They’re also shooting for 100% renewable plastic sources by 2030! All of the soft plant/leaf elements in sets right now and going forward are made out of bioplastic made from sugarcane, and they’re working on getting the regular hard plastic bricks out of that, too.
They’ve done it, actually! The full bricks are in the prototype stage now, and are expected to be 100% biodegradable without the need for a commercial compost facility. It’s very cool. Right now they’re testing the durability and playability of the bricks and seeing what needs to be revised/reworked on their final model.
So its that easy huh
Of course it is
Actually, this isn’t “easy” and is huge news. You see, Lego is absolutely meticulous about their quality control. Their standards for manufacturing are stupidly high, as are their safety requirements. You know that distinctive “click” when you pop two Lego bricks apart? They engineered that. That sound is so distinctive that it can be used to tell genuine Lego bricks from counterfeits and it’s a sound that would be based on shape and material.
Furthermore, one of the hard requirements for a Lego brick is that it must be compatible with any other Lego brick. If I buy a set today and pull a set from the 1980s? Those bricks would fit together perfectly. This requires a huge amount of precision engineering and controls on manufacturing quality. (I can’t remember the source, but I’ve at least heard that once the brick molds wear to a certain point, they’re pulled from the line and either melted down or turned into construction material for Lego HQ. Point being, no one is getting their hands on a worn Lego mold)
Recycled and non-petroleum plastics are different from other plastic. The chemistry is different. The timing and process to use them is different. This has been a reason why more companies haven’t moved to them, because there’s a drop in quality for material (so they claim).
What Lego just did is completely obliterate that argument. The corporation with some of the strictest quality control requirements for plastic just kicked the basic foundation of the “bad quality” argument out from under it, because if they feel confident enough to guarantee the same experience as using a brick from over 40 years ago, if they are confident enough that they can meet their own metrics at a huge industrial scale….
I dislike dogs, I think they’re annoying and I generally dislike their personalities unless they’re a) working (in which case I shouldn’t interfere with them) or b) basically cats (in which case, just get a cat, they’re far more physically pleasant to touch). I’m not afraid of them and I don’t hate or resent their existence, they’re important animals, I just don’t want them around me.
But if a dog comes over and wants pets or play then I WILL pretend I love it and I will pet it so much because it’s not the dog’s fault that I don’t like them. It wouldn’t understand my rejection and I don’t want to make it sad. Just because it’s an unpleasant animal doesn’t mean it deserves to be sad.
There seems to be a deeper philosophy one could derive from this but as it is its solid.
Behaving with basic compassion for other living things regardless of whether they fulfil your own emotional and aesthetic preferences. The world makes me happy but the amount of happiness I bring others isn’t contingent on them making me happy first. It’s not a serotonin transaction.
… Transactional Serotonin would make an absolutely fucking baller band name.
the idea that even momentary or situational perceived benefits from being assigned male at birth should completely invalidate a trans woman’s identity is such an absolutely bizarre position to take. trans women not having to worry about facing personal material consequences from not having access to abortion is a situational benefit, but it doesn’t give them systemic privilege. like y'all truly have not even gotten halfway through feminism 101 here.
i’ve been thinking abt this concept a lot and like. it genuinely seems like ppl think that being perceived as a cis man is only a benefit if you identify as a man?? like if a stealth trans man and a closeted trans woman both interview for jobs and they’re both chosen over other candidates because the people hiring them perceived them to be white cis men, the actual material reality of those two situations are not different. they both got the job because they were perceived to be white cis men. the trans woman doesn’t have less of a job because she internally identifies differently than the trans man.
people might read that and immediately recoil because “omg ur saying trans women have male privilege!!!!!!” which would be incorrect, bc if she had male privilege, she wouldn’t have to worry about making the decision between staying in the closet and keeping her job or coming out and potentially losing it. she wouldn’t have to worry about workplace discrimination if she did come out and didn’t lose her job but her manager was transphobic. she wouldn’t have to worry about if her gender affirming care was covered by her work’s insurance or if they would put up a fight. if she was a cis man, she wouldn’t experience those things. but she does have to worry about those things, because any benefit she may have gotten from being perceived as a cis man can be immediately taken away when that perception is gone. and as i’ve said before, if you’re given the choice between being openly who you are and facing violence or suppressing who you are to stay safe, that’s not a “choice” that’s a threat.
and like. i understand that a lot of people don’t want to have this conversation because they think that acknowledging any benefit, no matter how miniscule or temporary, a trans woman might experience from being perceived as a cis man must inherently mean she has Male Privilege, but that’s just literally not how reality works. getting a job based on an assumption is a temporary benefit, you’ll get paid and stay housed as long as you maintain the illusion that you are who they assumed you to be. maybe that means you’ll be able to save more than you would have if you hadn’t gotten the job. that’s another benefit you can acknowledge. but at the end of the day, it’s not a privilege if you can not only lose that job but also your housing and family and friends if you correct that assumption or even just fail to maintain the illusion well enough. temporary benefit =/= privilege.
if we understand that, then we understand that identity is not what dictates our experiences. which is scary, because our identities are extremely important to us. they’re what we’ve fought for, many of us for our entire lives. but if you allow yourself to believe that identity is the sole factor in your experiences, it’s going to be very easy convince yourself that any temporary benefits you may receive Don’t Actually Count if they don’t match with your identity. and if you get too comfortable with that, it’s very easy to let that slip from “dismissing temporary benefits” to “dismissing actual privilege” like white privilege.
because for a lot of racial and ethnic minorities, we don’t have the choice to frame our gender identity as the most important or prominent thing about our experiences. to a lot of people, i am a jew first. if i go in for a job interview, and the person perceives me as a cis man, they are still going to notice when i say i can’t work on friday nights and saturdays and need certain holidays off. they are still going to notice what i look like and the very obviously nonwestern cultural items i wear. so it doesn’t matter if they’ve perceived me as a cis man, because any benefit i might have gained from that is negated because they just don’t want to give me time off for yom kippur and also they heard jews were kind of stingy and neurotic and they just don’t know if they want that kind of energy in the office.
It is a good thing that they saw him as his true gender. Most trans women can’t experience that. That’s literally your friend experiencing male privilege, he is seen as the gender he says he is and that gender is male
i……….. genuinely don’t even know what to say anymore.
for context, this is in reference to a response to an ask where i mentioned my friend, who is black trans man, being told that he should consider it “affirming” to experience more police surveillance and violence. i seriously cannot fucking wrap my brain around how utterly disconnected from the real world you have to be to assert that a black person experiencing more police violence is not only good but privilege?????? like. how do we come back from this? how in the world are we supposed to redirect discourse that has gone this far off track? i am genuinely at a loss here.
ALT
Ohhey that’s me. If you’re passing by this post I encourage you to peek at the original tag because it often feels like I was put on this earth to tell off naïve white people for their unexamined, implicitly colonial worldviews. Got plenty good essays I wanna put in there soon but I’m very tired and also trying to wrangle enough good, freely-accessible papers to cite inline.
Guys, my little cousin just did an impromptu sock puppet show for me. She just walked into the room I was and without a word started acting. There were two characters, Dumb and his friend Dumber. They argued about who was more dumb for a minute before Dumb suddenly stoped and said “that’s it, you don’t exist now” and then Dumb turnED INSIDE OUT AND SWALLOWED DUMBER!? Then she bowed and after I told her that that was horrifying (sarcastically), she said that that was the point and walked away. Please never change weird little girls.
Did you know factory dumpster diving is totally possible?
Factories throw away tons of good shit that doesn’t look just right or wasn’t refrigerated for 5 minutes. So, like, look at what items (food & non-food) are being produced close to you and ask yourself ‘do I want a fuck load of just this one product?’ and if the answer is ‘yes’, go check if they have bins out. Fill up your freezer or feed a whole neighbourhood. Share around those non-foods.
Examples of stuff I or people I know have dumpster-dived in huge quantities: french fries, tofu, cheese, vibrators (i guess that’s a literal fuck load), make up, sneakers (it was a lot of work matching the left&rights but it worked out), coats, portable speakers, and more.
If you do this be careful of where the dumpster is ofc. At the factory I work at all of them are on property behind gates, and the security cameras can see them.
True. In all cases it is good to do a daylight scout and check out where bins, gates, security cameras and escape routes are. & Don’t forget the neighbours.
Factories that make expensive goods will have night guards and you are more likely to be mistaken for a burglar if you’re outside a factory like that at night, so if you’re going dumpster diving for luxury goods, maybe better to do it during the day and act like you work in the industrial neighborhood until you’re right next to the bin. Eating a sandwich or smoking is a good way to pass as a ‘worker on a break’ if you can look the part.
As with other dumpster diving: think about how you’re going to handle getting caught before it happens. Depending on your privilege, your confidence and your luck, you may be able to talk yourself out of a lot of situations, but it’s best to be prepared.
1 year ago
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