8 ms·

They mention this as a way to recycle plastics, but for me this seems like a perfect way to get lots of tiny plastic particles out and into the environment once

by chha 5y ago

They mention this as a way to recycle plastics, but for me this seems like a perfect way to get lots of tiny plastic particles out and into the environment once the road starts to wear.

hellow0rldz 5y ago
Breathable micro-plastics doesn't sound nice.
- shoto_io 5y ago
  I thought that’s happening anyways because we burn most of the plastic waste?
  - kzrdude 5y ago
    In a proper incineration plant it's so hot that there is no microplastics left over
    - shoto_io 5y ago
      But where does it go then? What’s the chemical reaction? Is there only CO2 and water left then?
      - leipert 5y ago
        Not an expert, but I assume remaining particles are filtered from the exhaust fumes and/or remain part of the remaining sludge. Pyrolysis seems also like a thing that hopefully becomes viable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
      - Tuna-Fish 5y ago
        Mostly, yeah. Of course polyamides also produce some nitrogen compounds and PVC also produces HCl that you have to deal with, etc. But generally, plastics are very complex long-chain carbohydrates. Burning them at low temperatures produces all kinds of partially combusted horrible byproducts, but properly incinerating them results in just water and CO2.
        m4rtink 5y ago
        I visited an incineration plan once and they showed how the make really sure the temperature is over 900 degrees Celsius st all times so that plastics and biological toxins are properly destroyed. They also make sure there is lots of air available to the combustion process and thats done in an interesting way. They draw it in via the waste storage bunker solving two issues at once - the stinky air from all the waste gets effectively burned and the bunker is kept as negative air pressure so the smell doesn't get out. And of course all the exhaust gases pass via a sophisticated fikter plant.
        zo1 5y ago
        Aren't we then shooting ourselves in the foot then by being scared of burning trash/plastic waste? As an interim before solving all plastic waste, it seems like a much better solution than just stacking plastic into giant dumps.
        imtringued 5y ago
        You have to capture the CO2 and then figure out how to store it or turn it into pure Carbon and then you still have to landfill that.
        CameronNemo 5y ago
        Maybe. The CO2 going to the atmosphere is not great. You have to way that against the risks of plastic pollution from land filling.
        Tuna-Fish 5y ago
        If you are burning any fossil fuels for power, starting up waste incineration power plants to replace them is a pure win.
        chihuahua 5y ago
        Perhaps burning trash would be the better solution. But it seems fairly unpopular with people in general, at least in the U.S. - you can imagine how easy it is to generate violent opposition to put a trash-burning facility in any place. An acquaintance of mine from high school for some reason devoted much of his life to promoting trash burning technology. It seems like a good cause, but a futile one.
tlrobinson 5y ago
This was my first thought as well. I’d rather discarded plastics be concentrated in dumps than thinly spread across the land.
- imhoguy 5y ago
  Or why not use it just to make fundaments, underground insulation or just a ground water barrier. My understanding is that the underground environment causes less degradation to plastics than a one exposed to sun and constant friction.
  - canadianfella 5y ago
    What is a fundament?
  - amelius 5y ago
    But might affect ground water quality.
systemvoltage 5y ago
Micro plastics are terrifying, but I’m trying to think why exactly. If the road is shedding plastic dust along with the ground full of insoluble things like tar, rock, pebbles and stone; what’s a tiny particle of plastic any different from a grain of sand? I’m not asserting that micro plastics aren’t bad, just trying to understand what are the risks compared to a lot of dirt around us. I think dust on microscopic scale is inorganic insoluble solid particles and we seem to breathe/eat this stuff with no issue. Are polymers any different than dust particles when it comes to risks to humans in inhaling and ingesting it? Is it something else?
- creshal 5y ago
  Microplastics can penetrate various biological barriers that were designed to keep dust etc. out. These biological barriers are already not perfect, things like heavy metals (lead, cadmium, …) do the same and can cause massive damages, which is why our only solution is to limit their uses and prevent them from leaking into the environment as much as possible.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    TIL, thanks for the insight. It's remarkable already that human body can take so much abuse, and still survive.
    - nosianu 5y ago
      Multicellular organisms are highly parallel, trillions of cells in a human. Even inside a eukaryotic cell (gigantic compared to far smaller bacteria) there is a huge amount of parallelism and non-linearity like in some assembly line. The discussions about some health consequences always come up with "death" as the binary outcome measure. This is so useless. There already is an effect for tiny amounts of molecules. Functions in cells work worse, and cells work worse. This affects all of your functions. Since you are only ever exposed to tiny amounts even when it accumulates - e.g. for heavy metals - all those small problems are either not noticed or attributed to age, which of course also advances. I had the "benefit" of diagnosed mercury poisoning (gray zone - enough to warrant chelation treatment, university clinic researcher doctor who always forgot to send his - very moderate - bills unless I reminded him several times for a year each time, so no over-diagnosis for profit). From a disappearing nodule in my thyroid that I had had for decades, unchanging, that suddenly disappeared within weeks of chelation to the great amazement of an endocrinologist who had recommended surgery and who ultra-sounded me twice because he could not believe it, to a huge long list of "minor" ailments that I had increased over the decades and that I had ignored and also attributed to age (I never bothered doctors, far from hypochondriac, never thought much of it), to my returning ability for abstract thought, to digestion going from delayed and stinky to perfect (really), from sleep problems to easy and perfect sleep, to never tired, soooo much went away. With the doctors permission and supervision I chelated far longer and far beyond what would have been justified officially, since it kept helping even though measured amounts were getting really tiny. Only because I saw the contrast, which rarely anyone ever does because for most people it's a very very gradual slope downhill, or they believe it's "genes" or age, do I even consider environmental factors. I once saw a webpage from a decades-long inner medicine clinic doctor who opened a private practice - in which she offered purely psychological bullshit "treatments" that you see from "alternative medicine". Her reasoning, explained on her (old, clinic-time) website: It's either genes or psychology in her clinical experience, meaning you can hardly ever really do anything but mitigation. Environmental factors never entered her mind. (I have no doubt any cases she diagnoses as "real" will be referred to a clinic by her right away, so not critic on her person from me.) Which make sense, because the science behind the many, many each very tiny amounts of chemicals and their influence is very hard. Diagnosing it on an individual level, and not just on a population level (the latter does not help a doctor when there is a concrete patient in front of them), is even harder. So as a public health administrator allocating funds I perfectly understand why it flies under the radar. Because individual doctors working with individual patients can't really do much of anything. That is then equated with "there is no problem" (or they would do something about it). Oh and the "they didn't die so it can't be so bad" attitude. . Oh and by the way, completely non-scientific and my opinion after watching myself through many boring cycles: - The common cold helps "getting stuff out". Significantly. I now wonder if eradicating it will have worse long-term outcomes for other issues. Also, not taking medicine to lower the symptoms for example for a good nights sleep might actually be better, the symptoms are part of that "getting stuff out". Yes it's very uncomfortable. It's horrible if you have to get up and go to work the next day. - The best treatment by far are low stress (no alarms to wake you up to go to work when you would still sleep), sleep, rest as needed (during the day, just lying down and letting the mind go off somewhere - no reading or listening, the brain has to have "free time" to do things on its own - work from home is best!), walking (needed to get things moving, from my body experience the normal blood and ECF circulation is not sufficient. - Changing sides left/right/left/right/... "I cannot find sleep" actually already is part of the brain's cleanup cycle! A lot of time spend in that phase may be an indicator that there is quite a bit. Clearly, having to get up for an early commute the next day adds stress and makes this hard to bear. But I recommend to accept it. It's a natural reaction, not something that should be suppressed. Yes it makes nights "work". - The last 1-2 hours of sleep, that some (many) people find makes them more sleepy and groggy, are essential (okay, all phases are, but that's the one people like to skip). - Being groggy after an afternoon nap is the same. Part of "getting stuff out". You can call me out on any of this and I have no way to contradict you apart from anecdotes without any scientific value (nothing was measured, for example).
natmaka 5y ago
Ready for another batch of "Scientists tracked down a mass killer of $SOMETHING"? See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25431550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25431550
- virtue3 5y ago
  yeah... you're not wrong. Plastics are basically organic compounds and they screw around with organisms very easily. Tho asphalt is already made with bitumen (a petroleum product) so it's not like it's THAT much different. Hopefully we aren't concentrating even more problematic compounds than what already existing in the asphalt.
  - gruez 5y ago
    >Tho asphalt is already made with bitumen (a petroleum product) so it's not like it's THAT much different. Plastics generate microplastics. Does bitumen generate microbitumen?
    - thatcat 5y ago
      Does bitumen bioaccumulate into food supplies? Why compare the two?
      - gilbetron 5y ago
        Here's one thesis that claims it probably does not: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/20366224.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/20366224.pdf
      - 8bitsrule 5y ago
        Ran into this interesting factoid a couple days back: "Kerogen is solid, insoluble organic matter in sedimentary rocks. Consisting of an estimated 10^16 tons of carbon, it is the most abundant source of organic compounds on earth, exceeding the total organic content of living matter 10,000-fold.... Petroleum and natural gas form from kerogen. Kerogen may be classified by its origin: lacustrine (e.g., algal), marine (e.g., planktonic), and terrestrial (e.g., pollen and spores).... Kerogen is insoluble in normal organic solvents in part because of its high molecular weight of its component compounds. The soluble portion is known as bitumen." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen] All from the same (previously locked-up) family of goodies, it seems.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
raverbashing 5y ago
Roads already have a lot of tire dust due to tire wear, I don't think this will be a significant extra source of pollution. > The polymer solves a longstanding problem that the asphalt industry has encountered since the first attempts at using recycled plastics in roads, namely how plastic separates once it's melted into the hot asphalt.
shoto_io 5y ago
I knew that this sort of comment was on top when I clicked the comment section :-) PS: I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s just fits the HN sentiment perfectly.
- Jemm 5y ago
  The article states that there is no advantage to the paving by having plastic mixed in. This begs the question why, other than landfill diversion of plastics, replace aggregate with plastic?
  - loonster 5y ago
    Greenwashing.
thereare5lights 5y ago
It's already everywhere https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-rain-is-the-new-acid-rain/ https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-rain-is-the-new-acid-rai...
- anakaine 5y ago
  Quantity and dosage also matter.
spodek 5y ago
Future generations will see our use of plastic like we see asbestos, HCFCs, and leaded gasoline. Nobody denies its utility. It just kills people and wildlife. Once we ban at least single-use plastic we'll recoil with horror at what we did and how long we took after realizing what we were doing to stop ourselves.
- thathndude 5y ago
  I’ve recently come to see this truth. Like reading the vintage ads recommending cocaine to help your tooth ache. I just hope the future finds a way to undo so much of the damage.
  - freeflight 5y ago
    > Like reading the vintage ads recommending cocaine to help your tooth ache. Cocaine didn't result in large scale environmental damage, to this day it's still in widespread medical use as a local anesthetic. Imho a much more apt example would be something like "plutonium toothpaste" and the fact how humanity has irreversibly changed Earths biosphere by introducing large quantities of atmospheric plutonium 239 during the countless nuclear weapon tests [0]. Any acknowledgement of potential deadly consequences out of that mostly exist in some fringe awareness [1], and pretty much never comes up in any debates around the risks and dangers of nuclear as a source of energy generation. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0096340215581357 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0096340215581357 [1] https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi...
  - spodek 5y ago
    > I just hope the future finds a way to undo so much of the damage. Future? We can undo it now -- just with life improvements and simplifications, I've dropped my emissions 90%, according to online calculators. I take two years to fill a load of trash at home, which used to be weekly. Many other changes. And one person changing is exactly what causes more people to change. As a result, Mayors, Congressmembers, and other politicians, CEOs, champion athletes, and more have come on my podcast, helping lead large communities. The Hacker News community is particularly recalcitrant, believing that Mars and fusion are simple and will solve everything while flying less or having fewer children is against human nature and solve nothing, but there's variation. Systemic change begins with personal transformation.

by chha 5y ago

They mention this as a way to recycle plastics, but for me this seems like a perfect way to get lots of tiny plastic particles out and into the environment once the road starts to wear.

hellow0rldz 5y ago

Breathable micro-plastics doesn't sound nice.

shoto_io 5y ago
I thought that’s happening anyways because we burn most of the plastic waste?
- kzrdude 5y ago
  In a proper incineration plant it's so hot that there is no microplastics left over
  - shoto_io 5y ago
    But where does it go then? What’s the chemical reaction? Is there only CO2 and water left then?
    - leipert 5y ago
      Not an expert, but I assume remaining particles are filtered from the exhaust fumes and/or remain part of the remaining sludge. Pyrolysis seems also like a thing that hopefully becomes viable: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_depolymerization
    - Tuna-Fish 5y ago
      Mostly, yeah. Of course polyamides also produce some nitrogen compounds and PVC also produces HCl that you have to deal with, etc. But generally, plastics are very complex long-chain carbohydrates. Burning them at low temperatures produces all kinds of partially combusted horrible byproducts, but properly incinerating them results in just water and CO2.
      - m4rtink 5y ago
        I visited an incineration plan once and they showed how the make really sure the temperature is over 900 degrees Celsius st all times so that plastics and biological toxins are properly destroyed. They also make sure there is lots of air available to the combustion process and thats done in an interesting way. They draw it in via the waste storage bunker solving two issues at once - the stinky air from all the waste gets effectively burned and the bunker is kept as negative air pressure so the smell doesn't get out. And of course all the exhaust gases pass via a sophisticated fikter plant.
      - zo1 5y ago
        Aren't we then shooting ourselves in the foot then by being scared of burning trash/plastic waste? As an interim before solving all plastic waste, it seems like a much better solution than just stacking plastic into giant dumps.
        imtringued 5y ago
        You have to capture the CO2 and then figure out how to store it or turn it into pure Carbon and then you still have to landfill that.
        CameronNemo 5y ago
        Maybe. The CO2 going to the atmosphere is not great. You have to way that against the risks of plastic pollution from land filling.
        Tuna-Fish 5y ago
        If you are burning any fossil fuels for power, starting up waste incineration power plants to replace them is a pure win.
        chihuahua 5y ago
        Perhaps burning trash would be the better solution. But it seems fairly unpopular with people in general, at least in the U.S. - you can imagine how easy it is to generate violent opposition to put a trash-burning facility in any place. An acquaintance of mine from high school for some reason devoted much of his life to promoting trash burning technology. It seems like a good cause, but a futile one.

tlrobinson 5y ago

This was my first thought as well. I’d rather discarded plastics be concentrated in dumps than thinly spread across the land.

imhoguy 5y ago
Or why not use it just to make fundaments, underground insulation or just a ground water barrier. My understanding is that the underground environment causes less degradation to plastics than a one exposed to sun and constant friction.
- canadianfella 5y ago
  What is a fundament?
- amelius 5y ago
  But might affect ground water quality.

systemvoltage 5y ago

Micro plastics are terrifying, but I’m trying to think why exactly. If the road is shedding plastic dust along with the ground full of insoluble things like tar, rock, pebbles and stone; what’s a tiny particle of plastic any different from a grain of sand? I’m not asserting that micro plastics aren’t bad, just trying to understand what are the risks compared to a lot of dirt around us. I think dust on microscopic scale is inorganic insoluble solid particles and we seem to breathe/eat this stuff with no issue. Are polymers any different than dust particles when it comes to risks to humans in inhaling and ingesting it? Is it something else?

creshal 5y ago
Microplastics can penetrate various biological barriers that were designed to keep dust etc. out. These biological barriers are already not perfect, things like heavy metals (lead, cadmium, …) do the same and can cause massive damages, which is why our only solution is to limit their uses and prevent them from leaking into the environment as much as possible.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  TIL, thanks for the insight. It's remarkable already that human body can take so much abuse, and still survive.
  - nosianu 5y ago
    Multicellular organisms are highly parallel, trillions of cells in a human. Even inside a eukaryotic cell (gigantic compared to far smaller bacteria) there is a huge amount of parallelism and non-linearity like in some assembly line. The discussions about some health consequences always come up with "death" as the binary outcome measure. This is so useless. There already is an effect for tiny amounts of molecules. Functions in cells work worse, and cells work worse. This affects all of your functions. Since you are only ever exposed to tiny amounts even when it accumulates - e.g. for heavy metals - all those small problems are either not noticed or attributed to age, which of course also advances. I had the "benefit" of diagnosed mercury poisoning (gray zone - enough to warrant chelation treatment, university clinic researcher doctor who always forgot to send his - very moderate - bills unless I reminded him several times for a year each time, so no over-diagnosis for profit). From a disappearing nodule in my thyroid that I had had for decades, unchanging, that suddenly disappeared within weeks of chelation to the great amazement of an endocrinologist who had recommended surgery and who ultra-sounded me twice because he could not believe it, to a huge long list of "minor" ailments that I had increased over the decades and that I had ignored and also attributed to age (I never bothered doctors, far from hypochondriac, never thought much of it), to my returning ability for abstract thought, to digestion going from delayed and stinky to perfect (really), from sleep problems to easy and perfect sleep, to never tired, soooo much went away. With the doctors permission and supervision I chelated far longer and far beyond what would have been justified officially, since it kept helping even though measured amounts were getting really tiny. Only because I saw the contrast, which rarely anyone ever does because for most people it's a very very gradual slope downhill, or they believe it's "genes" or age, do I even consider environmental factors. I once saw a webpage from a decades-long inner medicine clinic doctor who opened a private practice - in which she offered purely psychological bullshit "treatments" that you see from "alternative medicine". Her reasoning, explained on her (old, clinic-time) website: It's either genes or psychology in her clinical experience, meaning you can hardly ever really do anything but mitigation. Environmental factors never entered her mind. (I have no doubt any cases she diagnoses as "real" will be referred to a clinic by her right away, so not critic on her person from me.) Which make sense, because the science behind the many, many each very tiny amounts of chemicals and their influence is very hard. Diagnosing it on an individual level, and not just on a population level (the latter does not help a doctor when there is a concrete patient in front of them), is even harder. So as a public health administrator allocating funds I perfectly understand why it flies under the radar. Because individual doctors working with individual patients can't really do much of anything. That is then equated with "there is no problem" (or they would do something about it). Oh and the "they didn't die so it can't be so bad" attitude. . Oh and by the way, completely non-scientific and my opinion after watching myself through many boring cycles: - The common cold helps "getting stuff out". Significantly. I now wonder if eradicating it will have worse long-term outcomes for other issues. Also, not taking medicine to lower the symptoms for example for a good nights sleep might actually be better, the symptoms are part of that "getting stuff out". Yes it's very uncomfortable. It's horrible if you have to get up and go to work the next day. - The best treatment by far are low stress (no alarms to wake you up to go to work when you would still sleep), sleep, rest as needed (during the day, just lying down and letting the mind go off somewhere - no reading or listening, the brain has to have "free time" to do things on its own - work from home is best!), walking (needed to get things moving, from my body experience the normal blood and ECF circulation is not sufficient. - Changing sides left/right/left/right/... "I cannot find sleep" actually already is part of the brain's cleanup cycle! A lot of time spend in that phase may be an indicator that there is quite a bit. Clearly, having to get up for an early commute the next day adds stress and makes this hard to bear. But I recommend to accept it. It's a natural reaction, not something that should be suppressed. Yes it makes nights "work". - The last 1-2 hours of sleep, that some (many) people find makes them more sleepy and groggy, are essential (okay, all phases are, but that's the one people like to skip). - Being groggy after an afternoon nap is the same. Part of "getting stuff out". You can call me out on any of this and I have no way to contradict you apart from anecdotes without any scientific value (nothing was measured, for example).

natmaka 5y ago

Ready for another batch of "Scientists tracked down a mass killer of $SOMETHING"? See for example https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25431550 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25431550

virtue3 5y ago
yeah... you're not wrong. Plastics are basically organic compounds and they screw around with organisms very easily. Tho asphalt is already made with bitumen (a petroleum product) so it's not like it's THAT much different. Hopefully we aren't concentrating even more problematic compounds than what already existing in the asphalt.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Tho asphalt is already made with bitumen (a petroleum product) so it's not like it's THAT much different. Plastics generate microplastics. Does bitumen generate microbitumen?
  - thatcat 5y ago
    Does bitumen bioaccumulate into food supplies? Why compare the two?
    - gilbetron 5y ago
      Here's one thesis that claims it probably does not: https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/20366224.pdf https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/20366224.pdf
    - 8bitsrule 5y ago
      Ran into this interesting factoid a couple days back: "Kerogen is solid, insoluble organic matter in sedimentary rocks. Consisting of an estimated 10^16 tons of carbon, it is the most abundant source of organic compounds on earth, exceeding the total organic content of living matter 10,000-fold.... Petroleum and natural gas form from kerogen. Kerogen may be classified by its origin: lacustrine (e.g., algal), marine (e.g., planktonic), and terrestrial (e.g., pollen and spores).... Kerogen is insoluble in normal organic solvents in part because of its high molecular weight of its component compounds. The soluble portion is known as bitumen." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerogen] All from the same (previously locked-up) family of goodies, it seems.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

raverbashing 5y ago

Roads already have a lot of tire dust due to tire wear, I don't think this will be a significant extra source of pollution. > The polymer solves a longstanding problem that the asphalt industry has encountered since the first attempts at using recycled plastics in roads, namely how plastic separates once it's melted into the hot asphalt.

shoto_io 5y ago

I knew that this sort of comment was on top when I clicked the comment section :-) PS: I’m not saying it’s wrong, it’s just fits the HN sentiment perfectly.

Jemm 5y ago
The article states that there is no advantage to the paving by having plastic mixed in. This begs the question why, other than landfill diversion of plastics, replace aggregate with plastic?
- loonster 5y ago
  Greenwashing.

thereare5lights 5y ago

It's already everywhere https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-rain-is-the-new-acid-rain/ https://www.wired.com/story/plastic-rain-is-the-new-acid-rai...

anakaine 5y ago
Quantity and dosage also matter.

spodek 5y ago

Future generations will see our use of plastic like we see asbestos, HCFCs, and leaded gasoline. Nobody denies its utility. It just kills people and wildlife. Once we ban at least single-use plastic we'll recoil with horror at what we did and how long we took after realizing what we were doing to stop ourselves.

thathndude 5y ago
I’ve recently come to see this truth. Like reading the vintage ads recommending cocaine to help your tooth ache. I just hope the future finds a way to undo so much of the damage.
- freeflight 5y ago
  > Like reading the vintage ads recommending cocaine to help your tooth ache. Cocaine didn't result in large scale environmental damage, to this day it's still in widespread medical use as a local anesthetic. Imho a much more apt example would be something like "plutonium toothpaste" and the fact how humanity has irreversibly changed Earths biosphere by introducing large quantities of atmospheric plutonium 239 during the countless nuclear weapon tests [0]. Any acknowledgement of potential deadly consequences out of that mostly exist in some fringe awareness [1], and pretty much never comes up in any debates around the risks and dangers of nuclear as a source of energy generation. [0] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0096340215581357 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0096340215581357 [1] https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civilians-on-a-scale-comparable-to-hiroshima-and-nagasaki/ https://qz.com/1163140/us-nuclear-tests-killed-american-civi...
- spodek 5y ago
  > I just hope the future finds a way to undo so much of the damage. Future? We can undo it now -- just with life improvements and simplifications, I've dropped my emissions 90%, according to online calculators. I take two years to fill a load of trash at home, which used to be weekly. Many other changes. And one person changing is exactly what causes more people to change. As a result, Mayors, Congressmembers, and other politicians, CEOs, champion athletes, and more have come on my podcast, helping lead large communities. The Hacker News community is particularly recalcitrant, believing that Mars and fusion are simple and will solve everything while flying less or having fewer children is against human nature and solve nothing, but there's variation. Systemic change begins with personal transformation.