Why soda bottles have gaps in their threads (2000)
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Alcoholic beverages on the other hand have a pretty wide range of regular carbonation levels. On your lower end you have stouts and Scottish ales at 1.9-2.1, and on the high end you get your dubbel and heffe weisen at 3-3.5 volumes. Champagne is regularly in the 4.5-6 range, which necessitates a different bottle and closure design to handle the 2-3x pressure it contains compared to beer.
On a particularly dumb note, ciders are limited by law to 0.64g per 100ml, or 3.2 volumes. Above that level they cease being ciders and instead become a sparkling wine. This is very important because natural cider is taxed at $0.226 per gallon, while sparkling wine is taxed at $3.30 or $3.40 per gallon depending on how the carbonation is added. This is a difference of roughly 30 cents per standard bottle, or $1.79 per six pack; enough of a difference to make similar products more attractive on the market place shelf.
https://www.ttb.gov/tax-audit/quick-reference-guide-to-wine-...
Yet another way the rich shift more tax burden away from themselves. They pay a pittance of a tax on a $5,000 bottle of wine, while everyone buying "two buck chuck" at Trader Joes ($3-4/bottle) is getting hit with a huge tax percentage-wise.
Even taxing alcohol at different rates just because it's made with specific fruits is idiotic. It smacks of lobbyists buying off their congressional reps to get a rival sub-industry slapped with a higher tax. Just tax alcohol by its value, across the board at the same rate.
To be fair, this is just an excise tax on production. In most jurisdictions you'll also pay a percentage based sales tax on that as well. If you buy a bottle costing 2x as much, you'll pay 2x as much sales tax. Everywhere I've lived has had a pretty high sales tax on alcohol, in my current state I pay sales tax plus a volume based supplementary tax, the latter can get pretty high at $11.28 per gallon of distilled liquor.
Sales tax on discretionary and luxury products like this tend to be one of the few taxes that's actually somewhat progressive, given that the rich tend to consume a lot more in terms of dollar amount. Although in the case of alcohol, this would also hit addicts pretty hard.
> Even taxing alcohol at different rates just because it's made with specific fruits is idiotic. It smacks of lobbyists buying off their congressional reps to get a rival sub-industry slapped with a higher tax. Just tax alcohol by its value, across the board at the same rate.
Honestly, I think this is more about class than anything else. There is a long, sordid history of societies deciding that one type of alcohol is acceptable and classy, while another is base and to be suppressed. Usually the actual amount consumed doesn't seem to be a factor; nobody ever seems to get too mad at middle class and rich people for day drinking mimosas for example. My favorite cultural representation of this is "Beer Street and Gin Lane", which is both entertaining to me in its absurd hyperbole, and because I'm rather partial to gin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beer_Street_and_Gin_Lane
Personally, I'm mixed on what I think an ideal alcohol tax would be. It seems to me that we now have the ability to track the actual volume of pure ethanol created and sold, something that recently post-prohibition regulators probably were not capable of doing[0]. On the flip side I do think that there is some social utility in driving up the cost of high proof distilled alcohol via tax; the time before prohibition really shows that cheap distilled spirits tends to make a bit of a mess of things. This could probably be accomplished by a progressive taxation system per gram of ethanol based on the ABV above a certain point.
Thankfully most cider is pretty damned good at 2.5 to 3 volumes of CO2.
0 - The inputs into the fermentation process are a pretty good way to estimate what percentage of alcohol you'll get back out on average, which can be used as a rough means to regulate based on ABV if you lack the technical or governmental capability to test, track, and tax such things. Not all alcohol tax rules seem to use it this way though, such as the difference between cider and sparkling wine based on CO2 volumes, even if it's created by artificially carbonating it.
Broadly I agree, though I think in practice it would make life easier if this would be specified in "bands" rather than directly proportional to the alcohol content. The giant industrial scale producers can certainly produce mega-batch after mega-batch of identical product, but for small scale "craft" producers with more variability it sounds like a bureaucratic nightmare to have a different tax level for each batch.
That variability is already allowed (in the UK at least, but not banding) and comrs with an unexpected side effect - large brewers were advertising at higher abv values then they were brewing at, but paying duty kn the lower value [0]. taxing by abv simplifies the cslculatuons; you just measure it once.
You didn't expect them to forego an opportunity to shaft BOTH the consumer and the taxman at the same time, did you?
The usual solution is to carve out a bunch of exceptions. These exceptions tend to be incomplete and don't evolved with the times.
A far better solution is to just tax the ICEs that drive these things. Make it so that for most mundane uses, the electric ones will be cheaper. But the people who really need them can get them without mounting a lobbying campaign at the politicians.
The state is doing no such thing, it is however
> California is banning [the sales of new] gas powered leaf blowers and chain saws [after 2024]
There is a significant difference.
Perhaps one of the effects of a ban on sale will be the development of more practical and accessible, from a price perspective, power sources?
Whenever there's a discussion of using batteries for anything, the three issues that come up are cost, weight, and size. You can take a hit on one or two to get some improvement on the remainder, but...
Batteries for portable equipment must be good on weight and size given the power required, so cost is what goes up.
I love my electric 18"er, but most all of the ponderosas I have to fell on my property require my 24" gas Husquavarna. And if you look for electric alternatives you find nothing for actually for sale.
Even simpler and more effective is raising fossil fuel taxes. If the goal is to reduce usage of fossil fuels.
If the goal is to look like you are doing something about fossil fuel consumption, but do not really want to give up your SUV/pickup trucks, extraneous driving, life in large houses in spread out cities, and frivolous flights, then selectively targeting certain products is the way to go.
In general I agree with you, and that ought to be done for cars. But those small engines tend to be very dirty polluters, and it would be impractical to put an extra tax on gasoline meant for those engines.
A reasonable tax would be $50 to $100. The state is good at taxing in this manner, and the revenue could be used to subsidize some green project (though we both know the tax revenue will just be wasted, sigh).
It would be trivial to tax blowers in a pollution basis - they either use a 50:1 premixed fuel or you add oil to regular gas. Just tax the oil.
Personally, i think battery powered lawn gear is winning the consumer market as it is, banning stuff is just forcing people to accept inferior solutions for their needs.
And further, since your average homeowner doesn't use his chainsaw or lawn mower that much, they are relatively insensitive to the price of gas. Or IOW, if you were to raise the price of gas enough to reduce usage of these machines that way, it'd grind the whole economy to a halt.
I've seen this with chocolate too. The definition of chocolate in the UK and EU apparently requires one of the ingredients to be sugar, making sugar-free chocolate unable to be called chocolate unless it actually contains sugar. A friend of mine runs a keto chocolate company and he has to include a small amount of coconut sap to actually be allowed to market it as chocolate, even though he's trying to minimise carbohydrate content.
On the one hand, this seems a rather silly law, but on the other hand, how else do you define what a particular product is? Is it down to how it's marketed? Because then companies will just market it as something else that still hints it's the thing it's not, to avoid the tax and potentially gain more price-conscious customers.
> "how else do you define what a particular product is?"
> "companies will just market it as something else that still hints it's the thing it's not"
Jaffa "Cakes": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaffa_Cakes#Legal_status
I'm no expert on this.
I checked one and it contains 0.1g of sugar per 100g, but it's not added sugar, it's contained in the other ingredients. I don't know if it's possible to make it with absolutely 0g of sugar. But there is no separate ingredient "sugar" there.
FWIW that is literally a thing and it is seriously called "normal temperature and pressure".
If you cut gaps along the thread, when it prints you're effectively building a lot of small separated ledges out from a side wall. You don't have that cooling/tensioning effect and there's nothing to pull the filament away from where it's laid down so you end up with a cleaner thread.
That's as long as your retraction settings are well tuned, mind - continuous thread is one long extrusion with no retractions, whereas thread with gaps is potentially lots of islands, depending on how your slicer reacts to the geometry.
I print both depending on size, and a full thread is usually more self-supported, not _less_, while printing faster to booth. Toothed threads tend to suffer from curling more easily when comparing at the same overhang slope, and are weaker structurally.
I'm using toothed threads for larger threads to save on time/material usually, or oddball constraints.
I can see why you would get the effect you're describing, but this would only happen if you're printing with insufficient Z resolution in order to support the overhang of the thread. I cannot see how a toothed thread would improve in such a scenario.
Maybe the slicer you're using is doing something odd.
Keep in mind that if the filament string looks pulled in a full thread, a toothed thread with the same settings will be even weaker. In such cases it will change the result to localized sagging areas, where the structural element is just the start/end of each tooth.
A screw, even plastic one, will easily self-thread into the thin amount of plastic remaining, but that doesn't mean that the thread works as intended structurally.
If you have issues with smaller threads my reccomendation is to print an undersized cylinder and use a tap for best results, or just slightly undersize the hole and self-thread instead.
My Mum was a big fan of it, I've still got a copy of their telegram response to her question of "Why don't we see birds flying overhead with a penis flopping around?"
The answer was simple.
"Most birds don't have penises. They press cloaca to cloaca. Birds that do have penises store them in their bodies when not mating. Please stop sending questions about penises"
...it wasn't her first animal penis question submitted, and I'm assuming she'd developed a reputation.
My friend works there. She loves interesting questions -- probably even about penises. Unfortunately she says a lot of old folks use it just ease their loneliness and to ask tech support questions.
From the Goodreads blurb: ”a novel focused on the letters exchanged between Tina, a hardworking farm wife of three children and a museum curator and widower named Anders in Denmark. Their unlikely correspondence begins when Tina's seeks more information about the museum's most famous exhibit.”
In the days of poor information diffusion I guess content marketing was even more important than today: the Michelin Guide was similar: the tyre company wanted to encourage people to drive more, and figured the guide book would not only help with that but people would have the name Michelin in front of them. Hence the star ranking (go if you’re in town; if you’re in the area, worth diverting your trip a bit; worth making a special trip).
I actually used to jokingly call the iPhone “the destroyer of bar bets” but after a year or so on the market those discussions had pretty much died off, so maybe it wasn’t a joke.
And I'm saddened when I have to say "Well, we went to the library, and we hoped their encyclopaedia wasn't too racist".
In fact, as a kid I learned to use certain countries as a sort of metric of an encyclopaedia's relevance - if it discussed Rhodesia in the current tense, be very careful with anything else in it.
cw: nsfw
…
It is probably the first time I thank someone for showing me a duck’s penis. Feels a bit weird.
I imagine they were a fun place to work at 2am.
I find it hard to recall a contact number today. We get to use names, so that skill drops off quick.
Growing up, we had a wall mounted phone with an insane cord. Something like 15 to 20 feet so people could take a call and walk into the adjacent room.
One day, I wrote an important number next to the phone on the wall, and it started! Mom asked about it, and said something about writing on the wall being bad. I said something about the difference, because it is easy, right there, won't get lost..
She then put the school, family, few other things next to it. Instant buy in! I remember feeling good about that, like we did something that matters and was unorthodox.
I took one last look at it before moving out and into my life:
There it was. Our lives on the wall next to the phone. That pizza place, family, services, church, schools, friends, and other bits: birthdays, various identifiers, locations.
When I left, that on the wall directory was damn near a square meter!
A phone book was right below on a little stand. Actually two: the local one, very small. And the yellow pages. Huge.
One day, my brother drank gasoline! I was the only one home and sure enough! The little green poison control sticker was on that wall, next to the phone. Called them and they told me what to do, until someone could respond.
I remember once calling and asking how much Vitamin C was in an orange, waiting on hold for a minute or two, and then getting the answer.
Picture:
http://preview.turbosquid.com/Preview/2014/07/11__16_24_14/P...
More discussion:
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskEngineers/comments/372h8x/why_th...
Last weekend, on my way to the supermarket, I saw a juice bottle blocking a drain. To follow UncleBob's advice to clean as I go, I picked it up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BSaAMQVq01E&t=2021s
I wanted to pour out the remaining orange juice for a nearby tree to get its vitamins. Pop! The cap flew off, lightly knocking off my forehead, but with much force. Thank God it didn't shoot into my eye, it was quite powerful.
Although it wasn't a fizzy drink by design, the juice had fermented in the hot sun.
Today I learned that there's a solution to the cap flying off, using a different design of screw thread! Thank you jfrunyon for posting this to Hacker News so we can all learn from each other :)
I have a vague memory from the 80s of a UK consumer show ("Watchdog" or "That's Life") highlighting the dangers of opening pop bottles with your teeth because the caps could fly off and smash your teeth / soft palate etc. Not finding anything from the searches though.
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/bottle-jar-opener-made-fro...
When I eventually opened the bottle it basically shot my hand off with some speed and shock.
I was quite surprised and then investigated and found the gaps, it's a neat little addition to the design (and makes one wonder how many other little details like this there are in daily life products that we'll never even know about).
That's what I find most interesting about things like that. They are everywhere and its a joy to find them.
You notice the hard way when you try to build things yourself. All the small things that make mechanics go together ... like just getting the jiggle just right to make things not seize or be too loose.
The amount of institutional knowledge around is insane, and I fear that the quality drop in things in recent years is just not due to cheap imports, but also that employee employer loyalty is punished by the employers nowadays and they are losing experienced engineers. Like the "I'll be designing cupboard hatches here till I retire"-generation is retiring and the new engineers are job-hoping?
In a similar vein I recommend Not Just Bikes and City Beautiful for city planning details you haven’t thought of. It’s less expert advice and more observations, at least for NJB, but it’s eye opening!
And of course, Technology Connections.
I just discovered Not Just Bikes a few weeks ago, and I'm really digging his content. He complains and rants too much for me to really binge his channel, but I still go back to it for small doses. I'll work my way through his catalogue eventually!
I do like Technology Connections, but I'm a mechanical engineer by training so a lot of his videos don't really cover new stuff for me, or it's a 22 minute video for 8 minutes of real content. He tends to go over each concept repeatedly from sliiightly different perspectives each time. Which is cool, but I end up skipping around in the video until he gets to the point.
If you're into game design, check out Game Makers Toolkit; and New Frame Plus for animation.
> Non-pressurized packages (like bottled water) normally contain
> smooth, non-vented threads since there is no internal
> pressure to be relieved from the inside of the package.
Funny how one short report can cause a lifelong change in behaviour.
"In order to prevent "missiling" of the cap of a bottle or other screw-top container intended to contain a carbonaceous beverage, the screw-thread ridge 11 on the neck 13 of ..."
I have a hole in my kitchen ceiling from accidentally storing dry ice overnight in one too.
You need to edge the cap close to the point before the gas can escape, then give it a flick so it can twist open the last bit by inertia. Apply some pressure to the plastic bottle while doing so.
When it works the cap would fly off with a loud bang and the rapid change in pressure causes condensation inside the bottle, allowing you to push out clouds of vapor.
I think they changed the design of the bottle at some point and this would no longer work.