Apple has always talked a good game where recycling and
environmentalism are concerned. They’re quick to point out that they
recycle what they can and are always on the hunt for new, sustainable
manufacturing practices to adopt. They’ve got robots named Liam that
take old stuff apart to make new stuff! While the company’s PR machine
is spinning that it’s Apple’s dream to one day make all of their
products out of completely recycled materials, they’re presently
shitting the bed on the most basic of sustainability practices.
Apple rejects current industry best practices by forcing
the recyclers it works with to shred iPhones and MacBooks so they cannot
be repaired or reused—instead, they are turned into tiny shards of
metal and glass.
“Materials are manually and mechanically disassembled and shredded
into commodity-sized fractions of metals, plastics, and glass,” John
Yeider, Apple’s recycling program manager, wrote under a heading called
“Takeback Program Report” in a 2013 report to Michigan Department of
Environmental Quality. “All hard drives are shredded in confetti-sized
pieces. The pieces are then sorted into commodities grade materials.
After sorting, the materials are sold and used for production stock in
new products. No reuse. No parts harvesting. No resale.”
…A document submitted to North Carolina’s Department of Environment
Quality in September 2016 shows that Apple’s must-shred policy hasn’t
changed in recent years, even as it continues to position itself as a
green company: “All of the equipment collected for recycling is manual
and mechanically disassembled and shredded. The resulting fractions are
sorted into plastics, metals, and glass and sold as stock feed in the
manufacturing process.
So, that iPhone 5 you decided to take into your local recycling
depot? There’s a good chance that the depot isn’t allowed to take it
apart and use it to repair other phones. It can’t be sold or given to
someone who would be able to make good use of it, despite its no longer
reviewing software updates. Apple demands that the handset be destroyed.
The same goes for any iPads, Mac computers or iPods handed over to
third-party recycling companies that have signed on to work with Apple.
Basically, Apple doesn’t want its old stuff, even if it’s still usable,
floating around out there. Their end game is and will always be to try
and make us buy their latest toys. They’re not the only ones that want
that, of course: technology-oriented businesses rise and fall on being
able to convince consumers that owning their latest product, even if you
just bought last year’s model a few months ago, is totally worth the
price.
This feature
over at Motherboard took years to research and details how Apple forces
the recycling companies that they work with to play the game by their
rules, while paying lip service to the environment.
If you really care about sustainability, and this is coming from a
guy that reviews tech for a living, think, hard, before you invest in a
new product. Do you really need to upgrade your smartphone every year?
If you replace the battery in your computer instead of buying a new
laptop, will it continue to serve you well? Instead of recycling your
hardware, would giving it to someone who can’t afford the luxury of new
gear be a possibility? There’s nothing wrong with buying new stuff. It
feels good, I get it. But there’s pleasure to be found in making what
you already own work too.
Thank you for taking the time to go through my blog and do this. It’s something I keep trying to do and then get overwhelmed by and give up in frustration and tears because I inevitably read the comments and just want to jettison my blog into the sun.
Thank you for this.
Also lol, you can very clearly document through these posts when I started recovering from the jaw bone infection and got off the pain killers. They become much more consistent, expansive and a whole lot angrier hahaha
So I looked up funny wedding photos and I was not disappointed.
Like
These are all so wholesome and make for great draw the otp/draw the squad things for when you want to draw characters getting married but also be total dorks.
So I’m watching a Sir David Attenborough (Natural Curiousities on Netflix), to cope withe the crushing lonliness of solo housesitting, and he’s on about Really Weird animals and talks about the origins of the pheonix- a bird that people travelling though Africa only rarely saw shrouded in the streamy mists of volcanic soda lakes (which are literally boiling hot and also extremely caustic).
And all they’d see is the occasional bit of bright red plumage and see these things bobbing in and out of the horrible death clouds coming off the lake, and naturally came up with the myth of a firebird what the fuck ELSE would be living IN A GODDAMN VOLCANO??
The Central Africans told this to the Egyptians who told the Greeks* about this mysterious animal, and they ran hog-wild with it to create the now-famous Pheonix, but-
The bird they were seeing in those volcanic lakes?
*There is significant academic debate about who told who what when (esp as the firebird myth has cropped up multiple times and been culturally exchanged many, MANY times) but the Flamingo>Egyptian Bennu>Greek Pheonix>European Pheonix chain is fairly well agreed upon.
Some of my favorite tags so far:
@asleepinawell “Natural Curiousities” is on netflix and I think the PBS streaming app. BBC streaming keeps crashing on me but probably there too. It’s very much like his usual work, but with 500% more “Look at these funky specimens and the frantic scribbles of early scientific illustrators confronted with a fucking kangaroo” and “I’m Sir David Fucking Attenborough And I’m Going To Snuggle This Cheetah”
@heedra You are correct! According to Wikipedia: “The name “flamingo” comes from Portuguese or Spanish flamengo, “flame-colored”, in turn coming from Provençal flamenc from flama “flame” and Germanic-like suffix -ing, with a possible influence of words like “Fleming” THEY WERE TRYING TO TELL US ALL ALONG!
@melifair You’re in good company- I used to call them “Pimentos” until I was three and finally got the hang of the Letter “F”
Also, Apologies about the spelling. I have a reading disorder and it causes me to mis-read and by turn misspell certain words, especially ones with two nonidentical vowels in the middle of the word like Their and Becuase. Good thing we all know what I’m talking about anyway!
But how could you not tell us WHAT THE FLAMINGOS ARE DOING IN A VOLCANO?????
So Flamingoes are pretty badass.
They’re hyperspecialized filter-feeders, not unlike krill-feeding whales, and thier heads are shaped Like That, so they can dangle thier heads in the water, suck up water full of algae and brine shrimp and other goodies, and filter them out with thier Spiny Tongues.
(Image Source Apparently, according to the Ancient Romans, Flamingo Tounge has a “Superb” flavor. You Wacky Roman Bastards)
But the lakes with the tastiest and most dense algae and arthropods are not Normal lakes. African Lesser Flamingoes (lesser becuase they have a smaller range, but probably our phoenix given how people were travelling at the time) like to hang out in extremely Alkaline Lakes where thier favorite algae grow, and those lakes are mostly in the volcanic Great Rift Valley. Where the lava and occasional venting of hot toxic gasses happen.
In addition to the wierd diet, and caustic water, Flamingoes can also cope with some pretty intense climate. The Alkaline Lakes Lesser Flamigoes like are also VERY HIGH in the mountains, where they cope with low oxygen, Intense UV radiation, and rapid and extreme temperature fluctuations- below freezing at night and heatstroke hot in the day.
You can tell how well a Flamigo is Flamingoing by it’s color! The lovely red-pink color comes from the algae and arthopods they eat: the better-fed and healthier a flamingo is, the more intense thier colors will be! Zoo famingoes can thrive on a wide variety of diets, but thier colors will fade, and it will cause everyone to lose romantic interest, so they have to be fed a special color-intensive diet to keep breeding programs going.
So while Flamingoes probably weren’t the bird you were picturing when you thought of a Phoenix , they’re Pretty Badass and worthy of the mythic lore.
Today we step into the Archie McPhee Library to explore a macabre and fascinating book entitled The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death [Buy on Amazon] by Corinne May Botz, whose outstanding photos reveal one of the strangest and most significant tools in the development of modern forensic analysis: eighteen miniature, exhaustively detailed crime scene models built in the 1940s and 50s by pioneering criminologist Frances Glessner Lee (1878-1962). She called her models “Nutshell Studies” because, “the purpose of a forensic investigation is said to be to ‘convict the guilty, clear the innocent, and find the truth in a nutshell.’”
Glessner Lee was a grandmother in her 60s when she painstakingly created these dollhouse models, each of which is based on an actual homicide, suicide or accidental death. To help ensure accuracy she attended autopsies and made sure that even the smallest details of her models were correct. Clothing is appropriately worn out, pencils write, locks, windows, and lights all function, whistles blow, and mice inhabit the walls. These astonishing models were (and still are!) used to train detectives on how to asses visual evidence.
Corinne May Botz’s lush color photographs lure viewers into every crevice of Frances Lee’s models and breathe life into these deadly miniatures, which present the dark side of domestic life, unveiling tales of prostitution, alcoholism, and adultery. The accompanying line drawings, specially prepared for this volume, highlight the noteworthy forensic evidence in each case. Botz’s introductory essay, which draws on archival research and interviews with Lee’s family and police colleagues, presents a captivating portrait of Lee.
Frances Glessner Lee was also an heiress who used her considerable fortune to found Harvard’s department of legal medicine, the first forensic pathology program in the nation. In 1943 she was appointed an honorary Captain in the New Hampshire State Police. She was the first woman in the United States to hold that rank.
It’s a dark topic, to be sure, but this beautiful book is an intimate and utterly captivating look at the work of a truly remarkable woman and one of the most important figures in the development of modern forensic analysis.
Do you ever read a piece of writing advice so awful you’re not entirely sure if it’s satire or not.
If your character is an evil assassin, you might want to refer to his fingernails as daggers or stabbers.
Stabbers. Stabbers. Yep.
A jealous ex-girlfriend might have witch hooks or tentacles. Sugar- or flour-coated hands could be clues that a protagonist is a baker. Or a serial killer with a fetish.
Well this has taken an odd turn.
Use ‘hands’ too often, and the word will annoy readers. English offers a multitude of options.
Oh no.
Analyze what the hands are doing and assign a noun that suits them. In addition to the following, check the Movement section for verbs you could convert into nouns. For example, ‘boo-boo soothers’.
Get the fuck out of here.
prestidigitators
No.
shadow puppeteers
???
stranglers
WHY DOES IT KEEP COMING BACK TO MURDER
See also 300+ Words to Describe Human Skin.
I was looking for something else in my blog and found this post and absolutely lost my shit all over again lmao
If your jealous ex has tentacles you might have other problems.
