EU fixes textile waste. What about plastic waste that dwarfs any other polution with the forever chemicals? No economy dares to touch this subject seriously.
Nearly all of the clothes you can buy contain a decent amount of plastic (elastane, polyester etc are just nice names for plastic).
in fact, I’ve been trying to buy plastic-free clothing for a few years (ever since micro-plastic was linked to diminished testosterone & fertility in men) I am finding it difficult, you often have to buy luxury and even then it’s no guarantee.
rayon is a regenerated cellulose fibre: it biodegrades.
polyester is a thermoplastic polymer synthesised from petrochemicals: it doesn’t.
that’s the dividing line. one breaks down in the environment, the other persists for centuries and sheds microplastics into waterways every time you wash it.
rayon has its own environmental problems (deforestation, chemical processing), but “is it plastic?” is not one of them. the chemistry here isn’t ambiguous.
There are two points in MRIs that limit or (better) regulate their use:
* financial cost vs level of care. A full body MRI costs a huge sum but it is the most detailed non-invasive diagnosis we have for any disease that can lead to earlier therapy. Used as a screening method, does it worth to save one patient in tens/hundreds tests performed? You answer, but public health authorities, health insurances and medical societies are negative.
* MRI shows some minor findings that would never cause symptoms and better not be known to the patient due to the stress they bring and cost of ongoing follow up (eg in the brain small meningiomas or angiomas). This might bring more harm than good and limit their net value.
For some reason, I always found the arguments for "it's better to not know" for these tests to be strange and slightly infantilizing. But of course this must not be the end of it, and there might be some more well thought out arguments from bioethicists that go beyond "the patient can't handle the truth". Because this argument seems like it's doing a lot of heavy lifting without much evidence.
Many stuff are addictive, some legal (smoking, gambling), some legal with prescription (drugs) and some illigal (opioids). Infinite scrolling, either video only (yt shorts) or mixed content lies in the first category. This is a war one fights by himself as law doesn't helps with gatekeeping. Any weapon that helps me is welcome. Filtering the content that whould otherwise polute my screen space and distract me from the useful content is desirable. In Homer Iliad, Ulysses ordered his sailors to tie him up in order to withstand the voice of Sirens, while they were wearing earplugs. Today we have uBlock.
Haha, I take it as a compliment for now. Being not a native English speaker and managing to tie an LLM is a little flattering. Besides, Sirens are mentioned in Odyssey.
From the peak-civilization of Ancient Greeks a steady slow decline started and continued until the calamity of 5th cent AD. Pick your start of middle ages sometime there.
For a very long time a dark cloud was hiding the sun of wisdom until the scientific and other conquests came over. Pick your end there.
During the past months I have written enough online and now I am sure I will be unwanted at the US borders. I wait for the Dem POTUS to revert the situation and welcome the now "criminals" as heroes. I will miss the coming Olympic Games though.
The hunt has started: EU burocracy vs TK. In the past EU has rarely directly attacked a single company with so specific points. But anytime they remained consistent and dedicaded to their target and usually won. It just took a long time (from a few years till decades). The only time they lost a policy was at stopping summer-time switch which was cancelled when Covid started.
They avoid to mention the rest of social media platforms, which happen to be US based. It seems they choose a single quick and easy China-based target more like an experiment to decide for the rest. The key point is when: either the current kids will experience it or those that are not yet born.
even disregarding the fact that this affects multiple US based platforms that are larger than tiktok, have they tried to moderate their platform to not be unfettered brain rot?
Well, I dare to say my belief. The whole setup of the last 15 years and publication frenzy after the (obvious) murder of JE, is pushed as agenda of the Secret Western World government to keep the leaders as hostages. Their is a legal gun pointing on their head and if they don't comply, it will fire. Else, they will never be touched.
The same companies that sell addictive stuff to kids give them an aid to abstinence. They are kidding us all.
Better have multiple levels of defense. National firewall, school ban, parent supervision, phone lockdown. Only then the exposure will be mediated over all possible channels (stolen accounts, fake adult IDs, friends' devices).
"God made the integers, all else is the work of man", Kronecker, 1886.
Complex numbers are just a fancy way to represent 2-dimensional numbers that are convenient in geometry through the sq(-1)=π/2 rotation.
They are nothing special and they could just be a matrix. Out of my head I think about complex integers. Also there are higher-order complex numbers which are defined by sq(sq(-1)) etc. In Greek complex numbers are called "mongrel". Both names are bad, I would just use 2-dimensional numbers.
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