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Why do the mining interests prefer exporting it to selling to some local processor? you could probably get similar prices and the transport wouldn't be as complex, right?

isn't it literally the same company, Rio Tinto?

Roasted coffee loses flavor after roasting.

Chocolate requires various ingredients to make that changes the characteristics of the chocolate. It also, famously, doesn't ship well.

Copper ingots, however, weigh less than copper ore and if they are actually too low quality they can be resmelted into a more pure level.

The only reason I can think of why you might actually want the ore is you also want and are extracting other secondary minerals.

Or, you know, the Chilean US puppet Augusto Pinochet who killed, jailed, or exiled professors, intellectuals, students etc.

Unless the PRC is a gringo now, you should not limit your concern to the US. The easiest propaganda technique - and trivially easy to accomplish with basic agents and existing social platforms - is divide and conquer.

Get people fighting about who is exploiting them, and they cannot unite against anyone exploiting them.

edit: no need to make the thread deeper. I agree with your reply, too. Two things can be correct at once, and usually are.

Maybe you're a bad judge of what comments are botted?

"I didn't expect to understand this topic like with most articles about weird shit on Wikipedia but wow, that animation actually brought the DC of grokking that knowledge within the reach of my INT modifier! Like super cool, dude!"

How's this? Is it more human-like now?

(your feedback may be used to improve the model for everyone)

And blow out all the Heisenburg compensators on board? I won't do it, captain!

Somehow the technobabble of reversing the polarity of the quantum crystal matrix doesn’t quite work…

Clearly we must either reverse the polarity of the tachyon emitter (this voids the warranty), or shift the phase of the quantum crystal matrix (that’s in spec).

>Simple. Just reverse the polarity.

ngl I enjoyed the "Unipolar magnets" in Dyson Sphere Program (excellent game btw if you're into factorio style mechanics).

They're clearly a ceremonial artifact, and their reflective surface is used to perform some religious ritual or other, probably related to the sun.

Shame that dopant drift would render the chips inoperable eventually.

But if the Antikythera Mechanism is anything to go by, I think they would at least figure out it was an electronic communication device.

https://www.erasmatazz.com/library/life-in-general/marbles.h...

"""Civilization will not survive more than a few centuries into the future. If that sad assertion be true, then what will the earth look like in the far future? There was a television show some years ago entitled “Life After People”. It did a good job of showing how the artifacts of civilization would decay, erode, disintegrate, and disappear. What’s surprising is that most of the stuff won’t last more than a few centuries. Our big cities, freeways, bridges, skyscrapers, and so forth will be untraceable within a millenium of the collapse of civilization. What will survive for longer?

...

This is why I occasionally dig a deep hole — perhaps two feet deep — on my land, drop a marble into it, and cover it up again. I always dig such holes on flat land halfway between the slope and the creek. The soil erosion here is slowest. For many years, the rains will slowly move dirt down the slopes toward the creek. On this flat section of land, the process will be very slow, and the loss of dirt to the creek will be matched by the gain of dirt from above. But eventually the former process will outperform the latter process, and dirt will start eroding away from above the marble. Eventually, all the dirt over the marble will be washed away and it will be exposed. """

> that it might only take a couple of million years, to completely wipe all traces of even an advanced, mechanized civilization.

It depends who comes searching. u235 has a half-life of ~700m years, so finding it in enough places (i.e. rocket silos, even if underground) and obviously processed into spheres, would raise some advanced alien eyebrows. There's also a chance that some things we left on the Moon / in high orbits will survive for a few million years. (also the test tubes on Mars and the rovers themselves, some have RTGs which, even if "depleted" of usable energy might still register as artificial)

In a couple million years, what you’ll see are the mineral deposits where dumpsters are today, with all the materials that are not economically viable to recycle, but that will remain as they were for very long times - metal alloys, rocks that shouldn’t have formed at that time and place, oil deposits where plastics were that appear much older than the adjacent substrate in carbon dating, and so on.

The shape is erased, but the chemical composition mostly remains.

[dead]

>Nearly all UFO claims went away once high quality cameras in smartphones became ubiquitous.

If only, but no. Thanks to equally ubiquitous video and image editing and now AI and the profit potential of social media there are more such claims than anyone can count.

The sitting president of the US is even intentionally stirring the pot releasing obvious AI photos of himself walking with aliens while the government is releasing "evidence" that isn't any more credible than the stuff you find on Reddit and Youtube. A significant number of Americans already believe the government has confirmed the existence of aliens and UFOs on Earth thanks to "whistleblowers" like Grusch and the Tic-Tac stuff, even though the government's official position has never changed, and most of that "evidence" has been debunked, and Grusch et.al have yet to provide anything conclusive.

Far from going away, the whole thing has become normalized and I feel like we're going to reach the point where more people believe in interdimensional space elves than believe humans ever landed on the moon by the end of the decade.

Design in what way? A pyramid is the natural shape any pile of stuff takes when created because it is the most stable.

Heck, when just playing in the dirt or sand as a little kid you sort of instinctually learn that.

So once you have that, what is left to learn of the design process? Cutting and assembly.

Cutting we figured out already, with copper tools you can use the desert sand as a diamond abrasive (has microscopic diamonds in it). Put sand on block, move a saw blade with no teeth back and forth.

Assembly: we do have some idea of the assembly process, but yes we will never know for certain because it was either taken for granted in that age (like we take for granted how to use modern technology), or written on parchment long since destroyed.

Design: we have countless examples in the region of pre-giza pyramids that have different height/width ratios. And how the older ones are less stable due to having more height to width (taller than wide).

So yeah, designing really is do it at smaller scale. Heck hand held bricks would give you a lot of practice and design reference when building the real thing, for a fraction of the cost.

And you missed the most obvious thing we learned, (a) they had a ton of time (no YouTube), (b) they built it in the off-season and paid the workers in food - not slaves. It was a public works project, that was used to keep the citizens fed.

Yeah, I’m hoping to replicate the higher purity natural growth pathway in synthetics. The bottom line is higher purity means more zinc for us, and it’s a common enough ion in the earth’s crust. This mine in particular has a lot of Zn dense minerals, so there’s just a lot of zinc here. Most natural crystals might be less pure, but it grows so commonly in nature, it’s less surprising that some are more pure from that perspective

It means that if you remove the meaning humans give to to, it's much easier to explain it as a coincidence, something that is produced naturally and it just happens to have the right property (for any value of property).

There are a bunch of stories about people using valuable rocks as a doorstop, meteorites, gold, amber etc

Good shout for Mindat, I should have searched that immediately (I use it for other things).

Looking at the chemical structure it is a supergene mineral but what makes it unique is that it has zinc without the metals that normally associated with zinc in these deposits. That is an unusual elemental configuration. It seems like a thing you could model but it isn’t surprising that no one has because it wouldn’t have a use in mining.

The places where you would find this ore may not be in places with commercially viable deposit scale as a copper play, especially if it is mostly copper-zinc. The US west is littered with concentrated micro-deposits of diverse copper minerals but no one maps them in a serious way.