By what metric? Recycling gives a new use to discarded materials, so the material might be 100% not-discarded, but new energy is still consumed in the recycling process. This is why reducing and re-using are more powerful levers than recycling.
There is also the detail of whether a material is truly “re” cycled back to the original use, or is “down” cycled to a use with less rigorous technical requirements.
I hadn’t previously come across the printing press as an influence on witch hunts, interesting. It is pretty far down the Wikipedia article, though, and a different book printed almost two hundred years later is also cited as highly influential. I devoutly hope we are not in for two hundred years of unchecked social media and AI driven misinformation.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_hunt
…in 1487, Kramer published the notorious Malleus Maleficarum (lit., ‘Hammer against the Evildoers’) which, because of the newly invented printing presses, enjoyed a wide readership. It was reprinted in 14 editions by 1520 and became unduly influential in the secular courts.
The 1647 book, The Discovery of Witches, soon became an influential legal text. The book was used in the American colonies as early as May 1647, when Margaret Jones was executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts, the first of 17 people executed for witchcraft in the Colonies from 1647 to 1663.
And the lab issuing the fake results is based in the US :(
…a single US-based laboratory had certified at least half of the products that had failed Choice’s testing, and that this facility routinely recorded high test results. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-07-04/questions-over-lab-that-tested-sunscreen-spf-claims/105458458
In the past. Earth no longer has enough of the applicable isotope for them to happen. But it’s cool we found evidence at least one existed! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
Anti-intellectuallism is a repeating story in world history. Something about human genetics makes our communities susceptible to this. Khmer Rouge and China’s Cultural Revolution are a couple of examples of these movements gaining control of a government. Witch hunts (any woman with knowledge perceived to threaten church teaching must burn) were a long standing practice often driven from non-governmental actors.
It always passes, but previous iterations have taken decades or hundreds of years.
I’ve occasionally been part of training hourly workers on software new to them. Having really, really detailed work instructions and walking through all the steps with themthe first time has helped me win over people who were initially really opposed to the products.
My experience with salaried workers has been they are more likely to try new software on their own, but if they don’t have much flexible time they usually choose to keep doing the established less efficient routine over investing one-time learning curve and setup time to start a new more efficient routine. Myself included - I have for many years been aware of software my employer provides that would reduce the time spent on regular tasks, but I know the learning curve and setup is in the dozens of hours, and I haven’t carved out time to do that.
So to answer the question, neither. The problem may be neither the software nor the users, but something else about the work environment.
The skills of both writing useful minutes and prioritizing actually sending them out are frustratingly rare. An average meeting with five or six people has even odds of not including someone with both of those skills. I can see where reliably having a mediocre AI summary might be an advantage over sometimes having superb human-written minutes and sometimes having nothing.
I do not believe it is possible for cultured meat to ever be cheaper than industrially farmed meat. An animal as an integrated system has too many inherent efficiency advantages over a lab culture, even an industrially-scaled lab culture.
Cultured meat will come down in price, maybe from 10x animal meat to 2-3x, but it’s always going to be a novelty/luxury and will never compete on price as long as industrial animal farming practices are legal.
Insurance might not pay if the person doesn’t meet CDC guidelines. The $140 cost will probably prevent a lot more vaccinations than the extra pharmacy hoops.
Given that kids sometimes play outside, or take some time to get loaded into or out of cars in a driveway, and I am also sometimes outside or driving to or from my house, I feel like I have a decent handle of what kids live where in a one block radius of my house. I may not know the parents, but I would know which door to knock on to meet them.
The vice signaling at the Fed level such as the “alligator” compound, and the “encampments bother my snowflake sensibility, just move them” shit being done in D.C. is not a carbon copy of whatever California is doing. Success at their self-stated goals is TBD, but the California government is putting actual resources to attempt to provide appealing options to those being displaced.
From the linked article, bolding mine:
Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday announced the creation of a statewide task force aimed at dismantling homeless encampments on state property and expanding access to shelter and services.
The State Action for Facilitation on Encampments, or SAFE Task Force, will coordinate efforts across multiple state agencies, including the California Highway Patrol, Caltrans, and the state’s health and housing departments.
The governor’s office stated that the task force will prioritize sites deemed unsafe and collaborate with local governments to connect individuals with shelter, health care and substance use services.
I think you are conflating chronic homeless (less than 25% of all homeless) with people who are homeless for the first time, or have gone in and out of homelessness one or two times. The transiently homeless are absolutely driven there by lack of housing. Chronically homeless tend to have multiple issues that make serving them a challenge, but targeted support programs have been shown to make significant inroads even there.
This page has a lot of detailed breakdowns: https://endhomelessness.org/state-of-homelessness/
Yes, specifically focusing on birds. That is the focus I usually see when cat hunting comes up online.
It makes sense small animals that can’t fly would be easier prey - and therefore more likely to be impacted by predation - but I guess only birds are cute or something.
When one of my grandfathers died, none of his children or ex-wives wanted anything to do with a funeral or burial arrangements. My parents found a place that accepted his alcoholism-ravaged body, and they took care of things. I’m not sure of the details, and seems likely it wasn’t a medical school, but some organization took the body “last minute”.
Cats kill huge numbers of birds. Most small bird species have high reproduction rates, and crowding results in higher death rates from increased disease and parasite spread, competition for food, and all the good shelter from predators being taken. Higher death rates from one cause (say, cats) results in less death rates from crowding-related causes. I haven’t seen any evidence that, in general, cat hunting ends up actually impacting bird populations.
Specific species of birds in certain locations have been harmed by cats: the Wikipedia page list several examples in Australia (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat_predation_on_wildlife). So it’s good to have local awareness if there’s a particular vulnerable population. But in general, keeping cats inside is only for their own safety and won’t impact bird population one way or another.
It may not be abstractly good for cats to be allowed outdoors (my family growing up had a cat eaten by the neighbors dogs, a cat get hit by a car, multiple cats get serious injuries from fights with neighborhood cats, etc.) But having been in a household with a series of cats that only went out when they asked to be let out: they ask to be let out every day. It is completely inconsistent with my experience that a cat would “never want to go outside again”.
I see so much argument around UBI with the assumption it has to be enough to live off or it’s worthless. But Alaska’s system makes a real difference to reducing the number of people living below poverty level, even being just a small fraction of what is required to live there for a year. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/pop4.398
Although not designed as a social program to redistribute income, the Alaska Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) has been reducing poverty by providing equal annual payments to nearly all state residents for over 40 years. …the PFD reduced the number of Alaskans with incomes below the US poverty threshold by 20%–40%… The effect of the PFD has been even larger for vulnerable populations. The PFD has reduced poverty rates of rural Indigenous Alaskans from 28% to less than 22%, and has played an important role in alleviating poverty among seniors and children… up to 50% more Alaska children—15% instead of 10%—would be living in poor families without PFD income. The poverty-ameliorating effects of the PFD have lessened somewhat since 2000, as dividend amounts adjusted for inflation have been declining.
It’s a war of attrition at this point, with Ukraine providing almost all the people to become casualties but highly dependent on foreign aid for weapons, ammunition, intelligence, and continued sanctions enforcement on Russia. If either the foreign support or the domestic supply of soldiers falls short before the Russian economy collapses, Russia gets to keep the occupied land. If the first break is the ruble tanks to the point desperate poor foreigners stop signing up en masse to be cannon fodder in the Russian army, Ukraine could realistically take back the territory they lost.
Arguably Bernie got as many primary votes as he did (a good showing but a legitimate loss) because inside politics had cleared the field of more compelling challengers to Clinton. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/11/14/16640082/donna-brazile-warren-bernie-sanders-democratic-primary-rigged
As late as the 19th century? Belief in “like cures like” alternate medicines is still widespread today!
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7253376/