That and post-scarcity doesn’t mean “zero scarcity”. Like if someone wanted to create a picard funkpop the size of a planet, I don’t think they’d be allowed the resource budget.

It’s like how it doesn’t matter where you live, if you want to buy on the silk road, you need bitcoin. Presumably even the federation can’t just make latinum whenever they please, or we wouldn’t see them haggle with it. Although, it would be fun to see that they could and just take the responsibility of not crashing non-federation cultures entire economies very seriously, either out of respect or treaty.

Damnit, I want a LD episode where the crew is frustrated and desperately wants to just “buy” their problem away but can’t because an economist at command says it’ll mean they have to rescue all these non-federation colonies that are currently self sufficient. Come to think of it it’s right there with the “you break it you own it” concept of the prime directive.

I’m just going to give a quick overview of what wastewater treatment is and does.

The basic idea is that you can have something like a can of 7-up, it looks clean, but would kill a fish dead. It’s got loads of dissolved sugar, and if you dumped it into a river, microbes would go nots on the sugar, sucking out all the oxygen as they grew, and causing a boatload of other problems.

But you can’t filter dissolved sugar. I mean you can but it requires a highly specialized filter that would imeaditley foul is wastewater. And we’re not just talking dissolved sugar, there’s a whole range of everything in there.

So we do something very simple: we let the 7up grow moldy. 7 up would go through a coffee filter, but mold wouldnt. We let the mold suck up the sugar, then seperate that.

In reality it’s a bit different but that’s the idea. We grow a ton of microbes, let them suck everything out, then move them to another tank where they all stick together and settle to the bottom. The result is that the liquid at the top of the tank is clear, and free of anything dissolved as the bugs ate it all. (how we then get rid of all of that bug mass is whole other thing but basically we squeeze all the water out we can and it becomes dirt).

The problem with stuff like pfoas or any other micropollutant is that the bugs aren’t that interested. And they’re at such a low concentration it’s incredibly hard to get such a small amount out of millions of gallons every day.

Wastewater treatment was meant to mimic natural ecology so that when it was discharged we didn’t overwhelm the environment. If you poop in the woods, it’s probably not a problem. If everyone poops in the same area of the woods… The woods are going to look different and not in a good way. We solved that problem, but not the one of what to do when the poop is “radioactive”.

One last note: what I described above is secondary settling (letting the bugs settle and taking the liquid off the top). There ARE filters to seperate the bugs from the liquid, but they are no where near selective enough for specific compounds. Again, think coffee strainer.

Bare with me here because I am not an expert. I think what they’re getting is the same as how gravity doesn’t exist. Vsauce did a great video on that, but the general notion is that because space time is curved, objects traveling in streight lines will appear to be drawn closer to one another. “Gravity” isn’t fundamental, warping spacetime is. Nothing changed but our understanding of it, which does matter for some more complicated areas.

I think this is similar. Just like gravity “doesn’t exisit”, it’s just an emergent phenomenon: they’re saying so is time. They’re saying time isn’t fundemental, except that it’s an expected phenomenon that would arise from other factors, those factors being proposed to be some entanglement crap I have zero ability to talk about.

And I’m putting some words in their mouth with “time isn’t fundemental”. What they’re really doing is proposing a new definition that better fits observed phenomenon/models.

And still, none of this explains why we still have daylights savings time.

This is a good rule, especially for things that change their own atomic mass.

Grandpa wookie is the most badass character in starwars. “the space nazis are trashing my apartment looking for my renegade son. I should put on some porn in the living room”

Starwars was at its absolute zenith with the holiday special.

We want more of grandpa wookie watching porn in the living room on lifeday, Disney. The people have spoken!

After a quick googling, they also were on the religiously unpopular side of embryonic stem cells.

It’s just one of those things in terms of logic of the system giving rise outside of itself. Like I said, dogma and religion are two very different things. I just find a lot of beauty in the fact that science can predict literal apotheosis by our own definition; it’s inherent in the system. If someone chooses to see that and assign intent, I can’t argue.

There’s just something amazing about a system which defines the conditions which are outside it’s grasp. It’s like how banach-tarski shows 1+0=2. Practical? Not really, but none the less… under certain conditions…

Well right, which is why they’re separate things entirely. And I am definitely taking some poetic license, but I outlined a pretty concrete example of how the way the scientific process is structured it’s a tool for what’s demonstrable, not inherently what’s correct. In what I outlined, it’s possible you could never gather that data. In every sense that matters most of the universe would no longer exist.

You can do the same thing in reverse (we’ll never actually know what happened at the big bang, we weren’t there, still we can figure out a lot). It just drives the point home more when you realize there are things you can look at, observe, make hypothesis and test against here today, that will essentially leave the realm of science in the future.

So again, this is definitely some navel gazing, and I’m just about as atheistic as they come, but the original spawn of this part of the thread was “how can any scientist be religious”. It’s because the scientific process isn’t actually concerned with being “correct”, now or in the future, just plausible and useful. I’ve worked in the lab with folks who viewed their work as understanding the universe someone created for them. That’s entirely compatible with the scientific method. You can take a minute to appreciate the insanity and beauty of everything we know about this universe and the fact that were even capable of comprehending some of it without it corrupting your scientific method. Some people choose to appreciate that insanity and beauty and assign divine intent. So long as the graph has a decent R^2, that’s just fine.

Science and religion (in the broad sense, not specific statements of a religion) are just two entirely separate things. Faith by it’s definition exists outside anything testable, so it’s just not part of science. Here’s the one hitch: science does in-fact point to faith. Bare with me here.

We know with whatever certainty anyone would require that the universe is expanding, and that the rate of that expansion is accelerating. We know with certainty that >90% of all that we know is there, just by looking up, is already permanently and irrevocably beyond our grasp. It will all blink out of the night sky, and no interaction will ever be possible.

Future scientists (human, alien, whatever) will look at certain phenomena, the cause of which we today would know to be a specific galaxy, etc, but we would have no way to gather a single shred of evidence. There would be no way, literally none, to ever interreact with those stellar structures.

To these future scientists you would be citing ancient texts and proposing a 100% untestable hypothesis. You would be proposing literal gods outside of the machine. And you’d be right. But it would all have to be taken on faith.

So way late, but no that’s shifted a lot. This is anecdotal but does speak to a lot of industries: my understanding is that pizza shops now live or die by cheese prices.

Labor, while fluctuating, doesn’t move a ton month to month. Dairy can.

That’s like I said anecdotal, but broadly, real-estate, equipment purchase/finacince has all been so hyper optimized it squeezes the business owners out.

It doesn’t matter the market. PIZZAOVEN-XL will sell it to you, let you leverage payments against your home equity, grab it back and resell it. They can deal with the cash flow issue. They are “assembled in America”. They don’t care if you go out of business. They’ll do it again for the same person that moves into the same space trying to do the. Exact. Same. Thing.

And I’m not trying to draw a blanket statement across all industries. I’m just saying the wheels that make every industry move are smarter and literally longer lived than anyone starting out, and there’s a reason “John deer” and “John deer finance” are seperate companies.

So I’m stretching it a bit because at the end of the day this really does apply to more than restaurants, but the other commenter had it right.

Things like rent, insurance, etc go into the cost for well above the plate. So the ingredients are one thing, but you have to make up the cost of rent, paying the staff when there’s low customer volume, all the insane amount of costs that go into running a business. That server has to make up for the cost of printing menus and delivering them by mail.

None of this is the servers fault, who should get a fair wage, but it all adds up in a way that makes it hard for the owner. In fact, the person who sold them the grills, refrigerators, and all the other equipment, knows exactly and empirically how hard it is and sets their prices accordingly.

And it’s not like that company’s delivery drivers, techs, and fabrication workers also don’t deserve a wage. Or the Tyson folks that are plucking the chicken delivered.

The issue is, at the end of the day, those companies probably should be less profitable. But instead of accepting that, we put all of the companies that make all the stuff that run that restaurant into bigger companies that are now part of mutual funds, and they sell it out knowing they can grab it back if it goes under.

So you might be able to get away with making a few plates and some money, but trying turning it into something that will let you pay your rent and put your kids into a school. “Bob’s Burgers” is pretty true to life.

Restaurants have notoriously thin margins. I’m not defending this bill, and there are definitely awful practices out there, but it ain’t easy. Even a $34 dollar steak only kind of covers all the ancillary costs that make it happen.

The biggest issue with the crunch we have going on is that food (prepared or otherwise) should be way more expensive, and that shouldn’t be an issue because most people should be making way more money. All of those should/shouldn’ts got way out of whack over the course of decades, and the circus only continued because people found crappy ways to keep it going.

It’s a lot of industries. Construction is a great example. The developers make money. The material vendors make money. The builders make money. The sub contractors who actually put the parts together get haggled on invoices and take the lower amount because they have payroll to make and equipment loans to pay. Loans that are happily given out because the equipment can be easily repossessed.

It’s a very good thing everything is correcting, but it’s going to be an ugly process as workers get their due and pass the burden on to the small business owners.

I’m assuming the above person, like me, had one of those “come on, no WAY” moments. It just seems to insanely wrong.

Oh fair point. My dumb-ass sitting here going what is he talking about? A motor can run backwards, most pumps and compressors can’t, or at least wont be effective if they do. Unless their something like a peristaltic.

it is, (although the design is slightly different, you couldn’t just run the motor on an AC backwards).

Heat pumps are better for the environment because it’s (usually) more energy efficient to extract existing heat than create it. Heat-pumps get more heat per unit energy spent than resistive heat (like electric radiators) because they’re not creating the heat, they’re just moving it.

Natural gas still kind of wins out, but that has the issue of constantly needing more natural gas.

The most environmentally friendly play would be, if you were like on a space station or something: Imeaditley stop producing more natrual gas, use up whatevers left in reserves, then install heat pumps. But of course that’s not how things work so we’re transitioning now.

edit: re: AC not being good for the environment. AC isn’t the problem, just the power is. So it’s just seen as a luxury as opposed to necessity, although obviously that’s starting to change.

As others have said yes, thats an air conditioner, but to expand: that’s why the outside of an air conditioner (either one of the big ground mounted ones outside or the window ones) gets hot while it’s operating. You could technically just mount your window AC backwards.

To expand further, that’s part of why heat-pumps weren’t in expanded use for a while. In the summer you’re extracting hot from the room and putting the hot outside, so your heat exchanger is hot. But in the winter when you’re extracting heat from outside and putting it inside, you make the heat exchanger outside more cold. So cold, infact, that icing becomes an issue, and when it ices over it’s less good at extracting heat. There are some neat tricks modern heat-pumps use to avoid icing over their outside heat exchanger (including running backwards to extract heat from inside and heat up the coils for a bit).

It’s also why you saw early adoption of heat-pumps in areas where people might need both heating and cooling, but it didn’t get bitter cold.

Another way this is avoided in some cases is to simply bury the heat exchanger to a depth below the frost line, where it can’t freeze. Then you can add/extract as much heat as you want. That’s geothermal heating/cooling. In some cases geothermal may be passive (ie: you’re just circulating a fluid and temperature you get is what you get), but it’s real strength is as a heat exchanger.

In fact, with the ground being able to accept/source as much heat as you want, you could actually place the “topside” exchanger in an area where you weren’t trying to control the temp, and take advantage of the temperature difference to create power. Thats geothermal power. However, the efficiency and payback of that is based on the difference in temperature, which is why you only see it in instances where there’s some natural source of higher temp heat underground. I suppose geothermal power would work just as well with a natural source of low temp cold (like the opposite of lava), but I’m hard pressed to imagine what that would be.

I hear you on the “ten episode” bit. I HATE that that became standard. It’s some real garbage and has hurt a lot of different shows. The Last of Us was generally amazing, but suffered from rushing a bit. Without spoilers, there’s an episode where they expand on a minor gay character from the game, and the main characters aren’t in it much. The episode is amazing, and also got a ton of hate because the internet is awful, but one very valid critique is that in spending the entire episode in that wonderful little vignette, you had to rush beats of other episodes. That could have been fixed by simply having more episodes in the season.

Point is, somewhere shrinkflation hit our TV shows and I hate it lol.

I actually loved the bad autotune for the same reason you mentioned thatd you’d like the bad singing lol. It was kind of fun going “whelp, that actor is an actor not a singer”. I guess auto-tune has been around enough it’s in that “charm” category for me: “eh, they got the spirit”.

I hated it, because I hate musicals, but I love that it happened. I loved watching it and hated every godamn second.

Please… no more… but I’m glad this happened and I’m glad people that like musicals seemed to more or less have enjoyed it.

Just… I’m begging… no more.

edit: it was incredibly charming. I still hate it. It’s cannon and I wouldn’t have it any other way, but I hate it. There is no way I am the only person like this.