That being said, when Super GMs play a bad move against a lower rated GM, they quite often gets a pass. They don't capitalize, simply because they assume the move is excellent.
My recent visit to a BMW dealership (for parts for an old car) was so awful. Every aspect of the dealership feels scummy. The coffee machine "lounge", the shiny cars, the branded "merch", the sales staff, the "service department" layout. It's just a creepy experience at every step. I have never bought a new car (although I have bought used, from a few dealerships) and honestly I am not sure I ever would.
Phoenix "city planners" (do any cities actually do any intelligent planning?) must be the most pointless job in the world. "How can we design something so awful that it is nearly uninhabitable?" must be their design philosophy. Or perhaps I should give them more credit; it may be a high quality experiment in Martian landscaping and terraforming.
I've driven to the wrong location twice because the top search result was an ad. e.g. I searched for "Home Depot" and immediately clicked on the top link (there's only one Home Depot nearby) and after a few mins realized I was headed somewhere else entirely, because they'd injected a tiny subtle ad above their search results.
Your minimalist shoes aren't going to be faster in a race, but they are still good for you. I think the way to go is to run in many pairs of shoes. Super shoes for some fast workouts and races, normal shoes for long runs and tempo work, minimalist shoes good to keep your feet strong, Achilles long, etc. Some of the fastest runners I know run in zero drop shoes, but they also run in carbon shoes. There's no value in limiting yourself.
I can assure you that many super shoes will make you noticeably faster. Try them on in the store, you'll know right away. That being said, some of them (Nike's especially) are really hard to run in. Almost zero heel support, and so you do have to be quite fast to make some of them work.
I have run in Endorphin Pro 3's and they are super super stable. I've work them for very slow ultras as well as fast workouts: excellent shoes all around.
Isn't it about establishing a framework that people can trust, and closing loopholes? Just because the specifics are about sesame seeds, isn't that how the law works? Some stupid specific case forms the groundwork for the entire system?
I don’t know honestly. I understand the spirit of it but I also don’t believe a factory should have to be serve markets that it chooses not too. My point which I did not get to very well is that I think the FDA is in a weird spot. I understand their side but I also wonder how a bakery can legally and with the spirit of the law decide to not serve customers with allergies.
It's not forced to serve markets. They are just not allowed to say their products contain sesame when they don't. They are mislabeling their products, and the FDA's job is to ensure products are labeled accurately.
I am not sure which is why I think its a confusing spot. From the article...
- "FDA officials indicated that allergen labeling is a “not a substitute” for preventing cross-contamination in factories."
- "some companies began adding small amounts of sesame..FDA officials said that violated the spirit, but not the letter, of federal regulations"
Hence my open ended question, how do you legally and with the spirit of the law not serve the allergy market? If you allergen labeling is not a substitute for preventing cross-contamination...what if I as a baker/factory don't care about cross contamination?
Recyling plastic has died for me. I read an article (probably posted on HN) that convinced me the act of "recyling" dumps enough microplastics into the water stream that it's all better off in a landfill. Finally that was it for me. Maybe on the odd day I'll throw # 1 PETE into the recyling bin, else it's into the garbage bag for me. Now we must simply focus on buying less.
How much plastic ever got recycled in the first place? My understanding is it was always largely a charade where we mixed plastic in with stuff that made sense to recycle like aluminum cans and then sent it all to China where they would recycle the aluminum and burn/bury the plastic and we all just pretended everything got recycled. Eventually the recyclable:garbage ratio got so low that China said enough and refused to take it any more.
Most recycling is bullshit. "Electronics recycling" ships it off to third world countries where people pull apart PCBs over diesel fires and whatnot, dumping stuff all over the ground.
Each country gets tired of their land being used as a toxic waste dump and their people being poisoned, so the recyclers work to find another country desperate for some sort of industry.
The only solution is to tax the electronics at sale to cover the cost of recycling it in the least hazardous way possible, with extra penalties for devices with a fixed lifetime (ie, non-replaceable batteries.)
I'm late to the party, but I guess modulariry would be a plus. For example, CPUs don't grow in big leaps of capacity anymore, it would make sense to rediscover the practice of upgrading CPU, RAM, battery, storage, etc. instead of whole devices. This could put a significant dent in ewaste for bigger devices.
Landfills are awesome. Properly managed, they're pretty much the best way to deal with trash. But they're also not completely out of sight, so people desperately look for inferior alternatives.
Plasma gasification. It is fine we have decided we can only do so much to reduce the waste stream, that which remains can be fed into a system to render it inert and the syngas produced burned for energy in a responsible manner.
("This is NOT the same as incineration. Plasma gasification does not produce toxic gases vented to atmo, etc. The main byproducts are "syngas", which is mainly H2 and CO and can be reused to power the facility, and slag.")
I recall seeing a small documentary about some people living in a small island community who were using destructive distillation to convert the absolute fuckload of plastic waste washing up on their beaches into fuel for generators and such.
I’ll have to go find it again, it seemed like an interesting “local” solution to a genuinely hard problem (plastic waste).
Burning plastics is the simplest useful way to recycle them (plastics being mostly hydrocarbons in solid form), though it's also the least interesting. It's a kind of minimum - if you don't know how to better reuse the material, then treating it as fuel provides some amount of value. Now, when proposed recycling schemes start to look economically or energetically worse than burning it or just leaving it in landfills for future use - that's a really bad mark.
You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that is literally beamed in from space with no waste products.
I agree. But the thing about trash is, biosphere can't handle much of it. Chucking it into a high-tech hole lets you manage the decomposition, releasing contents over time in form and quantity that the biosphere can safely handle.
Also in general, unsafe things are usually best kept concentrated and supervised. Spreading them all around the environment isn't solving the problem - it's just another way to put the issue out of mind, while future generations suffer from a slow-brew, large-scale disaster.
I don't mean to dismiss the larger truth here about humanity's responsibility to exercise restraint in playing the impossibly strong 5-ace hand it was dealt by natural selection.
But the naturalistic fallacy has a knack for hiding its sharpest razors among the soft folds of words like "cooperative."
The universe appears, as far as we can tell, overwhelmingly hostile toward life with the sole observed exception of our precariously balanced biosphere.
And that biosphere is itself a circulatory system built on exploitation, consumption, and predation - host to endless torrent of unimaginable agonies which are both staggeringly abundant and structurally inalienable from the matrix of this 'cooperative' system.
It's hard, as another HN'er once succinctly put it, to be more cruel than Nature.
this is a dualistic belief that regards humans operating on human concepts as being somehow a qualitatively distinct phenomenon from the "system that systems" - a system in which they themselves increasingly constitute a locally (and potentially, a universally) significant energetic routing circuit.
No, it’s not dualistic at all. I have not and never do make the argument that humans are somehow “separate” from nature. I am making the argument that value judgments (like all concepts) occur in people’s heads and are not intrinsic characteristics of anything at all.
Sure, but in this context - in any reasonable context when one would make a value judgement on nature - a judgement is made relative to some human-specific or "unnatural" situation. When someone is making an appeal to nature, as in "nature is beautiful and good, and so the natural thing is better than our wicked ways", it's only right to point out that under this standard, nature is fucked up psychopatic hellscape, and the history of scientific and technological progress is one of escaping hell.
I think you might be unfamiliar with the term "dualism" since you don't appear to understand that your reasoning is synonymous with current spec, put briefly: "In general, [Dualism] the idea is that, for some particular domain, there are two fundamental kinds or categories of things or principles." [0]
To what domain, exactly, are you trying to relegate concepts with your vaguely dismissive take that they are "inside people's heads," as if this doesn't invalidate thought as an origin of material (that is, natural) change and thus pulls the rug out from under your statement itself - since, being just a concept inside your head, it should not have been capable of accumulating the physical mass and energy necessary to get out of your head, onto HN's server, and onto my screen - the letters of which are not randomly generated but an ordered echo of material pointing back to the source informing their order.
The relationship of concept to material is, especially in this kind of case, about as intrinsic as a relationship between entities can be.
When you look at, say, a pyramid in Egypt or Mexico etc, you are looking at the material shadow cast by nothing less than a concept that was at some point, only "inside someone's head" and which remains a fundamental and intrinsic characteristic of that structured mass of earth and stone.
I'd even go further and say that nature generally doesn't torture things for amusement the way the worst humans have done. Usually "nature is cruel and cold" underpins a "kind" humanist worldview that justifies factory farming, pesticides, lab animal testing, and mass murder of any inconvenient biological lifeform. Humanists pretend they aren't part of the same system of biological life that they hack at and injure at every turn and will to the end of their days deny the runaway extinction event they've kicked off and may also sweep them off the planet too. Because nature could never been cruel and cold to them and the system could never system them out of existence. They believe humans are special and the entire universe was created for them, or alternatively, the entire universe is at odds with their existence and it's a fight to the death. It's an absurd neurosis. We're incredibly lucky to be alive in a biosphere with so many food sources and so many lifeforms happy to eat our shit.
An superbly well-put rationalization for banal, business-as-usual cruelty. A desire to demonstrate that "I can go where others are too weak-minded/unwilling/inflexible to go" - to out-smug the smugness one sees wherever they find humanistic purpose, is to put an axe to the trunk of the tree on whose branches one smugly sits. Top kek, and all that.
But maybe you are not trolling. I'll assume rather that you're merely directing a blunt, honest cynicism toward what you see as the shallow, disingenuous cynicism of humanism (which I don't specifically subscribe but it's close enough for a throwaway internet argument). Someone who may or may not come from a place of disillusioned idealism, but in any case is not at all unhappy but rather perfectly content knowing we live in a morally neutral universe. Perhaps even a little pleased with yourself for having the tough-mindedness /so lacking in others/ that enables you to thrive in a hard objective vacuum intolerable to less robust spirits. Since there is essentially no point to anything, there will be no eschatological reckoning, and naturally no possible harm in optimizing for one's own material satisfaction for there is no such thing as harm at all.
Until we are confronted with conclusive evidence of intelligent life in the universe apart from what has developed in our own gravity well (setting aside the possibility of such entities existing outside a mutually impassible causality horizon); which is to say until we find evidence that the universe either has potential for a purposeful complex homeostasis other than the one we ourselves pursue, or else the apparent universal default fate of reduction to an undifferentiated energetic equilibrium, it is neither cold nor kind to act logically on the actual evidence at hand, which strongly suggests we are indeed the sole custodial inhabitants of this universe, conscious of our leverage over its fate, as we are of this planet (insofar as the notion of "custody" is presently confined to it until we learn otherwise - which, as an aside, would be fascinating even if it might trigger our destruction).
Consciousness (and the awareness, among other things, of suffering that it entails) will have to appear somewhere in the accessible universe first if it is to appear at all. So far, there's no basis for thinking that that somewhere isn't this biosphere right here, and consequently, for our purposeful (even if futile) opposition to the universal tendency toward self-consuming annihilation that would, unchecked, smother consciousness in its cradle.
On the timescales of the biosphere (thousands of years) the vast majority of plastics will break down and hydrocarbons bound in them will be as bioavailable (probably moreso) than they were originally. And on the timescales evolution can operate on, something will figure out how to digest it if there's enough of it available for long enough.
Which has nothing to do with whether or not we should work to solve the harm plastic presents to humanity and existing ecosystems (we should)
Biosphere chucked in a hole huge amounts of materials in the past. The hole is where our coal and oil come from. Chucking our solid carbon in a hole where it can wait for the species that considers it a treasure rather than a trash is pretty reasonable approach.
I disagree. The biosphere doesn't recycle many things, and instead just buries them underground, much like humans do. Just look ores: all that stuff that humans are mining in the Earth's crust is material from ancient asteroids that struck the surface and got buried.
You're talking about the 0.0001% of things it doesn't recycle. But almost every single molecule of your body will be recycled in dozens of different ways by hundreds and thousands of hungry little mouths that specialize in recycling viable organic matter--even your bones. Effectively everything within ~10cm of the surface of the Earth is going to get recycled into usable matter for the biosphere, and even those things ~1m will slowly decay in rich soil. Soil is alive by the way. It's not dead dirt, but 50% by volume bacteria, fungus, and other micro-organisms. Sure, soil accumulates and packs down and sediments out, as evidenced by so many geologic layers, but that's the 0.0001% I was referring to--limestone, sandstone, peet, shale, oil--the leftover of the very active recycling system back that pumps matter back into the biosphere and extracts latent chemical energy from it. Think of it; a layer in the sedimentary record that represents 10,000 years might only be 1cm thick, globally. That's not much waste. And it roughly balances out from all the volcanic eruptions, asteroids, meteorites, and space dust the Earth sweeps up.
Indeed. Also, in line with SI_Rob's parallel comment here[0], it's worth pondering what does it bury those ores under. Answer: it's bodies. Piles and piles and piles of dead bodies, covering the resources or even becoming them (e.g. limestone). Hell, the soil - the most important, life-giving resource we need to survive - is itself made of rock mixed with lots of dead bodies.
Sure, the soil and other things are literally made of the corpses of earlier lifeforms, but that still qualifies as "recycling". I'm just addressing the fact that not everything is actually "recycled" in this way, and is simply buried, similar to a human landfill, although for nature and asteroids, the stuff wasn't used by the biosphere in the first place so it isn't exactly "garbage" in the normal sense.
Stuff like lead (Pb), for instance, isn't useful to the biosphere as far as I know, and is actively harmful to lifeforms in fact. It came from asteroid impacts to my knowledge, and was buried in the ground before humans dug it up and extracted it from ore, yielding the lead pollution we have today.
I view stuff like lead less as something that biosphere couldn't figure out how to recycle yet, so it sequesters and buries it - but by the nature of how life works, if some random mutation would make lead useful as a building block (like many, many other elements are), the biosphere would happily suck all the lead back up and spread it.
The pattern I see here is that over time, the biosphere makes everything it finds useful diffuse, present everywhere in low concentrations; everything else, it sequesters and stashes in high concentration in few places. So not unlike what our industry is doing, just with different materials.
Uh, someone has clearly not spent much time in a swamp. Or around caliche/dry lake beds (especially when on that last stage of drying when everything starts to rot).
Just because it’s biological and natural doesn’t mean it’s necessarily pleasant, nice smelling, or healthy to be around.
If your only exposure to nature is national parks and the like, it’s easy to over glorify nature.
Not saying landfills are nice or anything, or healthy either. But nature has its equivalents.
Nature absolutely does not have an equivalent because nature (sans humans) does not produce the scale nor types of refuse that we do. Superficial similarities like “sometimes it smells bad too!” are complete red herrings.
Oil wells literally pump out stuff from purely natural dinosaur landfill. Coal mines extract material from tree landfills that happily accumulated waste for millions of years.
Give us a million years or two and we'll figure out what to do with plastic as well. Either we are gonna do it or some other species.
Wait so which of those dead organisms that decompose were like plastic? Answer: None.
Interesting pattern in this thread of anti-alarmists thinking they’re privy to some special knowledge but actually it’s stuff everyone learns in like 5th grade (btw it wasn’t literal dinosaurs, but whatever).
Which type of wood particulate is suspected of being endocrine disruptive and is being found bioaccumulating in the reproductive organs of ~every organism on earth?
Good response if the argument was natural == good, but it's not. Lighting coal on fire is also bad. Coal didn't suddenly zap into existence and then to global prevalence in air, food, and water within decades.
The argument is that burying things like plastics in a landfill is better than natural equivalents. Which you still seem impossibly locked into ignoring.
Tannins, when they first were evolved, almost certainly. And they still are used by plants to kill pests, albeit it’s steadily been losing effectiveness and the typical biological arms race has been going on a long time.
Again, I’m not saying plastics are awesome or perfect or whatever, and there aren’t problems.
I’m pointing out that if you think ‘putting it in a hole in the ground’ is somehow worse than the ‘natural’ solutions that’s ridiculous.
Especially since ‘letting it sit where it was made and have things eat it’, or ‘accumulate in a hole until it gets buried’, or ‘get washed into a swamp or the ocean and accumulate until they get eaten, subducted, or broken down’ is a classic natural way for waste to be handled in nature. And there are plenty of natural things that are super nasty that this literally happens with all the time, and kills lots of stuff.
And nature regularly has huge die offs, poison events like red tides, etc. from purely natural causes. So clearly this isn’t a ‘solved problem’ in nature.
If we even had a single event like that for humans related to plastics (or even an identifiable single event in animals where we could see it), we’d be having a very different discussion.
If you were arguing for literally not producing plastic at all, then it might be a different discussion - but that seems to be clearly impossible at this point, and not what anyone is arguing.
Uhhh that's not moving the goal posts except if you're starting from your own strawman. Burying gigantic amounts of plastic isn't suboptimal because humans bad/nature good/plastic ugly/etc., it's bad because of the actual effects that we're seeing in nature.
Tell me: how frequently do you think entirely new tannins are introduced to an ecosystem? How global are these new tannins introduced? Are plants suddenly producing a new tannin and spreading it across the entire globe within 50 years? Because we're producing totally new molecules in gigantic amounts and spreading them across the entire globe at a rate that is far too fast for us to even understand what the long term effects are, never mind for organisms to evolve to a new equilibrium in their presence
The lack of co-evolution is the issue. The tendency to invent, mass produce, and disseminate new molecules across the entire globe year after year at a rate much faster than evolution is the problem.
I don't know why you're harping on this "things die in nature" point. No one is disputing that.
We are still in the first million years of plastics on Earth, give it time. You'll see that after mere million years of producing plastics there won't be a new molecule introduced every decade or even every century.
And what effects are we seeing in nature because we bury plastics?
Because all the effects you are talking about near as I can tell is because we aren’t burying all the plastics. We dispose of them in other ways, or don’t at all.
Because when they’re buried, they don’t interact with anything anymore.
I'm not anti-alarmist. I think we are screwed. And need to triage. Global warming first. If plastics save us some CO2 then we should use them. We will deal with them maybe next century. Same goes for nuclear. Sustainable farming and other things. Trying to solve all problems at once will ensure that we fail with solutions to all.
I agree with prioritization but seriously disagree with your low-risk assessment of plastic. We have very good reason to suspect these compounds are disruptive to endocrine systems and we’re finding them bioaccumulating — even inter generationally — in almost every organism we look at.
Those two pieces of information by themselves should dramatically shorten your window of when this stuff will bite us, I.e. there’s good reason to suspect at least that our current obesity and fertility crises are significantly exacerbated by( if not totally caused by) plastic poisoning. It is absolutely not a given that we have time to solve this problem.
I agree there are potential risks. So we shouldn't be mucking around with trying to recycle or burn it. Just set up a good system for storing it inertly under ground.
I wouldn't go as far as blaming plastic for any of our specific ailments because there are so many better candidates for primary cause in each case but I agree that the potential for some harm is there.
For example with obesity. Japanese don't suffer from it and they use heaps of single use plastics and eat a lot of marine based food that could accumulate microplastics. They just teach their kids to like broccoli instead of stuffing them with industrial grade corn syrup to shut them up.
I'm pretty sure OP wasn't suggesting that we light it on fire or try to recycle it. They were suggesting that we use some of the materials that our biosphere has naturally figured out how to recycle whenever possible. I'd suggest that we increase the price of plastics to try to account for these externalities, similar to what we should do for HFCS (and sugar generally) per your comment.
Plastics' reproductive harm is very well established in marine life and early studies in mammalian life is pretty much in line with it. This stuff is almost certainly very bad, and we're using it for absolutely everything due to its rather fantastic properties and extremely low cost.
Agreed for obesity, there are more significant (and more addressable) causes -- but that's still quite far from "these are inert."
I don’t know what or who you think you’re arguing against, but it ain’t me.
First your response to “the non-human environment is an astoundingly efficient circular system” was “nuh uh, nature makes things that smell bad and are ugly too!”
Now your response to “nature doesn’t produce refuse of the same type or scale as humans” (clearly referring to the massive amounts of obscenely stable and probably-toxic-to-most-creatures plastic that we produce) is “MALARIA EXISTS, rich guy!”
Take a breath. Try to find where I said “nature works on smaller scales than humans.” When you find a line that looks similar but says something quite different, get curious about that difference! That’s where you’ll find what I’m actually saying.
Edit: oh, but you had to change your comment completely once you actually read things.
What a ridiculous person.
Swamps naturally breed malaria, among other diseases, similar to how dumps breed Rats. Swamps are where rivers and the like end up washing all the detritus. Malaria (estimated) has killed more humans than any other cause.
Living anywhere near a swamp is the natural equivalent of living near a dump burning tires constantly, but provably more lethal than the dump. Without massive effort to control the vector anyway.
Swamps are as natural as it gets.
How many hundreds of thousands of people are killed by plastic waste in dumps per year again? Zero? Except for maybe some rando who chokes on something?
And again, that is without discussing natural arsenic and uranium water contamination.
We get worked up about human hazards because humans ‘should know better’, and are at least nominally within our control.
Nature just DGAF, and works at scales we can barely comprehend most of the time. And is often completely outside of our control. So apparently some people seem to think the hazards don’t exist or aren’t clearly far worse in many cases?
After all, how much man made radioactive gas do you need to check if you are breathing in at home?
And yes, all of this is very pertinent to the ‘kumbaya nature is self sustaining and all loving and takes care of everything’ comment.
Nature is, of that there is no question, at least. The rest is up for debate/interpretation. I love nature - but let’s not pretend it can be pretty stabby sometimes.
my usual go-to here is to observe that cancer is 100% all-natural.
I have been tempted to put it on a T-shirt to be worn at gatherings where I might find myself in the company of people who celebrate or promote "natural" as if it were an axiomatic good.
In reality I could never bring myself to wear it in public out of concern for by-catch side effects: griefing random strangers for whom the miseries of cancer may form a very real part of their daily experience is not something I'd want to be associated with even if it was not the intended result.
Good point. And something similar occurred to me today: all that progress of science and relative safety of modern life made people stop feeling fear of the cosmos. Yes, Cthulhu isn't real - but cancer is. Along with millions other things that will maim or kill you in horrible ways, or just destroy your mind - all of which were here before us. The true cosmic horror, the dread of uncaring universe beyond our comprehension - it isn't out there, it's right here. It's called nature.
Worldwide ocean plastic kills vast quantities of marine life. It's an enormous problem that affects entire ecosystems. Malaria is a complete red herring.
"you just have no idea what you’re talking about" is just plain rude. No one comes here for that, so you'll have to stop doing that to avoid being ignored.
which we have records of for all of recorded history (and fossil records of from far before that).
I’m not saying plastic is good to be dumping in the ocean. It isn’t! Oil spills are bad! Dumping massive quantities of fertilizer and making oxygen depleted zones worse is bad!
I’m saying claiming that nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances is just ignorant. That claiming natural hazards don’t exist or aren’t often at least as or more of an hazard is ignorant. And leads to major mistakes on our side, if we think that.
And I wish I could be ignored. Arguing obvious stuff like this is exhausting, but apparently it needs to be done or the BS spreads even further - and causes real problems.
> I’m saying claiming that nature is always pretty and naturally balanced without massive die offs and imbalances is just ignorant.
More than that. Nature balances itself through the massive die-offs. I'm not sure how people imagine this, that animals sit around round tables and negotiate a balanced use of resources? No, everything tries to murder and/or consume everything else, and the equilibrium of death is what we call "natural balance".
This is the thread in response to the comment “You know what's awesome? The biosphere, which recycles 99.9999% of its own matter in a vast, global cooperative, driven by unending clean source of energy that is literally beamed in from space with no waste products.
Chucking it all in a hole? Not even close.”
Which is why mass human (and non human) deaths from natural processes related to the biosphere and it’s wastes/chemicals is pertinent.
Because throwing stuff in a hole is sometimes actually a pretty good thing to do compared to many natural processes.
We were talking about recycling. You read my comment and thought it said "humans bad, nature good" and went immediately to "humans good, nature bad, because swamps and malaria and uranium". That was a horrible misreading and long series of non sequiturs, mixed in with a lot of rude remarks. In retrospect, we should have ignored your trolling, which I will now do.
Uhhhh people get worked up about human hazards because we’ve been producing a mass extinction event buddy. The Anthropocene has seen extinction rates 100 to 1,000 times higher than the background extinction rate.
Let me know when the mosquitos and radon leaks catch up :)
Sorry to break it to you but you’re not the only person on HN who has heard of malaria or rotting swamps or uranium deposits.
As a side note, it’s telling that the only scoreboard you seem capable of using is which forces have killed more humans. I wonder if there are any other lenses through which one can understand the world ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
You seem really confused as to what thread we’re in.
You know the one about ‘natural processes are all great, and digging a hole and dumping things in it is terrible’?
Which is why I’m pointing out that many natural processes kill a ton of people and animals? And why digging a hole and dumping things in it may not be so bad after all?
What we started doing is a) ordering out from restaurants less b) saving those plastic takeout boxes and reusing them for leftovers when we do go visit (we keep them in our car trunk) c) bringing our own reusable utensils for those restaurants that still serve plastic utensils (fast food usually) - easy to wipe down & wash.
Not an exhaustive list but a good start for ideas on how to reduce without hampering your lifestyle too much.
We've also switched back to only ordering takeout from places that use more sustainable takeout containers. Those plastic dishes are reusable, but our need for them is not great enough to justify accumulating more than a few. And as soon as you surpass your need, they instantly flip from being reusable containers to being just about the most wasteful form of disposable food packaging imaginable.
Compare with what takeout was like in the 1990s and early 2000s, when it was accepted that only some restaurants and cuisines were appropriate for delivery and takeout. Pizza boxes, deli paper and cardboard clamshell boxes are biodegradeable and industrially compostable. Foiled paper like McDonald's would use has to go to the landfill, but at least there's arguably nothing horrible in it. Oyster pails like Chinese takeout restaurants used to use is probably plastic lined, but plastic lined paper is at least a lot less plastic than the plastic dishes.
Same here. We focus on reducing our consumption of plastic, reusing some (rectangular tofu bins are useful holders for screws, for one), and trashing the rest.
Let's say you eat tofu or something tofu-equivalent daily. That means you need to reuse one rectangular tofu bin daily. And that's a severe underestimate of the actual amount of plastic one generates in the course of a regular day, but let's say it's just the one box. And let's say you toss it every other day.
You still have 183 of those boxes after year 1. I don't know about your toolbox situation, but I will have run out of screws, nails, bits, bobs well before then to store.
It's a nice idea, and I do it too occasionally, but the size of the waste stream is just orders of magnitude more than one could reasonably reuse.
Somebody keeps inserting all that crap in between the things I really want, and it is time they are can't quite so cheaply do so.
