I just really love how human this mission feels. Both the crew and the ground making fun jokes and references ("amaze, amaze, amaze!") or things like Glover saying "hello baby!" to his family back on Earth, or how "moon joy" has become the team's favorite phrase, or those craters being named "Integrity" and "Carroll," or the astronauts being encouraged to describe how seeing the moon makes them feel (and doing so to a moving degree), and also describing how much working and talking together improves their capabilities on all fronts, and both sides constantly telling each other how excited they are and that there's "smiles all around" Not that missions like Apollo never had stuff like this, but it's different hearing it all live. Wonderful experience all around.
We know that we cannot take the current President's statements at face value. But in light of Trump's recent speech where he claimed that he's "saved" NASA and always supported them (which isn't true), I wanted to elaborate on some of this.
He's slashed the budget, forced removal of DEI history and contributions at NASA, and caused many NASA workers' unemployment. I have worked closely with people in these spheres and know that the budget cuts have deeply jeopardized the future space missions, space exploration, and space science.
My close friends and colleagues, especially those relying on DEI programs, have had such a difficult time during this administration, and we still are. This program found some success with Artemis II and beyond in spite of the current administration's lack of support and lack of funding.
Civilians have had apparent seizures. One had his eyes roll back. Another had ribs broken. “I felt like I was going to pass out and die,” sa
After George Floyd’s murder by a police officer six years ago in Minneapolis — less than a mile from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent shot and killed Renee Good last week — police departments and federal agencies banned chokeholds and other moves that can restrict breathing or blood flow.
But those tactics are back, now at the hands of agents conducting President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Examples are scattered across social media. ProPublica found more than 40 cases over the past year of immigration agents using these life-threatening maneuvers on immigrants, citizens and protesters. The agents are usually masked, their identities secret. The government won’t say if any of them have been punished.
In nearly 20 cases, agents appeared to use chokeholds and other neck restraints that the Department of Homeland Security prohibits “unless deadly force is authorized.”
I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Thu (Jan 22) at The Tattered Cover, and in COLORADO SPRINGS this weekend (Jan 23–25) where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
Growing up, I assumed that being a "professional" meant that you were getting paid to do something. That's a perfectly valid definition (I still remember feeling like a "pro" the first time I got paid for my writing), but "professional" has another, far more important definition.
In this other sense of the word, a "professional" is someone bound to a code of conduct that supersedes both the demands of their employer and the demands of the state. Think of a doctor's Hippocratic Oath: having sworn to "first do no harm," a doctor is (literally) duty-bound to refuse orders to harm their patients. If a hospital administrator, a police officer or a judge orders a doctor to harm their patient, they are supposed to refuse. Indeed, depending on how you feel about oaths, they are required to refuse.
There are many "professions" bound to codes of conduct, policed to a greater or lesser extent by "colleges" or other professional associations, many of which have the power to bar a member from the profession for "professional misconduct." Think of lawyers, accountants, medical professionals, librarians, teachers, some engineers, etc.
While all of these fields are very different in terms of the work they do, they share one important trait: they are all fields that AI bros swear will be replaced by chatbots in the near future.
I find this an interesting phenomenon. It's clear to me that chatbots can't do these jobs. Sure, there are instances in which professionals may choose to make use of some AI tools, and I'm happy to stipulate that when a skilled professional chooses to use AI as an adjunct to their work, it might go well. This is in keeping with my theory that to the extent that AI is useful, it's when its user is a centaur (a person assisted by technology), but that employers dream of making AI's users into reverse centaurs (machines who are assisted by people):
A psychotherapist who uses AI to transcribe sessions so they can refresh their memory about an exact phrase while they're making notes is a centaur. A psychotherapist who monitors 20 chat sessions with LLM "therapists" in order to intervene if the LLM starts telling patients to kill themselves is a "reverse centaur." This situation makes it impossible for them to truly help "their" patients; they are an "accountability sink," installed to absorb the blame when a patient is harmed by the AI.
Lawyers might use a chatbot to help them format a brief or transcribe a client meeting (centaur)- but when senior partners require their juniors and paralegals to write briefs at inhuman speed (reverse centaur), they are setting themselves up for briefs full of "hallucinated" citations:
https://www.damiencharlotin.com/hallucinations/
I hold a bedrock view that even though an AI can't do your job, an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job:
But why are bosses such easy marks for these gabby AI hustlers? Partly, it's because an AI can probably do your boss's job – if 90% of your job is answering email and delegating tasks, and if you are richly rewarded for success but get to blame failure on your underlings, then, yeah, an AI can totally do that job.
But I think there's an important psychological dimension to this: bosses are especially easy to trick with AI when they're being asked to believe that they can use AI to fire workers who are in a position to tell them to fuck off.
That certainly explains why bosses are so thrilled by the prospect of swapping professionals for chatbots. What a relief it would be to fire everyone who is professionally required to tell you to fuck off when you want them to do stupid and/or dangerous things; so you could replace them with servile, groveling LLMs that punctuate their sentences with hymns to your vision and brilliance!
This also explains why media bosses are so anxious to fire screenwriters and actors and replace them with AI. After all, you prompt an LLM in exactly the same way a clueless studio boss gives notes to a writers' room: "Give me ET, but make it about a dog, give it a love interest, and put a car chase in Act III." The difference is that the writers will call you a clueless fucking suit and demand that you go back to your spreadsheets and stop bothering them while they're trying to make a movie, whereas the chatbot will cheerfully shit out a (terrible) script to spec. The fact that the script will suck is less important than the fact that swapping writers for LLMs will let studio bosses escape ego-shattering conflicts with empowered workers who actually know how to do things.
It also explains why bosses are so anxious to replace programmers with chatbots. When programmers were scarce and valuable, they had to be lured into employment with luxurious benefits, lavish pay, and a collegial relationship with their bosses, where everyone was "just an engineer." Tech companies had business-wide engineering meetings where techies were allowed to tell their bosses that they thought their technical and business strategies were stupid.
Now that tech worker supply has caught up with demand, bosses are relishing the thought of firing these "entitled" coders and replacing them with chatbots overseen by traumatized reverse centaurs who will never, ever tell them to fuck off:
And of course, this explains why bosses are so eager to use AI to replace workers who might unionize: drivers, factory workers, warehouse workers. For what is a union if not an institution that lets you tell your boss to fuck off?
AI salesmen may be slick, but they're not that slick. Bosses are easy marks for anyone who dangles the promise of a world where everyone – human and machine – follows orders to the letter, and praises you for giving them such clever, clever orders.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"We want musicians to keep making music, and for fans to have confidence that the music they find on Bandcamp was created by humans," the co
Bandcamp’s new guidelines state that music and audio generated “wholly or in substantial part by AI” is not permitted and that it will not allow the use of AI tools to impersonate other artists or styles.
another win for bandcamp! and friendly reminder about Bandcamp Fridays, the first friday of every month, when the platform waives its fees so more money goes directly to the artists youre supporting, and often they run charity drives as well
anyway hoping that the generative AI bubble pops so disastrously that the tech industry becomes allergic to anything involving it for the next 1,000 years
If you’re looking something up and remember a page or article you saw one time that perfectly answered your questions before the internet was buried in AI slop:
Open Duck Duck Go
Enter your search term
In search tools, set the date range from 1993 to 2022
Bask in AI-free results and images
Another method for even briefer information searches, or ones that require data from the last three years:
Open Wikipedia and search there
Donate to Wikipedia
Donate again
Donate again because they are one of the last flickering candles in the misinformation darkness
Men, boys, and eggs of my acquaintance, I cannot stress this enough:
Nobody worth being with will ever judge you based on your deli sandwich choices.
Sincerely, a dude who had to watch like two dozen men pretend to find vegetarian sandwiches unthinkable in order to maintain a sense of masculinity today.
The sando gender spectrum I osmoted this weekend according to a specific type of dude:
1. Roast beef is the most masculine of sandwiches. The only sandwich it is permissible to ask for by name (we did not have roast beef as an option).
2. Ham is an acceptable substitute for roast beef. There appears to be some controversy, however, over the bread options; we only had two, croissant or ancient grains roll (gluten free). Croissant is considered slightly more manly than ancient grains UNLESS you are under 20 in which case "ancient grain" sounds badass.
3. Turkey is okay, obviously not ham but if you don't like ham it's an option as long as you don't show enthusiasm for it. Definitely has to have mayo however. Mustard is a bit much. (Initial field research indicates mayo is the manliest of condiments but we have not introduced barbecue sauce into the study yet.)
4. Chicken salad is woman food. Absolutely not acceptable unless you announce loudly that it's for your wife or that she's making you for your health.
5. Vegetarian wraps require a recoil reaction or a sheepish "oh, no, no, what meats do you have?" protest. We had the veggie wraps off to one side so vegetarians could get to them more easily, and guys would come up to the wrap boxes because there was no crowd/line, then I'd say "that's veggie wraps" and they'd stagger back.
To be clear, most of the people of all genders at the event were totally fine, this was a small and specific set of guys -- mostly older dudes and (unsurprisingly) their young sons or grandsons. Maybe 20-30 people out of the 400+ attendees. But it really was both sad and a little funny to watch them unnecessarily assert their manhood using deli meat to me, a guy in a floral shirt with neon blue hair handing out box lunches at a charity event. My indifference to your masculinity is so vast it has its own international calling code, fellas.
Friends, I have volunteered in the lunch tent once more and I have new scientific findings to share regarding the Sandwich Gender Spectrum.
We still do not serve roast beef, the most toxically manly of all sandwiches, but it turns out that there is a sandwich option almost as masculine, the mention of which will preclude a certain type of dude from even asking for roast beef:
The Italian.
For those unfamiliar, an Italian sandwich in most American sandwich shops is composed of ham, capicola, salami, and sometimes pepperoni, with provolone, the usual sandwich veggies, and a drizzle of Italian dressing.
The hierarchy from ham-downwards remains undisturbed by this revelation currently rocking sandwich discourse, but new data has indicated that the Italian sandwich occupies a special place above ham and technically below roast beef but so acceptable a substitute for roast beef that I only had one guy ask me for it this time around. I would say, "We have ham, Italian, turkey, or veggie," and the Certain Kind Of Man would look skeptically at the ham and then ask for an Italian.
I am now working on my doctoral thesis in Sandwich Gender, where I will be examining whether there is a direct correlation between how masculine a sandwich is and how weirdly homoerotic the name is. I'm going to call it "I'd Like An Italian: Gender And Sexuality Between The Buns."
Ahead of the Sandwich Gender Spectrum Studies Department's annual report on the September 2025 new data release, I wanted to share some recent findings by a research colleague at a prestigious academic institution on the east coast:
My sample size is growing all the time and my research is replicable.
Field work in sandwich gender studies, sandothropology if you will, can be challenging at times. While my thesis has been supported by both independent researchers such as above and grant-holding professionals (aka "people who work in food service"), the window of time in which I perform my yearly field survey is brief.
This year a new variable was introduced. The selection of sandwiches we were given to hand out was reduced to three: ham, turkey, or vegetarian. For the first time, the vegetarian option was a sandwich and not a wrap, as well.
There seems to be something about the idea of a wrap that makes it particularly unpalatable to a Certain Kind Of Person; we didn't have anyone getting hissy about being offered vegetables this year, and also got far fewer remarks about getting a turkey sandwich "for the wife" or "because she's making me". Perhaps when your options are realistically ham or turkey, rather than an array of choices that you have to navigate correctly, the social pressure eases off. Plus, ham and turkey both fall in the middle of the spectrum, so they're a little more ambiguous than say, roast beef and chicken salad. Why bother performing gender for two almost equivalent options? (There's a bisexuality joke in here somewhere.)
I did have one guy furiously lecture me for about two minutes because we didn't have any sandwiches on wholegrain bread, but if we'd had more sandwich options he'd have been mad we were spending the organization's money unwisely on sandwich fripperies (I know him of old) so that barely registered.
The Sandwich Thing is one of my most memorable examples of not being a Real Man[1], when a colleague saw the wrapper of my (Brie, Cranberry, Grape, Rocket) sandwich and said “Isn’t that a bit feminine?”.
I’ll admit the phrase “I’m sorry you want to fuck my sandwich?” isn’t the *most* suitable for an office context, but it did make a third party expel cola from their nose.
[1] Probably Imaginary Man, because being a Complex Man[2] seems like a lot of effort into something I don’t really value[3].
[2] I.e Odysseus
[3] if you were to arrange a scale of gender-devotee from agender at 0 to transgender at 100, I’d look at you strangely for a moment then wander off talking about cultural obsessions with quantification.
A planned community in Arizona has used time-honored Mediterranean strategies to keep temperatures down and attitudes high. Western civiliza
"A planned community in Arizona has used time-honored Mediterranean strategies to keep temperatures down and attitudes high.
Western civilization has grown remarkably climate conscious over the last 20 years, but not when it comes to building, civic planning, and especially zoning. Perhaps the interiors of buildings are becoming more climate adapted, and in some cases the facades as well, but in a way that’s a little like inventing a freezer designed to keep ice cream frozen while sitting next to a fire.
Wooden or concrete boxes arranged side-by-side across leveled ground with sprawling, largely treeless gardens and concrete sidewalks alongside wide, blacktop roads is simply a culture of construction that has to be abandoned if living in a world of 2°C or higher annual temperatures [or, hopefully, less than that, but nonetheless likely over 1.5°C] is to be tolerable.
Fortunately for Arizonans, change may have finally arrived in the form of a carless, planned community that looks and feels like a Greek island village.
In the Phoenix suburb of Tempe, Culdesac has arisen as a 17-acre mixed-use neighborhood from the ground up to stay cool and local, taking the concept of the 15-minute city, where anything a resident might need is only 15 minutes away, and putting a Mediterranean spin on it.
Buildings are tall, thick, and totally white. The residential areas look like they were built atop of the ashes of the Phoenix zoning code burnt in effigy. Crammed together, they create narrow streets and alleys that are almost constantly shaded, through which wind is channeled and accelerated in passing.
Windows open towards each other, allowing wind that enters one building to exit into another, while the total lack of asphalt means that the ground temperatures are a staggering 50-60°F lower than pavements beyond the limits of Culdesac.
No privately-owned cars are allowed to enter the neighborhood, in which electric bikes, robotic mini taxis, and light rail shuttle people around town, to downtown Phoenix, or out to the airport.
The street life is lively—there are no cars to bisect movement between the 21 different businesses and eateries, among which is a James Beard Award-winning Mexican restaurant, DIY ceramic business, and some stores run out of apartments—a big no-no under Phoenix zoning laws.
“Once you pull the cars out,” Architect Daniel Parolek who designed Culdesac, told BBC, “there’s so much more opportunity to make a vibrant, thriving community.”
His inspiration was sun-soaked locales like Italy, Greece, and Croatia, where town centers were designed before the automobile and before air conditioning.
Technically speaking, the entire Culdesac neighborhood is one apartment complex, but the paseos, or little alleyways, open up into plazas of open space exactly liked one would expect in a little village in the Cyclades.
Because no one has to jump in a car to get from place to place, people run into each other, sparking conversations, relations, and breaking through the counterintuitive phenomenon of big city loneliness, which in Phoenix hits particularly hard.
“Culdesac Tempe has shown that people do want to live car-free in the US, even in a metro area like Phoenix that’s often seen as the poster child for car dependency,” says Erin Boyd, Culdesac’s government relations and external affairs lead. “This success has shifted the conversation around what’s possible in American development.”
In the past two years, without much notice, solar power has begun to truly transform the world’s energy system.
"People have been telling stories about renewable energy since the nineteen-seventies, when the first all-solar-powered house opened on the campus of the University of Delaware, drawing a hundred thousand visitors in 1973, its first year, to marvel at its early photovoltaic panels and its solar hot-water system, complete with salt tubs in the basement to store heat overnight. But, even though we’ve got used to seeing solar panels and wind turbines across the landscape in the intervening fifty years, we continue to think of what they produce as “alternative energy,” a supplement to the fossil-fuelled power that has run Western economies for more than two centuries. In the past two years, however, with surprisingly little notice, renewable energy has suddenly become the obvious, mainstream, cost-efficient choice around the world. Against all the big bad things happening on the planet (and despite all the best efforts of the Republican-led Congress in recent weeks), this is a very big and hopeful thing, which a short catalogue of recent numbers demonstrates:
It took from the invention of the photovoltaic solar cell, in 1954, until 2022 for the world to install a terawatt of solar power; the second terawatt came just two years later [in 2024], and the third will arrive either later this year or early next [in 2025 or early 2026].
That’s because people are now putting up a gigawatt’s worth of solar panels, the rough equivalent of the power generated by one coal-fired plant, every fifteen hours. Solar power is now growing faster than any power source in history, and it is closely followed by wind power—which is really another form of energy from the sun, since it is differential heating of the earth that produces the wind that turns the turbines.
Last year, ninety-six per cent of the global demand for new electricity was met by renewables, and in the United States ninety-three per cent of new generating capacity came from solar, wind, and an ever-increasing variety of batteries to store that power.
In March, for the first time, fossil fuels generated less than half the electricity in the U.S. In California, at one point on May 25th, renewables were producing a record hundred and fifty-eight per cent of the state’s power demand. Over the course of the entire day, they produced eighty-two per cent of the power in California, which, this spring, surpassed Japan to become the world’s fourth-largest economy.
Meanwhile, battery-storage capability has increased seventy-six per cent, based on this year’s projected estimates; at night, those batteries are often the main supplier of California’s electricity. As the director of reliability analysis at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation put it, in the CleanTechnica newsletter, “batteries can smooth out some of that variability from those times when the wind isn’t blowing or the sun isn’t shining.” As a result, California is so far using forty per cent less natural gas to generate electricity than it did in 2023, which is the single most hopeful statistic I’ve seen in four decades of writing about the climate crisis.
Texas is now installing renewable energy and batteries faster than California; in a single week in March, it set records for solar and wind production as well as for battery discharge. In May, when the state was hit by a near-record-breaking early-season heat wave, air-conditioners helped create a record demand on the grid, which didn’t blink—more than a quarter of the power came from the sun and wind. Last week’s flooding tragedy was a reminder of how vulnerable the state is to extreme weather, especially as water temperatures rise in the Gulf, producing more moisture in the air; in late June, the director of the state’s utility system said that the chances of emergency outages had dropped from sixteen per cent last summer to less than one per cent this year, mostly because the state had added ten thousand megawatts of solar power and battery storage. That, he said, “puts us in a better position.”
All this is dwarfed by what’s happening in China, which currently installs more than half the world’s renewable energy and storage within its own borders, and exports most of the solar panels and batteries used by the rest of the world. In May, according to government records, China had installed a record ninety-three gigawatts of solar power—amounting to a gigawatt every eight hours. The pace was apparently paying off—analysts reported that, in the first quarter of the year, total carbon emissions in China had actually decreased; emissions linked to producing electricity fell nearly six per cent, as solar and wind have replaced coal. In 2024, almost half the automobiles sold in China, which is the world’s largest car market, were full or hybrid electric vehicles. And China’s prowess at producing cheap solar panels (and E.V.s) means that nations with which it has strong trading links—in Asia, Africa, South America—are seeing their own surge of renewable power.
In South America, for example, where a decade ago there were plans to build fifteen new coal-fired power plants, as of this spring there are none. There’s better news yet from India, now the world’s fastest-growing major economy and most populous nation, where data last month showed that from January through April a surge in solar production kept the country’s coal use flat and also cut the amount of natural gas used during the same period in 2024 by a quarter. But even countries far from Beijing are making quick shifts. Poland—long a leading coal-mining nation—saw renewable power outstrip coal for electric generation in May, thanks to a remarkable surge in solar construction. In 2021, the country set a goal for photovoltaic power usage by 2030; it has already tripled that goal.
Over the past fifteen years, the Chinese became so skilled at building batteries—first for cellphones, then cars, and now for entire electric systems—that the cost of energy storage has dropped ninety-five per cent. On July 7th, a round of bidding between battery companies to provide storage for Chinese utilities showed another thirty per cent drop in price. Grid-scale batteries have become so large that they can power whole cities for hours at a time; in 2025, the world will add eighty gigawatts of grid-scale storage, an eightfold increase from 2021. The U.S. alone put up four gigawatts of storage in the first half of 2024.
There are lots of other technologies vying to replace fossil fuels or to reduce climate damage: nuclear power, hydrogen power, carbon capture and storage; along with renewables, all were boosted by spending provisions in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act and will be hampered to varying degrees by congressional rollbacks. Some may prove useful in the long run and others illusory, but for now they are statistically swamped by the sheer amount of renewable power coming online. Globally, roughly a third more power is being generated from the sun this spring than last. If this exponential rate of growth can continue, we will soon live in a very different world.
All this suggests that there is a chance for a deep reordering of the earth’s power systems, in every sense of the word “power,” offering a plausible check to not only the climate crisis but to autocracy. Instead of relying on scattered deposits of fossil fuel—the control of which has largely defined geopolitics for more than a century—we are moving rapidly toward a reliance on diffuse but ubiquitous sources of supply. The sun and the wind are available everywhere, and they complement each other well; when sunlight diminishes in the northern latitudes at the approach of winter, the winds pick up. This energy is impossible to hoard and difficult to fight wars over. If you’re interested in abundance, the sun beams tens of thousands of times more energy at the earth than we currently need. Paradigm shifts like this don’t come along often: the Industrial Revolution, the computer revolution. But, when they do, they change the world in profound and unpredictable ways...
In retrospect, it’s reasonably easy to see how fast solar and wind power were coming. But, blinkered by the status quo, almost no one actually predicted it. In 2009, the International Energy Agency predicted that we would hit two hundred and forty-four gigawatts of solar capacity by 2030; we hit it by 2015. For most of the past decade, the I.E.A.’s five-year forecasts missed [underestimated the amount of renewables] by an average of two hundred and thirty-five per cent. The only group that came even remotely close to getting it right was not J. P. Morgan Chase or Dow Jones or BlackRock. It was Greenpeace, which estimated in 2009 that we’d hit nine hundred and twenty-one total gigawatts by 2030. We were more than fifty per cent above that by 2023. Last summer, Jenny Chase, who has been tracking the economics of solar power for more than two decades for Bloomberg, told the Times, “If you’d told me nearly 20 years ago what would be the case now, 20 years later, I would have just said you were crazy. I would have laughed in your face. There is genuinely a revolution happening.”
A new study found that people are more eager to recycle when offered a chance to win a large sum prize, instead of a guaranteed 10 cents. An
"In a new study, University of British Columbia researchers set out to answer the following question: Would you rather have 10 cents in your pocket or a 1-in-10,000 shot at $1,000?
Their findings indicate that they may have figured out a way to get people to recycle more.
The researchers, whose work was just published in the journal “Waste Management,” tested the idea of offering people who return used bottles a small chance to win a big cash prize, instead of the standard 5- or 10-cent deposit earnings.
The result? Participants recycled 47% more bottles for the chance at a $1,000 prize.
“This small change in how we reward recycling made a big difference. People were more excited, more engaged, and they brought in more bottles,” Dr. Jiaying Zhao, associate professor in the department of psychology and senior author of the study, said in a statement for the university.
“It turns out that the thrill of possibly winning a big prize is more motivating than a small guaranteed reward. It’s the same reason people buy lottery tickets; That tiny chance of a big win is exciting.”
The researchers ran three experiments in British Columbia and Alberta, where bottle deposit systems already exist. Despite the fact that these deposit stations give people a small refund when they return their recyclables, many bottles still end up in the trash.
In the first two experiments, people could choose between a guaranteed 10-cent refund or a chance to win a larger amount, ranging from $1 to $1,000. Even though the odds of winning were low, many people chose the lottery-style offer.
In the third experiment, participants were randomly assigned to either the guaranteed refund or the lottery-style refund. Those given the lottery-style option brought in almost three bottles for every two returned by the control group.
The researchers found that people even felt happier when they had a shot at the big prize, even if they didn’t actually win — a feeling called “anticipatory happiness” — that made the act of recycling more enjoyable.
All of this is modeled after an existing scheme in Norway.
“Norway is the only country in the world that has a similar recycling lottery, and their bottle return rate is close to 100%,” Dr. Zhao said. “The probabilistic refund could be their secret sauce. We hope Canada can adopt this innovative idea as well.”
In Norway, the bottle recycling lottery was implemented over a decade ago, and now, approximately 97% of all plastic beverage containers are returned across the country.
Here, the model is choice-driven, giving people the option to choose between the guaranteed refund or the chance to win anywhere from 5 to 100,000 euros.
“The system also doesn’t encourage gambling,” Fast Company reported, “because there’s no way to enter with cash, and there are no ‘near misses’ like with other kinds of gambling.”
Norway has also implemented a program where some of the lottery’s proceeds go to the Norwegian Red Cross.
“Instead of 10 cents back to you, what if the proceeds go to a food bank or charity?” Dr. Zhao asked Fast Company. This is also part of her team’s research, with results soon to be published.
It’s important to note that the lottery-style refund wouldn’t cost more than the traditional system, with both options sharing the same average payout. Cities could adopt this approach without spending an extra dime.
Additionally, Dr. Zhao mentioned that it’s important for cities to consider the choice-based model, giving people the option to get the regular 5- or 10-cent returns, alongside the new lottery initiative, to help canners and binners who rely on this kind of income.
“We don’t want to take the short gain option away,” she told Fast Company. “Instead, we want to give people the option to choose.”
Aside from the valuable psychological insights of the study, Dr. Zhao and her colleagues are optimistic about a future in which more people are engaged in recycling.
“Creating new bottles comes with a lot of carbon emissions, and not recycling bottles also comes with a lot of pollution,” Jade Radke, a lead author on the study, said. “So it can be a meaningful way to decrease all of those things.”
According to the UBC press release, if this approach is widely adopted, it could help recycle millions more bottles and reduce greenhouse gas emissions equal to taking one million cars off the road each year."
A new study found that people are more eager to recycle when offered a chance to win a large sum prize, instead of a guaranteed 10 cents. An
"In a new study, University of British Columbia researchers set out to answer the following question: Would you rather have 10 cents in your pocket or a 1-in-10,000 shot at $1,000?
Their findings indicate that they may have figured out a way to get people to recycle more.
The researchers, whose work was just published in the journal “Waste Management,” tested the idea of offering people who return used bottles a small chance to win a big cash prize, instead of the standard 5- or 10-cent deposit earnings.
The result? Participants recycled 47% more bottles for the chance at a $1,000 prize.
“This small change in how we reward recycling made a big difference. People were more excited, more engaged, and they brought in more bottles,” Dr. Jiaying Zhao, associate professor in the department of psychology and senior author of the study, said in a statement for the university.
“It turns out that the thrill of possibly winning a big prize is more motivating than a small guaranteed reward. It’s the same reason people buy lottery tickets; That tiny chance of a big win is exciting.”
The researchers ran three experiments in British Columbia and Alberta, where bottle deposit systems already exist. Despite the fact that these deposit stations give people a small refund when they return their recyclables, many bottles still end up in the trash.
In the first two experiments, people could choose between a guaranteed 10-cent refund or a chance to win a larger amount, ranging from $1 to $1,000. Even though the odds of winning were low, many people chose the lottery-style offer.
In the third experiment, participants were randomly assigned to either the guaranteed refund or the lottery-style refund. Those given the lottery-style option brought in almost three bottles for every two returned by the control group.
The researchers found that people even felt happier when they had a shot at the big prize, even if they didn’t actually win — a feeling called “anticipatory happiness” — that made the act of recycling more enjoyable.
All of this is modeled after an existing scheme in Norway.
“Norway is the only country in the world that has a similar recycling lottery, and their bottle return rate is close to 100%,” Dr. Zhao said. “The probabilistic refund could be their secret sauce. We hope Canada can adopt this innovative idea as well.”
In Norway, the bottle recycling lottery was implemented over a decade ago, and now, approximately 97% of all plastic beverage containers are returned across the country.
Here, the model is choice-driven, giving people the option to choose between the guaranteed refund or the chance to win anywhere from 5 to 100,000 euros.
“The system also doesn’t encourage gambling,” Fast Company reported, “because there’s no way to enter with cash, and there are no ‘near misses’ like with other kinds of gambling.”
Norway has also implemented a program where some of the lottery’s proceeds go to the Norwegian Red Cross.
“Instead of 10 cents back to you, what if the proceeds go to a food bank or charity?” Dr. Zhao asked Fast Company. This is also part of her team’s research, with results soon to be published.
It’s important to note that the lottery-style refund wouldn’t cost more than the traditional system, with both options sharing the same average payout. Cities could adopt this approach without spending an extra dime.
Additionally, Dr. Zhao mentioned that it’s important for cities to consider the choice-based model, giving people the option to get the regular 5- or 10-cent returns, alongside the new lottery initiative, to help canners and binners who rely on this kind of income.
“We don’t want to take the short gain option away,” she told Fast Company. “Instead, we want to give people the option to choose.”
Aside from the valuable psychological insights of the study, Dr. Zhao and her colleagues are optimistic about a future in which more people are engaged in recycling.
“Creating new bottles comes with a lot of carbon emissions, and not recycling bottles also comes with a lot of pollution,” Jade Radke, a lead author on the study, said. “So it can be a meaningful way to decrease all of those things.”
According to the UBC press release, if this approach is widely adopted, it could help recycle millions more bottles and reduce greenhouse gas emissions equal to taking one million cars off the road each year."
BIOCAP tiles reimagine seawalls as dynamic, ecologically active systems that have the potential to enhance coastal resilience.
From the article:
Unlike the flat, lifeless surfaces of typical concrete seawalls, each BIOCAP tile is designed with shaded grooves, crevices and small, water-holding pockets. These textured features mimic natural shoreline conditions and create tiny homes for barnacles, oysters, sponges and other marine organisms that filter and improve water quality.
The tile’s swirling surface patterns increase the overall surface area, offering more space for colonization. The shaded recesses are intended to help regulate temperature by providing cooler, more stable microenvironments. This thermal buffering can support marine life in the face of rising water temperatures and more frequent heat events driven by climate change.
Another potential benefit of the tiles is reducing the impact of waves.
When waves hit a natural shoreline, their energy is gradually absorbed by irregular surfaces, tide pools and vegetation. In contrast, when waves strike vertical concrete seawalls, the energy is reflected back into the water rather than absorbed. This wave reflection – the bouncing back of wave energy – can amplify wave action, increase erosion at the base of the wall and create more hazardous conditions during storms.
The textured surfaces of the BIOCAP tiles are designed to help diffuse wave energy by mimicking the natural dissipation found on undisturbed shorelines.
