Local burger chain that’s like, the local burger chain (before the burger-and-beer-to-go one Hooters bought out!)

[“Hooters” is an operation specializing in taking food service concepts to scale, that’s just their recognizable success]

with a sticker on their drive-thru window awkwardly explaining how their local supplier puts trace amounts of sesame seed in the buns now

In the 1950s, the Japanese export sector just then standing back up was known for pottery and cheap folded-tin toys.

In the 1960s after investing in machinery more modern than western legacy forges they started towards a leading position in steel.

In the 1970s, they came for big-ticket consumer products like appliances and automobiles.

By the 1980s they were exporting electronics, industrial management expertise, and capital.

(They had been known for optics since before WWII.)

Since the 1990s they have been exporting their culture.

Korea has very intentionally been following the same path with maybe a 25 years’ lag.

jiskblr:

teaboot:

teaboot:

please god above can someone explain to me why we’re still working on self driving cars when trains exist

“we’re training them to interpret road signs!” Train goes same place every day. No road signs.

“when forced to choose between old lady and child, which is more ethical for the car to hit?” Fence around train track. Nobody on the road.

“people with disabilities preventing them from driving themselves can be independent” Yes but also. Train.

“reduces the dangers of fatigue with long distance trucking” Train.

“the technology is not yet price effective for the average driver” Train.

Seriously come on choo choo bitches let’s goooooooooo

The minute you can have a train deliver things to a dozen buildings in a single neighborhood, then you might start to have something resembling a point.

The last mile is the hard part. Trains will never, ever solve it. Short of wild plans to use abundant energy from nuclear to dig massive underground tunnel networks, at which point ‘automatic underground small train’ and ‘automatic underground self-driving cars’ become the same thing - that would probably work if we could get there from here, but we can’t because people are stupid about both tunneling and nuclear power.

From historical experience of the decline of the LA streetcar system in the automotive age, “I can switch to the next lane when someone’s blocking this one”, “I can take an 82-block route along arterial streets but then at the end a 7-block final leg somewhat uphill” and “if this street is too crowded and slow I can use the next parallel major street over” were all critically important things cars but not rail transit can do

Cargo service further requires either space-consuming dedicated sidings or a willingness to have a train just sit in the street unloading for a while (streetcar-era cities sometimes resupplied outlying stores from central-city or dockside warehouses with overnight trams)

raginrayguns:

necarion:

raginrayguns:

necarion:

raginrayguns:

raginrayguns:

Metals of antiquity - Wikipedia

gold, silver, copper, tin, lead, iron, and mercury

no aluminum. I assume large scale aluminum use is a post-electricity thing? Cause you get it from the ore with electrochemistry somehow? Reducing aluminum oxide id guess

@agox said:

Aluminum used to be a precious metal. Like, Napoleon had an aluminum silverware set and the Washington Monument is capped with aluminum. You’re absolutely right about refining bauxite into aluminum being a post-electricity thing. I’m not too keen on the process, but I think it involves melting ore with giant electrical arcs in an oxygen poor atmosphere

hmm you do have to melt it but it is electrochemistry, if you just heated it all you’d get is molten aluminum oxide i guess, an electric potential is driving transfer of electrons from oxygen to aluminum atoms

You can heat it enough to melt it into aluminum, but it’s like a thousand degrees more. More even than when you don’t have the catalyst. Doable, but not in antiquity when they couldn’t even melt iron.

By “melt it into aluminum” do you mean… I don’t know, this is a chemical reaction, it’s not melting.

I guess, at some temperature, it goes from liquid alumina to liquid aluminum with evolution of oxygen? This should happen at some temperature for entropic reasons, but I can’t find any information about such a process (such as what temperature is required, or that there’s a catalyst).

Best I can find is here, if you use carbon to take away the oxygen in the bauxite, but at around 2000C

https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/166979/how-do-i-derive-metallic-aluminum-without-electricity

Also important to point out that it was not Napoleon who had the aluminum cutlery, but his nephew, Napoleon III. Aluminum wasn’t isolated until 1834.

yeah, that’s hot. I think the electrolytic process is at like a thousand degrees celsius, so this is like a thousand hotter, as you originally recalled.

Aluminum refining takes so much electricity it’s used as a way to export the value of renewable electricity generation with no nearby uses; bulk cargo ships haul bauxite ore to Iceland to use their geothermal power or to Siberia to use refineries powered off hydroelectric dams in the middle of nowhere.

lalalychee:

Due to the Unfortunate!

We are deeply out of Onions!

kontextmaschine:

You know what no I like this Japanese food subscription box, it’s not going for solid everyday stuff, it’s once a month and with this one it was like “…and this talked-about ramen from Chicago!” And like, their spin was roasted garlic and this one base. Which I didn’t love but I was like “hm interesting I see what they’re doing here, this makes me think about other flavor combinations that could work!”

I will say the preparation instructions kind of imply there are producers offering these packages to an intermediate market of redistributors, like someone’s getting that ramen in their “Taste of Chicago” boxes and someone else from their “Garlic Wonderland” subscription

psygull:

psygull:

next year’s met gala theme is THE PLYWOOD AGE

welcome to the met gala! the red carpet’s this way

No, it didn’t. So someone makes like, The Weed Vape Logic that every weed vape manufacturer uses?

I honestly wonder how Wal-Mart, Amazon, the United States Post Office, and the US military’s domestic logistics networks stack up against each other at this point.

mapsontheweb:

The length of the coastline of European countries (in km).

this map unironically explains a ton of WWII logistics

mapsontheweb:

Major US Railroad Lines by the 5 Core Owners.

War is basically a competition of hauling heavy shit from place to place with battle as a minigame