Great message...but gosh, can someone throw 15px of padding on that <td>? I know HN is supposed to be minimal, but I had to check the URL to confirm that this was a real page because of the odd design.
> Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
Agreed, but my biggest problem with this, is that most external keyboards don't really have an equivalent (at least in the some location). So while I have Fn mapped to my speech to text tool (Hex), I have to figure out something else when I'm at my desktop keyboard.
> But cloth diapers are obviously much better for the environment
What about this is obvious? Water usage, transportation, fabrication factors, different usage patterns; seems like there are many things to tease apart here.
I think as a general rule: a reusable thing is more environmentally friendly than a single-use thing (especially when the reuse cycles are high). Yes, there are exceptions. But you’ve got the bizarre case to make here, if you want to suggest single-use diapers (that also use water, require transportation, are fabricated, packaged, etc.) are a more efficient use of resources.
My primary point is that it's not a slam dunk for either side. Nothing's obvious about the "impact" here. I you're interested in picking a product based on its environmental impact, there are going to be many factors to consider. Just peruse this 200 page report from the UK government on the subject:
This study has serious methodological issues. I would encourage you to carefully peruse it yourself before citing. This is far from the only issue, but the fact that someone who works at Procter and Gamble is on the study's advisory board is... fun.
I don't think it's that crazy. It's fairly well documented that a reusable cloth shopping bag has a break even with plastic shopping bags at around a 100-200 reuses, something most people won't reach.
With diapers, you have wash water, electricity, and a gas dryer in the mix.
Then you have people in this thread talking about services to pickup and wash them for you. How many trips car trips is that- 2 a week?
1. Id guess an average cloth diaper gets reused more than 100x
2. Think about the mass differences you’re comparing here. A standard plastic grocery bag is about 5 grams of material. A standard cloth bag is around 250. Cloth vs disposable diapers are approximately the same amount of material. This is the “gotcha, vegan! Iceberg lettuce is less efficient on a CO2 per calorie basis than beef! Eat more steak to be greener” type of argument.
3. You’re doing the thing contrarians often do of only counting one side of the ledger, while hand waving away the other. Disposable diapers require water, tree growing, tree cutting, tree transport, tree processing, bleaching, transport, packaging, product transport, disposal transport, disposal processing, etc etc. for each time a diaper is used. Really think about the full cradle-to-grave cycle of these things. Reusables must be washed, yes. But they, importantly, don’t require any of the other steps, which is, y’know, extremely significant. It’s not even remotely plausible single-use diapers are more resourceful than cloth ones.
I think it's plausible that cloth diapers are worse per use than disposable ones due to the mass industrialization of manufacture and resource intensity of cleaning.
You are right that we have to look at the full breakdown of the cradle to grave resource cost.
A washer and dry cycle is about 5 kilowatt hours, which is about the average household energy consumption in China or twice that in India.
Financially, in California it's about $3 per wash for power before accounting for water, soap, ect.
Let's say you got 10 diapers per day and washing every 2 days.
That's 15 cents and 250 watt hours per diaper use.
American use a lot of electricity, so washing diapers would be about a 10% household increase
Cloth shopping bags are a really bad comparison here.
Some things working in favor of cloth diapers here are general greening of the grid, mitigating issues with electricity consumption.
Beyond that, line drying diapers works very well and even preserves the life of the diapers.
Cloth diapers hold their value extremely well and can easily be bought/sold/given away on sites like OfferUp or groups like Buy Nothing.
ALso, "2 car trips per week": do you have no idea how this works? No diaper service in their right mind would send out cars to make bespoke trips to individuals. They're done using a big truck on a schedule to amortize the cost of pick up and drop off as much as possible.
But there are lots of exceptions, right? Like a huge bunch of medical equipment where cleaning the thing to make it safe for reuse would be both more expensive and worse for the environment than single-use versions.
In many parts of the world they throw them in a basin of water and laundry detergent, let them soak for a bit, then hand wash them. No medical equipment necessary.
Of course if you have a washing machine you just launder them like any other item of clothing.
I encourage you to read the current thinking on this evolving language, which offers some explanation as to why we're moving away from damaging language like "committing" suicide.
I think they are saying that the current title ("people died ... amid scandal") muddies the water when it comes to the causal relation, arguably "people were led to suicide by baseless accusations" _might_ be a more faithful descriptor of who's at fault here, but I understand journalists don't want to risk being sued (and neither do I, hence my use of _might_)
You may disagree with my assertion, but there has been considerable research into the role of media and reporting in suicide, indicating that contagion is real and that words matter when reporting on these issues.
That words matter is why I'm in opposition, as this diminishes agency in people.
Today I would say that framing suicide as "immoral" in secular society is banal and has no traction, but most, excepting certain circumstances, would suggest it is a bad choice. That surely follows if you as well as I would try to talk an able person out of suicide.
I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following tough circumstances. That's the message I am getting from the euphemism treadmill game, and I reject it.
The message should be that you can go through hell and recover, and you still have a choice. And granted there's always nature vs nurture; just as we are not entirely the product of our environment, the environment does shape us. But it's not all-or-nothing.
The person you are replying to shared some research by experts on the topic giving recommendations. You can argue for or against anything, but it’s useful to at least engage with the evidence being presented.
Did you look at the link? Its just a long list. There is no point in there to engage with, and regardless the point of contention is not reporting in abstract, its the exact terminology of "commit suicide", its not even clear that is explored at all.
I would say it's not the treadmill at work in this case. It's not simply a replacement.
The article linked by the parent comment explains it well and references plenty of considered material. But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.
Consider how people would like your death, or the death of a loved one, described by others. And if you can't, maybe consider how others might be affected.
> But the tldr is that committing suicide aligns with an active criminal/immoral act, while dying by suicide is a factual cause of death with many possible causes.
The projections are doing the work here. Colloquially today what's understood is that "commit" merely means they did the deed. People can judge that to be immoral or not regardless; most people don't, except through the lens of religion.
They might judge it to be the wrong choice, as I surely do, and I don't think it helps to diminish agency as though suicide is an inevitability following any given circumstance.
edit: lol wut? The more I think about this the less it makes sense. The stigma of suicide is from the societal attitude that it's wrong and you should never do it. Using a verb isn't the bit that tells everyone it is wrong. If you want to remove the stigma take away all the signs for 998 and perfunctory statements that help is available, and replace them all with "do it. no balls, do it."
Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.
I doubt removing "committed" removes any stigma to seek help. What sucks about suicidality is that everyone is so sterile about it. Removing the word is more of that. IMO the sterility discourages the not-yet-at-rock-bottom suicidal from reaching out.
> Isn't the stigma desired anyway? It keeps people from going through with it. That's why society deliberately creates and actively cultivates the stigma.
That’s a very optimistic take on how “rational” society tends to be. The thought that “if things are in a certain way in society, then it must make sense (from a moral or societal point of view) for them to be that way.”
This is a key distinction. Plus codes map to a 14m x 14m square area and aren't aware of things like building units or elevation.
If you live in a high rise apartment, a plus code does not identify you precisely. Sadly to do this you need some knowledge of a structure's internals. It makes sense it's being done on the national level in Japan.
Or even just addresses that are split between multiple pluscodes?
For example, a duplex where the front door of each unit is adjacent to the other. Even at the 4m resolution, that means both units front doors (and thus street addresses) can fall into one single pluscode.
Overall, the colorectal cancer story is encouraging https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47078840
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