Something that surprised me in my travels (which are primarily West of the Mississippi) is how often the states actually line up with a significant geographic shift. Arizona is endless orange desert. New Mexico immediately becomes rainbow painted cliffs. Utah is somehow entirely vertical. California is a contradiction of green desert. Nevada is like a chemical mine puked on a bunch of bumpy ridges. Northern New Mexico falls off a cliff and the bottom is Texas.

If you watch closely, usually something fairly dramatic happens in the landscape within a few miles of the border.

I do this kind of “foraging plate” sometimes. Yours looks really good and balanced. Got some protein, plenty of plants, a little probiotics, great work, good eating!

The good news is you haven’t brought all your things in yet. Don’t bring anything else in until you’ve had some time to investigate.

One bed bug, like you’ve said, could come from anywhere. If this apartment is infested you will find so many more. Give it some time to make sure this is an infestation. Do you have bites? Are there other signs? Of course the landlord is ALWAYS going to say there aren’t any bedbugs, of course they would. But give it some time, pay another month, see what happens.

If no more bedbugs show up, and you don’t get bites, go ahead and move your stuff in. If it’s infested, get out because they are SO hard to get rid of!

A lot of fascism and authoritarianism comes from loneliness or a lack of community. Cutting him off could mean he seeks more community with Nazis. Be clear about your beliefs, keep calling him out when he’s wrong, but try to stay his friend. That’s different than “supporting” his beliefs. Take care of him when he’s sick, but don’t drive him to the Nazi rally. Your friendship might make a difference on his journey back to healthy beliefs.

Also, really sorry your friend is dealing with this right now, I know it must suck to see this happen to him. It’s not necessarily the final story though.

Oh, haha, yeah, I tried some stuff in ADB, too, but I think I want to keep the phone a bit longer. Thanks for your answer!

Did you find a way to get rid of that full screen update notification?

It’s a threat. Nobody likes the idea of crippling the economy with an unending general strike. But the people who watch the daily numbers use them to predict future behavior. A big blackout in the second month makes them think really hard about what is coming 6 months down the road. If the blackout is small, they know they don’t have anything to worry about. If it shifts 50% of sales to another day, they know they’re having a conversation with a giant that can move their numbers a lot.

First time it ever occurred to me, but now that I’ve read it, of course! Why wouldn’t every city make this free?! Solving transportation woes is a surefire way to stoke your economy, and removing payments is going to make public transportation more efficient and cheaper to maintain (no ticket kiosks getting vandalized, no payment processors to pay). Seems like a win win for any congested city.

Salt gets into rivers when material that can’t be dissolved is stripped away by erosion. This exposes new water soluble compounds to the water, where they dissolve into the water and are taken to the ocean.

Over millions of years erosion removes innumerable tons of material, essentially mining the subsurface soluble compounds and delivering them to the ocean. Once there, as you mention ,those salts remain in the ocean. On Earth, this process began billions of years ago and has been adding salt to the oceans ever since.

You can observe this happening in many rivers today. The Colorado River is a great one. If you measure is salinity at the headwaters (or heck, probably even the inlet of Lake Powell), and where it enters the Gulf of Mexico, you will observe an incredible increase in salt. There was an international treaty formed around the US delivering river water that is not too salty to grow crops in to Mexico. The US solved that problem by installing a desalination plant on the river!

However without that land based salt mining process, how salty would the oceans be? Lots of good clues in this thread, but I don’t think anyone has offered a definitive answer.

Sure, I get that, but without land for rivers to essentially mine salt from, the equation changes a lot. Underwater erosion is dramatically less destructive than above water erosion.

Earth’s oceans are in a steady state, where all the addition of salt by rivers is balanced by loss of salt in the ocean. If you removed all the rivers from the equation, Earth’s oceans would find a new balance at a point significantly less salty than they are currently. Though I have little idea if that would be something we consider freshwater, or just “less salty” saltwater.

This is all very interesting and pertinent. I was wondering about the hadean period, and whether you could actually get to an ocean world without first having continents with a water cycle. I don’t know enough about planetary formation to conclude further. Thanks for pointing me to the hadean period, I will read more about that.

You might misunderstand my comment about the dead sea. The dead sea actually precipitates salt crystals onto the bottom of the sea. No land is required in this strange process. I don’t think it’s clear to say whether this happens because of the extreme salinity of the dead sea, or if the extreme salinity just makes it the only place we observe this rapid desalination on human time scales. I offered this as perhaps the most striking example that salts dissolved in water are not necessarily a stable state on a timeline of billions of years.

Yeah, but not all that salt is in contact with water. There are huge deposits of salt under the Mediterranean, yet they have not dissolved into the ocean. You have to actually strip away the non-salt components to get enough water to salt contact to actually dissolve enough salt to make that much water salty.

Running water causes a lot more erosion than stationary bodies of water. Consider lakes, which are still cycling water much like a river, but over thousands of years they deposit so much silt that they cease to exist. That’s the opposite of erosion.

Underwater erosion is certainly a thing, but in comparison to downhill water erosion on land, it’s pretty insignificant. It does not seem a given that it could significantly offset the processes that remove salt from salt water.

Running water causes a lot more erosion than stationary bodies of water. Consider lakes, which are still cycling water much like a river, but over thousands of years they deposit so much silt that they cease to exist.

Underwater erosion is certainly a thing, but in comparison to downhill water erosion on land, it’s pretty insignificant. It does not seem a given that it could significantly offset the processes that remove salt from salt water.

Oh man! The fact that our current ocean isn’t getting more salty implies that the addition by rivers is very significant to the total saltiness of the ocean! Over billions of years with no rivers, the ocean must get significantly fresher! Wow! That is strong confirmation that an entirely ocean world would at least be significantly less salty!

The presence of sodium and chlorine on the planet makes sense to me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s dissolved in the water. I think the key understanding is if the water cycle is the key component of dissolving salt in water, or if the much less dramatic erosion on the bottom of the ocean is sufficient to make the water notably salty.

So far the best answer I’ve got is that water in comets and otherwise outside the planet might actually be something like salty, so maybe freshwater is just a temporary aberration of the water cycle.

At the same time, we know there are some processes that remove salt from oceans (e.g. the salt formations at the bottom of the Dead Sea), so in the end I think it would come down to where that balance of salt in vs salt out. It’s not totally clear to me that without the continental influx of salt from rivers, that that balance would result in something like freshwater or saltwater. This thread has highlighted several factors that come in on both sides, so it may be something we won’t know until we’ve explored more planets.

I feel like I’d rather drink saltwater before I drink water with ammonia dissolved in it.

Sure but once a continental plate is flooded, isn’t it by definition an oceanic plate at that point? A continent only exists if it isn’t flooded.

Thanks for all the detail! Your observation about comets is really pertinent. Saltwater is probably itself a purer form of water than comets. Maybe an ocean planet is actually more like a muddy swamp of nasty dirty water than a lake.

Exactly. If a planet ever had a salty ocean, adding more water probably wouldn’t dilute it in any meaningful way, so it would need to be a planet that never had continents.