It’s a pretty standard bandwidth/latency tradeoff in my view: email is high bandwidth (it’s in writing, you can re-read, etc.), whereas phone is low latency (several back-and-forth explanations can happen in seconds). Each has its place.

If social anxiety is a factor, that’s a perfectly valid, but separate, issue.

Well, yeah — dude’s brake cables are missing!

>2000 mile flight. Not crazy long but not short. (The state of Alaska was not involved, just the airline.)

I remember when phones used to be good.

Telemarketers have been around for a long, long time (Wikipedia claim “…the practice of contacting potential customers by telephone originated in the late 19th century.”).

I personally recall a lot more telemarketing in the 90s, though I was a kid and just passed the phone to mom or dad. But that was also a time when caller ID was a luxury, and not everyone had answering machines.

In the US it depends on the airline. We went on a babymoon vacation when my partner was 30-something weeks and didn’t need to provide any documentation (Alaska Airlines). She did run it by her providers first, but that wasn’t an airline/TSA/FAA requirement.

Inconceivable! Some also look like Winston Churchill.

Sawyer filter inline with a camelback is awesome. I’d just fill up my camelback in a stream using a (clean) handkerchief to get the large debris out and then let the filter do the rest.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/sickos-haha-yes

In my head it was definitely Cave.

Because not all humans strive for honor.

Would that really help though? Gold is super soft so I think it would need to get frequently coated/plated again — and we already have pretty good and resistant marine paint.

Titanium is very corrosion resistant, not to mention plastics/fiberglass/carbon fiber, as I understand.

But yeah, cheap gold would be be great, just seems to me that the market would more be in e.g. electronics, where both corrosion resistance and electrical conductivity are required (something gold is fairly unique at).

Yep, you’re right — I was just responding to parent’s comment about fiber being best because nothing is faster than light :)

That’s…not really a cogent argument.

Satellites connect to ground using radio/microwave (or even laser), all of which are electromagnetic radiation and travel at the speed of light (in vacuum).

Light in a fiber travels much more slowly than in vacuum — light in fiber travels at around 67% the speed of light in vacuum (depends on the fiber). In contrast, signals through cat7 twisted pair (Ethernet) can be north of 75%, and coaxial cable can be north of 80% (even higher for air dielectric). Note that these are all carrying electromagnetic waves, they’re just a) not in free space and b) generally not optical frequency, so we don’t call them light, but they are still governed by the same equations and limitations.

If you want to get signals from point A to point B fastest (lowest latency), you don’t use fiber, you probably use microwaves: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/private-microwave-networks-financial-hft/

Finally, the reason fiber is so good is complicated, but has to do with the fact that “physics bandwidth” tends to care about fractional bandwidth (“delta frequency divided by frequency”), whereas “information bandwidth” cares about absolute bandwidth (“delta frequency”), all else being equal (looking at you, SNR). Fiber uses optical frequencies, which can be hundreds of THz — so a tiny fractional bandwidth is a huge absolute bandwidth.

80% of the USA lives within urban areas (source). Urban “fiberization” is absolutely within reach.

Agree that running fiber out to very remote areas is tricky, but even then it’s probably not prohibitive for all but the most remote locations.

Yes, but you’re not alone (my partner tends this way).

So the irony is

I see what you did there…

“Can you hold it” was meant as “abstain from pooping for just a little longer,” but was instead interpreted as, “poop, and then hold the poop in your hands.”

I think you mean more scrupulous, not less.

If you lose power, you can use one of these cables to power your house (or at least, the part of your house on that phase).

This is not how you should do this, but it can work. It is not a good idea (possibly illegal?).

Hopefully you can publish in an open-access journal — if not it would be great if you could share an arXiv preprint :)