"The greatest trick companies ever played was making us think we could recycle their products."This video shows how deceptive a lot of companies are. The truth is that only small amount of our waste plastic particularly are being recycled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/recycling-myths.html
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Shows how little teeth governments have, and how marketing and advertisement are used to create myths. The thousand comments under the video are worth skimming through at least. We are always dealing with complex systems everywhere we go. But we function under the impression of simplicity. âGive consumers the illusion of what they want, and theyâll be just as happy as the real thing. Only, itâs cheaper for us to create the illusion rather than the reality. So less costs and more profits for us!!â But the âaffordable illusionâ actually makes us collectively pay a stupendous price: our nature, our society, our future.
Another recurring theme about our world in general is how we reduce our goals and principles to simple symbols or proxies, which in the end, can get mistaken for the real things they are representing, and easily get misused or misinterpreted knowingly or unknowingly: the recyclable logos on products, the cash in our pockets or figures in our digital accounts, the scores and certificates from our educational journey, and the likes, followers, views on social networks. What Iâm saying is: this makes us optimize our strategies and behavior for these proxies or symbols, rather than the actual values that they were supposed to be representing.
Itâs not exactly laziness, most of the people are slogging it off⌠But somehow, despite being so busy, weâve all been sleeping, and the corporations have been controlling our governments and all of us, rather than the other way. We seriously need to turn these things around! AND in a creative, constructive, peaceful way please!! This world has seen enough protests, violence, chaos already.
We need more independent creators and problem-solvers. Like white-blood cells and miracle medicines for defeating a cancerous growth in an organism (?: Iâm not sure how well this analogy holds, not a medicine person! But I basically meant having more alert and active citizens will be like having a resilient immune system, plus weâll need good medicines, for nullifying the systemic cancer growth - maybe something which will turn the bad cancerous cells into nutrients that boost the organismâs health? Thatâd great!)
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Nicely put, learner2020-and accurate! Who knows what to do really? Itâs often impossible to see a useful way forward, we truly are in the mire and itâs of our own making. Every one of us has played a part in contributing to the mess we find ourselves inâof course, some more than others, perhapsâŚ
âBut somehow, despite being so busy, weâve all been sleepingâ ⌠I believe itâs because weâve been so busy that weâve been sleeping. The endless and enormous level of distraction out there is the real culprit, locking all of us into anywhere but this moment. Present moment awareness sees right through the distractions. It sees them as the illusions that they are as opposed to the reality that they pass themselves off as being. Present moment mindful awareness has done and can continue to work absolute wonders in this world. Pass it on, as they say!
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But recycling has always been green salve to assuage white guilt. Recycling merely justifies waste. Unless you can reverse the second law of thermodynamics.
Just more lies they tell us to believe that limitless consumption is compatible with sustainable life on this planet. Reduce, reuse or perish.
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@richard1 @greg @LaurenceHerbert There is a potential âQualityâ in nature. And with âWorkâ, we are able to tap it, make it accessible, adapt it for our situations, making it into a practical âValueâ.
I can grow rice and you can grow lentils. We can share it and enjoy a meal. Thus we co-operate and share the Value that we are creating. There is no debt. There is a direct exchange or sharing of Value.
But what if Iâm unable to grow rice during a period, and so unable to transfer Value directly to you, in exchange for the Value you are giving me? I will write on a piece of paper âI promise to pay you the said Value in the futureâ, sign it and give it to you. Thus, Iâm indebted to you. In the future and over time, as & when Iâm able to grow rice again and transfer any real Value to you, once it fulfills the debt, you can tear the âpromise letterâ and we can set the debt as having been cleared.
Having this system of âpromise lettersâ is useful, as there are fluctuations in the Value each party can create at any given time. Also, since there are many parties creating Value in different ways (say different forms of food with nutritional content not found sufficiently in just rice and lentils). So, to allow us to trade Value in different permutations and combinations with other parties, we started exchanging âpromise lettersâ whenever we couldnât transfer real Value directly.
There is a lot of money going around. There is also a lot of debt. Well, weâve forgotten that money is âpromise lettersâ - promises to fulfill the debt at a later time. It is a âprocrastinating economyâ. âWeâll figure it out later, letâs enjoy nowâŚâ
Limitless consumption, and limitless creation of debt against that, without keeping the limited âQualityâ in nature in mind, was bound to be unsustainable. Sure, there is a limitless energy in the universe, but we are confined to one planet for now, and the limits have long been shown to us. But âcorporationsâ, diagnosed to be âpsychopath personsâ, have optimized the system for their narrowly defined âprofitsâ. Most people and most life on the planet has been exploited. But we keep working for more debt (money), rather than âWorkâ for âValueâ. Blinded by the symbols and proxies, mistaking them for what they are representing. Money ainât Value. It was designed to be a promise to pay back that Value at a later date. Got it @Free?
Iâm discussing about this âAnti-Workâ system that we have in place on another topic: The Anti-Work Phenomenon: Can you explain it? (plus, a new perspective on Work)
Very fair assessment. One of the callouts that might be missing is that 95% of the global financial industry is not based on real value exchanged but on leverage. Financial systems are distorted that the value of goods and labor are less than 1/20th of what the financial systems represent ⌠largely because banks, investors, etc. are allowed to place financial bets that are 20x assets. So most of the economy is based not on human trade but ghosts.
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Oh yeah stock markets etc. I totally missed that⌠So, most âmoneyâ is just flowing through the casino model? How does that even make sense?
I mean, letâs say thereâs this new company which has a great R&D department, some great thinkers, scientists, designers, businessmen etc. are working there, and it is developing some innovative products and services. Itâll be great to get more funding. How would the financial industry help here, v/s investors, incubators, crowdfunding or bootstrapping?
Can we exchange a few thoughts on this topic @greg? Should we start a new topic, since this could be deemed off-topic? Or perhaps, it does sound like a âgreater recycling conâ (âletâs keep speculating on the future value of something so that the bubble gets as big as possible and we can fill our pockets to the max - who cares if the value does get created in reality - the illusion is strongerâ?
Probably makes sense as a separate topic. Weâve probably annoyed enough people as it is here. 
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For a similar theme, but different subject, have a read of the essay:
The Great Diet Deception: How US Politics Have Duped the World
A neurosurgeonâs journey into Americaâs obesity and disease epidemic
on the following webpage:
Recycling sham
via Hacker News: Recycling was a lie to sell more plastic, recycling industry veteran says | Hacker News
The triple whammy to all this is that all over the planet people have been cleaning their plastics with hot water, drying and then separating it into different rubbish bags with separate collections and additional bins etc. All for a giant lie about recycling that was never true. We have wasted substantial energy and time on something that never worked and helped destroy the environment even more because of it.
Water situation
This is on par with âsaving waterâ by taking shorter showers while growing water-intense crops on the desert and water rights from 1850.
Permafrost melting
I clearly see the connection with climate change, media narrative does not emphasize the facts.
Hapiness, forgiveness, acceptance 
COVID gave me so much hope, radical change is possible.