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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2026
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How do you eat a whale?
With high explosives on the Oregon coast. And a nice chianti.
No, that's how they used to do it. The Hatfield Marine Science Center has a new blue whale skeleton.
The thing about a blue whale skeleton is that's not a thing you can just go out and get. You're obviously not going to go hunt one. There aren't blue whales in captivity. If you're a natural history museum and want an elephant skeleton, you can get one from a zoo after the elephant dies of natural causes. Not so much for blue whales. If you want a blue whale skeleton to display, you're just going to have to wait until a blue whale washes up dead on the beach.
I'm not sure if this is documented anywhere online. But if you go to the Hatfield Marine Science Center itself and browse through their exhibits, one documents the process they used to clean the skeleton.
They did it by first carving the whale carcass into big chunks. They then wrapped these in nets and hung them from buoys that suspended the chunks into the water column of Yaquina Bay. Little sea critters could swim through the net and pick away at the rotting whale flesh, while the net prevented bones from being carried away. They effectively did a controlled artificial shallow-water whale fall.
So nowadays, on the Oregon Coast, you eat a whale by letting it be devoured by the small fish and crustaceans of Yaquina Bay.
One bite at a time?
Just to make my Thai friends laugh, I should have responded:
Fried?
Oh, I know this joke.
With a knife and fork.
With a paper straw?
False. I let the whale eat me.
smart. from the inside out.
You change the system because you know that eating whales is wrong. You don't just hack off the fins and call it a win.
I am speaking metaphorically. But if you discount tactical victories because you're waiting for the be-all, end-all solution, you're going to be waiting for a long time. Every ounce of waste that doesn't go into landfills today is an ounce we won't have to deal with tomorrow, and that is a win. Similarly, every legislative action that curbs some small subset of pollution frees up resources to work toward the next small victory. Winning a battle doesn't mean the war is over, but wars are won by winning battles.
Also not sure what you mean by "changing the system". Clearly you are dissatisfied by this legislation, but this is changing the system. And large, complicated systems generally change one small change at a time.
I'm dissatisfied that there isn't a course of action for consumers to recycle or dispose of batteries at their end of use. As I discussed with someone else, I can appreciate that it is a step towards something better, and that is something, but it seems like it will take ongoing catastrophes in waste management to highlight that there needs to be a solution for what someone does with the battery at the end. This needs to be considered.
so i'm a cannabis consumer, not a nicotine consumer. but i have two dispensaries i use. the reasons i chose these two in particular are the same: they're friendly, and they have a prominent [recycle your old batteries/cartridges here] bin. also they're reasonably priced, but if they weren't they'd have gone out of buisness.
if your nicotine juice place doesn't have a recycling bin, maybe ask? it's one of those customer service things they'd add if they knew people wanted one. like, there were cigarette butts all over this one park in town because it didn't have any ashtrays. i put cement in the bottom of a cheap aluminum ash bucket, put it by one of the benches, and now all the smokers smoke at that bench and toss their butts. cost like 50 bucks but the city wasn't going to do it.
As am I. And unfortunately, we have an ongoing catastrophe in waste management right now that is largely being ignored, this particular legislation being an all-too-rare exception.
I think it would be quite cool if we could manage a comprehensive standardization of all batteries, and have legislation that requires all devices to use standard removable / replaceable batteries, and have municipal recycling systems where residents could dispose of old batteries of all types with no fee, or even swap an old battery for a new one. Domestic battery reconditioning would provide jobs, reduce waste, and reduce our dependence on foreign minerals. Heck, it might even end up helping device manufacturers in the long term if they can assume that consumers have access to batteries that don't have to be shipped overseas. Seems like a slam dunk to me.
But, until I become a congressional majority leader, or congress becomes significantly cooler about stuff, I don't think I have much of a chance of getting that passed. So I settle for smaller wins while I work on getting the big stuff viable.
And that's the crux of the issue. Instead of demanding real solutions, you'll settle for nonsense that accomplishes very little so you can feel like you've won something and don't press the issue further but chastise those that don't jump on the bandwagon with you.
You already addressed what a real solution would look like, but since you think it's impossible to achieve, you've given up and want to condemn anyone who isnt perfectly aligned with you on whatever hill you've chosen to die on.
This is just like paper straws or soda taxes. Stop settling for small wins because that's exactly what the goons running things want you to do
If you refer back to the rest of the sentence, you'll see that I do in fact press the issue further. The trick is to do both. My beef is with those who point to the incremental gains as some kind of evidence that revolutionary change is impossible: not only is that not true, incremental gains are often how revolutionary change happens. People think revolutionary change happens spontaneously in an instant of public fervor because they don't see the building toward it that happens one small policy change at a time. The idea that one has to choose one over the other is false and, in my experience, leads to inaction, frustration, and burnout. You gotta do both.
And what of my "real solution"? Even that is just a small piece of the overall puzzle. If I were to accomplish the goal I set out in that post (a task that I neither think is impossible nor have given up on), would I then be able to rest on my laurels and assume that the planet had been saved forever? No. There would still be much to do to solve the big problem. And big problems are solved one piece at a time.
The goons running things want despair and inaction. They fight the small wins because they know that they are the building blocks to bigger wins.