Phi for All

Car washing, and living in states with an "A" in them? Hmm, not so much. It may be called the same thing, but the Chinese and Mexican food in California are very different from the Chinese and Mexican food in either Texas or Florida. We all hate intolerance, and the Swiss. ... at some point over the last 45 years.

Get one of those RC model Harrier jets, and step up your game. "Seriously, MigL is freaking meowt." -- Mittens ! Moderator Note You cast Resurrection on the thread, using your +3 spell focus. Black tendrils of necrotic magic wrap themselves around the ancient, 10 year-old corpse, and with a dusty gasp, the spam is brought back to life.

What's the application? Are you looking to save money on the alternatives, or is there a supply problem?

! Moderator Note I had to beat that article to death with a broom, then used another broom to sweep the first one away. What a stinker! Asutoshjha, for homework purposes, the member's replies have actual science going for them. Which is nice.

I think it becomes very dirty when misapplied, like most things. There's nothing wrong with reasonable ownership, whether private, public, or state. I don't approve mixing the funding between them. If an enterprise is private, it shouldn't be getting public or state funding without an extremely good reason. Public programs should be as self-sufficient as possible, and not rely on private interests to accomplish their goals. My country was woefully underprepared for the pandemic. Part of the reason why We the People had no stockpile of PPE was because of how much We pay for things like roads. In Germany, when they put asphalt down on the Autobahn, they close that section off for 90 days to let the asphalt cure, so they don't have to fix it again for 10 years (it was that way here, when I was young). In the US today, the road crews are mostly private now, even in major cities, and we drive on the asphalt the day it's put down, which means it will need resurfacing in 2 years. Post-pandemic, I'd love to see People pick a few very important things (water, roads, education, healthcare, energy, internet, ?, ?) and nationalize them, transfer ownership to the People, and then work very hard to keep them free from private influences. I'd like to actually see capitalism thrive in a true free market, without subsidies and monopolistic practices. I think we've allowed too many capitalists to convince us to run non-profits and public institutions like businesses, to the detriment of all. Business is necessary, but it's not always the right tool or process for the job.

And now I have a company making red Draft Dodger window snakes for the anti-draft movement. They're printed with "Make America Calm Again", and they're filled with shredded voter ballots. Available in Small, Medium, and Yuge.

Beyond predatory capitalism, I also fault sports for promoting "fame" culture. Internet influencers, politicians, actors, and sports stars all contribute to a negative and harmful perspective on famous people. Fame means you're above the law, you aren't subject to normal rules of behavior, you get to do and say anything you want, and people have to kiss your ass. Since Charles Barkley finally removed that tired old "be a role model for kids" clause, all this behavior is held up for our children to see as legitimate. If you're popular, it's not really abuse when you make fun of others. If you have a lot of money and everyone knows you, you're empowered to behave as you like, regardless of consequences, and I think children are idolizing these people because of all the positive attention they receive even when their behavior is negative. Fame and wealth idolization have also led to placing unnecessary trust in some of these people. Being good at making money or acting in a movie or throwing a baseball doesn't make you a good leader automatically, yet we regularly allow fame to cloud even this simple truth.

! Moderator Note Your questions regarding storage of collectibles aren't appropriate for a science discussion forum, especially since it's clear you don't really listen to the replies. I'm going to request that you go someplace more specific to your problems, like: https://forums.collectors.com/categories/sports-cards-memorabilia-forum https://collectorsedition.org/forums/ I'm not endorsing these sites, but they seem more in line with your needs, and I'm sure you'll get more meaningful replies. General chemistry is probably not the aspect you need to focus on. Thread closed, don't open up any more of these.

The original Rollerball (1975) had an impact on me. A corporate society that removed the good parts of individual accomplishment in favor of the worst parts of team play seemed prophetic to me at the time, just going into college. And over the next 20 years I watched the corporations gain power and pervert the working and middle classes in the US in similar ways. The aspects of human society that truly unite us? We have an extremely rich and nuanced ability to communicate with each other, coupled with the technology to extend that ability virtually everywhere we exist as a species. We are one of the most cooperative species when we forget to be afraid of those who look or act differently. We are often intelligent enough to recognize when something is so important that it requires all our efforts, regardless of nationality or profit or personal fears. We can make a tool to overcome most inadequacies we face, and often we can agree when one of those tools is the best for a particular job.

Damned effective excluder, too. Bet you never had any giraffe problems growing up. Those snakes are an obvious choking hazard! Limbo! How low can you go?

Have you made any draught snakes? Fill some old tube socks (or sew up the arm from a long-sleeved shirt) with dry rice, making a "snake" you can put at the base of draughty windows and doors. Cheap and effective, and you don't have to keep flipping them over.

Competition between teams of elite athletes has many admirable aspects, but I'll never participate in that, only watch it. So I choose to focus on the spectator aspect, which is where I think modern sports drag us down as a species into tribal, paint-your-face animalism and brutishness. The teams pretend lofty values while celebrity sports stars get away with murder. Fans continue tribal rivalries well after they leave the stadiums. They get their interests artificially whipped up while they're part of the mob and most likely don't hear any respect in the after-fight interviews. I'm perhaps jaded by the asshat white males I see in their team-festooned pickup trucks behaving like cavemen while whooping it up on the highways on the way to a game. Sports are promoted as rivalries, and I think far too many people make far too much money keeping humans at each other's throats about one thing or another. What works for arms dealers works for sports as well. It's just business.

I'm not willing to give up my shilling. In the US, when private providers take over public utilities, they often get subsidized for unprofitable circumstances. An ongoing argument with the TVA (government owned power provider) is that it should be sold to private interests, AND because the Tennessee Valley is a difficult area physically to reach with power lines, in order to continue to provide affordable service to the residents, those private interests want government subsidies as well to offset their added costs. So my bet is that somewhere along the line, some of your England & Wales water providers are getting some extra taxpayer funding because some folks are harder to reach but can't afford the added costs.

So there are no areas in England or Wales that pose a distribution problem for private providers? Places where getting water to people costs more, but the residents overall can't afford private schemes?

Sorry, but I see this as wishful thinking. In reality, sports in general seems to be just another way to pit rivals against each other in a non-lethal way, but only exacerbates the problems with modern humans competing for "fun". We've worked hard so most people don't have to compete for resources, yet the animal in "us" wants the pleasure of crushing "them". The mindset sports encourages in modern, money-oriented settings is similar to modern business practices, and "winning at all costs" takes precedence over "reaching the top together". I don't think sports unite us, just the opposite. Saying it's a good thing because people all over the world are into it is bad reasoning. Humans are into a LOT of things that are horribly harmful to us and the planet.

Bet you a shilling your government subsidizes the water companies in addition to what they get from consumers. Usually it's for R&D, future technologies, better methods and practices, whatever. The US often lets the private companies only do the really profitable work, and it keeps the low-profit parts publicly funded. Our private prisons don't have to house certain inmates if they prove cost-ineffective.

That qualifies as a major capitalism shakeup, if they can pull it off. What about renationalizing water in England and Wales? I always thought roads were the most logical thing the citizens of a country could own, until I heard that y'all gave up your WATER to private interests.

If you believe George Carlin, Jeff's thrust is to prick holes in the stiff front erected by the national space programs.

Exactly. For an outdoor fireplace, it would seem the main factors are heat, light, and duration, all to provide various ambiances (I'm assuming this fire isn't for cooking). You can adjust these by configuring your fire differently, or by using different woods. Soft woods get started more easily, but hard woods burn longer. You need some context before you could say a specific treatment was harmful to a particular process. I'm not a big wood burner, but isn't this why firewood should be seasoned before burning, to dry it out as much as possible?

That pretty face has been getting you in trouble your whole life.

One of the creepiest things I remember seeing was in the opening credits for American Horror Story: Asylum. For just a split second, they show a woman bent all the way over backwards, walking on her hands and feet up some stairs like a big spider. It was SO unnatural, and it still gives me the willies thinking about it.

I'm not so sure. "Creepy" feels to me like a judgement based on specific differences, and ambulation may be one of them. Spiders and snakes seem "creepy" because they don't move right from our perspective, never have and never will. Too many legs on the spider, and none at all on the snake! The way they move is creepy mostly because it seems more unpredictable than the two or four limb movement we encounter most. If it's harder to predict what they might do, that adds to how creepy something is. Don't get me started on jumping spiders. Eight legs means when you jump, you're so fast it looks like you just disappeared. Despite those who keep them as pets, I don't think comparing any reptile or arachnid with a domesticated mammal is meaningful. Insect bites are a problem almost everywhere, and long term consequences complicate surviving them: https://sma.org/southern-medical-journal/article/national-estimates-of-noncanine-bite-and-sting-injuries-treated-in-us-hospital-emergency-departments-2011-2015/

I will share some science, instead of my ideas. Based on the best current information, the universe isn't expanding INTO anything. The universe is all there is, so "from a single point" and "everywhere at the same time" are not different theories. The universe expanded from a very dense and very hot state, and the expansion evolved into what we observe now. The LCDM model details all the maths that support this. Do you think there's a problem with the model? The universe may be infinite; we don't know. It may be finite, we don't know. The observable universe is finite. Spacetime is geometry, not a physical thing that can be layered over a structure. You can't bring me a bucket of spacetime. It's a system of reference that denotes the degrees of freedom we have to move about; three spatial dimensions and a temporal dimension so we can measure when and where any phenomena take place. NOT an explosion! Explosions explode outwards INTO something. The Big Bang was a rapid expansion of the whole universe. The maths we have can take us back until just a moment before the beginning of the expansion, but then they show us INFINTE densities and INFINITE heat, and we know that can't be right, so the model starts where our knowledge starts, at 10−43 seconds after expansion began. We CAN'T know exactly what was going on before, since the last thing we know is that the entire universe was filled homogenously and isotropically (everything was made the same and behaved the same) with this density and heat. "Ideas" about what happened before can only be worthless guesswork, since there's no way to check or predict.

Mean? We won't attack you personally. We'll be civil because it's our #1 rule. But we will attack your ideas. And hopefully show you where you need more study. You use a lot of unfamiliar terms, and some of your information is broken. Light can't escape from a black hole, for instance. The negative reactions are for the misinformed bits. If you stick around and read more than you post (a wise formula), there's a whole lot of good science for you to discover.

! Moderator Note You had me at baseless. Thread closed, because everybody has better things to do.