For serious, the easy solution is right there, go back to metal caps on all glass bottles. Twist off caps are still available on quite a bit, but even just going back and using a bottle opener would be fine.
It sounds like you're talking about the very caps (i.e. beer bottle caps) that the article says are the problem? Maybe you can link a pic of the caps you're talking about.
The ecodesign requirements will include:
— resistance to accidental drops or scratches and protection from dust and water
— sufficiently durable batteries which can withstand at least 800 charge and discharge cycles while retaining at least 80% of their initial capacity
— rules on disassembly and repair, including obligations for producers to make critical spare parts available within 5-10 working days, and for 7 years after the end of sales of the product model on the EU market >
— availability of operating system upgrades for longer periods (at least 5 years from the date of the end of placement on the market of the last unit of a product model)
— non-discriminatory access for professional repairers to any software or firmware needed for the replacement
The (bolded) requirement of 5 years of OS upgrades from date of end placement on the market is huge for Android devices, as currently to get that you pretty much need to buy a high-end Samsung or Google Pixel device.
Regarding battery replacement, the above pages links to https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/... in which section 4c, states:
From 20 June 2025, manufacturers, importers or authorised representatives shall ensure that the process for battery replacement: meets the following criteria:
— fasteners shall be resupplied or reusable;
— the process for replacement shall be feasible with no tool, a tool or set of tools that is supplied with the product or spare part, or basic tools;
— the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out in a use environment;
— the process for replacement shall be able to be carried out by a layman.
It will be very interesting to see how device manufacturers deal with the battery replacement issue, and whether the whole "we have to glue your phone together to keep it waterproof!" argument holds any water.
Wilmore added that he felt pretty confident, in the aftermath of docking to the space station, that Starliner probably would not be their ride home.
Wilmore: "I was thinking, we might not come home in the spacecraft. We might not. And one of the first phone calls I made was to Vincent LaCourt, the ISS flight director, who was one of the ones that made the call about waiving the flight rule. I said, 'OK, what about this spacecraft, is it our safe haven?'"
It was unlikely to happen, but if some catastrophic space station emergency occurred while Wilmore and Williams were in orbit, what were they supposed to do? Should they retreat to Starliner for an emergency departure, or cram into one of the other vehicles on station, for which they did not have seats or spacesuits? LaCourt said they should use Starliner as a safe haven for the time being. Therein followed a long series of meetings and discussions about Starliner's suitability for flying crew back to Earth. Publicly, NASA and Boeing expressed confidence in Starliner's safe return with crew. But Williams and Wilmore, who had just made that harrowing ride, felt differently.
Wilmore: "I was very skeptical, just because of what we'd experienced. I just didn't see that we could make it." [emphasis mine]
The official, though incomplete, logs of Skynet-1A’s status suggest final commanding was left in the hands of the Americans when Oakhanger lost sight of the satellite in June 1977.
But however Skynet-1A then got shifted to its present position, it was ultimately allowed to die in an awkward place when really it should have been put in an "orbital graveyard".
This refers to a region even higher in the sky where old space junk runs zero risk of running into active telecommunications satellites.
Graveyarding is now standard practice, but back in the 1970s no-one gave much thought to space sustainability.
Here in the UK public service telephone helplines have gone down the toilet since the employees worked from home , and a knock on effect of that is councils suddenly realised that perhaps they don't need so many of these people after all and my local one sacked hundreds and replaced them with AI.
And thats before we get to jobs being outsourced abroad even more than they were in the past. If you're not in the office you're not in the office - doesn't matter if you're next door or across the ocean for a lot of roles.
First, phone support workers are not exactly "top tech talent", which is the point of the article.
Second, you're suggesting that these workers' jobs wouldn't have been replaced by AI anyway (or outsourced until they were later replaced by AI).
It seems to me that phone support workers are one of the best candidates for working from home, because how can a worker "slack off" at home when there are absolutely solid metrics about the work being done (calls answered, call length, recordings of the call)? All the while saving the cost of maintaining a building to house them while they work. Of course that doesn't keep them safe from the risk of replacement by AI for any organization attempting to cut costs, though as anyone who has yelled "AGENT!" into a phone knows, quality will surely suffer.
Signal pays $14 million a year in infrastructure costs, for instance, including the price of servers, bandwidth, and storage. It uses about 20 petabytes per year of bandwidth, or 20 million gigabytes, to enable voice and video calling alone, which comes to $1.7 million a year. The biggest chunk of those infrastructure costs, fully $6 million annually, goes to telecom firms to pay for the SMS text messages Signal uses to send registration codes to verify new Signal accounts’ phone numbers.
There is no royal road to geometry. -- Euclid
