Fixed like Putin is "fixing" his borders through immoral violence, murder, oppression, ...? (Trump's regime are mimicking it well.) Or do you mean something else?

Are you saying USA, in the majority, is still imperialist? Is still racist? Is still white supremacist?

Tax CEOs of vape companies the percentage of their vapes that their company doesn't physically retrieve from customers to be recycled ...

A completely ridiculous and nonsensical proposal I can only assume was said in jest.

Hey, if your entire business plan is to produce actual garbage, maybe you should be held responsible for making sure that garbage has a pathway to proper disposal.

The company, sure, but selecting a fall guy to deal with arbitrary expenses will not help get anything done for the environment.

Yes, a jest. But essentially you have to directly impact the take home pay off CEOs as that appears to be the only thing they will change their behaviour for.

It sounds like a description of most of a deposit system to me, and deposit systems are good at encouraging recycling.

See "core charges" for many automotive parts to incentivize the return of waste for refurbishing at the higher end and bottle deposits for cans/bottles at the lower end. It's weird how things so common in one part of our society can seem so foreign in others.

Is that a genuine question, or are you parodying an ignorant point of view?

The World has limited resources, we don't have a spare.

Do you need it spelling out more clearly?

We are sitting on 5,970,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 kg ball of matter. We have a giant nuclear furnace in the centre of the solar system that's providing us with energy.

Some resources are still scarce. And a lot of those 6E24 kg is iron and nickel we can never get to. Another big fraction is basically molten stone. And we really should stop putting more carbon into the atmosphere.

Also, if you go for measures like mass processed, the weight of microchips, pcbs, parts is only a tiny fraction of what has to be processed and build in the supply chain.

Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.

> Agreed that it is smarter to use oil for plastics then to burn it directly.

My argument is that as long as we are still burning oil and gas, we might as well burn old plastic instead of new oil and gas.

If/when we stop burning oil and gas, then we can think more seriously about recycling plastic.

You might like to read about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incineration and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste-to-energy_plant

It's a fascinating topic. There's even more problems than the ones you bring up, but engineers are also pretty smart.

That sounds like an almost Malthusian viewpoint.

The world has effectively infinite resources, getting more is usually just a matter of figuring out better extraction techniques or using better energy.

The world only has effectively infinite resources if growth slows down, because exponentials get out of hand surprisingly quickly.

For example at 1% energy growth per year it would only take around 9-10k years before to reach an annual consumption equal to all the energy in the Milky Way galaxy. By "all the energy" I don't just mean consuming all the solar energy from all the stars, and using all the fissionable material in reactors, and fusing everything that can fuse, and burning all the burnable stuff. No, I mean also using all the gravitational potential energy in the galaxy, and somehow turning everything that has mass into energy according to E=mc^2.

From there at 1% annual growth it is only another 2-3k years to using all the energy in the whole observable universe annually.

Population at 1% growth also gets out of hand surprisingly quickly. If we don't get FTL travel then in about 12k years we run out space. That's because in 12k years with no FTL we can only expand into a spherical region of space 12k lightyears in radius. At 1% annual growth from the current population in 12k years the volume of humans would be more than fits in the sphere--and that's assuming we can pack humans so there is no wasted space.

We actually have population growth under 1% now, down to around 0.85%, but that only gets us another 2-3k years.

Eh, because the speed of light is finite, our growth in resource usage will have to 'slow down' to cubic after a while. Sure.

We are very far from that.

>effectively infinite resources

Sure, like effectively infinite atmospheric carbon sink, effectively infinite Helium, effectively infinite fresh water, effectively infinite trees ... we've treated these things as true, because the World is big and population of humans wasn't so big we've got away with that for a time, now those presumptions are coming to bite us, hard.

Yes, we can work our way out of some holes, maybe all of them. But we have to make things sustainable first, then spend those resources. We're not wizards, deus ex machina only reliably happens in movies.

A little Malthusian.

Did you mean "not plausible"? AV can detect novel viruses; that's what heuristics are for.

You'll also need to power it off. Air gaps can be overcome.

Yes, by using the microphone loudspeakers in inaudible frequencies. Or worse, by abusing components to act as a antenna. Or simply to wait till people get careless with USB sticks.

If you assume the air gapped computer is already compromised, there are lots of ways to get data out. But realistically, this is rather a NSA level threat.

Apparently I went from Germany to UK in 29 minutes, pretty good.

It's a 99.5% declared confidence and says it used 30+ signals.

Assuming you've a list of VPN IP addresses, and travel times between countries, I reckon you should be able to rule out some false positives.

Would be interested to know what the "signals" were that produced the match.

I'm on domestic broadband in the UK (IPv4), according to dnschecker they're on a mainstream mobile provider in Germany. Could be a private tunnel, but those would be rare. Which raises the question of how the confidence rating is made.

I like the general page presentation, a good landing page except that you'll tend to put off everyone who gets a bad result for the example. That might be turned around with something showing "if this isn't you, well done on your browser security" and maybe some compelling stats on confirmed matches from testing?

The schtick for Capitalism is that it is supposed to push all companies to the top of optimal resource production, the place you call the bottom.

Was it always the case that Western Capitalism was about optimising profits for an over-class, the optimising of resources was always just propaganda, or did it once have ethics?

Brands shifted away from garnering customer goodwill, and prioritized shareholder value by siphoning intangible assets accrued over decades of prior works.

There was little utility in judging if it was ethical, but merely to profit by the shortsighted stewards. =3

> Was it always the case that Western Capitalism was about optimising profits for an over-class, the optimising of resources was always just propaganda, or did it once have ethics?

Adam Smith wrote a whole book about ethics.

I actually think the ethical corruption has been very recent and driven by multiple factors, but the most important is the myth that people are rich because they deserve to be, and if they are poor it is because they are stupid or lazy. The rich therefore tend to feel far less noblesse oblige.

Why not a book about making co-operatives work, or managing direction in non-hierarchical orgs, management structure in public interest companies/charities, or establishing scientific organisations?

It sounds like he learnt lessons about the need for inclusion of users, need for strong information flow, what doesn't work (from his perspective) in hierarchy.

I read Maverick by Ricardo Semmler a long time ago and loved it about non hierarchy in business. Must re read it

That sounds useful. Consumers most likely choose the food they want to eat by type, being able to spot the healthier options within a category sounds like it would help me in the supermarket.

We have a traffic light system, pretty useful. But when all items in a category are bad for you, and you know it, them all having red lights doesn't help much.

I'd certainly try alternatives that are marginally healthier, if that's true generally then it puts some pressure on food industry to move to healthier choices.