• Zerlyna@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        I used to buy boxes for almost 10 years. Paper companies plant trees to replenish their supply. I bet they’ve sold off parts of their forests since the internet and “paperless” started. Lost jobs for loggers, paper mills have shut down, and then all the lost loads for truckers. Switching from bottles to cans equals less boxes. Emails and PDF is less paper. If we weren’t ordering online all the time the impact would be even greater.

  • Kelly@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    They might be silent when spoken but still offer disambiguation between words/meanings when written e.g. “dam” vs “damn”.

    • Eheran@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Many words are written the same way. In both cases, context is what does the actual trick. If you read “the damn was 10 meters high” it goes as far as assuming a typo.

      • Kelly@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        True context helps - but I wouldn’t want to consciously smurfify the language.

        • Eheran@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I agree and would go further, simplifying words so they more closely match how you pronounce them. So that there are not 3 completely different words, written exactly the same.

      • WarmSoda@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        If it was written out as “God damn that damn is 10 meters tall” People would complain that they’re spelled the same way.

        • Kelly@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          Another example: “Dam that river!” vs. “Damn that river!” could be confused.

    • Kelly@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      A lot of paper is wasted because we tend to use standard “document sized” paper (A4, US Letter).

      For content that is not designed to fill the page (poster or whatever) it will fill a random amount of the final page and on average half of that sheet will be wasted.

      If smaller paper sizes were used more often it could save a fair bit.

      • xigoi@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 year ago

        Smaller paper sizes would waste a lot more paper because the margins would be a bigger portion of the sheet.

  • JackGreenEarth@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    Not sure about silent letters specifically, but we could certainly compress our language to the smallest lossless format.