I hope @mark_lynas / @weplanetint does a podcast about this.
Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.
- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.
- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.
- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.
- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.
Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.
New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/jus…
Paul Youlten retweeted
Throwing rubbish in a landfill is (usually) better for the environment than recycling it. With few exceptions, recycling ends up emitting more CO2 and costing more money, while landfills are cheap and secure.
- Recycling mid-tier plastics (like plastic bottles or butter tubs) costs thousands of dollars per ton of CO2 saved. It's cheaper to do direct air CO2 capture than that! And there is no shortage of plastic, nor any problem with sequestering it in the ground once we're done with it.
- Modern landfills are extraordinarily secure and are *much* more than just big piles of trash. They capture 75%–95% of methane gas. Groundwater contamination is doesn't really happen with landfills built since 1990. A study of 31 landfills built since 1988 in NY found no adverse effect at all on local groundwater quality.
- The crusade against single-use plastics has driven us to products that use far more materials and energy and would need to be used an absurd number of times to actually be an improvement. A steel straw needs to be used 150 times to be worth using. A ceramic mug needs to be used 1,000 times to beat a polystyrene cup. A cotton bag needs to be reused 173 times to beat single-use.
- Some things ARE worth recycling. Recycling metal saves a huge amount of energy and material – recycling aluminium saves 95% of the energy spent on making fresh stuff. So we do a lot of it already: about 30% of steel worldwide is recycled.
Modern, well-run landfills cause minimal environmental damage. We have plenty of space for them – less than 0.01% of the US is used for landfill and only about 0.02% of Germany. We can even build on top of old landfills, so the land area is not spent permanently.
New in @WorksInProgMag, @robertwiblin and @chalmermagne on why it's usually best to just bury your trash. worksinprogress.co/issue/jus…
Paul Youlten retweeted
The War Meant to Prevent World War III
The case that America’s attack on Iran was not the beginning of a wider global war, but an attempt to make one with China impossible
#SteelmanTheory
medium.com/@2W/the-war-meant…
Paul Youlten retweeted
We have special news!
3 white-tailed eagles have fledged from wild nests in Dorset & Sussex this summer.
With 5 pairs now established across England we hope to see further breeding in the coming years as this lost species is restored.
bit.ly/4h83z3D
@RoyDennisWF
Paul Youlten retweeted
I need your help: I want to get more people into the WikiCritic beta-test. The launch will be huge, and you'll have bragging rights!
How? It's easy.
I've screenshotted some Wikipedia article introductions below.
Post a review of JUST THIS (the "lede") below! 🧵👇
Paul Youlten retweeted
Phenomenal PISA scores show forty years of education reforms in England under successive governments worked. Standards up. In Scotland and Wales they shunned reforms and the price is paid in squandered human capital and potential. open.substack.com/pub/reacti…
Happy to see that Jottit has come back to life: jottit.org I think it might be a good place to store and link my AI md files.
Paul Youlten retweeted
Reviews are deleted after 7 days. Accounts after 90 days idle. We will never sell your data.
If this is still alive in five years I want it to be something people still trust, not something that quietly harvested them.
thelatecommute.com/privacy
Plain English, not lawyers.
Paul Youlten retweeted
Suffering for over 15 years with a rare brain tumour, I went to countless doctors who told me nothing was wrong with me. They would say I was stressed, or needed to sleep more, exercise more, misdiagnosed with PCOS 3 times. These were NHS and private doctors. Specialists.
Scroll a timeline of films organised by historical setting from '10,000 BC' and 'The Flintstones' to 'Valérian and the City of a Thousand Planets' and 'Dune'
when-cinema-is-set.vercel.ap…
TIL: The Matrix and Star Trek are set in approximately the same time in the future: when-cinema-is-set.vercel.ap…
Paul Youlten retweeted
Less than 100 miles away, about 50 tons of steel and copper are spinning at exactly 3,600 RPM. A giant rotor slews magnetic fields through copper windings and, per Faraday and Maxwell, induces a synchronized 60 Hz sine wave across an entire grid.
That electromagnetic wave propagates through grain oriented silicon steel, laminated transformer cores, kilometers of aluminum conductor steel reinforced cable, SF₆ insulated switchgear, substations switching hundreds of kilovolts, distribution transformers, oxygen free copper wiring, silicon MOSFETs, ferrites, multilayer ceramic capacitors, and the USB C cable plugged into my phone.
There, power feeds a capacitive touchscreen. A transparent matrix of indium tin oxide is deposited on glass. The controller continuously scans the grid. My finger changes the mutual capacitance by a fraction of a picofarad, perturbing the local electric field just enough for dedicated analog front ends to detect before software reconstructs the touch.
Iron ore. Bauxite. Silica sand. Copper ore. Lithium brines. Rare earths.
Refined. Alloyed. Crystallized. Doped. Implanted. Deposited. Etched. Polished.
We purified sand into nearly perfect single crystal silicon, grew boules, sliced wafers, placed dopant atoms with nanometer precision, fabricated chips containing tens of billions of transistors, synchronized them with clocks billions of times per second, and engineered them to execute matrix multiplications at a scale no human could comprehend.
Somewhere along the way, matmuls started to look like us.
That is an astonishing thought.
The towers of abstraction are staggering. No one person built this. No one person fully understands it. Yet every morning millions of people wake up tired, answer emails, argue over specifications, chase margins, fix defects, make payroll, and try to cover their mortgages. Somehow the whole machine keeps humming.
A planetary Swiss watch assembled from physics, markets, bureaucracy, ambition, error, and human necessity.
And after all of that, I touch a piece of conductive glass and step into the Roman forum of modern thought, where millions of minds test ideas against one another in real time.
Clockwork humanity.
It staggers the mind.
I have a new /skill called 'court-clerk' that emerged while developing my game Doggo108.
Your favourite AI agent acts as a court clerk in an appeals/adjudication process that runs though the CLI.
It keeps track of all appeals and previous rulings to form a kind of library of 'common law' that can be referenced in future appeals. All names are anonymised in an effort to keep rulings fair.
try it using:
npx skills@latest add Payo/skills/court-clerk
Let me know how to improve it - or fork it and DIY.
Paul Youlten retweeted
/writing-great-skills is quickly becoming my most often-invoked skill
It's just really good at writing skills, guys.
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill writing-great-skills
after a few weeks of daily use of @mattpocockuk 's brilliant grill-me skill, Claude Code has started to suggest that we do grill-me sessions without me telling it. 🤖















