Star Wipers Makes the Rags That Clean Up All Your Messes

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Star Wipers Makes the Rags That Clean Up All Your Messes

The two-story cutting room at Star Wipers fills with a soft, mechanical hum. About 20 middle-aged women and a handful of men stand at workstations encircled by 6-foot-tall plastic bins full of used clothes and sheets. In the middle, Amity Bounds, one of the last professional American rag cutters, grabs a pink hoodie with a sparkly print across the front that reads justice love justice. Like her co-workers, she stands 6 inches from a tea-saucer-size blade that spins at chest level inside a metal guard with three small gaps. With a butcher’s precision, Bounds slips the hoodie into one of the gaps, cuts off the hood, then slices the garment twice so it lies flat. Next she cuts off the zipper and tosses it into a waste bin. Then she cuts off and tosses the sparkly print. (“It’s abrasive and no good for wiping anything.”) The remaining sweatshirt offers little resistance; she slices once, twice, three times, transforming it from a garment to rags.

Recycle !

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I was listening to the NPR story about what is recyclable and what isn’t at the grocery store. 🍱Honestly I think it’s too much work for the consumer – waste disposal needs to be convenient if you want people to dispose of waste responsibly. ♻ Disposable materials need to be non toxic and recyclable or compostable. I don’t think people should have to spend tons of time scrubbing out containers or figuring out which bin 🚮 to put things in. It should be easy and sustainable.

There really should be more national leadership on waste management, it shouldn’t fall on the consumer. One good thing is that toxic, smelly burning PVC has fallen out of use for disposable packaging, as has glass, which can’t be burned, often breaks as litter, and is difficult to recycle ♻ even if it in theory it’s fully closed loop. ➰

Recycling

Plastic Bottle Litter

Smolders

Sand Dune, Fence, Landfill

How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster – Los Angeles Times

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How the U.S. betrayed the Marshall Islands, kindling the next nuclear disaster – Los Angeles Times

Five thousand miles west of Los Angeles and 500 miles north of the equator, on a far-flung spit of white coral sand in the central Pacific, a massive, aging and weathered concrete dome bobs up and down with the tide.

Here in the Marshall Islands, Runit Dome holds more than 3.1 million cubic feet — or 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools — of U.S.-produced radioactive soil and debris, including lethal amounts of plutonium. Nowhere else has the United States saddled another country with so much of its nuclear waste, a product of its Cold War atomic testing program.

2019 County Comptroller Democratic Primary

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The Albany County Comptroller Democratic Primary played out as many observers of Albany politics would have expected. Darius Shanifar won Delmar - Elsmere and some of the more progressive neighborhoods in Albany, while Susan Rizzo won the more conservative and ethnically diverse parts of the county, including the South End, the Hilltowns and Green Island.

Purple - Won by Susan A. Rizzo
White - Vote split by Rizzo/Shahinfar
Green - Won by Darius Shahinfar

Data Source: Final 2019 Albany County Election June Primary Results, ED Breakdown.

CDTA Adds Real-Time Bus Maps to Website

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Screenshot of CDTA Website

I am very thrilled to see that CDTA has added maps that show the estimated real-time position of buses on all routes on their website. It might not be all that much more useful then the time estimates, but psychologically, to be able to pull up your phone, and watch the icon creep towards you makes you feel better.

The data isn’t perfect, it all depends on the access to GPS signals — which ain’t always possible downtown with the big buildings — and how many of the minute-by-minute beacons are not always successfully returned to CDTA World Headquarters in Albany and processed by the computer, but it’s certainly better then nothing, and makes you feel more like a bus actually coming.

Here is an example on CDTA Route 18 Schedule page.

The most hacked band password is ‘Blink-182’

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The most hacked band password is ‘Blink-182’

The world is awash in '90s nostalgia — and it's even showing up in our passwords.

A new study from the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has revealed the world's most easily hacked passwords, CNN reports. The top no-brainer passwords overall are impersonal number combinations, like 12345. But in the category of "bands," the most breached password is the name of the popular '90s pop-punk outfit, Blink-182.