Plastic is polyethylene, which is a long chain of repeating ethylene molecules. To make it biodegradable they just put starch molecules in the chain every so often.

A lot of plastic is polyethylene, but nowhere near all of it. There are plenty of polymers that can break down naturally, mostly polyesters like PLA (which breaks down into lactic acid, the same naturally produced compound that causes muscle soreness after workouts). A lot of work is being put into making PLA have better material properties so it can replace more of the conventional plastics. It’s also generally made from corn and can be pretty close to carbon-neutral. So long story short some biodegradable plastics are worse, but some have legitimate applications and are genuinely better than current options.

Btw your 20% figure includes those at Level 1 literacy, only 8% are below level 1 (from your source)

If you read the subreddit stats website, you’ll see a massive disclaimer at the top that the data is inaccurate after the API change because the site owner didn’t want to pay the new rates. I think a lot of people here are overstating how much reddit has changed since the API shutoff.

I completely understand that, and I know that’s why a lot of people need cars. I was primarily responding to the parent comment claiming that it wouldn’t work for anyone because it’d be impossible to bring enough groceries with you on the bus/train.

I will say that I’ve been able to bring 3-4 grocery bags onto a bus, which is enough to last me around 2 weeks. I’ve done this fairly consistently (basically whenever it’s too cold/snowy to bike) for the last couple years. It might not be possible for a family without more than one person making the trip, but for an individual it can definitely work.

This is still a feature in some major brands though. I have a Moto g power from a relatively recent model year and it comes with a built-in FM Radio app that uses wired headphones as an antenna. It also still has a headphone jack so I don’t know how indicative it is of the broader US market.

Yes but only for a couple of months, averaged over the whole year it’s significantly lower than that. Probably still on track to hit the annual average of 1.5 sometime in the next 10-20 years. Still definitely a dire situation but not entirely out of left field based on the recent estimates.

The recent records have now lifted the year-to-date global temperature to the end of August to 1.35C above pre-industrial levels, just 0.01C behind 2016 — the current record holder

I dislike Blue Origin as much as the next guy, but IMO the article (or at least the headline) distracts from the real problem here (the fossil fuel industry):

An air permit application filed with the TCEQ in January 2020 said the company expected to routinely dump LNG into the air to the tune of 3.4 million cubic feet a year, which would work out to more than 60 tons of methane.

Of course, Blue Origin’s emissions pale in comparison with those from its suppliers in the natural gas industry. Wells and pipelines in the Permian Basin, a huge oilfield near the rocket site, are thought to give off some 2.7 million tons of methane a year

Sorry, bad phrasing. I intended to say “The current government of Taiwan”

You’ve got it backwards - Taiwan (the Republic of China) actually used to control the mainland before the Chinese civil war that resulted in the modern-day government (the People’s Republic of China) taking control. Source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Civil_War

The critical assumption here is that it is easy to make plastic from “carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen”. While those are the primary atoms in plastics, actual polymerization reactions (to form plastic) require them to have specific reactive functional groups. The most common ones are alkenes (polyethylene, polypropylene, polystyrene, PVC, Teflon), epoxides (epoxy), or amines and carboxyl groups (the 2 monomers of nylon). While some compounds with these functional groups exist in nature, they are rare and polymers based on them do not have the full range of properties that conventional polymers do. There is a lot of active work in this field, but even once these polymers are perfected it will likely require quite a bit of chemistry/engineering knowledge to produce thm safely and without huge quantities of waste. The only practical way to get large quantities of the major synthetic polymers is as a by-product of oil refinement (they are in such low concentration in oil that it would be infeasible to refine oil just for them), and again there is the safety concern of bootstrapping it.