hathchip

I'm not arguing in favor of the GP's specific proposals, just pointing out that we should consider the displacement of fuel burning when we consider the carbon cost of plastics.

I assumed that his suggestion was not meant to be taken literally - that we should construct plastics for no use - but rather that we should think differently about the value and cost of plastics which are produced anyway.

Interesting, thanks

We could instead assume that you are either very ignorant or just talking crap.

No. Doctors who qualified in a different country cannot simply start working. They have to do expensive and time consuming training to convert their credentials. This is partly because it's very important your doctor has appropriate language skills and understands the local system - and partly because local trade associations of doctors insist on it to protect their own jobs.

> I don't think the limit on trainees has any effect on salary

This is far from true. On the margin, doctors can work in the private sector or leave the country. Only a few choose to do so, but this is (among other reasons) because the NHS always has to respond to price pressure to keep that small number from growing to where it causes shortages.

Recently a change in how pension contributions are taxed was pushed through almost entirely because it affected senior doctors. If the NHS had pricing power as you suggest, why wouldn't they just tell doctors to pay up?

> I don't recall much if any opposing new coal plants.

I can't argue with your subjective recollections, but this is not by any means an accurate picture of environmentalism historically. Acid rain in West Germany (caused by burning coal) is pretty much ground zero of environmentalism as a politically organized force.

But if you have a web client and app store apps, which are frontends to the same thing, doesn't that mean that your site is still constrained by the app store rules?

> You can't assume losing half of staff is a downside.

Said Elon Musk about Twitter. How's that working out for him?

Corporations decided to give away the single-use plastic bags for nothing when this was allowed. If they wanted to increase their profits like this, they could have just stopped giving them away for free.

Do you wash your clothes after wearing them? Maybe you should start wearing single-use plastic clothes since it's obviously much better for the environment.

I don't really agree with the point about anti-nuke environmentalism. In the past many environmentalists were opposed to both nuclear energy (because of the risk of Chernobyl-style disasters or because of the implicit subsidy to nuclear weapons proliferation) and they were opposed to fossil fuel extraction and burning.

The people who were opposed to the environmentalist worldview were in favor of nuclear, but also in favor of fossil fuel generation and extraction (and CFCs, and leaded gasoline, and deforestation, and DDT, etc). They often very publicly argued that all these issues were bogus, that global warming could never happen, that we had nothing to worry about, that all these concerns were motivated by hatred of money or progress.

The environmentalists, on the other hand, tried hard to make a more abstract point - that we need to protect our environment and treat it as a precious good to be shared. This was obviously right.

Why should we cherry-pick one aspect of an environmentalist strategy from a very specific time and use it to blame them for "the continued and expanded use of coal, oil, and natural gas for power generation". Why aren't the numerous vocal cheerleaders of fossil fuels (who may have happened to be in favor of nuclear, but only because they generally argued that we should ignore all safety and resource depletion concerns) held to account here?

I mean, if you use it less, it will wear down slower. Nothing to worry about.

What about yard waste?

Your original claim was 'almost all' so if you're just talking about plastic I think I'm quite right to question what you 'heard from the garbage guy'.

The headline says 'plastic recycling' whereas the GP's claim was about recycling and yard waste in general.

> Much of Europe

Single-use plastic shopping bags are banned or levied in much of Europe.