$65 for one chip?
Brilliant marketing.
Paqui, makers of the One Chip Challenge, are now withdrawing the product worldwide.
Fortunately, this remains available (click image to buy at Amazon).
Pure Cap is my go-to source for heat. It is a pure capsaicin extract in oil and has no taste of its own other than stimulating the heat response. It is rated at 500,000 Scoville heat units (SHU), compared to Tabasco sauce (see the post here on 2022-03-22, “Making Tabasco Sauce”) at 2,500 to 5,000 SHU, varying from batch to batch—thus 100 to 200 times hotter. Having no taste of its own, Pure Cap allows you to adjust the heat of whatever you’re preparing without altering its taste in any way. I use six to eight drops for 2.5 litres of spaghetti sauce made from 1 kg of ground beef. One bottle will last most people a lifetime.
You can always put Pure Cap directly on a tortilla chip if you mourn the loss of the Paqui product at the hands of Safetyland drippynoses.
Virgin Galactic’s recent (2023-09-08) Galactic 03 tourist flight was…odd.
Unlike previous flights, there was no live stream, and the identities of the passengers were not disclosed prior to the flight. Only after the flight were they named: three passengers and Virgin Galactic Chief Instructor Beth Moses making her fifth flight. After the flight, the following recap video was posted on YouTube.
This included, at the 1:13 mark, one of the asterisknauts* (Tim Nash, I believe) waving the pedo pride flag after landing.
After the flight, National Geographic reported:
In tribute to humanity’s longstanding thirst for exploration, fossilized bones from two ancient species, Australopithecus sediba and Homo naledi, hurtled into suborbit on Virgin Galactic’s spacecraft, V.S.S. Unity. They journeyed alongside three private astronauts, along with two pilots and one astronaut instructor, who were pushed to the edge of space with a rocket that briefly thrust them into microgravity and to an apogee of about 300,000 feet above Earth’s surface before returning to the launch site in Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.
It was the first time the fossil of a human ancestor has been to space. But why send fossils into space at all? Entrepreneur and philanthropist Timothy Nash, who carried the fossils in his pocket during the flight, tells National Geographic it offers a change to reflect on the enterprising spirit of our earliest ancestors.
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For Nash, the thought of viewing both Earth and the blackness of space has prompted reflections on how far humanity has come. “I think it’s going to be the experience of a lifetime,” he told National Geographic before the journey. As for the danger of taking one-of-a-kind fossils to suborbit with commercial spaceflight still in its infancy, he says it’s worth the risk. “These are only a very small part of the fossil record, and they have been very well studied. Exploring involves risks. Human advancement requires risks.”
Still, just to be safe, he planned to transport the fossils in a carbon fiber tube that Berger would watch over until a ceremony shortly after takeoff.
“They are two of the best studied, best replicated things in our collections,” says [paleoanthropologist and National Geographic Explorer in Residence Lee] Berger, who cites the abundant documentation of the fossils as one reason they were selected for the spaceflight.
- asterisknaut: person who has flown in the upper atmosphere higher than the 50 miles (80 km) which the U.S. (and only the U.S.) define as the edge of space, as opposed to the rest of the world which considers the Kármán line at 100 km as the threshold of space. Theodore von Kármán chose that altitude as where the atmosphere was so thin an airplane would have to travel at orbital velocity to generate enough aerodynamic lift to support itself. Virgin Galactic flies its passengers to altitudes below the Kármán line and relies upon the U.S. definition to call them “astronauts”. Blue Origin’s New Shepard, by contrast, flies to altitudes above 100 km, except when it doesn’t. I have noticed journalists, at least in more technically-oriented venues (as opposed to National Geographic), increasingly call Virgin Galactic flights to the “edge of space” and those on board “passengers” instead of “astronauts”.
Switzerland is an odd choice for people looking to flee wealth tax, as it is one of the only five countries in the OECD which has a wealth tax, the others being Colombia, France, Norway, and Spain. The wealth tax is imposed by the cantons (there is no federal wealth tax) and the rate varies from canton to canton, but all cantons are within the range of 0.3 to 0.5%. That’s a lot better than Norway’s 1.1%, but a heck of a lot worse than zero, which is the case everywhere else. Further, most cantons have a substantial estate tax, while Norway has none, so older people will want to consider this.
In some of the small mountain cantons wealthy people can negotiate tax deals which dramatically reduce the tax on income earned outside the country. I suspect this is a major motivation for Norwegians moving to Switzerland, with wealth tax a secondary consideration, although it may have been what pushed them over the edge.
Canada. Apparently a third 4-reactor plant at the same site:
Very cool, good to see they’re still using a CANDU design. Doesn’t really belong here in “The Crazy Years” thread, this is a positive sign. Which surprises the heck out of me to say that about something happening in Canada in current year.
(Click image to view in 𝕏, then click image to enlarge and see fine print. Note that the 1937 cost of building the Golden Gate Bridge has been adjusted for inflation. The cost in 1937 gold dollars was US$ 35 million.)
It is a testament to the irrationality (insanity) of our betters that the populations of developed countries will likely have to undergo several generations of unnecessary power shortages because of the “global warming” grift. The refusal to build sufficient new nuclear power generation plants will go down in history (if, indeed, there is history) as one of the most arrogant and downright stupid decisions of all time. Surely, sufficient experience, engineering expertise and narrow AI presently exists to make such plants operate extremely safely. Are there not even designs which greatly limit radioactive waste?
Indeed, the design and operating procedures of existing plants are such that the death toll from light water and heavy water moderated nuclear power reactors from 1957 (the first in the U.S.) to the present has been precisely zero. (Cheronbyl was a graphite moderated reactor intended for dual-use production of electricity and plutonium breeding and had no containment building.)
Coal-burning power stations currently in operation release an estimated 30,000 tonnes per year of radioactive radon, uranium, and thorium in flue gases from contaminants in the coal. Natural gas also contains radon from decay of uranium in the rocks surrounding the underground source. A one gigawatt electric natural gas plant releases around 8 Curies of radon into the atmosphere per month. This is approximately equal to the total radiation released by the Three Mile Island nuclear meltdown in 1979.
(Source: Robert Zubrin, The Case for Nukes, 2023)
As discussed by my “Nuclear Fission Fuel is Inexhaustible” post on 2022-04-25, a breeder reactor fuel cycle drastically reduces the amount of nuclear waste because it burns up many of the actinide elements which are the most difficult to manage components of spent fuel from water-moderated reactors. Actually, most of the “waste” from the moronic “once-through” fuel cycle used in the U.S. (but not in Europe or other saner regions of the world) is not waste at all but rather unreacted uranium-238, which a breeder reactor calls “fuel”. By eschewing fuel reprocessing, the U.S. even throws away the plutonium-239 and -240 bred in the spent fuel, which can be extracted and used as reactor fuel.