Comments

• By xelxebar 2025-01-140:583 reply

  Looks like a Miura fold: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miura_fold. When going to theme parks and the like, I love folding the physical maps like this. It's nice that the maps stay rigid when fully open, and the single-motion for opening and closing is glorious.

  By vismit2000 2025-01-149:311 reply

  Miura-ori fold covered very nicely in this video at timestamp 34:10: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p02DtmyQhU

  By vladde 2025-01-1413:09

  That whole video is really neat, love the guy teaching!

  By eleveriven 2025-01-146:361 reply

  I think I spent too much time watching the video of it folding and unfolding.

  By busyalx 2025-01-1413:12

  Same :)

  By qup 2025-01-141:03

  I hope my brain stows your comment safely away until the next opportunity.

• By calmbonsai 2025-01-1317:5412 reply

  I'm reminded of similarly useless "sustainable cardboard furniture" that came out about a decade ago.

  On the positive side, kudos to whomever in marketing/pr at the design firm got this useless product so much press.

  This is just the sort of "win" that a design consulting shop loves to have for actual briefs that lead to real moving-the-needle revenue. One example would be SmartDesign's modular slip-on "S-Grips" that led to the iconic vegetable peeler that then bled into the "design language" of every product at OXO.

  By wy35 2025-01-1318:011 reply

  Didn't know about the SmartDesign/OXO vegetable peeler, very interesting rabbit hole to go down.

  https://www.fastcompany.com/90239156/the-untold-story-of-the...

  By snowfarthing 2025-01-1319:38

  Indeed, it's an interesting rabbit hole!

  I liked the part where they were looking for someone to manufacture the handles, and the Japanese machinist said "If he could make it, I can make it!".

  Indeed, having gone down the rabbit hole of machining (both to see if it would be a viable hobby and if it could even be a career), this was the attitude of the shop teacher: "if you can think it, you can probably make it". I am far more surprised that neither the American nor the Taiwanese manufacturers said this. Then again, perhaps it was because management didn't talk to the guys who made things!

  (Now that I think of it, had they done that, perhaps they would have gotten the answer "We can do it, but the fins will wear down the tool too fast, at least until we can figure out a better material for the tools!" instead of "Nope, we can't do that!")

  By johnmaguire 2025-01-1318:175 reply

  This is a bit of a random place to mention it, but while I very much like OXO goods, IKEA makes the best (in my opinion) potato peeler for $5 - cheaper than anything OXO makes: https://www.ikea.com/us/en/p/ikea-365-vaerdefull-potato-peel...

  By pomian 2025-01-1320:441 reply

  Brilliant write up. I remember using the old ones, and only last year found the oxo model. truly amazing. Many important lessons in product design in that article; with the most important in the last sentence - it has to work!

  By JadeNB 2025-01-143:39

  I think you meant to respond to your grandparent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42686370, not your parent https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42686583.

  By mp05 2025-01-144:05

  Why are they peeling those beautiful golden potatoes? Skin is the best part.

  By ninalanyon 2025-01-1417:29

  I've tried swivelling peelers a few times and every time I return to my forty year old Lancashire peeler with its blade held on the plastic handle with tightly wrapped cotton string. A bit like this one: https://www.pattersons.co.uk/lancashire-peeler.html

  0.96 GBP including VAT.

  I had to replace the string this year though.

  By croisillon 2025-01-1318:263 reply

  that's something i never understood: why do they sell peelers with a movable part? like we are meant to peel in curves and expect the knife to follow the curve beautifully? the fixed ones are easier to use and easier to clean!

  By johnmaguire 2025-01-1318:292 reply

  The hinge allows you to peel in both directions (i.e. forwards and backwards across your potato/carrot/etc. without lifting the peeler.) It also means it can track a rough surface more easily. I haven't had any issues with the hinge, and I use a dishwasher for cleaning - what issues have you run into?

  By croisillon 2025-01-1318:50

  i'm almost never using a movable one but:

  - on the practicity: i can do exactly what i want with a fixed one, without risk for the blade to slip

  - small dust and bits tend to gather at the junctions and sit there

  By The_Colonel 2025-01-1413:18

  Which also makes it usable for left-handers.

  By eleveriven 2025-01-146:48

  The movable blade makes peeling oddly shaped veggies or fruits so much smoother

  By HPsquared 2025-01-1319:371 reply

  I find the movable ones cut a thinner peel, probably the blade is held at a more optimal angle if it can find its own position, or maybe my particular movable one is just better-made than my fixed one.

  By kevin_thibedeau 2025-01-1319:581 reply

  For produce with a tougher skin than innards, the blade will deflect off the inside of the skin and steer itself along that interface.

  By HPsquared 2025-01-140:16

  Fair enough, I don't usually encounter that. I'd probably use a regular knife in that case.

  By feistypharit 2025-01-1412:432 reply

  The ikea one mentions peeling asparagus. Is that a thing?

  By Broken_Hippo 2025-01-1413:32

  Yes, sometimes, especially on larger spears. The skin can get tough and/or stringy and some folks really don't like it.

  By astrolx 2025-01-1413:42

  Yes, not the wild asparagus but the ones you can shop have thick hard stalks at the base!

  By brudgers 2025-01-1318:54

  Cardboard furniture brought to mind Frank Gehry:

  https://www.vitra.com/en-us/product/wiggle?srsltid=AfmBOooT-...

  Expressing patronage of sustainability is emotionally equivalent to expressing patronage of artistry. Functionally a $10 chair from Goodwill will support a person equally well (and also be an expression of patronage for a person with options).

  By nordsieck 2025-01-1318:35

  > I'm reminded of similarly useless "sustainable cardboard furniture" that came out about a decade ago.

  Apparently no one learned their lesson, because the cardboard olympic village beds were also (allegedly) pretty terrible.

  By RicoElectrico 2025-01-149:52

  Some say Teenage Engineering products are mostly PR to promote their design studio (which is contracted by e.g. Ikea). Because indeed, value for money is not there. Or the product itself is preposterous (like their voice recorder).

  By nox101 2025-01-1320:00

  MUJI used to have lots of that (20-25yrs ago). Shelves made from cardboard tubes, etc... You could tell, one bump and it would be destroyed. I think they got rid of most of them.

  By Ekaros 2025-01-147:55

  Only way to get cardboard to work in furniture and such is to laminate all sides... And even then it is only acceptable. Albeit very light.

  By tiborsaas 2025-01-149:24

  I had a log seat style cardboard furniture for years, it was great when I needed something light but capable to hold stuff.

  By larodi 2025-01-1322:25

  indeed useless, you can use arbitrary anything - a book, a notebook, the earpods, the wallet -> all work. besides the thing blowing wind does not make much real difference it seems.

  By kazinator 2025-01-141:11

  I liked the stacked cardboard computer cases. Remember those?

  By uxp100 2025-01-1321:10

  60 or 70 years ago.

  By n3storm 2025-01-1317:571 reply

  LoL.

  Not only useless but also uncomfortable. My wrists get itchy when looking at those zigzag bevels...

  By rad_gruchalski 2025-01-142:161 reply

  https://roominabox.de/

  The Bett 2.0 was one of the most comfortable things I’ve ever slept on. The Grid Bed was useless and fell apart.

  By lopis 2025-01-1410:14

  Have one for several years. The main problem is cleaning it. Good luck cleaning the dust and spider webs from hundreds of individual holes. But otherwise, it's extremely sturdy and stable.

• By latexr 2025-01-1317:139 reply

  The article is seemingly outdated. The cheapest one I could find in the store was 29 USD. In Euros, it’s 36.37. And of course, you still have to pay for shipping. From Korea.

  This seems quite absurd. Whatever good you do the planet by using something out of recycled paper (thumbs up on the idea) will surely be offset by all the logistics of the shipping.

  This should have been a tutorial, not a product.

  By bko 2025-01-1318:044 reply

  I often see "recycled" or similar as a signal for more expensive.

  My favorite was when I saw a jam that touted "upcycled" strawberries. When I looked into it, it basically meant that it was made from beat up ugly strawberries that would have been used for animal feed. Surely there would be cost savings in using reject fruit, right? No, an 8oz jar retails for over $8 compared to about half that to an organic no sugar added alternative (I think its cheaper since I last looked though)

  They even get certified that they use the most undesirable fruit that they can find!

  https://mleverything.substack.com/p/what-are-upcycled-strawb...

  By jdietrich 2025-01-1318:494 reply

  >When I looked into it, it basically meant that it was made from beat up ugly strawberries

  That's true for basically all processed food that contains fruit or vegetables, for obvious economic reasons. The stuff that looks good goes to the supermarkets who care very much about shelf appeal, the rest goes to the processors who absolutely don't.

  By nosioptar 2025-01-1319:331 reply

  Stuff like Pringles are made from the nastiest rotting potatoes in the planet. It's been 20 years since the last time I set foot in a potato plant, I can still smell it.

  By TeMPOraL 2025-01-1320:041 reply

  Good. That means they're reducing food waste.

  A big problem with the food market is that people shop with their eyes, which leads to stupid amount of waste on fruit&vegetables section, as people prefer to go to another store than to buy veggies that look anything less than perfect.

  By osrec 2025-01-1321:012 reply

  In a lot of cases, that's how it works in nature too though. Visual appeal on the tree/bush is a big part of what attracts an animal to a fruit. It's just how we're built.

  By TeMPOraL 2025-01-1321:333 reply

  Right, but animals aren't as picky as humans - they'll eat anything that isn't rotten (and then some animals actually prefer rotten stuff). Meanwhile people will avoid buying veggies that look off even if there's no risk to health or taste involved.

  I suppose this is because most animals in the wild are always couple hours away from starvation and just can't afford being picky eaters.

  By ziml77 2025-01-1323:51

  I think we've had the luxury of training ourselves to only identify the best looking produce as safe/tasty. I doubt it's ingrained in our nature, which is to say, if you're raised in a situation where you can't be as selective, I suspect you'll see a lot more produce as perfectly fine.

  We definitely don't (generally) turn our noses up at various forms of rotten milk or the liquids of fruits rotten enough to be alcoholic.

  By guappa 2025-01-1322:001 reply

  Yeah elks love to get drunk on rotten apples. Humans prefer rotten grapes.

  By dullcrisp 2025-01-141:03

  Some humans prefer rotten apples.

  By floydnoel 2025-01-1612:40

  it isn't as if the grocer gives us a discount for the "worse looking" produce. so why would anyone prefer it?

  By makapuf 2025-01-1321:17

  I find dangerous red berries and colored frogs very attractive.

  By analog31 2025-01-1321:311 reply

  Oddly enough it now means that canned tomatoes are better than fresh.

  By bombcar 2025-01-1322:281 reply

  Part of that is you can can a tomato right when it is most ripe and ready to be eaten, whereas if you're shipping it to a store, you ship it unripe and hope it ripens somewhat on the way.

  By analog31 2025-01-143:15

  Indeed, and they also grow different varieties. The ones destined for the store are bred for shipment and long term storage -- the so called "cardboard tomato."

  By bko 2025-01-1320:14

  Exactly, which is why I found it so entertaining. The idea that the Smuckers CEO is paying extra for beautiful fruit right before it get pulverized into jam is laughable. It's the market and price system taking care of the problem and opportunistic brands making up a problem that doesn't exist and charging users a premium to solve the non-existent problem

  By yoavm 2025-01-1318:256 reply

  Sometimes it's a marketing stunt, but often recycling is more expensive. I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one. The unfortunate reality of our financial system is that it often rewards people for doing the wrong thing.

  By bko 2025-01-1318:378 reply

  If recycling is more expensive, isn't recycling the wrong thing?

  The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.

  Recycling is more expensive, it likely means that there are associated costs (e.g. transportation, sorting, cleaning, processing, etc) that make it less economical than just throwing it in a landfill. And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources

  By TeMPOraL 2025-01-1320:08

  > The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.

  It doesn't capture all of the costs. Key term here is "externalities", which are things that should be priced into a transaction, but currently aren't. Like the environmental impact of manufacturing process.

  If all major externalities were priced in, and recycling would still be more expensive, then we could confidently say that it's the wrong thing to do.

  By yathern 2025-01-1318:531 reply

  Your way of thinking definitely isn't entirely incorrect, and I think a lot of times people forget that prices, while they can certainly have an arbitrary component, are largely driven by market forces, which at the very least will tell you something about the supply and demand of a product. However, I disagree with this:

  > And all these additional costs likely make it the "wrong" decision since they likely contribute to carbon emissions or otherwise wasteful use of the earth's resources

  I think this doesn't often hold true, yes, an efficient market begets economically efficient resource allocation, but there's more to environmentalism than efficient resource allocation. Your example is good, it's certainly more economically efficient to use less petroleum when transporting goods, and that efficiency can be reflected in final costs. But let's look at another example:

  Say you're buying lumber to build a house. There's a local lumber farm that sustainably grows and cuts down trees. Since its close, transportation costs (and associated emissions) are low - largely coming from amortized land costs and labor. However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.

  By gruez 2025-01-1319:542 reply

  >However there's another company that buys cheap land from farmers in the Amazon, with cheaper labor, ships it up via freight, and sells it for marginally cheaper. The costs in the latter example are largely driven by transportation - and while cheaper, has a significantly larger carbon impact.

  How does this apply to recycling though? Landfills in developed countries have little, if any externalities, because they're engineered to contain waste.

  https://practical.engineering/blog/2024/9/3/the-hidden-engin...

  By yathern 2025-01-1320:062 reply

  Largely I agree - landfills are not nearly as bad as people assume based on aesthetics and history. In fact, putting plastic in the ground is essentially a form of carbon sequestration. I just disagree with the logic of "If recycling is more expensive, isn't recycling the wrong thing". There's many situations where prices do not correlate with environmental impact. In the case of recycling, I haven't done the research to be certain either way. I think for aluminum and glass it checks out, but not really for most plastics.

  By xp84 2025-01-1320:48

  > I think for aluminum and glass it checks out, but not really for most plastics.

  That's the same thing I've seen demonstrated. It's really too bad that the plastics industry seized on the opportunity to greenwash wasteful amounts of plastic packaging by giving people a recycling bin that claims to do something useful with that discarded plastic, when in reality it's rare for post-consumer plastic to make any rational sense (other than those things like we're discussing, where people in practice waste even more resources in the recycling process just to feel good that the plastic material itself was technically not 'wasted').

  By Qwertious 2025-01-1412:48

  >In fact, putting plastic in the ground is essentially a form of carbon sequestration.

  Only if it doesn't offgas. Or leech.

  By lupire 2025-01-1412:39

  They are engineered to contain solid waste, but often pollute the air and water, because the externality is cheaper than containing that waste.

  By davidodio 2025-01-1318:521 reply

  “Costs” often ignore externalities like environmental damage and inequality. Landfilling or dumping plastic may be cheaper now, but it shifts the true cost — centuries of pollution —onto vulnerable communities today. There is a reason the clothing dumps are in Ghana and Chile, rather than wealthier nations like the US or Germany.

  If the price to companies profiting from plastics included exteralities I could possibly agree with you but as it stands these costs are normally paid by disadvantaged individuals or marginalized ecosystems.

  By murderfs 2025-01-1319:122 reply

  The reason the clothing dumps exist is greenwashing. If we weren't pretending that reusing clothing is meaningful to the environment, we'd just burn the clothing locally.

  By Qwertious 2025-01-1412:54

  You'd think that cotton could be upcycled - the Soviet Union notably upcycled cotton, by turning it into the duraplast (made of compressed heated old cotton and plastic resin) that made up the body panels of their Trabant cars.

  Of course, the Soviet Union doing something doesn't automatically mean it's economical or sensible, but at least in premise it should be useful for something.

  By lupire 2025-01-1412:42

  Why don't the greenwashers greenwash burning clothes locally?

  By kbelder 2025-01-1319:381 reply

  I can't stop my wife from cleaning everything we put in recycling. Not just a rinse-off, but completely and immaculately cleaning them. Sometimes in the dishwasher. I think the net environmental benefit of our recycling may be below zero.

  By TeMPOraL 2025-01-1320:101 reply

  I couldn't convince my mom to stop washing the recyclables. Fortunately, our municipal sanitation department recently published an informational video on proper recycling procedures, in which they explicitly tell people to stop wasting water on cleaning the trash.

  By tonyedgecombe 2025-01-1322:35

  I always clean ours, with the water left over after I have cleaned the dishes. As far as I can see it has zero environmental issues and means the bin doesn't smell.

  By xp84 2025-01-1320:442 reply

  In terms of something like paper, you're likely right. There's a weird popular perception that when you go to the grocery store and get 4 paper bags, somewhere a logger fells a beautiful 1000-year-old sequoia to grind into paper pulp, when the reality is that the same managed forest land is replanted over and over with fast-growing trees and harvested and replanted as soon as they're ready. The more demand for paper, the more tree farms there will be, and i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees. If the paper ends up in a landfill, that's fine. It's not toxic.

  Or we could use a ton of energy and chemicals to recycle paper (and also to clean it since all consumer recycling in the US is "mixed stream" meaning someone's used dirty yogurt container and beer bottles are all over the paper), and produce much worse paper.

  But all "recycling" is too valuable to helping people feel good about consumption, for us to be honest with ourselves about how pointless most of it is besides aluminum and glass, and maybe steel.

  By latexr 2025-01-140:02

  That’s not the panacea you make it out to be. Tree monocultures significantly impact the environment, wreck the soil, harm biodiversity, increase forest vulnerabilities…

  By dTal 2025-01-1415:05

  > i can think of much worse things than taking up more of our land with CO2-slurping trees

  This does not have the effect on atmospheric CO2 that you implying, unless the resulting paper is deeply buried - not incinerated, or left to rot, or biodegraded in any way.

  By rvense 2025-01-1318:551 reply

  Most of the toothbrushes we've owned in our lives still exist. What is the cost of having them around still? I don't know, but I know it wasn't factored in at all when we bought them.

  By HPsquared 2025-01-1319:331 reply

  Really it depends where they end up. If you drop them on the street, that incurs a greater cost than landfill, which probably is less economic than incineration (plastic contains a lot of energy).

  By xp84 2025-01-1320:501 reply

  Honest question (no agenda): How does burning plastic interact with the environment in terms of producing pollution and/or CO2, I guess compared with putting it in a landfill?

  I'm fine with stipulations like using some kind of (economically-viable) filter on the resulting smoke.

  All that I "know" about it is only based on vibes so that's why I'm asking.

  By HPsquared 2025-01-140:121 reply

  I do know PVC can produce dioxin if the combustion isn't exactly right. Definitely there are some pitfalls with incinerating plastic! They could in theory capture the CO2 but nobody seems to do that. Probably not economical. It's basically an alternative to burning fossil fuel, still not great for the environment but at least you're not digging it up and it's disposed of. Recycling works okay for some plastics e.g PET.

  By dTal 2025-01-1415:091 reply

  Plastic is made from fossil fuels. You are digging it up. It's not an alternative, it's just a longer way around.

  By HPsquared 2025-01-1417:071 reply

  Taking a bunch of waste plastic and burning it does not cause a proportional increase in oil/gas extraction. The partial derivative is going to be pretty low.

  By dTal 2025-01-153:52

  Huh? It's already extracted. Burning it causes a precisely proportional increase in the amount of fossil carbon that ends up in the atmosphere. It is exactly the same environmentally as burning gasoline, except even dirtier.

  Better to bury it. Put it back in the ground, where it came from.

  By adrianN 2025-01-1318:39

  The price rarely captures all the costs.

  By fragmede 2025-01-1319:26

  If stealing from a factory and selling their products makes you more money than owning the factory and making the product, then doesn't it mean that stealing is the right thing?

  The price isn't some random number attached to an activity. It captures the various costs associated with it and is helpful in directing behaviors for this very reason.

  By userbinator 2025-01-142:401 reply

  I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one.

  Collect enough, and you can melt them into solid blocks that could be used like this laptop stand. Recycling common plastic of the same type (PE, PP) is actually easily done with commonly available equipment, unlike paper.

  By Ekaros 2025-01-148:01

  Likely depends on system. In multi-stream system I think paper is likely economically net positive in recycling. It scales well enough to large plants to reasonably complete with pristine material. Also many use case like cardboard for shipping is suitable use cases.

  By adrianN 2025-01-1318:381 reply

  Recycling a plastic bag is not necessarily better for the environment than burning it.

  By dowager_dan99 2025-01-1318:551 reply

  good point, and countries that do this on a massive (clean) scale count it (probably correctly) in their efficiency and non-fossil fuel stats. We really under-report the cost ($$$ and energy) of the full recycling chain, both complicated parts like plastics that should probably be burned and capture/treat the results, and simple things like glass; other than reuse it should NOT be recycled.

  By snowfarthing 2025-01-1319:032 reply

  I have concluded, as a general rule of thumb, that if something costs more to recycle than to produce naturally, it is probably more harmful to the environment to recycle it than to create it fresh and dispose of it properly.

  There are certain exceptions to this -- nickel cadmium batteries come to mind -- but for things like this, the question isn't "is it more economic to produce it new than to recycle it?" so much as it's "is it more economic to recycle it than to dispose of it properly?"

  By kijalo 2025-01-1319:551 reply

  I think 'dispose of it properly' is doing a lot work there. I understand that for something like plastic, properly disposing it would be to chemically render it down to it's constituents rather than just landfilling it. If the thought was to burn it, well then how are you properly disposing the released greenhouse gases?

  By tonyedgecombe 2025-01-1322:391 reply

  On the other hand if a pound of plastic being burned offsets a pound of coal then that is probably better for the environment. We are nowhere near not burning anything so I'm largely OK with incinerators.

  By kijalo 2025-01-1420:20

  That might be true. I guess the point I was thinking of was more related to the cost of producing new vs recycling or disposing of. I think that in a lot of cases,the cost of producing new does not take into account the lifecycle of the product - it does not factor in the cost to retrieve it to be burnt, it does not factor in the cost to develop and implement technology like carbon capture. It seems that the industry that creates plastic does not pay for its proper disposal, which is why it is so cheap to make new plastic.

  By makapuf 2025-01-1321:21

  That probably means that recycling is not worth it, so the only responsible way is to reduce its usage as much as possible (reusing or replacing with better solutions)

  By askvictor 2025-01-1320:191 reply

  > Sometimes it's a marketing stunt, but often recycling is more expensive. I mean, recycling a plastic bag is probably more expensive than making one.

  Depends on the price of oil. Metal recycling is far more cost effective that extracting from ore. Glass, too, is very economical to recycle.

  Plastic recycling was never about recycling, it was to convince people to use plastics.

  By thfuran 2025-01-1320:28

  Glass can be economical to re-use, but I thought recycling it uses nearly as much energy as producing it in the first place.

  By eleveriven 2025-01-146:56

  It prioritizes short-term cost efficiency over long-term sustainability

  By dowager_dan99 2025-01-1318:521 reply

  not really for paper though... We've largely solved efficient recycling of even complex mixed paper/plastic/coatings, a piece like this should be less expensive, and not shipped 1/2 way around the world to a market that has massive amounts of both new and old paper.

  By yoavm 2025-01-1318:56

  I didn't mean to imply that the price for this specific laptop stand is justified. I read the above comment as a small rant about how expensive recycled things are, and wanted to add that sometimes it is for a good reason. Not always, and like others have mentioned, the plastic bag example might not have been the best one.

  By snowfarthing 2025-01-1319:003 reply

  I find this particular notion to be rather weird. I cannot see how it's a "waste" if something's fed to animals instead of humans!

  By snailmailstare 2025-01-1319:20

  It is a horrible waste to produce any strawberries from an environmental perspective compared to the least sensitive feed crops so feeding them to animals is more of a better than nothing while getting someone out of the market for the grades of strawberries that drive production is not. But any mediocre quality strawberry jam probably does that.

  By latexr 2025-01-1319:371 reply

  Despite the quotes, the person you’re replying to didn’t use the word “waste” nor have they claimed using that fruit to feed animals would be bad. In short, they didn’t make the argument you’re against.

  However, in the interest of good faith discussion, I’ll offer a rebuttal to the argument you are making. The logic applies when (and this is very important) that food goes to farm animals which will be slaughtered of humans to eat.

  “Waste” isn’t really the right word, more like “inefficient”, in the sense that the amount of food which takes for an animal to mature is orders of magnitude greater than what you take from it. In other words, you could feed significantly more people if they ate what you’re feeding the animal.

  When you couple that with the environmental impact of raising animals as food, including deforestation and land use, which in turn affects us as well, it becomes a major issue.

  By lupire 2025-01-1412:471 reply

  Inefficiency is waste

  By latexr 2025-01-1416:40

  Potato potáto, that’s not what matters. The whole point of the post was to engage in good faith and see past the exact wording to focus on the argument. Obsessing about the definition is counter productive and an exercise in bad faith and derailing the conversation. That is a waste.

  By HPsquared 2025-01-1319:35

  Opportunity cost, mostly.

  By userbinator 2025-01-142:301 reply

  I often see "recycled" or similar as a signal for more expensive.

  That's just because of this new wave of eco-virtue-signaling that's become popular in the past few years. Before that, recycled meant lower quality and cheaper.

  See also: "vegan butter" or "plant-based butter" instead of "hydrogenated vegetable oil".

  By aziaziazi 2025-01-146:01

  While I get your point, some new plants butters don’t contained hydrogenated oils. See my favorite brand, Flora:

  https://www.flora.com/en-us/floraplant/our-products/salted-p...

  By harrison_clarke 2025-01-1317:591 reply

  it also seems like a very small savings. the thing sitting on top of it is full of lithium, cobalt, etc. so why should i care if it's sitting on a bit of plastic/aluminum/wood?

  that said, a tutorial to turn the shipping box for your laptop (or a flat of diet coke) into a stand would be good. useful in a pinch

  edit: keyboard box might be the best box to print the fold lines on. you need that for a minimally ergo laptop setup anyway

  By K0balt 2025-01-1411:26

  For 20 dollars I can buy an aluminium and stainless steel laptop stand that adjusts from a thin wedge up to holding my screen a nearly eye height.

  It will outlast me, and folds into a smaller size that fits nicely in my laptop bag.

  Laptops will probably go away, but it could be handed down for generations, and when it no longer can be used, the majority of the energy and resources used to make it can be recouped through recycling it’s intrinsically valuable metals.

  This 20 dollar piece of paper will last until the first month in a humid environment.

  This should be a tutorial on how to reuse discarded material into an improvised, impromptu laptop stand.

  If I saw someone pull this out of a box and put their laptop on it, they would lose a great deal of credibility in my estimation. If I saw someone make this out of some waste paper in a coffee shop, I would be intrigued and compelled to seek an opportunity to see if that person was open to making new acquaintances and sharing ideas.

  By andrewflnr 2025-01-1319:46

  > This should have been a tutorial, not a product.

  I love this. More tutorials, fewer products.

  By kevingadd 2025-01-1317:33

  All the embellishments on it seem like they probably involved operating imprinting machines or printing ink onto the paper, too.

  By p_j_w 2025-01-140:15

  >Whatever good you do the planet by using something out of recycled paper (thumbs up on the idea) will surely be offset by all the logistics of the shipping.

  The plastic laptop stand you by probably also had to be shipped halfway around the world, so this one is probably a wash.

  By eleveriven 2025-01-146:53

  Maybe a hybrid approach (like adding a tutorial) can be valid. Because not everyone has the time to make their own laptop stand

  By forinti 2025-01-1320:20

  > This should have been a tutorial, not a product.

  It doesn't seem too difficult to make something similar.

  By blharr 2025-01-1318:401 reply

  I mean, it's a good idea, I just wouldn't buy the one in Korea to get shipped over here. I don't get the cynicism, someone in Korea had this idea and made the product, probably intended for other people in Korea where the shipping isn't an issue?

  By latexr 2025-01-1319:451 reply

  > probably intended for other people in Korea

  The seller is called “grape lab”, with a “g” as the logo, and “Sustainable Design Lab” as the tagline. Everything in English. How is that “intended for other people in Korea”?

  By lupire 2025-01-1412:45

  It's origami, so making it in USA wouldn't fit our racist ideas about what makes a folded-paper design valuable.

  USA folded paper is cheap cardboard. Asian folded paper is origami.

  By tonijn 2025-01-1320:11

  Last time I checked 1 usd = 1 eur