Diary (January 14, 2021)

Online diary of Karl Jones for Thursday January 14, 2021.

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Diary

Recycling blues

Broken glass historically recycled

As a result [of failed plastic recycling efforts], our municipality has dropped recycling collection to every other week, and in February they will stop accepting…glass? I just watched them recycle glass on Time Team. They were doing it to explain why it was so rare for archeologists to find glass, because broken glass items were invariably recycled.

• Comment by user Ratel @ Boing Boing

Don't fall into the trap

I argue 90% of that efficiency is an illusion. All the stuff we ship in plastic used to ship in paper boxes. The stuff we buy in plastic bottles used to come in glass bottles with a recycling deposit. Aluminum cans as well. Juice used to come in cans and you had a special little pointy opener for it. All bags used to be paper.

We use plastic for packaging everything because it's cheap. It.s cheap because the price does not reflect the lifetime cost of the object. If the environmental damage was factored in with a tax, Watch how fast packaging companies would get clever with paper and glass, just like they did before plastic. The world now is not so different that we need plastic everything to get by. Our parents had just as busy and hectic lifestyles as us and didn’t have much that was plastic. I’m old enough to remember milk delivery, and it was better because you didn’t have to go to the store to buy it and we never ran out.

Don’t fall into the trap of looking at the world as it is and seeing that as inevitable. Our addiction to plastic was created by decades of marketing, price fixing, oil industry subsidies and all sorts of things that having nothing to do with actual practical benefits of the material.

• Comment by user VeronicaConnor @ Boing Boing

A Mob Boss, A Garbage Boat and Why We Recycle

• A Mob Boss, A Garbage Boat and Why We Recycle @ NPR

Hair styles and phrenological examinations under the Third Reich

"Evolution algorithm of hair styles and phrenological examinations under the Third Reich recapitulates phylogeny of evil."

• Comment @ Facebook

Man is a constellation

Man is a constellation.

From a distance, his brightest stars appear to illuminate a myth.

Man is a constellation.

Let's Not Be Strangers

Teen boy, raised as vigilante, kills strangers in a strange town.

Strangers raise his bail: two million dollars.

Now strangers object to this boy making White Power signs in a bar.

I say let him make White Power signs anywhere he likes.

Show this teen vigilante making White Power signs on television, on the news.

Show us ourselves, America.

Let's not be strangers.

Let's Not Be Strangers

Quondam

Quondam

Quondam Anonymous

Fiction cross-reference

• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles