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'Great Pacific Garbage Patch' Far Bigger Than Imagined, Aerial Survey Shows (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The vast patch of garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean is far worse than previously thought, with an aerial survey finding a much larger mass of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items than imagined. A reconnaissance flight taken in a modified C-130 Hercules aircraft found a vast clump of mainly plastic waste at the northern edge of what is known as the "great Pacific garbage patch," located between Hawaii and California. The density of rubbish was several times higher than the Ocean Cleanup, a foundation part-funded by the Dutch government to rid the oceans of plastics, expected to find even at the heart of the patch, where most of the waste is concentrated. The heart of the garbage patch is thought to be around 1m sq km (386,000 sq miles), with the periphery spanning a further 3.5m sq km (1,351,000 sq miles). The dimensions of this morass of waste are continually morphing, caught in one of the ocean's huge rotating currents. The north Pacific gyre has accumulated a soup of plastic waste, including large items and smaller broken-down micro plastics that can be eaten by fish and enter the food chain. Following a further aerial survey through the heart of the patch on Sunday, the Ocean Cleanup aims to tackle the problem through a gigantic V-shaped boom, which would use sea currents to funnel floating rubbish into a cone. A prototype of the vulcanized rubber barrier will be tested next year, with a full-sized 100km (62-mile) barrier deployed by 2020 if trials go well. "Normally when you do an aerial survey of dolphins or whales, you make a sighting and record it," said Boyan Slat, the founder of the Ocean Cleanup. "That was the plan for this survey. But when we opened the door and we saw the debris everywhere. Ever half second you see something. So we had to take snapshots -- it was impossible to record everything. It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean."
Wouldn't a huge sieve designed to strain out the plastic catch everything else as well? Like, you know, fish and seabirds and other critters?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
"there is no island of trash in the pacific"
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/the_next_20/2016/09/the_great_pacific_garbage_patch_was_the_myth_we_needed_to_save_our_oceans.html
Why doesn't the original article have any pictures of this giant patch?
As others have said.....they have many names for this elusive garbage collection in the pacific such as garbage patch and Plastic vortex, and yet, no one actually has a picture of said trash. Just infographics.
Have you ever fallen asleep at the keybhanusdiog?
The Chinese are going to melt the plastic scraps into one big island.
It will be equipped with a runway, and submarine base.
All that plastic rubbish is not collected into a huge floating island, nor does it look at all impressive on photos (which is why there are none in the articles). It isn't clumped together - it's more like flecks of plastic floating in a soup.
That does not lessen the problem. There's still a vast amount of debris out there, just spread out a lot, over multiple areas. And any plastics that do break down form "microplastics" that have now found their way into more than a quarter of fish sold in Indonesia and China.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Every half second you see something.
So, a plane cruising covers 500+ ft/s. So "one item per half second" is one item every 250 feet. The descriptions make it sound like a floating island of plastic you could walk across, but the reality from their description is a thinly spread cluster of debris over millions of square km.
Learn to love Alaska
You might recall that a type of bacteria has evolved that eats plastic bottles. Since plastics are a rich source of energy, they are like cellulose. But for that to work, there needs to be a concentration of smaller plastic particles, the Japanese researchers who found the bacteria, found it in a dump.
The whole issue with plastics was the lack of decay, yet even this lot admit that's not the reality:
“Most of the debris was large stuff. It’s a ticking time bomb because the big stuff will crumble down to micro plastics over the next few decades if we don’t act.”
Really, a plastic bottle every 250ft is not a big deal. If it was a coconut every 250 ft would be a big deal too and tropical islands would be wastelands. We don't worry about starch and fibres because they can be eaten, but then if plastics can be eaten what's the issue?
If you go to beaches on the north shore of Hawaii, which is on the edge of the patch, you get little pieces of plastic washing up on the beach all the time. It's annoying.
So yeah, there is evidence, I've seen it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
~30 Belgiums.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Birds and fish and Dolphins die all the time without help from humans. In fact, they were probably dying long before humans started polluting the oceans. The carcasses bloat up and float. They have to float SOMEWHERE, so why not that particular area? It's not unreasonable to think that the currents have made that area a graveyard for sea life. In fact, it's probably keeping the rest of the ocean relatively clean....
So you claim to be smart enough to know the term microbead, but are also too stupid to Google it....
No at all. I claim to be smart enough to identify when I don't know something and to call people out when they claim to know something that they obviously don't.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
There is so much plastic in our fish that it's already causing major health issues.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOAc71p-PLg
I don't watch YouTube links to get the 1.5 facts you're trying to point me to. Certainly not when they are overloaded with links, all from one "facts" website, and by a guy who is a "professional speaker on public health issues, particularly the benefits of a plant-based diet and the harms of eating animal products."
He's at the extreme end of the bias scale. Using big-words and showing screenshots of scientific papers doesn't make whatever you spout true.
Do you mean health issues in our fish or in us?
Because plastic is pretty inert, even more inert when it's been in the sunlight/ocean for a few years, and the quantities transferred to the human food chain via eating fish are minimal. In fact, there's a LOT more things we do that are much more dangerous.
And there is no evidence to suggest there's any kind of measurable human effect at all, really. If there was, we'd ALL be keeling over. So I think your "already causing major health issues" might just be a bit overblown. Sure, if we look deep, we might find out that it's not good.
But are we suggesting it's somehow worse than the crap that people choose to shove down their throats knowing full well that's it's no good for them?
Pretty much the only guys going to follow your expert's advice are other guys that think that plant-based diets are the only thing we can ever possibly eat (which is stupid beyond the extreme for a natural omnivore).
Go to Southend pier on the SE coast of the UK (i.e. the wrong side for any kind of Great Pacific Garbage Patch). The same happens.
That's not proof.
I'm sure there is a ton of plastic floating in every sea-sized body of water on Earth, but that we've just found out that this one is X times bigger than we thought? That suggests nobody's been looking properly and/or it doesn't have that much an effect that we've not noticed a glaring hole in our data up till now.
It's shit that shouldn't be there, we should stop just dumping waste and thinking "out of sight, out of mind", but in millions of square kms of ocean, I would expect to find millions of bits of plastic. And wood. And small metals. And just about every substance that human's discard. Even food and seashells.
But some plastic on a beach isn't evidence of it's existence or size.
Calling a lot of floating bits of garbage an island is indeed a lie, but the lie is coming from the person framing it this way for a "goalpost shift" and not those actually talking about water dense with garbage.
I can see why the poster with the goalpost shift was far too ashamed of their action to even post under a username.
...than their webpage.
Most of useful... no... ALL of the useful info on it is textual. .jpeg headers and images of similar file size scaled down to 1/8th of their pixel dimensions - like a 5000 by 3333 pixel image scaled down to a 660 by 440 display size. .gif of a diagram of a floating ball.
Yet it features 2 megabyte
And then there's a 20 (TWENTY) megabyte
For a moment there it felt like I was using dial-up again.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
A picture of a plastic island. Otherwise, it's just the Pacific.
Pics or GTFO
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Make multiple passes over it to drop water-activated glue until it's a giant raft, then get to work building condos.
I'll take 10% of annual revenue - email me to deposit funds :D
Requiem for the American Dream
Or for bigger, Rhode Islands, or for even bigger Texas.
And since nothing is bigger than Texas, at least for Texans, there is no other area unit necessary.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So you go after Smith&Wesson if a bank gets robbed?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
So they install net/catcher/whatever things to scoop up all the rubbish, then what? Pick it all up and bring it to a landfill? Burn it? Contain it in a smaller section of ocean? It's all so well and good saying let's clean up the ocean but what do you do with the stuff after that?
Wanna buy a shirt?
https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
Your numbers are trumped-up.
There largest file is 854KB at 1920x1280, scaled down to about 70% on my 1920x1080 screen. It's probably scaled up on a high-resolution screen.
The entire frontpage combined is slightly below 4MB.
For comparison, Apple's frontpage is 6MB.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Yann Martel's book, Life of Pi, and the movie based on it feature a puzzling algae island .
(http://www.shmoop.com/life-of-pi/algae-island-symbol.html)
Maybe the island is made of plastic.
I never said "frontpage".
Which at 4 megabytes would be INSANELY HUGE.
Even at 3.37 megabytes it's still insane.
BTW, Apple is a "mere" 1.14 megabytes, which is tiny in comparison.
But do feel free to enjoy the wonders of this scaled down to 660 by 440 pixels while this keeps loading and loading and loading...
If they're gonna have a 3-30 MB page where all actual info is text... why not just put up a pdf? Preferably a high resolution one, so it's even bigger.
Without images their "frontpage" is actually ~400 kilobytes.
41k when you also dump all the unnecessary scripts cause there's no reason for that page to be dynamic.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Nothing published in the federalist ever counts as "debunking" or indeed anything other than "blatant lies to support our fantasy dream world".
You really want to know what a deregulated market looks like ? Think Chicago during prohibition. Now before you go yelling about how prohibition *was* regulation - that's smoke and mirrors, the people who remained in the business after it was illegal - were the ones who didn't care about the law - and so they didn't obey regulations of any kind. A black market is always an entirely deregulated market - the very regulation that prohibits it also makes it deregulated in practical terms.
What do black markets look like ? Killing the competition is a valid way to stay competitive. Shooting your own staff if they underperform is a perfectly viable way to keep workers productive. Turf wars. Torture - and the community living in fear with a rapidly declining life expectancy.
But that's what EVERY business will do if it thinks it can. Because that will always be the most profitable way to run any business. The ones who are run by people that wouldn't *do* that - well they don't stay in business.
Prohibition is not an argument against regulation - it is an argument against prohibition but it's a false equivalence to pretend those are the same thing. It's proof of what deregulation inevitably leads to. It turns every market into a gangwar, every industry into a mafia.
Back during the industrial revolution it was standard practise to rape a female employee every Friday afternoon to keep workers disciplined. Every single factory owner in the UK did it. Every fucking one of them. It was 'rape' of the 'fuck me or I fire you' variety but rape nonetheless. The interesting thing is - a LOT of those factory owners kept diaries. They all admit to doing it in their diaries. They also, every one of them, write about how abhorent they find it. Many of them were once men who would find such behaviour disgusting. So why do it ? Because all the other factory owners do - if I don't, I'll have less disciplined workers than them - I could not compete, I would be out of business. Every single one of them blames all the others for forcing him to become a rapist.
That's business without regulation. Regulation is designed to prevent the most profitiable business practises (which is why libertarians hate it) but that is not a bad thing - because the most profitable business practises are always the ones that kill people. You simply cannot preserve life and the welbeing of others as cheaply as you can destroy it. You simply cannot ever compete more efficiently than to put your competition out of business for the price of a bullet.
And because this is the reality, those who embrace this as an outcome they want must constantly lie about reality. They must pretend that reality is something other than it is. Lying about the bad things rich people will do to get richer becomes standard practise. Once you do that- you will lie about anything that threatens the rich's ability to kill to get richer. There's a problem though - nobody believes a pathological liar... what to do what to do... oh I know, accuse everybody else of being pathological liars, misrepresent what they say, tell clever lies like when somebody speaks of arctic ice melt you link them to an article about the ice growing and hope they don't notice that this is in the antarctic and actually the growth is only in surface area, the volume is decreasing, and even then all the new shallow ice is refrozen melt-off from the arctic (fresh water freezes more easily than salt water).
And in that grand tradition of flat out lying about reality, but doing it very cleverly, comes the federalist with another classic case. There are lots of reasons why microplastics are bad for the ocean and people - their spelled out all over this board by many posters - the article never denies the massive amount of microplastics around, it just says "not many big pieces" and pretends that disproves the shit ton of plastic floating around
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I was wondering where that went last August!
It's new!
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Is this not the kind of thing that would be seen from the ISS? Or from a normal plane flying at the appropriate altitude? Where are the pictures?
The Duchy of Grand Fenwick would also have been a cromulent choice.
Unless Elon's called dibs on that, too
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
All the sea creatures poop and pee in the ocean. It only looks pristine from a distance. Up close there's all kinds of shit in the ocean.
When people discover a 'cause' that they can champion, they hurl at it all the resources and skills that they can. Apparently someone who is a web developer is passionate about the space garbage problem.
Wikipedia
From the second fucking paragraph:
"Because of its large area, it is of very low density (4 particles per cubic meter), and therefore not visible from satellite photography, nor even necessarily to casual boaters or divers in the area. It consists primarily of a small increase in suspended, often microscopic, particles in the upper water column."
Or are you going to take the conservative approach and pretend it doesn't exist?
...dissing web developers or being serious.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
Go to Southend pier on the SE coast of the UK (i.e. the wrong side for any kind of Great Pacific Garbage Patch). The same happens.
England is right next to the North Atlantic gyre. Notably, it doesn't happen on California beaches.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
If people like Zuckerberg want to throw money at a problem to show what great humanitarians they are, how about they throw money at cleaning up that huge island of trash in the middle of the ocean, instead of throwing money at something that everyone has been trying to solve for at least a hundred years like cancer, that millions of people are already working on anyway? Or is getting rid of the monument to humans being pigs not enough of a photo-op?
They're going to set up their own floating kingdom
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/593369/summary
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
The durability of the booms, emptying of the booms, safety to wildlife, the ineffectiveness of the booms since the patch is so huge... all of these issues have pointed to the fact this can't work. Basically this kid is pitching Solar Freakin' Roadways, but somehow got lots of money and a international coverage anyway. I think its the culture of celebrity getting behind this, along with the: screw the problem, lets treat the symptom strategy deployed when the problem is simply too big to address.
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
Volume is a more accurate measure of how much plastic garbage is in the ocean than sq. ft. spread. The Pacific Ocean is about 64 million sq miles with an average depth of 14,000 feet. The Pacific Ocean is about 25 quintillion (25 with 18 zeros) cubic feet of water. The plastic spread is 1.35 million sq miles. Assuming a very very generous average depth of 1 ft of plastic, the plastic volume is 37.7 million cubic feet. The observed plastic garbage dump would be 1.5 millionths of the Pacific Ocean volume. If the plastic volume averaged a more realistic 1 inch depth, it would be 1.3 billionths of the Pacific Ocean volume.
Reaching hyperbolic proportions !!
Where are all of these pictures of the "great Pacific garbage patch"? All I've ever seen is close-ups of piles of garbage on a boat, or whatnot. I've never seen any wide-angle shots of the patch itself.
I can't wait for millions of lost/broken lightning port dongles and millions of wireless headphones with dead batteries to be added to the mix.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I see no photo of this so-called "great Pacific garbage patch" so I'm inclined to think it's been hyped-up just a tad. I'm sure there is garbage floating around out there but its description is probably not an accurate reflection if none of these articles is game enough to post a decent photo of it, and only post illustrations.
I did respond to the false and misrepresented facts in the logic. I also didn't ridicule the source - but pointed out that their reputation predicts exactly what I found inside. Flagrant lies. I don't see anything funny about that.
Oh and Occam's Razor says it's much more likely an ideological propaganda publication like the federalist is lying than hundreds of scientists in fields as varied as marine biology and biochem all lying about the same thing,
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
To get an article published and make it go viral, you have to exaggerate and conjure an image of something visually dramatic.
OK, how about this? Chris says that he didn't touch anything... he only took pictures. I believe him.
http://chrisjordan.com/gallery...
"It was bizarre to see that much garbage in what should be pristine ocean."
Bizarre...? Hmmm. Not the word I'd use... more like DISGUSTING!
How a DVD Case Killed a Whale
http://news.nationalgeographic...
And the recent survey of the largest coral bleaching took out almost 1/4 of the Great Barrier Reef.
There's too much illness to report.. too many deaths from debris, bycatch, and overfishing, not to mention ~ 200 dead zones around the world.
There's NO distortion, rather there's no reporting of this in mainstream media. Obviously.
Kill the ocean and we ALL die. Forests barely make 20 percent of breathable oxygen.
No sig for you! Come back one year!
Irony: an environmental organization wasting electricity via this wasted bandwidth.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Just because something doesn't photograph well does not mean it doesn't exist - Pasteur posited germ theory damn near two centuries before we could see a bacterium. I've seen every one of those links. The slate article's headline is fooling you - it's actually sarcastic. It points out that the basis for the entire 'it's a myth' genre of articles in rightwing publications is a really bad level of arguing over semantics - and that, even if you take THEIR excessively literal interpretation and acknowledge that this isn't what's there - it's still a huge problem.
When it comes to science topics- NOTHING you read in the mainstream press can EVER debunk or confirm anything- because it's all simplified to the point where everything is technically incorrect, most of it is written by journalists who don't know how science works and the rest by journalists who don't *care* how science works.
The actual scientific papers - not the sensationalist headlines (both for and against) is what smart people evaluate, or if you can't -at least confine yourself to mainstream publications that have a reputation for solid science reporting, by specialist journalists - things like National Geographic magazine (though in the post-Murdoch-buyout days I'm not so sure I trust it anymore).
The science is that there is an ungodly amount of plastic in the pacific ocean, the vast majority of it is microparticles - which while not visible to the naked eye are deadly to fish and anything that eats fish (including humans). Among other things these have significantly increased the mercury content of the oceans - to the extent where, globally, it's now advised that pregnant women eat no fish at all (since a fetus has a much lower toxic-tolerance for mercury than an adult human). This is standard medical practise now - every obstetrician in the world knows it - and the cause is there. It's also a fact that the pacific ocean has a major vortex current where the vast majority of this stuff ends up.
Indeed if you go there you may not see anything more than a bottle-cap in a 50 yards (as the federalist so eloquently put it). But what you see is deceptive. The entire patch of ocean between the bottle gaps is filled with plastic, you just can't see it with the naked eye.
When marine biologists and journalists (especially ones working for an extremely ideological political/economic publication) don't agree - the odds are it's the marine biologists who are telling the truth.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
If you want irony, just read up their FAQ.
They originally wanted to process plastic into oil.
Because taking bunch of stable carbon which takes millions of years to decompose, making it into fuel and burning it into CO2 so it helps boost the greenhouse effect - that's green as fuck.
Why remove the plastic and transport it to land instead of processing it at sea?
After exploring plastic-to-oil conversion at sea, our team has determined that processing plastic on land is more practical.
Large-scale pyrolysis, the technique used to convert plastic to oil, requires heavy machinery.
To do this on the open sea, we would need a stable platform: a far steeper investment than transporting plastic back to land.
Until it is shipped to land, all collected plastic will be stored in an internal buffer which will have to be emptied approximately every six weeks, depending on the size of the transporting vessel.
For more information, please consult Chapter 4 of our feasibility report.
What will you do with the plastic once it's extracted from the oceans?
During the feasibility study we showed that ocean plastic is suitable for conversion into oil.
Because making oil from plastic consumes less energy than extracting fossil crude oil, this processing solution has a net positive carbon impact.
However, recycling into new plastic products appears to be a more attractive option.
Preliminary tests show that 100% recycled plastic can be turned into new, durable products.
The Ocean Cleanup receives tremendous interest from companies that want to use ocean plastic in their products, making large-scale recycling viable.
More information can be found in Chapter 9 of our feasibility report.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
An there we go... scientists lie to get grant money. The heartland institute convinced you libertarians that this is not only a viable thing but a commonplace one - and now you see the conspiracy everywhere.
It's bullshit.
The odds of a conspiracy this large even getting started is overwhelmingly against. It just doesn't work. Too many people have to be in on the lie - every one a potential whistleblower (or accidental leak). It's just not possible.
Anyway, how about the conspiracy that the atmosphere is full of oxygen - can you see any ? If there's so much oxygen in the atmosphere - why are there no photos of the stuff ? How can 71% of the gas in it be oxygen and we can't get a picture ? We have loads of pictures of water in the atmosphere - why not oxygen ? I sense a conspiracy among scientists to pretend that oxygen is in the air and that life depends on it, funded with grant money from the iron-lung industry. It all began with the space program really - to maintain the illusion so they could trick NASA into buying lots and lots and lots of oxygen to take with them to space for the astronauts. Never before has empty canisters been sold at such a markup.
Yeah... that's what you sound like.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Sure - almost 0.00001% of what is being made by the companies who fear it.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
Oh - and there is nothing 'elusive' about the garbage patch - it's just not easy to photography because microscopic particles, by definition, needs a microscope to take photos off.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
By the way - companies go bankrupt all the time - in every industry. Even fossil fuel companies. Did you forget about Enron already ?
And the ExxonMobil scandal is very much true - they knew about it, they planned to exploit it for profit in future - and smearing the journalists won't change it. ONLY a blinkered right-wing fool who believes everything that suits his ideology over evidence could believe the ridiculous smear you just swallowed.
You talk about leftie lies - there is no such thing as a rightwing truth. Not one. Because everything the right believes, absolutely everything is flat-out and fundamentally disproven by evidence every time. Right down to "minimum wage increases cause job losses" - there is literally not a single example in history where it has ever done that. Whatever impact it does or does not have on jobs is so incredibly tiny as to be completely lost in the noise of the billions of other things that affect the economy and the employment rate. The empirical data is overwhelming. the prediction has been made about the introduction of the federal minimum wage and every single one of the 22 increases over the years and every state increase ever made - and not once has it happened.
There is no measurable correlation whatsoever - yet the claim keeps getting made by people who think 'supply and demand' is a law of nature - but forget that economies are not controlled in a lab - and nothing ever changes in isolation, so the law often does not get followed because there are always other things happening that has a bigger impact.
If after 100-odd years of being proven wrong again and again and again they can't stop telling that lie - why would you believe anything else they say ? Why keep buying the lie just so you can have the honour of covering wallmart's wage-bill for them out of your taxes because nowadays it's apparently perfectly fine to employ people at less than the cost of living (only businesses should be profitable apparently - not people), and then have working people be unable to survive so the middle class has to carry them.
The nett result is that the earned-income-tax-credit has shown an interesting pattern. That one is a good proxy to measure because ONLY working poor people qualify for it... and since Reagan it has grown at roughly 5 times the rate of the population growth, it is now by *far* the single largest poverty assistance program in the united states.
You spend more on feeding working poor people than you do on feeding the people who can't find work ! Which actually DOES reduce employment. Very few people are motivated to go find work if they can't survive on their paychecks anyway. If that's teh case - why not just draw welfare if you'll need welfare after you get a job anyway ? It makes no economic sense to work at a loss. So increased minimum wage actually drives employment UP - and that's before you even factor in the income-effect, which by some measures means simply that - had the US been increasing the minimum wage alongside inflation all along the economic growth rate over the past 10 years would be 9% higher.
Imagine how many more people would be employed in an a economy 9% larger. No wonder any job losses from 'increased price of labour' get lost in the noise.
It's all lies. The entire conservative ideology and everything associated with it is nothing but a massive fraud - and this one is highly believable because the only people who need to knowingly lie to participate are billionaires and politicians - two classes of professional liars, and the rewards for playing along is literally billions of dolars each, and it requires no cooperation between the members (it's not so much a conspiracy in other words as just a lot of people who each, individually, found that the same lie makes them rich).
You can't maintain a large conspiracy with a few hundred thousand each - it's mathematically impossible... but for a few billion each - when whistleblowing will only hurt yourself and do nothing to harm the lie ? Easy.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *