Two strikes for you - first you make a poor analogy (In a completely deflated state the rubber is the entire volume and mass of the balloon), and second you missed the opportunity to make it a car analogy.

A better analogy would be that paint (or enamel) is pretty scarce on a car since such a tiny fraction of its total mass consists of paint, even though us "surfacists" consider the paint a very important characteristic of the car.

Answers to various comments/questions on this sub-thread:

Time dilation at 1/3 c is 5.7%, quite a noticeable amount, but not remotely close to to turning billions of years into millions.

Tidal effects are small for super-massive galactic black holes. I doubt tidal disruption of Earth-like (i.e. fairly close) orbits would occur, especially for cool M-type stars (the most common kind).

While individual particles of cosmic dust hitting the planet at 1/3 c won't be a problem, (they will simply explode high in the upper atmosphere), the energy flux hitting the atmosphere from interstellar gas would be considerable. Average interstellar space has something like 1,000,000 hydrogen atoms per cubic meter. At 100,000 km/sec every second there would be 100,000*1,000*1,000,000= 10^14 hydrogen atoms hitting each square meter of atmosphere. The kinetic energy of those atoms would be about 1000 J, so roughly 1000 watts/m^2 of heating from interstellar hydrogen. Earth gets 1400 watts/M^2 of heat from the Sun, so it would roughly double the heating of an Earth-like world until it cleared the galaxy plane. If it ran into a denser patch (all of the region in the galactic center would be denser than the average I quoted) then the heating could be 10, 100, even 1000 times higher for a bit. I think this would cook any existing Earth-like planet.

Once in interstellar space though the heat load would drop by a factor of 10,000 to 100,000 of the average interstellar value and would cease to be significant. From there on the planet and star system would evolve on their own, and a new biosphere could come into existence.

Thames and Kosmos. Their Chem 5000 set is the real deal, at least equal to, and probably better than, the ChemCraft sets of yore that I loved as a kid.

About five years ago I was casting about for a chemistry set for my daughter, and heard about Thames and Kosmos. Unfortunately at that particular moment they were retooling their offerings, and none were available - but they are back on the market, better than ever.

ICBMs can cover much of the Earth, but not all of it. The U.S. submarine fleet, consisting of multiple mobile missile fields, can. Submarines can be positioned closer to the target, and can thus put a warhead on it faster than an ICBM (not clear why you think shaving minutes is so important though).

Not at all clear that this true today, with modern communication systems. Silos have serious problems with communications when warheads land on top of them.

What effective "active defense" do you imagine exists in the world today against the U.S. SLBM fleet? They patrol a couple of thousand miles off the coast, if they need to, and there is no effective anti-submarine force in the world to target them. The Russian submarine fleet is less than 1/4 the size that it was under the Soviet Union.

You may have heard of the U.S. carrier battle groups of which the U.S. has 11, versus none for the rest of the world. SLBMs have the option of operating from the protective umbrella of battle groups, which makes the notion of them being effectively target truly ridiculous.

And the bombers have cruise missiles with a range of 1500 miles, so the effectiveness of active defense against them is questionable.

Sorry you are grasping at ancient, worn-out straws trying to prop up the case for the ICBM fleet.

You must be talking of ICBMs and SLBMs that belong to some other country - certainly not the U.S.

The U.S. SLBM, the Trident II D5, is a much heavier missile than the Minuteman III (130,000 vs 78,000 lb) so with the same warhead loading will travel much farther than the Minuteman. The shorter range you see quoted is only due to the fact that it carries up 14 warheads, versus a maximum of 3 for the Minuteman.

The maximum range of Minuteman III missile is about 13,000 km, but the farthest place in the world from U.S. missile fields is 20,000 km away. A good part of the Earth is outside of U.S. ICBM range.

But here is the kicker - the farthest point of land from an ocean in the world is the Eurasian Pole of Inaccessibility which is only 2645 km from the shore. So we can place submarine warheads truly anywhere on Earth.

"Scaling down" does not seem to be the solution. As long as there are some ICBMs this problem will persist, and it is a bad idea to have any nuclear weapons under the control of a dysfunctional organization like this. It should be outright elimination.

There should be no "launch on warning" period. It is a deadly dangerous posture, and is unnecessary - we have subs that will survive any sudden strike, and airplanes that can scramble, then return to base if there is no strike (and continue to their targets, with real-time re-targeting if there is).

It seems very unlikely that this problem can be fixed while retaining the ICBM force. The Air Force being what it is, only the fly-boys and fly-girls will get the promotions. Silo sitting is a career dead-end from the beginning. The reward structure in the Air Force is deeply embedded from the time of its creation, and it is all but impossible (and perhaps flatly impossible) to fix a deep organization-wide reward structure like this without wholesale rebuilding of the organization itself - a remote scenario to say the least.

The triad is not holy writ, immutable and divinely inspired. It was something of a historical accident, a product of the way technologies matured during the days of the nuclear arms race, a race that ended 25 years ago. In terms of service turf (an important consideration in Washington) the Air Force still has its nuclear armed bombers, so giving up the ICBMs will still leave them their "nuclear manhood".

You can do so reasonably well for sedentary (that is, most) people. There is a basal metabolic rate that consumes most calories for most people and only throttles down 10% at night. Even if an average person were to run a mile every day, they would only be burning an extra 120 Kcal, 6% more than their baseline 2000 Kcal, during that ~10 minute energy burst. This regimen matches the CDC recommendations for exercise (75 minutes of intense activity a week), but 80% of Americans don't even make it to this level.

So quoting an average energy consumption rate for the body is a reasonable approximation of the situation.

So you are proposing that the entire tax system should be based solely on taxation of wealth? Wow! I never suspected you would be so progressive!

Also, the core claim that the US spends the most per student - if we are talking about primary and secondary students - not college - is not true although it is on the high end. Switzerland, Norway and Luxembourg spend more, and Austria and Denmark are almost same.

The wait for a usable Micro$oft system has already made me jump ship - I got a Mac to go with my Linux systems. There are limitations in using Linux only, not all open source alternatives are adequate replacements for commercial apps, and many commercial vendors do not support Linux. But they do support Macs pretty well. There are no compelling "windoze only" apps that can force a Windows purchase over a Macintosh.

Citation (or explanation) please?

You sure about that? Seriously this is a very close copy of the Keely motor hoax.

I am sure there are any number of magicians who could set up this trick. This is just the "magicians hat" (which can produce anything, indefinitely) but with a different piece of apparel.

According to a poster on this page these "independent" investigators are in fact associates of Rossi's. If so then we can just shut this whole charade down.

Friends of the magician accepting assurances that he isn't trying to fool them...

And if your local water supply really is limited, and is being exhausted through over-use?

This isn't a "scam", it is that inconvenient thing called "reality" calling. No one guaranteed you as much water was you want to use at a low fixed price. If the cost running the system is fixed, then expect to pay a roughly proportionate share of that fixed price (depending on your relative share of water used, over some baseline), and if the water is in short supply expect to get less than you used to get for that same money. Sort of like that free market thing called "supply and demand". If the supply runs short, you will pay more for the same amount.