epic water filter + nalgene 32 oz hdpe bottle is a great, lightweight filtered drinking water on-demand system
filter pitchers are easy to use and a good safe guard against poor plumbing if you haven't had your home water tested
972 karma · joined June 1, 2022
filter pitchers are easy to use and a good safe guard against poor plumbing if you haven't had your home water tested
The idea that I could take one additional bike ride and not have to know that it's going to create a marginal increase in plastic pollution is a beautiful one.
If you care about a greener future or like the idea of a world that someday doesn't generate tons of plastic dust every single day through abrasion on concrete, then even if you decide the current product doesn't solve for your needs, this product and development along these lines is something to celebrate.
If you want to know how you can make a real practical difference in fighting pollution, supporting this company is a great way, as the standard "rubber" tire is a big source of plastic, forever pollution: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/tires...
I've followed these developments, the really sad part about this is nitinol shape memory tires were at first hoped to be a possible way to entirely avoid the disintegration of synthetic rubber from friction on pavement into microplastic/micropollution. Tires are responsible for an incredible amount of pollution even if you convert a car to an EV, that and brake pads. The NASA rover wheels that used nitinol for tires for example had no rubber at all.
Unfortunately this company found that nitinol wasn't enough by itself to give good tire properties, for one I think there were issues with traction. So they ultimately have just gone ahead and added the same tread material to the nitinol where the 'rubber meets the road', but at the least we can be happy these tires require 50% less rubber than normal ones. It also seems if they can get their re-tread program off the ground it will offer a reduction in the rubber that ends up in landfills: "In addition, METL tires use far less rubber than conventional tires, and the company is experimenting with different lower-emission rubber compounds".
If you care about pollution, we should all still support this company and purchase these tires if we hope to encourage them to perhaps have the budget for further r&d, it is a little sad though that there's no offering that's truly nitinol only for those who would be willing to sacrifice on other material properties.
There are other types of research on viruses, zoonotic virus reservoirs, all sorts of topics that don't involve intentionally making a sample more and more contagious or deadly.
Obama also instituted a moratorium on US federal funding for this class of research during his tenure. This is a bipartisan issue. Nothing controversial for anyone other than grant recipients who need this money to keep their business afloat.
You're doing the digital equivalent of saying "the pumpkins are right there for me to take, they were delivered outside for me to pick up and place in my car, for free. With no exchange of currency. I can just walk by the store and grab one and walk away".
In other words, you're ignoring both the legal contract (the terms of service) and the social contract (if everyone just grabs a pumpkin and walks away its obviously not going to be profitable and the company will stop offering it, we can only have the social 'nice thing' if everyone plays nice).
Just because its physically possible to do a thing doesn't mean the company consents to you doing it, or you deserve to do it.
You can easily litter. There's nothing stopping you. The ground is right there. You shouldn't though and you're rightfully called an asshole if you do.
If you applied your mentality everywhere, you would say "if you don't want me to litter in this National Forest, there ought not to be any businesses that sell disposable products within a 500 mile radius. It's not my fault you set this up for me to do so."
"analyzed the samples with laser direct infrared imaging and identified 20 to 500 micrometer-wide particles made from eight types of plastic, including polyethylene terephthalate, polyvinyl chloride and poly(methyl methacrylate)."
500 micrometer is 0.5 millimeter. According to a random Quora user, that's about half the thickness of your credit card/a ziploc bag, a paper envelope, etc.
Smal, but each sample "detected tens to thousands of individual microplastic pieces in most tissue samples", that adds up, though we don't know the distribution of sizes of those particules.
The rise of LLM and generative image and video absolutely poses threats in the form of criminal impersonation and scams, in terms of maliciously intentioned catfishing, in terms of manipulation of public discourse, and last but not least to the enshittification of online discussion.
Online discussion spam filters have been decent at removing low effort commercial shilling and automated trollposting, but LLM poses a real threat in that regard. If you don't want a 14 year old troll to be able to set an automated script to spam post 50 new convincingly written Reddit posts every hour about how horrible Playstation 7 is and how much better Xbox Series 15 is to /r/Games, then you care about human verification or spam detection that takes into account the new abilities of LLMs.
All that being said Worldcoin doesn't look like the best answer.
Now I'm wondering if Garmin InReach works at sea....
Super easy to inflate though.
Another option is an airtight backpack like those used by packrafters. Good for waterproof in a rainstorm but also good as improvised life preserver if it has an air purge/inflation valve like Watershed dry bag backpacks (if you're willing to pay more you can get them in black btw) have as an option.
You do have to deal with the flipside of having an airtight backpack though which is moisture management on the inside, if you put anything that condensates like a cold drink or has moisture like dirty gym clothes you'll need to make sure to keep the top opening opened to air out. Attaching a mesh bag to the outside though provides a mechanism for drying out items that retain moisture.
Beyond Watershed, another decent option is Patagonia Guidewater, Fishpond Thunderhead, or Simms Dry Creek. Have heard of waterproofness failures though with any given zipper based airtight bag whereas haven't really heard of any with Watershed's ziplock style closure. You don't get any internal organization or padding though. Though I've found that throwing a picnic blanket and spare jacket / insulation layer at the bottom provides some padding for a laptop and has a dual use.
Kind of an even worse version of this comment I'm writing right now.
I believe it should be normalized that we speak about the most egregious, permanent, impossible to reckon with environmental pollution in the same way - that is - it ought to be a crime to pollute in the most serious ways and that crime out to be punished with state executions.
But for example when refining YBCO (another famous superconductor - but one that requires liquid nitrogen cooling to demonstrate its properties), you can take YBCO and grind/blend it up into a powder and press the powder into whatever shape you want with a die cast and then re-bake the new piece.
Option 5: Convince yourself it's worth suffering through your shitty life because if you're a good moral person, you can keep your eye on the prize (eternal afterlife in paradise with all your dead relatives and loved ones in eternal abundance and joy), also historically achieved via religion.
"According to their analysis, religion is positively associated with life satisfaction, happiness and morale in 175 of 224 studies (78%). Furthermore, religion is positively associated with self-rated health in 27 of 48 studies (56%), with lower rates of coronary heart disease in 12 of 19 studies (63%) and with fewer signs of psychoticism (“characterized by risk taking and lack of responsibility”) in 16 of 19 studies (84%)."
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2019/01/31/religions-re....
Eg: Why is Sean M. Kirkpatrick (director of the Defense Department's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office) seemingly directly contradicting the testimony of David Grusch, despite Grusch claiming they worked together for years and that Grusch gave all the evidence he accumulated from people who came to him (people who allegedly worked on craft retrieval / reverse engineering) to Kirkpatrick?
Eg: Why are the congressionally mandated groups such as All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office not receiving or not requesting the Title 50 authority they need to access information on Special Access Programs (SAPs)? If Kirkpatrick is actually invested in succeeding in investigating what the government and military know, and gathering as much evidence and information as possible, why didn't he ask for the legal and intelligence authorities his group would need to do so? And instead just say they found nothing?
Eg: Why is the Navy being much more forthright with providing information, providing records of UAP sightings by seamen and pilots on carriers, while the Air Force stonewalls both the public as well as Congress itself?
Eg: Why are weirdos like the television personality Travis Taylor (scientist on the pretty much reality-TV show / UFO version of Ghost Hunters - Secrets of Skinwalker Ranch) appointed Chief Scientist of the UFO panel by the director of the UAP task force Jay Stratton?
Eg: Why are there respected scientists like Stanford's Chair of Pathology Garry Nolan - who claims he was hired by the DoD to investigate the brain damage of US servicepeople who got too close to UAP and were gravely injured or killed - involved in this? Are they victims of a psy-op or should we be taking their claims more seriously?
If we don't put public pressure on our UN-elected officials - those in the DoD and defense contracting, Department of Energy, etc. to reveal what they were told to reveal to Congress, these issues will continue to be swept under the rug just like they have been for decades despite the efforts of congresspeople and presidents.