a step to a more sustainable future that doesn't involve the cessation of plastic production is a step toward the foot of a volcano that's actively erupting.
it's interesting and hopefully some less-bad will come of the plastic we're currently dealing with but that really doesn't factor in the continued permanent damage done by petroleum extraction, refinement and plastic production.
speaking as a former professional pearl diver, you soak your big stuff (or anything burnt or covered in melted cheese) while you wash the small stuff. then you can almost just rinse the big stuff unless it's really burnt on.
two of the bigger comment threads have already been flagged so i'd like to reiterate a point made by anigbrowl before it disappears:
the most powerful tool we have against what's happening right now is a general strike. i'm reaching out to my union to see how we can collectively respond, and i encourage every single american unionized HN user to do the same or get involved with current action; but the seed must be planted in all of us: we don't have to accept what's going on, and we can grind things to a stop until we see change.
as long as we live in a representative democracy, we need leadership that's actually willing to act instead of stamping their feet about people not following the rules.
Spies have saved so many lives throughout history and they prevented nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War on many occasions. Therefore the more spies the better.
> they prevented nuclear Armageddon during the Cold War on many occasions
Spying created the conditions where we were on the brink of nuclear armageddon. That they also saved us from going over the brink isn’t really to their credit.
Also, fyi - as best as we can ever know there was no lab leak. If you want a good summary of why not - have a listen to the most recent “If Books Could Kill” podcast episode.
A 30min drive. So, a relevant point, especially since that’s basically the key piece of “evidence” for the lab leak.
> 6 minutes in “look at the viruses they were working on…”
> Can’t, it’s been scrubbed
They published papers about what they were working on. That has not been scrubbed.
> 7 minutes in: “never been a confirmed case of a lab worker getting covid”
> The documented black market of animals out of biolabs in China and the fact that it’s an aerosol virus might be important here…
Sure. That might be relevant. But it’s not evidence, it’s just an idea of how it might have happened. A wuhan lab worker getting covid early on would be evidence.
Nobody can say definitively it wasn’t a lab leak, but what we can say is that we don’t have credible evidence that suggests it was - just a couple coincidences that aren’t actually super coincidental when you look closer. Like, say, a lab and a market 19km away in a city of 11 million people. For comparison - that’s a city with more people than NYC, and the lab is in Manhattan while the market is in Coney Island.
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