Are you fucking kidding me‽

The Mellon fortune again? After Cordelia Scaife May used it to help establish our racist immigration system?

https://web.archive.org/web/20190815020220/https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/14/us/anti-immigration-cordelia-scaife-may.html

I wouldn’t worry. It’s not like an Excel error has ever caused human suffering at a global scale or anything, right?

https://inthesetimes.com/article/the-excel-spreadsheet-error-that-justified-global-austerity

What happened to all the phone apps that made an effort to detect IMSI catchers, like SnoopSnitch, which appears to be abandoned (F-Droid reports some fishy anti-features?).

Glory to Arstotzka, I guess.

Transportability is a huge consideration. Pawpaws can’t be transported nationally, for example. The plants we eat have been bred for maximum marketability, which includes getting the produce from where it grows to where people need it.

I currently use it, and have largely mitigated issues in a similar way.

Microsoft can’t seem to figure out sync, ever since Briefcase, if you involve multiple computers you invariably end up with more and more conflicting copies. It’s embarrassing.

Office itself is insanely bloated is a world with Markdown, open data formats, and easy access to scripting. They used some pretty unethical tactics to make OOXML a “standard” to stop governments from switching to an actual standard: ODF-based Libre Office.

Zen has “workspaces”, which I don’t get at all. Profiles seems like too much, containers works fine for me.

Crazy all the useless nonsense Mozilla has room for, since they helped kill RSS by dropping browser UI support for it for “simplification”. It was the same rationale for removing live bookmarks and Shift+Enter to add .net to an address and Ctrl+Shift+Enter for .org.

Is anyone keeping a list of these Hatch Act violations?

In DC. My state has been fighting harder against this stuff than almost anyone else.

They don’t teach the classics in school anymore.

I don’t know why they didn’t use that tagline in 1986.

Holy shit man, I’m not talking about you, I’m talking about the OP, and the anti-straw rhetoric that it’s referencing. You seem to be looking for reasons to be angry, I’m out.

Jesus, you presume too much.

Point to where I said not to do anything. My whole point was not to just stop at straws and find more ways to avoid plastic.

Maybe spend less energy on literal strawmen.

Look, all I’m saying is that straws probably aren’t the #1 source of discarded plastic, and it seems like focusing on one thing like that results in more performative than substantive change.

I didn’t make any such “observations”, or even claim that it doesn’t vary by location. I’m just pointing out that your approach ignores a lot of much larger plastic masses. It’s ok for identifying some obvious opportunities, but I’d hesitate to call it definitive for the purposes of establishing the most impactful strategy.

I’m not sure if people’s unmindfulness is responsible for a larger share of waste than indifference, but maybe?

Yeah, not everyone can do it, but I have no reason to doubt that most can, but we’re really getting hung up on a single example here, people.

How about deodorant? How many people use deodorant in a cardboard container instead of plastic?

Yeah that’s a reasonable expectation. I’ll just start a massive study to see if people use so many straws that it outweighs every other use of plastic in their life. You’ve totally got me there. Congrats.

Edit: That was sarcasm. The burden of proof that straws are the most impactful discarded plastic is on you, not on my skepticism of it.

KFD, surely?

Anecdotes aren’t a great way to measure this. Observations like this are variable by location, and ignores the much larger mass in landfills or unrecycled stockpiles.