Yeah I think this is the story everywhere.

PET (plastic drink bottles) can be recycled to produce more drink bottles, indefinitely and cost effectively.

Soft plastics like bread bags can be converted into shopping bags but in Australia at least it doesn’t seem to be cost effective.

A few other types of plastic like yoghurt containers can be down-cycled into ugly green benches or something.

Everything else just can’t be cost effectively converted into anything useful.

Recycling is just a fig leaf for plastic producers.

I think there’s a variety of complex legal, political, and technical reasons why torrent sites can avoid having their domain “seized”, but I think the summary is: there be dragons here and it’s not worth playing around with.

Politically, some jurisdictions define piracy differently and hosts won’t comply with legal threats from the US.

Legally, hosting a torrent is not the same as hosting a ROM. In the former case the actual copyright works are hosted by users, the torrent site just hosts the torrent file which is a list of users from whom you can download the content. ROM sites tend to provide the actual file for download, which contravenes relevant copyright laws.

Technically, you don’t need a commercial host platform to operate a website. It’s entirely possible to host a site in your mum’s basement on your laptop. Obviously for a large site you’ll want more appropriate hardware but the point is larger torrent sites are likely to run on hardware maintained directly by the admins.

The most compelling reason not to get involved in a public facing grey area site like ROM or abandonware hosting, is that it doesn’t really matter where you stand with the law - you won’t have the resources to defend yourself. Suppose Nintendo decides they don’t like you doing what you’re doing. They have an army of sophisticated lawyers who have spent a lifetime learning how to weaponise the law. It doesn’t really matter who’s “right”, all that matters is how much money you have with which to engage lawyers to defend yourself.

It’s a bit of a shit show in Australia.

Each city is responsible for it’s own waste management. Mine has 3x channels: green waste for biodegradable anything, recyclables, and everything else.

The recyclables are a furphy though because, you can put anything plastic or paper in them, but ofc it’s really only the PET plastic and the cardboard that actually gets recycled - the rest just goes to land fill.

We have a separate system for specific PET bottles vendors charge $0.10 per bottle, and you can return the bottles to a collection place to get that back.

We did have a separate system for soft plastics like plastic bags or whatever but that pretty much just wasn’t viable.

Rant triggered: we’ve aparently stopped single use plastics like takeaway boxes, plastic bags, and plastic cuttlery, but IMO that’s really just a fig leaf for companies that ship products in plastic packaging. It really shits me.

Additional rant: producers of plastic products like garbage bags have started this bullshit “ocean plastics” thing. They claim 50% or whatever of their bullshit bags are made from “ocean plastic” which they define as recycled plastic obtained from any community within 50km of the ocean (the vaaaast majority of Australians) which has no other plastic collection program. So basically… they charge city councils to disappear their plastic waste and then charge idiots to buy their “ocean plastic” garbage bags.

But the choice will be Trump-like or Obama-like. There is no “progressive revolution” option at this time.

Complaining about Obama-like is pushing a both sides narrative, which suppresses democrat voters.

If you want things to be less shit, stop doing that.