Usually, no. Not for myself or others. Too many people vote emotionally for them to be useful feedback in most situations.
They also aren't useful in short time frames on lemmy. I've lost track of how many people get whiny about votes, but they just didn't wait for things to balance out. It's lemmy, shit takes hours to spread and get seen, especially since not everyone sorts by new. Chill the fuck out.
But sometimes, they can be a warning sign, or an indicator of a successful comment/post. And other times, they can help realize you posted or commented in the wrong place.
I have a made up word I have never said to anyone.
Nobody claiming to be psychic has ever been able to detect it.
While it's a meaningless thing overall, it is endlessly entertaining to watch someone spiral from "trying" to discover it, to random guessing, to being angry and declaring that I'm lying and they got it the first time.
It's kinda like my secret. I have a secret I have never told anyone. It's another thing I will put before a self proclaimed psychic. Even once they progress to guessing, none have ever even thrown it out as an option.
And you'd be amazed how many self proclaimed psychics there are out in the world, and how many of them seem to really think they are psychic, to the degree that they'll accept someone presenting one or both of those challenges.
The made up word would be a difficult guess for sure. But my secret isn't something so rare that nobody could possibly hit on it as a guess.
I'm not willing to outright say that there's no thing that could be called psychic ability. What I am willing to say is that nobody has ever exhibited such, and likely never will
Well, the more I think about it and the more I look into it, "better" is likely not the best term.
What it would achieve is a likely decrease in harms that aren't controlled.
The stuff that would replace plastics, where it's possible, all come with their own environmental impacts. But, they're easier to control, so are also easier to minimize or mitigate.
That comes with a price, though. Monetary mostly, but also in reshaping our expectations of things like food storage. Not that we could entirely do away with even single use plastics, much less longer term uses.
But, as an example of what I'm talking about with different more than better.
We switch everything we can from plastics to glass. Bottles, whatever. So, you're increasing the costs of transportation, right? It's heavier, you can't pack as much in the same space. That increases energy use, no matter if it's diesel in a truck tank, or via power. But, if we also switch even more to EV trucks and trains, that's still a net positive because now that energy can be better regulated, reducing pollution alongside the reduction in plastic pollution.
But, now you're going to need more bottles of glass. That's more energy to make per bottle (can't remember the numbers, and I'm too tired to go digging), though not a huge amount. You also can't perfectly recycle a bottle without some new materials, and you've also now got an increased demand in silicates for new and recycled. So now the sand is even more in demand, and there's a shortage of it. Luckily, the transportation costs of raw materials is roughly the same, on average.
But, again, at least the sand issue is tighter. Easier to control for than random plastic shit blowing everywhere.
So, it's a net positive in terms of reducing the impact of plastics on the environment because that impact is more dangerous as well as less predictable. But it isn't necessarily better just because it isn't plastic. It's a trade off weighted with that specific goal. If there was a magic wand to guarantee all used plastics be centralized and consolidated, the balance of things isn't a net positive, it's just a difference in what problems are occurring.
That ends up applying to pretty much every replacement material for a given use. Swapping out plastic films for waxed paper means you're now increasing paper production, and that needs more trees. Swapping plastics out for paper in shipping protection is the same. Swapping out to metals brings the same weight issues as glass, and adds mining problems.
There's always a price to pay. You can't have the benefits of a modern world without some cost to the environment.
But, yeah, we haven't started a serious switch because plastics are petroleum and there's a shit ton of money and power tied up with that. It's entirely doable, though it would take time and cost a shit ton. Eventually, we would cut plastics in the environment down to a level that's more acceptable, and maybe even low enough to be unimportant (not that anyone has figured out what that would be yet afaik; we just know the shit is everywhere and causing trouble). But it has to start at the top, not from the bottom. Trillions of dollars are involved, and that kind of money wins, period.
southsamurai @ southsamurai @sh.itjust.works Posts 12Comments 4,203Joined 2 yr. ago
I fucking loved it!