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).

You can just watch the videos. It's made very clear where they sourced the information on the fraudsters.

This is why quite a few people followed in his footsteps and did the same thing. Went onto the relevant government website, pulled the data, and went to places. It's not like Shirley is the only one. He's just the one who started the trend.

tl;dr - research before you buy.

For people reading this thread. I'd recommend searching online about how well the suspend-resume works on Linux for the laptop model(s) you are interested in purchasing. Also worth looking into issues with very short battery life while in Linux. Because a lot of the power management ends up buried in some OEM options for the chipset windows drivers rather than properly expressed in the BIOS/UEFI.

It could be that. What it definitely was, though, is that Sony thought they could make more money selling to data centers than to the public.

Thanks for making my point for me there bro

I'm going to go ahead and assume bad faith on your part, because otherwise you're very stupid. But nobody in your potential audience is stupid enough to believe there aren't lasting effects to being bombed to shit.

I take your point about this being before the dawn of ubiquitous tech companies, but what kind of chilling effect did the Bell monopoly have?

About losing those lawsuits. They can absorb the fines and work around them. After a little bit of finagling the dollar amounts involved will not be terribly large. But on the other hand, and they have called this out in their sec filings, this basically makes it borderline impossible for any competitor to go up against them. In the long run it's probably going to save them money because traditionally the way they survive is by buying up whichever competitor of theirs the kids under 15 flocked to in order to find a place their parents didn't hang out

It's like how Microsoft lost their antitrust trial and the "punishment" was to give away millions of dollars of software to schools which they had been trying to get to take their software for 20 years...

I don't know what the opposite of a pyrrhic victory but I believe we've found it.

Do you think about me when you're jerking off, too? I know you do.

You will find that every single one of those age gate laws was written by a lobbying firm tied to Facebook.

There is no question that the age restriction laws are coming from facebook. Also Planitir. They are also behind some of the funding for lobbying for the laws. They use what's called template laws where they write a legal template that can be sent across the country to form the basis of laws that pass everywhere.

No we don't exactly know why. But it doesn't take a lot to figure out. It doesn't really drastically improve their tracking but what it does do is let them know that you are real. That's why we know it's about detecting AI slop.

It would take an AI to not get bored trying to construct working configs for SElinux

If the reality does not fit with your narrative, just write what you wrote.

Beancounter think. Yes, you can increase profits for the quarter if you gut the place. We were taken over by the bean counters where I retired from.

What was once an accounting office with 3 people, ended up becoming the largest group in the place. They gutted overhead, sucking it all up to pay themselves. I was mandated to travel to conferences at least once every other year. I couldn't perform the mandate, because there was no more overhead money.

Crazy thing was, my mandate didn't go away. I asked how the bloody hell I was supposed to do that. Boss mumbled something about taking quizzes online.

I forced the issue be during the self analysis part of the yearly review, that I had not perform a mandated activity for three years, and should be terminated for refusing direct orders. Gosh did they have to do a tap-dance.

So the bean counters pretty much destroyed the place. new innovations were not implemented, and we were falling behind. Meanwhile, they embedded a bean counter within each group, and were still agitating for more. I made a joke that we were going to have a 6 figure accountant hired to keep track of 5000 dollars of pencils. And then....

At the same time I was personally performing our groups finances and credit cards.

Perhaps you did not buy a Tesla. They are probably the most service-hostile vehicle ever sold in the US. Not sure about the UK, I haven't heard stories (horror or otherwise) about service for Chinese EVs yet. They would have to try really hard to be worse than Tesla, though.

First being in AI programmer is like having a limitless supply of Junior programmers doing their very very first gig and you are their manager.

Second what ends up happening is if the AI doesn't work you're doubling up your work because your boss tells you the AI must be working so you must be more productive. And if the AI does work it's just doing the grunt work and now instead of having a little bit of grunt work throughout the day to rest your mind in between the hard stuff you're expected to be full on 24/7 banging out the most difficult aspects of code one after another.

Basically it either doesn't work and now you have double the workload without any new tools to manage that workload or it does work and now your boss expects you to crank out super code 24/7. Either way your job just got a whole lot harder and a whole lot more miserable.