Like, I can’t deal with these videos. They are literal populism. They tell the people what they want to hear, put forward some “bad guy” to blame everything on, and then move on.

Reality is much more complicated, and especially, much less one-sided and much more interesting than that. For example, the common narrative among “climate studies” graduates seems to be that oil = bad, and the oil industry is a bunch of greedy old guys who exploit the planet for profit. Thing is, that is a very narrow-sighted thing to say. There’s so much more truth and beauty in it than just that. Plastics is literally one of the best inventions humans have ever come up with. It’s formable into every imaginable shape and literally has the potential to transform our material world in any way that we can imagine, in any way that we want to. That people put so much blame on plastics today sickens me. It’s wrong to blame plastics, just as it’s one-sided to say “well yeah oil companies are just plainly bad entities who only brought harm onto our society and planet”. Truth is that the oil production has been widely supported by both politics and society for the most part of the 20th century because oil is just an incredible substance with incredible value and brings a lot of improvement, benefits and progress to the society. We should be glad that we had it, and we should be thankful for the oil companies for producing it in mass quantities. It is only now that we start seeing the downsides to it, and it has to stop. Still, I can’t stand videos that just simplify things down to saying “oil is bad, plastics is a scam, …”. It is not, it’s just outdated.

Yeah but who’s gonna sign responsible for potential traces of dirt on your food?

The problem with recycling/reusing plastics has been notoriously difficult in the past. That is why it’s so often incinerated/dumped instead of reused/recycled.

I want to explain my view of this:

Reusing plastics is difficult because the bottles are often produced in a way that makes them as thin (and lightweight) as possible. That has the advantage of saving oil, but has the disadvantage that they are in turn so brittle that if you tried to reuse them, chances are high that the bottles would either break, or - more dangerously - abrasive effects would cause the bottle to get tiny cracks, which would set free microplastics and potentially additives, which could be really toxic; and nobody wants to be responsible for this, so they are dumped.

Then there is the problem with washing the bottles. A lot of the plastics is not made to be brought into contact with soap, as I understand it, because the soap severely impacts the plastics. So washing them thoroughly is difficult.

Recycling has a different problem. Recycling consumes more energy than simply producing new ones. In the past, that was the reason to dump them. With cheap solar energy, the game could change. Recycling still takes a lot of energy, but as energy is getting cheaper, industry could reuse the carbon atoms in the bottle; in other words: reuse the material that’s in the bottle, not the energy that’s in the bottle. This will require even cheaper energy prices though to be economical.

Well yeah, “renewable” in itself is only good in certain contexts, such as solar and wind energy.

When it comes to renewable biomass, which by definition is renewable too, it’s not so friendly to the environment anymore. It consumes huge areas and destroys the rainforest to plant even more economically usable plants. Such as soy, cotton, …

So i’d rather see huge amounts of underground oil being consumed, than the same amount of biomass out of the rainforest being consumed.

… well, in its defense, if it weren’t subsidized, renewable plastics would indeed be cheaper, but only at the expense of huge areas of farmable land and the rainforest. So it’s either “consume 300% of the planet’s fertile land to produce plastics” or “subsidize oil”.

Btw this is a clear example where in statistics, temporal order does not imply causality.

We clearly are given our names waaay before our adult faces develop; and yet, it’s more likely that our genetic traits (and therefore adult faces) determine the name, rather than the other way around.

While reading through the comments, I also found this interesting thing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

The easiest thing would be to mount a remote network storage as a local directory. This way you can easily access it to read and write through normal software.