Cleaning a Spoon Is Complex | Hacker News Reader

Cleaning a Spoon Is Complex

jefftk.com

22 pointsmhb58 comments

This is ridiculous. The complexity of manually washing a spoon, even with all those steps added, isn't even in the same ballpark as manufacturing it. You need all of the same kind of steps to manufacture the spoon (including piping water to the factory and cleaning it with soap or whatever), and the other ones are orders of magnitude more complex. And just because you added more words and used some technical terms it doesn't show any more complexity.

It's not arguing that one is more or less complex than the other. It's saying that everything in modern life is complex, and simply saying "X is complex" isn't a sufficient basis to make a decision about the relative merits of X and Y.

That's the problem. The original image is talking about "effort", which I take to be about energy and natural resource usage, but this response deflects it to "complexity" to make it seem like anything is equally justifiable regardless of how wasteful it is.

Key words being "I take to be..."

You're outright admitting you can't understand the post, or the point of the post, as you want to steadfastly hold to the original premise

If the reply post talked about the petroleum and other natural resources used to extract and transport the sodium hydroxide et al to your home, would that placate you?

No, I think I understand the point of the post perfectly fine, and I also happen to think you don't understand mine. The post is kinda like when someone says they don't buy things with "chemicals" in it and you take the opportunity to make a joke that highlights how naive they are. Doesn't mean there isn't a valid point being made if they were able to convey it better.

But then you have a lazy employee which doesn't wash the spoon properly, a patron gets intoxicated, or worse, dies (peanut allergy) and sues for $5 mil damage.

This unbounded liability in US law is the cause of a lot of bad things...

I don't see how bounded liability would prevent your scenario from happening.

Why is that a bad thing?

It sounds like the company doesn't have management in place to tell if an employee is lazy and doing a bad job, nor is willing to pay well enough to hire good employees.

Surely that's not a good thing.

has this happened?

It's even a business model:

> If you or a loved one gets sick after eating at a restaurant, contact OFT Food Safety & Injury Lawyers.

> To successfully sue a restaurant for food poisoning, you must prove that they had a duty, failed to meet that duty with negligent action or inaction. As a result, you became ill, and you suffered financial damages.

https://www.oftlaw.com/blog/can-you-sue-a-restaurant-for-foo...

> If the food is prepared with unclean cooking utensils

https://www.findlaw.com/injury/product-liability/food-poison...

The question was has your scenario happened.

That said, it's a poorly phrased scenario. Anyone can sue for any amount.

Like Jason Scott's talk "That Awesome Time I Was Sued For Two Billion Dollars" - https://defcon.org/html/links/dc-archives/dc-17-archive.html...

Even having a maximum doesn't mean that someone can't file a suit asking for more.

So, who has won a case similar to what you described, and with a $5 million settlement?

And, why was that gratuitously high?

That's important, because we know there are decades of propaganda for why business owners need protection against excessive lawsuits, where the actual details show it was not excessive, most famously, Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants. That last one shows how the jury awarded $2.7 million in punitive damages, which was reduced to $480,000 by the judge - and was still higher than what Liebeck sued for.

That said, you should also address why there are lawyers with that business model, which might be less common elsewhere.

1) The US system prefers a more caveat emptor approach, where issues are resolved though civil lawsuits (or, alas, binding arbitration) than through government organization which can investigate cases of food poisoning.

2) The US's private health-care system means the poisoned person is by default obligated to pay for care, unless someone else can be forced to pay. If the food poisoning requires hospital care, this can be quite expensive.

3) The US does not have strong job security laws nor a strong social safety net. If someone get food poisoning which keeps them from working for a couple of days, they may easily be fired, and find themself in economically precarious circumstances.

Because the US prefers lawsuits to resolve these things, there are lawyers who specialize in this area.

Change the laws - have strong food inspections, switch to single-payer health care, improve job security, and strengthen the social safety net for unemployed people - and there will be significantly less call for this business model.

Aren't there going to be likewise complex manufacturing processes behind the chemicals and machinery, including plastics, used in water treatment and piping?

It's turtles all the way down. That's the point.

Those processes could reasonably be considered essential in modern times, because we all need to have potable water available anyway. The manufacture of plastic disposable spoons could not.

Thanks, this is the obvious point every other reply here seems to blissfully ignore. The levels of cognitive dissonance are astonishing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongue-in-cheek

A tongue-in-cheek based on a straw man doesn't make you look good

Comparisons without numbers are just poetry.

The scale at which plastic spoons are manufactured completely dwarfs with efficiency, the effort to individually wash one spoon. It's likely 10X to 100X more expensive to the environment to wash that spoon.

See, its eco-theatre our generation will be remembered for. Fiddling around with plastic recycle while the planet burns.

What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. In reality, humanity has been washing spoons since the dawn of...spoons. Humanity has been making plastic spoons for ~60 years. "Because it scales [1]" is no argument whatsoever for doing something unsustainable.

[1] Right now, with cheap oil, that is.

So spoons are unsustainable? Not sure I follow.

It's more sustainable to throw away a plastic spoon that wash it. That's pretty plain - an individual has not optimized their process for cost and resource usage - they're just squirting randomly like 100X the soap it would take in a large industrial washer to get that spoon clean.

Efficiencies of scale are massive and irresistible. You cannot grow vegetables in your back yard at the same level of efficiency that big ag can, not even close.

You can't drive your individual car at anywhere the efficiency of a bus or train - we should all get on board that one, it makes sense to people. While somehow the other efficiencies don't. They just get mad when you point that out.

Industrially washing the spoon may be more efficient than someone washing it by hand. However, that's not really the comparison here. Even if the step of washing the newly created plastic spoons (if that exists at all) is more efficient, there's still a lot more going on.

Yes, sure. But manufacturing a plastic trinket is similarly cheap, to the point of vanishing small cost.

It is cheap now, but think of it more as a loan. The price of being so wasteful will come for future generations who will have to deal with all our rubbish and all sort of environmental issues we've been causing in the past century or so.

All true.

I think of it as a spaceship. We can argue about how expensive maintenance of the food recyclers, water purifiers and oxygen systems are, but that's really moot: we maintain those things or die.

We'd have to make the decision to stop the oil industry etc. before it matters though. Until then the marginal cost of 1 spoon is vanishing small, and fussing over it is spending time and effort on foolishness.

> It's more sustainable to throw away a plastic spoon that wash it.

I'm not sure what planet you live on, but I live on one with a finite amount of oil. It also happens to be a planet with beaches where I've picked up hundreds, if not thousands of these "sustainable" plastic spoons, and forks and knives and bottle caps and bottles, toothbrushes, straws, bags, and one-use containers of all kinds.

So when people talk about it being "sustainable", I admit, I fantasize about dumping a few hundred bags of this junk right on their front lawn and seeing how much they enjoy it.

In contrast, I have not once--not once--picked up a metal spoon off a beach.

What an astounding string of assertions. Maybe you should heed your own advice?

I don't understand your point. Are we talking about recycling plastic spoons or washing reusable spoons? Are you suggesting using plastic spoons and discarding them is better than washing reusable spoons? And are there no costs at all in disposing them?

read the article

The real difference is that having running water for washing things is a necessity, and can be also provided in an ecologically sensible way.

Manufacturing trillions of plastic spoons is insanity, but that's the free market for you. We put our comfort and vanity above everything. Unfortunately the top 10% that consumes the most by far will be the last to face the consequences, but they will face it too. Sooner or later these violent delights are going to receive their violent end.

Funny, but doesn't really work.

First, the manufacture of a spoon is going to involve water at many points. The same water that you wash it with, or likely even better because nobody wants to have sediment on their expensive manufacturing hardware. So on that part alone it fails, because the first picture includes the "rebuttal" in its own complexity.

Second, complexity greatly varies. Water purification is an extremely bulk and standard process we already use for a myriad ends. On the other hand, spoon manufacture has spoon-specific steps in it. Water purification is going to scale better because there's so much downstream use, and it's a single thing that doesn't need to be treated as discrete units.

I just lick it clean and put it back in the drawer.

Ooh look at mister fancy pants here with drawers.

lol, by 'drawers' I think they meant 'cupboard slide-out containers', not knickers/fancy-underpants/drawers.

Unless...

Wait hold up, where exactly are kitchen drawers a fancy thing? I don't think I've ever been in a kitchen here without at least a cutlery drawer.

Yeah, the joke was that I'm even more uncultured.

You might be joking but metal spoons are ridiculously good at not letting bacteria grow on it. A quick wipedown of any sort is basically all that's actually necessary.

I've found it much more difficult to clean a fork.

Wow didn’t think Joey has an HN account!

Lol. https://youtu.be/32hFijyWkmw

So much of recycling is more costly than getting new. I.e. injecting some (trivial) amounts of aluminum back into the extremely efficient aluminum mining/refining system is honestly more trouble than it's worth. Where I live recycled aluminum cans are shipped to a steel recycling plant (something that is worthwhile) to be dumped by the traincarload into each batch to precipitate out the sulfur, then skimmed and sent to a landfill. Useful, efficient and not just theatre.

You might've picked the worst example, as aluminium refining is an electrolysis process which is extremely energy intensive (Iceland imports a lot of ore and exports a lot of metal for this reason).

I might agree with you if you back your statements up with some data, but it does go against what I've always read about aluminium in particular.

Re-using is still much better though - there is essentially no cost to cleaning a metal spoon compared to building and throwing away a plastic one.

Bonus points for cleaning your spoons during the shower if you want to conserve water, Kramer-style (added since 90's sitcoms seem to have been popular in this thread).

Isnt that called negative externalities in economic theory? e.g. the overall cost od producing the spoon will be paid by governments who will have to deal with environmental demage... (and likely increased healtcare costs..)

It’s a good thing we have an infinite amount of aluminium to mine then or the system would be unsustainable in the medium term and it would be completely brain dead to do that.

Eight percent of the earth's crust is aluminum. That's a lot.

Of course, that doesn't mean that recycling aluminum is senseless - there's the energy cost of isolating the aluminum to consider. But literally running out of aluminum is not something to worry about.

Because of course we can mine the whole Earth crust. It’s a good thing our ability to effectively mine in not limited to a few kilometres and our ability to actually find ores is so amazing. I’m such a fool, sorry.

More seriously, I’m done with sarcasms. We actually need to recycle aluminium. Smelting is far more energy intensive than extraction and depletion is a very real problem. First, viable gisements are not that common. Second, as we extract the best, we are faced by poorer and poorer quality of ores which mean the cost of smelting gets worse and worse. Aluminium is definitely not endless as someone would have you believe in a reply.

Aluminum production exceeds that of all other non-ferrous metals combined. We're not anywhere near that description.

Anyone up for doing the math about how long it would take to deplete that much aluminum at the rate this planet consumes aluminum? Does it take us past the point the sun melts the earth?

Better read some more about that - aluminum is essentially endless.

The difference is you are already buying water in your kitchen for non-spoon purposes.

You are not already buying plastic spoons for non-spoon purposes.

Is there a better name for this "arguing past each other" or "arguing from a blind spot"

The use case for a single use plastic implement is very different from a reusable metal implement.

1. A plastic spoon is safe, sanitary, and very low cost. 2. Many can be industrially composted now, and have renewable sourcing.

Sentence one describes primary reasons why I would choose to use a plastic spoon. Sentence two has nothing to do with my use of the spoon.

To be clear, I have a strong dislike for single use plastic. Single use plastic is a scourge. I hate it when I see a plastic bag or bottle or implement in the park or a waterway. It's disgusting.

At the same time, plastic is a miracle. Most of the time, a reusable spoon makes more sense than a plastic spoon. But plastic spoons opens up food service options.

> From 3 July 2021, single-use plastic plates, cutlery, straws, balloon sticks and cotton buds cannot be placed on the markets of the EU Member States. In addition, the same measure applies to cups, food and beverage containers made of expanded polystyrene, and all products made of oxo-degradable plastic.

not sure how much it is enforced but I have to admit most single use cups or food packaging now at least pretends to be biodegradable.

It's ridiculous to compare those two aspects. Nature delivers water which can clean a spoon. Last time i checked plastic spoons didn't grow on trees. Also (apart from laboratory's experiments) plastics do not recycle, water can be cleaned and food waste in it naturally decomposes. Comparing these things downplays the enormous energy, transportation and even water consumption required to produce plastic.

Also you can describe anything with a few sentences. Just because it takes the same amount of words, doesn't make the process equally complex.

It’s a false equivalence as the potable, drinkable water extracted from this process is used for far more than just cleaning the spoon.

Cleaning the spoon is still easier

How old are plastic spoons? 50-70yrs-ish?

Reusing metal spoons is much older than that (by ok, 100-200yrs-ish - stainless steel was discovered on 1913)

> "You know the thing where you see something on Facebook, start reading it or composing a reply, and then you lose it?"

No, actually. I've never used Facebook, or Twitter. It's like having an automatic +10 on your roll for mental stability and anti-depression. I'd highly recommend it.

Facebooked and Twitterized... it means silo-ized (locked into partisan rabbit holes) and dumbed-down (incapable of comprehending concepts that require more than a few sentences to explain).

You know the thing where you see something on HN, start reading it or composing a reply, and then you lose it?

With HN, what happens more often than not is I see an interesting link, click on it, find some very useful information, often quite complex, which I then bookmark and come back to again later, typically learning something of value which I can then incorporate into other projects. There's really too much quality information disseminated here to absorb, so I have to pick and choose.

Quality of information on HN is certainly far higher than on the other social media platform I used to frequent, Reddit, where even on the tech subreddits it was a dumpster fire more often than not, to the point where I eventually just deleted my account there. And Reddit's superior to Facebook and Twitter, based on everything I've seen escape from those walled trashpits into the larger internet.

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