Pro-plastic propaganda for kids from 1997 "Plastics Makes It Possible"

[wazroth]

@fuzzyfungus

I told the IRB that I had an adorable baby kitten and a blowtorch;

If I’m not mistaken, the kitten * minute is the official SI unit for thermal insulation.

[Shuck]

@kmoser

if they were to ever grow up and serve on the jury of a case involving the plastics industry, they would tend to be more sympathetic to them

I’m now imagining plastic as an entity like Doonesbury’s character “Mr. Butts,” an anthropomorphic personification of the cigarette industry, whispering in the ears of jurors, “Hey, remember the fun times we had when you were a kid?”

@fuzzyfungus

the very existence of a video aimed at selling random children on the concept of ‘polymers, actually pretty cool!’ seems suspicious in itself

There’s literally no non-nefarious function for such a video!

@fuzzyfungus

If something seems like an OK enough idea; and then someone still goes and makes a video about how it’s not just good, it’s your friend, you have to wonder why they doth protest so much.

I remember something that someone said, some decades ago, that’s stuck with me, about the basic function of advertising - something along the lines of, “If advertising is loudly insisting that something is true, it’s almost certainly because it isn’t.”

[jhbadger]

But it has translational research applications! It isn’t just basic science! By making silicone suits for kittens we could potentially save kittens from house fires!

[BroccoliofDoom]

You mistake policy and human behavior for science. Plastic absolutely can be recycled in a very cost effective way, and in a way that is fundamentally more cost effective than recycling paper products. (Happy to go down that rabbit hole of chemistry, but even at a higher level if you’re talking about transportation costs required to end up being recycled plastic still comes out on top).

I wasn’t making an argument about any of that however, I was just referring to the tag line “Plastic makes it possible”. For better or worse, things made of plastic tend to be cheaper than things made of other materials you might use for the same purpose. Plastic also offers material properties that are valuable and allow for new applications (that bulletproof vest at the end for example, and although they didn’t go into details for food packaging it CAN (note doesn’t always) reduce food waste and definitely reduces the cost to ship food good around once packaged. As I said, fashionable to hate on plastic, but just be clear about what you don’t like about it (hint: it’s generally the intersection of those materials and human behavior, there’s nothing wrong with the materials themselves).

[cole.perry]

They had to know there would be SOME response to Captain Planet