The best QA people I've worked with were effective before, during, and after implementation - they worked hand in hand with me both to shape features testably, work with me on the implementation for the harness for additional testing they wanted to do beyond what was useful for development, and followed up with assistance for finding and fixing bugs and using regression tests to prevent the category of error from happening again.
At the very least I want someone in QA doing end-to-end testing using e.g. a browser or a UI framework driver for non-web software, but there's so much more they do than that. In the same way I respect the work of frontend, backend, infrastructure, and security engineers, I think quality engineering is its own specialized field. I think we're all poorer for the fact that it's viewed as a dumping ground or "lesser"
Yes, I've found some really interesting bugs using LLM feedback, but it's about a 40% accuracy rate, mostly when it's highlighting things that are noncritical (for example, we don't need to worry about portability in a single architecture app that runs on a specific OS)
For high reliability, I think I would suggest engraving it into a low reactivity nonvaluable metal, perhaps titanium sheet would be a good choice. Couple that with a backup on printed archival paper using carbon toner or an art-grade ink or dye. Between the two of them they will probably resist damage for 100 years or so.
Brass or bronze would also be a decent option, but you'd have to make the text larger for it to be readable with corrosion. Perhaps braille would be an interesting choice there.
And ceramics are a great choice - clay tablets, when fired, can last millenia.
I think between the three of a metal sheet, clay tablet, and paper book, one of the three is almost certain to survive a century.
The other issue with "a huge token window" is that if you fill it, it seems like relevance for any specific part of the window is diminished - which makes it hard to override default model behavior.
Interestingly, recently it seems to me like codex is actually compressing early and often so that it stays in the smarter-feeling reasoning zone of the first 1/3rd of the window, which is a neat solution for this, albeit with the caveat of post-compression behavior differences cropping up more often.
I find it very interesting the degree to which coding agents completely ignore warnings. When I program I generally target warning-free code, and even with significant effort in prompting, I haven't found a model that treats warnings as errors, and they almost all love the "ignore this warning" pragmas or comments over actually fixing them.
Easiest to have different agents or turns that set aside the top-level goal via hooks/skills/manual prompt/etc. Heuristically, a human will likely ignore a lot of warnings until they've wired up the core logic, then go back and re-evaluate, but we still have to apply steering to get that kind of higher-order cognitive pattern.
Product is still fairly beta, but in Sculptor[^1] we have an MCP that provides agent & human with suggestions along the lines of "the agent didn't actually integrate the new module" or "the agent didn't actually run the tests after writing them." It leads to some interesting observations & challenges - the agents still really like ignoring tool calls compared to human messages b/c they "know better" (and sometimes they do).
I generally think of needing hooks as being a model training issue - I've had to use them less as the models have gotten smarter, hopefully we'll reach the point where they're a nice bonus instead of needed to prevent pathological model behavior.
> It is also close to impossible run any node ecosystem without getting a wall of warnings.
Haven't found that myself, are you talking about TypeScript warnings perhaps? Because I'm mostly using just JavaScript and try to steer clear of TypeScript projects, and AFAIK, JavaScript the language nor runtimes don't really have warnings, except for deprecations, are those the ones you're talking about?
`cargo clippy` is also very happy with my code. I agree and I think it's kind of a tragedy, I think for production work warnings are very important. Certainly, even if you have a large number of warnings and `clippy` issues, that number ideally should go down over time, rather than up.
Procedural note: if you're an experienced HN user looking at this page, consider briefly turn on "show dead" and vouch for some of the spam-blocked comments - it looks like the filter takes exception to the single-website-and-nothing-else style post
Heads up: I actually started vouching a few but then looked more closely and all these accounts have 1 karma, were created recently (< 60 days old), and the linked sites smell suspiciously of AI slop. I also didn't find any prior comments, favorited content, no signs of life. Why would someone never comment only to do so now? I'm hesitant to vouch potential bot accounts.
{Insert Post-LLM Internet sadness for good intentions here}
Unfortunately it looks like someone went ahead and blindly vouched everything, there are almost no dead comments now. Bummer, but perhaps an inevitable eventuality if not this time.
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.
Not the original guy, but down 32%, for a point of comparison:
1) Amazing, like being a decade and a half younger
2) Not before, planning one in the next couple months, but I use skinfold and impedance and they say I've dropped from about 48% to ~20% as I've dropped from 272 to 186, lean mass seems maybe 5kg lower than I started with? Less lean mass loss than I expected.
3) Weight bearing exercise and medium-high protein intake (>80g/d)
4) Per above, starting BMI 37.9 -> ending BMI 25.9
Your stats are very similar. I started at something like 274 (though my overall highest point ever was 284 a couple years ago) and now I'm down to 181. It's a huge difference, as you say it's like being 15-20 years younger. Life changing.
To add my own anecdata, it took me a bit over a year (September 2024 to December 2025) to lose the weight. I averaged about 1.5 pounds a week consistently.
At the very least I want someone in QA doing end-to-end testing using e.g. a browser or a UI framework driver for non-web software, but there's so much more they do than that. In the same way I respect the work of frontend, backend, infrastructure, and security engineers, I think quality engineering is its own specialized field. I think we're all poorer for the fact that it's viewed as a dumping ground or "lesser"
reply