Matt_W
5301
Litter is really the biggest issue with these things. They’re not a major part of the waste stream. And their impact on marine wildlife is dwarfed by overfishing. If you want to save the turtles, you can have the greatest effect by eating less fish.
CraigM
5302
It all adds up. Same with plastic bags, stores by me don’t have them. Two years ago the county I’m in banned them. Either use paper or reusable bags. I just leave a handful of the reusable bags in my trunk.
What I’ve noticed is that (at least here in Seattle) they’ve banned ‘single use’ plastic bags. This worked for a few years. Recently, though, stores have switched to a thicker material and printed ‘please reuse this bag’ on them, so they’re back. But they aren’t what folks actually use for reuseable bags, so they just get thrown away, resulting in more plastic in the waste stream
Yup, with the addition of an 8 cent fee per “reusable” bag.
CraigM
5305
Interesting. At least by me that hasn’t been the case. There is some stores that, due to COVID did bring the thicker bags temporarily, but generally I haven’t seen much plastic bag use.
New York state banned styrofoam a couple of years again, but then delayed the ban due to COVID. I’m not sure if it is in effect yet or not. I’m also seeing a lof of paper straws, which largely mush up before the drink is near gone. They really need to improve the tech on those.
NY banned single use plastic bags for groceries (however, there were some exceptions, including food takeout), but paused it because it started right when Covid did, and grocery store workers didn’t want to touch gross bags that their customers had coughed on. That lasted about a year, and the re-usable bag requirement is in full swing again. Plastic is banned, and paper bags are a couple cents each.
The framing is always weird to me, because “banning single use bags” feels very different from “paper bags cost 3 cents now”.
Compostable plastic straws exist, but I assume they’re more expensive than paper. They also seem to be brittle (more likely to crack), and I’m not sure how truly “compostable” they are.
I had forgotten about the plastic bag ban, but yes, that too.
Timex
5309
San Diego seems to have some kind of bag ban, in that they specifically ask you if you want a bag when I go grocery shopping there when I’m traveling, but what I find weird is that of you do ask for a bag, they give you a much heavier weight plastic bag… But it’s still a crappy plastic bag? Like, it’s not what I’d consider reusable? But it must contain at least 10 times as much plastic as a normal disposable plastic bag? So it seems kind of dumb?
Matt_W
5311
Yeah that’s accurate. It’s dumb.
Timex
5312
Whoopi Goldberg got suspended from the view for 2 weeks for saying that the Holocaust wasn’t about race.
You mean the one where the perpetrators repeated, over and over again, that it was about race?
We were in Anaheim for 4 days last Dec. and our hotel restaurant served paper straws that held up pretty well to about 20-30 minutes of submersion each night. The one time I thought to check, the ends were only slightly soft.
I can kind of understand where Oprah is coming from. The Nazi’s killed Jewish people, but the Nazi’s also killed Polish people, Ukrainians, Slavs in general, Leftists, Christian ministers, Romani, homosexuals, Nazi factions that fell out of favor, people with perceived mental or physical disabilities, the lowest performing 10% of their programmers, etc. etc. etc . Given half a chance the Nazi’s would have been genociding Asia and Africa too. Nazism is fundamentally an ideology that can not coexist with anyone.
On the other hand, the Jewish people were the focus of much of the actual Nazi rhetoric and action. And there are still plenty of people in the world today who buy into that rhetoric to one degree or another, and so you don’t want to underplay the specific historical atrocity of the Holocaust. I wouldn’t normally do this, but there’s a recent twitter thread about this that is insightful:
Oof.
We talked about this a bit in another thread, but Whoopi was coming in with an understanding of what “race” means from her perspective: as a Black person, of a certain age, in America. Her main points seemed to be that a) she doesn’t really understand “Jewish” as a “race”, and b) as Rothda noted, the Nazis were persecuting people for all kinds of reasons, not just due to race.
I think she probably could do with a more complex modern understanding of how “race” is defined, as a social construct, and also about the construction of the Jewish identity and historical anti-semitism in Europe. But fundamentally, it’s not like she has any real disagreement on what was going on in Nazi Germany.
Thrag
5317
She totally had a “what do you mean white people can be racist to other white people, they’re all white people” moment. Given the dynamics in America currently and her having grown up black in America, I can see how something in the back of her mind can be all “wait, they’re all white”.
Still, you’re TV, maybe think before saying whatever pops into your head?
It’s true the Nazis killed a lot of people. But the considerable majority of the systematic and targeted killings were Jews, Slavs and Romani and very much due to theories of race.
Also it’s understandable that a black person steeped in Americas longstanding othering of people with different skin colours would look at the whole thing and go “but they’re all white”.
Race is a social construct, means different things to different people at different times. Whoopi did not understand a historical context since she is used to being oppressed by white people, Jewish and Gentile alike.
Thrag
5320
Whoopi at one point opened her own cannabis shop. Honestly, I think she normally understands the historical context but just had a stoner thought that escaped on air.
