That's neat! I turned it into a one liner `rm todays_nyt.pdf; wget -q "https://static01.nyt.com/images/$(date +%Y/%m/%d)/nytfrontpage/scan.pdf" -O todays_nyt.pdf && open todays_nyt.pdf
`
make the difference between successful and unsuccessful projects. Huggingface has nice (in a certain sense) tools for training and doing inference on small LLMs but is a train wreck when it comes to model selection and preprocessing. (To be fair a few years back I tried developing a general purpose trainer that worked for bigger models that scikit-learn would handle but did the model selection and preprocessing well and didn't like the answer I got)
Trees are naturally efficient at sucking down vast amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, but they release the carbon again when they die and rot on the ground. Sequestering trees underground could prevent this. If biomass burial works as well as hoped, it may provide a relatively cheap and easy way to pull down some share of the billions of tons of greenhouse gas that studies find may need to be removed to keep global temperatures in check in the coming decades.
This is a truly great idea. Putting great gobs of biomass and safely sequestering it underground is revolutionary. We'll need to put it deep enough that it won't decompose and we'll also meed to find a way to pressurize it to maximize the volume and prevent moisture intrusion. We probably want to put it near desserts where the naturally arid conditions will hasten the process of compaction. Perhaps we can get the Arab Countries on board?
For individuals though, it pretty much means you're supposed to take them down the street to a "donation" dumpster rather than toss them in the trash. Almost certainly, no one is going to come to your house and arrest you/fine you because they found an old t-shirt in your trash but they maybe could.
> Textiles means clothing, footwear, bedding, towels, curtains, fabric, and similar products, except for textiles that are contaminated with mold, bodily fluids, insects, oil, or hazardous substances.
Apparently it's also legal to jizz on your used clothing and then toss them in the garbage. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I don't make the rules!
Well that's the story. Already the value of secondhand clothes in Africa has gone way down as people have access to the internet and can see they are not the latest fashion.
Clothes that won't be worn should be recycled in the country of origin, not sent to Africa to be dumped in landfill.
> If used clothing is the problem, why not prohibit it altogether? The answer is that countries tried. In 2016, a group of East African countries joined forces to ban imports of secondhand clothing. In retaliation, the Trump administration threatened to remove the countries from the program that is at the core of U.S.-Africa trade policy if they followed through. No surprise that a lobby group representing used clothing sorters backed the move. The only country that stood firm was Rwanda and, to this day, its duty-free apparel benefits under AGOA remain suspended.
I don’t have a subscription either yet I managed to read it directly via the posted link. Please do so as well before asking more questions, unless of course, you’re just grinding an axe and the details would get in the way.
> So someone is sending free textile shipments to Africa?
Trash clothes are bundled with good clothes because proper disposal would be more costly.
> How is the demand "artificial", is someone masquerading as buyers?
There are no ultimate buyers for the trash clothes. They are imported only because they are bundled into good clothes. The importer has no export-side employee vetting the shipment. And the importer has no homeland authority with the power to ensure that the importer doesn’t eventually offload the disposal costs onto the environment and future generations. The exporter knows this and happily takes advantage (along with a little help from government power and threats to revoke “free-market” incentives, ironically).
> So is it about environmental issues, is it about protectionism, both?
It’s about protectionism and environmentalism as a reaction to the use of power in service of greed to offload home-grown externalities onto desperate third-world countries. Or, if you choose not to read the article, it’s just about environmentalism and protectionism and their evil anti-market ways. Your choice.
I'm asking because even after reading the piece[0] it's not clear.
There's no data on how "often" the clothes are soiled garbage, how does this whole value chain work, who is paying for what, and so on. But of course there's a call for AI investment to sort the threads/fibers. WTF.
Nominally the text beings by talking about this trade agreement (AGOA) which is set to expire in 2025, and then just completely nosedives into bullshit.
The only datapoint is that there was an attempt to ban import - which presumably was a violation of the agreement anyway - then the fascist monkey administration started throwing shit.
Protectionism for protectionism's sake is bad. I recommend this recently released interview with Anne Krueger, who did the study on rent-seeking in 1974 (which demonstrated how the whole import licensing was nothing more than very expensive legalized smuggling).
Yet the world is also getting more complex, and externalities are important. Like waste, dumping, or market-distorting subsidies (as on Chinese EVs). Hence tariffs on imports have their place.
