There’s no alcohol. Just orange juice.

Like, the mixer?

Yeah, people drink it.

The sweeteners are the sweeter juice that they add. Usually concentrated apple juice.

That way they can continue to label it 100% juice and no sweeteners added and put on the nutrition label 0g added sugar, but still add a bunch of sweetness and sugar when formulating the product.

Amtrak works best on two routes: the Northeast Corridor between Richmond, Virginia, and Boston, Massachusetts, and the car train between DC and Florida, where they’ll bring your automobile so that you have it at your destination.

I just looked at ticket prices on the Northeast Corridor. The very popular DC to NYC route is between $25 and $55 per way if purchased at least 2 months in advance, depending on the popularity of a particular time. A plane ticket would be probably $150-$350.

Plus the actual seat experience is akin to business class on an airplane, so maybe the better comparison is $400-$1000 for the equivalent airplane.

But that’s basically the only route where downtown to downtown is faster than airplanes (because both DC’s and NYC’s train stations are in a much more convenient walkable/transit friendly location than their airports).

Oh, and children under 12 can travel at 50% fare and still take a full seat. So for families, the train might be much cheaper.

Then again, passenger rail is a disaster for the other 85% of U.S. residents who don’t live in the Northeast.

You’d never get Kessler syndrome at Starlink altitudes.

Starlink satellites orbit at around 550km, and get dragged by the little bit of atmosphere that is at that altitude. Each collision might make more debris, but the conservation of momentum means that any debris that gets kicked to a lower orbit will probably burn up on the atmosphere while any debris that gets kicked to a higher altitude will be smaller mass and therefore cause less damage on the next collision after that.

Collisions can still happen, but the runaway conditions where debris begets debris won’t happen at those orbital velocities and altitude.

First things first: it’s obvious we agree on more than we disagree on, and this is just quibbling about details when we’re on the same page on the big picture stuff. I agree that giving directly is the best way to bypass the very real problem of the giver misidentifying the recipient’s highest priority needs. But I’m pointing out that at this particular moment, the balance may need to shift towards more efficiently meeting needs at large scale.

It look me less than 30 minutes to hand out $400 with $20 to a car to those in line at the food bank.

You see what I mean, though, right? You’re talking about the effort required to find a charity but your strategy of giving directly already starts from leveraging a charity you’ve already found.

Many food banks around the country are turning people away after running out of food. In that kind of context, I think $100 to the food bank likely does more good than $100 directly to individuals.

So if we’re talking about balance, I’m currently putting almost all my charitable giving towards those organizations and rarely handing out cash, and it’s generally only to the needy people I’m already familiar with in my neighborhood. My ratio is very skewed at this point in time but I believe I’m maximizing the benefit from my giving.

Identification of cost-effective strategies requires time and energy (and likely transportation requirement) from both donors and service recipients.

If I have $500 to donate, giving 25 people $20 each is gonna take a bunch of overhead in the searching and matching. Plus the logistics of actually being in the same place at the same time to hand over cash.

Make it $5000 and the logistics become impractical. The economies of scale don’t just extend to the service being provided, but also to the identification of the needy person who can benefit from that charity.

Your statement also assumes that there exists locally a cost-effective charity that serves every need of life of those in need.

The beauty of the food bank is that it knocks out an expense for almost anyone who uses it, leaving them more cash to buy a tank of gas or school supplies or medication. Everyone needs food. Someone who needs more money for gas can get that if their grocery bill is reduced by $20. Money is fungible, so addressing the most fundamental needs ends up solving that problem of double coincidence that you’re alluding to.

I’m not saying this approach is perfect. And I’m generally in favor of giving directly, especially for governmental transfers. But there is still a huge role to be played by nonprofit organizations, especially in meeting the foundational needs like food, water, shelter, and medical care.

I can’t know their needs better than they do.

You’re right, but that’s just one of several factors at play. An individual is generally better positioned to identify and prioritize their own needs and wants. But they needs to be counterbalanced with the comparative advantage that another might have in being able to satisfy those needs/wants more efficiently.

The food example is just the best example of the economies of scale. A soup kitchen may have utensils and equipment that the individual does not have, such that they can accomplish far more and meet far more need than giving directly does.

Other nonprofits may provide shelter, warmth, clothing, etc. in a more efficient manner than what the individual could accomplish.

Ideally, the efficiency can come in the form of providing something that the person would’ve bought, at a cost that is much lower than what the person would have had to pay, that frees up the rest of that person’s finite remaining money to be steered towards their own identified priorities. In that way, it’s still more efficient to give to cost-effective charities because meeting that need can still result in more cash in that needy person’s pocket.

Also, I would ultimately prefer my donations to go directly to the people that need it without administrative overhead shaving off percentages.

If a food bank can buy rice at $1/lb and its overhead costs are 10%, while grocery stores sell rice at $1.20/lb, donating to a food bank gets more rice to those in need than donating to the individuals.

Or a charity that provides hot food (meals on wheels, homeless shelters) can definitely turn $100 into a lot more ready-to-eat hot food than giving $100 directly to a person, because those organizations can leverage economies of scale in cooking large batches of food.

The fact is, the larger food nonprofits can effectively feed people for cheaper than individuals can achieve on their own. Much of it comes from scale, and some of it comes from being able to manage supply chains to intercept what would be waste from distributors, retailers, etc.

Actually I was off by a factor of 1000. That Camry needs to be raised to 7.3 km. Or you need 1000 of them. Or some combination of increased weight and height.

You’re absolutely right.

I don’t know why I thought to use grams instead of kilograms. I knew kg was the base unit for these conversions but just slipped for some reason.

Sorry whoops I was off by a factor of 1000 because I used grams instead of kilograms. The Camry needs to be raised 7.3 km. Or you need 1000 of them in one house.

is it really easier and cheaper to store the energy needed for a home in a chemical battery?

Yes. A 5kwh battery is about 50kg and smaller than a carry-on suitcase. String 6 of them together and you’ve got 30 kWh stored with no moving parts. Anker has that for about $15,000, maybe $30k installed.

How much does a 3-story elevator cost? What about one that can capture the stored potential energy on the way down, and not break down?

Potential energy (in joules) is mass (in g) times height (in meters) times 9.8 m/s^2 .

So in order to store the 30 kWh per day that the typical American house uses, you’d need to convert the 30 kWh into 108,000,000 joules, and divide by 9.8, to determine how you’d want to store that energy. You’d need the height times mass to be about 11 million. So do you take a 1500 kg weight (about the weight of a Toyota Camry) and raise it about 7.3 meters (about 2 stories in a typical residential home)? (this is wrong, it’s only 0.001 as much as the energy needed, see edit below)

And if that’s only one day’s worth of energy, how would you store a month’s worth? Or the 3800kwh (13.68 x 10^9 joules) discussed in the article?

At that point, we’re talking about raising 10 Camrys 93 meters into the air, just for one household. Without accounting for the lost energy and inefficiencies in the charging/discharging cycle.

Chemical energy is way easier to store.

Edit: whoops I was off by using grams instead of kg. It actually needs to be 1000 times the weight or 1000 the height. The two story Camry is around a tablet battery’s worth of storage, not very much at all.

Do you apply a similar rule to California Rolls, Texas Toast, Key Lime Pie, New York Cheesecake, or Philly Cheesesteaks?

All I know is that my genitals say “maybe”

That’s one of my pet peeves, when people use relative comparisons to overstate things that have very small absolute differences.

55g of CO2 is basically nothing. A gallon of gasoline represents about 2400g of CO2 emissions when burned. So for a typical vehicle that gets 30 miles per gallon, 55g of CO2 is basically the equivalent of driving 0.6875 miles (1.1km).

It’s less than the carbon footprint of a cup of coffee (60g).

Or, alternatively, eating a single quarter pound hamburger would be about 3 kg of CO2, or 55 hours of video viewing at this rate.

Fun fact, though, Kraft Mac and Cheese removed artificial dyes in 2013, didn’t tell anyone at first, and waited to see if consumers would complain. Nobody did, so they announced that they were able to replace the artificial yellow colors with really colorful spices like annatto and turmeric.

So you’re still gonna get staining. Turmeric gets in everything.