Tar_Alcaran

It’s a creative writing exercise someone is posting to Lemmy in exchange for upvotes.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone under 60 call this anything but a “flexible curve”, and that was 20 years ago.

Come to think of it, I haven’t seen one in about 20 years either.

Let me give you a little parable.

There once was a juggler, who could juggle with three balls all day. Then someone from the audience threw a fourth ball, and he kept going. Someone threw a glass, then a flaming torch, and he kept going, occasionally burning his hands. Seeing he could do it, someone throws a machete, and the juggler almost never cuts his fingers keeping all those things in the air. A chainsaw gets added, and an open bottle of bleach, and occasionally the juggler gets his hair caught or spills some bleach, but he keeps going. As he keeps going, people keep adding more and more things. Eventually it’s too much, and it all comes crashing down, killing the juggler and several members of the audience and destroying all the objects in the air.

On the next street corner, a juggler stands with three balls. Someone from the audience throws in a fourth. He steps aside and lets it fall to the floor, happily juggling three balls.

Honestly, I see people being quite optimistic about gen Z and Alpha. Most the whining comes from the right, with their “young people are destroying the [nonsense here] industry” and for brazenly treating other humans and people despite not all of them straight white christian cis men.

Personally, the worst things I see about the new generations is that young people are young. Someone who is 17 can’t adult quite as well because they are literally not an adult. I’ve been an adult for longer than they’ve been alive, of course I’m better at it than them and dealing with things I’ve dealt with before are easier than new things. That’s not a shortcoming, that’s how time works.

Is it annoying to see a girl make all the mistakes I made when I was a girl? Yes damnit. Will telling them stop them? Didn’t work for me, hence I made the mistakes too.

Yeah, if there isn’t an unconnected hose or cable, that’s about the extent of my car knowledge.

Truly reaching Russian levels of credibility

It’s a delete request, not a deletion.

There are also issues of societal specialization leading to the ability of individuals to specialize in gaining knowledge, instead of 100% of the population working 99% of the time on survival.

But my brain and Og the Caveman are basically the same.

Us, the wealthiest owners of Raytheon and Lockheed shares. Who did you think?

Its fine, I got it (a bit late).

Ok, that makes it sound way shittier…

Well, we can pretty much all tell. It’s just OP who hasn’t figured it out yet.

I know you didn’t create this data, but wouldn’t “by weight” or “by volume” have a more meaningful impact on reducing the amount of plastic in our oceans?

Yes, but that data is also harder to gather. It’s very easy to count pieces, it’s much harder to asses volume or dry weight. I’m also not entirely sure if that gives meaningful answers either, because a kilo of polystyrene is worse than a kilo of bottlecaps. If you’re working with a huge of different stuff, all measurements are kind of arbitrary.

If we take a PET bottle as an example; it is likely to sink as it fills up with water, but the cap, which is made of different type of plastic (HDPE), will stay afloat for much longer.

The marine litter in the paper is specifically about stuff that gets fished up. It covers floating AND seafloor debris, and floating stuff to a much lesser degree (since nets don’t drag over the water surface). So if the bottles are mostly on the floor and caps mostly float, we would expect to find many more bottles in marine litter.

this seems like a really convoluted way to “fix” the problem and will only mitigate the issue

Mitigation is good though. If you can reduce the volume of plastic in the ocean by a noticable fraction, by basically just very slightly changing the manufacturing process, that’s a good thing.

According to The Ocean Cleanup Project

Oh no… You’ve triggered one of my ecological pet peeves.

The Ocean Cleanup Project is a terrible fucking idea. It’s basically a scam that turns a HUGE amount of amount into a tiny amount of recovered plastic. The OCP reported on twitter in 2025 that they have, in total, removed 40.000 tons of plastic from all their activities. According to this they got about 300m in $A in funding since 2019. I’ll just pretend that’s all they’ve ever gotten, and conclude they spent 5300 USD to remove one ton of plastic waste.

So let me be extremely pessimistic and offer a vastly superior alternative to sailing around with boats and removing basically no waste:

Since OCP already knows where all the waste is coming from, what they SHOULD be doing is going there, buying up all the trash for 1000 USD per ton (which is an absolute fortune to most people there, so they will absolutely cooperate), shipping it to, I dunno, Australia for 100 USD/ton (which is again a fortune), and dispose of it for another 400 USD per ton (which is more than double what we pay here in Europe), and then they would still be 350% more efficient than what they’re doing, assuming the most impossibly generous terms for them.

Really? Name one for me.

It’s an untestable “theory” that has no predictive power and explains nothing. It could be entirely true or entirely false and it would make no difference. It’s literally useless.

And as an adult, you’re suddenly in a new house that doesn’t have the dozens of tweaks that you fixed in the past years, and you’ll have to deal with the moronic amateurism from the previous owners.

Which is exactly what the people moving into your house will say as well.

I mean, he doesn’t demand worship, but you will get an extra burger during grilling if you say a prayer.

Ohhhhhh, its solipsism in a trenchcoat.

Indeed, I can’t solve the problem of hard solipsism, but neither can you. I can only say that we’ve made a pretty successful run at things by just assuming we all share an objective reality.

And if that reality doesn’t exist outside my brain, I’m a pretty fucking impressively smart girl, with some really fucked up issues.

To say anything about the world, you blatantly obviously need consciousness first. That’s the status quo. The burden of proof is on materialists.

Burden of proof for what? That you need a brain to make observations of the world? That’s not a hard claim to support.

You, however, seem to assert some form of magical super-consciousness that seems utterly undisprovable

For many people, the foundational promise in a relationship is being monogamous. If you betray the foundational promise to your partner, that shows they don’t give a shit about everything that’s built on that foundation.

You foundational promise could be “Brush your teeth every morning” and it would be no different.