All “break down” means here is to turn into extremely small micro / nano particles. With hard plastic the damage you’re doing to the environment is more constrained to one piece which you can scoop up if you want. It’s way worse if it’s turned into dust and distributed in rain water, ocean water, the veggies you eat, etc.
Rust is amazing. I’ve been using it for six years now. Being strict is exactly what you want when building anything more complex than fizzbuzz. It’s just that people aren’t used to it so it makes them uncomfortable enough to not attempt to learn it or see how beneficial it is.
How do they know what qualifies as “encrypted” vs a binary blob that could be a photo or something?
People become ultra violent, majority starts killing each other, anyone slightly bad starts doing bad things, most of them get killed by the other people they do bad things to. Total rampage.
Cycle repeats and repeats 100 times. Pacifists / smart people GTFO of town and hide in forest.
On 100th day, cycle stops unexpectedly. Only it stops at night, after the daily rampage is over. Nobody regenerates.
Cycle starts unexpectedly again, every once in a while.
Groundhog Day becomes society’s Russian Roulette.