Scrolling by I literally thought “Man, that candy looks delicious, what’s this article about?” And then read the headline… 🫠

My buddy asked for feedback once. The recruiter said, “We passed because of the words you said.” That was it. 😐 Say better words next time guy.

Something that surprised me in my travels (which are primarily West of the Mississippi) is how often the states actually line up with a significant geologic shift. Arizona is endless orange desert. New Mexico immediately becomes rainbow painted cliffs. Utah is somehow entirely vertical. California is a contradiction of green desert. Nevada is like a chemical mine puked on a bunch of bumpy ridges. Northern New Mexico falls off a cliff and the bottom is Texas.

If you watch closely, usually something fairly dramatic happens in the landscape within a few miles of the border.

If you were suddenly fabulously wealthy, would you continue to work in stone, or quit and never look back?

The good news is you haven’t brought all your things in yet. Don’t bring anything else in until you’ve had some time to investigate.

One bed bug, like you’ve said, could come from anywhere. If this apartment is infested you will find so many more. Give it some time to make sure this is an infestation. Do you have bites? Are there other signs? Of course the landlord is ALWAYS going to say there aren’t any bedbugs, of course they would. But give it some time, pay another month, see what happens.

If no more bedbugs show up, and you don’t get bites, go ahead and move your stuff in. If it’s infested, get out because they are SO hard to get rid of!

A lot of fascism and authoritarianism comes from loneliness or a lack of community. Cutting him off could mean he seeks more community with Nazis. Be clear about your beliefs, keep calling him out when he’s wrong, but try to stay his friend. That’s different than “supporting” his beliefs. Take care of him when he’s sick, but don’t drive him to the Nazi rally. Your friendship might make a difference on his journey back to healthy beliefs.

Also, really sorry your friend is dealing with this right now, I know it must suck to see this happen to him. It’s not necessarily the final story though.

First time it ever occurred to me, but now that I’ve read it, of course! Why wouldn’t every city make this free?! Solving transportation woes is a surefire way to stoke your economy, and removing payments is going to make public transportation more efficient and cheaper to maintain (no ticket kiosks getting vandalized, no payment processors to pay). Seems like a win win for any congested city.

Salt gets into rivers when material that can’t be dissolved is stripped away by erosion. This exposes new water soluble compounds to the water, where they dissolve into the water and are taken to the ocean.

Over millions of years erosion removes innumerable tons of material, essentially mining the subsurface soluble compounds and delivering them to the ocean. Once there, as you mention ,those salts remain in the ocean. On Earth, this process began billions of years ago and has been adding salt to the oceans ever since.

You can observe this happening in many rivers today. The Colorado River is a great one. If you measure is salinity at the headwaters (or heck, probably even the inlet of Lake Powell), and where it enters the Gulf of Mexico, you will observe an incredible increase in salt. There was an international treaty formed around the US delivering river water that is not too salty to grow crops in to Mexico. The US solved that problem by installing a desalination plant on the river!

However without that land based salt mining process, how salty would the oceans be? Lots of good clues in this thread, but I don’t think anyone has offered a definitive answer.

Sure, I get that, but without land for rivers to essentially mine salt from, the equation changes a lot. Underwater erosion is dramatically less destructive than above water erosion.

Earth’s oceans are in a steady state, where all the addition of salt by rivers is balanced by loss of salt in the ocean. If you removed all the rivers from the equation, Earth’s oceans would find a new balance at a point significantly less salty than they are currently. Though I have little idea if that would be something we consider freshwater, or just “less salty” saltwater.

Running water causes a lot more erosion than stationary bodies of water. Consider lakes, which are still cycling water much like a river, but over thousands of years they deposit so much silt that they cease to exist. That’s the opposite of erosion.

Underwater erosion is certainly a thing, but in comparison to downhill water erosion on land, it’s pretty insignificant. It does not seem a given that it could significantly offset the processes that remove salt from salt water.

Running water causes a lot more erosion than stationary bodies of water. Consider lakes, which are still cycling water much like a river, but over thousands of years they deposit so much silt that they cease to exist.

Underwater erosion is certainly a thing, but in comparison to downhill water erosion on land, it’s pretty insignificant. It does not seem a given that it could significantly offset the processes that remove salt from salt water.

I feel like I’d rather drink saltwater before I drink water with ammonia dissolved in it.

Sure but once a continental plate is flooded, isn’t it by definition an oceanic plate at that point? A continent only exists if it isn’t flooded.

Thanks for all the detail! Your observation about comets is really pertinent. Saltwater is probably itself a purer form of water than comets. Maybe an ocean planet is actually more like a muddy swamp of nasty dirty water than a lake.

Exactly. If a planet ever had a salty ocean, adding more water probably wouldn’t dilute it in any meaningful way, so it would need to be a planet that never had continents.

I was trying to figure out how much underwater erosion there is but if you compare the sandy and silty bottom of the ocean to like, Utah, it seems like continental erosion is orders of magnitude more significant.

Conversely, we know oceans deposit all sorts of stuff at their bottoms, which makes me think there is a small amount of salt being deposited. Would that cancel out significant underwater erosion?

Similarly, if underwater erosion was a big deal, wouldn’t old lakes (in geological time) be notably saltier than young lakes? But the only salty lakes we have primarily lose all their water through evaporation, basically ultra concentrated river water.

And if you like Travelers, make sure to watch Sarah Conors Chronicle

Check out Travelers. They start out with a lot of agency but stuff gets wrong and it’s more and more desperate.