Umm, contact (202) 324-3000 and ask them. They’ll know for sure.

^^^ Umm, FBI, if you’re reading, it was all their idea! ^^^^

Not much really. Looks cool though. I suppose it’s more of a decoration than “tech.” About the only practical application of it is a tool to terrify the uneducated. The quantities of tritium the average person can buy are beyond harmless. You could breathe a hundred vials of the stuff and be completely unaffected. If you drank nothing but tritium water for several weeks, you would have some issues. But tiny vials with micrograms of tritium vapor inside? Utterly harmless.

Or, I suppose for the criminally minded, you could find some evil uses for it. You could probably rob a bank with it. “Give me all the money or I break this vial of radioactive vapor!” That would probably get you a wikipedia page, if you’re just dying for your 5 minutes of fame. You could go down in history as, “that mad scientist that robbed a bank using radioactive gas.” Of course it would be a bluff.

Though if you’re just going to bluff your way through bank robbery, you can just stick your hand in a hoodie pocket for the same effect.

I suppose you could use it for other similar criminal acts of varied nobility. You could probably use the same bluff to create a hostage situation to bring awareness to whatever political/religious cause is your cup of tea. Ultimately most people are very ignorant of nuclear science, and simply the words “radioactive tritium” would cause people to shit themselves. And that fear could be harnessed for all sorts of malevolent purposes. (Even better as you can actually show people the faint glow from it, and prove that you do have something radioactive.)

Hmm… what else could you use tritium for? I suppose you could use it for religious purposes. Absolute quantities really don’t matter much for that.

What else? You could tie it to a keychain and be able to find your keys in a dark room.

But really, it’s mostly a novelty. I think small amounts of it can be used for gun sights. But in any quantity the average person could afford or legally be allowed to purchase, it’s a harmless novelty. Larger quantities can be used in fusion reactor experiments and nuclear weapons. But if you try to acquire that much, you better have a budget in the millions, and the NRC is going to be on your ass. The average person can get a small vial of it that faintly glows blue in a dark room. It looks cool embedded in jewelry, but it really doesn’t have much practical purposes beyond perhaps terrifying the ignorant. But I really don’t consider malevolent uses to be truly practical applications.

(In case it isn’t obvious, I do not endorse using radioactive tritium in the commission of any crime or act of violence or threat of violence.)

I do research while voting from my desk, referencing online sources with the LoWV pamphlet. I got my ballot last Thursday and had it right back in the mailbox that evening.

A bow drill fire starter.

…I suppose it depends on what you assume the future will be like…

Barring that, you can get some small vials of tritium gas for under that price.

As a business investment, what is the long-term outlook for the bouncy house industry? I assume it has its ups and downs.

Gender reassignment surgery.

My understand is, yes. They just broadcast the message on all towers in an area. The pager may be a simple one-way passive device. Or, it might have just enough broadcast ability to periodically ping a cell tower.

Pagers still have some specialized use cases. One of these is hospitals. A lot of hospitals still use them. Hospitals, as structures, are designed to the most strictest structural codes of any kind of building. If an earthquake or hurricane happens, you want your hospital to be the LAST building that ever falls over. So hospitals tend to be big, heavy structures that are massively over reinforced, way beyond what commercial or residential buildings would be. If you look at hospitals, they just look different as buildings. They’re hulking leviathans of structures.

While this makes them damn-near indestructible, it also can make it really difficult to get cell signals inside of them. Cell companies don’t like wasting power broadcasting signals strong enough to penetrate bunkers. They size their towers so their signals can penetrate most common buildings.

But “penetrate” is a complex term. If you only need to transmit a simple message, a lower-quality signal is often fine. Think of the difference between talking and shouting. In a noisy environment with lots of interference, we automatically switch to a form of verbal communication, shouting, that can overcome a lot of noise, but has a low information density. You can shout to be heard over a din, but you’re not going to be able to communicate subtle emotional context by minute tones in your voice.

Alternately, you can think of it that a simple message can easily be repeated many times. Want to make sure a simple text message gets through? Broadcast that thing 10,000 times in a row. That 10,000 times will still represent a fraction of a second of the data volume needed for a video call. But the pager can piece together the message from the few hundred fragments of messages that manage to get through.

I’m sure the actual network protocols are complicated, but I’m just talking about general communication here. The key is that for many reasons, you can often trade communications reliability for communications complexity. A video call will only work in perfect conditions. A simple page will penetrate thick concrete walls and work in the worst of weather events.

Oh, and often hospitals will actually install their own pager repeaters or independent pager systems right on site. In that case, the network doesn’t need to worry at all about figuring out what tower to send the signal to.

We’re bringin’ back capes and cloaks.

To prevent the obvious reference, the trend will be called, “‘No capes’ only applies to superheroes.”

Same. I used reddit since 2008. I’ve had accounts with multiple posts to /bestof, with over 100k karma get banned. The things I’ve been banned for have always been trivial “zero tolerance policy” violations that remind me of the zero tolerance, zero thought policies you used to (still do?) see in American high schools. At least when I was in school, my school had a zero-tolerance policy for violence. A bully could attack a victim and both of them would be suspended for fighting. The administrators didn’t want to bother figuring out who was at fault, so they just punished victim and perpetrator equally.

On different accounts, I was banned from some of the largest subreddits that I had years of history of posting very high quality and well-regarded comments in. The biggest account I ever had was under the username “isleepinahammock.” You can still find links to now-deleted bestof posts through google. The things I’ve been banned from the big subreddits for include:

1. On January 6th, as the capital was actively being breached, wondering aloud why this invasion wasn’t being responded to with soldiers and automatic weapons. (Historically how such mobs trying to overthrow governments are always dealt with. Later we learned that the reason those soldiers weren’t present was because Trump deliberately left the place unguarded.)

2. As SCOTUS was considering its ruling on presidential immunity, stating that if SCOTUS rules the president has complete immunity and effectively be a dictator, Biden should simply drone strike Supreme Court justices until the ruling is reversed. (Later news articles and opinion pieces proposing this exact kind of thing were openly promoted to the top of r/politics.)

3. Flippantly telling an overt bigot, commenting in one of the LGBT subreddits, to “go die in a fire.”

4. Making pro-Palestinian comments in r/worldnews.

Never did I ever threaten anyone. Never did I propose vigilante justice on anyone. Any mentions of violence were either obviously flippant remarks or suggestions of lawful and just use of government authority. But these comments violated the zero tolerance, zero thought policies of the major subreddits. I received bogus site site suspensions for these, which I ignored with alt accounts. Eventually I received a total IP ban for ban evasion.

I realize that reddit likes to claim to have a neutral hand. They say that moderators should be able to operate their subs as they please. But these major community subs aren’t some niche community. If you want to create r/rightwingworldnews, go ahead, but the main worldnews section for the biggest discussion site on the net should not be run by a bunch of radical Israeli supremacists. r/politics, the main political discussion forum, should not apply a harsher standard to their commenters than they do the standards they apply to the very stories they feature. And there should be a meaningful appeals process to actually get access restored to individual subreddits and the site as a whole.

If they actually cared about quality content, they would do this. But this takes care and thought. And if all you’re trying to do is juice ad revenue, your number one priority is to make the site as clean and sanitary as possible. If all you care about is maxing ad revenue, then having a zero-tolerance, zero-thought policy of “any mention of an act of violence in any context = ban,” makes sense. Even though in some cases, such a nation’s capital literally being stormed by an invading rebel army, violence IS the correct response.

I don’t know if you saw images of what the capital looked like a few weeks after January 6th on Biden’s actual inauguration day, but the capital was a damn fortress. If those fuckers had tried to storm the capital again on that day, it would have been a blood bath. And you know what? I would absolutely support the military opening up machine guns on any violent mob trying to overthrow our democracy. The moment you choose violence, you deserve to be responded to in turn with violence. You do that? Well you’ve made your choice. I have no sympathy for you. And zero-tolerance, zero-thought moderation policies prevent us from talking about these harsh realities. Sometimes violence IS the answer. Sometimes democracy DOES need to be defended with force. But we cannot discuss these harsh realities on the main political page of the biggest discussion site on the net, just to keep the place clean for advertisers.

Oh, and one more reason I was once banned from r/politics? Someone posted a doomer comment saying something to the effect of, “how can we possibly deal with MAGA terrorists? What if they lose the next election and just start an open rebellion? It’s hopeless! We might as well give up now.” I responded with the obvious and correct statement. Something to the effect of, “what do we do if armed revolutionaries enter open rebellion against the government? We shoot them. We send in the military and we shoot them. That is what you are SUPPOSED to do to people who take up arms against a just and legitimately elected government. It’s that whole ‘enemies foreign and domestic’ thing that soldiers swear to enforce.” I was literally banned for suggesting the very thing every US soldier swears an oath to do if necessary.

Yup. I walked the whole path. Slashdot->digg->reddit->now lemmy I guess.

Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.