Likewise. Though I already preferred paper bags to plastic ones (they stand up on their own and so make better trash receptacles, and also have other uses as scrap pieces of thick paper), so the only thing the "bag ban" did from my perspective was make me pay some negligible charge to continue what I was already doing. Which annoys me, but I'd rather tolerate that tiny annoyance than let busybodies with their wrongheaded plans force me to change the perfectly fine way I've always done things.
Same thing stopping me from bringing reusable bags to the grocery store: the fact that it's not necessary because I can get what I need there without any excessive cost or inconvenience. (Yeah, charge me one or two tenths of a percent of the cost of my groceries to provide me what was free before and see if I even notice or care. You can add some tiny fraction of a percent surcharge to my dinner bill for bioplastic/bamboo/paper/whatever utensils too and I won't care about that either, so long as it's not metal).
Oh and also, in my experience plenty of people do bite their cutlery. I thought I was weird being so careful to put my lips around my teeth. So many people seem to scrape their forks with their teeth with every bite. That makes me cringe too.
You know there are some people who are more than 20 (or 30 or whatever) years old, right?
When I was a teenager, metal fillings were all my poor family's crappy medicaid insurance would cover. As an adult, every dentist has strongly urged non-metallic ones, and I now have the money/insurance to cover it, so I've always gone with that. But the fact that they're suggesting and implicitly asking if that's okay suggests to me that metal is still an option, and the option that the very poor would probably choose. Of course in Europe you don't have financial pressures like that because you have a functional first-world medical system. But nevertheless despite not facing such pressures myself anymore, I still have metal fillings from decades ago, because I'm not a child.
Not that I think the fillings are the root of my particular problem, anyway; see my sibling response to yours.
That is an interesting explanation, but I'm not sure it's behind my problem. If I am very careful to keep my lips between the metal and my teeth, I can cautiously use metal utensils without the nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling. On the other hand, the sound of metal utensils scraping against something like ceramic can cause the same response, like if someone is dragging the tines of their salad fork across their ceramic plate trying to get the last shreds of lettuce or whatever. It's exactly like nails on a chalkboard. So I don't think it's galvanic in nature, for me.
I generally do use my lips to remove the foot from the utensil, but it's pretty easy to accidentally make contact now and then in the course of a meal, and it's unpleasant enough that the constant anticipation of it makes for a very unpleasant dining experience. If for some reason non-metal utensils are not available, I can very carefully use metal utensils, but it's much nicer being able to just relax and eat naturally and not worry about whether I might accidentally touch my teeth on the edge of a spoon and involuntarily recoil in pain.
Any kind of slurpee-type drink or shake or for that matter something like a root beer float is pretty much undrinkable without a straw, so there is definitely need for straws in at least some circumstances.
I do prefer no straw when drinking normal liquids, though.
Yeah actually, given that this is a thing, I predict this will be a non-problem in the end. Everyone will just switch from plastic to bioplastic and keep having their disposable utensils around like they always have and I'll be able to request them as needed (though I won't be able to reuse ones I get to go at home, since they'll biodegrade, but there are alternatives to that already). Nothing will change except for what's in the oceans of landfills, which is the point of this, so everything will be fine in the end.
Maybe you are new here, but there's this convenient little number up there that tells you exactly how new here someone is, and mine is an order of magnitude smaller than yours.
Still, it's been kind of surprising how hostile the reaction to my innocuous little post was. If anything I'd expect the usual Silicon Valley libertarian crowd that hangs out here to be rabidly against (to use their rhetoric here) Europeans and their nanny states banning yet another harmless thing like they did with plastic bags.
Literally never had a problem getting plastic cutlery upon request. Most places have it on hand to provide with take-out orders, so can provide it in-restaurant if need be.
Please don't let this spread to the U.S. I have some problem that makes the touch of metal silverware on my teeth feel like scratching my fingernails on a chalkboard, and I need to request plastic utensils everywhere I go because of that.
I've noticed that basically every dairy product has a message on it to the effect of "Made with milk from cows not treated with growth hormones, not that there's anything wrong with that." I assume that is to offset the effect that you describe. If it just said "Made with milk from cows not treated with growth hormones" people would assume that growth hormones are a bad thing, so they follow it up with a disclaimer that it hasn't actually been shown to be a bad thing, just, y'know, if you care about it for some reason anyway, buy our product because we avoided that harmless thing you're afraid of anyways.
It's so prevalent and such identical language that it makes me wonder if they're required by law to write exactly that.
I don't know what is or isn't happening with these latest turns of event, but every coffee shop I've been to in the past decade or two (here in California) has already had Prop 65 warnings, and I'm pretty sure they specifically mention acrylamide, and go out of their way to explain that it's just a normal byproduct of the roasting process and not some scary chemical they add to their coffee.
I think I've seen at least numerous burger chains and possibly some bakeries with similar warnings (because browned bread and grilled meat are also sources of acrylamide -- basically anything that gets remotely darkened or charred in the process of cooking).
Those warning labels are all there already, and have been for years, decades possibly. They are widely ignored because everyone knows it doesn't really mean anything. I haven't RTFA but the "affirmed" in the summary suggests to me the court simply ruled that they are not to be taken down.
Outdoor air is great, if you mean really, really outdoor air, away from where people are. Outdoor as in the Great Outdoors.
But outdoor air anywhere that people congregate if full of the contrails of filthy fucking ash-holes spewing their drugs into the air that other people have to breath.
Give me clean filtered indoor air over the air around any sidewalk or plaza or roadway or parking lot any day.
You're assuming the artificial intelligence has some other goal that is in competition with maintaining humans. While that's possible, since we would be the ones creating it we would certainly do our best to make sure that that is not the case, and if we succeed at that then maintaining humans would not be a drain on progress because the goal the AI is progressing toward would be the better maintenance of humans.
My point was precisely that it's difficulty (having to, as you say, take the time) acting as a filter that makes some forms of contact weigh as more important than others (letters more than phone calls more than email), so if something like this Duplex makes calling your representative easier, that will make calls from constituents less important to your representatives.
Likewise if something made mailing letters to the representatives much easier, mailed letters would start to weigh less too.
Because representatives realistically cannot be expected to attend to the huge numbers of people they are supposed to represent, so they have to let difficulty filter it down to the ones who care the most.
I would think that if anything, this technology would make phone calls taken just as (non-)seriously as emails, because of the lower effort required to make them. If more people are robo-calling their representatives because it's easy to do so, then calls to representatives begin to carry less weight each.
The only real solution is to have a small enough population represented by each representative that they can realistically afford to care about each and every constituent.
Slashdot Mirror
Thank you for that detailed explanation, but can you elaborate further on how the Higgs interaction is not fundamental? What is it then?
If it doesn't interact with any of the other fundamental forces, from where does its mass come? Or does Higgs interaction not count?
Likewise. Though I already preferred paper bags to plastic ones (they stand up on their own and so make better trash receptacles, and also have other uses as scrap pieces of thick paper), so the only thing the "bag ban" did from my perspective was make me pay some negligible charge to continue what I was already doing. Which annoys me, but I'd rather tolerate that tiny annoyance than let busybodies with their wrongheaded plans force me to change the perfectly fine way I've always done things.
Same thing stopping me from bringing reusable bags to the grocery store: the fact that it's not necessary because I can get what I need there without any excessive cost or inconvenience. (Yeah, charge me one or two tenths of a percent of the cost of my groceries to provide me what was free before and see if I even notice or care. You can add some tiny fraction of a percent surcharge to my dinner bill for bioplastic/bamboo/paper/whatever utensils too and I won't care about that either, so long as it's not metal).
You missed the part where I was writing what I expected people would say, not my own opinion.
If you read above you'd note I already do use them at home.
And at Asian restaurants.
Not all restaurants are Asian restaurants though.
Oh and also, in my experience plenty of people do bite their cutlery. I thought I was weird being so careful to put my lips around my teeth. So many people seem to scrape their forks with their teeth with every bite. That makes me cringe too.
You know there are some people who are more than 20 (or 30 or whatever) years old, right?
When I was a teenager, metal fillings were all my poor family's crappy medicaid insurance would cover. As an adult, every dentist has strongly urged non-metallic ones, and I now have the money/insurance to cover it, so I've always gone with that. But the fact that they're suggesting and implicitly asking if that's okay suggests to me that metal is still an option, and the option that the very poor would probably choose. Of course in Europe you don't have financial pressures like that because you have a functional first-world medical system. But nevertheless despite not facing such pressures myself anymore, I still have metal fillings from decades ago, because I'm not a child.
Not that I think the fillings are the root of my particular problem, anyway; see my sibling response to yours.
That is an interesting explanation, but I'm not sure it's behind my problem. If I am very careful to keep my lips between the metal and my teeth, I can cautiously use metal utensils without the nails-on-a-chalkboard feeling. On the other hand, the sound of metal utensils scraping against something like ceramic can cause the same response, like if someone is dragging the tines of their salad fork across their ceramic plate trying to get the last shreds of lettuce or whatever. It's exactly like nails on a chalkboard. So I don't think it's galvanic in nature, for me.
I generally do use my lips to remove the foot from the utensil, but it's pretty easy to accidentally make contact now and then in the course of a meal, and it's unpleasant enough that the constant anticipation of it makes for a very unpleasant dining experience. If for some reason non-metal utensils are not available, I can very carefully use metal utensils, but it's much nicer being able to just relax and eat naturally and not worry about whether I might accidentally touch my teeth on the edge of a spoon and involuntarily recoil in pain.
Any kind of slurpee-type drink or shake or for that matter something like a root beer float is pretty much undrinkable without a straw, so there is definitely need for straws in at least some circumstances.
I do prefer no straw when drinking normal liquids, though.
bioplastic compostable cutlery
Yeah actually, given that this is a thing, I predict this will be a non-problem in the end. Everyone will just switch from plastic to bioplastic and keep having their disposable utensils around like they always have and I'll be able to request them as needed (though I won't be able to reuse ones I get to go at home, since they'll biodegrade, but there are alternatives to that already). Nothing will change except for what's in the oceans of landfills, which is the point of this, so everything will be fine in the end.
Maybe you are new here, but there's this convenient little number up there that tells you exactly how new here someone is, and mine is an order of magnitude smaller than yours.
Still, it's been kind of surprising how hostile the reaction to my innocuous little post was. If anything I'd expect the usual Silicon Valley libertarian crowd that hangs out here to be rabidly against (to use their rhetoric here) Europeans and their nanny states banning yet another harmless thing like they did with plastic bags.
Literally never had a problem getting plastic cutlery upon request. Most places have it on hand to provide with take-out orders, so can provide it in-restaurant if need be.
For use at home, sure, but what about when dining out, which is what I'm talking about?
I actually use bamboo chopsticks at home whenever possible because of this.
Bringing my own utensils when eating out would be kind of difficult/annoying/awkward, though.
Please don't let this spread to the U.S. I have some problem that makes the touch of metal silverware on my teeth feel like scratching my fingernails on a chalkboard, and I need to request plastic utensils everywhere I go because of that.
I've noticed that basically every dairy product has a message on it to the effect of "Made with milk from cows not treated with growth hormones, not that there's anything wrong with that." I assume that is to offset the effect that you describe. If it just said "Made with milk from cows not treated with growth hormones" people would assume that growth hormones are a bad thing, so they follow it up with a disclaimer that it hasn't actually been shown to be a bad thing, just, y'know, if you care about it for some reason anyway, buy our product because we avoided that harmless thing you're afraid of anyways.
It's so prevalent and such identical language that it makes me wonder if they're required by law to write exactly that.
I don't know what is or isn't happening with these latest turns of event, but every coffee shop I've been to in the past decade or two (here in California) has already had Prop 65 warnings, and I'm pretty sure they specifically mention acrylamide, and go out of their way to explain that it's just a normal byproduct of the roasting process and not some scary chemical they add to their coffee.
I think I've seen at least numerous burger chains and possibly some bakeries with similar warnings (because browned bread and grilled meat are also sources of acrylamide -- basically anything that gets remotely darkened or charred in the process of cooking).
Those warning labels are all there already, and have been for years, decades possibly. They are widely ignored because everyone knows it doesn't really mean anything. I haven't RTFA but the "affirmed" in the summary suggests to me the court simply ruled that they are not to be taken down.
Outdoor air is great, if you mean really, really outdoor air, away from where people are. Outdoor as in the Great Outdoors.
But outdoor air anywhere that people congregate if full of the contrails of filthy fucking ash-holes spewing their drugs into the air that other people have to breath.
Give me clean filtered indoor air over the air around any sidewalk or plaza or roadway or parking lot any day.
You're assuming the artificial intelligence has some other goal that is in competition with maintaining humans. While that's possible, since we would be the ones creating it we would certainly do our best to make sure that that is not the case, and if we succeed at that then maintaining humans would not be a drain on progress because the goal the AI is progressing toward would be the better maintenance of humans.
My point was precisely that it's difficulty (having to, as you say, take the time) acting as a filter that makes some forms of contact weigh as more important than others (letters more than phone calls more than email), so if something like this Duplex makes calling your representative easier, that will make calls from constituents less important to your representatives.
Likewise if something made mailing letters to the representatives much easier, mailed letters would start to weigh less too.
Because representatives realistically cannot be expected to attend to the huge numbers of people they are supposed to represent, so they have to let difficulty filter it down to the ones who care the most.
I would think that if anything, this technology would make phone calls taken just as (non-)seriously as emails, because of the lower effort required to make them. If more people are robo-calling their representatives because it's easy to do so, then calls to representatives begin to carry less weight each.
The only real solution is to have a small enough population represented by each representative that they can realistically afford to care about each and every constituent.
Related peeve: people who write this/ that instead of this/that or this / that. Symmetrical spacing around your slashes people!