Installing ultra sonic cleaners, reverse osmosis machines, AC units, &c. in every single of our houses/flats won't be sustainable

40+ years of externalizing costs has taken its toll.

Eg: Both sides care about children, productive economy, value of education

The school I went to was a Dalton school (though basically only in name, as explained below), one of the pioneering futuristic school systems developed in the early 20th century which said that people would learn more if they are allowed to learn about what they actually care about. My school had a copy of the original book describing the Dalton school system in the library. Almost everything described in the Dalton school from 1905 would be illegal if it were done today.

My point is, I'm fairly left-leaning but I support a radical deregulation of education on all levels: this seems to be one area where we should let the free market take care of things. And of course, if it turns out that a different way of teaching works better, there's nothing (except inertia) stopping the public schools from adopting the same methodology, making it universally available.

Often this is addressed through a voucher system. Single Payer (or subsidizer), multiple provider.

Eg: gov't gives a voucher for $10k per head, you're free to shop for the best schooling your money can buy (perhaps even online!)

Aside: this exact concept can apply to healthcare too

My personal belief is that the death of the old education system is over a century overdue.

We don't need to kill it, just stop making alternatives illegal and the problem will solve it itself.

There's nothing preventing a public system from being changed and improved. Take Finland as an example. Everyone goes to the same public schools there, rich or poor. The result is one of the best education systems in the world. New methods are regularly tested and teachers have a lot of freedom to choose the ones that suit them.

So I’m curious because taken on it’s own your comment sounds a lot like a fiction a conservative American would author about what they think ‘Europe’ is like. But this might just be a result of your alternative schooling.

Also your schooling is described as being not available where you are yet still what you went through which seems a bit of a conundrum as well. Was it actually illegal, or do you think you might have been exposed to biased propaganda by the institution coloring your view on what the educational system in your country is actually like?

I'm half Croatian, half Australian, and speak with an American accent due to my childhood friends. I went to an international school (IB) followed by a Dutch high school (VWO). (Basically I'm an alien everywhere I go.)

My school called itself a Dalton school, but upon reading the book by the creator of the original Dalton school (Education on the Dalton Plan, Helen Parkhurst, 1905) I was absolutely blown away by how radical and futuristic this school sounded, and how short my own school (which supposedly was the same kind) fell of that mark. I investigated why my school did hardly any of the things Dalton schools are supposed to do, and found out that they were against Dutch law.

As you say, Europe is not (yet) a monolithic entity, and perhaps there is even a country here where letting kids do what they want isn't considered a crime. Hopefully I was wrong to generalize in this regard, I would certainly be happy to hear about it.

As for my bias, I admit freely that I absolutely hated school, consider it an abomination and a crime against the human spirit, and almost certainly would have left if it weren't illegal (they send the police after your parents). I say "almost" because I did rather enjoy the part where you get to see your friends every day—although at the time it wasn't clear to me that this would go away with graduation, or how much I would miss it.

To be clear I have no problem with people willingly submitting themselves to such a thing, it's the coercion part that I can't stand for.

As an immigrant to the US who's been to a dozen or so states, I'd add it's also inaccurate to talk about the US as a uniform thing or group of people

Homeschooling is the closest to that free market in the US. Your comment prompted me to look up the homeschooling statistics [1] and I was surprised by the results for Europe. The US outstrips the rest of the world by number of children in homeschooling by a large margin.

US homeschooling outcomes are so far promising [2], so one could say it is a pretty competitive alternative market.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261885035_The_Socia...

Yeah, that's why they're adamant about the dangers of freedom of speech.

Functioning roads and schools supported by taxes is supported by 99.9% of people. People only object to paying high taxes for wasteful, inefficient bureaucracies and corrupt deals to pay well-connected insiders or campaign donors excessively for providing services.

Everyone wants roads and schools. Conservatives complain when they realize they're paying taxes for a campaign donor to rebuild the same road every year. Liberals complain when they realize the owner of the construction company is now a billionaire. Both want the road, neither want corruption and injustice, they just focus on slightly different aspects of the same dysfunction.

The reality is pesticides and other crop technologies substantially increase efficiency of the land we're using. This means per capita: we're using less land (more back to nature), losing less crop (less fuel/maintenance wasted), and requiring an increasingly smaller percentage of the population to tend to crops.

So don't ever eat out or make anything nice? Do you only eat rice and beans?

> or going to a casino are a total waste of resources

I broadly bucket expenses like that as "entertainment", which I guess isn't directly productive, but at the same time is arguably appreciated by the people who enjoy it. Hacker news arguably falls under this, mind you. There's a non-negligible amount of resources (server costs, paid moderator(s), and opportunity costs of all the participants) that's spent on it. So if you really want to put your money where your mouth is, you'd get off hn ;)

It definitely is a "waste" of resources, when looking at it from a rational perspective. Humans like to enjoy life though.

An AC unit is more sustainable than a furnace burning fossil fuels and electric heaters. They are just as sustainable as heat pumps.

So here in the PNW, we typically only heat during the winter. Most people here have never had AC in the summer time. So typically, power usage in the summer here is really low. Most of us just turn off the furnace for a number of months. We know it's fall when we finally turn on the heat.

Now that more and more people are getting heat pumps, I suspect that the energy saved during the winter is going to be offset quite a bit by people running their AC in the summer. I don't know how much that will be, but I know I'll be running my new AC unit this summer. Hopefully I won't need it more than a couple of weeks. But it's been hotter the last few summers, and if the trend continues, we'll be running the AC a lot more.

Meanwhile, look at what is built in the south today. The same sort of buildings you might see from alaska to phoenix to orlando to upstate new york. Only they might have installed central air for that floorplan in phoenix or orlando. They aren't building structures fit for the particular environment, they are building structures that are cheap to build in the market and don't really fit too well anywhere, and shoehorning it into whatever environment it sits with AC.

They're also not particularly efficient in terms of space utilization, making them unfeasible for sustainable, 'walkable' neighborhood development.

Recently in CA in my neighborhood, someone decided to paint their spanish style home dark brown. I can't help but think going from ivory white to dark brown is going to increase their AC bill in the summer. Just using basic physics with consideration to the environment can go a long way.

"we fucked up big time, but the rich will be able to shield themselves with additional waste, while the poor can suck it up"

https://theconversation.com/amp/emissions-inequality-there-i...

This is all a moot point in the face of stagnant population growth. It would be no less sustainable for the West to consume more by virtue that the demand isn't infinite and technological innovation increases efficiency all the time.

Again, after living in rural communities, they largely eat what they can get - which includes a lot of raw fruits and vegetables. Of course meat is important, but no more important than nuts, berries, tubers etc.

[1] https://aeji.journals.ekb.eg/article_17804.html

[2] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fmicb.2017.0156...

That's all and good, but how do you even know that? One can live with parasites for quite a while before noticing any symptoms.

I come from a 'third world' country. We really wash our fruits and specially our vegetables. Even though they might come from large farming operations, you can still have people without proper sanitization handling them after taking a dump.

Heck, there are still places where you cannot enter a body of water without worms piercing your skin and having a party in your intestines. Our elementary school curriculum was pretty extensive on diseases and specially parasites.

> The idea people throughout history didn't eat raw fruits and vegetables is also quite wrong.

They did. People also died a lot. Although a berry growing somewhere in the wilderness will probably have less of a chance of carrying diseases or parasites that infect humans (on the account of not having encountered other humans). After farming? All bets are off.

Maybe less of a chance, still deadly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Echinococcus_multilocularis

(That is, if you don't have undetected Helminthiase or some other disease)

This is just a lucky side effect, I'm 100% sure that main goal is for the pesticides industry just take their cut on the producers margin. By growing those margins, sure, but it's not something that should be forgotten.

Without these pesticides food would be significantly more expensive and less accessible to many people.

I agree that we should talk about moving away from chemical dependent farming but we need to be aware of the full picture in order to avoid glib solutions.

I think what you are saying is that they have turned to predatory behaviour in order to grow profits and protect market share.

Your point would have been better made if you had said just that, with examples.

Now looking into alternate forms of resistances while still enjoying modern treatments, theres an idea.

Doesn't follow. We can create them today. Pretty sure farmers would be very happy on not having to dedicate resources to pest control.

It's probably not even feasible long term. Pests can and do adapt. The main problem is monoculture.

Also, those resistant cultivars are probably not going to do so well when it comes to other variables: shelf life, taste, etc.

Is this claim backed by anything? Or is it just a claim by the manufacturer?

Organic salad I can buy here (Switzerland) comes marked as pre-washed and ready to eat in many cases.

I bought one because my relative wanted to have this particular model in his 3D printing... cave (for lack of a better word) and it broke down after a few weeks.

https://www.rahatsmall.com/

http://www.livinghertz.com/

are apparently 2 popular consumer brands in Korea.

I just searched aliexpress for "ultrasonic food cleaner", they probably work but no idea how they compare.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001039347867.html?spm=a2g0o...

>As a general rule of thumb, you will require between 50watts to 100 watts per gallon for your ultrasonic jewelry cleaner to achieve efficient cleaning.