Umm, contact (202) 324-3000 and ask them. They’ll know for sure.

^^^ Umm, FBI, if you’re reading, it was all their idea! ^^^^

Not much really. Looks cool though. I suppose it’s more of a decoration than “tech.” About the only practical application of it is a tool to terrify the uneducated. The quantities of tritium the average person can buy are beyond harmless. You could breathe a hundred vials of the stuff and be completely unaffected. If you drank nothing but tritium water for several weeks, you would have some issues. But tiny vials with micrograms of tritium vapor inside? Utterly harmless.

Or, I suppose for the criminally minded, you could find some evil uses for it. You could probably rob a bank with it. “Give me all the money or I break this vial of radioactive vapor!” That would probably get you a wikipedia page, if you’re just dying for your 5 minutes of fame. You could go down in history as, “that mad scientist that robbed a bank using radioactive gas.” Of course it would be a bluff.

Though if you’re just going to bluff your way through bank robbery, you can just stick your hand in a hoodie pocket for the same effect.

I suppose you could use it for other similar criminal acts of varied nobility. You could probably use the same bluff to create a hostage situation to bring awareness to whatever political/religious cause is your cup of tea. Ultimately most people are very ignorant of nuclear science, and simply the words “radioactive tritium” would cause people to shit themselves. And that fear could be harnessed for all sorts of malevolent purposes. (Even better as you can actually show people the faint glow from it, and prove that you do have something radioactive.)

Hmm… what else could you use tritium for? I suppose you could use it for religious purposes. Absolute quantities really don’t matter much for that.

What else? You could tie it to a keychain and be able to find your keys in a dark room.

But really, it’s mostly a novelty. I think small amounts of it can be used for gun sights. But in any quantity the average person could afford or legally be allowed to purchase, it’s a harmless novelty. Larger quantities can be used in fusion reactor experiments and nuclear weapons. But if you try to acquire that much, you better have a budget in the millions, and the NRC is going to be on your ass. The average person can get a small vial of it that faintly glows blue in a dark room. It looks cool embedded in jewelry, but it really doesn’t have much practical purposes beyond perhaps terrifying the ignorant. But I really don’t consider malevolent uses to be truly practical applications.

(In case it isn’t obvious, I do not endorse using radioactive tritium in the commission of any crime or act of violence or threat of violence.)

I do research while voting from my desk, referencing online sources with the LoWV pamphlet. I got my ballot last Thursday and had it right back in the mailbox that evening.

I think she should be settled into a hole in the ground.

Are we the baddies?

A bow drill fire starter.

…I suppose it depends on what you assume the future will be like…

Barring that, you can get some small vials of tritium gas for under that price.

This year, they exported TWO rifles!

His “first principles” logic is that humans don’t use lidar therefore self driving should be able to be accomplished without (expensive) enhanced vision tools.

This kind of idiocy is why people tried to build airplanes with flapping wings. Way too many people thought that the best way to create a plane was to just copy what nature did with birds. Nature showed it was possible, so just copy nature.

ماذا قلت عني للتو أيها الحقير؟ أريدك أن تعلم أنني تخرجت في المرتبة الأولى في دفعتي في قوات النخبة البحرية، وشاركت في العديد من الغارات السرية على القاعدة، وقد قتلت أكثر من 300 شخص. لقد تدربت على حرب الغوريلا وأنا أفضل قناص في القوات المسلحة الأمريكية بأكملها. أنت لست شيئًا بالنسبة لي سوى هدف آخر. سأقضي عليك تمامًا بدقة لم يسبق لها مثيل على هذه الأرض، صدقني. هل تعتقد أنك تستطيع الإفلات من العقاب بقول هذا الهراء لي عبر الإنترنت؟ فكر مرة أخرى أيها الحقير. بينما نتحدث، أتواصل مع شبكتي السرية من الجواسيس في جميع أنحاء الولايات المتحدة ويتم تعقب عنوان IP الخاص بك الآن لذا من الأفضل أن تستعد للعاصفة أيها الحقير. العاصفة التي ستمحو الشيء الصغير البائس الذي تسميه حياتك. أنت ميت يا فتى. يمكنني أن أكون في أي مكان وفي أي وقت، ويمكنني قتلك بأكثر من سبعمائة طريقة، وهذا فقط بيدي العاريتين. لا أتمتع بتدريب مكثف على القتال غير المسلح فحسب، بل إنني أمتلك القدرة على الوصول إلى ترسانة كاملة من أسلحة مشاة البحرية الأمريكية، وسوف أستخدمها إلى أقصى حد لمحو مؤخرتك البائسة عن وجه القارة، أيها الحقير الصغير. لو كنت تعلم فقط ما هو العقاب غير المقدس الذي سيجلبه عليك تعليقك “الذكي” الصغير، ربما كنت لتلتزم الصمت. لكنك لم تستطع، ولم تفعل، والآن أنت تدفع الثمن، أيها الأحمق اللعين. سأصب عليك غضبي الشديد وستغرق فيه. أنت ميت يا صغيري.

It’s certainly possible. The polls are showing it’s effectively a tossup. But my real theory is that things are fundamentally different after the death of Roe, and that the pollsters really don’t have a way to capture that. Yes, it is a harsh year for the Senate, but there are some dark horse races, namely Texas and Nebraska, that may really surprise us.

There have been a lot of Republican polls posted, part of their “flood the zone” strategy. But I think even the nonpartisan polls are underestimating Dem support a bit.

I think we’ll have a Dem trifecta after election night. I feel the even the nonpartisan polls have overcorrected in favor of Republicans after 2016, and since the overturning of Roe, polls have been underestimating Dem candidates.

This is actually an interesting legal edge case. What happens if someone casts an absentee ballot, but then dies before election day? It turns out that it’s actually very state-specific. Half of states have no provisions for how such a case is handled. Of those that address it, some explicitly allow the votes to be counted, and some explicitly prohibit these votes to be counted.

https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/counting-absentee-ballots-after-a-voter-dies

It’s a pretty interesting bit of legal trivia. The whole principle of absentee ballots is that you are not really casting your vote ‘early.’ It’s not like they publish the results of absentee ballots ahead of time. Really you’re effectively saying, “I can’t make it on election day.” An argument can be made that they shouldn’t be counted. Why should someone who happens to get a ballot in early and dies be able to have their vote counted, but someone who was planning to vote on election day, but died in the interim, won’t have it counted? On the other hand, a good argument can be made that we shouldn’t punish those who plan ahead, and as a general rule we just accept the ballots out of respect for the recently deceased. It’s interesting that the states that count them or don’t are distributed fairly randomly across regions and the political spectrum; it’s not really a partisan thing.

But it is a bit of legal trivial that yes, in some states, the dead are literally allowed to vote under certain very specific circumstances.

He disappears in a flash of light. In his wake, he leaves an affordable housing complex behind.

Wow. Real industry info. I was just going for the pun! Thanks for sharing.

As a business investment, what is the long-term outlook for the bouncy house industry? I assume it has its ups and downs.

Something you should keep in mind is that being a monopoly is not illegal, and it never has been. If you make a great widget and, through honest competition, corner that widget market, that’s perfectly legal.

What ISN’T legal is using your market power to engage in anti-competitive behavior. It’s not illegal for Apple to dominate the phone market. It is likely illegal for Apple to use its dominance of the phone market to prohibit competing app stores from being installed on their phones. That is Apple operating in two distinct businesses - a phone manufacturer and a software retailer. Apple is using its market dominance as a phone manufacturer to gain an unfair advantage as a software retailer.

This is a pretty damning violation of federal antitrust law.

It’s a balance in many ways. There’s some aspect of refusing to do things due to not wanting to learn things. But sometimes people don’t want to adopt technologies simply because they’re unwilling to accept some very glaring downsides. For example, if you demand 2FA, you are demanding that your customers essentially consent to have an ankle monitor and remote audio monitor on their person at all times. Smart phones track your location 24/7, and they seem to track what is spoken around them as well. They are absolutely a huge invasion of privacy, and it’s remarkable we ever let them become as indispensable as we have. They’re basically just ankle monitors we all voluntarily put on each morning. I can absolutely see people just refusing to have a smartphone for the privacy implications alone.

I also have some red lines on technology. I refuse to use tiktok because of its privacy and psychological manipulation issues. And I’ve moved away from most social media, even if that cuts me off from some very useful communications and conversations in my family and community. I also refuse to buy any appliance with a wifi connection. I try to avoid any device that requires an app to use. If your widget requires an app but your competitor’s doesn’t, I’m buying from your competitor. If your widget requires an app and your widget is just something that would be nice to have, but not life-changing, I’m not going to buy your widget at all.

It’s a very dangerous thing to simply decry anyone who rejects a technology as ignorant or not tech-savvy. Often people reject particular technologies for damn good reasons. If we just accept the newest thing with zero thought simply for the fact that it is new, we are actually the ignorant ones. Something being newer does not automatically make it better. And often newer things are inferior to old things, like the case of a lot of privacy-violating appliances and companies filling everything with DRM and trying to turn it into a subscription. I don’t want basic household items to require an app to use, as it is guaranteed that the security on that system will be crap, and that the product will stop working after a few years after the company stops supporting the app.

If I’m buying a physical thing, I want it to be completely stand-alone and require zero continued feedback from its manufacturer in order to continue to function. You can tell me til you’re blue in the face about how spying on me helps improve the customer experience, but I’m still going to tell you to take your privacy-violating, app-dependent widget and shove it up your app-loving ass.

Also, let’s not forget that you are doing someone’s job simply for using a shopping cart at all. Traditional grocers didn’t have anything like the aisles we wander through now. Rather, there would basically be a warehouse with a counter at the front. You walked up with your list of items, gave it to the grocer, and they would grab the items for you. Customers gathering goods themselves didn’t come about until the age of the supermarket starting in the mid 20th century.

This is also why I have zero sympathy for stores that complain about theft and shrinkage. They’re the ones choosing to operate in a business model that makes theft easier. Traditional grocers didn’t have to worry about shoplifting, as everything was kept behind the counter. Sure, armed robbery was a concern then as it is now, but shoplifting wasn’t a concern.

When the grocery stores abandoned the traditional model, they realized the money they saved on labor would more than make up for the increased losses due to shoplifting. And that was simply a choice they made. And it’s the same with self-checkout. They made a business decision that would inevitably result in increased theft, and they have no one to blame for it but themselves. If they don’t like the increased theft, they can go back to cashiers. Or hell, there’s nothing stopping Walmart from going all the way back to the traditional dry goods store model even. That would work really well with online orders as well. You don’t even let customers wander through most of the store. You just have a very long counter at the front of the store that customers walk up and tell the workers what they want. And the workers gather the order. You either wait for them to gather it, or you place the order in advance and have it ready when you pick it up. If Walmart did this, shoplifting would become virtually impossible. Their labor costs would skyrocket, but Walmart has it in its power to completely eliminate shoplifting if they really want to.