Metal straws are nice
Yeah, but I’m terrible about carrying them with me
Start a cocaine or ketamine habit and you will always remember to have it on hand.
I never had any issues with paper straws. Is it a skill issue?
my sneaking suspicion is that a lot of people are getting fast food in their car, they put the soda in the cup holder and put the straw in right away, and slowly sip on it for like a full hour and by the end of that it’s obviously going to become part of the drink…
Same.
The people I’ve noticed complain seem to buy giant drinks and let them sit around for a while.
Never been a fan of flat warm soft drinks myself.
okay so like, do you people posting this stuff actually think about it for even a second? or do you just not realize that physical plastic material ending up on the ground is a different thing than air pollution?
yoyu can’t compare the two, they’re completely different things, even if everyone stopped using fossil fuels it would still be exactly as bad to use plastic straws.
While this scum is allowed allocate all of the world’s resources; every drop of water you conserve goes to their data centers and pleasure fleets.
There is no conservation until they’re gone. It simply cannot be done.
Companies 3 years ago: helping the environment is part of our core values
The same companies one day later: start to heavily use and train AI
That was always just green washing bullshit.
Amazon bought an entire arena and named it “climate pledge arena”. You can’t make this shit up
helping the environment is part of our core values
By the way, back to commuting to/from the office, people!
I mean yes, but it’s not like they use an extra drop for every drop conserved, it’s still okay to not be wasteful.
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why is your local council providing 2 bins but sending everything to the one place?
when you bought it up what did they say?
Recycling centers try and then often give up and just landfill plastic. And then you’re dealing with the extra transportation to have it make a stop at the recycling plant on the way to the landfill.
There is a lot of “shift the blame off corporations to the consumer and act like they can do something” happening when in reality the consumer can’t do much, and what we can do isnt 100% effective anyway.
While this scum is allowed allocate all of the world’s resources; every drop of water you conserve goes to their data centers and pleasure fleets.
Does it? If everyone in America reduced the amount of water they used would data centres and yachts use it all up? Do you believe this?
The irony of using AI to make this image…
Humanity really is a lost cause
Training is expensive. Inference probably cost less than the mushy straw.
Do not patronize these systems, regardless of how small you think your individual impact might be. User counts are used to justify continued investments in these things.
People need to just say no.
I mean they use electricity, you want to advocate for more renewables in your energy mix locally then it doesn’t matter that they use lots of it because it’s renewable anyway
for example mistral is french: https://chat.mistral.ai/chat
MGX, Bpifrance, Nvidia, and Mistral AI plan 1.4GW Paris data center campus
A gigawatt-scale data center cluster is set to be developed outside Paris, France.
And how much co2 does it output? hardly any because France has tons of nuclear power plants:
We need the international court to set hard caps that will result in prison time.
Fuck the billionaires that do that, but that doesn’t mean that me using a straw isnt still making the shit worse. At least I can sleep at night knowing I am not making the situation worse, and I will still try to vote for politicians that are fighting against the billionaires
The normalization of needless single use products, like straws, by making them non plastic DOES make things worse. It delays real action, like removing straws altogether.
It’s greenwashing inherently unsustainable practices, just like introducing carbon capture technology on oil rigs or hyping electric cars as a way to keep the auto industry going (while suppressing more efficient means of transportation).
If we’re not going to fix shit, then why the fuck bother with mushy straws.
Agree with this take. It’s like yeah electric cars are technically better, but any advantage they have over combustion engines is blown away by things like public transportation, or designing walkable/cyclable cities.
Our solutions can’t just rely on swapping out for “greener” tech. We need radical changes to how we are currently living in order to ensure a livable future.
There is no future that is not radical. This gradualist, neolib (let’s make sure all the investors get a chance to divest from dirty tech before switching!) fantasy will fuck us. It’s been fucking us for a hundred years. It’s time to try literally anything else.
Our (Germany) cities are pretty much “walkable”, yet the public transportation sucks big sweaty monkey balls. Wherever you wanna go, plan a lot of additional time. And then it’s either
A) pay first class and enjoy SOME comfort (while still have to get TO the train in a horrible way)
Or
B) use the “normal” way and stay the whole time pressed against stinky other humans that breathe in your neck.
One way is far too expensive and the other even more.
And There’s not much to do about (except prices). How many trams, busses and trains and their tracks can you build. Yet our population gets bigger and bigger.
So fuck public transportation and fuck walkable. I wanna get to places quickly and comfortably. And that is a car. But at least we only have one, as we don’t need to work.
With adequate public transportation, it becomes much more comfortable and convenient.
My city installed a few additional bike paths, and added some more buses, and the difference is huge.
I don’t even need a car except when traveling longer distances.
But there is no adequate transportation. And we just have no space for more tracks and more trams and busses. Quite the contrary, we even canceled many routes. Public transport is a nightmare here and I wouldn’t use it if I’d be paid to do it. Well and bike-paths is the same problem. No space. Biking is bad here, the absolute opposite to our neighbors the dutch. But I wouldn’t wanna use a bike anyway. I wanna get to point B quickly.
You’ve got to invest in it before it gets good. You’ve got decades of car centric infrastructure inertia making cars the more convenient choice. All you’ve got to do is invest just enough to make alternatives actually possible.
I don’t know the challenges of your specific infrastructure, but there are certainly improvements that could be made
Sure you could tweak here and there, but you’d need to turn it completely around to make it attractive to me. And then, a car is still more appealing to me. But as said, we have limited space and growing numbers of people. It’s room to live or more trains. And trains are only used by the lower classes, so nobody actually cares…
Sorry, but I am confiscating your moral license if the straw you use is justification.
The straw you use does nothing but make you feel better, which I would argue is harmful. You shouldn’t feel better for doing nothing when such large problems exist.
Your use of the right straw is akin to you killing a single invasive ant in a rain forest, and saying you did your part to remove the invasive colony. You then spend every opportunity talking about how you killed that single ant, all while the ants have already multiplied and utterly nullified your non-effort contribution.
Shipping barges, data centers, meat production, gas and coal burning are all many orders of magnitudes greater problems than what straw you use. Gas, coal, and fossil fuel use is over 70% of all emissions, so that should be the primary conversation. In addition, these are all growing in use. Talk about that. Put your attention and action towards that.
The straw is a metaphor for doing what you can in your own world no matter how small, not the absolute culmination of all the good that we’ve done.
We can all do much more than straws.
Edit: let me rephrase this. Unless you are a billionaire, there is nothing you can do individually that matters. The problem requires banding together and holding these people accountable. This requires honest communication so people at least understand what the real problem is.
Given we are barely at the honest communication stage and ignorance is running rampant, and that we have a fast approaching deadline before nothing we do will work, I do not have much optimism for the survival of our species.
Do you know what a metaphor is?
It’s replacing real action in place of a good feeling. It’s THE plan to not do anything effective.
Eco-friendly straws don’t have to be mushy paper.
There are several other “vegetable plastics” that last long enough to serve as a fully functional straw, but months later degrade naturally. The reason you don’t see them being used is because McDonald’s doesn’t want to spend an extra $0.10 on every order, because that would totally bankrupt the billionaire company you know.
I gotta be honest, I would personally insert a straw into the nose of every baby seal on earth for a flying cruise ship.
That’s sad as hell tbh
Baby seals know what they’ve done
Oh totally. billionaires carbon footprint is many orders of magnitude larger than multiple lifetimes and generations of us normies. Abolish billionaires. Redistribute that wealth. The environmental future we want - NOW.
And yet, there aren’t very many of them but there are billions of us.
Even if their lifestyles result in 1000x as much pollution, they only represent 0.00004% of the worldwide population, which is not enough to move the needle.
To put that in perspective, metro Tokyo has a population of approximately 38 million. If the fraction of billionaires in Tokyo matches the global ratio, there would be about 15 billionaires in Tokyo. Anything 15 people do in Tokyo will be just noise compared to what the other 37,999,985 people do.
Let’s just pretend that all 3000 of the world’s billionaires lived in the USA. They’d still only make up 0.001% of the entire US population. Even if they were flying around in personal jets, being followed by Airbus Beluga jets carrying their yachts, it would still pale in comparison to the sheer number of people currently suffering in economy class right now.
I still think billionaires should be squashed by a hydraulic press, but I’m not kidding myself into thinking that doing that will have any impact on the environment at all. I support it more because they’re greedy assholes who are taking far more than their share, and who are using their immense wealth to distort the well functioning governing of the world.
The billionaires aren’t the ones teaching you about how the planet works. In fact how rich as person is has nothing to do with it.
If you want to understand how the planet works, learn it from planet experts.
Ok I’m genuinely curious, what are you talking about? Where did you get “teaching how the planet works?”
I’m curious as to why you’re using a straw at all.
is it that because you’re at a restaurant?
You should know that by giving most restaurants your patronage, you are contributing to a lifestyle that we all cannot participate in.
What does this even mean?
It means that anyone who does anything totally sucks.
i guess that means since billionaires fly on planes everyone else is free to: /s
Would you recommend a better solution? A high speed railway over the Bering Strait, perhaps?
bering strait railway is boring and easy, you only need to span like 80km of water and there’s an island in the middle.
The real shit is the TRANSATLANTIC RAILROAD, scotland - faroe - iceland - greenland - canada
Real hyperloop, not the Musk bullshit. Scaled up pneumatic tube systems operating at orbital speeds (7 km/s).
Most of the planes in that screenshot were over land.
They tricked us into taking all the blame for climate change, so we’re busting our ass off to reduce and they don’t even pretend to care. In truth we could do more for the environment with guillotines than paper straws
Always remember that coke and pepsi do not use recycled plastic in their coke or pepsi packaging, yet they are outwardly huge proponents of recycling the waste they create
Do they not elsewhere? Is it just Australia?
We want our packaging to have more than one life. In Australia, all our bottles and cans can be recycled and all our soft drink and water bottles under 1L are made from 100% recycled plastic*.
*Excl. cap and label
https://www.coca-cola.com/au/en/offerings/thank-you-for-recycling
huh? PET bottles are like, the single most recycled thing after asphalt, i think
