Tar_Alcaran

I do workplace safety, and it’s incredibly hard to work with (manufactured) stone in a safe way. The dust gets everywhere, and you basically have to take the same safety precautions as with asbestos remediation.

Every resin-based material is friable after the resin decays. That’s one of the major problems with asbestos roofs, the resin holding the asbestos is breaking down after decades of sunlight.

What do you think most brake pads are made with?

Today I learned the US allowed asbestos brakepads till mid 2024. Jesus fucking christ people.

Aren’t the vast majority of people suffering cancer from asbestos exposure the people that worked with asbestos for years?

Sorta kinda. It was much easier to get prolonged asbestos exposure than repeated glyphosate exposure. We used it in everything, including carpets and roofs. The asbestos fibers in those roofs are fine, but the glue holding them together isn’t. It’s been falling on the ground since forever, but it’s accelerating more and more.

Meanwhile, the only people working unsafely with glyphosate are basically a subset of farmers. Now, I’ve basically NEVER seen a farmer handle chemicals according to the instructions, so within that group unsafe exposure is basically 100%, but it’s a much smaller fraction of the population.

For all the panicky people:

Microplastics are bad, but they’re not remotely close to asbestos bad. Nobody is dying horribly from emphysema because they accidentally contacted microplastics two decades ago. The effects absolutely exist, but they’re quite subtle and do not involve suffocating while you cough your lungs out in small pieces.

Gylphosate is bad, but it’s mostly bad for the people working directly with it and ignoring every safety precaution (the Venn diagram of those two groups is pretty much a circle). Eating food that was once treated with gylphosate will not be remotely bad for you on any measurable scale.

Source: am chemist, work as a safety professional (independent, no large company is paying me for anything but an occasional audit that is mostly unrelated to chemistry)

But, I’ll happily add something that’s bad, but not on the level of asbestos. Indoor cooking on fire and/or with poor ventilation. It creates combustion products, releases particulate and smoke and many complex volatiles that are just drifting around in your house for pretty much the entire evening.

Edit: and growing your own food on local soil in a city. That dirt has been collecting pollution for a century, and the odds are pretty decent that it might actually qualify for remediation if you live near anywhere industrial or a big road that’s been there for a while. Get your soil tested, or use raised beds if you’re growing food.

Not in tech, but LLMs have been great for my safety and compliance consulting business. I can honestly say LLMs have made me thousands of euros.

Before LLMs, I would spend quite a bit of my regular workday on creating safety plans and coming up with systems to improve conditions and ensure compliance.

Now, with the power of LLMs, management can generate those plans themselves. So instead of me spending my normal workday on it, I get to bill my emergency rate when the hallucinated slop gets rejected and they need something actually legal at the last minute.

The product would not be possible without AI,

has made developers acutely aware of just how flakey and unreliable AI is.

Sales must love you.

I like how I linked to a specific part of that article that bypasses the typical rebuttals from trolls, so you had to pretend I hadn’t.

I’m pretty sure they didn’t even click the link

Your life on the fediverse improves significantly if you just block the entire lemmy.ml and hexbear.net instances.

giant pocket mares

I don’t want to Google if this is real, so I’ll take your word that this is how it’s done.

The point was that the more you keep compensating for other people’s dumb moves, the greater the damage when it all inevitably comes crashing down.

In other words, just do what they ask, get them to sign off on it and watch it crash and burn in an unmaintainable, unsecured mess

Let me give you a little parable.

There once was a juggler, who could juggle with three balls all day. Then someone from the audience threw a fourth ball, and he kept going. Someone threw a glass, then a flaming torch, and he kept going, occasionally burning his hands. Seeing he could do it, someone throws a machete, and the juggler almost never cuts his fingers keeping all those things in the air. A chainsaw gets added, and an open bottle of bleach, and occasionally the juggler gets his hair caught or spills some bleach, but he keeps going. As he keeps going, people keep adding more and more things. Eventually it’s too much, and it all comes crashing down, killing the juggler and several members of the audience and destroying all the objects in the air.

On the next street corner, a juggler stands with three balls. Someone from the audience throws in a fourth. He steps aside and lets it fall to the floor, happily juggling three balls.

Honestly, I see people being quite optimistic about gen Z and Alpha. Most the whining comes from the right, with their “young people are destroying the [nonsense here] industry” and for brazenly treating other humans and people despite not all of them straight white christian cis men.

Personally, the worst things I see about the new generations is that young people are young. Someone who is 17 can’t adult quite as well because they are literally not an adult. I’ve been an adult for longer than they’ve been alive, of course I’m better at it than them and dealing with things I’ve dealt with before are easier than new things. That’s not a shortcoming, that’s how time works.

Is it annoying to see a girl make all the mistakes I made when I was a girl? Yes damnit. Will telling them stop them? Didn’t work for me, hence I made the mistakes too.

Yeah, if there isn’t an unconnected hose or cable, that’s about the extent of my car knowledge.

It’s a delete request, not a deletion.

There are also issues of societal specialization leading to the ability of individuals to specialize in gaining knowledge, instead of 100% of the population working 99% of the time on survival.

But my brain and Og the Caveman are basically the same.

I know you didn’t create this data, but wouldn’t “by weight” or “by volume” have a more meaningful impact on reducing the amount of plastic in our oceans?

Yes, but that data is also harder to gather. It’s very easy to count pieces, it’s much harder to asses volume or dry weight. I’m also not entirely sure if that gives meaningful answers either, because a kilo of polystyrene is worse than a kilo of bottlecaps. If you’re working with a huge of different stuff, all measurements are kind of arbitrary.

If we take a PET bottle as an example; it is likely to sink as it fills up with water, but the cap, which is made of different type of plastic (HDPE), will stay afloat for much longer.

The marine litter in the paper is specifically about stuff that gets fished up. It covers floating AND seafloor debris, and floating stuff to a much lesser degree (since nets don’t drag over the water surface). So if the bottles are mostly on the floor and caps mostly float, we would expect to find many more bottles in marine litter.

this seems like a really convoluted way to “fix” the problem and will only mitigate the issue

Mitigation is good though. If you can reduce the volume of plastic in the ocean by a noticable fraction, by basically just very slightly changing the manufacturing process, that’s a good thing.

According to The Ocean Cleanup Project

Oh no… You’ve triggered one of my ecological pet peeves.

The Ocean Cleanup Project is a terrible fucking idea. It’s basically a scam that turns a HUGE amount of amount into a tiny amount of recovered plastic. The OCP reported on twitter in 2025 that they have, in total, removed 40.000 tons of plastic from all their activities. According to this they got about 300m in $A in funding since 2019. I’ll just pretend that’s all they’ve ever gotten, and conclude they spent 5300 USD to remove one ton of plastic waste.

So let me be extremely pessimistic and offer a vastly superior alternative to sailing around with boats and removing basically no waste:

Since OCP already knows where all the waste is coming from, what they SHOULD be doing is going there, buying up all the trash for 1000 USD per ton (which is an absolute fortune to most people there, so they will absolutely cooperate), shipping it to, I dunno, Australia for 100 USD/ton (which is again a fortune), and dispose of it for another 400 USD per ton (which is more than double what we pay here in Europe), and then they would still be 350% more efficient than what they’re doing, assuming the most impossibly generous terms for them.

Really? Name one for me.

It’s an untestable “theory” that has no predictive power and explains nothing. It could be entirely true or entirely false and it would make no difference. It’s literally useless.

And as an adult, you’re suddenly in a new house that doesn’t have the dozens of tweaks that you fixed in the past years, and you’ll have to deal with the moronic amateurism from the previous owners.

Which is exactly what the people moving into your house will say as well.