I’m in the middle of a TNG rewatch. This is my next episode. Every time I look at the thumbnail, I just can’t. Even though Best of Both Worlds is so soon after.

I bet she drinks prune juice

Technical people that move into management usually (but not always) suffer from something I’ve started calling management brain rot. They’re exposed to the spreadsheet warriors and their corporate jargon, and it doesn’t take long for the good ones to give up and the bad ones to thrive in a, let’s call it, “low-information environment.”

We eat him last.

Drawbacks are mostly the economics of it. You have to convince people to put time and energy into turning waste into monomers. If the monomers you get from crude oil are cheaper, you’ve got an uphill battle.

The catalysts can be complex, but the good ones are really simple. The zinc one in this article is pretty easy to understand. Ours was an organic molecule, but a really abundant and cheap one. (We could easily recover and re-use the catalyst, too, which I also doubt most of the metal salt catalysts are capable of). Part of the project was optimizing that catalyst. We found ones that worked a little better, but were like 10x as expensive. So we just used a little more of the simple one and figured out how to use it over and over.

I worked on a similar (but competing) technology to this one for a few years. Depolymerization is absolutely the way forward for most polymer recycling.

For most uses, manufacturers want plastic that’s colorless and has good physical properties. Melting down clear plastic can work, but it degrades the polymers in hard-to-control ways. And if there’s any pigment in the plastic, forget about it.

If you break down polymers into their constituent monomers, you’ve turned a polymer process into a chemical process. Polymers are hard to work with. Chemicals are, comparatively, pretty easy. You can do a step or two to extract all the color and impurities, then re-polymerize the cleaned up material and get plastic that’s indistinguishable from brand new.

If your depoly process is good, it can distinguish between different polymers, so you can recycle mixed waste streams. Ours was even pretty good at distinguishing nylon from PET, which I sorta doubt the zinc process will be. But hey, more competition in this space is gonna be good for the world.

I don’t think articles like this help that situation. “Plastic isn’t actually recyclable” is a pretty dangerous mind virus that’s basically already running rampant.

Pyrolysis isn’t perfect. But it is absolutely better than throwing plastic in a landfill, and can handle otherwise impossible-to-recycle mixed feedstocks.

The process I worked on recycled PET while leaving the other materials in the mix untouched, ready to go through a different specialized process. That was kind of the whole point of it. Those sorts of technologies are harder in the sense that the tech is more sophisticated, but realistically doesn’t cost more to run once you have it going. The future isn’t all doom and gloom. That’s why I hate these “don’t bother recycling” articles.

There are alternatives to pyrolysis that are slowly coming online. They have their drawbacks – it’s certainly easier to chuck a bunch of mixed plastic into a reactor and heat it up until something happens – but they’re real.

I worked on one of them for a few years. It’s pretty cool! They’re currently building a pilot plant to demonstrate the technology at scale.

Yes. Muzzle loaders. Shoot once, then spend a few minutes loading a powder charge and a bullet down the barrel. They weren’t flintlock muskets like it was the 1700s, they were modern rifles. Just loaded through the muzzles. It gives the deer a fighting chance. You have to hit on the first shot. Did you know that people also hunt with a bow and arrow? Those have been around since the Neolithic. Sometimes not using the most advanced tech is the point.

It’s funny that you typed all that stuff trying to explain firearms to someone who you assume knows nothing about them. I’ve shot everything from pellet guns to the aforementioned muzzle loader to a .30-06 to, yes, an AR-15. I can pick up most guns and check to see if the chamber’s clear. I can disassemble and clean and put them back together.

I want these things to go away. Not just AR-15’s. Anything semiautomatic with a magazine that can hold more than, let’s say, six rounds. Anything beyond a revolver is over the top for personal protection, and if you think that’s not true you’re a lunatic or just want to cosplay army guy. Duh, AR-15’s are the most commonly used firearm in shootings because there’s a lot of them. How about we make there be less of them and other guns that can kill so many people so quickly?

Enforcement at fewer points (manufacturers, distributors) is much easier than at each individual person with a gun being evaluated.

Okay, then. I guess I’ll ignore the muzzle loaders my dad and all his friends used to hunt with until the AR-15 became such a symbol of the “cold dead hands” crowd that they all went ahead and got one. And then a few more.

I think the AR-15 should be banned because I think any semiautomatic rifle and pistol with a magazine capacity of more than a few rounds should be banned. That’s enough for the “guns are easier than getting medicated for anxiety” crowd to feel like they can engage in deadly personal defense without making it easy for someone to walk into a school or church or business and just unload.

I mean depending on who the wellness check is for, the answer may be “they are not well, because they were shot by a cop for no reason, and whoops that was their neighbor, and also the cop shot the neighbor’s dog too”

same as any other rifle

I’m sure the use of AR-15s in shootings has nothing to do with its magazine capacity, firing rate, and deadliness at relatively short out to intermediate range. Not a lot of kids in elementary schools getting killed by people wielding muzzle loaders.

supports the second amendment

I think we should have a well-regulated militia. But I don’t think that every school child should be able to wield an AR-15. I guess that makes me anti-2nd?

Yeah, that sounds like seizing Russian assets and selling them to the west with more steps.

I understand the sentiment, and I’m definitely not a Boeing apologist. But the first version of the Apollo command module killed three astronauts. They had growing pains, too.

At work, my work PC laptop drives two 1080p monitors. I don’t keep it open to use the onboard one because Windows is so terrible at handling displays of different sizes, and the fans run so much when driving three displays that I think it could take off my desk. So I know what you’re talking about.

But. Have you ever used a Mac with two displays? A current-gen MacBook Air will drive a 6K@60Hz and a 5K@60Hz display when closed, and it’ll do it silently. Or both displays at “only” 4K if you want to crank the refrsh rate to over 100Hz. You think that’s not enough for the least expensive laptop they sell?

I’m really tired of people who don’t know what they’re capable of telling me why I shouldn’t enjoy using my computer.

What percentage of people who buy the least expensive MacBook do you think are going to hook it up to more than two displays? Or should they add more display controllers that won’t ever be used and charge more for them? I feel like either way people who would never buy one will complain on behalf of people who are fine with them.

limit it

There isn’t some software limitation here. It’s more that they only put two display controllers in the base level M-series chips. The vast, vast majority of users will have at most two displays. Putting more display controllers would add (minimal, but real) cost and complexity that most people won’t benefit from at all.

On the current gen base level chips, you can have one external display plus the onboard one, or close the laptop and have two externals. Seems like plenty to me for the cheapest option.

I have a Mac with multiple monitors. It handles them a hell of a lot better than my PC at work.