My understanding is that bees actually use circles. It's just that the wax ends up warm and a bit flow-y, resulting in the circular tubes naturally warping into the efficient hexagon shape. The bees aren't making hexagons on purpose necessarily, nature just prefers the shape and is generally awesome.

You mean an editorial opinion piece? Call me when you have something, not when you find a Trumpster who agrees with Trump. I don't have Wall Street Journal account, so I can only read paragraph one.

There's no question in anybody's mind why Trump's unqualified appointee chose now to dismantle the post offices ability to deliver mail, when it's needed most. Any problems the post office has had existed when Trump came into office, some have worsened since (edit:holy shit! They've doubled annual losses under Trump's perfect business acumen, now nearly $9 billion a year loss and skyrocketing!), but they did nothing about it until months before an election ( that is depending on the post office) to make changes, changes that make them less efficient, cost money, and make them incapable of on time delivery (so incapable of handling the election). Not one bit of that is by accident.

The post office cannot raise postage rates without congressional approval, and have other congressionally mandated costs costing them billions ( https://news.nd.edu/news/postal-service-losing-money-because-of-congressional-mandate-not-low-prices-expert-says/) so the letter side of the business is losing money, the package delivery side Trump complains about has mostly paid the bills for a while now, but they still lose millions/billions as a unit, that's why they asked for I think $23 billion to upgrade to be able to meet historic minimum standards and $3 billion to cover extra costs associated with the election, money Trump says are no go because they'll allow fraudulent voting (the first sitting president ever to go to great lengths to ensure the smallest vote count, btw)...but recently said he would sign a bill including that funding for the post office if Democrats agree to billions more in more tax cuts that mostly benefit people like....wait for it....himself (as if the deficit isn't growing fast enough). If he really thought mail in voting was fraudulent, why would he agree to do it for anything? Isn't that selling out democracy?! Aren't you enraged?!?

Ammonimum nitrate does require a sensitizer in order to be explosive, however this stuff was intended for blasting, so it presumably already had something mixed in with it. The other requirement is a low explosive detonator, eg blasting caps. In this case it was probably a random accident, so not as efficient as a deliberate blasting setup.

The colour of the plume apparently indicates a lot of unexploded nitrates. Ammonium Nitrate needs to be mixed with other things for an efficient reaction. Once the explosion started the reaction couldn't continue efficiently and the excess was expelled into the plume.

Bob,

Here's where we agree on something.

I came from amazing wealth, like total top .01%, then lost everything and ended up in absolute poverty. I taught myself a valuable skill and kept building and building on it. It started with shit jobs, but I kept learning and doing more and never stopped believing in myself or in my ability to better my circumstance. I went to college and learned how to learn more efficiently. Even now, I'm improving my skills on a daily basis. 40 years later, now I'm in the 1%.

This is America to me, one part of it: that in America, you at least have a chance -- however small, however improbable -- to better yourself through your own skills, drive and determination. It's not a 100% guarantee, but I honestly haven't seen another country that fosters this attitude.

For the nb, did I have a leg up? Definitely. I was born with an extraordinary mind into a hyper-affluent family. As a child I went to the best public schools in America during a time when education was valued above all else. By the time my mom and I were basically on the street, I had enough base knowledge to build on what I'd already learned. I also took advantage of community college when it was all but free ($50 a semester) and was able to take pretty much any class that interested me. I was also able to afford a computer when they were very expensive and complicated.

Finally, I was born a white male and caught innumerable breaks because of that. I have zero doubt that I am where I am in part to this accident of birth, because I was told by cops, teachers and employers, sometimes quite openly and sometimes in coded language, that I was preferred over non-white people.

For all America's sin -- and many be thy score -- the nucleus of true capitalism is still alive.

Newt,

This is in response to your comment on my statement about Biden needing to lose in '20.

I recently wrote this as a reply to one of my readers (I write under a number of different names in other places).:

Dear <name>,

>I took some time to absorb what you wrote. It's a lot to juggle. The Atlantic has an article in the July-August issue on the worst and best case scenario in CLO defaults. I'll read more.

I read the article you mentioned, and while it's certainly good, it also misses a very important point that explains the mess we're in: the collapse of Lehman and Bear-Stearns, while catastrophic in their own ways, were not the nightmare that caused the Fed to freak out in 2008 -- AIG was. Had AIG gone under and the counterparty default contracts triggered, we'd be on the barter system right now. We came within hours of not having an economy in the western world. The $700b ($.7t) the Fed coughed up to stop this from happening calmed the panic, but did nothing to resolve the underlying issues. These issues continued to compound during the 2011-2020 stock run-up and now we're at the point where the Fed is throwing trillions of dollars at every piece of bad debt they can find just to keep the whole thing from imploding into an economic black hole. It is important to note that in September '19, the credit markets started freezing because of the debt that was already on the books then, -before- CV-19 started rolling, and it took $3t just to get them unlocked again. Absolutely nothing has gotten better since then, and I would argue things have gotten dangerously worse.

In an odd coincidence, the NYT ran an article today about the looming bankruptcy crisis. They're calling for 30-60 days before things start imploding, but I'll stick to my estimate of ~90 days. There's some talk about extending the $600 benefits (we'll see) and chatter about another stimulus check, but that's kicking the can as well as telegraphing how bad things really are. When the Republicans are getting behind free money, you know we're in some uncharted territory. For all intents and purposes, Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) -- the reason the Fed is backstopping debt and printing money like crazy -- is the hill the US economy will live or die on. Should the US dollar come unpegged as the world's de facto currency or should inflation begin (and there's already worrying signs this is happening), that's game over.

Please don't take anything I say as the Word of God; please do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Everything I've said is an opinion based on my education, experience and way of thinking. Your mileage may vary.

Here is the article I mentioned: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/18/business/corporate-bankruptcy-coronavirus.html -- might be paywalled, but clear your cookies for the NYT and you should be able to read it.


>Frankly, it's the physical danger in my area of the States that concerns me. There are the guns and bullying. During some BLM demonstrations in the Midwest, locals were standing around with semi-automatics. I drive a Prius for the fuel efficiency. Pick up trucks enjoy tailgating, trying to intimidate me. This behavior isn't going to change with a change of President but will get worse is we don't change. This ideological push to takeover the country instead of ruling by compromise started around the same time we came to the US in 1981, Reagan's first year. I was so shocked when I heard talk radio for the first time; this wasn't the country I had left in the 1970s.


And now we come to the giant pile of sweaty dynamite that's just waiting for the right shock to set it off. I could give you a prolonged lecture about how this all started in 1978 with California's Proposition 13, or how David Stockman's tragically prescient warnings were blatantly ignored, but Haynes Johnson does a far better job at this than I ever could in his 1991 book "Sleepwalking Through History", as does Kevin Phillips in 2006's "American Theocracy". Honestly, at this point, the prelude is academic. The reality of the situation is that a large swath of adult Americans are appalling ill-educated, innumerate and devoid of even the most basic critical-thinking skills. These people are now locked out of the Information Economy. They lack the most basic skills required to compete in the 21st century job market and thus will watch their standard of living sink into the abyss. These people are not blind to this fact because they're living with the reality of their situation every single day. They're totally without hope, cut off from all avenues of control over their own lives and they feel utterly abandoned by the very people who're supposed to be helping them. The reason you're seeing bullying and behavior like that is because these same people are totally removed from any avenues of recourse and the only people they can take their anger out on are people like you and me. Their anger is being stoked on a daily basis. FOX News and the GOP are experts at this and have a host of boogeymen to keep the anger from being pointed their way: ANTIFA, BLM (black Americans have always made a perfect target), "coastal elites" and, of course, Liberals.

Trump's election was a warning, not an outlier. Trump was the primal scream of these people and Liberals and the Democrats as a whole chose not to listen because they found the sound so abhorrent. The rage will only get worse and the number of people enveloped by this rage will only grow as economic conditions worsen. At this point, it no longer matters who wins in '20. Winning the election will be like winning the deed to the World Trade Center one second after the first jet hit. The damage has already been done and no steps are being taken to repair it; if anything, people are actively making it worse either through ideological blindness, deliberate malfeasance or outright stupidity. It took almost 50 years to get to this point and the endemic issues will not be undone in a single generation, much less a single election. Until the people who voted for Trump feel a sense of real hope, a sense of control over their lives and a genuine expectation of recourse for their grievances, they will keep right on voting for Trump, or people like him.

My unfortunate suspicion is that this country will rip itself to shreds long before those reforms are enacted.

Side note: the fundamental difference between the United States and Europe is that European history has forced the nations of Europe to live with the consequences of their actions. Not so the United States. Europe has suffered for her sins. Not so the United States. The two bloodiest wars in human history were fought on European soil. Not so the United States. The United States has never faced true suffering, nor has it ever had to live with the ramifications of its own actions. Both these facts are about to change and a nation whose character is built on a mythology of individual action and violence is going to have to face reality. The people of this nation are not prepared for this and they will not like it.

Second side note: many people are erroneously comparing the current situation to the Wiemar Republic. This is a lack of historical understanding. A more apt comparison would be to Spain in late 1935.


>As for re-opening, we could have gotten some control if the "leader" had simply donned a mask and used realistic thinking. People could go back to work more safely, wash hands, stay a certain distance. But his hubris led the way, so now we'll have a roller coaster for months and years that will affect the economy even more. France is a good comparison because they were unprepared also, having slashed the public healthcare budget for the last twenty years. But when they laid down the rules, troops patrolled the streets to be sure they were followed. So far, they've flattened the curve (for now), and used different economic incentives, such as paying part of employees' salaries to keep them employed.

At this point, the pace of re-opening is a difference between very bad and much worse. Had $3t been used to pay the yearly salary of every American, we could have saved lives and the economy, but we didn't. The history of 2020 will be littered with "what-ifs". However, the first thing you learn when studying history is that what-ifs are useless because things are what they are and you can't change that. It's already obvious we're going into a second wave. If previous pandemics are any indication of what's to come, this second wave will be many times worse than the first. The wait for a vaccine is indeterminate, but if we're going for herd immunity, ~70% of Americans will need to catch the virus. To date, ~1.5% have. If the US population is ~330 million, ~230 million will need to catch the virus. Call the mortality rate 2%, that means ~4.6 million Americans will die. That's a lot of dead Americans and grieving families.

Take care,

(my actual name)

Worked for an place I can't discuss trying to make things more efficient. We worked our socks off creating a product which made a small but significant task much faster.

We worked out we could save people 20 mins each per day, ran the numbers across the place and realised it added up to a large number of people freed to do more valuable work.

Then we went to speak to a user at about 1:30pm. "Oh I'm sorry, are you on lunch?". He had his feet up on his desk, reading a book. "No, I'm just done for the day". "You're working a half day?", "No I've finished". "Finished what?" "My 10 widgets for the day".

We realised all we'd done was allow this guy to start reading his book at 1:10pm.

Designed by an accountant most likely because it achieves the efficiency goal of having fewer people to hire and pay to pickup trash. However, it seems that having a more complicated machine would require more people to fix or maintain it.

I remember when I was a kid, the garbage truck had a driver and 2-3 guys that ran ahead to pick up the trash cans and dump it in the truck as it drove slowly down the street. We now have a similar two-man system, but it's not like the one in the video. It has a crane thing in the back, one guy drives the truck and another gets out and pulls the trash cans to the back of the truck for the crane to pick up and dump in.

It seems slower as the truck is constantly stopping and going and it's just one guy dumping one can at a time. I suppose it's safer, and also requires fewer people to pay.

Maybe an Engineer filming that absolute failure of mechanical design. Seriously, that is the dumbest automated pickup system ever. It achieves exactly 0 efficiency goals.

I was thinking about car safety and how the biggest variable is likely the driver...how specific cars are driven on average, and it struck me that the best way to promote public safety would be to make your maximum speed limit variable based on gvw (gross vehicle weight). This is already done for vehicles with more than two axles or those towing trailers because it's obvious they take longer to stop. The same logic should apply to every car. It's a no brainer that a Humvee takes longer to stop than a Miata, and is far less controllable under emergency braking. For the safety of both those in such larger vehicles and the general public, they should not be allowed to go as fast as cars weighing 1/4 their weight with better brakes.
A side benefit of such a system would be greater average fuel economy, because bigger cars have greater wind resistance (on average) so become less efficient at higher speeds.
Of course, I wouldn't expect that kind of reason to ever fly in America where the most popular car is a heavy truck that's never used for hauling and could be replaced with a Honda Civic with no loss of functionality for >75% of owners....but everyone wants to drive a tank so they're safer, with no thought about what that means for the other cars on the road.

*quality explanation of why crash testing is only a tiny part of real life safety in cars
*promote

I just want to know where this originated?

I really want them to explain the process of how their butt holes are converting the sun's energy at a more efficient rate than the rest of their skin.

What is the secret of the butt hole energy efficiency? =)

Nice. So, as expected, while it does technically work, it's hardly efficient and is incredibly more expensive than desalination.

Sounds good, but .08kWh per liter is 80kWh per M³. Desalination is as low as 2-3kWh per M³. That makes this technology very inefficient by comparison. Useful where absolutely no other source is available.
It bears noting that no where can I find the cost of his machine, only estimates of operation energy costs. Others that make 250 liters per day (with enough humidity) cost around $8500 on eBay. That makes me think his larger unit is likely 10 times that cost or more.
Also, he didn't invent this technology, Arye Kohavi is credited with that, but he may have made it more efficient. Essentially it's an industrial dehumidifier and nothing more.

for more background, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor

I would have liked to hear how efficient this is.

@bcglorf Here's a tome for you....


It's certainly not (the only way). Converting to green energy sources stimulates the economy, it doesn't bankrupt it, and it makes it more efficient in the future thanks to lower energy costs. My solar system paid for itself in 8 years, giving me an expected 12 years of free electricity and hot water. Right wingers would tell you it will never pay for itself....utter bullshit.

Every gap in our knowledge I've ever seen that we have filled with data has made the estimates worse. Every one. Every IPCC report has raised the severity and shrunk the timeframe from the last report....but you stand on the last one that they admit was optimistic and incomplete by miles as if it's the final word and a gold standard. It just isn't. They themselves admit this.

The odds of catastrophic climate change is 100% in the next 0 years for many who have already died or been displaced by rising seas or famine or disease or lack of water or...... and that goes for all humanity in the next 50 because those who survive displacement will be refugees on the rest's doorsteps. Don't be ridiculous. If we found an asteroid guaranteed to hit in the next 50-100 years, and any possible solutions take a minimum of 50 years to implement with no surprises, and only then assuming we solve the myriad of technical issues we haven't solved in the last 100 years of trying and only if we can put the resources needed into a solution, not considering the constantly worsening barrage of smaller asteroids and the effects on resources and civilisation, we would put all our resources into solutions. That's where I think we are, except we still have many claiming there's no asteroid coming and those that already hit are fake news....including those in the highest offices making the decisions.

Every IPCC report has vastly underestimated their projections, they tell you they are doing it, only including data they are certain of, not new measurements or functions. They do not fill in the gaps, they leave them empty. Gaps like methane melt that could soon be more of a factor than human CO2, and 100% out of our control.

The AR5 report is so terrible, it was lambasted from day one as being incredibly naive and optimistic, and for not including what was then new data. Since its release, those complaints have been proven to be correct, in 5 years since its release ice melt rates have accelerated 60 years by their model. I wouldn't put a whit of confidence in it, it was terrible then, near criminally bad today. I'll take NOAA's estimates based on much newer science and guess that they, like nearly all others in the past, also don't know everything and are also likely underestimating wildly. Even the IPCC AR5 report includes the possibility of 3 ft rise by 2100 under their worst case (raised another 10% in this 2019 report, and expected to rise again by 2021, their next report), and their worst case models show less heat and melting than we are measuring already and doesn't include natural feedbacks because they can't model them accurately yet so just left them out (but noted they will have a large effect, but it's not quantitative yet so not included). Long and short, their worst case scenario is likely optimistic as reality already outpaces their worst case models.

Again, the economy benefits from new energy production in multiple ways. Exxon is not the global economy.

It took 100 years for the impact of our pollution to be felt by most (some still ignore it today). Even the short term features like methane take 25+ years to run their cycles, so what we do today takes that long to start working.

If people continue to drag their feet and challenge the science with supposition, insisting the best case scenario of optimistic studies are the worst we should plan for, we're doomed....and what they're doing is actually worse than that. The power plants built or under construction today put us much higher than 1.5 degree rise by 2100 with their expected emissions without ever building 1 more, and we're building more. Without fantastic scientific breakthroughs that may never come, breakthroughs your plan relies on for our survival, what we've already built puts us beyond the IPCC worst case in their operational lifetimes.

There's a problem with that...I'm good with using real science to identify them without political obstruction and confusion, the difference being we need to be prepared for decisive action once they're identified. So far, we have plans to develop those actions, but that's it. In the event of a "surprise" asteroid, we're done. We just hope they're rare.
This one, however, is an asteroid that is guaranteed to hit if we do nothing, some say hit in 30 years, some say 80. Only morons say it won't hit at all, do nothing.
Climate change is an asteroid/comet in our orbit that WILL hit earth. We are already being hit by ejecta from it's coma causing disasters for millions. You suggest we don't start building a defense until we are certain of it's exact tonnage and the date it will crash to earth because it's expensive and our data incomplete. That plan leaves us too late to change the trajectory. The IPCC said we need to deploy our system in 8-10 years to have a 30-60% chance of changing the trajectory under perfect conditions....you seem to say "wait, that's expensive, let's give it some time and ignore that deadline". I say even just a continent killer is bad enough to do whatever it takes to stop, because it's cheaper with less loss of life and infinitely less suffering than a 'wait and see exactly when it will kill us, we might have space elevators in 10 years so it might only kill 1/2 of us and the rest might survive that cometary winter in space (yes at exponentially higher cost and loss of life and ecology than developing the system today, but that won't be on my dime so Fuck it).' attitude.