Right now I have a large and stylish open kitchen but there are times where I miss having a galley kitchen, where I could stand in one place and reach everything I needed - pots and pans hanging from the ceiling, knives and accessories on magnetic racks on the walls, fridge contents reachable while standing at the stove... somehow it even had enough prep space.
I have a large open plan kitchen with one counter surrounded by hanging pots and pans, knives on a magnetic wall mount, all chopping boards stored vertically in racks and most of the condiments on a wall rack or in the drawers
If you cook with a partner, a kitchen with a wide enough aisle so that one can open a dishwasher and also open a cabinet on the opposite side makes life so much easier, since it means it is also wide enough for 2 people to move past each other easily.
Big tub sink on one side, range on the opposite side of aisle, and at least 3ft/1m of countertop space on both sides of each those is my ideal. One side of the sink will have a dish rack, leaving 3 sides. That means 3 available spaces for prep, eventually turning into 2 as dirty kitchenware piles up next to the sink.
They changed the policy maybe 5-years ago about a train waiting for a late train to come in because they found that it added additional delays to the entire system. I prefer the new way.
I live in Zurich-wollishofen and love it here. There are some areas of dense housing (Green City, Entlisberg, etc) but despite that there's a farm that's a 5-minute walk to get to, two other farms that are about 30 minutes, a fourth farm that's 45-minutes, and finally a fifth farm that's over an hour and includes a 400 meter climb up a ridge. We do much of our shopping at the farms.
The lake and swimming is a 10-minute walk with many green areas, and I gather mushrooms on the uetliberg/Albis ridge that takes me about 25-minutes to get to on foot.
Zurich has dense housing areas but its also well-integrated with nature and it's not just my neighborhood - there's lovely forests all around the city with streams and waterfalls, wild garlic and berries and mushrooms..
That sounds great, but that experience of the 15000 or so people in Wollishofen can't be provided for the half a million folks living in Zurich. That's the whole point of Verdichtung. That you get higher density in exchange for short distances. If everybody lived like Wollishofen does, then you'd have suburbia as far as the eye can see. In a sense, Wollishofen has the cake and gets to eat it too (because it's so close to the dense Zurich center but is itself only sparse). Which is nice for the small minority living there, but not a model that can really be applied everywhere.
Hong Kong (while obviously quite different) is similar in the sense that many urban areas are fairly compact and walkable, and regions of very high density housing alternate with parks, forests, playgrounds, zoological gardens, water front, etc., so that groceries, restaurants, public transport, but also recreational areas are never more than a few minutes away.
My first experience with this was in Maastricht. We started walking in the city center and before I know it we were on the outskirts. This was unexpected to me at I'm used to North American cities.
IIUC, it's more about the client hardware that determines ability to play without transcoding. You'd have to check the mix of devices you have connecting to it and make a judgement call.
I started to convert a lot of my content in AV1 until I realized that my Nvidia Shield devices won't play AV1. My $30 firestick will play them but I do really prefer the Shield. I guess I'll wait it out and hope for a new Shield (it's been 2019 since Nvidia released one) but i'm not going to hold my breath.
They're very strict about sorting your own recycling, organic waste, and household waste here in Zurich. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly. And also there are newspaper articles with the format of reporting on someone receiving a fine and how thankful they are now that they know the proper way to recycle (obviously planted - I had to write an article like this in junior high because I used the school phone to call 911 to ask the time).
What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location. I mean, even with these strict rules they still need to sort the stuff that people didn't sort properly in the first place. So why not sort it all? (Except for the biowaste because that could contaminate the recycling)
There's a lot of things that really jam up recycling.
One of them is plastic grocery bags. They just cause a lot of problems in the mechanisation of recycling so it's very non-trivial to work around them.
Oils and biowaste of course are of course another issue. Especially for corrugated fiberboard (brandname: cardboard) and the like.
And then also it's hard for machines or lineworkers to easily differentiate plastics without sufficient market or regulatory pressure. If consumers are already generally sorting by broad category then they take most of the legwork out (leaving the facility to check their work) and those consumers also apply market pressure on manufacturers to make it obvious how their product is expected to be recycled.
And of course also there's just a general component of everyone doing a little at a time to keep things organised from the start making the entire process an order of magnitude easier and more efficient for everyone downstream.
It is a free for all in USA, sometimes the trash truck comes down and grabs both recycling bins and trash bins and just dumps all into the same truck. No one cares, customer or trash service company. Many facilities dont sort if sorting becomes too much work they just toss what was picked up as reycling into the trash. Walk inside any warehouse type facility in America and they throw anything and everything into the trash that has lost its utility for the business. Working inside an order fulfillment warehouse opened my eyes to how much waste is created just to pack and ship everyones cheap single use junk. Bottle deposits haven't been adjusted for inflation in decades, no one even talks about it. States that dont have deposit laws people just litter aluminim cans everywhere. When there are bottle deposit laws they have exceptions like no deposit required for aluminum can if its contents are not carbonated. Why should that matter? Most people toss their food waste into the trash, effectively no one bothers with the effort to return nutrients back into the earth. Why do that when we can just pointlessly haul it away in a fuel burning truck and seal it away with toxic everyday garbage. The people who actually care about re-use and or reducing waste are tiny vocal minority compared to everyone else. When I walk into a grocery story filled with 100+ shoppers I am always the only person using reusable, non-plastic bags. I also laugh when if you don't use plastic bags, they slap plastic stickers on your items thanking you for not using plastic bags LOL. I know other countries are worse with pollution but gosh. Sounds nice in Zurich if there's actually people that care.
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.
That depends. The big is there is so much volume that isn't recyclable that the costs of machines to sort everything (when most is waste) is just too high.
As the other post started to get to: for some things clean waste matters and is common enough to sort. If you have greasy paper about all that we can do is burn it, but clean paper has enough value as to be worth it. Thus a separate stream for clean cardboard/paper is something that should be done early.
For other things cleaning isn't as big a deal (unless you can get perfect clean they will need to clean again - but you still want it not to stink). Throw all your plastic (no bags - unless you have the rare system that can handle them), cans, and glass together: They have to sort anyway, but compartments for each (or separate trucks) are going to add up costs - One week there is more cans than others so you end up going back to the facility with half full compartments all the time burned fuel each way.
You still want to separate trash, (even if the bag issue was solved) as there is so much that we can't really do anything about that the quantity means the sorting machines needed to handle total volumes are too high unless most things we know can't be recycled are not in.
I'm not sure about organics. My impression is that most houses don't have enough of it as to be worth the bother in general. Businesses that have enough as to be worth it should also separate their kitchen waste but otherwise more fuel is burned in the trucks than we save.
We also have to ask what is done with regular waste. Landfills are slow compost piles for organics, and we do collect the methane these days. Incinerators turn organics and plastics into fuel which is often the best we can do with them (recycling plastics still needs a lot of energy/chemicals, burning releases some CO2, but perhaps less than the above - this has been argued many times to different conclusions)
The Ford Bronco assembly plant is near a large landfill where the methane is captured and used in the plant. Fans of other brands joke that the Bronco is literally made from garbage.
Bronco fans could counter with this: so are Princess Catherine's (rather not cheap) shoes. She is a fan of a brand called Rothy's, which makes casual footwear out of recycled plastic bottles that sell for $150 or so/pair.
It makes a big difference. We'll sorted garbage is easier to deal with.
I watched this video from Andrew Fraser on Indonesias plastic recycling industry. There were a few points during the documentary where this is pointed out. I had gemini point them out and verified them.
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The documentary indicates that separating rubbish bins at the source is important because it eliminates an entire process and makes almost everything recyclable (14:18 - 14:24).
The speaker contrasts the Indonesian system, where scavengers sort mixed waste, with Western systems where waste is separated at the source (2:00 - 2:08, 6:57 - 7:00). At a modern processing facility, the speaker notes that if waste is not separated at the source, some material becomes too dirty to recycle (14:26 - 14:29, 20:26 - 20:29).
Furthermore, the video highlights that imported plastics from Western nations are highly valuable because they are clean, dry, sorted, and high-grade, having gone directly into the recycling side of consumer bins (28:57 - 29:11). This high-quality imported plastic is essential for Indonesian recycling plants like PMS to mix with lower-quality local waste, allowing them to process more raw domestic waste and create more jobs (28:01 - 28:27).
Sorting, and charging different prices for different types of waste (typical in Europe, don’t know elsewhere), also provides economic and psychological incentives to potentially reduce purchases of certain type.
>What I always wonder about though is just how much work it saves in the end for us to do it instead of at a central location.
It's not about efficiency, it's about making some portion of the population feel good about their consumption. It is obvious that the production and use of pretty much all of these plastics leads to undesirable very long term outcomes, but very desirable short term outcomes.
Politically, it is untenable to completely ban the plastic as the people would revolt, but it is (or was) also politically untenable to not do anything about the problem.
Hence, the politically tenable solution is to pretend like society is doing something about the problem. It's the same thing with fossil fuels and carbon emissions.
Since people make mistakes in categorization and sorting, recycling facilities have to do it over again. It's redundant. So why do they never the less have people sort? It's just a psychological tool: It makes people 'care' and it makes people think society at large, including the recycling company cares. Now, that doesn't mean the company doesn't care about recycling in and of itself --they probably do to some extent, but they also need to project outwardly that they care.
>. So strict that people are fined for not doing it properly.
Some parts of Oregon I lived in had high cost for general trash (almost every trash bin/dumpster I encountered was chained locked) and to use the city dump you needed an ID and maybe even required to live in the same county.
The result of these asinine policies to force people into 'recycling' things that aren't recyclable and making trash so onerous that all you can find is locked up dumpsters, is you would often see piles of trash and junk in the national forest or BLM land, the result of either extreme inconvenience or desperation.
That dumping is probably not about recycling policies, but more about the cost of trash. Illegal dumping still happens in places where recycling is barely offered.
When I was an undergrad (or maybe it was grad - it was a long time ago) we learned about the Minnesota twins study that attempted to find the strength of genetics in personality. The study developed new statistical techniques to measure this and can to the conclusion that genetics is very strong.
But now you hear nothing about this study. I'm not sure if it's because the results are tainted by eugenics, or if the techniques they developed were wrong...
What you call name-dropping is justified by the need to clarify the stakes and be transparent about where the criticism is coming from.
If the article is too long for you & you're already familiar with the notion of heritability, you can go directly to the "The Dog Eat My Control Group" section near the end.
I think you're going to find "I refused to read the article" is not a very effective persuasive strategy on HN. Especially when your opening bid is a restatement of what the article is about!
If you ever come to Switzerland download the swisstopo app. It is very detailed and useful for hiking but even in the city too, showing the locations of fountains, for example, rural and urban official and unofficial hiking trails, closed trails, slopes too steep to traverse, etc etc etc.
This is where screenshots come from, official topo data are free. I use them all the time for hiking, ski touring etc. Good thing they cover also neighboring mountains a bit (to varying detail) so ie France or Italy can be enjoyed just with a single app.
Then you go further and realize how much worse free easy to find things are. There are variations of opentopomap but they lack the finesse of this.
Also available in various other layouts ie biking (veloland), canoeing or various winter sports (sadly no outright ski touring so I aproximate summer hiking paths, the best to use are still physical maps but then you need a hefty stash of various zooms at home, pricey too).
But none is perfect - opentopo map has some obscure artifacts, see ie here what I found by a chance - some hole too deep to be real, near Aletsch glacier or famous Eiger, a mountain slope in Bernese alps [1], while official Swiss topo looks like this without any such illogical artifact [2]
Oh god, do we really want to have the smells of sex when watching porn?
On the other hand, I see an opportunity even without tech: porn star perfume collabs: Spray some Gukki Bloom and press play on that video to smell what the star was wearing on the day.
But I guess high-end perfume brands don't want to be associated with actors of the flesh.
You're getting downvoted, likely for prudish reasons, but in all seriousness it doesn't seem unlikely that you're right.
The porn industry has historically been very quick to adopt new technologies, it's easy to see how this could benefit that industry, so it's a logical enough conclusion to draw. They'll very likely be the first commercial application of this, once viable.
The scene from Torrente comes to mind where the protagonist gives a set of anal beads to a gay guy who then identifies it as ar*e smell, hence it was used. Or smth like that :D.
reminds me of the book "ready player one" in which world-builders would insert terrible smells to troll the minority of VR players with a smell-o-vision device
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