The microplastics in a product don’t have to originate in a product’s final packaging. Things like airborne particles on the production line, filaments from filters and cleaning equipment, manufacturing swarf, and cleaning processes that are oriented to killing small things with heat / UV / chemistry rather than filtering tbem out is probably more of the answer than leaching and degradation.
Without resorting to abolishing the family kitchen altogether (many years of church morning teas give me the heebie jeebies about foodborne illnesses around community food prep) - there are ways to avoid some plastic packaging. Depending where you are, wholefoods places probably exist and will happily sell you a scoop (metal) of the ingredient you need in a pickle jar (glass). Also a good way to avoid storing bulk amounts of rarely-used ingredients, saves some waste.
Has there been any serious proposal for hydrogen to replace reticulated gas in domestic supply? The cost to refit existing infra would surely make it less attractive than something like power-to-methane.
In the UK, British Gas and Cadet tried to force 2,000 some homes to change to hydrogen by cutting of their natural gas supply in order to run a trial project [0].
I just came across the article and came here to see whether it had been posted and I’d just missed it. Glad someone did, amazed it didn’t get same the traction. Amazed!
Syllabic notation is harder to understand, someone talked about it above, syntactical boundaries are harder to parse, and the language’s functional parts - things like tenses and inflections, are mostly written in kana, the rest mostly in kanji.
This article (featured previously on HN) discusses the efficiency thing a bit - https://yakkomajuri.com/blog/language-efficiency - though I think the pixel count metric is meaningless and leads to weird conclusions, there are some good thoughts.
Fun exercise, I went ahead and asked ChatGPT, here is what it had to say:
Prompt: what does ワープロ馬鹿 mean?
"ワープロ馬鹿" (waapuro baka) is a Japanese slang term that literally translates to "word processor idiot". It is used to refer to someone who is not proficient in handwriting kanji characters because they have become too reliant on word processing software and digital devices.
This term was commonly used in the past when computers and word processors were becoming more popular in Japan and many people were losing their ability to write kanji by hand. The term implies that people who rely too much on technology to write are lacking in basic writing skills and knowledge. However, the term is now considered outdated since the use of digital devices has become more prevalent in society.
Prompt: what is an equivalent term that would be used today?
Today, a more common term to describe someone who relies too much on digital devices and cannot write kanji by hand is "スマホ字 (sumaho-ji)". This term is derived from "sumaho" (smartphone) and "ji" (character), and it refers to people who are unable to write kanji characters by hand due to their heavy reliance on smartphones and other digital devices for communication and writing.
Other similar terms used to describe this phenomenon include "キーボード依存症 (kiiboodo ishizonshou)" which means "keyboard dependency syndrome" and "タッチペン馬鹿 (tatchipen baka)" which means "touch pen idiot". These terms reflect the increasing reliance on digital devices and the declining use of traditional writing methods in modern society.
スマホ字 seems completely made up, and google results for the others suggest entirely different meanings....
On the second and third try it came up with スマホ字バカ, which doesn't exist either.
When I asked entirely in Japanese, it insisted on キーボード依存症. The best it came up with after a while was 筆力低下, which literally means decline in ability to write, and doesn't seem to be used to describe this phenomenon, per Google search results.
Dated put probably not outdated - Japanese also retains パソコン (pasokon, short for “personal computer), which shows its age. I recall a Japanese friend explaining it in 2003, at which time the IME for kanji in Windows had had at least a decade of common use and was remarkably sophisticated. It may be that post-smartphone it’s been such a common phenomenon that everyone accepts it as part of everyday life, there are certainly enough articles and posts about it.
Children aren’t exactly reading as literary historians. The tropes that have been lightened up in these changes are things like equating disfigurement with evilness, fatness with moral failure, femininity (in women) with virtue. Kids will absolutely repeat the unkindness that they pick up in works like these. If you read through them, the changes are not “covering up” anything or “forgetting” history, they’re clearly there to lessen the ambient amount of ridicule against certain groups of people that kids get exposed to.
And - this happens all the time, you can look at Enid Blyton and things like Biggles for properties that have quietly changed language here and there to keep them from getting too dated. Panties get bunched when the currency changes from pounds and shillings, the _Spectator_ trots out another piece about wokeity sending us all to hell because Noddy and Big Ears aren’t gay any more - but those books stay in print.
If Mark Twain is more to your taste, go have a browse of an early 20th centry edition and see how you feel about teaching the language in that to your kids.
Encourage you to have a look at the number of different English-language translations exist of biblical texts and the kinds of debate that goes into discerning what those words mean.
The article is written from experience in one paediatric centre, when the pratice between different centres - and laws in different states - differ vastly.
Information about people seeking gender affirming care in different places and stages of transition is not refutable based on this article.
And it is anecdata - how many patients had positive outcomes? Article doesn’t tell you. What did the (brand new) centre learn from these cases with negative outcomes? What protocols was it using? Are they the same now? Are they common elsewhere?
