Those prepaid visa cards don't actually exist, I think they were killed by AML/KYC. Instead, they appear to be "prepaid visa gift cards" accepted at less than a hundred large chains.
The visa gift cards work pretty much everywhere, unless they are specifically disabled by the establishment. They do show as a gift card but all the POS systems are perfectly capable of splitting the payment now. I've only seen them disabled at small restaurants that have dealt with scam charge backs and sites like Raise that deal in gift cards and gift card scams as part of their business.
Usually they simply aren't worth it because of the activation fee. It's always more than the highest paying credit card cash back. However sometimes stores, run sales where they waive the activation fee, but there's always a limit.
Continuing to carve out economies of scale in battery + photovoltaic for another ten doublings has plenty of positive externalities.
The problem is that in the meantime, they're going to nuke our existing powergrid, created in the 1920's to 1950's to serve our population as it was in the 1970's, and for the most part not expanded since. All of the delta is in price-mediated "demand reduction" of existing users.
In places with guns they're not busting doors down, they're black bagging people on their way out of routine courtroom proceedings.
A big part of the problem here is foundational - that Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and even Joe Biden deny that the asylum process is a human right or a legitimate mandatory administrative process. These people are often somewhere in the legal, well-documented asylum process after entering from Mexico and walking into an immigration office immediately, they're checking in with a parole process on a regular basis, and Miller/ICE terms them "Undocumented" or "Illegal" and deports them to South Sudan.
That would require a sensible immigration regulation.
What we have instead is a regulation that almost prohibits immigration, but which has a whole bunch of grey areas, exceptions to the rule that qualify you for some special status, and courts that are overloaded by a factor of ~100 relative to what they would need to do their job, or overloaded by a factor of ~10 relative to what they would need to do a terrible pro forma job. While waiting for a court date (let's say you walk in and claim asylum) you are granted a special status by administrative custom which says that nobody is coming after you until after your status is adjudicated. Deportation is "deferred", and can be rescinded after the fact based on adjudication. Previous administrations have "prioritized violent crimes" for deportation, leaving about 20 million people at a time outside the system of legal permanent residency, and another 40 million of their family members who rely on them with legal status but precarious. Being custom rather than law, when Stephen Miller and his white supremacist posse comes in they can suspend that, and work at odds with the court and the process. They literally wait until these people check in with the courts and black bag them on their way out of the courtroom.
The US agricultural, construction, and food service sectors have come to almost completely rely on this system permitting either nominally illegal cash-under-the-table work, or "I can't actually prove he's illegal" work, or work performed under a green card sought after the delays and deferred prosecutions in that court date permit the immigrant to start a family and see their kids through college.
It’s broken by design because certain key US industries, like construction, hospitality, restaurants, cleaning, and agriculture, are dependent on a supply of under the table below minimum wage and tax and benefit free labor.
It's broken because of intersection of demand for labor with three other things:
American society has always had a somewhat racist, xenophobia character
Right-wing oligarchical power sees exploiting this character as their path to lower tax rates and a regulation-free corpo state, and has poured tens of billions of dollars into media to set the terms of the conversation
The system for proposing and passing laws has been fundamentally dysfunctional and irrational for a long time. A system with a filibuter-containing Senate and strong partisan infrastructure after the campaign finance system and media circus has matured, evidently just cannot make decisions on sensitive subjects like this.
In the US, public defenders may try 1000 cases a year, may not meet you until five minutes before the initial plea, may have essentially zero investigative capability. Court cases may take years to arise, bail may be effectively denied by virtue of economics, and the plea bargain offered is often <5% of the sentence sought, while being the ultimate way of settling nearly every case.
Arguing for the merits of an adversarial system is one thing. But many parts of due process are effectively completely dead for the vast majority of defendants, and prosecutorial discretion rules the justice system almost completely for those of us who aren't millionaires. "Adversarial" might work for OJ Simpson, but it hasn't worked for most of us for a long time, and the US prison system holds the most prisoners per capita in the world - it isn't close†.
Defenders of the shortcuts we have created proudly justify it as saving the taxpayer money; of making workable a situation where they feel they are underfunded by an order of magnitude, but the reality is that it is justice amputated of essential components. If you want to save money, maybe consider making fewer things illegal, and imprisoning people for a shorter amount of time, but go back to actually holding real, speedy trials that are effectively adversarial in nature. In the meantime, we have a judge/jury/executioner in the DA's office, and they get re-elected electorally largely based on their conviction rate; Like shooting fish in a barrel.
†Depending on how you view internment camps for specific minorities
Do not decry the value of a hammer. There are more specialized tools, and they have their place. A shared property we value is that you can put the hammer down, and it stays a hammer. It doesn't Develop Ideas about spying on you, it doesn't pivot to being an awl, the handle doesn't spontaneously fall off, you don't have to re-learn how to hammer things.
I have to re-learn how to use software very regularly, and as more and more things become software I have lost some functional skills because there are only 24 hours in a day and I can't stay current on everything. If I haven't done a thing in six years, it means I need to research what the current software tool for doing that thing is, try installing four of those things and land on the one that isn't broken or some type of malware, and then teach myself an entirely new interface over time. I just wanted to hit a nail! My hammer was installed on my old computer! I knew that hammer!
But no, it's never that simple with software. I can learn 150 software tools to do specific things and have to re-learn something every week just to maintain capability. I don't have to do that with hammers, wrenches, saws, etc.
We need more hammer-like tools instead of managed, constantly updated "ecosystems", and when we do find a good one, we need a way to keep it. Because we have finite time and cognitive bandwidth.
"That was deprecated three years ago, why are you still trying to use an old version that doesn't even have security updates? What is wrong with you?! [WONTFIX]"... Fuck you, give me back my fucking hammer. I could do this task I'm trying to do in literally 90 seconds ten years ago; I'm an hour deep into determining how you would even begin to do it today.
It's harmful to a tiny watershed of marine habitat immediately downstream of the discharge pipe, and dilutes rapidly. With that said - if you can harvest a meaningful amount of energy from desal anything helps. I don't know that 5% is a meaningful amount, however.
Biodiesel is an oil plus an alcohol (usually 80% vegetable oil + 20% methanol) reacted using an alkaline catalyst like lye.
Methanol is also known as "wood alcohol", and can be made at ~40% yield by cooking down wood ("destructive distillation") in a specific fashion, or made from too-cheap-to-meter natural gas if you've got it. Anything you can do with natural gas can also be done with anaerobically fermented methane. You can also use ethanol (fermented from any carbohydrate crops) instead of methanol, creating a biodiesel with slightly different but still usable properties.
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Sunflower, rapeseed, and soybean oil have very well-established agricultural workflows which require very little labor input.
Palm oil is substantially higher yield, but more labor intensive and is associated with tropical rainforest destruction.
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You don't necessarily even need to react your vegetable oil. The original Diesel Cycle demonstration engines ran on straight peanut oil, and there are some truck engines out there (like the 12 valve Cummins) that will happily run on filtered waste fryer oil all day long. It's just a matter of tuning, viscosity, compression ratios, seal materials, and the like, being slightly different from petrochemical diesel fuel. Reacting vegetable oils into fatty acid esters ("biodiesel") does attain some modest engine benefits, but mostly it's to match compatibility with petrochemical diesel grades so that you don't, eg, need to replace your fuel lines & pumps with different diameter fuel lines & pumps.
By far the most credible case for asteroid mining is water & carbon compounds. A little H, O, and C, and you have conventional hydrocarbon propellant + LOX.
I don't know what the actual claim that is being made here is; This seems to redirect ultimately to a lay press release from a state space agency rather than to a scientific paper. There do seem to be a number of competing articles on electrochemical synthesis of ethylene from CO2.
Oxygen weathering is a primary constraint on life on Earth, and every carbon-hydrogen based organism in the past 2.5 billion years has had to develop biochemical coping mechanisms for this toxic gas that wants to react with carbon and with hydrogen; It is harnessing this reaction ("respiration") with biologically mediated processes and modulating it to specific rates that permits us life.
For humans, acute breathing gas toxicity only happens in a high pressure environment.
Air approximates an 80/20 nitrogen-oxygen mix. Atmospheric pressure is 14.7psi.
The 120psi air compressor in your auto body shop is equivalent to a dive only 81 meters deep. SCUBA divers and later saturation divers have probed the various limits of the human cardiopulmonary system using very specialized gas blends all the way down to 700 meters. Too much oxygen partial pressure causes all the symptoms you see listed, and higher partial pressures cause symptoms to appear faster.
> The curves show typical decrement in lung vital capacity when breathing oxygen. Lambertsen concluded in 1987 that 0.5 bar (50 kPa) could be tolerated indefinitely.
This means you could breath 80/20 nitrox at 2.5 bar, or 37 psi, or 25 meters depth, "indefinitely" in the sense of hours or days.
PS: Chronic use of 100% oxygen at atmospheric pressure causes other types of toxicity. Some of the oxidative damage therein, accumulated over the years at a normal 20%, probably directly analogizes parts of the human aging process. Other types of oxidative damage probably work faster than proportional exposure. We only start to notice damage like this in people with impaired lung function who rely on an artificial supply of oxygen boosted to beyond an 80/20 ratio, to breath.
To add to this, when diving with compressed air most people get woozy and otherwise intoxicated from oxygen around 30 meters from the surface. For some people 25 meters is enough for such symptoms to occur.
Yes, he is. Oxygen toxicity causes seizures, not narcosis, and kicks in at around 1.6 bar of partial pressure (just below 65 m when breathing 21% oxygen as in regular air). PADI uses 1.4 bar to add an extra safety margin.
Oxygen toxicity is really the one thing in recreational diving that will kill you if you do it wrong, though for recreational divers the risk only exists when using enriched air(*).
Fortunately it's trivial to avoid it by only using enriched air where the sea floor is at a safe depth, but you should know the math nevertheless. For example if the sea floor is at 35 m (4.5 bar) you won't enrich air above 1.4/4.5=31% oxygen, probably more like 28%.
Oxygen toxicity is also the (or the main) reason why enriched air must never be stored in white or yellow bottles. If you see yellow you can assume it's 21%, while for any other color you must use an oxymeter before using it. Not doing so can be literally the difference between life and death.
Scuba diving is safe but a lot of the safety is about procedures, as you can see.
(*) Enriching air above 21% oxygen is done to avoid the other issue with nitrogen, which is decompression sickness. It lets you stay longer on the bottom. In other words, enriched air improves the trade-off between bottom time (limited by nitrogen) and maximum depth (limited by oxygen toxicity).
Not with 21% oxygen. 25 meters is 3.5*0.21=0.73 bar of O2 partial pressure, which is within even the strictest limits that apply to rebreathers (1.3 bar).
If you're breathing 100% oxygen for decompression, that's a completely different story and not something a recreational divers will do.
I don't see any thing that supports "when diving with compressed air most people get woozy and otherwise intoxicated from oxygen around 30 meters from the surface".
"Be aware that oxygen toxicity is unpredictable. Divers have experienced convulsions at shallow depths under conditions where most experts would not have expected them to occur."
But that doesn't say what depth, what oxygen % and how often it happens.
It also says that oxygen toxicity is a possibility only above 21% oxygen. In fact, with regular air there are way too many things that have already gone wrong if you are at 65 m depth (or even 50 m).
It's clear from reading the document that convulsions at "shallow depths" refers to the case of breathing 100% oxygen, where 1.5 m difference is the difference between <1.6 bar (safe) and >1.7 bar (absolutely not safe).
700m! That's wild, I mean nuclear submarine crush depths are at like 400-500m? I get that it's not like you can compare a hard steel tube with a human body but regardless, it's wild.
The published data for military submarines is the nominal test depth, not the actual design limit. The operational depth may be much deeper but that will be classified.
Recent US submarines all have test depths described by as being in excess of the same few hundred meters. In all likelihood that is a throwaway value. It seems unlikely that they produced generations of submarines that were less capable than their older ones.
> The published data for military submarines is the nominal test depth, not the actual design limit. The operational depth may be much deeper but that will be classified.
We know the actual collapse depth for an older sub: 730m for the USS Thresher (test depth: 400m), in 1963.
Test depths of current generation subs are ~20% higher; pushing them to 700m or so might be plausible, but not much more. Radical hidden capabilities would either require substantial advances in material science or drastically different hull thickness, neither of which is really feasible to hide from adversaries anyway, especially considering how little utility you get from hiding this (compared to e.g. exact capabilities of anti-air interceptors or radar characteristics for bombers/fighters).
There are of course vessels that have gone deeper and are specially designed for it, but it struck me that the depth specified was close to that of 'standard' subs that are not specially designed for very deep operations
Yah. I picked that one because its size and build is more like that of a common sub, not like the small, hyperspecialized things going down to the Mariana Trench, or something like that.
>It seems unlikely that they produced generations of submarines that were less capable than their older ones.
i wouldn't be sure. There seems to be no military advantage to deeper so why spend the money. A sub needs to hide, but it can't do any other job when too deep. sinking ships can only be done when near the surface. If the sub can get under a couple thermo layers that is good enough, any deeper is more a party trick than useful.
i'm not in the navy but that is how I read the unclassified information I have access to.
> sinking ships can only be done when near the surface.
Isn't this itself a huge assumption?
Sinking ships via upward facing torpedoes would be a huge tactical advantage at first glance. Less time to detection and deploy countermeasures or evasive maneuvers.
Perhaps, I am wrong in assuming they cannot be fired below a certain depth?
Indeed, the grandparent post is a pretty good summary of the takeaways you get from taking PADI’s enriched air nitrox course (which is a requirement if you ever want to dive with enriched air).
In the olden days this was tracked manually (the ratio of your depth to percentage of air and time under water) via so called “dive tables”. The purpose and output of the dive table is to determine the safe amount of time you could dive at a certain depth without risking narcosis.
As this is a sliding window based on multiple variables - and you are very rarely maintaining a constant depth as you dive - it’s of course annoying and less accurate to hand calculate this. Modern dive computers just seamlessly calculate it all for you nowadays.
Fun fact: those dive tables were created by the US Navy conducting experiments on its own divers, there was a real human cost to acquire that information.
Scuba diving is great. You don't have to do deep or risky dives to enjoy it. There's a ton of fun in diving around reefs 10m down.
That story is pretty wild. And relatable.
I got myself into a little trouble when I dove the Blue Hole 16 years ago. We were warned pretty heavily how many people have died doing it, so I went in with a healthy level of anxiety. It was my second dive where the dive plan was to go to 40m, which is the limit on regular air.
The descent was surreal. You have the wall of the crater on your side, but everything else is different shades of blue. Past about 10m, there's not really any wildlife to look at, just blue. We descended straight down, going in slow motion. As we went down the blues got gradually darker and deeper.
At probably the high 20s, I started to notice I could really see the surface clearly anymore, and I started to panic. My breath started racing and I started being annoyed by my regulator in my mouth, which is an unnatural feeling to being with. For maybe a minute, I debated whether I should try to get myself under control, or signal my dive instructor I wanted to ascend. Meanwhile, we were still drifting downward. I worried whether nitrogen narcosis might affect my judgment or ability to control my panic.
In the end, I decided not to be a hero. I gave my instructor the thumbs up to ascend, and we went through the orderly process of safety stops. When we got to the top I told her I explained I was feeling panicky (you can't really communicate anything nuanced below the surface), and then I spent the rest of my tank diving the first 10m, which was relaxing, and let me finish the day on a high note.
that comment is a classic and certainly entertaining, but there are multiple levels of safety to prevent something like this from happening, the first of which is the wall of tombstones that greets you when you arrive at that specific dive site. To end up in that situation means to have already made a number of big, big errors.
I remember the Blue Hole as one the best dives I made, and not even the scariest: that prize goes to the time I was in calm waters at 20 meters, and the pressure regulator just failed, leaving me without air from both mouthpieces. And that's why you have a buddy...
I don't think I've ever had anything fail on me diving, but I've been with people who have run out of air (my buddy was constantly using all his up), so having to breathe off someone else's tank isn't uncommon.
As I mentioned in my sibling comment, I did have a scary time on the Blue Hole. I think my other most nervous dives were:
- Pacific dive in Costa Rica in rough seas and surge. We suddenly had visibility drop to near zero when we hit the outflow current of a river. Definitely a lesson in how quick conditions can change.
- Cavern diving in a cenote in Mexico. Nothing weird happened, but we went kinda far in, and I get nervous in overhead environments.
Running out of gas or having to breathe off of someone else's tank is uncommon. Gas planning and monitoring is a fundamental skill that every diver needs to master just to get a basic open water certification. If your buddies aren't able to do this reliably then they need remedial training.
It's good to practice gas sharing as a contingency in case of equipment failure but actually running out is not acceptable.
Shouldn't happen, but did. I don't know why he depleted his gas faster than everyone else. He probably was breathing very inefficiently. I still had a good amount of air left and our instructor had like half his tank.
same, blue hole is notorious because inexperienced divers get pressured into deep dives they haven't trained for by local guides looking to make a quick buck.
my scariest dive was when a 14 year old got separated from the group and thought it would be a good idea to continue his dive for 30 minutes.
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