evasive_chimpanzee

If you wanted pizza to be "italian", it would have to have no tomatoes, peppers, pepperoni, buffalo milk cheese, basil or a whole bunch of other ingredients that are commonly added to pizza.

Pizza is a global food, do with it as you will

They try really hard not to explain how the system works. It doesn't mention it at all in this news story, or anywhere easy to find on their site. I crunched some numbers, and it seems like this device has about double the heat capacity for the mass than just plain water would have. That means it probably has to be a phase change material. All of the "smarts" and app control is nice, but at its core, it's really simple concept. I think this kind of thing would sell better if instead of trying to make it sound high-tech, they just admitted it was a low tech solution that they've made user friendly.

I did find this mention in the site q and a:

Q: What is the storage medium made of?

A: Proprietary mix of high-density, inert, non-toxic and low impact materials

I don't understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It's so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it's too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I'm selling something that I've used, it's cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.

Oculus was founded by a shitty person who sold to Facebook and then went on to help make a company to bring Big Tech into surveillance and autonomous weapon systems. Basically, he's trying to bring on an orwellian nightmare.

Oculus would have gone bad weather or not Facebook bought them.

Yeah, freezing water is definitely great. It's just a little trickier to deal with since you need to account for the expansion, and the fact that you can't pump it around anymore.

A huge problem with the wine industry in America is that they've always tried to position themselves as a premium product with respect to other forms of alcohol. With respect to the information available to the consumer, the pricing seems to be random. Products that are aged understandably are going to cost more, and huge brands should be cheaper than small brands. Other than that, prices just seem to be set to correspond to whatever market segment they are targeting. A $20 bottle of wine may taste way better than a $15 bottle, but it could also be worse. There's no indication of what could make the $20 bottle better than the $15 bottle other than the fact that it's more expensive. Some brands put a little bit more info in, like the percentage of grapes, and sometimes they tell you where the grapes came from, but most consumers are just going to grab the cheaper bottle.

Contrast this with beer, where you know higher abv=more ingredients=more expensive, aged beers are more expensive, and beers from smaller or foreign breweries are more expensive. Breweries often tell you the exact ingredients that went in, so you can get a decent idea of what a beer will taste like before ordering, and you can make an informed decision to buy slightly more expensive products.

Wine is a little more tricky because there are fewer ingredients, and less processing, but they could absolutely give way more info. The wines that are good just try to market it as the magic of terroir in a bottle, rather than actually pointing out how and why they are better or taste different.

Coffee beans aren't beans. There are some beans that are roasted as a substitute for coffee, like the seeds of the Kentucky coffeetree. In times of shortage, people have tried many things to replace coffee, like dandelion and chicory root. For the most part, the substitutes arent as good as the original, so people don't stick with them. There's a chance someone has tried to roast and brew pinto beans or whatever, but they probably taste bad.

Yeah, this should really be the future. There's a lot of unnecessary materials used/energy wasted to give us our current "all power costs the same all the time" system.

According to this, about 70% of US household energy use is heating/cooling the space, or water. Much of that can be time shifted. What can't be time shifted can be stored in cheaper ways than battery storage.

1 tonne of rock heated (or cooled) 20° C above ambient is a store of about 4.7 kWh. According to that same site, the average yearly energy use in the US is 10500 kWh. If 70% is heating/cooling, that's about 20 kWh per day, so you'd need about 5 tonnes of rock to hold that enough energy. That seems like a lot, but it's just about 2 cubic meters of rock.

If you use water, it has 5 times the specific heat (but less density), so you only need 1 cubic meter. Probably easier to heat/cool/use, too. Water can also be heated more than 20 degrees above ambient, too.

Really, we should create incentives for homes to be built with high thermal mass. Even without any sort of fancy direct heating or cooling of a thermal mass, it will store significant heat.

Yeah, if you watch a video on old water powered mills, they had all sorts of transmissions built out of wood, including clutches to turn on and off the power.

The headlight thing is really cool

I've heard (though I can't say authoritatively), that while "american" is obviously used for people from the USA, "americano" applies to all residents of the New World in Spanish in most countries that speak it. Wikipedia seems to agree:

In Spanish, americano denotes geographic and cultural origin in the New World, as well as (infrequently) a U.S. citizen;[13][14][c] the more common term is estadounidense ("United States person"), which derives from Estados Unidos de América

It's also useful as a visual notice of a parenthetical comment.

Here's some thoughts off the top of my head.

There are loads of wiring in a car, that can all be reused.

Depending on the vehicle, the wheels/suspension could be converted to like a trailer or something.

The seats can be pulled out as chairs.

Various pumps can be used for moving fluids (though you'd probably want to be careful with that, hazmat-wise).

The transmission could be rigged up to a wind/water mill to adjust rotational velocity of a sawmill or some other industrial application.

Windows are tricky cause the shapes are weird, but they could be set in clay or concrete or something.

Alternators are definitely useful.

Headlights for spotlights.