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What about the shareholders! Think of the shareholders!!! Won’t someone think of the shareholders!!!
One of the beautiful things from the Simpsons that will forever be lodged in my brain.
Those poor, brave shareholders
are shareholders truly that evil or is the company using them as scapegoats? like are shareholders seriously angry about not making massive growth? and if so, fuck em. they’re just gambling anyway.
Have you ever heard of shareholders suing a CEO or Company for not being aggressive enough on profit making ? It does happen, shareholders are pure scum !
haha damn. that is so sad.
Well, the shareholders are going to put their money where it makes the most money. Shareholder profits are everything now. Capitalism is so fucking stupid, and it’s going to kill us all.
Not profit, speculative profit. Buy low sell cheap. Years of steady growth dividends are gone and so does long term consequences.
Shareholders (collectively) are the company, the CEO is actually the scapegoat, you remove one, the board (who are chosen by the shareholders who have shares with voting rights) would just appoint another CEO that does the same thing, putting profit first, that’s literally their job, they wouldn’t get appointed CEO if they won’t do the dirtywork.
They say Brian Thompson murdered people, yes, but who gave those orders? The board who appointed him, and the voting shareholders that appointed the board.
ah i thought shareholders we just stock market people.
Eh. Single use plastics are REALLY useful in certain areas of healthcare where sterility is important. Especially for vascular access devices. Nothing is going to beat the ability of plastic to:
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stay sterile on a shelf for months to years at a time, so that it can safely be used to bypass 90% of a person’s immune system to give lifesaving medication and reliably produce quality samples for testing
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do it while being flexible enough to not damage the vasculature permanently or in a way that causes enough damage / inflammation to render the access point unusable
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Yet be resistant enough to breakdown that it’s unlikely to break off in a large enough chunk that could migrate and damage the brain heart or lungs.
And I suspect someone who works OR has a way longer and more interesting list than I do.
Now there are other areas in healthcare that plastics could be significantly reduced. The big one that occurs to me is hygiene supplies. We use a lot of single use wet wipes and bed pads with plastic backings. If we were willing to give direct care workers more time to spend with each patient they could make better use of washcloths, washable bed pads, etc.
But there are a select few use cases where I expect plastic to outperform all alternatives for the foreseeable future.
Some years ago I read an article that more and more hospitals (in Germany) are getting rid of their sterilisation facilities, because single use tools can be ordered in bulk and the facilities + personnel are costly. Profit-driven healthcare is such a nightmare for the environment.
It’s not like sterilizing is free either, it uses a lot of heat energy which in most places means you’re burning methane on the grid. That also releases co2 emissions.
Would be interesting to see which uses more energy. Implementing a carbon tax would surface those costs pretty quickly.
Can confirm, I worked as a vendor for both OR facilities and various laboratories. It’s something I’ve been thinking of for a while, actually. Single use plastics are so important to both areas of healthcare I don’t see how we can reduce their usage. It’s one of the few cases I know where not using plastic has a risk of actually killing a number of people due to inferior quality or cross contamination.
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I make things for a living. Every time I order screws, brackets, or any other small component, it dawns on me how many more single use plastic bags we use than most people realize. I’ve been making this big thing at work that uses a ton of aluminum extrusion (aka 8020) and we’ve been using a ton of these little corner brackets. Every. Single. Bracket. Comes in this plastic bag. Inside the plastic bag there is another plastic bag that contains 4 screws and 4 T-nuts, and a 3rd plastic bag that contains the bracket itself. I started making a bag full of little bags like a year ago with the intention of reusing them, but the bag is now full of several hundred crumpled up little bags and I’ve used maybe a dozen. I’ve stopped saving them. On this project alone we’re probably going to use over 150 of those little brackets. We have a small operation, I can’t even imagine how many little bags an actual factory goes through in a single day.
The bag of bags that is in every houses
I’ve been reselling my condom for years!
I’m sure there actually are people who would buy used condoms.
I don’t want to meet them. But I’m sure they exist.
Certainly not as a novelty either.
what, the same one? do you sell it to the same guy every time and then buy it back?
🎵 it’s the ciiiiiircle of cuuum! 🎵
Prime example here is refrigerators. If you get a leak in the refrigerant line, your refrigerator is pretty much toast. I found this out the hard way when I wanted to repair one. They don’t even have taps that you could refill it with. I had assumed there would be something like with a car’s air conditioner where you could add refrigerant and recharge it. Instead, it’s a closed system and because of the way that they are designed, to recharge a refrigerator well over $3,000, because the technician has to tap into the line and reseal it after they top it off which requires specialized tools, so basically if anything happens with that system, you’re better off buying a whole new refrigerator. Super wasteful design imo. I guess one could argue that by making it not sealed it could be more prone to leaks over time, but it’s still wild that you don’t have the option of filling it with maybe 10 bucks worth of refrigerant and instead have to scrap the whole machine.
I mean, I fix my own fridges and appliances and do small appliance work for my friends and neighbors, but I already own the required tools so I’m really just charging for some time and the refrigerant.
134a is still cheap, and no company worth their salt should be charging a fee to customers so that specialized tools can be purchased. If you don’t own the tools of the trade, that’s a company problem, not a customer problem.
3000 dollars was a “I don’t want to do it price”
For people I don’t know, I do charge about 300 bucks to just show up, because that covers operating costs and an hour of my time. But unless the system was pulling into a vacuum, it shouldn’t take longer than an hour or so to recover the refrigerant, patch the leak, pull a vacuum, and recharge. So yeah, if your fridge is only worth 500 bucks, it’s not worth it. But if it’s an expensive fridge it might be worth it to find an appliance technician that will charge you a fair rate to repair the damage.
I might have misremembered the price. I just remember it being prohibitively expensive vs just getting another fridge. I ended up just getting a free one off nextdoor n tossing the old one. It was a garage fridge. Having said that, I can see what you’re saying about if someone had a higher end fridge.
They have piercing valves that cost a few bucks, shredder valves are also less than five dollars. These are typical and easy repairs for for household refrigeration. I do it daily.
Depending on what the job requires it’s 125 to 500 to refill a system.
Most fridge manufacturers don’t put access valves on their sealed systems because they cost more money and are significantly more prone to leaking.
On the one hand maximizing design for material conservation also tends to increase costs, creating shortages.
On the other hand ignoring the externalities of production leads to environmental costs causing collapse.
In the gripping hand is our ability to create and manage an economic and political system capable of deciding where that balance is.
Total lifetime cost and emissions are more important. Recycling something doesn’t mean its total pollution is free.
I guess light bulbs are going to become expensive.
Oh and can be recycled is kinda meaningless if the system to recycle the items doesn’t exist.
lightbulbs that never die already exist, but big bulb mafia says no one can sell em.
‘Reduced’ implies manufacturing changes. What if, once the product is reduced, it still can’t be reused/recycled?
What if the intended life of a product is 50 years maintenance-free after which it’s landfill? Can’t be reused, can’t be refurbed, can’t be recycled - but it’s still generally a good use of resources.
In many products, there’s a repair-reliability tradeoff. If you pot it, you can’t repair failures, but you’ll reduce the failure rate by >90%. Repair shops hate it because the ones they see can’t be fixed, but they’ don’t see all the ‘easy repairs’ that never needed doing in the first place.
The problem is we are only paying for half the lifecycle of the product. Start charging disposal fees to companies for every plastic/non-recycleable bit, and your head will spin at how fast they can get us 90-100% repairable, recyclable, and re-useable products.
I think it should work like bottle deposits.
Make producers pay a fee per unit of crap they make - plastic, forever chemicals, whatever - and then refund them based on the amount they can remove from the environment and store safely.
Literally everything can be resold.
Digital items.
Ah, yes. :3
They can be resold. We’re just living in a world where WE don’t allow that.
But it’s possible to do.
You have software. Tim wants software. Well fuck Tim. Sell it to Steve instead. Now Steve pays you money. Now Steve has the software. You don’t anymore.
See? Done.
Why not just make copies and then everyone can enjoy the same software for free? smh
Of course its technically possible, but the OPs point is that it often isnt possible
If you choose to pay for a digital something, that’s on you.
Sometimes the seeds and peers just aren’t there…
Give me the enthropy reversal machine LadyButterfly! Divulge your secrets!
Well I mean if it can be reduced then it should be removed, lol, that one doesn’t belong in the list.
As someone in the repair industry, I can tell you this meme is nonsense.
Refurbished, reused, repaired, or otherwise remanufactured parts are almost always inferior to new ones. That’s not opinion, that’s reality. They’ve always been worse and always will be, at least until corporations stop playing the profit maximization game.
The truth is, these companies don’t care about quality. Their only goal is to spend the absolute minimum making old parts “usable” again, which leads to a massive percentage of defective components flooding the market.
