Thank god for that. It was hard enough to learn 9 (now 8) planets at school. Can you imagine having to learn all the names if the hydrostatic equilibrium definition held?

Since when does science work by a standard of "what is easy for children to memorize lists of"? Do we say "There are 8 rivers in the world, and all others are dwarf rivers, which really aren't rivers" to make it easier on kids? Do we say "There are 8 bones in the human body, and all others are dwarf bones, which don't really count as bones"?

That's not how science works. Science is focused on practical distinctions about how things developed and their physical properties relative to each other. Hydrostatic equilibrium is a very practical definition. The process of undergoing relaxation induces metamorphism and releases heat, altering bodies. You go to non-equilibrium bodies if you want to study the primordial makeup of our solar system. You go to equilibrium bodies if you want to study tectonics, volcanism, non-primordial chemistry, and search for past or present life. The boundary could not be more meaningful. Yes, there is a bit of fuzz between equilibrium and non-equilibrium, but the same applies to pretty much all scientific fields.

Supporters of the IAU definition (which I should add was a deeply biased sample, in that it looked like they were headed toward no definition or a hydrostatic equilibrium definition, so most supporters of that left, but the people trying to switch it to an orbit-clearing definition stayed) will argue that it's cleared if the remaining objects are trivial transients or in orbital resonance. But that's not what the IAU definition says. Also they'll point to the Stern-Levison parameter, but (A) that was based on the ability to scatter today's distribution of asteroids, not the primordial distribution, which included outright planetissimals**; and (B) Mars didn't even clear it's own orbit, Jupiter did. Also, in the paper that introduced the Stern-Levison parameter, they argued for a better definition where you combine adjectives and nouns (each with specific implications about the body) as needed to describe its size, composition, etc.

But the OP's point stands, in that it's stupid to say that something is a "dwarf planet", yet not a planet. It's like saying dwarf stars aren't stars or dwarf galaxies aren't galaxies or whatnot. An adjective-noun is almost always a noun, that's how language works. In the cases where an adjective-noun isn't a noun - say, "shooting star" or "slow worm" or whatnot - we treat these as scientifically erroneous colloquialisms, and formalize corrected scientific terminology. We don't do literally the opposite and have science codify misleading language.

Speak for yourself, Pluto is fascinating. Tectonically active. Cryovolcanism so abundant it appears to have formed large mountains by the merger of individual domes. A gigantic scar exposing its mantle, which over time roils in massive convection cells, pockmarked in sublimation pits. Mountains drifting like icebergs and accumulating on the shore. Penetentes (sublimation ice spikes), the size of large hills. A multilayer blue atmosphere, in which organic chemistry occurs, depositing not just organic matter onto its own surface, but that of its moon as well. Active glaciation. A probable subsurface ocean, in contact with rock. Conditions suggesting it was habitable when it formed.

IMHO, it's way more interesting than a number of recognized planets.

(Also, I'm confused by your response. This isn't about the moon, and the moon has no atmosphere for flying)

Honestly most pickups never tow. According to companies that make them and have a vested interest in knowing what they need to build. Less then half of pickup owners ever tow anything.

The under half that do tow are still people though and still have needs and dollars. I tow, I early tow more then about 200 miles, I mean why would I fill a dump trailer with dirt from two states away and haul it home? We have dirt here! Most of my towing is under 50 miles. Occasionally it is 400 miles (not for dirt though).

you can make a successful product that doesnâ(TM)t address the needs of every single person.

Yep. Back in the early days of Slashdot, when helium usage would come up, I'd grumble about how wasteful the medical industry was with helium.

It still uses a lot, but it's nowhere near as wasteful as it was before.

Yes, like the Nile Delta, water flowed in from wet regions further away to the desert and near-desert lowlands, and humans began using it for agriculture. Around the Tulare Basin, there's dozens of inches per year in the mountains due to orographic uplift, but only half a dozen in the lowlands. The problem is that farmers first consumed the water from the mountain-fed local rivers and are now consuming water shipped in from as far away as the Oregon border and drawing down groundwater much faster than it's being replenished. At the same time, the mountain rivers are becoming less reliable as climate change leads to snowpack melting earlier. As it stands today, it is not sustainable. More water is being used than is long-term available.

Indeed, I have no clue what you think you were trying to prove with this link:

The conversion of this water system to a lake-and-slough wetland to agriculture began in the mid-1800s when European settlers began to build canals and diversion structures to irrigate their crops. This early irrigation infrastructure upstream from Tulare Lake slowly cut off the lake from its source waters, shrinking the lake's footprint. By 1899 - less than 50 years after irrigation was initiated - Tulare Lake went dry for the first time in history.

They were overdrawing the rivers *even before the 20th century*.

Or to be less dismissive, people that tow a lot? My EV is fantastic to drive, and gets pretty decent range, until I tow a many thousand pound and worse yet physically large travel trailer, and then my efficiency drops to about 1.7 miles per kWh, which gets me about 166 miles on a full charge (and 0% to 100% charging is slow).

Which mostly means I don’t plan on any trips to locations much over 100 miles away with a big travel trailer. Which is ok, it is a big EV, I can sleep in it if I want. Not quite as nice as an actual TT, but it works. Other people maybe actually tow enough to that they can’t just decide to “not do that”.

Well for me it is a rare problem, say 0-3 blackouts a year, and 0-1 lasting more then a few hours. So less important then say “how does it deal with a long trip I make once a year”.

On the other hand a 3 day power outage in the winter (not normal, but not unusual) is no joke. It is enough of a “no joke” the most houses around here have an external input for a generator or other 240V power source. Mine in particular will power the house’s heating (well the water circulation pumps and the furnace ignition), as well as the kitchen fridge/freezer, and the wall outlets & ceiling fixtures in a few rooms. Which is nice because it means for around 500W you get heat, lights, and a way to keep the beer cold. You don’t get the stove (electric, high draw 240V), or the microwave (I mean you could drag it over to an outlet that has power, but a microwave is pretty hard on a portable generator), or the coffee maker (again it can be dragged to a outlet, but it is hard on a generator).

I have a big ass APEX battery something like 3kWh and does 240V output. It is way happier with the coffee maker then my little generator. It is decent in general for running the house’s limited “backup power” mode. Except it will only run it for around 6 hours. On the other hand my EV does have 120V 15A out, which won’t run my home heating system, but it will power the APEX. The EV has around 100kWh in the battery, so it’ll run the APEX and indirectly the house for a very long time.

Or to be fair a really crap Harbor Freight portable generator that will last one outage and then die a horrible death could be used to feed the APEX, and the APEX can weather all the rough loads and ramp-up/down and generally make life easier for the generator.

However that is all a bit of a diversion from my main point. It may be a bit uncommon to have a 3 day winter power outage here (although the power outages tend to happen during rough weather, so -20F ice storms tend to bring the power outages, and the bad weather makes it harder to get linemen where they need to be and equipment to them, so yeah the long outages tend to be winters!)...but they aren’t even rare. Live here for a decade and you will have about three of them. Having it well below freezing and no power and no heat means whatever water you have is going to freeze and expand. A lot of heating around here uses water to transit the heat, so the normal “nothing will freeze and burst in the first day, maybe two” you get “well at least one of those pipes runs in the low insulation areas under the roof to help clear ice sheets...and that one will freeze in a few hours. Plus others will freeze pretty early as well, maybe not day one, but you arne’t getting through much of day two without many thousands of dollars of damage.

So try not to over generalize from your local power stability and lack of winter power oriented damage. This kind of feature can be worth tens of thousands of dollars every few years.

I’m less sure that there are a lot of places you can save enough from buying power at low rate times and using it from you down battery at higher rate times (I think there are clearly places with a 3x rate difference, but even so it is around 20 per kWh, and most EVs have more like 40kWh batteries, not the 98kWh battery I have, so the savings tops out around $8/day and that isn’t a lot even if it doesn’t put any noticeable extra strain on your EV’s lifetime it has a super low payback. Then again maybe some places have a much larger kWh cost and a bigger off-peak discount? I definitely don’t know any place it is a fast payback though.

"Point us to an post about a guy given a job he is clearly unqualified"

That's literally my point -- the post isn't about the person in charge of the ministry! It's about them testing Collabora and the users just having too many issues with it. I guarantee if it was the same exact story and the minister had a male name none of you would have done this deep dive and criticism.

And why do you think she is unqualified? The Minister of Digitization doesn't need to be an expert on digitization, they need to be competent at high-level management and understanding how laws and policies work. Did she do something wrong? Would someone else have somehow convinced the 37 or however many employees who tested it not to hate it?

Yeah but for some reason Slashdot commenters jump to targeting people mentioned in the stories when they have a female first name.

While this is true, being the subject of an experiment to see what happens when you do that is not something most people would choose for themselves. It's not *irrational* to be concerned. Absence of evidence on a largely unexplored question like microplastic infiltration in human bodies is not the moral equivalent of absence of evidence in an extensively studied question like a vaccine-autism link.

Oh, you want me to google Köppen classification maps? Here you go. Gee, what a shock, they're exactly what I described!

As for your paper's offhanded sloppy remark (California contains a lot of Mediterranean climate, but not the specific pistachio growing centres), your paper says:

Fig. 1. Pistachio cultivation in California (year 2022) , showing counties with the largest planted area: Kern, Kings, Tulare, Fresno, Madera, and Merced. Own elaboration with data from: DWR (2023).

Gee, I wonder, what's the typical annual precipitation in the lowlands in Kern, Kings, Tulare, Fresno, Madera, and Merced counties? Let's just start with Kern, which alone produces 1/3rd of the state's entire crop: Hey Google, what's the typical annual precipitation in Kern Country? Let's see your top hit

Water sources in Kern County
Precipitation in Bakersfield averages 6.49 inches per year. It’s a very dry climate.

6.49 inches per year. That's a desert (sub-10 inches). Do I need to walk you through the rest? Oh wait, I already fucking did that.

Here, let's sum up the whole thread: Hey AI, who's right in this thread?

Rei is overwhelmingly correct.

While Rei made one minor typographical error regarding Köppen climate codes, their factual claims regarding California geography, pistachio cultivation, precipitation levels, climate classification rules, and water usage are scientifically sound. Conversely, DamnOregonian’s rebuttals rely on fundamental misunderstandings of how climate classifications work, California's geography, and where pistachio agriculture takes place.

1. Where Pistachios Are Grown & Whether It Is a Desert

DamnOregonian’s claim: Pistachios are not grown in the desert, and the San Joaquin Valley is a Mediterranean climate where crops get "ample water."

Rei’s claim: Pistachios are overwhelmingly grown in the Tulare Basin lowlands (southern San Joaquin Valley), which receives 5–8 inches of rain annually—well within the standard definition of a desert.

The Facts:

California produces over 95% of U.S. pistachios[1][2][3]. The vast majority of production is concentrated in Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Kings, and Madera counties[3][4][5]. Kern County alone produces over a third of the state’s total crop.

These lowlands receive between 5 and 8 inches of precipitation per year[6] (Bakersfield averages ~6.5 inches[7], Lost Hills ~6.6 inches, and Kettleman City ~7.5 inches). For comparison, Phoenix, Arizona receives ~7.2 inches.

In biology and geography, this region is formally recognized as the San Joaquin Desert (established by Germano et al., 2011, and recognized by the USGS and conservation agencies)[8][9][10].

Without massive state and federal irrigation projects (the Central Valley Project, State Water Project, and groundwater pumping)[6][11][12], these orchards could not survive on local precipitation.

2. The Köppen Climate Classification Blunder

DamnOregonian's central argument relies on a flawed reading of the Köppen climate classification system:

DamnOregonian quoted Wikipedia’s description of Csa:
"Regions with this form of a Mediterranean climate experience average monthly temperatures in excess of 22.0 C... Point out where they mention rainfall."

Why DamnOregonian is wrong:

Köppen classifications are hierarchical, and Group B (Dry/Arid climates) takes precedence over Group C (Temperate/Mediterranean climates)[13].

To even consider whether a region belongs in Group C (Csa), the region must first fail the Group B aridity test[13].

The aridity threshold (P th) is calculated using mean annual temperature and the seasonality of precipitation[13][14]. Because the Central Valley gets most of its precipitation during winter, Köppen’s threshold formula is: P th =20×T Celsius

For Bakersfield (mean annual temperature ~18.5 C / 65.3 F), the threshold for aridity is 370 mm370 mm (~14.6 inches). Under Köppen, if an area receives less than half of the aridity threshold (P3. Native Range of Pistachios

Rei’s point: Pistachios (Pistacia vera) are native to the arid plateaus and steppes of Central Asia, northeastern Iran, and northern Afghanistan.

The Facts: Rei is correct. The modern commercial cultivar used throughout California (the "Kerman" cultivar) was collected in 1929 from the desert-adjacent Iranian Plateau by USDA botanist William E. Whitehouse[4][21]. The tree naturally adapted to thrive in hot, dry, rainless summers and survive on deep taproots in arid soils[4][21].

4. Rei's Only Minor Mistake

Rei wrote:

"southern San Joaquin Valley lowlands are a mix of BWh (Hot desert climate) and CWh (Cold desert climate)."

In the Köppen system, a cold desert climate is abbreviated BWk, not CWh[15][22]. Cwa and Cwb are temperate monsoon climates[14][22]. This was clearly a slip of the keyboard, as Rei correctly provided the definition ("Cold desert climate") in parentheses.

Conclusion

Rei is correct. The heart of California’s pistachio belt lies in the Tulare Basin / southern San Joaquin Valley, an arid desert and steppe landscape receiving only 5–8 inches of rain per year[6]. DamnOregonian's claim that this region is "not a desert" and that Köppen Mediterranean climates do not depend on rainfall criteria represents a complete misunderstanding of both climatology and local geography.
Sources
help
americanpistachios.org
agmrc.org
agwestfc.com
ca.gov
farmonaut.com
wikipedia.org
encountertravel.com.au
figshare.com
scienceforconservation.org
kglmeridian.com
nature.org
capitolweekly.net
climatezonemap.com
hardymaps.com
oregonstate.education
wikipedia.org
plantmaps.com
figshare.com
wikipedia.org
noaa.gov
californiacurated.com
worldbank.org

"Get fucked" yourself. Facts will continue to remain facts whether you like them or not. Pistachios are grown in the desert, specifically, the San Joaquin Desert, in the Tulare basin lowlands, in the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley.

I mean, it's not irreplaceable (despite the fact that atmospheric helium, sourced from radioactive decay, "leaks" to space from the planet). But there is a risk of significant cost increases if we just burn the super helium-rich NG deposits without separation. Helium is still recoverable from poorer NG deposits, non-NG deposits (anywhere that volcanic heat melts old basement rock - for example, the Rukwa Basin), and even as a byproduct of atmospheric air liquefaction (for separation to extract N2, O2, and noble gases). But you risk costs rising significantly faster than tech advancement can offset them.

We're still going to have helium, but it'll affect our usage priorities of we're not smart about how we handle the resources. We got too used to, for too long, treating it as a cheap disposable.

(If anyone is curious where it goes: 2/3rds to arc welding, medical imaging (cryogenics), semiconductors, and fibre optics; 3/4ths if you add in metals processing. "As a lifting gas" is only 6%. It's industrial use that's the problem. At least medical imaging has gotten a lot better over the past couple decades)

So, if you care about the actual history, TL/DR, it was your typical "Government Waste!" panic (an earlier version of DOGE-ism).

The first person to really push for getting rid of it was Rep. Christopher Cox (R-CA), who thought it was a stupid government boondoggle. He and his allies in the '80s and early '90s mocked it as an absurd relic of the '20s intended to supply military blimps and dirigibles and pointed out that it had racked up $1,4B in government debt. In 1984 Reagan, launched the Grace Commission (the President's Private Sector Survey on Cost Control), which was the late 80s equivalent of DOGE (he literally used the phrase "drain the swamp"!), and based on its recommendations, Reagan proposed selling off the reserve in both his FY 1989 and FY 1990 budgets. Then in 1993, under Clinton, VP Gore did his own DOGE (the National Performance Review (NPR)). Once again, privatizing the helium reserve was featured as an objective (Clinton would later, in his 1995 State of the Union, refer to it as one of "over 100 programs we do not need"), but it they decided not to push on it in '93 because Clinton needed the support of Rep. Bill Sarpalius (D-TX), whose district housed the reserve in Amarillo. In congress, Republicans took the lead (Democrats were initially more skeptical, though most still supported elimination); after Republicans won control in 1994, they focused on eliminating "obsolete" federal programs as a policy keystone (Rep. John Kasich and Newt Gingrich in particular). By 1996, there was broad bipartisan support, and congress drafted and passed the Helium Privatization Act (H.R. 4168) with near-unanimous support.

The TL/DR is, elected officials LOVE the idea of "cutting government waste". Their track record of determining what actually is "waste", however, is not nearly so great. It's a lot easier for ignorant elected officials to rail against something to an ignorant public with soundbites ("Lol, we're wasting money preparing for zeppelin-warfare, HAR HAR HAR!") than it is to take the time to understand the full consequences of what you're proposing to eliminate.

Another one of those counterintuitive things (on the algal oil) line for me was creatine. Clearly more athletic power and performance is unambiguously evolutionarily advantagenous - if it were good and safe for us to have more, why wouldn't we just produce more?

It turns out that the answer is: it's massively costly to us to produce. We can't just produce and attach methyl groups (part of the creatine synthesis pathway) out of thin air. Creatine alone consumes half of our transmethylation flux from SAMe -> SAH -> homocysteine! We have to utilize the essential amino acid methionine (which is low in most plant matter, which makes up the majority of most hunter-gatherer calories). And the process is actively harmful to us. The intermediary SAH inhibits almost all transmethylation enzymes. Homocysteine is toxic (endothelial damage, oxidative stress, protein misfolding, etc). Clearing homocysteine is expensive, SAMe does double duty with epigenetic regulation and as a metabolic sensor, etc. High methionine metabolism is directly linked to accelerated aging, and methionine restriction leads to significant increases in lifespan in animal models.

Since consumption of dietary creatine downregulates the production of innate creatine and thus its transmethylation requirements, it's arguably outright healthy to consume more dietary creatine.