Let's make laptops from radium. How's that for planned obsolescence? Its international reputation trashed by Brexit shenanigans, the UK government has been desperately trying to distract its citizens with a promise to extend the ban on single-use plastic products. It all began with disposable carrier bags. But now they're clutching at straws. It is the great contradiction that defines our era: …
Someone at Norton apparently once told a motoring journalist (Bruce Main-Smith IIRC) that the engines leaked on purpose so the owner would keep the tank topped up with clean oil, and not forget to do a regular oil change.
And Joe Craig was the Messiah, no doubt.
At least on Velocettes you knew that the lubrication system was deliberately designed to allow a little oil through the taper roller main bearing into the chain case, ensuring that the chain got lubricated. Velo did not have planned obsolescence. Sadly, lack of an R&D budget meant they ended up with unplanned obsolescence. But there's a lot of Venoms still pootling around, seemingly far more than of BSAs which sold in much bigger numbers.
Same here, my 10 yo MG Magnette was getting worse and worse fuel consumption even after fiddling with the twin carbs. At 6mpg I inspected further to find multiple drips from the petrol tank that turned to holes when a screwdiver touched them. Scrap dealers were my friends in those days!
Wasn't there something about those direct injection petrol engines having a major inlet valve carbonisation problem because engines rely on the petrol washing over the valve to remove the oil that trickles down the guide seals? One of the few advantages of side valves was that guide oil leaks were downward, not up.
Organic self composting laptops would fetch a premium price just like organic vegetables, they would also not have to look good as buyers of 'organic' produce are conditioned to trade good looking veg for so called healthy veg.
There are already sellers of operating systems that are self composting so why not laptops?
For a while in the '70s Lancia were buying back their rotten cars, my youngest brother had a spray shop but for a few months his biggest earner was 'disposing' of Lancias the owners couldn't sell.
I think Yugo cars had the absolute worst bodywork, some of them were rusty from new.
Fscked on rainy days, found on road dead, flung on recycling dump...
Yes, this was Dagenham Dustbin era. My uncle used to work in the tractor plant and wasted 20 years of his life putting one bolt in as they went past. Given the monotony, it's easy to see why the people on the lines didn't GAF.
I hear they even moved the whole factory lock, stock and barrel over to Yugoslavia when Fiat was done with it.
Pretty standard in that era. the Renault 12 production line was moved to Romania to turn out the Dacia 1300. Fiat actually built a new factory in Togliattigrad to produce various Lada models.
The worst vehicles ever produced must have been the Chinese Chang Jiang CJ750. The production line was set up to build the Ural/Dnepr M-72, a copy of the 1938 BMW R71. Side valve engine, 6V electrics. After the Russians considered the plant obsolete and the jigs too far worn, they sold the lot to the Chinese who happily started building theirs, with very predictable reliability. The Chinese also built a Jawa/CZ copy on a similarly ratty production line that had already spent more than its useful life in Czechoslovakia.
Wow "Jawa", that's not a brand I've heard of or seen for a long time. A friend of mine had a Jawa moped when I was a young teen. It literally fell apart, piece by piece. I had no idea they dabbled in cars--I thought maybe a manufacturer of plastic dog crap or other novelties had branched out..
UNIFIED GROUND ELECTRICAL SYSTEM!
OMFG I HATED THAT!
Fried of mine was given a Lancia Lancer as payment for something or other and the brake lights didn't work. We worked on that bastard for three days and never did figure out why.. No chassis ground wtf were they thinking? Double the amount of wire used with a separate ground wire for everything.. jesus I'm getting upset and that was 30 damn years ago...
Friend... well I'd say 'Paid It Forward', but no, he fucked somebody else with it... 'Fucked It Forward'? idk
a trip in a teacher's 2CV, overspill from the clapped out Bedford school minibus, back from a field study centre, heading towards one of those new fangled "fun pools" of which there were only one or two in the country during that era, on a very hot, sunny, late June morning.
The road noise suddenly increased, and as we looked up to where the roar was coming from, a steadily growing sliver of daylight was appearing between the roof and the top of the car's passenger frame.
We all grabbed onto whatever dangly bits of roof we could and held on for dear life until we managed to get to the swimming pool, and the teacher could get to a phone box to call a garage!
and the engine sheered off its mountings and crashed through the radiator.
As the brakes were attached to the engine instead of to the front suspension arms as would be common, you essentially had the entire engine being wrenched off its mounts, torqued forward each time you braked heavily. Acceleration was not a problem at all with the anaemic engine it had.
A friend had a Dyane for several years. A good while after he got rid of it I visited him riding a BMW R80, same engine configuration with a little more capacity. He felt it necessary to remark that his Dyane had a similar engine, to which I replied that it would take him five times as long to reach 100km/h, with over 140km/h simply being out of the question.
Back in the 1970s when British cars were almost unredeemably awful and seemed to spend more time in the garage that with their owner, a colleague bought a Datsun.
For three years the British car owners had to listen to tales of its total reliability, routine servicing only, everything just worked.
After three and a half years the exhaust fell off. Well, how long do British exhausts last?
After 4 years the wings fell off, and soon after it was scrapped for spares.
Being too poor for a car I had a Kawasaki motorcycle. I was told that the frames were made from wrecked battleships recovered after the War. Whatever, when I sold it there wasn't a trace of rust, the chrome was good as new and it could still show a clean pair of heels (well, three smoky exhaust pipes) to a Bonneville. The obsolescence method for Kawasakis was attempting to go round a bend at speed.
"For three years the British car owners had to listen to tales of its total reliability, routine servicing only, everything just worked."
There was a certain amount of sampling bias. The UK manufacturers were certainly making some dreadful cars but if you compared the state of the average Japanese car in the car park with the average British car you needed to take into account that the Japanese were newcomers and the average Japanese car was going to be a few years younger.
My very first motor was a red Ford Escort estate, MKIII
I thought it had really comfy, springy seats but it turned out to be a rotten floor.
I found out when it went for an MOT and the mechanic said it needed some welding - he'd French chalked the area..."the area" turned out to be the whole floor.
What else?
First and reverse gears were randomly interchangeable because the gate was knackered, the boot lock barrel could be pulled out and the boot opened by pushing the lever...that's not to forget it also had a tendency to just pop open at random anyway.
The heater had two settings - the Arctic or Hell. Ditto the fan - off or full on and it sounded like a jet taking off. Shook the dashboard like it, too.
And the choke...the god awful, manual piss take that THAT thing was. Too warm - won't start. Too cold? Won't start. Cloud over on the horizon, within 20 miles? Won't start. Damp or wet? Won't start.
But I did love it all the same - it was my first proper bit of freedom.
Had to watch out when getting in to the front passenger seat! He used to leave it in his driveway with the keys in it, because he figured if someone stole it they'd be doing him a favor. No one ever did, though maybe because it was orange and a Chevette moreso than the rust.
He ended up selling it after he graduated college, because even though the body was shit the engine just kept going and going despite never doing any maintenance at all in the four years he owned it. Don't think I ever asked what he got for it, probably asked for a few 24 packs and called it even!
(some) American cars went through a dark period in the late 70s and 80s like that. I had a 1981 Pontiac Firebird. (which I don't admit to just anyone) While the body was sound, the doors sagged and had to be lifted to close, the leaf springs wore out, water would need to be bailed from the trunk when it rained, and it had an electrical system that needed an exorcist. It would burn out a brake or tail light every week or so. The turn signal stalk fell off. When I installed an aftermarket amplifier (wired correctly), the gauges would "boogie" in time with the music. At night I finally discovered a solution when I saw sparking near the ashtray and found a poorly secured ground wire. I provided a better ground and no more disco gauges.
On the other hand I had a 3rd-hand rusty 1980 Chrysler New Yorker, purchased in 1995. Despite having over 150K miles on it, it had zero squeaks and rattles (except the bottoms of the rusty doors chattering when you shut them), and I had pretty much zero trouble with it in the 5 years or so I owned it. The air con even worked until the last year or so until it got too expensive to keep pumping R12 into it. (too bad some of the other Chrysler products I had weren't quite so good)
Saw a documentary once about the Longbridge plant. The body shop was on one side of the road and the paint shop on the other, so the unfinished body shells had to moved through British weather on a low-loader to be painted until they built the conveyor bridge.
Can't top the 300000 miles car, but I did get an Alfa Romeo 159 to 150000 before I sold it and it was still solid.
You're pressing all my pet hate buttons. Deliberately. Far better to keep adequate kit working for longer than have it fall to bits on cue. The real problem with consumerism is the "keeping up with the Joneses" element or, in the connected age, your e-peen.
BTW, polylactic acid or PLA that we 3D printing nuts like to say is biodegradable is only biodegradable under certain circumstances with the right bacteria. The stuff generally doesn't turn into mush and compost on its own.
Agreed. We have a wicker shopping basket and some thick cotton bags. They will biodrade eventually, but, more importantly, we have been using the same bags and basket for over a decade... The same for the plastic fold-boxes, the newest is 10 years old, the others date back to the end of the 90s. If you are going to use non-biodegradable materials, then don't make disposable products with them!
We have some chars kicking around from the 19th and early 20th century, but the modern sofas don't even last half a decade! The last one, a nice leather reclining sofa, which cost a fair packet and we thought would last, only held out for about 5 years. This time we bought cheap and durable, so will probably last 5 years as well, but cost about a fifth of what the expensive one did.
My mother got a Sunbeam mixer when she married in the 60s, it lasted until the early 2000s, being used at least once a week. My wife has been through 3 mixers since I met her, and they weren't used nearly so often!
Coffee-to-go? I always use my thermos cup. At work I have a cheap Ikea thermo flask for tea, I've been using it for nearly 2 decades and it cost about a tenner. There are solutions to some of these problems that are easy, but we are generally too lazy to bother. Why carry a thermos cup with you for coffee, when you get a free environmental nightmare cup in the coffee shop? Better still, make an extra cup of coffee in the morning before you leave the house and pour it in the cup and take it with you, no queuing and you save yourself a small fortune! And if you do need a supplemental caffeine injection during the day, you can still use the cup.
For technology products that are quickly superceded, there isn't much you can do - maybe biodegradable casings - but for established markets that don't change fast, we should reward manufacturers who make products for longevity, not short lifespans and gimmicks.
Just a few weeks ago my wife had the idea to stop using plastic water bottles to take on the road. I fully agreed with her and we decided to buy a set of aluminum thermoses that we use now. Not only do they look a hell of a lot better than plastic bottles, I now have fresh water available for most of the day.
And I am no longer polluting the environment with used plastic water bottles.
I only regret one thing : that it took me fifty-two years to realize that.
Plastic water bottles are a Good Thing.
I always keep a couple of them around the place. Then I can fill one to take with me when I go out for long enough to get thirsty. Or just fill with water and put in fridge, with a hint of extra flavour like mint or lemongrass.
As for plastic waste, yes it's a problem. But not a permanent problem in the sense of CO2 emissions. Plastic is organic and energy-rich. There's an ecological niche for things that can digest it. Nature abhors a vacuum, and something is sure to evolve to fill it. Though what might happen in the meantime isn't nice.
We use glass bottles for the fridge - we have 4 Sodastream glass bottles, which we use for cold, still water.
On the move, we have the thermos bottles / cups. They hold the water cold (or the coffee hot).
We try to avoid plastic bottles as much as possible, mainly using returnable glass bottles, where they are available. The water tastes better out of glass bottles as well. And you don't get emollient/plasticizer mixed in with the water from cheap plastic or from bottles left in the sun.
They are a very long term problem (how many millions of years was the Carboniferous era that laid down most of those deposits and terraformed Earth to a planet that could eventually support evolution of the first mammals)? As good as permanent as far as those life-forms that don't survive the reverse terraforming are concerned.
As for nature's cleanup, that would be something that photosynthesises rapidly and aggressively. An ocean-wide algal bloom might accelerate healing, but would be Very Bad News for many (most?) of today's life forms.
CO2 residence is on the order of a few years. As I said, life needs the stuff to continue, so any excess is rapidly absorbed by expanding flora exploiting the available resources.
More CO2 than we have now is better than less. C3 plants (which make up most of our staple food crops) stop photosynthesis entirely around 180ppm, a level that was nearly reached within the lifetime of our own species. The general trend over the last couple of millions of years has been down, as CO2 is removed from the atmosphere by geological processes. Without fresh injections of CO2 to the atmosphere, we could expect all life but the most basic to perish on this earth within the next few million years.
All plants photosynthsize most efficiently between 600ppm and 1000ppm. We should be aiming for that level, not trying to starve our staple crops out of misplaced fear of change.
The point at which carbon in the atmosphere becomes problematic to people.
Oh, look:
35 ppm Headache and dizziness within six to eight hours of constant exposure
100 ppm Slight headache in two to three hours
200 ppm Slight headache within two to three hours; loss of judgment
400 ppm Frontal headache within one to two hours
800 ppm Dizziness, nausea, and convulsions within 45 min; insensible within 2 hours
1,600 ppm Headache, increased heart rate, dizziness, and nausea within 20 min; death in less than 2 hours
[And then it gets worse]
So you are suggesting we test this out on you first?
That's carbon monoxide, not dioxide.
But the other poster is quite wrong.
It was ferns that evolved in a high carbon dioxide environment. They removed it by growing, dying and forming what became coal deposits. Conifers and then flowering plants evolved as the CO2 dropped. This also made deciduous plants and grasses possible, thus creating the habitats that made our ancestors possible. We are here because of low CO2. It's no good saying levels were higher millions of years ago because we could not have lived in that environment.
Many modern plants cannot tolerate high CO2 levels because it affects the pH of their leaves (where gaseous exchange takes place.) They are not adapted for levels of 600ppm and above.
My bad! Was the one off the top of my head, without coffee. XD
I had a strange feeling I'd make that mistake. (I blame Google trying to be helpful and not actually searching what was typed, and I blame my dyslexia for taking an age or two to realise mono/dioxide prefixes while reading/typing).
" In concentrations up to 1% (10,000 ppm), it will make some people feel drowsy and give the lungs a stuffy feeling.[117] Concentrations of 7% to 10% (70,000 to 100,000 ppm) may cause suffocation, even in the presence of sufficient oxygen, manifesting as dizziness, headache, visual and hearing dysfunction, and unconsciousness within a few minutes to an hour.[119] The physiological effects of acute carbon dioxide exposure are grouped together under the term hypercapnia, a subset of asphyxiation."
So we have a LONG way to go then. Back to double checking everything I must go. :)
At least you're the kind of decent person that admits a mistake, unlike the other poster who exposed their ignorance of biology, and then downvoted a simple, factual correction. They haven't even the excuse of being a Creationist since Creationists don't believe the climate was ever different (dinosaurs are either faked fossils by God testing our faith or didn't fit the Ark's gangplank.)
a drop of dishwashing liquid, fill it half full of hot water, cap it, shake it around a good couple times, hole it upside down as you unscrew the cap to force the soapy water through the threads, and a double hot water rinse. that usually works.
(at least, that's how I wash out the hydroflask work bought for each person in the department- cheaper than buying 10+ cases of bottled water every week...)
Or shove it in the dishwasher with the rest of the washing. The neck and the lid are the important things and with good placement will get washed well (remember to leave the lid "open" if it's that sort of lid). My investigations suggest that even narrow-necked bottles do get some washing right inside, if they are placed correctly. For example, a bottle previously used for Ribena doesn't smell or taste of the stuff after a dishwashing.
That said, we don't use Ribena since they've dropped the sugar from the recipe. Not only does it not taste the same, it doesn't last anywhere near as long. If they wanted to avoid the sugar tax (and this goes for other providers of such drinks too) could they not provide a concentrate without any sweetener, and let us add a couple of spoons of sugar at home if we wanted to?
Probably good though; we drink more plain water these days.
M.
My mother got a Sunbeam mixer when she married in the 60s, it lasted until the early 2000s, being used at least once a week. My wife has been through 3 mixers since I met her, and they weren't used nearly so often!
Mrs Chronos has one of the old Moulinex Masterchef processors. Its jug interlock failed a few years back but she was adamant she wanted it repairing because the new ones are, in her own words, "designed by bean-counters and assembled by muppets," so one destroyed relay for some decent contacts and a bit of soldering later, "Brenda the blender" was fully operational again. The work was simple, the pride was in herself and her BOfHness. It's still in service now.
For technology products that are quickly superceded
But are they? I have a Toshiba Tecra here that is all but obsolete, yet it took 8GB of RAM and an SSD. Being a CoreNumberNumeral something-or-other¹ it is no slouch in the CPU department for everyday tasks and, with Devuan on it, it's fast enough that I'm not even considering replacing it. Unless there's a compelling reason for the Latest'n'Greatest™ I see no logical advantage to buying it except lightening the weight of one's wallet. How much of this continuous upgrade->throw away cycle is peer pressure?
It's the same with 'phones. I have a Wileyfox Storm here that works fine, gets Pie security updates through LineageOS and is fast enough. Even though it has a couple of design flaws, I'm not replacing it unless and until it fails to do something I need it to do.
Don't even get me started on cars. The 1994 Daihatsu is still going strong, TYVM.
¹ I don't care enough to remember the T number. It's fast enough.
I was thinking about the first couple of generations of products, E.g. smartphones between 2007 and 2010, or PCs during the late 80s and early 90s. The performance and capability increases were exponential, we went from 4.77Mhz to 1Ghz in just over a decade. The old kit was old in a year to 18 months. If you were doing a lot of processing, it was often more economical to replace the kit than leave it running - if a process took 4 hours to complete and replacing the PC got it down to 1 hour, that was a lot of saved time and money.
As the markets mature, the lifecycle extends - as you note. I worked for a company in 2010 who thought their 2002 PCs were still state-of-the-art. They still ran and the employees could still work on them, if a little slowly at times. The same with my 2010 Sony Vaio, an SSD gave it a new lease of life (it already had 8GB RAM). The original battery still lasts just over an hour (2.5 when new).
Some years ago, I bought a refurbished PC, the kind that lays flat and you stick a monitor on top. Had it for the better part of a decade myself, then a year or two ago passed it on to a friend whose Win95/98 (I'm unsure which, but from their description was almost certainly one or the other) PC had finally given up the ghost, and him and his wife are still happily using it (running Linux Mint) now. Does perfectly well for browsing the web, sending emails and suchlike.
Compared to them, I'm a power user - because I like playing games, and my gaming machine is also a refurb, no idea how old it is, but I suspect better part of a decade, but thanks to Steam, there's plenty of decent games of the types I like to play that I can play. Sure, I'd love to have been able to afford to buy a bespoke gaming rig, but I'm not sure I;d have bought one even if i could, because my experience with refurbed PC's has been so good - they just seem to keep on going and going. I guess its because they're made up of components that didn't die quickly, and so are probably sligjhtly better quality than average (there's always going to be some variability in build quality), so they last longer.
The point about processing power for professional use is spot on. Years ago I was talking to a guy who had just replaced a top of the range Mac with a new one that had 7% more speed.
It was worth it to him because it was being used for rendering, and although 7% doesn't sound like a lot, it's the difference between the overnight job finishing at 9a.m. and 10a.m., a whole hour of lost productivity at advertising agency hourly rates.
I endeared myself to my future in-laws when, told that the microwave didn't work any more, promptly asked for a screwdriver, disassembled it and pinched the spade connectors.
Since they were WW2 vets and considered waste a sin, they were made up.
Fixing the TV power switch (by passing it completely in fact so they had to use the wall switch for power - no remote control for them) only added to the admiration.
Fixing stuff that appears totally broken is very rewarding. I met my girlfriend 'repairing' her laptop.
Swapped out the phone camera from a broken unit for my girlfriend last week to 'fix' a focussing problem and replaced the system board in this laptop to keep my favourite laptop going, for 40 quid. Added a cheapo 60GB SSD to make it zoom - having not realised it could have that capability until I repaired it!
"The 1994 Daihatsu is still going strong, TYVM."
I wonder where the break-even point is in terms of running a 25 year old car considering it's fuel consumption and likely emission rates and a new, more fuel efficient and less polluting car, taking into account the environmental effects of scrapping the old one and building the new one.
You really have to see the big picture for that one. You have to factor in recycling energy, transportation costs, the footprint of creating the replacement, longevity, parts, electronic waste (it's worse now everything is electronic) and so on. The Sportrak has a 1.6l Bosch controlled mulit-point fuel injected sixteen valve engine; it's Japanese so it's about as efficient as anything modern from non-Japanese manufacturers could possibly be. The early ones were carburated, admittedly.
There's also herself's 57 plate Aygo in disguise which returns mid-sixties MPG and the ancient '91 Rover SLD which returns the high fifties, although using the oily fuel. The latter is off the road right now as I haven't plucked up the courage to try to take the gearbox off to replace the pressure plate which is short of a few release fingers as it also needs a rear crank seal, which means taking the sodding flywheel off. 240k miles on the same clutch isn't bad, though...
Airbags and pretensioners have to be replaced after a period between 10 and 15 years. It is possible to keep a car at its original safety levels for 30 years or more - but I understand that the complex airbag systems on some modern cars are such that it is not economical to replace them because by then the replacement costs far more than the residual value of the car.
So to a degree it depends what value you put on your life. Older cars tend to be lighter, modern ones are heavier, so it's easy to see which compresses most in a crash.
When it gets too old to run Windows, either due to the processor being too slow for the latest bloatware, or because drivers are no longer available, throw Linux on it and give it a 2nd life. You probably won't do any serious gaming on it (though I'm suspecting that isn't your thing), but it should be more than acceptable for everything else.
I work in IT (like so many here) and am still using a desktop that I built in 2011, which is pretty old by today's standards. I'll upgrade it someday, but there's so many other things I'd rather spend $500-1K on right now.
The story on bag re-use and environmental impact is apparently complex, for cotton to be worthwhile you have to re-use it for along time (as you have). The most pressing crisis is CO2 really, so it's necessary to keep an eye on that over plastics pollution (the two don't necessarily have the same optimum approaches). E.g. https://ourworldindata.org/faq-on-plastics (just a quick find, not sure about reliability).
we should reward manufacturers who make products for longevity, not short lifespans and gimmicks.
But economic growth!
Go one better, and levy a disposal tax at the factory gate / port / border.
This tax would be based on the current cost of disassembly and responsible disposal.
eg a simple ballpoint pen, with metal and an assortment of different plastic bits would be taxed more heavily than, say, a ballpoint pen that uses only one polymer type throughout.
With the cost of disposal having already been paid, and that money having been thoughtfully distributed to councils and other entities responsible for our waste, it would have the effect of cutting council tax, while encouraging growth in modern recycling plants, capable of qualifying for disposal bonuses out of the fund, as they put less and less into landfill.
The flip side of the coin, is that designers will be encouraged to make their products easily recyclable, and hence incur minimal disposal tax.
If the market is all about everyone paying for everything they use, rather than forcing those costs on the entire community, then billing the people who make the junk that ends up in landfill is a natural progression.
Go one better, and levy a disposal tax at the factory gate / port / border.
This tax would be based on the current cost of disassembly and responsible disposal.
Supposedly something along these lines is already done in WEEE, but I suppose it could be extended. (And perhaps made to actually work, for an individual in the UK who doesn't own a car WEEE disposal is pretty non-existent.)
Erm, it's the same in the UK too...
It's not advertised but you can both return to the shop you originally bought from or get the delivery man (for larger items) to take the old one away with them.
It's an EU thing...https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Electrical_and_Electronic_Equipment_Directive
It's even more general than "take the old one", you can ask them to take any old white goods, following common sense. It's to ensure things go in the right supply chain rather than being dumped.
While I have gotten them to take about a skip load of old stuff (previous owner left ~15 small CRT monitors) I did warn them, and suggest that they come last.
It being the Netherlands my local busybody got on my case about having the monitors piled up outside, even when I pointed out they'd be gone by that evening...
Except, the tax would be collected in China and the product disposed of in another country.
I would work for locally made stuff - and making the stuff locally should be a goal. It is crazy that shipping a product half way around the globe is cheaper than making it "next door".
"factory gate / port / border"
The concept of transferring the disposal tax as the goods travel was obviously implied, in much the same way exported goods don't incur tax in the source country, but in the destination country.
Also implied are the charges on goods from nations that chose not to take part be levied at the point of entry into the "ecosystem".
There is one (with several points) obvious flaw in your plan.
Taxes very rarely go to pay for the service used to justify them.
Once the money comes in it goes to cover the most urgent shortfall.
Then Central Government cut back funding of local Councils because they have a new revenue stream.
Then urgent awareness moves to another area.
Capitalism revokes the additional tax.
The local Councils lose the revenue but don't get a replacement from Central Government.
Recycling services are cut as uneconomic.
You are then left with an item on which you paid a recycling premium on purchase but you now cannot recycle.
Lies, damned lies, and Government spending promises.
At which point the tax no longer gets passed onto the distributing government as they have by default left the scheme.
Similarly, products originating in that country, whether they have already paid the tax locally or not will incur the tax again as it enters a country that isn't morally corrupt.
I think that would focus even the most debase of our politicians into never tampering with the system again.
"There is one (with several points) obvious flaw in your plan. etc"
There's a great deal to be said for ring-fenced taxes, not least that the Treasury absolutely hate them. The hate, of course, is indicative of the fact that it prevents them playing the silly tricks the OP describes.
"Go one better, and levy a disposal tax at the factory gate / port / border.
This tax would be based on the current cost of disassembly and responsible disposal."
Let me add another category. Junk mailers to pay the recycling costs to the councils to whose areas they address mail.
"With the cost of disposal having already been paid, and that money having been thoughtfully distributed to councils and other entities responsible for our waste, it would have the effect of cutting council tax, be squandered on totally unrelated things, "
There, fixed that for you.
I noticed an odd thing while in Chicago last month: during conference breaks, colleagues would serve themselves from the coffee urn into the takeaway cups with plastic lids even though there were plentiful quantities of regular ceramic mugs. They weren't for takeaway - we were all in a conference together, sitting in rows of name-carded desks. I suppose it's just habit.
"I suppose it's just habit."
Or they've been trained over years to "enjoy" the taste of coffee from plastic or waxed cardboard cups. Personally I find the taste of coffee from disposable cups to be quite different from using a proper ceramic cup or mug, and not in a nice way!. It's probably just the texture sensation on the lips, but it feels like a different taste.
Or it could be a way to eke out the coffee a bit longer. Disposable cups tend to hold slightly more than a "standard" mug (and often it's not a mug that is supplied, but a cup-and-saucer) and are slightly better insulated (particularly when fitted with a lid) so in a long boring conference your coffee will stay drinkable for longer.
A lid also helps avoid minor spills if you have limited space to put the cup, and avoids accidentally dropping your Biro into the cup if you are so bored you doze off.
Lastly - and I suspect one of the more important reasons - you don't have to think about returning your cup to the tray when you are finished with it or - horror - actually arranging for all those mugs to be washed. You just leave it on the desk or the floor and someone else sweeps it into a bin bag along with all the other detritus you've scattered about. Bring back the Wombles.
The obvious answer is to provide reusable lidded mugs. They don't even have to be plastic as there are some quite good Bamboo-based ones available now which are dishwashable. They are probably even better insulated than a disposable cup, though often they seem to have silicone lids. Silicone can also be dishwashed, but it does deteriorate eventually.
Nothing beats tea from an unwashed ceramic mug though :-)
M.
My first working visit to the states in the late nineties I had the same shock. Why were all the people in the hotel using the nasty styrofoam plates and plastic cutlery when there were perfectly good ceramic and metal alternatives. A colleague from the area told me they were saving on the washing up!
It's back to the everlasting lightbulb scenario.
You'd still get a replacement cycle when technological advances would offer the same performance for less ongoing cost (filament bulbs -> CFL -> LED), or significantly more performance for the same ongoing cost (computers). The Everlasting Lightbulb Co should be sufficiently forward-looking to have R&D budget available for such changes.
I can actually beat your shopping bag.I bought some green cotton bags in a German supermarket (to piss off certain people because they had the slogan "Umwelt Wir helfen Dir". That was in 1992. I finally disposed of them to Oxfam for recycling in 2017, 25 years later.
But sofas? G-plan. Still rock sold.
The idea of 'expiring' money was suggested as an alternative to all the quantitative easing malarkey. Instead of giving money to banks to stash in the Cayman Islands, you give money to pensioners, with the proviso that it can't be saved, it has to be spent or you lose it. So they spend on shiny things, and people who make shiny things don't go bankrupt. The money will, of course, still eventually find its way to the Cayman Islands, but it hopefully will have done some good on the way.
I always thought that would have been a better way to dish out the dosh that bail out the banks with billions.
Give everyone a house / pay off a mortgage.
Sounds ridiculous until you consider that you now have about £1000 per month of disposable income.
That's enough to go out to restaurants, bars, buy that bit of luxury, or new tech.
Each of those requires people to be employed, in fact you will need to employ more people to keep up with the demand, each of those getting wages that can be spent on stuff, requiring people to make / sell stuff.
What happened instead is the bankers got bailed out from their stupid bets with each other, were allowed to keep making stupid bets with each other, and bunged the rest offshore while failing to lend to small businesses like they promised.
> As an example to the rest.
Agreed. Some crimes have such major consequences that retrospective legislation and punishments are worth invoking. All of Lehman Brothers top 100 (if not top 500) managers deserve 20 year stretches apiece.
All of Lehman Brothers top 100 (if not top 500) managers deserve 20 year stretches apiece.
You know all of Lehman Brothers unsecured creditors were repaid 100% in 2014, and since have been paid interest ??
Not saying that they behaved ethically, but it turns out that on unwinding things, it wasn't quite so bad.
PWC made a tidy penny out of it......
Apparently the reason you don't just hand out real cash to people is because that isn't reversible.
The idea is (at least as far as I recall) - instead you create virtual money and lend it to banks to encourage them to keep lending, thus hopefully keeping the economic wheels oiled; but when that encouragement is no longer needed, you get that virtual money repaid back, and can delete it. This means the inflationary effect of the QE can be also minimised.
However, that doesn't make it seem any fairer, even if it is more economically sensible.
Apparently the reason you don't just hand out real cash to people is because that isn't reversible
It's easily reversible. When the economy picks up again you raise some tax or other. If you are being sensible you do it in a time-limited or at the very least an hypothesised way.
The main problem is making sure that the money goes where it is needed and in a fair way. Paying off debt is a great idea, but is it such a great idea that you insist people can only claim the money directly into their mortgage accounts? What if they don't have a mortgage or other loan? Does everyone get the same amount (proportionately affects "poorer" people more) or do you just pay off all loans, no matter how large?
Instinctively I like the idea, but it needs some thinking-out. For example, if you let banks go bust as a deliberate policy, you probably also need fully to protect investors, rather than the current UK offering which only protects the first £80,000 with any one institution - as we are "between mortgages" at the moment, we have more than this limit sitting in one bank right now, and although it won't be there for very much longer it does make me incredibly nervous. You also need to set aside some money to sort out the mess when a bank goes bust, perhaps to "nationalise" the institution temporarily so that millions of people don't suddenly find themselves unable to pay for the weekly shop, or behind with the direct-debit gas payments in the middle of January.
Thanks for the intellectual work-out first thing on a Sunday morning :-)
M.
"but when that encouragement is no longer needed, you get that virtual money repaid back, and can delete it."
Slight snag here. We don't seem to get to that position, at least not until inflation has devalued it to the point where it's become loose change.
>>Apparently the reason you don't just hand out real cash to people is because that isn't reversible.
The Australian labor party did just that during the last GFC they gave everyone a handout. Conservative opposition whined about how all the poor would be buying big screen TV etc.
But hey, it worked and australia rode thought the GFC with bugger all problems.
> Sounds ridiculous until you consider that you now have about £1000 per month of disposable income.
No it still sounds ridiculous. :-)
[Because, QE is reversible: if the economy overheats it can be reined in. Paying off everyone's mortgage is not so easily reversible.]
Even easier - vote to remain in the EU, where measures are afoot to force the CIty of London to open up the entire can of worms they have dotted around the globe in quaint little Island territories.
The list of the top one hundred thieves that forced transparency would reveal wouldn't deviate much from the top one hundred rich list.
The icon is your average Cayman Island depositor rifling through the pockets of coats left in a school cloakroom.
I had an Economics teacher who would muse how much fun it would be if cash was made from radioactive isotopes with a short half-life. He wasn't hoping to irradiate the population so much as to see what might happen to consumer spending habits if everyone knew they had to dispose of their pay packet before it blinked out of existence.
Some bloody economics teacher that hasn't heard of hyperinflation. Ask Venezuela .
You could even have done it with money that doesn't expire. Specifically, instead of bailing the banks out to the tune of 30k per head, each person gets a ten year 30k term deposit at the bank of their choice. Or perhaps forced to have it at their main bank.
It would have (in saving the banks) achieved exactly the same thing. Giving people direct spending money is also a pretty good solution to a temporary loss of consumer confidence.
But that's not how these things work. Heads they win, tails we lose.
I read recently that there are thousands and thousands of brand new vehicles that do not get sold. They just get parked in some lot in a desert somewhere... Maybe we need to change how and 'when' we manufacture things? Want a new car, great, go to the dealership, and place an order. Your new vehicle will be produced as needed, you can take delivery in 4 weeks...
In the end, the human race will drown in a sea of plastic packaging.
Who could forget ice cream also came in cardboard packs in one of three flavours which we all know so I won't bore you with repeating them here, and after a few months when the cardboard went manky and mixed in with the ice-cream we ate it anyway and we were happy for it and it never did us any harm (twitch).
So the pack was eco-friendly but judging by the colour the ice cream was probably made of radium.
Nothing wrong with dog's milk. Full of goodness. Full of vitamins. Full of marrowbone jelly. Lasts longer than any other type of milk, dog's milk.
Lister: Why?
Holly: No bugger'll drink it. And the advantage of dog's milk is that when it goes off it tastes exactly the same as when it's fresh.
Norman Lovett a genuinely nice gent, who while we were eating ice cream up on the Space Needle in Seattle said to me "That it wasn't a day out without an ice cream".
Icon because it's a AI head on a black screen.
It was dire muck. The raspberry ripple, for example, was so hard that you treated the ripple bits as fault lines. Then it thawed a bit, say a couple of degrees C, and turned into sandy crap that fused with the cardboard. As Dr_N hints, no bugger would eat it unless there was sod-all else.
"Uranium" glass goes back before the Victorians: Wikipedia link. Uranium glass was very popular in the Art Deco period, but Victorians liked it too.
However, at the time nobody was interested in radioactivity. Uranium glass was invented sixty years before Becquerel, and although Becquerel discovered radioactivity because some plates got fogged, we reproduced the experiment at school and discovered that an ordinary photographer who did not store his uranium intensifier next to his plates would never discover it.
> when lots of glass was made with some Uranium content,
The uranium in glass is perfectly safe, it's the safest (although expensive) way to store radioactive waste.
All glass contains some radioactive bits of rock - it's a pain making some optical detectors, you have to chemically purify the glass to get the background down
There are also a whole bunch of optically really useful glasses you can't get any more because they contain lead. Lead chemically bonded inside glass inside an optical instrument sent into space = because won't somebody think of the children !!!
Meanwhile you can buy lead crystal glasses to drink from in any antiques shop.
"All glass contains some radioactive bits of rock - it's a pain making some optical detectors, you have to chemically purify the glass to get the background down"
K40 for one. When the Belfast carbon dating lab looked into the problem they calibrated and reused supposedly disposable containers for the scintillation counter samples.
Have a beer, Sir. I have literally just had a Belkin "Wireless Charger" fail this morning. Mind you I had a bit of fun with Belkin Support, along the lines of,
BS: "To fix these issues, try to move your phone slightly on the wireless charging pad or stand to align it correctly."
Me: "Ok, I am standing, what next?"
BS: "Not you, the phone"
Me: "Silly you, the phone can not stand - it does not have legs"
BS: "...."
One more Belkin product consigned to the category of failed accessories.
The one exception is Belkin's ridiculously named FlipBlade Universal (i.e. hinged tablet stand). I've had mine for 7 years and it's still working. Oh, apart from the bit that fell off it, of course.
They could save a fortune by omitting it from the design, a
Then another bit would fall off, which is more likely to be a bit you don't want to fall off. So you leave the design as is, and run the widget through the bitfalleroffer at the end of the production line.Now with these fallen-off bits can be more easily recycled as they are all in a fallenoffbitsbin, of a single production process, and not mixed with other bits fallen off of other stuff.
I am sure the cold-blooded dinosaurs that roamed beyond what is now the Artic and Antarctic Circles are impressed by the green brigades' claims that "the Earth has never been this warm before!" but I'm old enough to remember how some moron in Cambridge thought fiddling the figures was a good idea, and all the stories from the same sources who said that Reality consistently failed to match their dire predictions because Reality was obviously wrong.
The climate is always in a state of flux so blaming it all on humanity is at best a stupid mistake. I don't deny the climate is changing, I just challenge the suggestion that if I sit shivering naked and starving in a cave then the world will suddenly become a good and happy place - but try explaining the difference (between scepticism and denial) to some environmentalist and you'll stand a good chance of seeing just how close some people still are to primordial slime.
The Earth is now as warm as it has ever been in the history of human civilization and continuing to get warmer. This is simultaneous with there now being about 7.5 billion people, versus 1 billion in the early 1800s and less than 0.5 billion prior to the 14th century. Further changes in climate will disrupt the balance onto which we're just about hanging, we know from history what happens when there's a sudden scarcity of resources: wars, famine, mass movement of people. There is a well-understood mechanism by which the CO2 and other greenhouse gases that are being emitted can warm the planet, and a rather telling correspondence between their increasing emission due to industrialisation and the warming of the climate.
Given all this, pretending you've been asked to sit shivering naked in a cave and tarring those people who find the situation concerning as primordial slime, in the name of a 'scepticism' that often seems to start from the conclusion it wants to reach, seems a little... hubristic.
The damage was done by the time we realized it, they have proven that the eco laws passed have worked... But now because the atmosphere is so clean, the clouds don't reflect enough sunlight that the polluted clouds did, causing the seas to warm... Ever seen pics from the early to mid 1900's? The amount of pollution in the air was visible.
So by making the world cleaner, we have unmasked the damage already caused, we cant undo it, unless we put up carbon scrubbers everywhere and bury the waste. The horse left the barn years ago, but nobody noticed!
So many ways to be wrong! Your post has 3 sentences (there isn't a world full stop shortage btw). You managed at least 9 falsehoods - are you actually Donald T?
Dinosaurs weren't all cold blooded and could thermo-regulate. The polar living dinosaurs did live in a warmer planet but it was still cold in the high latitudes, not wildly different to today. No reputable 'green brigadista' has ever claimed that the world has never been this warm before - we are at our warmest in 125,000 years, and that's warm enough. Not sure who your 'moron in Cambridge' was - lot's of possible candidates. I'm guessing you meant Norwich, and he didn't fiddle anything. As for reality and predictions - prediction, 30 years ago, 0.8 degrees rise, actual 0.6 degrees - but adjusted for actual emissions and CFC reductions, the model predicts 0.6!
No one ever blamed all climate flux on humanity. You kind of are denying it. Again, no one is asking you to sit naked in a cave (actually I will....). As scientists we understand the difference between scepticism and denial. One is based on evidence, hypothesis and continual testing of assumptions, and the other is blindly accepting a narrative peddled by Fox news. Your last statement about seeing how close some people are to primordial ooze - yup, I'll accept that. You are pretty close.
"the cold-blooded dinosaurs that roamed beyond what is now the Artic and Antarctic Circles"
You do realise, don't you, that the bits which are now beyond the Arctic and Antarctic circles weren't always where they are now? There's this thing called plate tectonics...
OTOH climate and relative sea levels have never been constants. Those who insist that they are regardless of burning fossil fuels and those who insist they would be if we stopped are both deluded. However there has been no excuse for decades for the amount of valuable fossil carbons that have been stuffed up power station chimneys for the last many decades and the greens of past generations are largely to blame for that.
Nobody "fiddled" the figures; here is the full story but not from The Daily Mail or Fox News:-
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2017/feb/09/whistleblower-i-knew-people-would-misuse-this-they-did-to-attack-climate-science
Not IT related but...
I bought some compostable bin bags for lining the in-kitchen scraps bin so that when full I could just chuck the whole lot into the composter.
They decomposed far better over a few days in the kitchen bin, thus negating their whole purpose, than they ever did outside. When I emptied the composter I kept fishing bits of them out and consigning them to landfill.
"My straws have a full metal jacket."
And, oddly enough to some people, metal straws are now a real thing you can buy. Take your own straw to save plastic. Take your own mug, to save plastic coated cardboard. Next? Take your own cutlery to save the plastic. Buy a sustainable cotton rucksack to carry all your permanent "green" goods in to save the planet! Comes complete with a dispenser for organic soap, a cotton towel and 2 litre water reservoir for washing your items on the go, easily refilled using our special canisters, available only on automatic subscription if you buy this WiFi connected rucksack which monitors usage and automatically reorders soap, water podules and clean towels, deliver direct to your GPS tracked location! But wait! There's more! Buy now for the low, low price and get a "free" pooper scooper and 3 whole days supply of biodegradable doggy doo bags (note, doggy doo bags degrade within 10 minutes once exposed to air and shit. Does not degrade if placed in bins or landfill, free wetwipes included)
Because, as an adult I have cultivated facial hair.
Consuming liquids and emulsions now requires special tools to avoid wearing them externally.
Growing a beard may not seem like much, but its about the most meaningful thing I achieve at work.
Also quite popular amongst my peers / demographic... the place looks like a casting call for a Hobbit movie..
"You could just pop your obsolete laptop in your compost bin alongside the grass cuttings, egg shells and potato peel."
They'd need to do a better job than the so-called compostable plastic bags. A few years ago there were allegedly compostable bags for collecting kitchen waste. The waste composted, the bags didn't. Similarly the so-called bio-degradeable plastic bags the Co-op sold vegetables in. There seems to be a new generation in that in the last few days National Trust, English Heritage and Gardening Which magazines have all arrived in bags which claim to be compostable. We shall see - although I might pose it as a question to GW.
I discovered, however, that Morrisons' paper bags are bio-degradeable. More than three carrots weight and they fall to pieces.
These things are all "compostable" as in "compositble in an industrial composter"; they require three things to break down; heat, moisture and oxygen. Your home compost bin is probably missing at least one of those things. You might have a bit more luck with a big compost heap that gets left out in the rain and a regular turning, but they are intended for a big ol' bio-reactor type composter in a recycling centre somewhere downwind of any houses.
Is your heap large enough to get hot? (oo-er missus, etc.) Does it get turned (to let oxygen in)?
If the answert to both of the above is yes, I'd be genuinely surprised if they didn't degrade at elast enoguh to be in smallish fragements when you use the compost (and those fragments are only going to add structure to your soil while they degrade further, so not a bad thing). Unlike plastics, in a healthy soil, they should eventually get eaten up by various bugs and worms in any case.
I don't know the end of the article, but at my old school judging from the first half it would have got a low grade for going off topic. What does all of this have to do with the title?
After reading the first paragraphs of very well known and constantly repeated stuff I started going through it rather quickly, but I gave up before the end. Can anybody tell me where in the article it says about the clickbait topic radium?
>> What does all of this have to do with the title?
I see you are new to this. Books, films, theses and peer-reviewed papers have titles. News stories have headlines. Inconsequential weekly columns intended as a bit of a laugh have the first sentence in a large, bold font at the top. Also, I tend not to include a bibliography at the end.
The oldest version of the "radioactive money" idea I have come across is an essay by SF writer Larry Niven, called "The Roentgen Standard".
It explains a lot of the knock-on effects, including why rich people will still want gold.
You can read it online here: http://www.larryniven.net/stories/roentgen.shtml
If you hear a noise with your milk and your bowl,
It must be the ten-thirty Humphrey patrol.
In slippers with pom-poms for creeping about,
Watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out, there's a Humphrey about!
One Hundred Humphreys soft as silk,
Off on their search for your Unigate milk.
Get extra pintas or you'll be without,
Watch out, watch out, watch out, watch out, there's a Humphrey about!
The 70s, when ads were real ads...
Ah, yes, that would have been the Winter months when it was kept on the steam radiator so it didn't get too cold!
First school, a Victorian building in North East England, it was to thaw the stuff out. Trouble was the milk changed from ice lolly form to cream cheese without passing through the liquid stage in between.
Wow! Sounds like a quite a few people went to schools where the staff had no idea how to store the daily milk delivery. I can't ever remember any problems with the daily school milk when I was there. That would have been 1967 onwards when there still plenty of adults who likely grew up without a fridge in the house and so knew how to store milk safely.
"Staff"? We had three teachers, each with two years' worth of brats to teach, and two dinner persons. The sodding milk was the least of their worries. It was dropped off in several miniature crates in skyscraper configuration and left on the veranda with all the bikes until 10:30.
"Sounds like a quite a few people went to schools where the staff had no idea how to store the daily milk delivery."
Milk delivered from the farm was unpasteurised and fresh. Milk delivered to the school had a cooked taste; whether that was simply age or over-zealous pasteurisation I'm not sure but living in the country one knew the difference.
In Macon, Ga, USA, we had 1/2 hints of milk in glass bottles with the cardboard stoppers. If you couldn't get the little flap to come up with your fingernail to open it, you had to punch it down into the bottle with your thumb and get a small splash of milk if you were lucky. If not, you got a lap full of milk.
Actually, there is no IT angle here.
Don't use them to keep ANYTHING in. They degrade into a shower of centi- and milli-particles (bigger than micro- or nano-particles), spreading the former contents of the bag everywhere and coating everything in a statically charged fuzz of plastic.
Trying to clean them up is like playing asteroids, except that the geometric progression of division into smaller and smaller objects in greater and greater numbers doesn't end after three hits.
We're all supposed to say aluminium (as decreed by the final arbiter of such things IUPAC. In return, I have to remember to spell sulfur with an 'f'. (The original spelling, I think, until some Jacobean scholar decided sulphur looked Greeker - many differences in US English are based on British English c.1600, e.g. 'gotten'.)
Three years ago my Eco-warrior neighbours persuaded me me to buy a environmentally friendly recycled polyester fleece. It was a bit expensive but nice enough and wore it with pride for doing my bit to save the planet. Fast forward to last week and they are in my face about micro-plastics and how my favourite piece of clothing is killing the planet... they haven't spoken to me since I pointed out it was them that sold it to me.
They do decompose of course. entropy cannot be defeated. Indeed they decompose a damn sight faster than glass and pottery. I don't know how things stand now, but forty years ago when I worked with PVC all the best stabilisers were being banned because of safety fears, and I'm pretty sure that at least some of the preferred replacements have been banned since.
what might happen to consumer spending habits if everyone knew they had to dispose of their pay packet before it blinked out of existence.
It''s already been tried by the Social Credit government of Alberta in the 1930s.
Following the 1937 revolt, the government made a serious attempt to implement social credit policies. It passed several pieces of radical populist legislation, such as the issuance of prosperity certificates to Alberta residents (dubbed "funny money" by detractors) in accordance with the theories of Silvio Gesell. Douglas, the main leader of the Social Credit movement, did not like the idea of prosperity certificates, which depreciated in value the longer they were held, and openly criticized Gesell's theories.
Plastic carrier bags are a huge waste of time, what with having to drive 35 miles to the nearest ocean to throw them in. Bloody 70 mile round trip every 2nd weekend.
"Why?" Well you simply must do this, because otherwise there'd be little connection between plastic carrier bags in Western nations and the very real issue of plastic in the ocean (95% of which originates in just ten specifically identified river basins, where littering is rampant).
So to maintain this conflation of two otherwise unrelated topics, we must make these efforts. We must all do our part.
I've read through and I'm not sure I've found any reality so far.
As far as I can find out online, plastics break down eventually into very small particles (down to nano particles) and migrate into the soil and water courses and then the oceans. They can then stay there, including in all stages of the food chain, for millennia. This may explain why your cod and chips tastes a little plasticy.
CO2 tends to get removed from the atmosphere in 40-50 years which is used to justify burning forests as "renewable energy".
In this thread I have seen the argument that "something will evolve to eat the plastic" (it did have a caveat) but this does smack of "magical thinking" much like the idea that the hard border problem in Ireland can be solved by "technology" or the various justifications for backdoors to encryption.
My current uninformed view is that given the choice I would burn all the plastic and keep the problem for our generation to solve by reducing the immediate production of plastic.
I wouldn't ban burning of plastic then let the planet spend millennia trying to deal with ubiquitous micro-plastic pollution. Otherwise known as kicking the (plastic) can down the road.
As long as anyone anywhere is still burning coal, then there are essentially zero rational objections to burning 'previously-purposed oil' (e.g. plastic carrier bags) in modern, clean burning, waste-to-energy incinerators.
The kWh thus produced must displace, to some ratio, a bit of coal. And it's merely oil that was put to other uses along the way.
Any organic waste (e.g. paper) in the waste stream that is converted to energy is weakly 'Renewable'.
CO2 tends to get removed from the atmosphere in 40-50 years which is used to justify burning forests as "renewable energy"
Wood burning is essentially a closed cycle - the wood that's burned has been a standing crop that has been building up for a few decades. The C in the CO2 it releases into the air is the C that it removed from the air when it was growing so there's an equilibrium.
Burning fossil fuels releases as CO2 carbon that was fixed many millions of years ago and that amount of C will hang around until it finds its way to another long term sink.
So many questions....
- Did this stuff ever degrade?
- Apart from the obvious reasons (ie removal of any sensitive skin, ability to repel all moisture, a smear factor of 97.3%) where did it go? Was it added to the Geneva convention?
- was its extinction caused by the destruction of its natural habitat of piss lakes and broken porcelain?
School milk? the horror of it, luke warm milk. I have NEVER liked drinking unadulterated milk, probably because since being weaned I have been a normal mammal and lactose intolerant. I was living in NZ when Thatcher stole the kiddies' milk and I cheered. One of the good things about emigrating to the South Seas aged 6: no school milk.
Mind you I thought it the only good thing Thatcher ever did. I would probably have gotten into fights over it had I still been a wean here in Scotland. Mind you I would probably have been involved in a running battle with the teachers over not drinking my sodding milk. It makes me feel bad miss.
When I was 17 and running 100miles a week some post dinner ice cream once went through me in 40minutes. I timed it as I could feel it. NZ ice cream is lovely stuff too. I make my own LF ice cream since the supermarkets replaced the unlovely plain stuff with coconut and almond/soya milk ersatz things.
Laptop from radium, Now I am a bit ignorant on how nuclear power stations work exactly, it's not a skill I have needed but from a simplistic point of view.
How Wonderfully Green.
Lots of radioactive laptops and they will all eventually need binning. They can all go to selective landfill, lets call it a reactor. Green Electricity!.
The users of said laptops may pass early, convert to them to Solent Green. Recycling? as a side effect, population reduction, a Virtuous Circle.
OK, radium, uranium not the same, Solent Green not real? But Hey, why let reality get in the way of, Hey that's a good idea!
"I had an Economics teacher who would muse how much fun it would be if cash was made from radioactive isotopes with a short half-life... to see what might happen to consumer spending habits if everyone knew they had to dispose of their pay packet before it blinked out of existence"
I think Germany ended up trying something similar between the wars - it didn't end well IIRC...
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