Hundreds of years of burning coal has spread mercury compounds all over the land, so that quite often when they build a new dam for hydroelectric power it’s dissolved into the water and ends up concentrated in fishes that people eat.
having to be careful about how much fish you eat due to mercury is one of the top dystopian things to me. People think about agriculture and grains with civilization but when you look at how important and common fish was to our diet for so long. Its crazy.
I dunno man, sounds fucking woke to me
its all big alchemy immortals trying to keep mercury’s benefits under wraps
I KNEW Qin Shi Huang was still around, fucking us from the past!
also its organic mecury, which is more toxic than the metallic form.
Man, humans have fundamentally and irreversibly fucked up this planet. We burn coal, so we have that problem you mentioned. I learned recently how chemical companies have done decades of a poor job just dumping chemical waste wherever they want or developing things that does more harm than good at the planet’s expense.
Enjoy it while it’s here I guess.
There’s no way to make a backdoor for encryption that keeps the encryption secure. Politicians and government flunkies can’t seem to wrap their pea brains around that concept.
Adding an extra lane to a congested road will always cause that road to be more congested, and will also increase traffic on nearby roads.
When China removed a highway, it reduced car traffic thought the entire city while not reducing the number of people travelling to and around the city.
The only solution to car traffic is viable alternatives to driving.
Tangential but nobody seems to know how to drive in traffic. Pick a lane and stay in it, leave extra following distance, and try to change speed as smoothly as possible. If everyone did these three things, traffic congestion would be significantly less severe.
Don’t forget zipper merging. I lived in an area where hundreds of hours spent commuting allowed me to observe the inability to merge was the primary driver of freeway congestion.
The main problem I’ve observed with zipper merging is nobody can seem to agree on what it is. People get aggressive when you try to use the available space on the road, and in discussions online it seems people think you’re trying to queue jump if you don’t merge as early as possible.
Probably not always. You build a 12 lane road entirely within a random small town, and it will stay empty and stupid. But, in the range of what actually might be built, yes, there’s pretty strong empirical evidence that cars fill any available space.
Which this actually isn’t a straight example of, exactly. Jevon’s paradox says more and better roads will mean more cars operating, not less. That happens, but in this case the increase is so great, that it leads to the same level of congestion on the roads all over again.
The wiki uses the example of coal. Better boilers and engines increased the use of coal, but it’s fair to say industrial Europe had better coal powered equipment afterwards, not the same or worse. (Although, to be fair, congestion is only one metric of traffic performance)
I agree, Jevon’s is not the perfect way to describe this affect. Is there a better way to classify this? It’s bugged me for a bit as I’ve had good debates about adding biking lanes and better sidewalks instead of just more lanes for cars. But Jevon’s is the best I could come up with.
No, it’s relevant enough, thanks for bringing it up.
You could say something about the elasticity of road usage being 1, but if you’re not a wonk that means nothing. Induced traffic is another technical term you might see around. Saying “research suggests another lane means an equal number of additional cars, eventually” is about what gets the best comprehension.
This is definitely not always true. They added a lane in my city a few years ago and my commute went from 45 minutes to 30 minutes.
IIRC the trend is observed over longer periods, where it feeds into people’s decisions about whether to have a car or second car, and how far to commute. And even then, congestion and travel time are two different things - an extra lane probably makes no difference, but a new route or higher speed limit will get you there faster regardless.
this logic asssumes more road == population growth
sure, and telescopes created all the stars in the sky.
The number of car-hours per person per year isn’t even close to fixed over the long run. The trend is basically that in the past, people might have carpooled, taken a bus or even hitchhiked, and usually lived close to their job. If the roads get better, they drive more.
so your idea is installing a system is pushing for classism and hoping to furthering socioeconomic downturn on the landscape of select neighbourhoods with select individuals with large populations that are struggling, paying the most taxes, yet expected to travel for lower wage jobs and you want to make their travel to work harder.
how bigotted.
WTF are you even saying, we’re talking about cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol
I’m surprised we don’t have global internet outages more often.
DNS constantly has weird little issues and attacks, same with ARP. Meanwhile, BGP just keeps on chugging along in the background, ignored and unappreciated, day in and day out.
Also, the route back to the source host doesn’t have to be same as the route out.
Despite the many issues that it can cause, that is an important feature of BGP. Since network connections can be asymmetrical, and outbound and inbound connections can have different requirements, the best (or most adequate) route from A to B might not be the best route from B to A.
The longevity of concrete isn’t just tied to the cylinder break strength.
Also, concrete with certain aggregates end up creating silica gel, which is bad for concrete.
This is indeed a concrete technical fact!
Got to make sure I’m providing what OP wants.
Well, played, my friend, well played.
Which aggregates?
What are some other tests you can use to decide which concrete is best for you?
Aggregates with a lot of unstable silica like strained quartz can cause the creation of silica gel when exposed to cement. The aggregate supplier should be the one running tests to prove they don’t have reactive silica.
Other tests include air entrainment and the slump test. The concrete mix requirements should be chosen by the engineer or architect.
Good to know, thank you!
An example from my field of expertise: Mixing different kinds of metals in wet environments causes the less noble one to corrode.
The phrase “sacrificial anode” comes to mind
That reminds me, I need to get a new one for my hot water tank. I’ve lived here 6 years, you’re supposed to change them around 5.
It can be the difference between a water heater lasting 7 years and lasting 30.
Wait, that’s a thing?
If it is, then my 10 yr old hot water heater isn’t happy.
Yup, they stop your tank from rusting out. If you replace them regularly your tank will last virtually forever. If you don’t, you’ll be replacing the water tank before too long. A sacrificial anode costs around $50 bucks or so, a tank costs a lot more.
Here’s a video showing you how to do it. It’s not very hard at all. https://www.thisoldhouse.com/heating-cooling-2/how-to-replace-an-anode-rod-on-a-water-heater
Well shit.
Yeah. The worst part is that a lot of engineers and technicians don’t fully understand galvanic corrosion when specifying how to attach two different metals together.
Microwaves can cause water to become super heated and explosive upon touch.
This includes things that are mostly water, like uncracked raw eggs.
Even cracked raw eggs can be volatile if you don’t scramble them.
The asphalt pavement of roads must be 4 inches thick to last forever. 3 inches lasts 5 years, 2 inches lasts one year, 1 inch is crumbling before you finish. You constantly see crumbling roads in the third world because of corruption, they don’t put as much pavement down as they charge for.
Now that’s a concrete fact
An asphalt fact, rather. Asphalt facts have lower modulus, so they are more adaptable to the point of the conversation.
Concrete being called cement.
I don’t see how that creates any issues
The workers at the jobsite are going to have an issue when they’ve showed up to pour a slab and your cement order arrives.
It’s like expecting dough and receiving a bag of flour.
I understand this anology.
You need to test your restore procedure all the way through & periodically to have confidence in your backups
The Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The borders between countries in the Middle East including India/Pakistan were deliberately drawn to cause conflict. Of course when that conflict started to come back home everyone was shocked pikachu faced about it. I really don’t understand why people of those countries don’t just throw away the map and sort it out amongst themselves like adults, but I guess expecting world leaders of a majority of countries to act like adults is a bit much to ask most of the time.
kashmere, and northern india/bordering china. one wants the whole terrority the other wants the same, a pretense to expand later on.
Among many other reasons, the biggest reason for me that the US stock market cannot be trusted is because market makers combine 3 techniques to create fraud and push risk to others to dilute unwitting companies and investors: borrow stocks, selling a borrowed stock to buy later, strategically failing to deliver stock.
Borrowing stocks doesn’t create a clean paper trail, can be done repeatedly, and steals shareholder votes.
Selling a borrowed stock to buy later can strategically intend to fail from the start where they don’t even have to locate (not even acquire as you might assume) a share to borrow, effectively creating new shares out of thin air. Market makers in the US can legally do this, even for the benefit of their hedge fund counterparts (sometimes under the same company).
Fails for stock delivery are allowed, so they’re a strategy. Cash in lieu is not the same as share ownership. Cash is fungible, stocks are not, and this gap can create technically infinite risk.
Nah, the stock markets were fixed in 2008!
They created dark pools.
But in seriousness this unrealistic playground should be completely separated from real economics and fucks everything up.
Your infinite risk is my infinite gain 🍌
Inheritance.
Lol what
He’s obviously talking about the book series by Christopher Paolini.
Software dev.
