
They should just be banned outright. In no world is this going to end up in bins 100% of the time. Disposable really means it’s destined for the trash at best, and just simply litter at worst.
Yeah ban is the answer. Trouble is that, as shown in the article, even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.
Taxing waste is one part of the story but it's actually a really good thing that vaping is cheaper than smoking so this can only go so far before it's counterproductive.
I think the answers lie in stuff like banning sale of pre-filled ones. If you make people buy a separate bottle of nicotine liquid (and you enforce that this is quite a large minimum size, like we already do with tobacco) and fill the device up before they use it, I think they are much more likely to refill it when it's empty and recharge it when it's dead.
Maybe another thing could be restricting points of sale. I bet a lot of the waste comes from drunk people buying them at 10pm in the corner shop near the pub. If you make people plan ahead that might also help.
> Trouble is that, [...], even if they include the charging and refilling bits they can be cheap enough to throw away after use.
Well that is fixable, it's even one of the solutions posited here. Just make them artificially expensive by adding a deposit, which you'll get back when you return it to the shop (instead of throwing it away).
I think disposable vapes are banned in the U.K. (where I think the author is?) or at least they will be soon. But the non-disposable options end up being cheap enough that they can be disposed of when empty.
I think a better thing to do may be to try to embed disposal costs into the price of the original product. That changes prices to hopefully incentivise reuse.
This is true but as a workaround disposable vapes now all include a charging port but are still treated as disposable (so is just another component to be wasted)
For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
As for electronics, I would say no one has anything in place, and human nature is as such that hardly anyone will drive to the next recycling center to deliver a single device that broke down, or call the city hall to collect it.
We should go back to the old days, when electronics were repairable, which naturally companies will lobby against, as that will break down the capitalistic curve of exponential growth in sales.
Those are mandatory in Germany. Recently-ish they started forcing supermarkets and other large retailers to accept small electronics, but in practice I never managed to do it. You pretty much have to argue with the staff every time.
Not sure about electronics as a whole, but I was able to recycle (or at least dispose of properly) an inflated old Dell laptop battery at either a Best Buy or a Home Depot (I'd assume it was the former, but they were next to each other so I don't recall). This is in the US.
Home Depot accepts old batteries. Though it's kind of terrifying because they accept batteries in any condition as long as you put them in individual plastic bags.
And then there's a huge bin of damaged LiPos just chilling by the front door. I'm astonished we don't hear about fires in these bins.
Maybe Italy is more advanced, you can bring eWaste to the municipal center or to leave to the shop where you are buying a new device. On the street they started to place bin for small eWaste like phones, chargers, keyboards, vape.
> For example Germany, while the country is famous for the whole splitting the garbage, I am still waiting after 20 years to see the kitchen oil recycling recipients as we have in Portugal.
Because German environmental policy is about virtue signalling to keep the plebs busy, not solving environmental problems. Nuclear power plants replaced by coal and natural gas, obsession with recycling but nothing done about disposable packaging, car regulations and city design dictated for decades by the car manufacturing lobby, combustion engine limits/bans only when said manufacturers thought they could get on the Tesla gravy train and subsequently rolled back when reality became apparent, it just goes on.
Based on your reply you haven't fully considered context. Smokers don't care about themselves or else they wouldn't smoke. As demonstrated by the article, you can see proof that they also don't care for the environment. What makes you think people who intentionally pay to kill themselves and then throw the waste on the ground instead of trash will ever recycle?
It's a summation. Go pick up litter for an hour or 2 in your neighborhood and categorize the rubbish you collect. When I do this (large sample) the results are: ~80% tobacco, 14% fast food waste, 5% alcohol waste, 1% other.
Point being, many smokers litter. My thesis after a lot of public service is they do this because: they don't care about themselves, so why would they care about anything else?
Oh, I agree with you in this regard, but your take was... overtly simplistic in a crucial, key detail.
Concerning litter presence in general - as much as the poor manners the distinct absence of the bins strongly amplifies the problem. At least in my country (pretty large western country) - most of the public spaces (streets, etc) lack ANY sort of the bin, and while it's easy to tuck the plastic wrapper from the food and take it home, I'd say people are much less inclined to carry a stinky cigarette but or leaking can for a couple of miles.
Why though? Bottles/cans are easily recycled and I believe the small reimbursement is easily recovered during the recycling costs.
It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
100 times the deposit amount would be like $5-10 USD per-device which is insane. I do agree that any retailers should be required to take back empties and dispose of them responsibly.
> It's not profitable to recycle small electronic devices otherwise you'd see heaps of shops doing it. It's toxic, hazardous and labour intensive.
Sounds like they should be banning their sale and/or production then, just like many jurisdictions have been with plastics and other non-recyclable items. These devices are not an essential-to-life item where the waste produced is justifiable, especially when you consider the LiPo batteries, which are a borderline-environmental disaster from the moment the lithium is mined to the day that battery finds its way to a landfill. Why single-use disposable vaping devices exist in the first place is somewhat perplexing given permanent/re-fillable ones are also available, often right beside the disposable ones, and generally offer a significantly lower cost of ownership.
I think waste management should be required to scan the garbage and remove useful items, i.e. recyclables. This would take the burden off consumers and allow more items like this to be intercepted. The technology is there, why not force the corporation to innovative?
It's very profitable to recycle small electronics in some economies where thousands of companies do it (eg India or Shenzhen); in countries where human labour is more expensive, it's untenable
That's a good point. In America we call this type of deposit a "core charge." The "core" is the component you return to the store to get your deposit back.
This is done for components like starter motors, alternators, power steering pumps, batteries, and a variety of other components. The complex components are re-manufactured to like-new specifications and the less complex components are recycled to recover materials. The battery is a probably the only component where the potential ecological impact drives the cost of the deposit.
I never thought about it but it is odd car-components are the only thing most people will experience with a "core" charge. Why don't more industries do something similar? Is it just because car ownership and car repair has been such a core (no pun intended) component of American culture? That a system of recycling has been set up?
I was curious about when and where these core charges started. It looks like it was the result of WW2 and the shortage of steel and other materials forcing both the military and civilian manufacturers to turn to recycling and rebuilding parts out of necessity. After the war, the remanufacturing industry was large enough to stand on its own and the concepts stuck around. Some hazardous items like lead acid batteries have legislation helping to enforce the core charges but the rest seem to be market driven.
You paying a nonzero cost for creating a negative externality is an improvement compared to the status quo, in the context of this economic philosophy of discouraging production of negative externalities by aligning economic incentives.
I don't want to advertise for the brand but I bought a disposable "looking" vape today where they split the liquid from the core. So the end result is a very small stick but is actually re-usable and they had a re-cycling digital bin.
The problem is you can’t find any company willing to recycle them. Because of the nicotine content, I’ve heard e-waste recyclers consider them hazardous waste and refuse to touch them.
yeah, e-waste recyclers suck, they love to ship it all to the 3rd world where piles of circuit boards get tossed in an open fire and stirred by kids to reclaim the metals.
I feel like the take it back approach, just ends with the retailer/manufacturer throwing it away anyway.
Looking at this device it feels like it shouldn't be hard to have a reusable base with battery and electronics, and a disposable capsule that attaches on top but is replaceable.
Who bears the cost of that improvement? Either the manufacturer, the retailer, or the customer. The problem is that the waste created by vapes is a negative externality so there's no incentive to improve their design. Until the government starts requiring safe disposal of these things, we won't see a change. Think about what people used to do with old car oil before new environment protection regulations.
Someone imported it, someone's selling it in the stores.
If the price of the "disposable" is, say, £5, make the deposit £50. Suddenly all the vapes will end up back at the retailer.
And make sure retailer has the financial incentive to return the used disposables and that's it.
I'm confident the lawmakers have been bribed to refuse to tackle the problem, otherwise how you can explain minimum price on plastic bags but tolerating toxic landfill fires and staggering waste of lithium (recycling will inevitably br fixed soon).
Well realistically just ban imports. But then people will import them criminally anyway. And to your point; what if Chinese companies assist in evading import bans or customs, as they do now and have done for decades.
Even in the UK, they've added restrictions to it but...surprise, surprise the Turkish/Kurdish corner shops all have a steady supply, with nothing being done about it. As a foreigner living here it's honestly pathetic how disengaged the public here are with things like that. People drive like absolute wankers, too.
> Many countries have deposits for single use bottles/cans [...]
Yeah, the deposits for cans are a bit stupid: people already widely recycle aluminum (and scrap metals in general) purely for commercial reasons. No need for extra regulation there like mandatory deposits.
It's much easier to recycle things when everyone participate and bring their trash to a common place.
I've lived in places with no deposits and there is much much much more littering compared to places having deposits on every types of metal/plastic beverage containers
In the specific commit, what seems like a bot or automated script added changelog entries for 3 new versions in a single commit, which is odd for an automated script to do. And only the latest version had the date added.
That actions-user seem to be mostly maintaining the Changelog but the commits does not seem consistent with an automated script. I see a few cases of rewriting previous change log entries or moving entries from one version to another which any kind of automation would not be doing. Seems like human error and poor testing.
YMMV and a lot of people hate it, but I've run Nextcloud for this for years. It has pretty comprehensive support for WebDAV and CalDAV. Has sharing and lots of different authentication options; I use OIDC with PocketID.
It used to be a constant headache to keep running, but ever since I switched to the TrueNAS/Docker plugin it has worked smoothly. I know a lot of other people also have had good luck with the much lighter Radicale if CalDAV is your primary concern.
> It used to be a constant headache to keep running
It’s been very easy to run for me since version 15 or something. Basically i just use the stock docker image and mount a few files over there. The data folders are bind-mounded directories.
As usual with anything php, it’s only a mess if you start managing php files and folders yourself. Php has a special capability of making these kind of things messy, i don’t know why.
Ostree and immutable distros in general are seeing a renewed interest lately for mostly security reasons but they have been and are still widely used for appliance-type devices.
I could see someone wanting to build an arch based firmware with OTA updates use this as a proof of concept. Yes, they would have to customize it and operate some infra but that does not make it useless.
exactly. plus i mean, this particular build is quite boring because it's, like i said, silverblue. vanilla gnome and all that. but one can go quite wild and make vastly different builds. building locally takes very little since it's basically decompressing a bunch of packages, moving some files around and building an initramfs, so the infrastructure one actually needs is minimal (especially if said upgrades happen silently).
i must say that even though this tech has been around for a while it's still very much WIP. much of the ostree command line is undocumented, some commands are hidden and even though there is significant overlap between rpm-ostree, ostree and bootc, they do quite different things and some things are easy with one tool and outright impossible with the other. but personally i think this is the future of "mainstream" linux, and even though "immutable linux" has been often associated to locked platforms (e.g. android), it's been fun to showcase how you can do it yourself too, with whichever distro you like.
They are an alternative to the tailscale operated DERP servers, which are cloud relays.
Even with the much touted NAT punching capabilities of tailscale, there are numerous instances where tailscale cannot establish a true p2p connection. The last fallback is the quite slow DERP relay and from experience it gets used very often.
If you have a peer in your tailscale network that has a good connection and that maybe you can even expose to the internet with a port forward on your router, you now have this relay setting that you can enable to avoid using the congested/shared DERP servers. So there is not really a new use-case for this. It's the same, just faster.
The explanation that I think wasn't entirely clear in the post is how it actually works/why that's better.
From what I can tell, the situation is this:
1. You have a host behind NAT
2. That NAT will not allow you to open ports via e.g. uPnP (because it's a corporate firewall or something, for example) so other tailscale nodes cannot connect to it
3. You have another host which has the same configuration, so neither host can open ports for the other to connect in
The solution is to run a peer relay, which seems to be another (or an existing) tailscale node which both of these hosts can connect to via UDP, so in this circumstance it could be a third node you're already running or a new one you configure on a separate network.
When the two NAT'ed hosts can't connect to each other, they can both opt to connect instead to this peer node allowing them to communicate with each other via the peer node.
Previously this was done via Tailscale's hosted DERP nodes; these nodes would facilitate tailscale nodes to find each other but could also proxy traffic in this hard-NAT circumstance. Now you can use your own node to do so, which means you can position it somewhere that is more efficient for these two nodes to connect to and where you have control over the network, the bandwidth, the traffic, etc.
Officially you are right, they release it as a stable OS after a few weeks of beta's.
Unofficially any serious user knows to stick to LTS for any production environment. This is by far the most common versions I encounter in the wild and on customer deployment from my experience.
In fact I don't think I ever saw someone using a non-LTS version.
Canonical certainly has these stats? Or someone operating update mirror could infer them? I'd be curious what the real world usage of different Ubuntu versions actually are.
Certainly, there are other market forces at play. Certainly carriers refusing changes and refusing to let a 3rd party authority sign their certs.
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