And just to be clear, there were previous videos of interceptions and near interceptions that just didn't look so photogenic so weren't widely distributed. This video was not where things changed.
The condensate water is laden with bacteria, mold spores, and pollution concentrated from the air. It can definitely be filtered and sterilized, but in water scarce environments you usually can't pull enough water from the air to be worth it.
The additive they found to be associated with heart disease is Vitamin C, so I'm somewhat skeptical of the value of these results given how well-studied it is.
Lowering the pH of food is a pretty common way to preserve it and if you're going to lower the pH then using an acid that is also a vitamin seems like an easy win.
Obviously nobody thinks once-in-a-generation exceptional monsters should be living among us, building straw men like that isn't helpful. I recommend reading the Scott Alexander blog post "Prison And Crime: Much More Than You Wanted To Know" here: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prison-and-crime-much-more-...
To oversimplify, the only value that prison provably offers to society is the crimes prevented by keeping someone who would have done crimes locked up. Pretty much all of the other supposed benefits like deterrence (not doing a crime due to fear of punishment) or rehabilitation (becoming a better person in prison) don't actually exist in real life at meaningful rates. Because it costs so much to keep someone in prison, it's actually really hard to find cases where the harm to society for the crimes they would have done justifies the investment of resources to imprison them. That doesn't mean no such cases exist and we shouldn't have prisons, but they are clearly overused when they are almost the default method of crime consequence in Western society, especially for minor property crimes like retail shoplifting.
For most crimes at both the mild and severe ends of the spectrum, the reality is that imprisonment is the only effective way to reduce these crimes. Deterrence and rehabilitation are fiction: criminals are and will continue to be criminals.
What is your proposed method to prevent minor property crimes? A fine? Probation? An educational class on not stealing? When those inevitably fail, you need to remove the person from society to prevent them from continuing to commit the crime and impacting others.
There's certainly a discussion to be had about imprisoning people for victimless crimes, like drug possession by itself (my POV is overdose to your heart's content), but for crimes that result in victims, removal from society to reduce/prevent additional victims is a reasonable course of action.
I feel like you're asking two different questions: what do we do about average criminals, and what do we do when our normal strategies don't work?
Most shoplifters stop after they get caught the first time, even if they don't face any further consequences. Most people who keep shoplifting after that stop if they are caught and face consequences like community service. In general, the system of escalating punishments before prison actually works to keep problems from developing to that level.
If someone is doing serious violent crimes then it seems obvious that they need to be imprisoned until we can figure out how to make them stop. But what if someone is doing minor property crimes where the total value of those crimes does not exceed the cost to imprison them? In that case we are essentially offering an incredibly inefficient subsidy to property owners.
The real answer is to directly address the factors that lead to crime and disorder, such as cost of living exceeding prevailing wages, unemployment, drug addiction, and mental illness.
Most criminals do not stop after they get caught the first time.
I can't find shoplifting-specific statistics, but then again, essentially nobody is being jailed for only shoplifting anyways, so it's a moot point in a conversation about incarceration.
On a broader discussion of the importance of incarceration in reducing continued victimization of society:
"According to the National Institute of Justice, almost 44 percent of the recently released return before the end of their first year out. About 68 percent of 405,000 prisoners released in 30 states in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years of their release from prison, and 77 percent were arrested within five years, and by year nine that number reaches 83 percent.
The solution for your example of minor property crimes is reducing the cost of incarceration, not letting them continue commit property crimes and therefore offload the costs of society's failure to police criminals onto citizens.
To your point of "how do we make them stop", incarceration/forced hospitalization is ironically the answer to some of your supposed "causes" of crime, like mental illness and drug addiction. Look to a place like California or Seattle to see the impact of these approaches, where every imaginable alternative has been tried to control homelessness, drug addiction, and nuisance crime, far exceeding the cost of just locking them up.
Recidivism in the USA is higher than almost every other nation [0], at about 65-70%.
You're absolutely right that they don't stop, the first time, in the US. However, the cause of that same recidivism, is overwhelmingly correlated to a lack of support on leaving. Rehabilitation is in the name - habeo, to have or possess.
Why do people reoffend? Because currently, they're fucked. Background checks in everything, screw them over. They can't get work, they can't rent, and so, when all other options are off the table, is it actually a surprise, that they reoffend?
It'd be a hell of a lot cheaper, not to lock them up, and not expose a first-time offender to a black hole where everyone says the world would be better off with them dead.
See for example, Norway, with the lowest recidivism rate in the world [1], where it actually is true, that most do not reoffend.
I work in this industry, and a big issue is that a major customer of the cheapest, shadiest telcos is the US federal government. Because they're "being responsible with your tax money." So cracking down on them will affect government calls and quickly generate too much pushback. "I don't care how scammy Bill's Discount No-Questions-Asked VoIP LLC is, the army uses them!"
The main benefit for me is that digital watermarking becomes completely inaudible with high-res audio, but I can sometimes clearly hear it in standard resolution.
It takes too much energy and produces water too slowly to scale. In general any area with sufficient moisture in the air to explore this also has easier access to rain and ground water.
A lot of energy is only a problem if that energy is very expensive.
The good news in a desert: plenty of sunshine. So you can generate a lot of electricity with some cheap solar panels, there is plenty of space to put some down, and there aren't a lot of NIMBYs around to complicate the permitting process for that.
Some desert ecosystems actually depend on condensation with specialized plants and animals harvesting humidity from ocean breeze. Large parts of e.g. the Sahara border on the Atlantic ocean. Lots of water in the air but not a lot of rain. And even if humidity is low, there still is some water in the air usually.
But the simple fact of course is that there is a lot more water in water than there is in air. If you want to extract meaningful amounts of water from air, you need to process a lot of it.
Great point, in my case in the PNW, the water from my local well is infested with manganese (as in clogging the household plumbing in the absence of a sediment filter) and other contaminants and the water company providing it is owned by private equity. Legally, I can drill my own well for non-potable irrigation, but god forbid I filter and/or chlorinate it for my own household use. So I end up considering options like this, thanks for debunking.
At the very least I would UV disinfect anything coming from the ground and absolutely make use of a 20 micron sediment filter if only to address cognitive load: Another place, another time, coliform bacteria from the well. Super fun(not).
I vacillate between trusting my well and trusting my RO (10,5,1 micron filters, plus the membrane). But it isn't healthy to drink RO all the time and I don't wanna mess with remineralization.
This is honestly what I'm thinking. Carbohydrates and hydrocarbons will oxidize to CO2 and water in our atmosphere, and especially quickly at warm temperatures, in the presence of energy sources like sunlight, or in the presence of ozone or elevated oxygen levels. In general biological processes like aerobic decay are so much more effective that we ignore this, but it still happens.
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