Arn_Thor

I suspect you’re right. From my hometown’s local waste authority: After [we have] collected the waste from your bin, the purple dotted bag [with plastic waste] is sent on for collection and pressing before being transported to large sorting facilities in Northern Germany and other places in Europe. Here, 75% of the content in the purple dotted bag (figures from 2019) is recycled, and the remaining waste (often residual waste and food waste that has been incorrectly sorted) is utilized for energy.

And more detail: This is how household plastic is recycled: Collected plastic packaging is first finely sorted in Germany, before moving on to recyclers in the same country or elsewhere in Europe. We differentiate between the recycling of household plastic, which is the plastic you sort at home, and plastic packaging from businesses. - The plastic packaging you sort at home is collected by the municipality or an inter-municipal waste company. They press the plastic together into large bales. - Plastretur transports the plastic to a sorting facility. - At the sorting facility, incorrect sorting and contaminants are removed. This can include paper and metal, or other items that ended up in the wrong collection at your home. - Additionally, the plastic is sorted into different qualities, and non-recyclable packaging is removed. The sorting facilities classify the plastic into several plastic qualities such as PP, LDPE, HDPE, PET before it is transported to a recycling plant. - At the recycling plant, the plastic is washed. This process also removes labels and glue. - Then it is ground and melted into small beads, called pellets. Pellets are a raw material that can be used to make new products from recycled plastic.

There's a certain logic to it, if I'm understanding how it works correctly. The training data is real interactions online. People tend to be more helpful when they're asked politely. It's no stretch that the model would act similarly.

“ However, Trajan still thought it important for such projects to go ahead if properly managed – the need for infrastructure and public buildings did not vanish just because previous efforts to construct them had been incompetently handled.”

Something something HS2…

I agree with the first part but I admit I love the smell of it. In small doses and always at some remove.

No, in these cases the right to build one house lasts for the duration of one male heir since 1972. There are also restrictions on the conditions of sale if I’m not mistaken, which makes it more difficult to sell off to big developers.

I added “really” to imply it’s impractical. What developer would pay a high premium? They can’t build a big tower unless they have a ton of adjoining plots. The village is abandoned and the owners are all abroad or just disinterested. The developer would have to do a lot of leg work just to find these people. And if one of them objects then the thing stalls.

It’s a lot of effort and high risk. Much easier to buy out active villages where you can knock on a door, show them a check and do it that way.

Edit: actually it may be even more difficult than that as the inheritance right appears limited to the heir building one house. I’m not sure the plots even can be sold. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Small_House_Policy

A missing part of the story is that so many moved abroad. So the land rights now belong to first or second generation migrants and there just isn't enough pull to get them back. Yet there are sentimental and family reasons to hold onto the land--it costs nothing. And the land plots can't really be sold to developers at a high price unless the whole village, or a section of it, all get together and agree.

I can shed some light on this. Most of these villages began their demise around the middle to late middle of the last century, before or during the upsurge of the economy that would lead to the city's boom times. Times were very tough, especially out in the sticks, so those that could move abroad, or send their kids abroad, did. That is a large part of why you have a huge ex-Hong Kong community in the UK, Canada, Australia, etc. Entire villages cleared out.

The thing is, they moved but most often retained land rights. So those villages fell into disrepair as people moved but the houses and plots of land usually belong to families that have lived abroad for one, two or three generations now. They could be developed but so far there's little incentive for people to do so, despite the high property prices (those that were very successful abroad instead bought property in Hong Kong's new towns and have seen asset values skyrocket).

Hong Kong's government has historically been very good at providing services for the outlying areas. The many villages that did not end up abandoned have for decades had all the amenities, with stable power, clean water, fiberoptic broadband and often gas as well.

Most Hong Kongers agree it’s nice that they don’t. The nature parks are treasured. It’s also a false dichotomy because it’s not about “housing or nature”. There is plenty of brownfield land but in the New Territories it would be politically challenging to develop on it because it would mean buying or forcing out the owners who have rights to the land because of the legacy system of male heirs.

Retaliation is abundant in the US. What are you smoking?

If a company thinks it can get away with it, it will. Saving money is more important than a hypothetical, minuscule and temporary hit to their reputation. There will always be consumers looking for a bargain at any real cost, workers desperate for a pay check, and shareholders worshipping the bottom line.

That’s why we need unions

You're barking up the wrong tree. (i) systemic change on a global scale is needed, individual actions don't "matter". (ii) corporations and governments are the only entities large enough to make changes. Governments need to force companies and incentivize individuals to make better choices, and help those that would be financially disadvantaged by those choices. (iii) paradoxically, while individual actions don't "matter", they add up of course. Both in energy usuage, and in voting. The latter is more important if we want governments to force and incentivize companies and individuals to make positive changes. So giving the environmental cause a bad name by yelling at individuals for making sensible financial choices is going to cost the green cause voters, which we sorely need.

Stop it.

> Wouldn't this only apply to research from the USA?

No. Lots of people from wealthy (and predominantly white) countries across the world have the same kinds of motivations.

To recognize that the existing structure of the world split between the haves and the have-nots is created only by human choices, not a natural state, is to admit to oneself: that one’s station in life is more luck than merit, that one is part of a fundamentally unfair system that one benefits from every day, and perhaps that one has a moral duty to fix it—or at least that the fix may require a dramatic change in one’s standard of living and habits and traditions.

For most people, who consider themselves inherently “good people”, that is a very tough pill to swallow. It is easier to look for other options, even to the point of some self-delusion.

Thank you for the comment. Everyone else is talking around the issue but you cut right to it, and did so very cleanly.

Thanks for explaining your reasoning. That sounds more reasonable than I’d assumed. I stand corrected

You think it’s biased because it’s using words like “right-wing” and “anti-diversity”? I’ve usually found such terms to be right on the mark, even if some don’t like it pointed out

No it doesn’t. The law’s application is ambiguous and the public discourse is rife with stories of doctors that won’t take the risk because the punishment is drastic and the legal details have yet to be properly established. Simply put, the non-profits can’t find enough doctors to perform the abortions.

And (need I point this out??) this is all utterly unnecessary

Ah. But that is expecting action from a reigning government that has proven itself unable to do literally anything forward-thinking. It’s regression all over.

I’m sorry but I’m just not going to switch off my orientation lock and turn my phone sideways just for a website to “work fine”. It’s 2024. I expect better

I’m not familiar with Delve. Care to elaborate?

Yes! I was a bit cagey because I hadn’t tested it so didn’t know if it worked. It’s a Mill smart convection heater. Their smart stuff works both with their app and with a Home Assistant integration (and via HASS with HomeKit as well). Really neat to use when it’s all set up.

What impressed me particularly is that the generation 3 smart heaters (which is my version) lets you specify to NOT connect to the cloud when it joins WiFi, and instead is accessible only locally—in my case via home assistant. (But I did have to create an account on the first-time setup to update the firmware) The fact their newest products offer this kind of functionality gives me some faith in the future.

Just bought a convection heater today. I was willing to spend more for a “smart” one, but on the one condition that I was confident it would work with Home Assistant. Certainly not opening my wallet for the likes of Haier until they change their tune.

Absolutely wrong. Mistakes happen. Bugs, fat fingers, laziness, hangovers--whether by human or machine, errors occur. The legal system was supposed to uncover the facts. Because of the Post Office coverup, the judges were told " no, there are no bugs. No, nobody has remote access to these terminals. Yes, the only possible way these figures could turn up is through theft." This despite the fact that at least one Post Office inspector explicitly wrote in a report that there was no evidence of theft. The legal system failed to penetrate the veil of lies and find the truth. That's a legal systemic failure.

Brazil

The Western media is so focused on it—over other conflicts—because we (in the West) are witnessing an ethnic cleansing committed by a country whose population has strong familial and cultural ties with the West. (Obligatory notadefenseofhamas)

Except in this case he walked from corporate cash to an academic role. I’d be curious why he left the integrity division in Meta. Anyway, when someone like this expresses caution it causes me to listen.

Very true. But there is probably something about the fact that traffic accidents are direct human error, usually, that make us more comfortable with the risk than the prospect of a systemic, corporate or technical error. Entirely irrational of course.

Seems to me the solution to the union problem would be some kind of direct deal with the union on outsourcing rather than a workaround based on staff rules relating to seat numbers.

Exactly. Someone would have looked out the window, seen no apparent fire, and opened the slide right into a runaway engine

Same. Also I’ve had some software error out as it waits for drives to spin up (in an NFS share context).

That is one argument. But the company doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt