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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 6th, 2023

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  • Do you mean what ubiquitous toxin will be next?

    Or do you mean how can we get by without plastic?

    If it’s the second one, the answer is easy, fucking aluminum. We’ve had the answer forever and it still works great. Glass too, good for many applications.

    Now the actual problem isn’t plastic bags or beverage containers though, it’s clothing and tires. Most clothing is plastic these days and tiny plastic fibers break up into micro plastics and take to the air or end up in the sea. Car tires are also just plastic these days, not rubber (which is arguably better for the environment than leveling rainforest for rubber tree plantations, sigh…), the tires rub off on the road like a pencil eraser on sandpaper. This also ends up in the air and sea.

    So anyway, replacing plastic beverage containers is a great step, a no brainer, but it also doesn’t address the real problem at all. I hope that some day soon tires and clothes can start to be made with biodegradable “eco plastics”, but if that doesn’t turn out to be feasible, we’ll be in some serious trouble. And once we have some real, feasible, affordable replacements, then we need to actually outlaw the use of older plastic tires, in every country on the planet, despite heavy lobbying against any new measures from vested interests… I can’t even imagine how to make that happen. How did we do it with lead? Has every country outlawed lead in gas?



  • Oh, I enjoy lots of great art! But do you think I watch every film? Listen to every band? There’s tons of shit out there!

    Do you really believe, of all the songs that are written every day, that less than a third are crap? Even Taylor Swift doesn’t publish everything she does. Sometimes you work on something for weeks and then end up tossing it in the bin. More often, you work on something for 30 minutes before deciding “I’m gonna start over, try something different”. The majority of art is crap, but then you keep the stuff you think works.

    And what’s that expression, “good artists copy, great artists steal”. I mean, that’s a bit satirical, but the fact is, everything is derivative to some degree. It’s not that there aren’t new ideas, it’s just that our new ideas are based on older ones. We stand on the shoulders of giants (or at least, on the shoulders of some people who came before us).

    All I was really saying, was that the accusation “2 parts copying, 1 part crap”, well honestly that’s par for the course, that’s how humans work. (And we do some great work that way).












  • That’s almost like a “three strikes” rule for drunk drivers.

    Oh man, that would be amazing. If after 3 strikes, all drunk driving could be eliminated… If only we could be so lucky.

    He’s not talking about a per-vehicle points system, he’s talking about a global points system for Tesla inc. If after a few incidents, essentially Tesla FSD had it’s license revoked across the whole fleet, I mean, that’s pretty strict accountability I’d say. That’s definitely not handing out free passes, it’s more like you get a few warnings and a chance to fix issues before the entire program is ended nation wide.





  • Man, I cannot figure out why that vehicle was turning. What is it trying to avoid? Why does it think there could be road there? Why doesn’t it try to correct its action mid way?

    I’m really concerned about that last question. I have to assume that at some point prior to impact, the system realized it made a mistake. Surely. So why didn’t it try to recover from the situation? Does it have a system for recovering from errors, or does it just continue and say “well I’ll get it next time, now on with the fetal crash”?