Plastic packaging disposal is super easy for me.

My area has a waste to energy facility (an incinerator) that burns all of our trash. Our recycling goes through a single-sort facility, then all paper and plastic from that stream gets burned in the incinerator too.

At this point, I think of my plastic waste as natural gas that had been borrowed temporarily from the local power plant.

LOL. MAGA cities.

We have Rock solid evidence that approximately 7 million Americans got denied the right to vote using common voter suppression tactics last election.

I LOLd. What you have is rock solid evidence of 7 million fraudulent votes in 2020 when all 50 state election systems were in chaos.

This is known in the business as the Maddow Defense.

People are slowly waking up to the truth that this was never about labor costs. The Chinese government deliberately built up their industrial capacity because production becomes power over time. They used every trick in the book to become attractive to manufacturing. For a while, cheap labor was one of the tools they had, but Chinese labor hasn't been cheap for a long time now. Sometimes now it is even more expensive than American labor, but we still can't compete because we've lost those skills, that knowledge, those networks.

WW2 was over before it started because America had the industrial capacity to outbuild the rest of the world combined, in every category. WW3 will go exactly the same way for exactly the same reasons, but it this time it won't be America.

My estimate is that approximately 7 billion people are alive today who would not be alive without oil and gas.

No, SCOTUS did not rule that. They didn't need to - the word "corporation" literally means "person".

What the Citizens United ruling really said was that humans didn't lose their political and first amendment rights when they work together with other humans using a structured organization.

When I tried opening my spreadsheets in Calc, anything that had dates in them was broken. Libre Office forces dates to follow the Libre Office locale setting, which in America is absolute garbage.

I can override any components of the default locale in Windows, and Excel uses the specifics provided by the operating system. That means that all of my spreadsheets that use sane dates (ISO 8601) work in Excel, and fail in Calc.

This has been a known problem for more than a decade, if the bug reports and forum posts I've found are accurate. The proposed workaround is to edit the locale definition and recompile the office suite.

Bears, rain, wind, other women, pickle jars, spiders, credit card bills.

From the source, page 300.

To implement this policy directive, DOC was tasked to make releasable portions of the catalog available to the public either directly or through a partnership with industry and/or academia. DOC was also tasked to assess whether statutory and regulatory changes are necessary to affect this change in responsibilities.

Under the prior administration, DOC was unable to complete a government owned and operated public-facing database and traffic coordination system. In the convening time, private industry has proven that they have the capability and the business model to provide civil operators with SSA data and STM services using the releasable portion of the DOD catalog. Furthermore, DOD Space Command confirmed that even after DOC completed its SSA system, USSPACECOM will continue to maintain the authoritative space catalog and will remain the provider of SSA and space domain awareness data supporting national security issues in space, including classified data sharing and threat awareness in support of mission requirements.

The Administration confirms the intent of SPD-3 has been satisfied by supporting private industry to provide SSA services, including through offerings of both a free basic service as well as fee-based concierge services to civil operators. DOC will continue to monitor the use of SSA services by civil operators to determine whether additional policies are warranted to ensure space remains a safe domain to operate.

You sound vaccinated.

And to think that our army of gender studies graduates was only a trillion dollars away from unlocking the secrets of male menstruation.

So, way, way back in the day, the Air Force (might have still been the Army Air Force - that's how old this anecdote is) decided to standardize cockpits. Making them highly adjustable is a huge pain in the ass, and very expensive.

So, they brought in thousands of volunteers for measurement. They measured torso lengths, the lengths of shinbones, the lengths of upper arms, the lengths of fingers, etc. Virtually every body part that had a length was measured.

They compiled tables of statistics for all of these data sets. As expected, each measurement had approximately a normal distribution - a bell curve. The plan was to build a cockpit with minimal adjustment that was still able to fit the vast majority of people in the wide middles of these bell curves.

Punchline: Their new cockpit didn't fit anyone.

That's an exaggeration, of course. It fit a few people. But not many, and certainly not the majority of pilot applicants like they hoped it would.

It turns out that even though almost everyone is basically normal in most measurements, almost everyone is also highly abnormal in at least a few measurements. You have stubby fingers. Joe has unusually long thigs. Bob has short forearms.

The moral of the story - and the way it ties in to the article - is that if you have enough dimensions, it is very normal for everyone to be abnormal in some way.

Rare earth metals aren't rare, they were called that only because they were difficult to refine when someone was thinking up a name for them

Rare can also mean "dispersed" or "low density". This usage is still common when talking about air. For example, sound is a train of alternating compression and rarefication of air. Jet aircraft are more efficient when flying in the rarefied air at high altitude. It is also still somewhat common when talking about social status, basically by metaphor. But it was once fairly common in other contexts too.

Also, by comparison to things like iron, rare earth elements are rare by both definitions.

On your main point, the part that I find most tragic is that battery electric vehicles would be unambiguously great if we had spent the last 50 years making electricity cheaper instead of making it more expensive. And by "we", I mean the fucking morons who destroyed our ability to reprocess uranium and build thorium reactors.

You probably don't want to drop all the way down to a dumb phone. You probably really want to keep a few key features. For me, I'd want to keep my TOTP app. I still want to provide internet access to my GPS device over bluetooth tethering. I still need my bank's app for uploading checks.

You probably have a few other things that you really want to keep too. Go ahead and pause now to make your list.

Now that you have your list: Delete all of the other shit on your phone

If you were thinking about buying a dumb phone to reduce distractions in your life, following my two step plan probably reduced your notification load by about 95%. And it still provides the essential communication services that you've come to rely on.