Solid vitamin C is relatively stable, but it decomposes rather quickly when dissolved in water. Factors such as pH, temperature, oxygen, and the presence of catalysts (iron, copper) influence the decomposition process. The lowest rate of oxidation is observed at pH 3, where vitamin C solutions are the most stable. Raising the pH to 5 increases the oxidation rate by a factor of 2.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3510389/

The study uses particularly clean water (clean enough to be suitable for medical injections) with a pH of ~7.4. At that acidity and a temperature of 20°C (≈70°F), it takes about 95 days for the vitamin C to decay to 10% of its original concentration, or 28 days to reach 50%.

Normal drinking water has a pH of 6.5-8.5, but also contains a lot of other substances, which might increase the rate of oxidation. Given the potential time between treatment and consumption as well as the fact that people might boil it and increase the rate of decay that way, it’s just not as economical to add ascorbic acid to the water supply if only a small percentage of it will ever reach the consumers.

Additionally, the exact dosage will be hard to control, leading to a risk of excessive side effects such as kidney stones. People with a specific enzyme deficiency may also suffer anemia as excessive doses.

Compare that to, say, lemons, whose juice has a pH of ~ 2.4 and renders the vitamin a lot more stable. If you want people to get a good intake of vitamin C, tell them to eat fruits and vegetables, preferably uncooked. The vitamin C dosage you’ll get from that will hardly lead to megadoses, unless you eat such vast amounts that you’d probably get other problems anyway.

The reason fluoride is added is that it’s quite stable, safe and effective, while also being fairly cheap.

Also, to make sure there are no linguistic roots left over on your system that it might grow from again, add --no-preserve-root.

I never push to production 😎

I give my users a dev preview and ask for feedback before finalising, they never respond and I find out later they’re using it daily.

Hitler was extremely charismatic, an effective speaker and a clever politician. He was a terrible commander, compounded by his inability to acknowledge and account for that weakness, but in the run-up to the war and in the opening phase, he correctly estimated and effectively capitalised on the other powers’ reluctance to fight another war.

In Musk and Trump, you can observe a similar phenomenon: the ability to hit the right notes with the right people in order to rile them up and seize the moment before their opponents manage to effectively rally and organise a resistance. Whether by blind luck, intuition or cunning calculation, their results aren’t those of fumbling idiots. However idiotic they may seem to us, their success (so far) proves they got something right.

But the story isn’t over yet. If I’m wrong and they do end up fumbling their big chance, I’ll happily rescind those words. But as it stands now, I’d rather not underestimate their cunning.

That’s what I mean. Voting third party isn’t reasonable, unless it polls well enough ahead of time that it becomes a viable choice for people to risk their vote being wasted for the chance to pick a better option. But even then, they need to trust those polls and need to hope that enough other people come to the same conclusion to actually make it so…

If you want to break the two-party-stranglehold, you have to vote third party, but only if enough other people vote third party, and that kind of “guessing motives” or trusting in the other actors to make individually irrational but collectively rational decisions is where Game Theory breaks down.

The theory is clear, but humans aren’t quite so easy to model, and when your game features piles and piles of incomplete information and non-deterministic decisions, things get muddy.

I think many just don’t understand or don’t want to understand the complexity of the public opinion guessing game that is attempting to break the vile equilibrium of a two-party-system without spoilering the worse party into power.

At least that’s what I hope, because the alternative is that they actually think Trump is better and I’m trying to get out of the habit of assuming the worst.

Time to take my alt account elsewhere…

Voting for Harris was always going to be an attempt to buy more time for more effective change measures, for pushing progressive support in primaries and local elections, for building public perception that the left actually has a chance and can make a difference. It was never going to fix things –nothing can do so quickly, because cultural change takes time – but prevent the worst so that there might be more time for other measures that would set a better course.

But some people opted to let perfect be the enemy of “not as bad” and call their complacency noble, so I guess that option is off the table now.

I thought that was a synonym for shit smear?

I once worked on a codebase where the reset function had a hardcoded default password

Put them on an Ark - wooden, overloaded, cast adrift in the type of weather that would cause massive flooding, if you catch my drift. Of course, gathering two of each animal would be cruel, so we’ll skip those.

pay off the national debt

As if

so it’s hard to know exactly what to make of the results

Sounds like someone desperately trying to not ruin future grant chances by saying “this trial is absolutely worthless”…

Should have spent more time reflecting on his wrongs I guess

Right thing for the wrong reasons is still the right thing. We’ve got bigger fish to fry than him.

For now.

I think spoilers on Lemmy use triple colons:

::: spoiler Spoiler title
hidden content
:::

Fedora works for me, thanks for the pointer

Firefox is my main browser, but I occasionally need a Chromium browser for technical reasons. I had been using Brave - note the past tense there. Any suggestions for my new secondary browser?

What a pile of steaming bullshit

I’m guessing it’s more about the clear bias on display, wherein certain topics are suppressed