Drugs. :/

If you’re going to post a YouTube link, please use an Invidious instance: https://invidio.us/

• I have heard that the price of virgin plastic is so cheap because important inputs are produced as byproducts of other petroleum processing. If those byproducts weren’t being made into plastic, would it be easier or harder to handle their environmental impact? Easier. Those byproducts were in one place and the result of one process by one firm (or a small handful of firms) whose competency is converting crude oil. Instead, plastic is everywhere, in all sorts of forms and qualities. Virtually any substance would be easier to control than the trillions (quadrillions?) of pieces of microplastic strewn across the earth, in the ground, and in the oceans.
• Plastic has a lot of properties that are desirable for packaging. I’m sure there are many of those properties that can be reproduced by analogues if those analogues are produced at scale and thus cost-efficient. What do materials scientists think would be harder to get right? I know a materials scientist but I am not one, so I am really speculating but I would say that the solution would just be biodegradable plastic.
• Do governments fund materials research into plastic replacement? Oh yes. https://www.grants.gov/web/grants/search-grants.html?keywords=plastic
• Where do economists think it would be most effective to tax plastics to reduce their use / environmental impact? (I.e. at which stage of the production pipeline?) I’m only including this question just to say that I’m not sure of that research but I will say that one of the functions of a government is to be a prime mover and to not act with a profit motive. Since a state that is a sovereign issuer of currency can have unlimited funding (with only a few constraints), then it is probably most effective to fund the replacements and subsidize them than it is to tax at any point in the supply chain, especially considering how petro-plastic is an international phenomenon.

Leave me alone.

Well, I’m not interested in mindless chatter, so please stop responding to me on this topic. Have a nice day.

Democracy really is just a way to vote on a government, or in broader terms to participate in defining ones society. That government is making such rules as this, but only because the majority wants these rules. In a perfect democracy, the government wouldn’t do anything that the majority doesn’t want. Democracy isn’t a moral agent. The public is the agent.

Democracy doesn’t just apply to states or how elections are run: were that true, there would be no democratic workplaces. I also never said that democracy is a moral agent. I have no clue why you keep on responding in this conversation or what your endgame is here.

What I am saying is that majorities can support fascism. Just because 50%+1 agree with something does not make it democratic, as democracy supports minority rights and fascism does not.

In case it’s not obvious, this site/app takes posts from https://www.reddit.com/r/UnsentLetters/ and turns them into scrolling text without the comments.

No, literally no one wrote that or anything like it.

I’m familiar with Beaker but thought it was just experimental for sharing web pages peer-to-peer. Is it useful for actual everyday browsing?

You wrote that majoritarianism isn’t fascist and that’s not true so I am pointing out how you are wrong.

It is, thanks.

Does anyone know of a better Chromium-based alternative?

To the extent that having fewer children is a desirable public policy (and that is very much debatable), there should be nudge libertarian policies that incentivize or disincentivize the free choice to have or not have children. Outright banning of reproduction is not democratic.

A majority of German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish citizens were just fine with their fascist dictators.

Zoho Office Suite is a competitor to Google’s Office.

Can you clarify: I think you may be asking one of two questions.

One is a kind of social experiment one about viable alternatives to non-federated services and if the network effect is sufficient. E.g. I personally use two Mastodon instances and I don’t use Twitter. I find discussion on Mastodon to be much better than on Twitter and far less ugly and confusing, so in that respect, it is a viable alternative. If you are looking for a flood of hundreds of millions of users making a firehose of posts, that’s not going to happen any time soon.

The second question you may be asking is something along the lines of, “If I have a non-ActivityPub-based service on the Web, can I convert that into an ActivityPub-based one?” and the answer there is a lot more complicated but some services such as WordPress now allow federation, so that’s something.

In other words, in terms of adoption of fediverse services, there has definitely been traction and mostly it’s a matter of quantity over quality. If you are asking a technical question about how easy ActivityPub is to use as a standard, I’m too ignorant to answer.

This is a fantastic development. Way to go to the technical team.

Just writing in plain text something that you don’t mean. I think it would have been understood. Thanks.

Ugh. I hate it.