No. Back up and read the original problem. How does using dissolvable containers help this problem? How does this let people bring in their own containers? You just saw a discussion involving plastic and decided to shoehorn in a reference to a completely irrelevant plastic product.

What are you talking about?

So instead of selling the food in thin containers that eventually become planters or paint buckets, why not let people bring their own Tupperware or plates from home?

Food safety reasons. The restaurant then has to clean any random container people bring in, because it represents a contamination risk to the kitchen.

The key difference between all previous civilizational collapses and the one we potentially face is that most people in the past were farmers. Even in the grandest empires like Rome, less than 10% of the population actually lived in cities. Most people lived in the countryside working the land. The city of Rome lost something like 95% of its population. But those people didn’t just crawl in a hole and die. They abandoned the city and joined the vast majority of the population that was living in the countryside. Many in the countryside actually saw their quality of life improve substantially. Many who had been slaves found the old legal system enforcing their slavery no longer existed. Rome collapsing just meant the end of the grand cities; political and economic systems could fragment, and people would just live more locally.

But today? Less than 5% of the population actually works on a farm. The vast majority of the population lives in cities. If the political and economic system collapses, the countryside can’t just absorb all those extra people. Hell, the farms can’t even operate without the equipment, fuels, and chemicals produced by the larger economic system.

Historically, when civilizations collapsed, the common folk just left the cities, abandoned the corrupt elites to their madness, and returned to small villages and rural life. But now there is simply nowhere for people to retreat to.

Harris could have promised to kiss Bezos’s feet and anyone remotely antifa should have still voted for her.

You’re beyond saving. You are why Kamala lost the election. Please emigrate to Russia so you can vote for the lesser of two evils there and not pollute our electorate further.

Forget charging ICE agents with terrorism. We need to rendition ICE agents to the countries of their victims. The US justice system cannot be trusted to hold ICE agents accountable for their crimes against humanity. SCOTUS is corrupt and not a legitimate court. So let’s send ICE agents to where they will be held accountable. All those ICE agents that sent innocent Venezuelan citizens to a torture camp in El Salvador? They should all be rounded up and sent to Venezuela to face justice for their crimes against Venezuelan citizens.

And yet, Brian Robert Thompson will never kill again.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/26/blackstone-group-accused-global-housing-crisis-un

https://pestakeholder.org/reports/helter-shelter-how-blackstone-contributes-to-and-profits-from-californias-broken-housing-system/

https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/almost-a-crime-report-finds-blackstone-hiked-rent-nearly-double-market-rate/

https://prospect.org/education/2023-02-28-university-california-blackstone-housing/

https://www.archpaper.com/2025/01/blackstone-cushman-wakefield-landlords-justice-department/

While I don’t support mass shootings in general, if someone is so far off the deep end that they’re going to throw their life away in an act of random violence, I at least hope they choose targets like Blackstone instead of a random elementary school. At least they’re smiting someone who deserves it, for once. The country would be a lot better off if we had several hundred corporate shootings and zero school shootings each year. No shooting period would be better. But if you’re going to go on a rampage, at least go after evil people first.

They should have made any bank bailout contingent on nationalization. That was the big mistake.

Is your bank insolvent to the point that it needs emergency federal assistance? Is it so grand that letting your Tower of Babel collapse endangers the entire nation? Do we the taxpayers have a guns to ours heads here, forcing us to give out these bailouts? All to clean up the mess left behind by overpaid, overconfident, completely incompetent bank executives?

If so? Fine. A bailout will be given to protect the customers and the nation, but the existing shareholders are completely wiped out. The feds take ownership of the bank. They divide the accounts and remaining assets of the megabank up amongst a dozen smaller new banks it creates as a replacement for the failed giant. The Federal Reserve provides credit to the new banks as they get started. Eventually, when they stabilize, the government holds IPOs for the new banks and completely divests ownership of them.

THAT is how bank bailouts should work. This way, moral hazard is avoided, the government isn’t fleeced, and market consolidation is reversed all in one go.

Yes! Each customs agent needs at least one, preferable several, scrappy apprentices.

YES! Make it a glass sphere adorned with many brass fittings. And they track the counts/minute by manually counting and using a brass stopwatch that matches the design of the cloud chamber.

I like to imagine radiologic security checks are done by border agents with cloud chambers. Not fancy electronic detectors, just literal cloud chambers. Just imagine there’s some customs guy at a port in LA. He’s standing outside a shipping container. In his hands he has a giant glass dome filled with fog. And he’s just awkwardly waving this giant impractical object all over the surface of a shipping container.

If you’re in the US, it actually is possible and legal to order small quantities of radioisotopes even today.

https://unitednuclear.com/radioactive-isotopes-c-2_5/

Just note, they DO NOT ship internationally. And if you try to order 10,000 disk sources, you WILL be getting an angry knock on your door from the NRC.

I want this except it’s a 30 year old incel literally living in his mother’s basement…somehow working as a life coach.

This is the true killer feature of prestidigitation. Lets you instantly clean a soiled object.

More Sanders voters voted for Hillary than Hillary voters voted for Obama. Enough with your anti-progressive stereotypes.

Seriously. I chose Mussolini v. Hitler precisely because it was meant to be a reductio ad absurdum. A case where it’s so obvious one should boycott an election. Kamala vs. Trump was not Hitler vs. Mussolini. I only brought it up as an example so absurd that even the densest minds should have to admit that there are times not voting is the logical answer. But some folks are apparently so brainwashed into electoralism that they’ll keep doing it even if it is objectively meaningless. They’ll participate in a cargo cult of a democracy before they admit that voting for either side is pointless.

What are you trying to say here? That it’s better to “take the higher ground” and just NOT vote? Giving the hardcore right-winger voters an even larger margin by which they elect the horrible option?

You’re brainwashed. Election boycotts are a tried and true method of political participation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_boycott

If a large portion of the electorate boycotts an election, it doesn’t legitimize either side. Even though one candidate ends up winning by a silly margin, that margin yields no political capital.

Or better yet, and more to the point, if they’re just defensive, why aren’t we giving the Gazans and iron dome system to shoot down any Israeli aircraft that cross into their skies? The Gazans have just as much right to armed self defense as the Israelis do.

I’m a trans person. Do not use my people’s name to justify genocide. All the trans people I know were extremely wary of supporting Harris. Palestinians are an unpopular minority group, just like trans people are. If corporate Democrats are willing to throw Palestinians onto the pyre, they would be willing to do so for trans people as well. This was obvious to every trans person I know who was politically active. And now, as anyone with two brain cells to rub together could have predicted, corporate Dems like Newsom are throwing trans people onto the pyre right on schedule.

Again, those willing to let one minority group burn are extremely likely to do so to another group. That’s the whole fucking point of the “first they came for…” poem.