True. However, most oddities are going to translate as just that, oddities. If I'm pointing at a sign at a train station next to a yellow line, and it says "please not to mock the lizard", then I'm going to assume it's garbage. If it says "please to stand backward of yellow line" then I get the gist of what it is saying.
I can see this as really useful for things like menus. Even the literal translation of each word gives me SOME idea of what I'm about to order. OK, so maybe the marmaset comes out medium well instead of the well-done I ordered, but as long as it tastes like the chicken I thought I was ordering...
If you're dealing with any sort of sensitive information on your network and you are dependent on vendors who make you configure your computers insecurely to get the job done, you (as a company, not necessarily as an individual) didn't do your homework in vendor selection, and that selection is putting your data at risk.
You personally may have had nothing to do with the software selection, but a word to the wise: there are few things more detrimental to your IT resume than having the name of a company well-known for a major data breach on there.
On the upside, my local town has 5,000 residents, the larger town next door where all the stores are has 15,000, and I can afford a few acres of land for my privacy. It's all about tradeoffs.:)
Any network administrator worth half their income should always consider their LAN to be compromised. That's why you use secure transfer protocols to transfer any data containing any sensitive information between company systems. That's why you have active network monitors that turn off network ports when they encounter an unknown MAC address. That's why you don't allow anonymous logins to your active directory, and you strictly control access to everything by at least department.
Security is done in layers. Firewalls can and will be breached. If it is, your goal is to slow the attacker down until you can detect the breach and close it. Honeypot servers, data encryption, network segmentation, network resource security, all of these things are vital.
Unfortunately, we are. There isn't a specialty camera shop within an hours' drive of my house. The options I laid out are the options available to me, unless I want to drive over an hour.
My "local shop" *IS* Best Buy. It's the closest thing I've got to a "local shop". They and Wal-Mart drove out all the really "local shops" about 5 years ago.
I like having local stores, too. Unfortunately, not enough people do, and they're all gone around here.
Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and mail order. That's it for electronics stores around here. And I include Radio Shack only because of fond memories of what they used to be, not because they are a useful electronics store.
Borders. That's our local bookstore now. We used to have three of them. And Borders is now saying that they are having trouble because everyone buys their books at Amazon because it's cheaper, so we're likely to lose our only bookstore for 20 miles in any direction.
We used to have three hardware stores. Now there's one local one left, and they just got bought out by a big chain who intends to close them, so it's Lowes or Home Depot now.
There used to be four local stores you could go into to buy toys. One specialized in quality toys, like wood toys and durable stuff. Now, it's Target or Wal-Mart, and both carry such complete shit for toys that I took up carving so my daughter could have half-decent toys, and we have to mail-order most of the rest.
That points directly back to the issue raised by the article. Local stores cannot compete if the focus is solely on price.
Amazon, where I can't see the item in person and I have to buy it based on a picture and some reviews?
Wal-Mart, where the item selection is so pathetically poor they might as well not have a display, and half the display models are broken or displayed only as cardboard or plastic replacements?
At least with Best Buy, when I'm shopping for a digital camera, I can look at a dizzying array of cameras. I can hold any one of them as an actual functioning digital camera in my hands, take a few pictures with it, drive through the menus a few times to see if they are intuitive, etc. When I'm shopping for a netbook, I can try out the keyboard for fit and feel, look at the screen for brightness and clarity, etc.
When I'm shopping for a hard drive, there's nothing to display. It's a hard drive. In a box. I'll go to Beast Buy and pay the premium if I need it today, or mail order it if I'm OK with waiting a week. Hell, I'll even go to Wally World if there's a chance they'll have what I want, but I'm very frequently disappointed there because the selection of any one thing is pathetic, and the selections usually involve the lowest-common-denominator products in each category.
What do you mean, started? I've been asked to leave several stores because I have a notebook and am writing down item descriptions and prices for comparison-shopping with other local stores.
This was long before da interwebz existed, and that practice is not at all uncommon even today.
Try it sometime. Take a notebook and pen into a store, and pick a few products, stand in front of them, and start scribbling into your notebook. 90% of the time, nothing will happen, but the other 10% can be fun.
It's not supposed to be a fair comparison, it's supposed to be a good example of how our brains work, and it is. This isn't about how much money you have, it's about how much you are about to spend on something.
In each case, you're saving $50 and are assumed to be putting in about the same effort. To save the same $50, people will go to the effort of driving across town in descending order of likelihood:
1. Receive $50 in cash or a gift card without buying anything at the moment. 2. Receive a free item worth $50. 3. Receive $50 off a $100 item that they intended to buy. 4. Receive $50 off a $500 item that they intended to buy. 5. Receive $50 off a $5,000 item that they intended to buy.
All other constants, like how much money you have in your bank account, are the same. Even the poorest person, after saving for a year to buy a $15,000 item, will generally drop a week's grocery money in additional cost to save a drive across town, when they'd happily drive across town for a free week's supply of groceries.
In all cases, it's the same amount of money they are saving by performing the same effort. $50 for driving across town. It's just a beautiful quirk of our monkey brains that $50 has a variable value depending on how much you were intending to spend at that moment. A quirk that companies are very good at using to their advantage.
That's because store overhead (rent, heat, wages, disposal of display models, etc) is somewhere around (wait for it)... 20 to 30%. If not often higher.
Stores want to make money, too.
And to show you all that shiny in person and let you touch it and try it out before you drop your benjamins on it, they have to spend more than Amazon does to show you a picture of it on teh Interwebz.
Choose Amazon too often, and you'll only ever have an option to see the pictures. Because the stores will go out of business. Your choice.
Here's the problem. Running a brick-and-mortar store costs money. Not only do you have to have the store, but you still have to have the product shipped to the store and warehouse excess inventory, which is not quite as expensive as shipping it to the customer directly but not all that different. The overhead of the retail space (rent, heat, etc), the employees, the display models which usually have to be sold at a discount or disposed of at a loss, and all that makes the per-sale cost of doing business as a retailer significantly higher than that of a pure warehouse operation. You simply can't make up even a fraction of that by negotiating lower costs than what Amazon or NewEgg or Buy.com can get the same item for. Even if you can get a lower cost by 15%, your store costs will gobble that up and more. And you aren't getting lower costs than Amazon, their sheer volume ensures that they will probably have a lower cost than you do.
If you go into a store, that retailer is paying a great deal of money to show you that product on the display rack and allow you to twiddle with it. He's paying a great deal of money to have the item you want sitting on the shelf ready for immediate purchase. He's paying a great deal of money to have someone sitting there ready to at least make a half-assed attempt at answering your questions. He's not paying any less than his mail-order competitors for his product. In order to make a profit, he's got to charge more, so he has to figure out ways to get you in the store buying things he can make a profit on.
I'm not at all suggesting that you "owe" that retailer a sale - it's a free country. But if you go on Amazon and mail-order it to save $10 after spending an hour in a local retail store looking at the item and having their employee answer questions, and enough people do it, the retailer can't make a profit and is going to go out of business. You'll lose the local display of products that the retailer offers you (not to mention the local jobs that retailer offered your community, and the immediate availability of product when you're in a hurry to get something).
It's your decision. I'm just suggesting that throwing your local retailer a bone every now and then will help keep them around. They can't compete with the Amazon's of the world in price, their cost structure is much higher. But they offer you services Amazon can't (immediate availability of items, in-person local returns, display models, live human beings to answer questions, local jobs, etc).
If you don't value those services, then by all means shop from Amazon. Just don't crybaby when your local shops close up and you have to drive two hours to see anything in person, or you are limited to an in-person view of only what your local Wally World carries. Wal-Mart keeps their prices low by engaging in really, really strongarm price negotiations with their vendors, but their selection in any one type of item is usually pathetic and limited to the cheapest and junkiest of the product to keep the prices low.
Again, I'm not suggesting that the retailers have any sort of right to demand your commerce. They don't. The displays are there for you to use. It's a good idea, however, to acknowledge occasionally that those displays cost a lot of money, and consider whether you want them around for future shopping when looking at a few bucks' savings on an item you want. They simply can't match mailorder pricing. So you'll have to decide whether you want to see things before you buy them, and whether that service is worth anything to you.
"Reduce" comes from not using disposable bags in the first place, but there is a tradeoff of course, and you have to take that into account.
The following numbers are made up for discussion purposes.
Let's say I take a canvas (or heavier plastic) bag with me to the grocery store. That bag, obviously, had more environmental impact to make than the two-to-three plastic bags it replaced in my grocery trip. Let's say it has the environmental impact of 10 plastic grocery bags.
Plastic grocery bags, however, can be practically reused a very small number of times before they become too fragile to reuse any more.
I can reuse my canvas bag for decades.
So the investment in creating the canvas or heavier plastic bag means it is suitable for more reuses, reducing the number of low-reuse plastic bags I need to have created to meet my demand.
Reduce trumps reuse. Each of the plastic bags that didn't need to be manufactured for my use saves 100% of the resources necessary to produce them.
Reusing the disposable plastic bags can only approach 100% as I reuse them repeatedly, and since they are disposable they weren't designed with reuse in mind, so they will fail early.
But, having said that, reuse trumps recycling, since your reuse of your bags repeatedly at least doubles the efficiency of a given bag for each time you reuse it.
And, of course, if you need disposable plastic bags for other uses (say, garbage bags), it's more efficient to get one residual use out of a disposable bag than it is to buy a fresh one-time-use bag for the purpose. So if you use plastic bags for your garbage, and you can use grocery bags instead, you might as well use grocery bags for the purpose rather than getting a canvas bag to carry home your disposable plastic garbage bags...
It's all about optimization. Invest in reusable items where you will use them enough times to make it worth the extra investment. Use disposable when it makes more sense.
I'd call it "repurposing" if you want to stick with an "R" word so the mantra still works (grin).
It's getting one last use, for something different than the original intent of the product. In terms of efficiency, it's generally going to be a step above landfill and a step below recycling.
So, if you want to complete the treehugger mantra, it would be "reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose".
And a lot of what we call recycling today is actually repurposing. We're not giving it another cycle of its original use, we're finding what incremental use of it is left and making the best of that.
It's better than throwing it away, but worse than actually recycling it, assuming you can practically recycle it (which is hard with plastics).
Right, I'm not at all arguing against recycling, or at least the safe disposal of stuff like motor oil and the segregation of things we can have a further incremental use for but can't actually recycle.
At least your used motor oil is finding another last use as heat (so the dump doesn't have to burn fresh petroleum product), and the potential groundwater pollution is worse than the air pollution produced by burning it. It's not a perfect solution, but engines have to be lubricated and the lubricant has to go somewhere when it becomes useless. So you're doing the best you can with that, and good on ya for doing it.
It's just that I see people justifying the use of disposable plastic bottles under the myth that recycling them "makes it all better". It is better than throwing them away, sure. But it doesn't make it all better. Recycling is inefficient and costly last resort, marginally better than throwing it away, but not by a whole heckuva lot. But it gets more press than better methods, like reducing and reusing.
Reduce, where practical, has 100% efficiency. You didn't make the stuff in the first place. Yay.
Reuse, where practical, has an efficiency lower than 100% but still pretty high, depending on how many times you reuse the product. If you buy a disposable water bottle and refill it from the tap 9 times instead of buying 9 more bottles, reuse in this case has a 90% efficiency, because you're using 1/10th the number of bottles you might have. Even refilling plastic bottles once from the tap is better than buying a second one, that's a 50% reduction in waste.
Recycling for plastics has an efficiency far lower than 50%. Probably close to zero, but just enough over zero to make the other environmental advantages (like not filling up landfills) worth pursuing things like this.
Either way, it comes to the same result, plus or minus a few wars here and there. We're gonna run out of oil, we're not a very rational species with a good track record of playing well in large groups, and each group is going to want to hang on to the best living standard they can.
There's little I or anyone else alive who has an interest in changing this can do to change it, and those who have the power to change it have the power to make sure it doesn't happen to them or their kids, so they won't do anything to prevent it because sustaining the current system means their grandkids have an advantage over everyone else.
I conserve what I can, carpooling and being efficient and whatnot, knowing that by doing so I'm just feeding more resources into the pockets of those who will win anyway, but hoping to stave off the eventual energy collapse until after I'm dead and buried and don't care about it any more.
And, just in case, I intentionally remain in a more rural area where I have enough land to at least eke out an existence should it become necessary in my lifetime.
I think you need "Karma: Excellent" to start at more than +1. There's a whole FAQ on the karma system, but with respect, talking about your karma as an off-topic thread on a discussion is a great way to take a karma hit, and I'm sure I'll take a hit for even replying. Oh, well.
Karma can be hit down easily by a couple of misunderstood or off-topic posts. That's the way the karma system works. Posts get misunderstood. Moderators are human.
Don't sweat it, just keep posting. People can see +1 posts, so if you remain polite and constructive, you'll get post upvoted and you'll be back in "Karma: Excellent" territory before you know it.
Except these bottles came from... oil. So this is a stopgap. When oil becomes expensive enough that something like this is a lot cheaper than sucking the remaining dead dinosaurs out of their graves, we'll have long since stopped using our precious remaining petroleum reserves for something as horribly wasteful as disposable plastic bottles or propelling our automobiles.
It's a GREAT stopgap, mind you, but it has a supply even more limited than that of the petroleum that went into the bottles in the first place. It's just that this supply is currently large and very easy to obtain, and really has no better use.
The main output of this is Diesel fuel. The fuel used to power large trucks. The same trucks that can't be converted to electricity because we don't have anywhere NEAR the energy density necessary in electric storage to power a cross-country truck.
We can very easily convert petroleum into electricity. We have few means of turning electricity plus old petroleum into new petroleum. This is a stopgap measure that will be obsolete in 50 years, but will still be useful for at least a few more decades.
Even if the energy is break-even, you're converting electricity from a hydro plant where very little manufacturing exists any more into fuel that can be used in cars and trucks. It's still more efficient than battery-based electric cars (which are great, don't get me wrong, but with battery storage losses and range issues, anyone other than a short-haul commuter won't find them very useful).
We can easily convert petroleum into electricity, but this is a way to convert electricity plus garbage into petroleum. It's a stopgap until we can figure out a better way to propel our vehicles than the burning of a limited resource that has so many more valuable uses.
This isn't really long term, it's medium term at best. You need oil to make the disposable plastic bottles in the first place, so the cost of oil is going to roll directly into the cost of the bottles that get disposed to be recycled into a small fraction of the fuel you could have gotten out of the oil if you had turned it into automotive fuel in the first place.
In other words, they are inefficiently reclaiming a small portion of an inefficient use of fossil oil. Good as far as it goes, but as oil prices go up people will start using it in smarter ways and stopgap technologies like this will die off as their cheap source of supplies dry up.
That's not to say this is a bad idea, it's certainly worth reclaiming what we can out of the waste we've made. But it's hardly long term - it still depends on a steady supply of petroleum-based products.
Ah, but have you talked to the people who are actually doing your "recycling"? Most of the towns around here contract with a firm in New Hampshire. That firm sells the plastic to the highest bidder, which is as it should be. Trouble is, there are few bidders for it.
Currently, as I understand it, most of the recyclables are going into the previously empty shipping containers making the return trip to China after bringing over all the stuff we import from there. Once it's in China, it can be recycled in methods free of US environmental laws, and the bulk of the plastic is simply burned for fuel because it can be done over there in a land without environmental law.
We're not actually "recycling" a lot of what we recycle. We're saving it from going into a landfill, and we're not polluting air in our close vicinity, so we're calling it good.
I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not quite as good as you might think.
I do it because the recycling company breaks even on it, so it doesn't cost me money like bags of actual garbage do.
Projects like this are cool and uncool at the same time, from an environmental perspective. They are cool because we've found a use for old plastic. They are uncool because they lengthen the time before we find more environmentally-conscious alternatives to both burning shit in our automobiles for propulsion AND encourage the use of disposable plastic bottles under a commonly-held myth that recycling them makes it all better.
Remember the chant of the treehugger. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". We're putting waaaaayyyy too much emphasis on the last of those, when "recycle" should be the absolute last resort because it's horribly inefficient and only marginally effective at best. Reduce and reuse come first and second in terms of efficiency.
According to Google not only did the report use Chrome 6 for the tests, whereas the current version is Chrome 8...
No, it should read "the person who wrote the summary was unaware that Google Chrome 6 was the current version in October of 2010, when the report was written".
Slashdot Mirror
True. However, most oddities are going to translate as just that, oddities. If I'm pointing at a sign at a train station next to a yellow line, and it says "please not to mock the lizard", then I'm going to assume it's garbage. If it says "please to stand backward of yellow line" then I get the gist of what it is saying.
I can see this as really useful for things like menus. Even the literal translation of each word gives me SOME idea of what I'm about to order. OK, so maybe the marmaset comes out medium well instead of the well-done I ordered, but as long as it tastes like the chicken I thought I was ordering...
Yes, but this case is about porn, and therefore more newsworthy.
If you're dealing with any sort of sensitive information on your network and you are dependent on vendors who make you configure your computers insecurely to get the job done, you (as a company, not necessarily as an individual) didn't do your homework in vendor selection, and that selection is putting your data at risk.
You personally may have had nothing to do with the software selection, but a word to the wise: there are few things more detrimental to your IT resume than having the name of a company well-known for a major data breach on there.
On the upside, my local town has 5,000 residents, the larger town next door where all the stores are has 15,000, and I can afford a few acres of land for my privacy. It's all about tradeoffs. :)
What? You mean there's another option?
Any network administrator worth half their income should always consider their LAN to be compromised. That's why you use secure transfer protocols to transfer any data containing any sensitive information between company systems. That's why you have active network monitors that turn off network ports when they encounter an unknown MAC address. That's why you don't allow anonymous logins to your active directory, and you strictly control access to everything by at least department.
Security is done in layers. Firewalls can and will be breached. If it is, your goal is to slow the attacker down until you can detect the breach and close it. Honeypot servers, data encryption, network segmentation, network resource security, all of these things are vital.
Unfortunately, we are. There isn't a specialty camera shop within an hours' drive of my house. The options I laid out are the options available to me, unless I want to drive over an hour.
My "local shop" *IS* Best Buy. It's the closest thing I've got to a "local shop". They and Wal-Mart drove out all the really "local shops" about 5 years ago.
I like having local stores, too. Unfortunately, not enough people do, and they're all gone around here.
Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Radio Shack, and mail order. That's it for electronics stores around here. And I include Radio Shack only because of fond memories of what they used to be, not because they are a useful electronics store.
Borders. That's our local bookstore now. We used to have three of them. And Borders is now saying that they are having trouble because everyone buys their books at Amazon because it's cheaper, so we're likely to lose our only bookstore for 20 miles in any direction.
We used to have three hardware stores. Now there's one local one left, and they just got bought out by a big chain who intends to close them, so it's Lowes or Home Depot now.
There used to be four local stores you could go into to buy toys. One specialized in quality toys, like wood toys and durable stuff. Now, it's Target or Wal-Mart, and both carry such complete shit for toys that I took up carving so my daughter could have half-decent toys, and we have to mail-order most of the rest.
That points directly back to the issue raised by the article. Local stores cannot compete if the focus is solely on price.
Compared to what?
Amazon, where I can't see the item in person and I have to buy it based on a picture and some reviews?
Wal-Mart, where the item selection is so pathetically poor they might as well not have a display, and half the display models are broken or displayed only as cardboard or plastic replacements?
At least with Best Buy, when I'm shopping for a digital camera, I can look at a dizzying array of cameras. I can hold any one of them as an actual functioning digital camera in my hands, take a few pictures with it, drive through the menus a few times to see if they are intuitive, etc. When I'm shopping for a netbook, I can try out the keyboard for fit and feel, look at the screen for brightness and clarity, etc.
When I'm shopping for a hard drive, there's nothing to display. It's a hard drive. In a box. I'll go to Beast Buy and pay the premium if I need it today, or mail order it if I'm OK with waiting a week. Hell, I'll even go to Wally World if there's a chance they'll have what I want, but I'm very frequently disappointed there because the selection of any one thing is pathetic, and the selections usually involve the lowest-common-denominator products in each category.
What do you mean, started? I've been asked to leave several stores because I have a notebook and am writing down item descriptions and prices for comparison-shopping with other local stores.
This was long before da interwebz existed, and that practice is not at all uncommon even today.
Try it sometime. Take a notebook and pen into a store, and pick a few products, stand in front of them, and start scribbling into your notebook. 90% of the time, nothing will happen, but the other 10% can be fun.
It's not supposed to be a fair comparison, it's supposed to be a good example of how our brains work, and it is. This isn't about how much money you have, it's about how much you are about to spend on something.
In each case, you're saving $50 and are assumed to be putting in about the same effort. To save the same $50, people will go to the effort of driving across town in descending order of likelihood:
1. Receive $50 in cash or a gift card without buying anything at the moment.
2. Receive a free item worth $50.
3. Receive $50 off a $100 item that they intended to buy.
4. Receive $50 off a $500 item that they intended to buy.
5. Receive $50 off a $5,000 item that they intended to buy.
All other constants, like how much money you have in your bank account, are the same. Even the poorest person, after saving for a year to buy a $15,000 item, will generally drop a week's grocery money in additional cost to save a drive across town, when they'd happily drive across town for a free week's supply of groceries.
In all cases, it's the same amount of money they are saving by performing the same effort. $50 for driving across town. It's just a beautiful quirk of our monkey brains that $50 has a variable value depending on how much you were intending to spend at that moment. A quirk that companies are very good at using to their advantage.
That's because store overhead (rent, heat, wages, disposal of display models, etc) is somewhere around (wait for it)... 20 to 30%. If not often higher.
Stores want to make money, too.
And to show you all that shiny in person and let you touch it and try it out before you drop your benjamins on it, they have to spend more than Amazon does to show you a picture of it on teh Interwebz.
Choose Amazon too often, and you'll only ever have an option to see the pictures. Because the stores will go out of business. Your choice.
Here's the problem. Running a brick-and-mortar store costs money. Not only do you have to have the store, but you still have to have the product shipped to the store and warehouse excess inventory, which is not quite as expensive as shipping it to the customer directly but not all that different. The overhead of the retail space (rent, heat, etc), the employees, the display models which usually have to be sold at a discount or disposed of at a loss, and all that makes the per-sale cost of doing business as a retailer significantly higher than that of a pure warehouse operation. You simply can't make up even a fraction of that by negotiating lower costs than what Amazon or NewEgg or Buy.com can get the same item for. Even if you can get a lower cost by 15%, your store costs will gobble that up and more. And you aren't getting lower costs than Amazon, their sheer volume ensures that they will probably have a lower cost than you do.
If you go into a store, that retailer is paying a great deal of money to show you that product on the display rack and allow you to twiddle with it. He's paying a great deal of money to have the item you want sitting on the shelf ready for immediate purchase. He's paying a great deal of money to have someone sitting there ready to at least make a half-assed attempt at answering your questions. He's not paying any less than his mail-order competitors for his product. In order to make a profit, he's got to charge more, so he has to figure out ways to get you in the store buying things he can make a profit on.
I'm not at all suggesting that you "owe" that retailer a sale - it's a free country. But if you go on Amazon and mail-order it to save $10 after spending an hour in a local retail store looking at the item and having their employee answer questions, and enough people do it, the retailer can't make a profit and is going to go out of business. You'll lose the local display of products that the retailer offers you (not to mention the local jobs that retailer offered your community, and the immediate availability of product when you're in a hurry to get something).
It's your decision. I'm just suggesting that throwing your local retailer a bone every now and then will help keep them around. They can't compete with the Amazon's of the world in price, their cost structure is much higher. But they offer you services Amazon can't (immediate availability of items, in-person local returns, display models, live human beings to answer questions, local jobs, etc).
If you don't value those services, then by all means shop from Amazon. Just don't crybaby when your local shops close up and you have to drive two hours to see anything in person, or you are limited to an in-person view of only what your local Wally World carries. Wal-Mart keeps their prices low by engaging in really, really strongarm price negotiations with their vendors, but their selection in any one type of item is usually pathetic and limited to the cheapest and junkiest of the product to keep the prices low.
Again, I'm not suggesting that the retailers have any sort of right to demand your commerce. They don't. The displays are there for you to use. It's a good idea, however, to acknowledge occasionally that those displays cost a lot of money, and consider whether you want them around for future shopping when looking at a few bucks' savings on an item you want. They simply can't match mailorder pricing. So you'll have to decide whether you want to see things before you buy them, and whether that service is worth anything to you.
It's both, we're just putting emphasis on different parts of the transaction.
You say reuse drives reduce, I say reduce is driven by reuse, we're saying the same thing in two different ways.
"Reduce" comes from not using disposable bags in the first place, but there is a tradeoff of course, and you have to take that into account.
The following numbers are made up for discussion purposes.
Let's say I take a canvas (or heavier plastic) bag with me to the grocery store. That bag, obviously, had more environmental impact to make than the two-to-three plastic bags it replaced in my grocery trip. Let's say it has the environmental impact of 10 plastic grocery bags.
Plastic grocery bags, however, can be practically reused a very small number of times before they become too fragile to reuse any more.
I can reuse my canvas bag for decades.
So the investment in creating the canvas or heavier plastic bag means it is suitable for more reuses, reducing the number of low-reuse plastic bags I need to have created to meet my demand.
Reduce trumps reuse. Each of the plastic bags that didn't need to be manufactured for my use saves 100% of the resources necessary to produce them.
Reusing the disposable plastic bags can only approach 100% as I reuse them repeatedly, and since they are disposable they weren't designed with reuse in mind, so they will fail early.
But, having said that, reuse trumps recycling, since your reuse of your bags repeatedly at least doubles the efficiency of a given bag for each time you reuse it.
And, of course, if you need disposable plastic bags for other uses (say, garbage bags), it's more efficient to get one residual use out of a disposable bag than it is to buy a fresh one-time-use bag for the purpose. So if you use plastic bags for your garbage, and you can use grocery bags instead, you might as well use grocery bags for the purpose rather than getting a canvas bag to carry home your disposable plastic garbage bags...
It's all about optimization. Invest in reusable items where you will use them enough times to make it worth the extra investment. Use disposable when it makes more sense.
I'd call it "repurposing" if you want to stick with an "R" word so the mantra still works (grin).
It's getting one last use, for something different than the original intent of the product. In terms of efficiency, it's generally going to be a step above landfill and a step below recycling.
So, if you want to complete the treehugger mantra, it would be "reduce, reuse, recycle, repurpose".
And a lot of what we call recycling today is actually repurposing. We're not giving it another cycle of its original use, we're finding what incremental use of it is left and making the best of that.
It's better than throwing it away, but worse than actually recycling it, assuming you can practically recycle it (which is hard with plastics).
Right, I'm not at all arguing against recycling, or at least the safe disposal of stuff like motor oil and the segregation of things we can have a further incremental use for but can't actually recycle.
At least your used motor oil is finding another last use as heat (so the dump doesn't have to burn fresh petroleum product), and the potential groundwater pollution is worse than the air pollution produced by burning it. It's not a perfect solution, but engines have to be lubricated and the lubricant has to go somewhere when it becomes useless. So you're doing the best you can with that, and good on ya for doing it.
It's just that I see people justifying the use of disposable plastic bottles under the myth that recycling them "makes it all better". It is better than throwing them away, sure. But it doesn't make it all better. Recycling is inefficient and costly last resort, marginally better than throwing it away, but not by a whole heckuva lot. But it gets more press than better methods, like reducing and reusing.
Reduce, where practical, has 100% efficiency. You didn't make the stuff in the first place. Yay.
Reuse, where practical, has an efficiency lower than 100% but still pretty high, depending on how many times you reuse the product. If you buy a disposable water bottle and refill it from the tap 9 times instead of buying 9 more bottles, reuse in this case has a 90% efficiency, because you're using 1/10th the number of bottles you might have. Even refilling plastic bottles once from the tap is better than buying a second one, that's a 50% reduction in waste.
Recycling for plastics has an efficiency far lower than 50%. Probably close to zero, but just enough over zero to make the other environmental advantages (like not filling up landfills) worth pursuing things like this.
Either way, it comes to the same result, plus or minus a few wars here and there. We're gonna run out of oil, we're not a very rational species with a good track record of playing well in large groups, and each group is going to want to hang on to the best living standard they can.
There's little I or anyone else alive who has an interest in changing this can do to change it, and those who have the power to change it have the power to make sure it doesn't happen to them or their kids, so they won't do anything to prevent it because sustaining the current system means their grandkids have an advantage over everyone else.
I conserve what I can, carpooling and being efficient and whatnot, knowing that by doing so I'm just feeding more resources into the pockets of those who will win anyway, but hoping to stave off the eventual energy collapse until after I'm dead and buried and don't care about it any more.
And, just in case, I intentionally remain in a more rural area where I have enough land to at least eke out an existence should it become necessary in my lifetime.
I think you need "Karma: Excellent" to start at more than +1. There's a whole FAQ on the karma system, but with respect, talking about your karma as an off-topic thread on a discussion is a great way to take a karma hit, and I'm sure I'll take a hit for even replying. Oh, well.
Karma can be hit down easily by a couple of misunderstood or off-topic posts. That's the way the karma system works. Posts get misunderstood. Moderators are human.
Don't sweat it, just keep posting. People can see +1 posts, so if you remain polite and constructive, you'll get post upvoted and you'll be back in "Karma: Excellent" territory before you know it.
Except these bottles came from... oil. So this is a stopgap. When oil becomes expensive enough that something like this is a lot cheaper than sucking the remaining dead dinosaurs out of their graves, we'll have long since stopped using our precious remaining petroleum reserves for something as horribly wasteful as disposable plastic bottles or propelling our automobiles.
It's a GREAT stopgap, mind you, but it has a supply even more limited than that of the petroleum that went into the bottles in the first place. It's just that this supply is currently large and very easy to obtain, and really has no better use.
The main output of this is Diesel fuel. The fuel used to power large trucks. The same trucks that can't be converted to electricity because we don't have anywhere NEAR the energy density necessary in electric storage to power a cross-country truck.
We can very easily convert petroleum into electricity. We have few means of turning electricity plus old petroleum into new petroleum. This is a stopgap measure that will be obsolete in 50 years, but will still be useful for at least a few more decades.
I'll also put in a plug for Freecycle, if you have a local site. There's lots of good stuff on there.
Even if the energy is break-even, you're converting electricity from a hydro plant where very little manufacturing exists any more into fuel that can be used in cars and trucks. It's still more efficient than battery-based electric cars (which are great, don't get me wrong, but with battery storage losses and range issues, anyone other than a short-haul commuter won't find them very useful).
We can easily convert petroleum into electricity, but this is a way to convert electricity plus garbage into petroleum. It's a stopgap until we can figure out a better way to propel our vehicles than the burning of a limited resource that has so many more valuable uses.
This isn't really long term, it's medium term at best. You need oil to make the disposable plastic bottles in the first place, so the cost of oil is going to roll directly into the cost of the bottles that get disposed to be recycled into a small fraction of the fuel you could have gotten out of the oil if you had turned it into automotive fuel in the first place.
In other words, they are inefficiently reclaiming a small portion of an inefficient use of fossil oil. Good as far as it goes, but as oil prices go up people will start using it in smarter ways and stopgap technologies like this will die off as their cheap source of supplies dry up.
That's not to say this is a bad idea, it's certainly worth reclaiming what we can out of the waste we've made. But it's hardly long term - it still depends on a steady supply of petroleum-based products.
Ah, but have you talked to the people who are actually doing your "recycling"? Most of the towns around here contract with a firm in New Hampshire. That firm sells the plastic to the highest bidder, which is as it should be. Trouble is, there are few bidders for it.
Currently, as I understand it, most of the recyclables are going into the previously empty shipping containers making the return trip to China after bringing over all the stuff we import from there. Once it's in China, it can be recycled in methods free of US environmental laws, and the bulk of the plastic is simply burned for fuel because it can be done over there in a land without environmental law.
We're not actually "recycling" a lot of what we recycle. We're saving it from going into a landfill, and we're not polluting air in our close vicinity, so we're calling it good.
I'm not saying it's bad, it's just not quite as good as you might think.
I do it because the recycling company breaks even on it, so it doesn't cost me money like bags of actual garbage do.
Projects like this are cool and uncool at the same time, from an environmental perspective. They are cool because we've found a use for old plastic. They are uncool because they lengthen the time before we find more environmentally-conscious alternatives to both burning shit in our automobiles for propulsion AND encourage the use of disposable plastic bottles under a commonly-held myth that recycling them makes it all better.
Remember the chant of the treehugger. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". We're putting waaaaayyyy too much emphasis on the last of those, when "recycle" should be the absolute last resort because it's horribly inefficient and only marginally effective at best. Reduce and reuse come first and second in terms of efficiency.
Should it be:
According to Google not only did the report use Chrome 6 for the tests, whereas the current version is Chrome 8...
No, it should read "the person who wrote the summary was unaware that Google Chrome 6 was the current version in October of 2010, when the report was written".