I didn’t know that was a thing. Thanks! I’m honestly surprised some MBA bean counter hasn’t replaced those with a chip of some sort by now. Really cool!

Any mechanical regulation process that used to be handled by actual machine parts. Think of the centrifugal governor, this beautiful and elegant mechanical device just for regulating the speed of a steam engine. Sure, a computer chip could do it a lot better today, and we’re not even building steam engines quite like those anymore. But still, mechanically controlled things are just genuinely a lot cooler.

Or hell, even for computing, take a look at the elaborate mechanical computers that were used to calculate firing solutions on old battleships. Again, silicon computers perform objectively better in nearly every way, but there’s something objectively cool about solving an set of equations on an elaborate arrangement of clockwork.

I suppose it really depends on your perspective. If you’re that uncontacted tribe, you see birds all the time. The idea of a creature being able to fly is pretty mundane. Humans can’t naturally fly like birds, but neither can they naturally wield knives as long and sharp as tiger claws. But flying is ultimately just duplicating something already found in nature.

But the ability to instantly and effortlessly summon fire? The closest thing in nature is the bombardier beetle, and that shoots boiling acid. Impressive, but it’s not true fire. There are no creatures in nature that can just summon fire on command. From a natural perspective, instantly creating fire is a lot more impressive than a flying machine.

When the aliens who secretly physically resemble demons show up to help your entire species reach their next phase of evolution, ascension to a higher plane of existence.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Gender reassignment surgery.

My understand is, yes. They just broadcast the message on all towers in an area. The pager may be a simple one-way passive device. Or, it might have just enough broadcast ability to periodically ping a cell tower.

Pagers still have some specialized use cases. One of these is hospitals. A lot of hospitals still use them. Hospitals, as structures, are designed to the most strictest structural codes of any kind of building. If an earthquake or hurricane happens, you want your hospital to be the LAST building that ever falls over. So hospitals tend to be big, heavy structures that are massively over reinforced, way beyond what commercial or residential buildings would be. If you look at hospitals, they just look different as buildings. They’re hulking leviathans of structures.

While this makes them damn-near indestructible, it also can make it really difficult to get cell signals inside of them. Cell companies don’t like wasting power broadcasting signals strong enough to penetrate bunkers. They size their towers so their signals can penetrate most common buildings.

But “penetrate” is a complex term. If you only need to transmit a simple message, a lower-quality signal is often fine. Think of the difference between talking and shouting. In a noisy environment with lots of interference, we automatically switch to a form of verbal communication, shouting, that can overcome a lot of noise, but has a low information density. You can shout to be heard over a din, but you’re not going to be able to communicate subtle emotional context by minute tones in your voice.

Alternately, you can think of it that a simple message can easily be repeated many times. Want to make sure a simple text message gets through? Broadcast that thing 10,000 times in a row. That 10,000 times will still represent a fraction of a second of the data volume needed for a video call. But the pager can piece together the message from the few hundred fragments of messages that manage to get through.

I’m sure the actual network protocols are complicated, but I’m just talking about general communication here. The key is that for many reasons, you can often trade communications reliability for communications complexity. A video call will only work in perfect conditions. A simple page will penetrate thick concrete walls and work in the worst of weather events.

Oh, and often hospitals will actually install their own pager repeaters or independent pager systems right on site. In that case, the network doesn’t need to worry at all about figuring out what tower to send the signal to.

Burn the witch!

Are you high?

We’re bringin’ back capes and cloaks.

To prevent the obvious reference, the trend will be called, “‘No capes’ only applies to superheroes.”

Exactly. Maybe Steven Hawking is just really bad at throwing parties!

I mean, I am literally working on a PhD in wood science.