If it does actually happen to you. There will be a thought in your head that that person is still there somewhere and is potentially suffering. Your scientific reasoning and your "good for humanity" will likely not even cross your mind.

All you'll see is someone you love laying on a bed and not able to function. You won't choose the experimental lung because you want to help humanity. You'll do it because even if the doctors say "it will not bring them back" you are desperate for any hope of talking to them again or just seeing their eyes open so you can say goodbye.

The family likely ended it to relieve their own emotional suffering with a false sense of hope. Along with the fear that what they were doing was prolonging the suffering of someone they loved very much.

Interesting that you want to know me better than myself. You are wrong in both that assumption and how/when I (don't) think rational.

Why did you unloaded this purely statistical assumption here anyway?

What a robotic response to someone trying to explain love and losing a loved one to you.

I'm not talking to someone that can't understand empathy. Good luck with that.

I'm a survivor of my beloved who has died twice:

• Once when she had an asthma induced heart attack and her brain was without fresh oxygen for fifteen minutes. Her brain turned into complete mush, while retaining some minuscule bodily functions like breathing, defecation, pupilary reflex. "Persistent vegetative state" used to be the less apt description for it.
• Second time after she has succumbed to pneumonia while in hospice. Her mother, the only next of kin with sway over her fate, a religious nut job, kept her alive for four years.

Where I am trying to go with this is that false hope and selfishness is bad, and if I had the choice, nay SAY back then between keeping her alive or having lungs transplanted into her as an experiment that may establish the procedure to save someone's life in the future, I'd have chosen the experiment every time.

I did not have a say in ending her absolutely pointless continued existence though. And she warned me about her mother's selfishness and narcissism many times before her person as I knew her ceased to exist.

My point is that love is very much often a selfish act, as opposed to compassion, empathy or altruism. And people often make the wrong choices out of selfishness.

Thanks for sharing. And you are absolutely right about love being irrational and at times selfish. My experience of this was somewhat similar. At least in terms of the selfish and irrational love my mom had.

My dad was diagnosed with Lewy Body Dementia (similar to Alzheimer's) and my mom was in denial for far to long about it. Basically preventing getting him any help early on or even a diagnosis. Very religious and trusting that God would do something.

I don't even know when it was that I "lost" him. I don't remember much from that time as I suppressed the memory of those years I was in college. Visiting home and finding out a new piece of him was gone. The last real conversation I remember he asked me "do you hate me?"

He had been asking me if I checked the tire pressure in my car. Whatever was left of him was hyper-focused on worry. He had asked me about 100 times that day. I don't even know what I said to get him to ask me if I hated him. I don't remember. I just remember his face so confused.

I know I told him I loved him. Gave him a hug. But I think that was the last time any form of conversation was possible. So when I walked out the door that day and drove to class is when he "died" to me.

I'm sorry for your loss and can understand that feeling of having no control as you see a person you loved alive but already gone.

If it hasn’t already been broken down into microplastics yet and it’s floating around in its whole form, then other organisms that eat fish that size could think it is a fish and then eat it,” Wootton said.

And:

“Since they are quite a thick plastic, it does take quite a while for them to degrade.”

I imagine the people who get takeout sushi and the people who have a bottle of soy sauce in their fridge are largely different groups.

Tbh there's your answer, fix that. Buy some damn soy sauce, they sell it at the most basic stores.

But that doesn't solve the issue for people eating it at a third location, like work, their car, or an unprepared friend's house, can't buy bottles of soy for literally everywhere you go "just in case" and such.

Maybe we still need them for that, but we can also be mindful of our circumstances and prepare/choose appropriately. Would require people to change personally however, so keep waiting lol.

Hell maybe we just make it common for them to sell little 4oz resealable glass bottles of kikkoman at the Chinese spot, then one can still be unprepared and still get the sauce there (though it'd be cheaper if they prepare next time), and whatever sauce isn't used is retainable. Still not perfect since those bottles have plastic tops, but it's something! Maybe make the caps out of hemp plastic for added bonus?

How does it biodegrade though?

Just like disintegrate into tiny plastic molecules that we can no longer see but it's still plastic? Or does it degrade as far as becoming the individual components that made up the plastic and can be recycled and used by things in nature?

Sure, but PLA will eventually biodegrade, unlike things like polypropilene or polyethylene, which are incredibly useful precisely because of their imperviousness.

EDIT: I'm willing to bet that PLA IS biodegradable in home settings if the correct method is used, like the Berkeley method, which produces much higher heat than "heap" methods. The Berkley method can produce compost in under a month, via endothermic processes that generate relatively high heat. All you need at home are the compostable materials, and a roughly 1m cube, which can be made out of pallets, for example.

How to Make Compost in 18 Days Using the Berkeley Hot Composting Method

Regular composting, also known as cold composting, involves placing a variety of organic materials in a compost bin, enclosure, or even just in a large heap, and leaving it there until it breaks do…

^{Deep Green Permaculture}

The caveats you express are somewhat valid, but not totally correct. Printing correctly, with a food safe nozzle, path, and PLA formulation, is entirely possible. Simply printing in single layers, with a properly dialed in printer can eliminate your concerns. Medical items and implants are printed out of PLA, albeit with extreme production controls.

However, printing these single use items would be absolutely un-economical. 3D printing shines in short runs, bespoke items, like replacement part that are out of production, or which are very difficult to manufacture by other methods like injection or machining.

Its true that PLA, in unmodified form, has a much higher modulus than PP or PE, so squishiness is out of the question. What I have mentioned before is that I have bought single serve olive oil in PLA containers. From what I could see, these were injection molded and had a film top made from a plastic I never bothered to identify.

These containers were surprisingly elastic when crushed, not as elastic as other plastics, like PET, PP or PE, but much more than I had come to expect from my experience with the material. I'm going to attribute this to molding vs. extruding.

Good luck relying on informed customers when customers are too busy living their lives to keep track of a billion different reasons for why they shouldn't buy one product over another. Also, these are given out at restaurants. Do you recommend refusing to go to a restaurant if they happen to see this dispenser being included there?

How is making sure millions of people are informed and making the "correct" decision every time a better solution than simply restricting on the supply side?