Solid vitamin C is relatively stable, but it decomposes rather quickly when dissolved in water. Factors such as pH, temperature, oxygen, and the presence of catalysts (iron, copper) influence the decomposition process. The lowest rate of oxidation is observed at pH 3, where vitamin C solutions are the most stable. Raising the pH to 5 increases the oxidation rate by a factor of 2.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3510389/

The study uses particularly clean water (clean enough to be suitable for medical injections) with a pH of ~7.4. At that acidity and a temperature of 20°C (≈70°F), it takes about 95 days for the vitamin C to decay to 10% of its original concentration, or 28 days to reach 50%.

Normal drinking water has a pH of 6.5-8.5, but also contains a lot of other substances, which might increase the rate of oxidation. Given the potential time between treatment and consumption as well as the fact that people might boil it and increase the rate of decay that way, it’s just not as economical to add ascorbic acid to the water supply if only a small percentage of it will ever reach the consumers.

Additionally, the exact dosage will be hard to control, leading to a risk of excessive side effects such as kidney stones. People with a specific enzyme deficiency may also suffer anemia as excessive doses.

Compare that to, say, lemons, whose juice has a pH of ~ 2.4 and renders the vitamin a lot more stable. If you want people to get a good intake of vitamin C, tell them to eat fruits and vegetables, preferably uncooked. The vitamin C dosage you’ll get from that will hardly lead to megadoses, unless you eat such vast amounts that you’d probably get other problems anyway.

The reason fluoride is added is that it’s quite stable, safe and effective, while also being fairly cheap.

Sometimes, I wish the other 26 would just collectively agree to kick it out. It’s not even a Trojan Horse at this point, just a wrench in the gears.

Short version: If we’re talking national level (that is, electoral votes), then Congress elects the president (House for President, Senate for VP).

If we’re talking state level however, for most states the 34% will win and take all of the state’s electoral votes.

This is the cornerstone of the two-party system, which emerges naturally as a consequence of plurality voting systems. If you have two left-wing parties, one of which gets 10% and the other 42%, they both loose to the 48% of the single right-wing party. Hence, it’s strategic for the left wing to unite, which would theoretically earn them 52% of votes (practically, voter disillusionment makes it more complicated).

This is called the Spoiler Effect: A left-wing party would end up splitting votes off the Democrats, leading to a plurality victory for the Republicans. And in winner-takes-all systems, that plurality is enough to get the respective state’s electoral votes.

Hitler was extremely charismatic, an effective speaker and a clever politician. He was a terrible commander, compounded by his inability to acknowledge and account for that weakness, but in the run-up to the war and in the opening phase, he correctly estimated and effectively capitalised on the other powers’ reluctance to fight another war.

In Musk and Trump, you can observe a similar phenomenon: the ability to hit the right notes with the right people in order to rile them up and seize the moment before their opponents manage to effectively rally and organise a resistance. Whether by blind luck, intuition or cunning calculation, their results aren’t those of fumbling idiots. However idiotic they may seem to us, their success (so far) proves they got something right.

But the story isn’t over yet. If I’m wrong and they do end up fumbling their big chance, I’ll happily rescind those words. But as it stands now, I’d rather not underestimate their cunning.

That’s what I mean. Voting third party isn’t reasonable, unless it polls well enough ahead of time that it becomes a viable choice for people to risk their vote being wasted for the chance to pick a better option. But even then, they need to trust those polls and need to hope that enough other people come to the same conclusion to actually make it so…

If you want to break the two-party-stranglehold, you have to vote third party, but only if enough other people vote third party, and that kind of “guessing motives” or trusting in the other actors to make individually irrational but collectively rational decisions is where Game Theory breaks down.

The theory is clear, but humans aren’t quite so easy to model, and when your game features piles and piles of incomplete information and non-deterministic decisions, things get muddy.

I think many just don’t understand or don’t want to understand the complexity of the public opinion guessing game that is attempting to break the vile equilibrium of a two-party-system without spoilering the worse party into power.

At least that’s what I hope, because the alternative is that they actually think Trump is better and I’m trying to get out of the habit of assuming the worst.

Time to take my alt account elsewhere…

Voting for Harris was always going to be an attempt to buy more time for more effective change measures, for pushing progressive support in primaries and local elections, for building public perception that the left actually has a chance and can make a difference. It was never going to fix things –nothing can do so quickly, because cultural change takes time – but prevent the worst so that there might be more time for other measures that would set a better course.

But some people opted to let perfect be the enemy of “not as bad” and call their complacency noble, so I guess that option is off the table now.

I thought that was a synonym for shit smear?

Put them on an Ark - wooden, overloaded, cast adrift in the type of weather that would cause massive flooding, if you catch my drift. Of course, gathering two of each animal would be cruel, so we’ll skip those.

you can’t really compare it

My point is that ridiculous difference. 10m is a lot of money, yet these people wouldn’t actually lose much because what they have left is still so obscenely much more.

Oh no, I mean based on my current income. If I made 10m less than I make now, I’d make about -10m. My yearly income is about 54k, or 0.054m, so subtracting 10m would get me to -9.946m.

I was trying to make a joke about how much 10m is for the average person, yet it’s rather minor when you’re already making 200m.

In fact, I’d be very much happy to make just those 10m, I don’t even need the 200m, nor would I need it more than once. A one-off sum of 10m would be more than enough to solve a lot of my problems and still have plenty left to be ready for future preparations.

Actually, losing 10m income would be bad. For me, at least, it would put me about 10m in debt.

so it’s hard to know exactly what to make of the results

Sounds like someone desperately trying to not ruin future grant chances by saying “this trial is absolutely worthless”…

Should have spent more time reflecting on his wrongs I guess