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.

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?

It sounds like you’re breaking down cops into several categories:

1. Cops that do bad things on purpose
2. Cops that do bad things on accident
3. Cops that work alongside groups 1 and 2

Sure, group 3 cops may use that discretion for good. Maybe they don’t pull someone over for going one over the speed limit, or decide to look the other way when a homeless guy tries to sell cigarettes. I agree with you, this is the kind of discretion that’s supposed to happen.

But when people say ACAB, they’re saying that when cops that don’t do terrible things work alongside cops that do, they are complicit. One cop slowly, agonizingly kills a guy. Three cops watch and do nothing to stop him. That’s an extreme example. But there’s a million small versions of that, in every big city and small town, where a cop uses either their legal authority or “I’m a person with a gun” authority to do something bad, and their coworkers let it happen.

Cops that don’t stop their coworkers from doing bad things are just as bad as those doing the bad things. So, ACAB.

Discretion is just selective enforcement. Lots of people do a thing. But cops only think it’s damaging to society when the wrong kind of people do it. That thing might just be existing.

Maybe that punishment involves jail time, but more likely it means being harassed, or put in cuffs for a while but let off, or just be intimidated by a guy who can legally whisper “I fear for my life” into a body cam and then kill you.

ACAB means cops either participate in that system, do nothing to stop it, or try to stop it and get forced out.

The small beings are being brought to the slender building of magic!

A better question would be why Microsoft went with a nonstandard layout when they designed the Xbox controller. Nintendo had been using the A-to-the-right layout since 1990.

Not… really? Like, nobody strung up Washington for being a tyrant. Cromwell ruled England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland until he died. Castro ruled Cuba until he died. Stalin was one of Lenin’s lieutenants, and ran the Soviet Union until he died.

The French Revolution (of 1789, the big one) was infamous for this. The original batch of revolutionaries were mostly liberal-ish nobles and lawyers. The second wave (of what the original guys considered to be street trash) sent many of those guys to the guillotine if they didn’t get out of town fast enough. The third wave sent a bunch of second wave guys to the guillotine. Et cetera, until Napoléon grabbed the reins.

1. Hack together a proof of concept
2. Works well enough that management slaps a “done” sticker on it
3. Pile of hacks becomes load bearing
4. One or two dependencies change, the whole thing falls over
5. Set evenings and weekends on fire to fix it
6. Management brags about moving fast and breaking things, engineers quit and become cabbage farmers and woodworkers
7. New graduates are hired, GOTO 1

A noble French name, with a death sentence in 1790. There’s a good chance that the radical republican that issued the sentence was accused of being a monarchist by another even more radical republican a year or two later and executed as well.

The Revolution ate a lot of her children.

If you drop the “say cheese” part, it gets a lot less onion-y to me for some reason.

Anything you do while touching the trackpad with one finger at a time is the same as though you were using a mouse. Tap once to select, tap and drag to move, double tap to open.

If you tap with two fingers on the pad at the same time, it reacts as if you’ve right-clicked. I usually use my index and middle finger.

I work a 9ish-to-5ish in a science field, salaried. Nobody really cares when I arrive or when I leave, as long as the work gets done. Sometimes science stuff goes off the rails and I have to arrive early or stay late, but I keep track of my hours and arrive a little early or leave a little early on other days to compensate.

I mean, it took four years of college and more than six of a PhD to get to this point, which stunk. But now I can monitor my chemicals stirring in a flask for a few minutes while hanging out on my phone, which is nice.

I’m not sure I understand your complaint – if you two-finger tap anywhere on an Apple trackpad made since around 2009, it’s interpreted as a right-click.

Reply to edit: “I forgot that I changed it to make it worse and I’m mad at Apple about it” is maybe the most Lemmy comment I’ve ever read

I’m sure that whatever is causing the leak, after being shaken violently and pulling a few g’s during ascent, will get… better?