Microplastics are stored in the balls.

…starting in a future year, right?

Amazon is worse for those communities, though. They undercut retailers by even more, and then don’t hire local employees at all. In the communities where they do set up warehouses, the working conditions are even worse than Walmart.

That kit is $40 on their site. Weird that it’s cheaper on Amazon in the first place.

No, Amazon does this on purpose. If you want to sell on Amazon, the search and recommendation algorithms will make your product hard to find unless you have Amazon fulfillment. But if you sign up for Amazon fulfillment, not only do you have to give Amazon a bigger cut of the price, you have to agree to never sell your product for less than Amazon does, even on your own website with your own fulfillment.

The FTC sued Amazon for this practice, and that case is progressing. But who knows if the Trump administration is going to maintain the lawsuit, or if the court will rule against Amazon.

The U.S.'s flowchart is pretty complicated, too.

We sell soda in 20oz, 1L, and 2L bottles, or 12 ounce cans. Fountain drinks are measured in ounces.

Wine and liquor are sold in 750ml bottles (and other larger format bottles measured in liters), but individual servings are generally measured in ounces.

Our bullets/ammunition are also mixed, probably because we did standardize our military on NATO standards, but also love our legacy calibers and have a bunch of calibers that aren’t used in the military.

And the U.S. isn’t unique in having a bunch of ways to measure energy (joules, calories, kilowatt hours, therms, BTUs), but we’re somewhat unique in having too many ways to measure power (watts, BTUs/hr, horsepower).

At what ratio of width to length does it become a water bridge instead of a tunnel?

Enforcing against screenshots would be difficult, especially if screenshots of Bluesky/Mastodon are allowed but X/Threads isn’t.

I’ve been against electronic voting in the USA for years. Many states, especially the so called battleground states, rely on these for the most of the results.

Direct Recording Electronic voting machines are less common now, and DRE machines without voter verifiable paper receipts are even less common. Here is a state by state list. Louisiana is the only state with statewide DRE without paper verification. The other states that permit precincts to use DRE without paper are Mississippi, New Jersey, Oklahoma (only for those in need of assistive technology), Tennessee, and Texas. So that’s one state that uses totally electronic voting statewide, 5 states that permit it in some instances, and 44 (plus DC) that prohibit electronic voting without a paper trail. And none of the states with DRE and no paper trail are swing states (although many have swing districts).

I think it was a bigger problem before, but is getting phased out.

I would think that using fusion or fission for synthesizing elements is going to still be less efficient (among all resources, not just energy) than using the newfound abundant/cheap energy to extract those preexisting elements from mixtures that exist on Earth.

Take neodymium, your example. That’s pretty abundant in the Earth’s crust. It’s just that it’s energy intensive to extract it from the mineral formations that naturally occur. At that point it’s still probably much cheaper, energy wise, to separate a bunch of minerals into their constituent elements, rather than try to synthesize atoms through fusion and fission.

It is very clear you and your best friend HylicManoeuvre are one and the same person

I dunno, I think our comment histories are pretty distinct, in both our views/preferences and the topics we’re comfortable discussing. I think that’s pretty clear for anyone who just wants to take a look. Again, by insisting that we must be alts for the same person with a secret vegan agenda comes off as paranoid and delusional.

The fuel for it is the most common on the planet, if not the universe, requires no special refining

It is true that regular hydrogen (with 1 proton and no neutrons) fuses in the Sun, first to deuterium (2 protons combine into a nucleus that immediately decays a bunch of radiation and becomes a proton and neutron), then another hydrogen proton to create helium-3 (2 protons, 1 neutron), then two helium-3 nuclei fuse to create 2 hydrogen protons and a stable Helium-4 nucleus (2 protons, 2 neutrons).

But nobody on earth is trying to accomplish fusion through that difficult pathway. We don’t have the ability to create the pressures and heat to ignite that reaction.

The way all of these fusion projects are trying to achieve are deuterium (1 proton, 1 neutron) plus tritium (1 proton, 2 neutrons), to form Helium-4 (2 protons, 2 neutrons) plus a neutron and a bunch of energy. That is a reaction that human technology can ignite. So all the research goes into this particular reaction.

And for that, tritium is exceedingly rare. We can make it as a byproduct of fission reactors, from lithium.

You are the only one implying preference

Third party here, jumping into this thread. It’s pretty clear that OP didn’t say, or even imply, anything about preference, and even put scare quotes around “preference” when responding to you bringing it up. You come off as paranoid and bizarrely defensive in this thread, and it’s a bad look.

The specifics are a pipe dream but the general principle holds: if energy suddenly becomes more plentiful and cheaper by orders of magnitude, society will find a way to use that new plentiful resource in ways that we can scarcely imagine today. That’s always been true of new inventions, where much of the post-invention innovation comes in the form of finding new applications for a thing that has already been invented.

In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the “therm,” which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.

Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied “per hour” when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.

Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.

I think if we figure out nuclear fusion there will be induced demand for energy, in applications that were previously infeasible: desalination via distillation instead of reverse osmosis, direct capture of CO2 from the atmosphere, large scale water transport, ice and snowmaking, indoor farming, synthesized organic compounds for things like carbon sequestration or fossil fuel replacement or even food, etc.

Geoengineering might not be feasible today, but if energy becomes really cheap we might see something different.

Glasses make me look weak. They’re like a wheelchair for the eyes.

By cherry picking a few Republican priorities designed to spite big tech and totally ignoring the big enforcement efforts that the Biden administration has pursued through the FTC and the DOJ Antitrust Division, in both tech and non-tech industries.

The communication that kicked off this whole thing was saying something positive about Trump and something negative about Democrats in direct comparison, on an issue that the Democrats are actually way better on.

It’s not just saying something positive about a political official or party. It’s actively saying “this party is better than that party.” And he was wrong on the merits of the statement.

And then amplifying the message using an official account is where it went off the rails. CEOs are allowed to have opinions as individuals. But when the official account backs up the CEO, then we can rightly be skeptical that the platform itself will be administered in a fair way.

In the U.S., they meter gas by the “therm,” which is defined as 100,000 BTUs. It’s a misconception that it’s equal to 100 cubic feet of natural gas at standard temperature and pressure, and is merely a coincidence that those values are very close.

BTUs are like a shitty imperial calorie, the energy it takes to heat up one pound of water by one degree fahrenheit.

Also, don’t confuse therms for thermies, a totally different unit that means the amount of energy required to heat up a tonne (1000 kg) (not to be confused with the imperial ton that is 2000 pounds) of water by 1°C.

Energy is so useful in so many different contexts that we can just always expect a million ways to express it.

It’s pretty common to use acre inches and acre foot as a unit of volume for measuring water in agriculture, water use, flood mitigation, etc.

So if we can use area height as a volumetric unit, by not volume/area as a height unit?