Plastic straw bans won’t save the turtles, it’ll just kill more of them.
A preamble before we get down to business. It doesn’t matter if you’re a climate activist, denier or someone who just doesn’t care. This article isn’t about taking sides. It’s about looking straight at the facts, talking common sense, and hopefully, we’ll be able to make the world a more livable place.
In the last decade, one of the milestones of the environmentalist movement was the Plastic Straw Ban. Stoked to action by viral videos of plastic-straws killing turtles, environmentalists lobbied for bans which were rolled out across US states. F&B giants like Starbucks and Macdonald’s pledged to remove plastic-straws…
“Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who’s the fairest of them all?”
In the fairyland of Snow White, the evil queen clearly had quite an issue with insecurity and narcissism. And I’d argue that social media has brought the mythical mirror into our palms, and it isn’t exactly giving us a newfound sense of self-identity. Quite the opposite.
So what exactly is beauty? According to Cambridge, it’s the quality of being pleasing, especially to look at. Broadly, beauty has largely been confined to superficial appearances, and I think that’s a pity. But let’s just go along with it for now.
I…
As sentiments cool over overt Chinese aggression, China is exerting a subtler form of manipulation over vulnerable countries. Over the past decade, as China’s economy continues to grow in leaps and bounds, it has rapidly increased its global investments into other countries around the world, concentrating a large sum of wealth into African and Asian countries. Chinese outbound foreign direct investment (FDI) is set to rise to a record of $2.5 trillion over the next decade despite increased regulation from the government.
As of 2017, Chinese companies now hold 11% of FDI assets globally, the second largest share just behind…
Abel Chen
Aspiring writer who flirts from one idea to the next
