We definitely get most of our groceries from standalone grocery stores. For the most part, you drive right to it.

I just looked at some Sydney shopping centres, and they look much like our malls on the inside (except for groceries), but it seems like they are much more integrated in the neighborhoods. It looks like parking garages are more popular there than the giant lots here.

I just looked at the dead mall wikipedia page, and it has a picture of the century 3 mall. That’s a good example of what they look like here; separate from where people live, and surrounded by big lots. You can actually see the strip malls that replaced it all around it.

In America, there’s like 3 different things you could call a mall. When most people talk about them, it means a giant building with central indoor paths connecting a bunch of businesses. Typically, there would be a handful of “anchor” businesses, like department stores and a movie theater, and then space for a bunch of much smaller businesses in between including restaurants. These malls (at least the ones I’ve been to) for whatever reason don’t typically have grocery stores. I have seen pharmacies and small Dr’s offices in them.

Then there are “strip malls” that are typically a row of businesses on one side or surrounding a big parking lot. Typically grocery stores are in those.

Lastly, there’s “outlet malls”, which are often set up like a fake town with parking distributed throughout. They are commonly built on cheap land in the outskirts of towns, and they have mostly clothing. They are typically brand specific stores (e.g., Nike), so they are allegedly cheaper.

It’s that first category that Americans are going to be talking about if they just refer to a “mall”, though. The idea to have all your shops in a convenient place has been around forever, and still works great in many traditional business districts. The “shopping mall”, though, was somewhat of an artificial movement in the 80’s and 90’s that was always a bit destined to fail. Like people have said, the internet is partially responsible, but malls were hurting before the internet started really doing damage. In America, you basically have to drive everywhere, and if you are driving everywhere, it’s easiest to just drive directly to whatever shop you need. With malls, you have to park far out in a giant lot, and walk a long way to get to whatever business. You could call it lazy, but if you’ve only got a little bit of time after a day of work to do shopping, are you going to do the option where you get the task done in 30 minutes, or an hour?

It actually screws us 2 ways. First, by removing liability/responsibility from the company and putting it on people. Second, by forcing everyone to have to car about the stock market, and be subject to its whims

It’s called black tea because of the color of the leaves, not the final product

These pressures are all gauge pressure, not absolute pressure. 1 bar gauge pressure would be about 2 bar absolute.

Poop indirectly on crops. Systems like this or the Aztec chinampa system, basically try to keep nutrients in the loop with fish and other aquatic organisms. Obviously, there’s a disease risk if you do it wrong, but that’s also true for modern water treatment.

The background check agency probably uses data brokers, though. They would just only pass along what they are allowed to.

The effect of larger shipping noise on whales is something we don’t talk enough about. Also, there seems to be a bit of a gentleman’s agreement on sonar usage to avoid power/frequencies that would be really harmful to whales, but the moment one countries breaks that agreement, they will have a leg up because they could get better long range and more detailed data on the movements of another country’s navy.

There have been isolated test events that have lead to mass whale suicide.

Elbows have always been allowed on the table. The rule for fancy dining was that you couldn’t have elbows on the table during a course, i.e., when people are actively eating, but before/after, it’s fine. That’s a reasonable rule to be considerate of space.

Fold your clothes immediately after drying, while they are still warm. Also, dryers that can add steam really help if you’ve got a few things that need wrinkle removal. Also, handheld steamers are cheap.

Mostly, avoid needing to iron by avoiding wearing formal business attire.

Keeping the air dry reduces both the length of time microorganisms can live outside your body and the length of time that vapor particles can harbor them.

Pretty sure this is only true for some microorganisms. Well, I’m not sure about length of survival time, but I’ve definitely see studies that have shown that lower humidity causes respiratory droplet evaporation, resulting in more airborne virus particles and increasing spread. There is some evidence that this increases infection rates

Any info on surface roughness? I’m thinking shiny side would be smoother and therefore less sticky, though I don’t know how much the passivation layer would affect it. Probably no where close to making a difference at the end of the day, but I’m curious.

You just gave me a flashback to a system I encountered as a student where my password got truncated, so I couldn’t log in. I had to ask the teacher what to do, expecting her to have access to a reset or something, but she just told me what my password was. It was like 3 and a half words, clearly truncated and stored in plain text.

Sentry Safes aren’t safes, they are fire boxes with a fancy lock.

Judging by the one I bought when I went off to college to keep some documents safe, they don’t even have fancy locks. I misplaced my key, but I was able to open it in the same amount of time with a pumpkin carving knife as a jiggler.

this explains it a bit. The quick and dirty answer is that when you boil a mash, you are boiling a solution, not just 3 individual liquids (ignoring all the other stuff in there). It’s similar to how adding salt to water lowers the freezing point and raises the boiling point.

Water is polar, while ethanol only has mild polarity. Methanol is more polar than ethanol, so it holds onto the water more. If you had a mixture of methanol and ethanol with no water, you’d probably get more methanol first, but the water changes things.

Pecan is literally a hickory, carya Illinoinensis, the Illinois hickory.

There’s actually more methanol in the tails than the foreshots due to complicated chemistry.

They need to do better at wording the titles of articles like this. It should read something like “34 dead after drinking tainted/poisoned liquor”. Contrary to popular belief, brewing does not produce enough methanol to be toxic, and distilling does not concentrate it relative to the ethanol to a point where moonshine could be toxic. Media likes to portray like you have to be careful not to produce methanol, when really, you would have to intentionally make it. Here’s a good writeup about it.

Methanol toxicity only really occurs when people deliberately add methanol to alcohol, either as a deterrent to keep you from drinking it (e.g. hardware store “denatured alcohol”), or to counterfeit real drinking alcohol. I can guarantee you this is a case of someone dumping a bunch of cheap, industrial methanol into watered down real booze to increase profits.

Yeah, I definitely agree we’d be better off cutting land used for livestock. I guess it’s a slightly different story in Germany because any land you’re using for livestock (or livestock feed) is presumably land that could be used for human food. In America, much of the land used for cattle is ranch land not suitable for agriculture. We do still have massive amounts of land cultivating crops like corn and hay for cattle that is suitable for agriculture, though.

Just going down that pro and con list, though, it really does seem unclear to me. OA releases less CO2, but it also stores less CO2 in the soil. Lower energy use/higher efficiency per land area is great, but what we really want is lowest energy use per X amount of food. The “enhanced soil and water quality” part is also debatable. this study shows a higher eutrophication potential from OA, so worse for water. It does seem to be dependent on the crop, and the impacts of beef are so insanely higher than plants, that it almost seems irrelevant how you farm crops.

It’s somewhat like saying that a suburban block is better for the environment than a city block. It’s true, but only if you consider just that plot of land. A city block is way more efficient in terms of per person effect on the environment.

I think the crux of the problem is that the original tenets of organic agriculture were set by some scientists a hundred years ago, but also people like Rudolph steiner who was an occultist. There’s still a mix of actual science and hippy pseudoscience mixed in to this day. For example, the focus on only “natural” pesticides means using compounds that have higher runoff, persistence in the soil, and broader impacts to insect life. I wish that there was more flexibility for OA standards to change to the best evidence that we have.

This is going to be different country to country, but organic farming can still use pesticides. I posted a link below as well, but organic farming is also not conclusively better for the environment. It has lower yields, and therefore requires more land. You have to balance the effects of converting more land into organic farmland versus the benefit of, for example, less fertilizer runoff.

At the end of the day, “organic” is a marketing term, not a statement of health or ecological benefit. Most complaints about conventional agriculture (and GMOs) are actually complaints about industrialized agriculture as a whole.

I wish there was a good, regulated term for food that was produced with the best known processes (and perhaps there is for specific foods), but “organic” is not it.