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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 19th, 2023

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  • I’m fully on board with the idea of reducing plastic use, but I have some questions regarding use of and recycling of paper products. By my understanding, the vast majority of paper products are made out wood from fairly young-growth tree farms, where the trees are all cut down and then replanted so that they can be harvested again several years down the road. The paper products which are created from this process are primarily atmospheric CO2 which has been captured by the trees. Basically every proposed solution to the problem of greenhouse gases is some form of reducing emissions, or capturing greenhouse gases and sequestering them so that they can’t reenter the atmosphere. Landfills are largely anaerobic environments where materials are not able to break down for a very long time. Most of the trash in the US goes into landfills. If all of that’s true, then one of the more effective ways to sequester carbon should be to produce and use large amounts of paper products and then throw them into landfills. Paper recycling on the other hand to my knowledge at least requires a similar amount of energy to produce, but involves no new carbon capture. So wouldn’t it be worse to recycle paper than to throw paper waste in the trash?

    If the trees in these tree farm forests were not harvested, then they would continue to grow and capture carbon, but they would also release it back into the atmosphere as they died and were broken down by natural processes. It’s also my understanding that young trees grow more quickly and therefore capture carbon more aggressively than older ones…

    So what’s better? Recycling paper, or throwing it in landfills?


  • I have a small 8 oz “condiment squeeze bottle” that works great. It has a small nozzle so you don’t shoot out a ton of oil at once. If you are talking about cooking on steel or cast iron in a way that’s likely to have food stick, then you’re probably cooking something with a spatula of some kind. Squirt a little oil around the pan, spread it around a bit with the spatula (or a paper towel or something) and then get cooking. For best results, cook on a preheated pan, immediately after you put the cold oil in. I pretty much exclusively use avocado oil because it has a neutral taste and a very high smoke point so it’s great for frying or searing.






  • According to the article, because of the method of desalination, and likely because of the fairly small amount of water that each bouy can process and harvest, they say that the brine that’s separated from the freshwater is of low enough salt concentration that it should not damage the ecosystem, so they just dump the brine back in the ocean, presumably below the bouy itself.

    They also mentioned that one of these buoys as currently designed can provide water for about 43 houses, and that their plan to scale up is to just add more buoys. If they add enough of these buoys in a given area to make a meaningful contribution to a community’s freshwater requirements, with each of them individually contributing in a relatively small way to a higher concentration of salt in the local seawater, what does that add up to? How many of these can you put in an area before you are raising the salinity in a given area to a level that’s harmful to the ecosystem?


  • From your linked pdf:

    Ukraine is the only country in the world where cluster munitions are being used as of August 2022.

    • Russia has used cluster munitions extensively since invading Ukraine on 24 February 2022.

    • Ukrainian forces appear to have used them at least three times during the conflict.

    • There were no reports of new cluster munition use in any other country during the reporting period (from August 2021 to July 2022).

    149 cluster munitions casualties recorded in 2021; a 59% decrease from 2020 total (360).

    • Civilians accounted for 97% of all casualties.

    • Children accounted for 66% of all casualties where the age was known.

    • 2021 was the first year in a decade that there were no new casualties resulting from cluster munition attacks.

    • Cluster munition remnant casualties recorded in: Azerbaijan | Iraq | Lao PDR | Lebanon | Mauritania | Nagorno-Karabakh Sudan | Syria | Tajikistan | Western Sahara |Yemen

    • Preliminary data indicates at least 689 civilian casualties during cluster munition attacks in Ukraine during the first half of 2022.

    So to summarize:

    1. Nearly every cluster bomb being used worldwide is being used by Russians in Ukraine
    2. Nearly every cluster bomb casualty is a civilian

    Considering that Russia has an extremely well-documented history of specifically targeting civilians, regardless of munitions type, this seems like more of a Russia problem than a cluster bomb problem (at least to the point that it renders these specific statistics moot in a discussion about the general risks of cluster munitions, when used by militaries that are not as barbarous and murderous as the Russian military)



  • So is your definition of “liberal” just “someone who wants to maintain the status quo”, full stop? If so, that’s a very strange definition.

    As I understand it, Classical liberalism, as described in the link you provided generally just prioritizes individual liberty. It’s not full on anti-government libertarianism, but it favors a limited government.

    And again, as I understand it, Neoliberalism is essentially the orthodoxy of the west, post WW2. It’s still largely focused on individual liberty but perhaps not to the same extreme, and it’s largely based on the idea that capitalism (regulated, and with social safety nets) can be harnessed as a global force for good.

    I don’t see how anyone who adheres to either of those ideas could use them to justify an anti-abortion position, aside from deranged religious based arguments about fetal personhood.



  • I got used to slow-closing toilet lids at home. It’s become a habit to get the lid moving down with a little flick of the wrist. Not too hard, but not nothing either. I recently stayed in a hotel room where the bathroom didn’t have this feature… When out of pure habit, half asleep and barely even realizing that I was closing the lid, I used my familiar flick of the wrist, the heavy, solid lid flew down like a bolt of lightning and slammed hard against the toilet seat. There amongst all of the acoustically reflective surfaces of the hotel bathroom the noise was so loud it actually made my ears ring. It was lucky that I had just relieved myself because had I still had any shit left in me, the surprise might have scared it right out.