A bit more about the latter. Beyond organophosphates, the main other alternative is pyrethroids. These are highly toxic to aquatic life, and they're contact poisons to pollinators just landing on the surface (some anti-insect clothing is soaked in pyrethrin for its effect). Also, neonicotinoids are often applied as seed coatings (which are taken up and spread through the plant), which primarily just affect the plant itself. Alternatives are commonly foliar sprays. This means drift to non-target impacts as well, such as in your shelterbelts, private gardens, neighbors' homes, etc. You also have to use far higher total pesticide quantities with foliar sprays instead of systematics, which not only drift, but also wash off, etc. Neonicotinoids can impact floral visitors, with adverse sublethal impacts but e.g. large pyrethroid sprayings can cause massive immediate fatal knockdown events of whole populations of pollinators.

Regrettable substitution is a real thing. We need to factor it in better. And that applies to nanoplastics as well.

So, when we say microplastics, we really mainly mean nanoplastics - the stuff made from, say, drinking hot liquids from low-melting-point plastic containers. And yeah, they very much look like a problem. The strongest evidence is for cardiovascular disease. The 2024 NEJM study for example found that for patients with above-threshold levels of nanoplastics in cartoid artery plaque were 4,5x more likely to suffer from a heart attack. Neurologically, they cross the brain-blood barrier (and quite quickly). A 2023 study found that they cause alpha-synuclein to misfold and clump together, a halmark of Parkinsons and various kinds of dementia. broadly, they're associated with oxidative stress, neuroinflammation, protein aggregation, and neurotransmitter alterations. Oxidative stress is due to cells struggling to break down nanoplastics in them. They're also associated with immunotoxicity, inflammatory bowel disease, and reproductive dysfunction, including elevating inflammatory markers, impairing sperm quality, and modulating the tumor microenvironment. With respect to reproduction, they're also associated with epigenetic dysregulation, which can lead to heritable changes.

And here's one of the things that get me - and let me briefly switch to a different topic before looping back. All over, there's a rush to ban polycarbonate due to concerns over a degradation product (bisphenol-A), because it's (very weakly) estrogenic. But typical effective estrogenic activity from typical levels of bisphenol-A are orders of magnitude lower than that of phytoestrogens in food and supplements; bisphenol-A is just too rare to exert much impact. Phytoestrogens have way better PR than bisphenol-A, and people spend money buying products specifically to consume more of them. Some arguments against bisphenol-A focus on what type of estrogenic activity it can promote (more proliferative activity), but that falls apart given that different phytoestrogens span the whole gamut of types of activation. Earlier research arguing for an association with estrogen-linked cancer seems to have fallen apart in more recent studies. It does seem associated with PCOS, but it's hard to describe it as a causal association, because PCOS is associated with all sorts of things, including diet (which could change the exposure rate vs. non-PCOS populations) and significant hormonal changes (which could change the clearance rate of bisphenol-A vs. non-PCOS populations). In short, bisphenol-A from polycarbonate is not without concern, but the concern level seems like it should be much lower than with nanoplastics.

Why bring this up? Because polycarbonate is a low-nanoplastic-emitting material. It is a quite resilient, heat tolerant plastic, and thus - being much further from its glass transition temperature - is not particularly prone to shedding nanoplastics. By contrast, its replacements - polyethylene, polypropylene, polyethylene terephthate, etc - are highly associated with nanoplastic release, particularly with hot liquids. So by banning polycarbonate, we increase our exposure to nanoplastics, which are much better associated with actual harms. And unlike bisphenol-A, which is rapidly eliminated from the body, nanoplastics persist. You can't get rid of them. If some big harm is discovered with bisphenol-A that suddenly makes the risk picture seem much bigger than with nanoplastics, we can then just stop using it, and any further harm is gone. But we can't do that with nanoplastics.

People seriously need to think more about substitution risks when banning products. The EU in particular is bad about not considering it. Like, banning neonicotinoids and causing their replacement by organophosphates, etc isn't exactly some giant win. Whether it's a benefit to pollinators at all is very much up in the air, while it's almost certain that the substitution is more harmful for mammals such as ourselves (neonicotinoids have very low mammalian toxicity, unlike e.g. organophosphates, which are closely related to nerve agents).

This is an interesting observation, but not entirely false. There are edits on Wikipedia that basically amount to "wiki link every word in the article". IMHO this could well be in violation of potential laws against algorithms. I'm not sure if Wikipedia should get a pass because it is "free" or whatever.

Wrong, âoeslopâ means excessive amout of AI content. It can be quite accurate and correct and still be called slop.

This could also be fake, designed to make people like that look stupid by basically satirizing their rants

that yummy koolaid

I hate all of this sales pressure BS - that the instant anyone hears your name you have to try to "convert" them to sales - and I literally run a webstore.

It's all so deeply anti-consumer, and I want no part in it.

Some states are not allowing RealID that has an address outside the voting precinct. This is why Student IDs are needed. Certainly when I was at school my driver's license indicated I lived in a different state.

ReadID does not include an indication of citizenship and non-citizens can get them.

It is unfortunate that some of the items that can be used to get a RealID are also proof of citizenship and thus they could have added this information to the card at that time. I'm not sure what to do if somebody thinks they are a citizen but lack any of the acceptable proofs, they may have to get the RealID without the citizenship indicator if they need it soon, and there will have to have another option than a RealID to register to vote.

None of this has anything to do with using RealID or any other license or card at the polling station. That is ONLY to prove you are using the right name, you have to be registered in order to vote.

You need ID to register to vote. Stop lying.

Do you carry your birth certificate with you because you needed it to get your passport?

The ID at voting is supposed to confirm that the person is a particular registered voter. If they are not allowed to vote then they would not be registered.

I do agree that people would feel more comfortable about the voting system if voters produced a physical object rather than the current scheme of saying a name that is registered and they can assume nobody else will say. If they allowed a few obvious things like Student ID's or utility bills the number of disenfranchised voters would be small enough that it would not effect the voting results (it would not be zero though so there will always be sob stories for opponents of ID). Crossing names off in a register is still going to be done since that is the real prevention of fraud (including stolen IDs), but public comfort even if it can be proven that the IDs do nothing can be considered a useful goal.

The Republican attacks on the ability to register to vote are pretty serious. IMHO anything done by the government that happens to know if you are eligible to vote should automatically register you, in particular getting a RealID drivers license, and quite a few methods of applying for benefits. The attacks on mail-in voting are also blatant, mail-in votes are a good deal more secure than any non-biometric ID since they require the voter to have access to the mailbox that the numbered ballot is delivered to. I also personally know I will be out of the country on Election Day so I am personally disenfranchised by this. The continuous claim that the only thing in that bill is ID at voting is a LIE, stop doing it.

Firstly, I see you have this notion that martian rocks must all be igneous.

You're not talking about rock, you're talking about regolith.

Depending on where the regolith is sourced

Regolith is not "sourced", it's blown across the whole planet. It's not simply "whatever the underlying strata is made out of".

But, since we are playing 'name the ignorance' in this exchange, your attestation stat perchlorate is 0.5% liberatable oxygen says 'Say i'm ignorant of basic chemistry without saying i'm ignorant of basic chemistry, and am bad at reading too.' The 0.5% statistic comes from the publication at bottom, and is the proportion of the regolith that is perchlorates.

I am the one who mentioned that regolith is 0.5% perchlorates, not that "perchlorates are 0.5% oxygen". *facepalm*

"Saying we'll get oxygen from the 0,5-1% of a poison in martian regolith, rather than bulk ice or CO2, is..."

For God's sake, learn to fucking read.

Washing the regolith to remove the perchlorate is a requirement for *any* other use of that regolith

Which is why you shouldn't be celebrating its existence. It is a problematic contaminant, not a resource.

As you have rightly pointed out, the water ice on mars is more 'frozen mud'. Cleaning the melt is going to be a necessary first step to using it *regardless*. That means either vacuum distillation, thermal distillation, or reverse osmosis filtration. Again, NOT OPTIONAL. This is necessary equipment that you need to bring, regardless.

And this just to get water, the most basic of offworld resources. And all of that equipment (especially the mining hardware itself) requires maintenance and spare parts, which impose more dependencies. And the TRL for use on Mars is low regardless.

You've gone from talking up the ease of operating on Mars to talking it down, yet your self-righteousness hasn't shifted at all in the process.

RO filtration is the least energy intensive of these.

Except, it isn't. 0,5-1% perchlorates. RO typically removes 90-95% of perchlorates. So you're down to ~500ppm. Human safety levels** are in the low parts per billion. You're five orders of magnitude off. Yes, you can purify water that far - and the more perchlorates, the easier - but you're talking an over millionfold reduction. It is not at all trivial. You're talking first RO to get it down to levels where it won't hinder bacterial growth, then bioreactor bacterial remediation, then filtration, then RO, then ion exchange. This is not some little, simple system.

** Plants can tolerate much more perchlorates than humans, but they also bioaccumulate perchlorates of exposed to them, so you have to reduce the water to low ppb levels.

The end products are clean water and perchlorate contaminated mud, and clean mud, with contaminated water.

Viola! *eyeroll*

And your "plan" for dealing with waste perchlorate doesn't just magically produce pure O2 and NaCl in the real world. First off, molten sodium perchlorate, which is what it becomes before it decomposes, is an extremely corrosive oxidizer. Exactly what are you planning to make the furnace out of, platinum? Secondly, you never get perfect decomposition. Apart from residual perchlorates, you have residual sodium chlorate, which is also corrosive, and is a literal herbicide. And your gas stream will contain contaminant chloride and chlorine dioxide, which, news flash, you don't want to breathe.

There is no way on Earth anyone would ever prefer this to just conducting electrolysis on the water that you've already purified.

I would be very surprised if someone had that argument when the car was invented. You're really stretching for this one.

Waymo might have done the right thing here. If the car had sped away and accidentally run over the person, that would be a very different story.

The guy in the car was annoyed for six minutes and then it was over. I have some sympathy but not really.

From the article: