Spyke

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Is it really true that meth or amphetamine can be synthesized from plastic spoons?

Couldn't you technically synthesize anything from anything as long as you have all the molecules and don't care about yield or cost? Trivially, all organic compounds can be broken down into methane, and then reformed into whatever you want. Polystyrene is all carbon though, so you'll still need a source of nitrogen to get meth.

It's been over a decade since I've taken orgchem, so I don't know if I'm remembering this stuff correctly.

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Phoenix tried a reflective coating on black asphalt; noon surface heat fell 12°F

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I'll quote the relevant passages for you. It describes the results from two different studies.

Study #1:

The research found that mean radiant temperature, a measure of the thermal radiation absorbed by the body outdoors, rose by an average of 5.5°F on the coated streets.

Study #2:

It noted [...] mean radiant temperature over the [coated] pavement rose about 4°C (7.2°F) at midday

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It's about logic and not "feelings"

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That's the point of having savings. You could just as easily ask yourself what you would do if you spent 2k on car repairs and suddenly your friend urgently needs financial assistance the next day. If you need to spend that money, then you spend it. If you can't, then you deal with the consequences.

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A community to discuss about sortition, a type of governance where officials are chosen by lottery.

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I don't see how that's better than just having a large representative body and counting all votes. The expected value of a bribe is still the same no matter what percentage of the votes are counted, but a lower percentage also increases the variance such that one bribe has a chance of having a big impact on the voting outcome, whereas if you count all the votes, a single bribe will only ever have a small effect.

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What does "araffe" mean?

I searched through Lemmy posts with that word. Half of them have people asking the exact same question, and based on the answers, I'm going to conclude that no one knows.

One guess that seems plausible is that it's an AI hallucinated word that's showing up a lot because they're using AI to generate the captions.