Last I heard, depending on local attitudes, potentially jail. For that matter, minors can be charged for producing images of themselves. The CSAM laws in the US tend not to draw distinctions between first- and third-party production:
The gp comment speaks more of freight than of passengers. But the same analogy applies… trains are great when you need to transport a whole bunch of people exactly the same way, but they’re less useful if every person needs to start and end at a totally different place.
In the same sense, parallelization (and computing on a GPU) are great when you need to perform the same computation on a huge number of data. When each computation is more independent, it might make more sense to perform it through the CPU.
It’s pretty wild, although if I were Mr. Kato I might be somewhat more grumpy about being jailed for 3 weeks in South Sudan, apparently on the authorities’ opinion that their immigration laws required ministry approval for his run [0].
I have to say I don’t find myself too surprised that anybody non-local doing extreme-long-distance running through insular Croatian towns might arouse the interest of the local constabularies—and I imagine the runner being a Ugandan guy would be an especially surprising sight to people in Croatia (91% Croat, 3.2% Serb, officially recognize 22 other ethnic minorities, none of them from Africa) [1]. Which I suppose is the point he was trying to raise.
> I have to say I don’t find myself too surprised that anybody doing extreme-long-distance running through insular Croatian towns might arouse the interest of the local constabularies
I don't live in Europe, but just help me out, why call the cops on a guy running down the road, in running gear, even if he's an ethnicity you rarely ever see?
Most of the comments here are missing the mark IMO.
The primary reason why he got so much police harassment is because Croatia is a EU Schengen border country, the patrols here are much stricter than everywhere else, and the associated problems are much worse as well.
I don't think it's entirely due to racism - if you were a border policeman, and you are tasked with bringing in people illegaly entering the country, what would you do seeing a person of color running on back roads near the border of an otherwise extremely ethnically homogenous country?
For every case of someone who entered legally and got harassed, they probably bring in thousands of people which they are supposed to bring in (ie. entered ilegally).
> Saying that you can’t come into Europe because you’re African is still racism.
Are you suggesting no countries in the world should have any border control?
You weren’t born here and don’t pay taxes here is pretty different from you’re African, right? So why do you say racism and not discrimination? Why do you say African and not non-European? Phrasing Europe’s border policy as racism against Africans is misleading and escalating, rather than edifying.
Let’s fix that: Saying that you can’t come into Europe because you’re not a European resident is discrimination based on country of residency that could look like racial discrimination if you’re not careful.
In as much as, ahem, some government policies actually are racist, it’s true that border policy does discriminate based on country of residence, but this is not necessarily racist. Europe is not necessarily discriminating against Africans, it’s discriminating all non-Europeans, including China, Russia, America, the Middle East, etc., right?
When people say racism it is often (usually?) referring to beliefs about other races being inferior in some way, or hate for other races. Racism typically means prejudice and antagonism combined with discrimination. Discrimination on its own without judgement may be necessary, and doesn’t mean there is any animosity or value judgements being made based on someone’s race.
To summarize / strawman, "Europe isn't racist, it's xenophobic, get it right!"
And to be clear, that's not wrong, but it's also a distinction without a difference. People will still feel discriminated against even if the source of that discrimination is different from what they named.
All countries have border policy including yours, this isn’t about Europe, or about Africa. Why do you assume border policy is xenophobia, and not, say, logistics and resource and tax management? Why would you jump to a conclusion this has more to do with race than with money or stopping crime?
I think some cities in the world do have borders with ID checks. Which cities are we talking about, specifically? In the US there are state borders that (edit: may) require ID checks. This is true in other countries too. And as others pointed out, you can’t cross private property boundaries in many locales either, whether it’s backyards or corporate property.
I can certainly think of several reasons why city border can and should be less restrictive than country borders, but I would first turn the question back to you, since your question involves unstated assumptions: why should it apply between cities? And then think about it carefully and see if you can imagine some reasons for why things are they way they are. A really big hint: think economics.
FWIW, the questions in this thread seem to be somewhat ignorant of history and global politics and economics. This stuff has been debated and written about ad nauseum, you can for sure find tons of material explaining how various countries/states/cities arrived at their border policies if you’re actually curious about it. I’m certainly no expert on it, so if your question is serious, please research the answer rather than wait for someone on HN to tell you.
The other thing your question implies, and others here are failing to acknowledge is the practical realities of the tradeoffs involved. There isn’t some perfect solution, that does not exist. This is an area of government that comes with both advantages and disadvantages no matter what policy is chosen. The goals are usually to balance the costs against the benefits. Assuming that lax borders is the answer is almost certainly the wrong answer. But, there are huge teams of smart people in every country who’ve studied and dealt with the logistics and legalities of policing borders. Sometimes there are brash politicians who dictate bad policy over the objections of many, but even so, to me it’s always absolutely wild to see armchair internet critics assume they know better and that obvious things have been completely missed. If you do think it can be improved and feel strongly, get involved!
> I can certainly think of several reasons why city border can and should be less restrictive than country borders, but I would first turn the question back to you, I since your question involves unstated assumptions: why should it apply between cities?
For the same reason it should apply between countries - whatever those are. It should be obvious that I don't think there are good reasons. You've got unstated assumptions about countries.
Your comment contains a lot of non-arguments: "think about it if you're serious", "think economics, "[what you're saying] is almost certainly not the right answer", "practical realities", "huge teams of smart people" etc.
You are on a soapbox challenging the status quo of every country on earth and I’m not, so you automatically have the higher burden of argument. I’m not defending the status quo, I only jumped in to help people who were making obviously incorrect and wildly negative assumptions about the reasons for border policies.
There are lots of reasons why the border policies between cities and countries might/can/should be very different, including but not limited to countries having a federal government or something analogous, and countries specifically wanting the free flow of citizens and their money within the country. Countries generally want the flow of citizens and money from other countries too, but they want control over what gets in the country. It seems fairly obvious to me that that strict city border policies everywhere serves little purpose and would be obnoxious and limiting for the people and the economy of that country, and that it would require a ton of enforcement resources that small cities don’t even have.
Here’s an analogy. Lots of companies have VPNs to get access to the company network. You don’t have a separate VPN for every team, or every building, or every computer. A few secret labs might have their own security, but by and large once you enter the company’s network, you have access to all the company resources. The VPN is like the country border. It’s a small hurdle for the employees of that company, but if there were hierarchical VPNs for everything everywhere in the company it would interfere with people’s ability to work and do very little to increase security; it would be net downside.
Again, it does not matter what my argument is. If you want to know the reasons why all countries in the world have border policies and why the country border policies are usually more strict than cities, the reasons have been written down, debated for hundreds of years, they exist and you are free to go read them if you’re actually curious (which you should be if you think it should change). They aren’t on Hacker News though, and no amount of opining on Hacker News is going to change the world’s border policies.
Hehehe. Smh. It’s also what is said to people who think the earth is flat. Some people just have beliefs that are ignorant of the things they can’t see. It seems like you just did compare borders to slavery, to complement your bogus comparison between borders and racism.
You can keep trying to poke some sort of specious logical hole in my arguments as long as you want, and it still won’t demonstrate anything, since I’m not arguing for borders and you’re not demonstrating any understanding of my points here. You seem unable to articulate any specific reasons, or even a specific goal. I’m not even sure what you’re proposing or arguing against. What do you want here? HN points? An actual discussion? Gain some realistic and practical understand why border policies exist? What?
No, some states have had border checks for things like animals and produce/fruit (to prevent the spread of some diseases), among other things, for many decades. The California border is the one I’ve run into most often. They don’t always ask for ID, I misstated that, but there is a stop and they can scan license plates and look for suspicious activity.
Hehe, maybe review some of the huge swath of border checkpoint refusal videos on YouTube before making such an assumption. Some people get away with it, and some do not. Refusing to show ID might be justification for detainment or arrest.
Also, pro tip: when crossing the CA border, if they do ask for ID or ask for you to get out of your car, make sure to buckle your seat belt before you drive. The cops waiting there will pull you over for buckling 3 seconds after you start moving, I learned first hand.
Edit to add a few informative links, as I’m googling them, with some details that are new to me…
Furthermore, why aren't efforts being made to fix those problems to make mass migration from more countries viable? The existence of an emergency situation that justifies an authoritarian solution does not absolve the state from its responsibility to take action to prevent that situation from happening.
What is the problem, exactly? What responsibility, exactly, does the state have to make mass migration viable? It seems like you’re making really big assumptions.
Make a list of the costs and benefits for both too lax and too strict borders for all the countries your ideas should apply to. Account for the costs and benefits of both incoming residents and outgoing residents, both from the point of view of the people moving, and from the point of view of the state. How would you balance lax borders against the downsides like weapons, drugs, human trafficking, and other criminal activity? Would you do anything to control the flow of too many people at once to places where there is no housing or utilities for them? Would you do anything to stabilize the economies of countries that lose or gain too many people in a short period of time? What do you propose for settling disputes about the border policy? If other people in your country don’t agree with your idea, how should the policy be decided? What would you say if you found out that the majority of people in the country you live in want strict borders, and vote for them?
The state has a responsibility to keep people happy. If states keep people sad, we should abolish them because they have no good purpose. Borders don't keep people happy.
Very telling that you didn’t address a single one of my questions…
Pls see Chesterton’s Fence. If you think borders serve no good purpose and that nobody is happy about them, it’s because you’re ignorant about borders and haven’t bothered to read anything or think about it at all. Lots of people want borders, and for better or worse, lots of people are happy about them, which is why they are there. You don’t get to take borders down until you understand and acknowledge the reasons they were put up.
Which state are we discussing? Can you point to a legal document or constitution for a country that defines the state’s purpose as keeping people happy? Maybe one exists, but I’ve never heard of that anywhere. I think in most countries, it’s your own responsibility to keep yourself happy. A lot of countries will, however, try to keep it’s citizens safe and try to protect the economy, and borders are seen as one of the tools to help meet those ends.
It’s not racist and you know that. They also would not want a white person without authorization.
Also, in your border-free dreamworld, how far does this go? Can anyone / everyone in the world come live in your country? How about your city? How about your backyard?
The end result of that is everyone moving to the rich countries with social safety nets, those countries then collapsing or removing those safety nets, and repeat until countries decide that was a terrible idea and we’re back to having borders except everything is a mess.
Countries aren’t geographic regions. They’re collections of people. If you magically swapped the populations of South Korea and Germany, those geographic countries would change overnight to be their demographic countries.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with wanting your country to stay at least somewhat stable in its ideals, crime levels, particular problems, etc.
the point of a social safety net is to make sure people can afford a home and healthcare. excluding non-citizens from that, yet allowing them to stay here creates exactly the kind of situations that we do not want. and as soon as people get a job they also pay taxes, healthcare and social security, at which point it seems unfair to exclude them from those benefits. so i don't see a a way how this would even work. people living here either get a job, run a business or collect benefits. if they do neither, then how would they live? only independently wealthy people could do that without having some illegal income somewhere.
i am for the elimination of borders and free movement of everyone across the world, but that requires that we help raise the standard of living everywhere to remove the incentive for people to move just for economic reasons.
> People within a country can freely move between cities
This is far from universally true, both because of legal direct constraints on internal migration and because of implicit controls which are the result of economic constraints (which are themselves part of the means by which societies are governed, whether or not they are overtly intended products of state policy.)
I’m saying it should be the same between countries as between back yards.
The same logic that justifies national government with tax-levying and rule-enforcing power also requires national borders. (ie, a group of people own this area together and will vote to determine what is done).
In a world without borders, what's to prevent some wealthy Europeans from pooling their resources to buy up huge swaths of the Congo and doing colonialism, libertarian open borders style? Governments and borders are necessary.
That is naive. The wealth disparity between nations is so great that if borders were done away with, people from wealthy nations would be able to trivially outspend people in poor countries. Once they own the land and the businesses, political power is theirs. Meanwhile the people from those poor countries might try to do the same in wealthy countries, but wouldn't have the resources for it. It would be katastroika on steroids.
Then they can be removed in two steps. First, allow people to come and work to get wealthy so they can compete with other wealthy people. Second, allow wealthy people to spend money.
> The wealth disparity between nations is so great that if borders were done away with, people from wealthy nations would be able to trivially outspend people in poor countries.
Free movement of people does not mean that you don’t have extreme taxes on high-wealth individuals that they become subject to when they move.
> Once they own the land and the businesses
You are assuming, again, in addition to free movement of people a basically capitalist economic system in every country. That you are free to move to a country and live and, if you can find a job, work there does not mean that you can simply buy land and/or control of the non-financial means of production. It may mean you are as free to do so as local residents, but it doesn’t mean anybody is free to do so.
Note, that because even slightly capitalist countries – rich or poor – tend to provide relatively free movement of capital already, whether or not they allow free movement of people, this “buyout by remote elites” is already a problem for relatively poor capitalist (or even somewhat capitalist) countries, even with border controls – you don’t need to live in a country to buy up property and businesses there, and exercise control through such ownership.
How can it not be entirely due to racism, if race is the only factor determining whether you stop someone who is jogging on the street in jogging clothes and likely athletic supershoes?
Ya know, this is an incredibly interesting question. Because my instinct is to say that, if the patrols duty is simply to analyze anyone who stands out, and they do so in the proper channels without malice or harassment, then that would be the least racist possible scenario in which this occurs, some may say, not racist. But then even if the guard is kind and helpful, is the guideline "people who stand out must be questioned" racist itself? It sounds like yes. But then what justification do they have for that, is it genuinely that the vast majority of illegal crossings come from people who stand out? Or do most of them blend in, or is it just the stand outs that get caught, thus making it appear in data as if they're the problem and intensifying the patrols around them? Like the airplane problem.
Then the hypothetical, what if it were true that the people attempting to harm your society singularly visually differed? Would that be racism, some strange "justified racism" or simply not racism? If you say, we are not prosecuting on race, but on propensity to crime. Well that starts to sound like some things I've heard in my country, which we believe is racist. Interesting questions.
Well, the neighboring country to Croatia is Bosnia and Herzgovina. The ethnicy is similar and some from there also have motivation to enter illegally. Basing on race ignores those.
Also turning it around: Is it right for somebody, like the runner, who legally entered to repeatedly be treated bad just because others who share skin color do bad?
even better, the first check could have asked him for his route, and phone ahead to let their colleagues and especially the call centers know that he is coming. with a photo even. the reverse of a wanted poster. and if they had to deal with a lot of illegal immigrants in the area, the maybe could have asked him to wear something easily identifiable that someone else would not wear. maybe a number thing that's common for runners in a competition.
part of the problem is not only that he is checked, but how he is being treated during those checks.
i mean that's my experience in china. every interaction with authorities was extremely polite and friendly. even when it was an issue where i broke the law because i didn't register my new address in time. of course africans experience racism in china as well, so i can't say for sure that they would get the same treatment as me, but certainly not what this guy experienced in croatia.
after reading the article i found the links to other articles on the guardian site linked to this: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2024/oct/10/p... "Croatian police accused of burning asylum seekers’ phones and passports". the problem seems to be more than just never having seen a black person.
To add relevant context Croatia is at the edge of the Schengen zone. On the other side of the border are Serbia and Bosnia with less strict border controls and visa rules, so this is one of the roads for illegal immigrants to reach rich western countries. This and Hungarian borders are what's between them and their goals. Connect that with the fact that Croatia doesn't have non-white minorities, there were probably zero cases before this of black person wondering down the roads who was not an illegal migrant.
Passport are also needed for deportation. I can not see any reason, why police would burn their documents. It creates a lot of extra paperwork and headaches.
Destroying passports is a normal practice for illegal immigrants. It extends their stay in EU by several years. Most countries are considered safe, and it is hard to claim you are from Syria with Egyptian passport.
Rarely... I was 20 years old when I first saw a black person in real life. This was in a center of a big city, and it surprised me so much that I remember exactly where and when it was.
Nowadays times have changed and it's not that rare in my country - at least in big cities. But I imagine a Croatian farmer seeing a black person - running! - and calling the police to investigate what the hell is going on.
For a laugh I used to read the local paper which published a log of police calls, they were along the lines of "A dead racoon was reported on Oxbow Rd. When officers investigated they found it was a hat."
And as unfortunate as it is, some people see black people running in their neighborhood as a danger to society and will call the police (or in some cases will just hunt them down and kill the person themselves https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/federal-judge-sentences-three...)
In Spain people call the cops for seemingly everything. I had a bunch of race motorcycles I was unloading at my house and some idiot neighbor called the cops because they thought I was running an illegal repair shop. I had to spend almost an hour proving that my four kids raced semi-professionally. Even had to show them their race licenses before they realized that I was telling the truth. I have found in many places in Europe people have a very hard time minding their own business — especially old ladies. For reference, I’m a white American. So some Croatians calling the cops after seeing a black dude doing a Forest Gump in the middle of nowhere would certainly attract the attention of the local busybodies.
This is schengen area border country, dealing with tons of smuggled immigrants, most of which are coming from Africa. While having from 0 to next to 0 local population of same/similar ethnicities.
First thing to many occur to especially older folks watching news is illegal immigrant running ie from busted police operation, not some epic runner. They definitely dont recognize running sportswear.
But all of racism is based upon the idea of "reasonable assumptions". You don't need to assume. By your logic, stats can inform assumptions about black people being up to some crime, Arabs being up to some terror plot, Indians committing some rape, etc. etc. But the whole point is that one person should not be tarred by the assumptions others make about their ethnicity.
Your question is a trick. If only statistics make something reasonable, then the only "reasonable" assumption is that he is a criminal. And all racist assumptions will be "reasonable". But the very idea that a person should be assumed about based on his ethnicity is not reasonable or morally right.
Who would you nominate? The US certainly has severe problems with racism, but everything I've ever read about other countries has led me to believe that this isn't actually a totally implausible claim.
> The WVS survey asks respondents from more than 80 countries dozens of questions, including one that asked respondents to identify types of people they would not want as neighbors. The more people of a particular country responded that they would be happy to have a neighbor of a different race, the more racially tolerant the respondents' country would be considered
That is based on 2 studies, one of which puts the US as one of the least racist countries and the other puts the US as among the most racist. Something is wrong.
The US is very racist by self reported observation of racism. However citizens of different countries have different definitions of racism.
If you use a constant definition of racism like “Would you live next to people of another race, yes/no?” Then you find that almost all Americans say yes (low racism) . In some other countries over 70% of people would not live next to a person of another race.
It depends a lot on which part of the US you look at. Here’s a high school having its first ‘integrated’ (i.e. not racially segregated) prom a mere 11 years ago: https://youtu.be/fDla-r2uj7U?si=Zun-NdDnjnSq0Yk4 The idea of formally separating an event like this by race would have been shocking 11 years ago in many Western countries. The US is ahead of the curve in some ways regarding racism, but it still has incredibly high levels of de facto racial segregation. As a Brit who lived in the US for a while, this was the aspect of US life that surprised me the most. Many white Americans still quite openly regard majority black towns or city districts as no-go areas (even though they don’t openly talk about it in racial terms). You see segregation on a smaller scale too (e.g. the common pattern of the restaurant with all white serving staff and all Latino kitchen workers). I’m aware that this kind of segregation isn’t usually the result of a deliberate evil plot to segregate people, but it’s still notable.
I am not saying that the UK is necessarily ‘less racist’ overall than the US. I think racism manifests itself quite differently in the two countries, so it’s hard to compare.
Canada and New Zealand are part of the “west” so they’re very similar to the US.
Jamaica is a good pick. A non western country that has very low levels of racism.
Maybe the assertion should be that the US is amongst the least racist countries in the world. The US is clearly in a different league compared to Russia, China and India.
Why do you think Caribbean nations are not part of the "west"? How about countries in Africa or South America?
Why do you think Russia, China, and India are "more" (moar?) racist than the US? All three of those countries are continent-sized and (internally) wildly diverse. Interestingly, all three of them have significant minority groups that practice Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity, yet they are peaceful places to live. This whole Internet trope that the US is more or less racist than country X is weird. I see it so many times. Any country that had institution racism well into the 20th century (many!) is going to be working through a continent-sized garbage dump of cultural baggage. I don't care so much about any country's absolute state; I care more about their direction and progress.
Two interesting examples:
30 years ago Germany treated Turkish people, who had peacefully and legally settled thanks to the post-war guest worker programme, as second citizens. Today is completely different. There are ethnic Turks who are national ministers!
Less extreme: Both Italy and Romania have large populations of Roma people (outdated term: gypsy), but today they are more integrated into mainstream society than ever. 30 years ago they were absolutely second class citizens.
Regarding China, Russia and India. They’ve all got a big problem with the literal enslavement of people from ethnic minority communities. I think that’s racism.
I’m surprised to see them characterize the cellulose from a paper teabag as releasing “microplastics.” I get that cellulose is a polymer, but do practitioners not distinguish between naturally-occurring polymers and synthetic plastics in this kind of microplastic/nanoplastic research?
When I boil some vegetables, do they leach microplastics into the cooking liquid, or is that something different from what this study is describing?
(Edit: on looking to the study itself, it seems like this was more about developing a methodology than asserting anything in particular about the paper teabag, which they described as a random pick stripped from some green teabags from the store.
Specifically I didn’t understand it to suggest that synthetic microplastics had gotten bound up in the paper matrix somehow and THAT was what was being released… so maybe it was, after all, just “model intestines absorb cellulose but not super well.”
Maybe practitioners would understand the cellulose results to be used like a control here?
>do practitioners not distinguish between naturally-occurring polymers and synthetic plastics in this kind of microplastic/nanoplastic research?
They don't care. This is a junk paper that cites a bunch of other junk papers. It's published in the same junk journal that gave us the junk paper on black plastic kitchen utensils. I can't really say more without risking a defamation suit, but what you're looking at has nothing to do with science.
Not only of science papers, I recently bought new shampoo and it has a "0% microplastics" label, on its plastic bottle.. it's milking people's emotions for money, like usual
The White House pdf suggests a scientific consensus of some form, stating: “Researchers are sounding alarm bells over the growing presence of microplastics in the human body, and are concerned that the ingestion of microplastics and exposure to plastic-related pollution are posing a growing risk to public health.”
>I can't really say more without risking a defamation suit
Not even the part about how you know it's junk? Is that based on your own critical analysis of the content, or just on what Retraction Watch has to say about Chemosphere?
Thankfully they break down the results per material, so you can care about the other materials and ignore the cellulose results if you like. So, yes, the different types of material are distinguished from one another.
> The tea bags used for the research were made from the polymers nylon-6, polypropylene and cellulose. The study shows that, when brewing tea, polypropylene releases approximately 1.2 billion particles per milliliter, with an average size of 136.7 nanometers; cellulose releases about 135 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 244 nanometers; while nylon-6 releases 8.18 million particles per milliliter, with an average size of 138.4 nanometers.
That’s also the materials from each type of tea bag, not a list of materials found in a single bag:
> To such end, three teabags of different chemical compositions were used in this study: (1) empty nylon-6 (NY6) teabags (as a model of polyamide), (2) empty polypropylene (PP) teabags, and (3) commercially available teabags containing tea, and cellulose as the polymer composition.
Yes, to the rebuttal of: "do practitioners not distinguish between naturally-occurring polymers and synthetic plastics in this kind of microplastic/nanoplastic research"
The quote you provided explains clearly, they measured three different types of teabags, distinguished by the different material that each was made of. "three teabags of different chemical compositions"
You have a mistaken understanding of paper teabags. They are made of paper, but during manufacturing the paper bag is sprayed with plastic to finish it
(And no, I’m not talking about the silky plastic pyramid style ones. Just the cheap paper ones)
> To such end, three teabags of different chemical compositions were used in this study: (1) empty nylon-6 (NY6) teabags (as a model of polyamide), (2) empty polypropylene (PP) teabags, and (3) commercially available teabags containing tea, and cellulose as the polymer composition.
To me, that suggests there were bags included containing no PP or Nylon-6.
> Most paper tea bags also have plastic fibers
used in the sealant in addition to these nylon and PET plastic tea
bags. Even paper tea bags have an unsettling substance called
epichlorohydrin added to them in order to keep them from
bursting.
this is such garbage paper you are referencing, and in particular the claim "most paper tea bags contain unsettling amounts of bad plastics" screams for citations and testing method.
I guess the authors only took into consideration some bad quality local trash brand.
Yorkshire Tea claims "most of the bag is made from natural fibres like wood pulp and the seal is made with PLA - an industrially compostable, plant-based plastic"
> In environments above 60°C, such as in hot liquids or high-heat exposure, PLA can begin to leach additives or degrade into its lactic acid monomers
Why the fuck are these sodding tic tacs putting 3D printer plastic into tea bags that will be thrown into boiling water?!
Well that's interesting, I presumed the so called biodegradability of PLA was more of a joke since you need to compost it, but the body is fairly warm I suppose.
Regardless the problem is not the plastic itself, but the plasticizers and other additives that leech out once you decompose it from what I understand. For medical use I would expect it's fairly stringent on what goes into it, but for something like tea bags I'm less sure.
Because PLA is made from sugar, funny enough, if use PLA from Europe to 3D print it smells like cotton candy (cause made from cane sugars) whereas PLA in the US smells like popcorn (because made from corn syrup). It's also why its completely biodegradable, if you leave it outside, bacteria and UV light will eventually break it down, its also why its not a good material for anything exposed to environmental elements or something that needs to be durable for a long period of time. Its fine for most things, including biodegradable cups and straws. All that said, its probably the least toxic of the plastics considering its source.
PLA has been around for a while, its not new with 3D printers, its just commonly used for 3D printers because it has excellent properties for 3D printing.
Because it's literally a polymer of lactic acid? It's safe enough that they use it for medical implants because its degradation products already exist in the body?
(Or is this a sarcastic response along the lines of "didn't you know it contains dihydrogen monoxide, a chemical widely used in nuclear reactors and military applications!"?)
I suspect this is something like Tazo that has the little pyramids make of a nylon type material vs the basic Lipton type tea bag that's just a paper product.
According to the comment just above you, that’s not the case, it’s talking about plain paper bags that are then treated. They link to an NIH page as their source.
> To such end, three teabags of different chemical compositions were used in this study: (1) empty nylon-6 (NY6) teabags (as a model of polyamide), (2) empty polypropylene (PP) teabags, and (3) commercially available teabags containing tea, and cellulose as the polymer composition.
I'm not a chemist, but skimming the paper it certainly sounds like the cellulose itself is what they are measuring:
> Following, ATR-FTIR analysis was performed in the teabags as well as in the leached mixture of nanoparticles plus fibers (Fig. 3). Both teabags and the leachate suspension matched their polymer composition being two of them petroleum-based polymers like nylon-6 (NY6, sample 1) and polypropylene (PP, sample 2), the third one (from the supermarket) being cellulose (CL, sample 3), a bio-based polymer.
I didn't see any mention of plastic binders or other material in the cellulose sample, just references to cellulose.
On the other hand, it was curious that they purchased the synthetic bags empty, but cellulose bags filled with tea, when it is pretty easy to find empty paper tea bags, so maybe there is something particular about the specific type of cellulose tea bag they chose?
keyword being cellulose polymer *composition*, there are hydrophobic additives infused into the cellulose fibers that are proprietary. For example: https://patents.google.com/patent/EP0632163A1/en
For the bags made of cellulose, yes, for the PP and Nylon-6 bags, no:
> To such end, three teabags of different chemical compositions were used in this study: (1) empty nylon-6 (NY6) teabags (as a model of polyamide), (2) empty polypropylene (PP) teabags, and (3) commercially available teabags containing tea, and cellulose as the polymer composition.
Oh my. I hadn’t thought about the adhesives. And just at a gander at the study’s figures, their various microplastic signals from the cellulose bag are hard to distinguish from the pure nylon and polypropylene ones. That’s a sobering thought…
I don’t know where you are in Europe, but I’ve been to enough of Europe to say that that pretty much everywhere uses teabags that look like this: https://images.app.goo.gl/ZKonRKNqTvfi1qd38.
Sometimes, the top fold is closed over with a small metal staple, but that’s not the only place the bag is sealed.
"To such end, three teabags of different chemical compositions were used in this study: (1) empty nylon-6 (NY6) teabags (as a model of polyamide), (2) empty polypropylene (PP) teabags, and (3) commercially available teabags containing tea, and cellulose as the polymer composition."
The different teabag composition materials were from separate types of teabags, not composition materials of the same teabag.
Do you have any brands in mind? In the bagged tea with cellulose tea bags that I've bought, they are typically held together by just a staple. I've found this to be the case since I occasionally empty the tea from the teabags into my percolator.
Pillow style tea bags are fully enclosed paper tea bags with no string or tags, and have a crimp around the rim. I never thought about them using glue, but it makes sense. Some brands I know of that use them are Taylors of Harrogate, Celestial Seasonings, Republic of Tea.
Edit: Also some tea bags for loose leaf tea like t-sac or finum brands have that crimp on the edge. However, t-sac confirms they use glue, but finum specifically claims to not use glues, so maybe it is jumping to conclusions that all bags of these sort do.
There is some confusion about the materials used in teabags. Depending on the brand, they may be pure cellulose, or they may be made with plastics and PFAs.
It sounded from the methods section like a random paper teabag from the store. It wouldn’t surprise me at all if the manufacturing world had moved from paper to some kind of engineered cellulose bioplastic… but I always thought of those more in the context of rayon, and those horrible “bamboo” textiles and foams. (Versus linen made from bamboo fibers, which is lovely :)
Are there other processes that work out cheaper than paper for teabag kind of applications these days?
Anyway, it comes across like they're trying to warn about nylon or polypropylene being unexpectedly found in disposable tea bags that appear to be made of paper; but in the details you read that the microplastics are "derived from several types of commercially available tea bags" - a category which certainly includes bags very openly and obviously made of nylon (reusable, pyramid-shaped ones). There are tons of places reporting on this new study, but the idea doesn't seem to be new at all. (It also seems like common sense to me that immersing a fine plastic mesh in your food, and allowing it to reach close to 100 degrees Celsius, might be a risk for this sort of thing.) It wasn't new in 2019, either: see e.g. https://ratetea.com/topic/nylon-tea-bags/30/ .
But then, a bit of searching suggests that the disposable paper bags may indeed contain a significant amount of plastic (see e.g. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10389239/ , although the tone of the writing here seems rather fear-mongering). The reporting would be much better if it made this sort of thing clear.
Most of the older folks I know get their meds in the mail these days, even from the pharmacy that’s closer than that. The pharmacist is happy to talk to them over the phone.
> They also determine which pharmacies are in network for insurance plans, and which of those are “preferred,” offering patients lower co-pays.
[…]
> Dr. Qato argues that Part D plans should not select preferred pharmacies at all.
“Allow patients to choose which pharmacy to go to, with the co-pay the same, regardless,” she said. “So the pharmacy is reimbursed fairly, whether it’s preferred or not.”
I must be missing something, but what is unfair about passing along cost savings to consumers (in the form of lower copays) when they patronize pharmacies efficient enough that they can accept lower reimbursement rates?
Sorry missing something here as a non Americana person. Why should someone have to understand and negotiate co-pay, or having to chose more efficient pharmacies and reimbursement rates when they just want the pharma that like keeps them alive?
I know that is the talking point, but that is not my lived experience. I have been on 5 regular meds for chronic conditions and I currently pay less than $25/mo with my insurance plan. Twelve years ago I did a 18 month stint doing freelance work with no health insurance and paid about the same.
Those same 5 meds are probably free in most EU countries and even some south american ones. It could also be given for free in the US at a fraction of the total spending but that would impact the GDP too much.
I see it as an example of stopping a crime before it happens by removing the ability of everyday people to even make the choice to commit the crime.
This seems necessary when the penalty for being caught after the fact is insufficient to stop people from doing it. Either because penalties don’t work in preventing behavior, or because current society has difficulty implementing sufficiently harsh penalties because it feels too mean.
Right but the criminal isn't the person trying to have their medicine delivered in this scenario. It's a compromise in the quality of the medical apparatus because the policing apparatus can't or won't do its job. A same medical apparatus should be independent of enforcement activities or else patients will always receive suboptimal care and services due to the now mixed goals.
What do you imagine, directionally speaking, as a more elegant tool?
I’m understanding your comment to suggest that you find money a clumsy tool for the purpose of allocating human effort and capital… I hope and suspect you have something broader and more elegant in mind than “money, but digital”!
1. Money will communicate demand to continue, but not demand to stop. Until a profitable but harmful behavior is made illegal there's aren't many ways to stop it even if there's widespread consensus that it should be stopped.
2. It carries no metadata about its history. This means that when I accept a dollar from my employer I don't know what kind of behavior I'm acting in support of. If it's benign, the scarcity dynamics work ok and I should just take it because now I have a scarce thing to trade. But if it was issued to a mining company as part of a loan in support of some operation that's poisoning my drinking water, I'm better off refusing it and telling my employer to find me some cleaner money, otherwise I'm participating in my own demise.
Or maybe that's the same deficiency stated twice, I'm not sure.
I don't think blockchains are the right data structure so there's not much prior art to build on--but yes I do think money's successor will be modulated by software in some way--money being an information technology in the first place.
Lately when I take a crack at it it looks like a CRDT that stores debts and helps people find loops such that those debts can be nullified. If Alice owes Bob one and Bob owes Charlie one and Charlie owes Alice one, then the records of these debts can be purged without needing to settle in some far off clearing house or blockchain (supposing Alice, Bob, and Charlie are all on the same network partition). This buys you partition tolerance, which I think lends itself to something a little more difficult to use for exploiting people who don't know you.
There would be this lattice of trust relationships so you couldn't just waltz in to a poor village where nobody trusted you and expect to wield your foreign wallet to make the locals treat you like a god. If want something to "spend" with a remote population it would be based on some kind of proof you've done something that benefits them.
Mostly I'm just working on the software primitives you'd need, I'm not especially good at the degree of community-mindedness you'd need to do a good job with such a design. But when the time comes I hope to have helped provide the right person with the tools they need.
The only point I wish to make here is that for millennia we had to deal with whatever system the laws of physics handed us (the scarcity of gold and other substances was sufficient to build an economy around) but now we can write our own rules. Maybe it'll take us a few decades or centuries to kick the habit of thinking in the old way, but now that we have options... Well it seems unlikely to me that we wouldn't explore them, instead favoring Caesar's original design.
> What do you imagine, directionally speaking, as a more elegant tool?
Joints
but seriously. We have enough to provide to all living people on earth. We do not need to work all day every day to consume. It is possible to create a society optimized for enjoyment where every living person has enough to have a fulfilling life.
We don't need to replace money, we need to make it less important. Something similar to 1 person, 1 vote that made modern democracies possible.
Taxation is supposed to make market-based economies function like weighted democracies. But in practice, the rich just pass laws making it easy for them to evade taxes, so the normalization never occurs and we end up at oligarchy.
Are people normally extradited in civil matters? With the penalty being a fine of up to $1000 per violation, plus options for customers to sue individually, wouldn’t it work like any other civil matter?
Get a judgment in NY with or without the defendant choosing to show up, come after their assets, that kind of thing? Even if they’re Canadian, presumably they’re accepting money in dollars somewhere along the line, couldn’t a motivated attorney come after that cash flow?
Between your site copy and your early comments on this thread, it was this rundown that made the product click in my mind.
I’m sure that in this early preview you’re trying to reach mainly devs with existing domain expertise, but the way that, in this comment, you laid out existing constraints and what possibilities might lie beyond them—it really helped me situate your S2 product in the constellation of cloud primitives.
Just wanted to offer that feedback in the hope that the spirit of your comment here doesn’t get buried down-thread!
It sounds like the gp’s objection might be that they’d like for their children to use iPhone and its parental controls, but they themselves would prefer to use other platforms to manage the supervision features. As far as I know, you do in fact have to be within the apple ecosystem to manage the ScreenTime features as you suggest.
Firewalla looks really thoughtfully designed! I’m glad to be aware of it.
