American supermarkets are a special category, since everything is wrapped in plastic.

In poor countries, plastic bags are a significant contributor to overall amount of plastic waste produced. Banning plastic bags in a place like that actually has an impact, because most things aren’t necessarily wrapped in layers of plastic.

If you wanted to have a similar impact in America, you would need to introduce a plastic packing and wrapping tax. So yes, banning a single product in a place like that is only a very small step in the right direction.

How do you define intrusive in this case?

If your subconscious mind suddenly reminds of that one time you said something stupid and embarrassing… Yeah, that happens to pretty much everyone. Just tell that thought that nobody remembers that day or cares about what anyone said, so carry on as usual. That’s just the human mind doing its thing, making sure we pay attention to social interactions. Humans are social animals after all.

If troublesome thoughts bombard your mind all the time and you’re having trouble living your normal life, consider talking to a mental health professional.

You know, there are third world countries with a more progressive approach to plastic…

Many years ago, I formed the opinion that protests rarely accomplish anything useful. If the government has decided to pass a particular bill, build a dam, cut costs or whatever, people often respond by protesting. Usually, the bill is passed, the dam is built and costs are cut regardless. The way I see it, protesting gives people a chance to feel like they’ve done their part, while the government does what they wants anyway. From the perspective of the government, it’s useful to allow people to have a channel where they can safely vent their anger. If you make protests illegal, people will form a resistance and start a guerrilla war, and that never ends well.

There are notable exceptions too, so not all protests end up being useless. It’s just that the probabilities aren’t in our favor. You proposed other forms of political activism, and I totally agree.

To me, all of this is rather theoretical, because I’ve never actually participated in any of this. Instead, I’ve just observed these events from the outside, while you’ve seen it from the inside. I’m really curious to know if agree or disagree with these thoughts.

That seems to be a common theme in medicine. You have a super common symptom that is usually caused by something completely harmless, but there’s also a non-zero chance that you’re absolutely screwed.

Wow. That’s amazing. And terrifying. I hope you’re doing better now.

Wait, it’s possible to have a heart attack for 5 days? I thought a heart attack means your heart stops and you pass out?

Reading these comments is exposing how little I really know how cardiology. This is what it feels like to be on the first peak of the Dunning-Kruger curve.

But isn’t heartburn all about stomach acids? How is that related to the heart? After all, these are two completely separate organs.

Meaning that you would be technically one of the NPCs.

Now that you put it that way, it’s mildly terrifying.

That would be cool. Boringly though, there are safer ways as well. Birds tend to be scared of loud bangs, so you could scare them away with just sounds.

That is a valid question. Initially, I used the community search to find all the communities I might care about, and subscribed to all of them. Occasionally, I also tried the all feed, but didn’t find anything worth my time, so I stopped doing that. Nowadays, my list of communities is pretty stable.

Occasionally I check what’s going on in [email protected]

I prefer the whitelist option instead. I just read the “subscribed” feed and ignore the “all” feed

Humans are so invasive that they have gone to places that can’t even support human life for prolonged periods of time. Deep sea trenches, tall mountains, polar ice caps etc. Even the Moon isn’t safe from humans, and now they are also planning to invade Mars. Once they’ve spread all over every planet, moon and asteroid in the solar system, they’ll probably try to land on the Sun.