We actually kinda do perceive a fourth dimension: time. Sure, we infer it from our memories and come up with cause and effect relationships to help us understand it. But we do know it’s there.

Sometimes i’ll do this in the winter. We try to minimize heat/AC energy usage, and i get cold easily, so once i’m in the nice warm shower it takes a minute to work up the courage to make the mad dash to get my clothes back on lol

OH! I see it! It’s a little guy saluting

Because “tasteless” also has the alternative definition, meaning “gaudy”, “tacky”, or “pretentious”. So, I think they did indeed think about it, perhaps even longer than you did before getting all worked up over it.

or cut the size but keep the price the same, then release a new “jumbo size” that’s as big as the previous size (with the new and improved higher unit price), then discontinue the “standard” size.

I’d totally be willing to spend twice as much if it was gonna last twice as long, and i’d spend three times as much if additionally no exploitative practices were involved in the making of the clothing. I’m still over here wearing 10 year old clothes, partially because they have outlasted a lot of my newer clothes, partially because i don’t care about fashion trends, and partially because i get paralyzed thinking about all the injustice that must have occured for this shirt to only cost $20 or whatever. Oh, and plastic-blend fabrics make me itchy and/or sweaty.

I started just buying stuff from Goodwill. At least that way i know sweatshop owners aren’t getting any of my money, and if it ends up being cheaply made i only spent a couple of bucks on it (though that seems to be a decently rare problem, cheaply made items tend not to last long enough to make it to Goodwill in the first place). It takes some digging, but i can almost always find something good. Some of my better finds even had the original tag still on!

I should check out the hemp socks/undies situation, though: can’t get that at Goodwill!

That got me thinking about the plastic-eating bacteria that keeps getting discovered in landfills… Do you think the polishing ponds might also be a good place to look? Or maybe the evolutionary pressure just isn’t there like it is in landfills since there’s so much poop to eat, haha.

Using waste heat to generate syngas sounds cool. So we’re at least getting more out of the fuel, and i guess locking that energy away again, for a time at least.

I’m actually kind of jealous of you now. It must be nice to be making such a tangible difference. I’m a computational chemist, and while I wanted to work in materials (making better solar panels or better batteries, to be specific), I ended up in drug design and discovery. I know I am making a difference too; compared to what big-pharma is doing, our process reduces the amount of wet-lab work required to discover a new drug – so, less lab waste (which is mostly plastic), reduced usage of chemical reagents (which often require fossil fuels to make and need to be disposed of responsibly), etc. But it’s much harder to see the impact since it is so indirect.

I certainly wasn’t intending to imply your work is not worthwhile, and I apologize if i came off as combative or dismissive. Plastic recycling is such a scam, I do think burning it makes sense in the short term (especially with the scrubbers you talked about, those sound cool and will at least help with the microplastic problem). I guess it’s just that the marketing push to conflate “clean” with “green” has been bothering me recently, and, while perfect should not be the enemy of the good, we’re running out of time (or possible have already run out of time, depending on how depressed i am when you ask me) for incremental change to be sufficient. But, you are right. We can only do what we can to make the world we’re currently in better, not simply will it into perfection overnight (despite how much I hate not being able to do that…).

I’m in favor of not using plastics at all (or at least only used in medical and scientific applications in which it is absolutely necessary). My point was that burning it is trading one set of problems for another.

best case, you’re releasing extra CO2 into the atmosphere that would have at least been locked up in the landfills/seas of microplastics. worst case, you’re also releasing unstudied and most likely carcinogenic incomplete combustion products.

Not the first. The cyanobacteria that first figured out photosynthesis put so much oxygen into the atmosphere so fast that it cause mass extinction of much of the anaerobic life (and most things were anaerobic life back then). They also caused a literal rust belt (since many metals up to that point were now able to be oxidized en masse), and that rust layer can be seen in really old rocks (“banded iron formation”).

Great Oxidation Event

it means we can change it enough that it will no longer support US, but life continues at its own rhythm, we are oarr of that rhythm, not separate from it

We are not the first instance of life forever changing the environment to the point of mass extinction. When early cyanobacteria figured out photosynthesis, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere they produced as waste killed off massive numbers of other species for which oxygen was toxic.

However, we are the first instance of life capable of understanding our place in the ecosystem enough to do something about how we as a species affect the biosphere and the pressure we are putting not just on other life forms but on ourselves as well. We are not mindless cyanobacteria pooping out oxygen to the detriment of all others; we can and MUST do better.

A huge part of that is understanding exactly what you pointed out: we are part of the ecosystem, not separate from it. I just wish someone could get the mega-wealthy and fossil fuel CEOs and politicians to understand it. There is no safety for them; their money and power will not save them.

in this context, i meant it as “paradoxical”. since i can work hard and persevere, but i’m also a bit lazy about it all. Like, have you ever dropped your phone on the floor when lying in bed and come up with some absurd bodily contortion to reach it without physically leaving the bed? But you could have just gotten up and grabbed it and laid back down in much less time with much less energy spent overall? That’s the kind of diligent slothfulness that I am quite prone to.

sloth and diligence. i am a conundrum, but a somewhat stoic one i guess?

Coincidentally, -196°C is the boiling point of Nitrogen

Pretty sure it’s the beaters (assuming that’s an electric hand mixer type-thing, i’ve never heard them referred to by that term) that made them gummy. Over mashing will break up the cell walls too much, releasing the starches and ruining the texture. Cooking chopped or whole doesn’t matter as much, since the number of cells broken by chopping is negligible. And the skin is water permeable anyway.

You gotta mash by hand, that’s all.