We bought a simple doorstop for a door that simply wouldn’t stay open. It was oily on the surface, and smelled terrible, like oil-soaked tires. I had to get a new one that looked like synthetic rubber (brownish), which was probably not recycled unfortunately.
I guess recycling tires is better than this
Companies need to do a better job of choosing what to recycle for particular uses–and clean them better.
Our front doormat is made from recycled tires. It faces east, so it gets plenty of solar heat, but it’s never smelled bad; I got it in…well, before my mom started going downhill mentally & physically, but after I moved in, so between 2008 and 2015. Sugarplum likes it very much, though I’m sure the placement has to do with it, and she does use it as a scratching mat as well.
Interesting! Maybe they cleaned it better. Or being outside that long has given it a chance to air out. The stinky doorstop is in the basement, with the thought that maybe it could be used if it ever aired out. So far that corner of the basement still stinks.
Our dishwasher has “bitumen” (a probably lesser known term for tar) as sound proofing. It stinks too when the dishes are done and we open the door. We always turn the stove exhaust fan on, but who knows what chemicals we’re inhaling despite the fan.
Bitumen is mentioned in this video as an adhesive, starting at the point where I copied the vdeo link:
If you thought things couldn’t get stupider, someone just held a CO2 reader up to a PC to prove ‘bitcoin mining has zero carbon emissions’
The astonishing claim was made in a video posted to YouTube and Twitter (opens in new tab) which begins with a man in a helmet and hi-vis vest walking through thin, patchy Texas scrub as he tests the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. “We’ve got lots of plants here,” he says, which is the first obvious lie, because quite clearly there are not a lot of plants anywhere nearby. “These plants are consuming CO2 and emitting oxygen, which is fantastic. When we measure CO2 out here, we’re in the green. There are very low levels of CO2.”
At that point, the man in the helmet says that the test is “a great way to establish a baseline,” which will be compared to the CO2 readings inside: “If the number does not go up, then the mining rigs are not emitting CO2.”
SMH.
Too bad people don’t understand that you have to average over the entire earth and for a year to get any meaningful data. I remember a stupid republican congressman (sorry to be redundant) throwing a snowball to prove global warming wasn’t happening.
For emissions caused by their mining rigs, you don’t even need to go to that trouble. A large part of their carbon emissions are going to be fairly local, in the generation of the electricity that runs the rigs and is used to cool them. No worldwide averaging needed. 
As one of the comments on the youtube video pointed out, by their logic you could also hold a wallet next to their mining rigs and “prove” that they generate zero profit.
WTAF???
This is worse than those eye drops recalled due to contamination. This is on purpose.
Yep, some idiot in Florida went to a county commission meeting this month to demand an investigation into whether the ISS is a fraud on the American public.
Alleging a massive fraud by a federal agency, with an international conspiracy to fool the entire world… and you think a small county in Florida is the way to go. 
Carlson said: “You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true.”
And I think he is truly a colony of termites.
No. Termites are useful compared to him. They’re just termitin’, they don’t know any better. HE knows better, the poor sick bastard.
It took three days to pump millions of litres of water out of the dam, after Rajesh Vishwas dropped the device while taking a selfie.
Confusion ensued as no one else could find the cited cases. Castel issued an order on April 11 saying that LoDuca “shall file an affidavit annexing copies of the following cases cited in his submission to the court,” and that “failure to comply will result in dismissal of this action.”
The plaintiff’s lawyer continued to insist that the cases were real. LoDuca filed an affidavit on April 25 in which he swore to the authenticity of the fake cases, including one—Shaboon v. Egyptair—that he claimed was “an unpublished opinion.” One day after the filing, Avianca’s legal team wrote that “the authenticity of many of these cases is questionable.” Since the cases don’t exist, the defendant’s lawyers were unable to find them using tools such as Westlaw, PACER, and Lexis Courtlink.
LoDuca eventually came clean that they’d actually had a different lawyer, who was not admitted in the district the case is in, do the legwork in writing the filings.
Lawyer Steven Schwartz of the firm Levidow, Levidow, & Oberman “greatly regrets having utilized generative artificial intelligence to supplement the legal research performed herein and will never do so in the future without absolute verification of its authenticity,” Schwartz wrote in an affidavit on May 24 regarding the bogus citations previously submitted in US District Court for the Southern District of New York.
How was Schwartz taken in by the fake cases? Because when they asked ChatGPT if the cases were real, ChatGPT told them they were! It’s clearly all ChatGPT’s fault, as the idiotlawyer explained while submitting screenshots of the chat:
First off, both lawyers (smartly) lawyered up with lawyers from outside their own firm. Second, on Wednesday, they filed their required response to Judge Kevin Castel’s order to show cause, which was effectively the two lawyers throwing themselves on the mercy of the court. The shortest summary of the 29 page document is “we may be ignorant and stupid, but we’re not malicious — and sanctions should only be put on malicious lawyers” And also “we’re super duper sorry, and everyone’s mocking that, so isn’t that punishment enough?”
However, even within that filing there were some issues. When filing a legal brief, it normally includes a “Table of Authorities” which includes citations to every other case named in the document.
But, because the response includes a discussion of ChatGPT providing that cite (and others) those fake cases are mentioned in the brief… meaning whoever put together the Table of Authorities included the fake cases that were mentioned. Really.
First, the judge went after LoDuca, whose signature was on the docs, but who has now admitted that he was just signing everything that Schwartz put in front of him without really reviewing it (this was because LoDuca is admitted to the federal courts in the federal district, while Schwartz is not).
Already, this is questionable enough, in that LoDuca was signing stuff without really checking it over, but also the judge got him to admit that he had lied to the court regarding a vacation when asking for an extension of time (Schwartz was the one who was actually going on vacation). From Inner City Press’s transcription:
Judge Castel : Do you recall writing to me you were going on vacation? And the Court giving you until April 25?
LoDuca: Yes.
Judge Castel: Was it true you were going on vacation?
LoDuca : No, judge.
meh. it had to happen. at least it’s Paul doing it, and not some third party.
There’s actually a way to prompt ChatGPT to check the veracity and it will run it through Wolfram Alpha. I just saw this recently on a video. Seems like a whole bunch of people need to do just the barest of research on how to use ChatGPT before getting let loose on it.
Um, what the fuck about GEORGE?
