As a professional procrastinator, even the title makes immediate sense, and has already helped me reframe my to-do list. I'll read the rest of it ...later.
Yeah, I don't regularly use straws, but when I do, I just need/"need" a straw and really hate having an inferior straw. For whatever reason, I just really hate stainless steel straws.
Not only are there much bigger priorities, but it's also ridiculous in some forms, and that creates another type of distraction from what actually matters.
For me personally I disagree with the idea that straw waste and biodegradability doesn’t matter. This overemphasis of “priorities” is a mistaken philosophy.
Reduction of straw use matters just like the same as the reduction of any type of disposable use. Anything produced with the sole purpose of being discarded is an issue.
Maybe we can make an argument that it’s a greenwashed lazy half-step to eliminate straws or provide less effective straws while still selling disposable cups, but at the same time it isn’t just one little plastic straw we are talking about here.
A company like Starbucks that has over $20 billion in revenue…divide that by five bucks as a rough average cost of a drink and assume about 1/4 of their product sales are cold drinks and you’re looking at a company that would potentially be producing multiple billions of straws every year if they hadn’t eliminated them as a default inclusion.
Imagine a billion straws in a room and how much material that would be.
The sheer scale of many of these businesses and the human population itself is why very small steps like saving a bit of plastic on the screw cap of a soft drink or replacing straws with a hole in the lid make a huge difference to consumption and waste. I personally don’t think its productive to look steps like that with too much cynicism.
On top of that the corporation gets to enjoy the cost savings so it’s really a win-win. Obviously companies shouldn’t pat themselves on the back and consider the job done but I don’t think the world becomes a better place if Starbucks hypothetically added straws back to the waste stream.
The DOJ approved two 1-month "delay periods", first in May, then in June, as part of the criminal investigation. We found that out earlier this morning, see earlier discussion.
There are companies registered in the UK where all of the company officers are other companies. I don't know if this is legal (the registrar, Companies House, is notoriously lax) but it's definitely a thing.
It's definitely legal (and not uncommon) in the US, but you can at least trace it up to a human at some point. Those humans, at least in theory, can be held accountable, even if it's their shell company's shell company that broke the law.
The new FinCEN BOI reporting requirement seems to be an attempt to make that easier. I don't see them accepting URLs as company officers any time soon.
OTOH, there are also towns with dogs and cats as mayors, but I suspect being elected makes the difference there.
I guess the only way to know for sure is to try, but I can't see the tax people accepting "my dog is the CEO and ate the taxes and ChatGPT was our treasurer, so collect from them", for example.
> Corporations are already considered people, aren't they?
No, not really. They are considered independent legal entities with a subset of the same rights that people have, but they aren't broadly considered "people".
Yeah, we had a couple customers ask about this, but they were ultimately satisfied with dropping the token from the session to give the appearance of logging out (so they could log in as another user), and just decided to accept whatever risk goes along with someone copying the session token, hitting "logout", then running cURL commands for 4 more minutes.
Absolutely none of this has ever been objective, or even based in reality, let alone evidence, so I find it hard to care.
The issue was never about masks, but of two highly-polarized groups (few of them having any real knowledge on the subject) dehumanizing the other under color of Science™.
It was purposefully misunderstanding and sloganizing Science™ into simplistic, unscientific statements like "Masks work" and "Masks don't work" [for what? for whom? etc]. Objective science isn't sold as bumper stickers and lapel pins on Etsy.
It ignored completely and purposefully the two extremely basic and fundamentally different modes of operation: protecting the wearer from inhaling Bad Things (Masks Don't Work) and protecting people other than the mask wearer from what the mask-wearer is exhaling (Masks Work).
The Science™ on this hasn't really changed in any meaningful way, and the whole subject is tiresome. People who can't think past Mask Good or Mask Bad might think otherwise, but their opinions are perhaps even less valuable than this study.
Besides, if you're not a physician or have a PhD in maskology, how could you possibly begin to evaluate this evidence anyway? It's so very complicated and technical, see. You should be Trusting The Experts™.
Except the experts are mostly objective. However, the waters have been muddied in the public's view by anti-maskers, like anti-vaxxers. This is a real catastrophe of the pandemic.
