WritingTheRongs
WritingTheRongs t1_j6pjjck wrote
Reply to comment by smokedroaches in PayPal to lay off 2,000 employees in coming weeks, about 7% of workforce by DeificClusterfuck
Yeah it's hard to picture these big multinational companies with the tens of thousands of employees. In my naive brain, Paypal just runs on a bunch of virtual servers without intervention. Some of their processes require duplication in each country I'm guessing. Duplicate IT teams, devs, customer service, etc. Then you accrete employees. HR, secretaries, office staff, janitorial? idk i still can't picture 28k people
WritingTheRongs t1_j67m8bi wrote
Reply to Eli5 : What does hot air rise and cold fall? And why they higher I get in the atmosphere, the colder it get? by hopitlong21
Man these answers … this is a classic for being simple yet hard to explain. The first part of the question is easily answered. Hot air is less dense. There’s less “stuff” in a packet of hot air. So it rises up , just like a balloon held under water rises up. All the colder air around the packet of warm air is pushing it up. In fact if you could look really closely you would see that the cold air was pushing on the warm air a littler more on the bottom than on the top, and that slight difference in push means there’s a net upwards force. Now you might think that’s true for a packet of cold air right? But what is the counteracting force ? What’s pulling down on everything? It’s gravity. Gravity pulls down on the cold air and warm air alike right? But remember we said the warm air had less “stuff” in other words it doesn’t weigh as much as cold air. This is the secret sauce of buoyancy. The cold air pushes up with the exact same force as gravity pulling down *on a packet of cold air”. After all that’s where air pressure comes from in this first place, from gravity smashing all this air together at low altitude. But if you replace a chunk of cold air with a chunk of warm air, such as in a hot air balloon, the gravitational force on the balloon is less than the surrounding air. Imagine a more extreme where the balloon was empty. No weight at all except the skin of the balloon. Now all that cold air outside the balloon is pushing at the bottom of the balloon but there’s no downward force from the weight of the balloon because this imaginary balloon is weightless! So up it goes.
For the second half of your question, we have two things going on. But the simplest way to understand this I think is to ask yourself not why it gets colder but why it’s warmer down at sea level. The answer is simple, that’s where the heat is. Where does most of this heat come from? It’s sunlight. Sunlight hitting the earth and warming it up. The ground gets warm and so the air near the ground is also warm. 30,000 feet up , the sunlight is passing through the almost perfectly transparent air without even touching the air molecules. So they stay pretty cold. Go far enough up and you’re almost in space where it seems logical that the air is cold. It’s only down on the ground that it makes sense to feel warmth. There are complications to this , and there are parts of the upper atmosphere that are technically very hot because they are in fact absorbing some high energy light. But there’s so little of that air that you wouldn’t feel the heat. The other issue is pressure. The hot air rising in the first question does something interesting as it rises. It starts to spread apart because the pressure drops as you get higher. As the warm air molecules spread a part from each other , they use up some of their heat energy. So not only is it colder up high; the process of getting up high cools you down from the work of expanding.
WritingTheRongs t1_j5xqtzq wrote
Reply to comment by Telemere125 in The bivalent mRNA boosters from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were 48% effective against symptomatic infection from the predominant omicron subvariant (XBB/XBB.1.5) in persons aged 18-49 years according to early data published by the CDC by shiruken
That actually makes me feel a little better! I can deal with a cold
WritingTheRongs t1_j5xqo4g wrote
Reply to The bivalent mRNA boosters from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna were 48% effective against symptomatic infection from the predominant omicron subvariant (XBB/XBB.1.5) in persons aged 18-49 years according to early data published by the CDC by shiruken
Wait 48%? Like by itself or what if this is your 4th shot?
WritingTheRongs t1_j564adj wrote
Reply to comment by GirlScoutSniper in At least 78 people die as winter temperatures plunge in Afghanistan by 38384
just double the figure
WritingTheRongs t1_j26ly7r wrote
Reply to Marion Biotech: 18 children dead in Uzbekistan after consuming India-made syrup, ministry says | CNN by kuasha7
ethylene glycol strikes again. What's truly horrifying is that it's happened in the past. Corruption kills.
WritingTheRongs t1_j0iih3t wrote
Reply to comment by AudibleNod in Aromatherapy spray that killed two people in a multistate outbreak also killed pet raccoon by AudibleNod
i..this.. what?
WritingTheRongs t1_j0ifzis wrote
Reply to comment by MotherPierogi in Chinese doctors and nurses reportedly told to work while infected as Covid surges by Neo2199
i work for a major health care organization. we got 14 days paid if we got covid no questions asked. Which makes sense because it is not possible to prove where you caught a virus.
WritingTheRongs t1_j0iftof wrote
Reply to Chinese doctors and nurses reportedly told to work while infected as Covid surges by Neo2199
what's the sensation called again? the feeling like you've seen this before?
WritingTheRongs t1_izyp1d0 wrote
Reply to comment by TheSquarecow in Low-cost battery built with four times the capacity of lithium by BlitzOrion
dude, 30 years ago my Macintosh had...wait for it... a zero gigabyte hard drive. zero! you booted from a floppy disk ffs. Hard Disks have gotten massively bigger since zero. . I credit the cow poop.
WritingTheRongs t1_iyejb8l wrote
Reply to comment by 6horrigoth in ELI5 why fraudsters like Anna Sorokin managed to deposit bad checks and immediately withdraw cash elsewhere without banks stopping it? by 6horrigoth
It depends on the amount. Do you want $100, or $1000? They are much more likely to give you $100. And she was friendly and "normal" looking and was very good at not setting off people's radar apparently. But yes, you would think in the modern age the banks would have figured out a way to verify funds.
WritingTheRongs t1_iv3hpt9 wrote
Reply to comment by Assblastersauce in Toxic smog turns India's capital "into a gas chamber" by cyberpunk6066
I live in Portland / Seattle area and the wildfire smoke a few weeks ago was bad. I had to break out my inhaler for the first time in years.
WritingTheRongs t1_iuj4usa wrote
Reply to comment by thefutureofamerica in ELI5 Why can’t plants absorb nitrogen from the air? by Cool-Boy57
very nice! my (ex) spouse did some research on rhodopsin in anabaena. really cool stuff.
WritingTheRongs t1_iuj3iib wrote
Reply to comment by thefutureofamerica in ELI5 Why can’t plants absorb nitrogen from the air? by Cool-Boy57
That's funny but ya know, it's Reddit! Yeah i didn't want to get into the weeds with oxygen poisoning etc but you're aboslutely right, oxgyen really is a nasty little reactive atom and the cyanobacteria is it? manage to fix N2 without even the benefit of membrane bound organelles!
WritingTheRongs t1_iuiucd6 wrote
Man the answers are all over the place on this one. Maybe because what your asking sounds more like a philosophy question . Plants can absorb nitrogen from the air btw. I'll assume you are asking why they can't turn it into protein. The short answer is they absolutely could but lack the genes for it. Why can't you turn sunlight into sugar? Why can't we breathe under water? The answers to questions like this is that we don't know for sure. Evolution took the paths it took and here we are. Maybe it's not worth the bother to plants when they get enough nitrogen from bacteria or lightning strikes. Another part of your question involved farming. Farmed plants are not natural. We use fertilizer to increase the yield, but those plants will still grow without fertilizer.
WritingTheRongs t1_iuisqmx wrote
Reply to comment by Sand_Trout in ELI5 Why can’t plants absorb nitrogen from the air? by Cool-Boy57
how are lowly bacteria able to do something that's too difficult for a plant or animal cell??
WritingTheRongs t1_iuisnxn wrote
Reply to comment by Drewismole in ELI5 Why can’t plants absorb nitrogen from the air? by Cool-Boy57
the question was "why not", you just reitereated that plants cannot take up nitrogen.
WritingTheRongs t1_iuiqajs wrote
Reply to comment by robbz23 in ELI5 Why are airport ceiling so high? by TrShry
concourses are typically lower ceilinged especially right at the gates, the discussion was about the terminals. that photo of concourse C looks totally normal to me. And of course is nowhere near as claustrophobic as the actual aircraft.
WritingTheRongs t1_iuipria wrote
Reply to comment by simanthropy in ELI5 Why are airport ceiling so high? by TrShry
plus they have these giant pistons that keep ramming air in and out...aka the trains themselves.
WritingTheRongs t1_itx1l5s wrote
Reply to comment by DashboardNight in Atmospheric levels of all three greenhouse gases hit record high by hugglenugget
Yes unlike your 401k it's always a new record high.
WritingTheRongs t1_j7if69s wrote
Reply to comment by Ace_da_Place in Thieves steal valet stand, car keys from outside downtown DC restaurant by AcceptableGovernment
The beeper king?