Think of the efficiency associated with driving trucks around and picking up old toilets and sinks that last in homes for many decades, taking them to a facility where they are ground into small porcelain chips, ultimately shipping the chips to the people who mix the ingredients for the bedding of Germany’s 830,000 miles of roads.
It would be more cost-effective to shuttle rocks down from the moon.
Building biodegradable plastic is tricky, because a plastic container can’t fall apart until it’s no longer needed to contain its contents. E,g., you don’t want a plastic milk bottle to last 500 years, but it needs to last at least a month.
The claim here is that bottles know “when they are no longer needed.”
Sounds a bit far-fetched.
This is funny, but there is a certain sadness to it as well, i.e., that old people tend to be Trump supporters.
It would be interesting to know why this is. Perhaps it has to do with having grown up in the times in which racism was completely acceptable, in fact, de rigueur. Maybe it has some connection with having grown up in the Depression.
Until recently, Americans uniformly accepted the science behind vaccinating their dogs and cats against diseases like rabies that could potentially kill not only the pets themselves, but any of the people they bit or scratched.
That was before the Trump administration came along with its Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who is known for his aggressively anti-science perspective on all this.
Here is the story in The New York Times, Vaccine Skepticism Comes for Pet Owners, Too, of a woman (pictured above), just four years out of vet school, who has a practice that is seriously threated by this kind of ignorance. From the article: “I actually had someone scream and yell at us and storm out because we required rabies vaccines for her cats,” Dr. McGuire said, adding that the owner had accused her of trying to “kill her cats with vaccines.”
To the reader who sent me this:
Really. Our president is a criminal sociopath who had his people storm the Capitol and came within an eyelash of overthrowing the U.S. government in 2021. He was charged with 91 felony counts across four different indictments handed down by grand juries but then used his power to make the most important ones disappear. I guess it could have been worse.
Seriously, this guy’s comment shows how deeply screwed our nation is.
19th Century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer certainly never won the “Mr. Popularity” prize for his dismal perspectives on human life. He’s probably best known for his views that intelligent people can never be happy, and that, in fact, the smarter a person is, the harder he needs to struggle to have friends and fit into the world around him.
At left, he says something that reminds us of my earlier post in which I suggested that people who our proud to be Americans, because of the accidental fact that they were born here and not Japan or Egypt, are not too bright.
IMO, we all have something important to learn from Schopenhauer, but I’m glad he wasn’t my father.
America, with its childish response to immigrants, as shown at left, stands in stark contrast to Switzerland, one of the most sophisticated and highly developed countries on Earth.
Switzerland features: Fabulous education, incredible, urbane culture, and a standard of living close to the very top of the world rankings.
Pertinent to this post, they have four official languages–French mostly spoken in the west, German in the north, Italian in the south, and Romansh, a variety of Latin, in the east. The truth, however, is that no one could possibly care what language you speak. If you want to speak Mandarin or Bulgarian, you’ll have trouble communicating with others, but that’s your problem.
The United States features: A considerable level of affluence, but entire regions that are drowning in poverty, ignorance, racial hatred, fanatical Christianity, lousy public education that gets worse with each passing year, and people who seem to have nothing better to do than heap even more pain on some of the world’s most miserable people.
To answer the question posed at left:
America at one time had moral standards, but we’ve abandoned them.
Now, it’s about the essential principles of MAGA: white nationalism, the rejection of science, and the repudiation of “wokeism.”
It’s a disgusting period in our history — one from which we’re very unlikely to fully recover.
Schoolchildren all around most of the country, and all over the world, are taught (roughly) the truth about U.S. history. Alabama is one of few outliers.
There, children are taught that blacks and whites have, and have always had, equal rights, and equal protection under the law.
Educator Jonathan Kozol, who recently celebrated his 89th birthday, 67 years after graduating from Harvard summa cum laude, taught young white and black children in the Boston public school system, and wrote an essay in which he posed the question: Why do the parents of black kids not trust white teachers?
Answering his own question, he went on: Did white teachers protest against the use of the racist Scott Foresman elementary school textbooks that taught that “though slavery did exist, most slave owners treated their slaves kindly,” and made numerous other remarks that suggested that the North and South had equal rights to determine whether or not slavery was valid, and should be allowed to exist into perpetuity.
As to the trust issue, he concluded: “It’s simply because we are not worthy of their trust.”
Here’s a suggestion for Kay Ivey, the governor of the most backward state in the union: Tell the truth.
There are 2.86 million U.S. military personnel. How many are transgender? Although no one really knows, it’s a minute fraction, perhaps like the percentage of left-handed redheads over seven feet tall with Mensa-level IQs.
Does any rational person really believe that the presence of transgenders in our armed forces puts our national security at risk?
Obviously, banning transgenders from the military appeals to idiots. Perhaps that’s all that needs to be said here.
