I let out a long sigh.

This has to be a joke. Something they tell the new guys to jerk them around. “Collect taxes from cryptids” my ass, this is straight up workplace hazing. They even sent Jim along to keep me company - he’s probably going to film this for the office christmas party or something. Well… I guess I may as well play along. “So, how am I supposed to contact Bigfoot? Just shout into the woods?”

“Yes, actually. This is where we’ve found him the past few years, so he’s probably still living here. And he prefers ‘Mister Squatch.’” Jim’s advice doesn’t make this feel any less like a prank.

“Mister Squatch? You have to be kidding me… EXCUSE ME? MISTER SQUATCH?” I bellow, “WE’VE BEEN SENT TO CONTACT YOU ON BEHALF OF THE IRS!” I can’t believe I’m out here making a complete fool of myself.

And then it happens.

A rustle in the bushes, followed by snapping twigs and shaking branches moving fast through the underbrush. Jim bends down and opens his briefcase - why? Why did he even bring a briefcase to the middle of the woods? Suddenly, the movement in the bushes stops as it reaches a clearing, and I see something massive race towards the trees on the far side. Suddenly, it stumbles, tripping and tumbling as it falls, wrapped in a net.

A net? Where did a net come from in the middle of the woods? And then I see Jim’s empty briefcase, and the empty net gun in his hand. Laying in the middle of the clearing is the Bigfoot, and now I have to treat this like it’s normal and actually collect his taxes. Before I can even react, though, Jim is starting to untangle Bigfoot. “Look, Mister Squatch, I keep telling you, if you just pay your taxes, we won’t have to keep hunting you down like this. You know the drill, pay up or we’ll start telling the tabloids about where you live. You remember how annoying that was last time, right?”

“Yeah…” Bigfoot talks!? I’m not even sure if I’m at work right now, or if the CIA guys in the next office over slipped LSD into our coffee again. “I still keep it in the cave by the creek, just take what I owe you and leave me alone.”

“Glad we could settle this easily.” Jim cuts him free, and turns to me. “Let’s go get the money. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover… Our next stop is in West Virginia. Say, how do you feel about bridges?”

I feel like I need a new job.

I’ve worked in retail, and… That’s not an actual RFID alarm sticker, and it’s not just there for the potential theives.

Some manufacturers will actually put an RFID tag on the inside of the box. These tags work exactly like the RFID stickers, and they’re deactivated the same way (usually a magnet underneath the store’s counter).

This sticker is actually a “chip away” anti-theft sticker. They frequently go on the same products that get RFID stickers, but all they do is tear apart instead of peeling off. They’re mostly an internal tool for LP to try to link thefts and fraudulent returns (that number is the store number that it came from). This one just happens to conveniently have “ALARM” printed on it as a secondary feature, letting thieves know that the item will set off the alarm without showing where the RFID tag is.

Edit: I should probably add that they also put them on high-theft non-alarmed items, but they probably didn’t get separate sets of stickers.

Flat Earth? Firmament?

Sir, I assure you that the Earth is round… For the Space Lasers move separately from the stars fixed upon the Firmament! Clearly they are hung within the Crystal Spheres which revolve around us! And how could those divine Spheres revolve, were the Earth not round?

It’s either a typo, or a lot or sass for a PopSci article.

“Look at this huge, unparalleled rise in carbon levels millions of years ago, it’s so huge… Psych! We do that every five years! Buckle in, buckaroo, things are about to get bad!”

Wait… Y’all are talking about X-Wing: Rogue Squadron and Star Wars Episode 1: Battle for Naboo, right?

I owned those windows ports!

They worked great back in the day - I had such a blast with them that I begged my parents to get me a shitty Logitech joystick! If you want to check them out, it looks like Rogue Squadron is only $10 on Steam; and Battle for Naboo seems to be abandonware, but it seems to be hosted on a lot of “better spread than dead” game sites.

I think there may have been a tragic misunderstanding… It looks like they were using X as a placeholder, rather than the noun that Elon wants it to be; but the sentence construction could have been clearer.

Something like “I think X is wrong, but I want it to be legal for me to do wrong things Y and Z” might be a bit closer to what they were going for.

If you’re into hard sci-fi and you’re looking for a good read, they actually dropped a pretty good recommendation with that reference at the end - Larry Niven does a great job of blending real-world theories like Dyson spheres and advanced propulsion drives, with some of the more far-flung standards of the genre like an intra-planetary teleportation grid.

Actually… Yeah, that’s a really good point.

I had a nerf football as a kid that had fins on the back end - no matter how badly you threw it, the fins would help straighten it out and make it fly a bit better. Something like that would have probably fixed a lot of the “unpredictability” issues with this.

They’re so close, yet so far away - when the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian calendar, they actually did move the start of the year from April 1 (right after the spring equinox) to January 1.

…Everything else they said was about as wrong as it could be, though.

I don’t want to be a downer, but… The rats probably aren’t high if they’re just eating weed. Buckle up, y’all, time for a stoner science lesson:

THC is present in cannabis in two main forms: THCA and Delta-9 THC. Throwing around those delta numbers can seem scary given all of the unregulated Delta-8 in illegal states, but it’s really not. THCA breaks down into Delta-9 THC naturally with time and heat, through a process called decarboxylization… Which is great, because THCA isn’t psychoactive, while Delta-9 THC is. Because of this, smoking a joint or eating a properly made edible will get you high, but eating an entire ounce is just having a terrible salad.

You’re fine - I grew up in a rural state, and I thought they were super rare until I lived in a city where the public transit system gave them as change.

…You’re sure that’s not a prototype Dyson V8?

I can only imagine what’s going through his head…

“Twice - twice now, we’ve just given up and switched sides. A few weeks ago, we were shooting at these guys; and now we’re buddies? Shit, this war is as much of a mess as the last one. Just six more months until I can retire… Six more months.”

That’s actually a really good analogy. Mind if I throw some numbers on it to flesh things out?

Let’s set that moving walkway going at 5mph, and we’ll put ourselves on that walkway, on a turned-off rascal scooter. The scooter is stationary on the belt, but it’s still moving at 5mph - that’s your tailwind pushing the air around the plane forward.

Now, let’s turn that scooter on and throttle it up to 5mph. The scooter is plugging along comfortably at 5mph, but it’s actually moving at 10mph. This is your plane flying with a tailwind, performing normally for its indicated air speed, while having a much higher ground speed.

Curiously, this does make the phrase “supersonic speeds” somewhat debatable. While they were traveling over the ground faster than sound would, they weren’t moving faster than sound would in the air around them.

I ended up going down a wikipedia hole because I was curious about the inventor also making a car muffler, and it looks like it might be a regional thing. Sort of. Like, we’re trying to make it one.

Originally, everyone called them silencers, but apparently “suppressor” started to gain traction in the US in the late '80s. Since then, most American firearms groups have picked up the newer term, including the ASA (formerly American Silencer Association, now American Suppressor Association); meanwhile Britain is starting to adopt the term “sound moderator.” Neither term is really wrong, per se, it’s mainly a matter of preference.

As a side note, it turns out that Maxim’s company is still around! It looks like they only make the boring kind of silencer, though.

Sorry, I think my phrasing might have been kind of weird - I was referring to the weights of H2 and N2 relative to CO2, which weighs a whopping 44 grams per mol.

…Although, I just did some quick estimates last night, and “almost twice as heavy” was still pretty far off. CO2 is much closer to 1.5x the weight of N2 than double the weight of N2.

I’m not a scientist, but one could argue that it’s likely that all three planets had nitrogen, but only Earth still has it.

I don’t know much about Venus, but I know that part of why we have way more atmosphere than Mars is due to Earth’s magnetic field. Earth has a much stronger magnetic field than Mars, and it does a pretty good job of shielding us from the solar wind; meanwhile Mars has been slowly trickling atmosphere into the void for ages because it lacks that shielding.

Given that CO2 is actually super heavy, it makes sense that Mars would lose almost everything else first. You mentioned H2, but it’s also almost twice as heavy as N2 - because of this, nitrogen would concentrate at higher altitudes, eventually becoming exposed to the solar wind as lighter gases were stripped away.

As for Venus… Again, I’m not an expert, but a quick search suggests that it has a weak magnetic field as well. With a primarily CO2 atmosphere and a weak magnetic field, one could infer that Venus is in a similar position to Mars, and any significant nitrogen that may have been in its atmosphere has simply been stripped away by the solar wind.

You’re talking about an e-liquid tank full of distillate, kind of like this, right?

If you just filled it, you should just have to let it sit for a while - I left mine overnight before I hit it to let the distillate soak into the coils.

If it worked for a while before dying, though, then the atomizer might have burned out. You can replace it, but you’ll have to empty and refill the tank, so it might be easiest to just empty it into a spare tank and use that one for a while.

I feel like I would use it voluntarily if it put the sponsors in the “add a destination” menu. I tend to use Google maps for longer trips, and I try to add any stops on the way to my route so I don’t miss them - if I hit “add destination” and it offered, for example, Citgo stations, 7-11s, and Dunkin Donuts on my route, then I would probably get gas and snacks at sponsored locations almost every time.

As it is, though… Well, just having a Dunks on the way to the laundromat doesn’t make me want to stop in and buy a coffee. Driving by ten of them “randomly” on my way to another state isn’t going to make me any more likely to stop at one.

Believe it or not, that’s actually what the complimentary branded matchbooks that smoke shops and strip clubs used to give away were meant to be!

They weren’t an ad directed at you, though - they were an ad directed at your friends. You’d go hang out somewhere, set your cigarettes and matches down, and people would see the logo.