In this case, though, it probably wasn’t $3.80. That’s what the cost would have been to the owner of the gas station, but to the cashier, letting a customer walk with goods could cost them their job. Definitely a different risk/reward

I didn’t even know there were non 24hr locations

Recyclability, too

I have friends with one of those valves on their shower, and it’s really easy to use. One thing I wonder about is how it effects things down the line. They have a septic tank, but I’m also thinking of greywater systems for watering plants or whatever.

Could the concentration of soap in the water interphere with things?

You are thinking of legionnaires disease

Cigna doctors spend an average of 1.2 seconds per case. Their whole system is to deny everything right off the bat, and then they only have to potentially pay out for patients who have the resources to appeal.

That’s exactly how you do it. It’s not same-day, but if you really need a passport same day, you probably messed something up, lol.

If it is expired, I don’t think you can do it. Just if you are in the last year of validity.

That’s how it has been in the US. Now, though, if you already have a passport, you can renew online and take the picture yourself, and get it mailed directly to you.

The thing that makes getting a passport slightly tricky to begin with in some circumstances is needing proper ID. In the US, there’s no generalized law saying that you have to have certain forms of ID. Most people use drivers licenses as ID, but obviously not everyone has one (by choice or as a consequence of drunk driving). There are a lot of people without ID, and there are ways to get ID, but they can be difficult for people without resources. A birth certificate is hard to get if you don’t have one already, especially if you don’t know where you were born.

Here is a really good article about the topic. The gist is that typically in mountaineering, there’s not often an official definition of the “start point”, but the “end point” is back at the start, so people who die midway on the return journey don’t “count”. The “top” should be easy to define, but often, the top of a mountain is a large area, and you aren’t going to hike around looking for which part is just barely the highest. Also, some true summits are habitually avoided as sacred places to the locals.

They try really hard not to explain how the system works. It doesn’t mention it at all in this news story, or anywhere easy to find on their site. I crunched some numbers, and it seems like this device has about double the heat capacity for the mass than just plain water would have. That means it probably has to be a phase change material. All of the “smarts” and app control is nice, but at its core, it’s really simple concept. I think this kind of thing would sell better if instead of trying to make it sound high-tech, they just admitted it was a low tech solution that they’ve made user friendly.

I did find this mention in the site q and a:

Q: What is the storage medium made of?

A: Proprietary mix of high-density, inert, non-toxic and low impact materials

I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.

Oculus was founded by a shitty person who sold to Facebook and then went on to help make a company to bring Big Tech into surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. Basically, he’s trying to bring on an orwellian nightmare.

Oculus would have gone bad weather or not Facebook bought them.

A huge problem with the wine industry in America is that they’ve always tried to position themselves as a premium product with respect to other forms of alcohol. With respect to the information available to the consumer, the pricing seems to be random. Products that are aged understandably are going to cost more, and huge brands should be cheaper than small brands. Other than that, prices just seem to be set to correspond to whatever market segment they are targeting. A $20 bottle of wine may taste way better than a $15 bottle, but it could also be worse. There’s no indication of what could make the $20 bottle better than the $15 bottle other than the fact that it’s more expensive. Some brands put a little bit more info in, like the percentage of grapes, and sometimes they tell you where the grapes came from, but most consumers are just going to grab the cheaper bottle.

Contrast this with beer, where you know higher abv=more ingredients=more expensive, aged beers are more expensive, and beers from smaller or foreign breweries are more expensive. Breweries often tell you the exact ingredients that went in, so you can get a decent idea of what a beer will taste like before ordering, and you can make an informed decision to buy slightly more expensive products.

Wine is a little more tricky because there are fewer ingredients, and less processing, but they could absolutely give way more info. The wines that are good just try to market it as the magic of terroir in a bottle, rather than actually pointing out how and why they are better or taste different.

Coffee beans aren’t beans. There are some beans that are roasted as a substitute for coffee, like the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree. In times of shortage, people have tried many things to replace coffee, like dandelion and chicory root. For the most part, the substitutes arent as good as the original, so people don’t stick with them. There’s a chance someone has tried to roast and brew pinto beans or whatever, but they probably taste bad.

Yeah, if you watch a video on old water powered mills, they had all sorts of transmissions built out of wood, including clutches to turn on and off the power.

The headlight thing is really cool

I’ve heard (though I can’t say authoritatively), that while “american” is obviously used for people from the USA, “americano” applies to all residents of the New World in Spanish in most countries that speak it. Wikipedia seems to agree:

In Spanish, americano denotes geographic and cultural origin in the New World, as well as (infrequently) a U.S. citizen;[13][14][c] the more common term is estadounidense (“United States person”), which derives from Estados Unidos de América

Here’s some thoughts off the top of my head.

There are loads of wiring in a car, that can all be reused.

Depending on the vehicle, the wheels/suspension could be converted to like a trailer or something.

The seats can be pulled out as chairs.

Various pumps can be used for moving fluids (though you’d probably want to be careful with that, hazmat-wise).

The transmission could be rigged up to a wind/water mill to adjust rotational velocity of a sawmill or some other industrial application.

Windows are tricky cause the shapes are weird, but they could be set in clay or concrete or something.

Alternators are definitely useful.

Headlights for spotlights.

Protesters and police don’t wear masks for covid, they wear them so they can’t be identified. Places like Hong Kong used them heavily before covid existed.

That lance Hedrick video had a lot of good relevant info.

I’ll add that the definition of “light” changes as much as the definition of women’s pants sizes do. Its essentially “vanity sizing”, but for flavor. Most consumers, at the end of the day, want their coffee to taste exactly how they are used to, but they paradoxically also want to be having something “different” or “unique”. It’s why Hawaii is full of roasters selling $70 bags of coffee that taste the same as $8 grocery store bags.

Roasters have to weigh whether to give accurate info that will appeal to us nerds, or whether to aim for the general populace. There are probably many roasters who legitimately don’t know better, but I’d reckon many roasters are just making the economical choice.