The good news is you haven’t brought all your things in yet. Don’t bring anything else in until you’ve had some time to investigate.

One bed bug, like you’ve said, could come from anywhere. If this apartment is infested you will find so many more. Give it some time to make sure this is an infestation. Do you have bites? Are there other signs? Of course the landlord is ALWAYS going to say there aren’t any bedbugs, of course they would. But give it some time, pay another month, see what happens.

If no more bedbugs show up, and you don’t get bites, go ahead and move your stuff in. If it’s infested, get out because they are SO hard to get rid of!

A lot of fascism and authoritarianism comes from loneliness or a lack of community. Cutting him off could mean he seeks more community with Nazis. Be clear about your beliefs, keep calling him out when he’s wrong, but try to stay his friend. That’s different than “supporting” his beliefs. Take care of him when he’s sick, but don’t drive him to the Nazi rally. Your friendship might make a difference on his journey back to healthy beliefs.

Also, really sorry your friend is dealing with this right now, I know it must suck to see this happen to him. It’s not necessarily the final story though.

Oh, haha, yeah, I tried some stuff in ADB, too, but I think I want to keep the phone a bit longer. Thanks for your answer!

Did you find a way to get rid of that full screen update notification?

It’s a threat. Nobody likes the idea of crippling the economy with an unending general strike. But the people who watch the daily numbers use them to predict future behavior. A big blackout in the second month makes them think really hard about what is coming 6 months down the road. If the blackout is small, they know they don’t have anything to worry about. If it shifts 50% of sales to another day, they know they’re having a conversation with a giant that can move their numbers a lot.

First time it ever occurred to me, but now that I’ve read it, of course! Why wouldn’t every city make this free?! Solving transportation woes is a surefire way to stoke your economy, and removing payments is going to make public transportation more efficient and cheaper to maintain (no ticket kiosks getting vandalized, no payment processors to pay). Seems like a win win for any congested city.

540°

Iowantout

N

The presence of sodium and chlorine on the planet makes sense to me, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s dissolved in the water. I think the key understanding is if the water cycle is the key component of dissolving salt in water, or if the much less dramatic erosion on the bottom of the ocean is sufficient to make the water notably salty.

So far the best answer I’ve got is that water in comets and otherwise outside the planet might actually be something like salty, so maybe freshwater is just a temporary aberration of the water cycle.

At the same time, we know there are some processes that remove salt from oceans (e.g. the salt formations at the bottom of the Dead Sea), so in the end I think it would come down to where that balance of salt in vs salt out. It’s not totally clear to me that without the continental influx of salt from rivers, that that balance would result in something like freshwater or saltwater. This thread has highlighted several factors that come in on both sides, so it may be something we won’t know until we’ve explored more planets.

I feel like I’d rather drink saltwater before I drink water with ammonia dissolved in it.

Sure but once a continental plate is flooded, isn’t it by definition an oceanic plate at that point? A continent only exists if it isn’t flooded.

Thanks for all the detail! Your observation about comets is really pertinent. Saltwater is probably itself a purer form of water than comets. Maybe an ocean planet is actually more like a muddy swamp of nasty dirty water than a lake.

Exactly. If a planet ever had a salty ocean, adding more water probably wouldn’t dilute it in any meaningful way, so it would need to be a planet that never had continents.

That is super interesting! I hope the Clipper gives us a definitive answer!

I was trying to figure out how much underwater erosion there is but if you compare the sandy and silty bottom of the ocean to like, Utah, it seems like continental erosion is orders of magnitude more significant.

Conversely, we know oceans deposit all sorts of stuff at their bottoms, which makes me think there is a small amount of salt being deposited. Would that cancel out significant underwater erosion?

Similarly, if underwater erosion was a big deal, wouldn’t old lakes (in geological time) be notably saltier than young lakes? But the only salty lakes we have primarily lose all their water through evaporation, basically ultra concentrated river water.

And if you like Travelers, make sure to watch Sarah Conors Chronicle

Check out Travelers. They start out with a lot of agency but stuff gets wrong and it’s more and more desperate.