I actually work in the wastewater industry and from what I’m reading, a properly functioning sewage treatment plant already captures a very high proportion of microplastics. This widely cited study noted above 98% removal efficiency at one plant.

We’re already at approaching 2 log (99%) removal without actually trying to. It doesn’t seem improbable to me that with a few relatively modest tweaks to the system we could get 3 log removal (99.9%). Getting to 4 or 5 log removal is likely where things will get really expensive and challenging. But for now, a 2-3 log removal is probably good enough to focus on other sources like tire fragments/dust that typically pass directly to receiving waters with no treatment at all.

The group think around here is so crazy. Should we be using less single use plastic, especially the thin films? Absolutely. But the environmental impacts of mining all that metal and making all that glass to replace plastic with, plus the added energy for transporting the heavier packages and the cost of increased spoilage and product lost to dented cans and broken bottles, dwarfs the negative impact of the plastic replacements.

Yeah, but those metal tubes were awful. I have been brushing my teeth with Tom’s of Maine for decades, and I remember how much I hated those metal tubes. They always split open weeks before the tube was empty and then they’d leak and make a mess and I inevitably wasted a lot of product. When Tom finally sold to whatever corp and they switched over to the plastic tubes that don’t leak and let me use all the toothpaste I paid for, I danced a little jig.

Yes, except for it’s Bing search not Google

Step 1: astroturf on lemmy

Step 2:?

Step 3: profit!

I work in government. Biden has an excellent idea of what he’s up against. And he saw how Obama and Clinton talked a good game but got out maneuvered by the right. He’s an incredibly effective president, vastly better than I thought he’d be. He’s managed to get so much done even with the right going full fascist against him, and he’s done it without complaint or drama.

I am honestly baffled when I hear liberals complain about him. He’s gotten more progressive goals across the finish line than any president since FDR, and he’s not even 3 years in. Is he 100% perfect? No. But he’s very very good. I’ll take very very good over outright fascism any day of the week.

If you’re talking about California, than earthquakes, fires, floods, and mudslides are all part of the algorith. And if you are wealthy enough to have a choice of where you want to live, the algorithm is less and less in favor of California.

I’m with you on that. I’m also pretty sure my wife would leave me if I tried to force her to use some weird non-standard search engine and browser instead of the thing that literally everyone else uses. She has no interest in any of this.

But the fact that people like you and me, the kind of people who comment on threads like this on lemmy, are balking at the price of kagi really lays it all bare. $20/month is probably a tiny fraction of what google makes off selling our data. Their ad revenue is on the order of $25/person for every man, woman, and child in the world. But given that huge swaths of the world aren’t online, or are in a place where Google isn’t the default, or don’t make enough money to be worth marketing expensive products to, people like you and me and our families are probably worth many multiples of that annual revenue.

Yet we balk at paying to opt out, even though we know we should. If we’re not willing to do it, who is? And what possible solution is there?

I miss that man

Seriously. Our house is 175 years old and hadn’t had much work done to it since the last major renovation in the 1920s. People ask me if I renovated it myself. I laugh and explain that no, a crew of full time professional carpenters, roofers, masons, demo experts, plumbers, electricians, plasterers, and painters spent over a year on it. I just don’t think anyone has any concept of how much work is involved in real renovation.

Fortunately interest rates stated low enough that I could keep borrowing more and more and more money to pay all those people. But now I’m trapped and can never sell.

Hard to say. My experience with people in general is that they’ll keep going even if things aren’t great, but they’ll get upset. And eventually things will come to a head and there’s a major change in a short period of time. This being a somewhat democratic platform, I would bet that we’ll have that sort of trajectory.

As for donations, it’s just very hard to get people to donate enough and often enough to support this kind of thing. Think of the regular donation appeals on public radio, or Wikipedia, or even The Guardian. They have a whole organization and system built around soliciting donations, and even then they are always operating on a shoestring. How often do you donate? How often do your friends and family?

There’s no business platform here. So it will go a different path. Buy eventually the mods and instance admins who are volunteering their time and money to keep this going will wish to spend their time and money elsewhere. What happens after the first round of people who really work to make a free platform like this succeed go away? If there’s not a good deal of planning and acculturation for new people, there’s a high likelihood that a second generation of mods takes over who have different motives and reasons for running the place and the platform sees noticeable changes. Or nobody steps up at all and individual sections just end.

They literally stole the doors and windows

Don’t invest in Detroit real estate

Depends on how you define that. Literally none of the communities I was part of on reddit have a functioning equivalent here.

Boston? Dozens of posts a day on reddit, maybe one a week here.

Burning man? I don’t even know if there have been a dozen posts in the community here.

Geology? Don’t think I’ve seen a single post.

Communities for specific bands (I’m a jamband fan) exist here but have no are almost no content.

And so on.

I’m the kind of user who comments often but doesn’t post much. With no one here posting, there’s nothing for me to interact with.

If you want echo chamber liberal political memes, obscure open source software discussions, or endless hentai, then lemmy is great. But it has no pull for people who want to participate in niche communities like mine. Hopefully it’ll happen, especially as reddit gets shittier and shittier, but even for people like me who desperately want to leave reddit and are willing to take a chance on a new platform, this is a tough sell.

It’s going to take a few more digg type events to really get lemmy to pick up enough users to make the conversations in the small niche communities hit critical mass. Until then, lots of people will give it a try, then bounce.

But when you listen to jam bands random YouTube videos ARE the high quality music!

Out of 240,000,000 eligible voters

My biggest takeaway from this article is that I should get into the white noise game on Spotify. Even if I only make 1/20th of the quoted revenue for a few months it will be worth it

I love YouTube music. I get all the same songs as the other big services, plus free YouTube premium. Between my jam and habit and my quixotic quest to teach myself woodworking, I watch a LOT of YouTube videos.

We have a reasonable electorate, inasmuch as Trump has no chance of ever winning the popular vote and never did. What we don’t have is a rational electoral system where all votes are equal.