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> ""What's exciting about this," he said, "is we can go to as low as 1 percent of our additive, and you get a plastic alloy that really has super-great properties.""
The properties of a polymer are specific to the application intended. "Super-great" doesn't appear on a spec sheet [0]. If you're making plastic for high pressure natural gas pipe, you go with a polymer that is different from a film resin. Plastic producers work closely with the end users to craft polymer that matches very specific applications. It's possible that this additive can be crafted for different applications, but combining polyethylene and polypropylene is already starting from different beasts.
In the world of polyethylene, I previously worked at a plant that made ~50 different grades/resins ranging from low to medium to high density PE for wildly different applications (pipe, blow molding, film, etc.). Of those 50 resins, they were made from 2 different catalyst systems and multiple actual catalysts. All of our end product was nominally "polyethylene". That detail worked to ensure you made exactly the polymer you wanted for the application. It is this specification of properties that prevents recycled material from ending up in the critical high volume applications.
If you're making millions of milk jugs a day, it doesn't matter that a single milk jug is worthless. You're using machinery that is custom tuned to the polymer you are running. That tuning relies on the polymer having specific, repeatable properties. We had customers complain when an identical resin was made from different plants at the complex.
> ""If you could make a milk jug with 30 percent less material because it's mechanically better, think of the sustainability of that," he said. "You're using less plastic, less oil, you have less stuff to recycle, you have a lighter product that uses less fossil fuel to move it.""
Plastic producers can already make stronger polymer that requires less material. Presumably the milk jug folks don't want to pay the premium for it. The same is true of this additive. What does it cost? It's the reason we don't make everything metal out of titanium.
I completely agree. There are some things you can do in Excel that are nearly impossible to track down. There are auditing tools that help, but you can truly ruin a spreadsheet in undetectable ways if you want (or more likely, don't want).
The user actions that lead to mistakes in Excel are the same with any other environment: typing formulas. If I'm doing an engineering or financial calculation and misplace a decimal point, flip a sign, or forget an ABS(), I'm going to get the same wrong result in R or Excel. The upside of Excel is that the feedback is immediate so you have a chance of spotting the error if you're expecting a certain output. There is no clean solution to that regardless of environment. It's just as easy to make mistakes when you're changing code or changing a spreadsheet.
R has the advantage of being easier to do a proper diff between files if a change was made in error, but most people don't think they made a change in error. The change was intentional; they just got it wrong.
The things you've listed as R being better at are things that no typical Excel user contemplates doing (i.e. blogging, processing 5GB data sets). You're also ignoring that out of the box Excel comes with a wide range of features that just don't exist in R. Most important for the typical user is being able to format and edit their "data" and calculations as they go with immediate updates on dependent cells.
Take your typical Excel user and explain to them that R is significantly more powerful, and they will stop listening the first time they get the arrow wrong on a variable assignment. You probably won't even get that far because the idea of a typing a variable name is foreign even though they've been using "variables" hidden behind cell references. "Why am I assigning a variable... in Excel I just type my data where I want it and click when I want to use it".
The Notice of Violation (NOV) [0] is worth checking out if you're interested in the nitty gritty details of regulatory enforcement. It's quite readable and paints a clear picture that EPA believes FCA violated the Clean Air Act. Specifically that they have software/code (AECDs) which were "neither described nor justified". Also interesting that they already set up a short URL for this particular issue. [1]
Source: https://github.com/byronwall/hn-client
This Show HN in the app (how meta): https://hn.byroni.us/story/24371278
Features:
Optimized for lurking. No ability to login, comment, or do anything other than read comments and follow links.
Three main views for accessing stories: front page, day, and week. Each view provides 50 stories. Infinite scroll is intentionally avoided.
When loading a list of stories, all comments are loaded for all stories. Experience says loading all 3 pages will require around 15MB of local storage.
App locally stores HN pages that have been visited to grey them out on the main page.
No logging, analytics or other tracking on the server.
Optimized for mobile including `code` blocks which normally look awful.
Any links to other HN articles are automatically loaded in the app.
While reading comment threads, a pleasant UX is provided to collapse threads and store collapse state.