It essentially causes neurodegenerative diseases, especially if you inhale it.

This applies to unintuitive routes of exposure, like taking a hot shower on an Air Force base that used flame retardant in fire drills decades prior and breathing in the water suspended in air.

Good thing they do mandatory evacuations before using it and don't let people back in until clean up has happened.

Edit: yes it moves it around, and just like the cleaning person at the office does you move it into the water table or drainage system. Or do you separate your dirt when you mop a floor or wash your clothes?

Removing dirt from the carpet and washing it down the drain is fine because ordinary "dirt" (i.e. soil) is made of non-toxic or biodegradable stuff. By contrast, washing toxic materials or heavy metals into the water table is the place you don't want them. There's a reason it's illegal to pour used motor oil down the drain.

I haven't found any studies about that, can you link them? It doesn't look like ammonium phosphate is dangerous.

At air force bases, airports (both the trucks and hangar suppression systems), firefighter training facilities. Municipal fire departments have metering devices on their trucks and can mix in the foam additive if it's warranted. Foam is incredibly effective on a lot of fires.

It gets into the groundwater from stuff like accidental hangar fire suppression system triggering, training exercises (at an airport near me, they have a dedicated steel structure that vaguely resembles a jetliner which they use for training, and yes, they use foam every time.) There are a lot of videos on youtube of the systems going off, intentionally (certification after installation - the system has to fill the hangar to X feet of foam within Y time), or accidentally being triggered because someone didn't respond to the prealarm fast enough to get to the control panel and stop it before the system started discharging.

At AF bases, FF training facilities, and airports it gets into the groundwater and it's game over - everyone who gets water from that water table has to install an expensive filtration system. And that's assuming it doesn't get into a nearby river or stream. The stuff gets used on a lot of vehicle fires on highways, those are often near riviers, streams, lakes, reservoirs....

I hadn't heard that PFAS or related chemicals were in the colored flame retardant used in forest fire fighting, though.

Personally, it’s about $10/litre to dispose of. Regardless of concentration. So properly rinsing out old equipment is expensive. But I know the situation differs by country, and what’s deemed “acceptable” varies too.

Powder doesn’t contain fluorinated compounds, at least to my knowledge. The role of fluorosurfactants is in increased wetting and emulsifying with hydrocarbons. Not really applicable to a dry agent.

Phos-check doesn’t contain fluorinated compounds.

I don’t think it is shown that the flame retardants used by cal fire are the same as those in the article from nyu.

But yes Phos-check isn’t that

I thought, why should we try to intervene with millions of years of evolution? Inflammation has to be there for a reason. Nitpick that statement all you want but in this specific case I'm glad I didn't mitigate the inflammation.

I was unaware of the acronym HELM and told everyone I was doing the exact opposite of RICE on purpose.

The link between BMAA (from toxic algae blooms) and neurodegenerative diseases in predisposed people is basically causal and proven at this point, but it's allegedly suppressed by Big Fishing and Aquaculture.

You may be right. There are many other components contributing to the problem in Finland, too.

You're confused here. The two conditions for a problem being NP-complete are (1) it being NP-hard and (2) it being in NP.

You suggest (2) is the issue, but usually it's harder to prove (1) rather than (2). In the context of factorization problems, the factors are simply the certificate that satisfy condition (2).

Being in NP doesn't exclude being in P. Every problem in P is also in NP.

The definition of "NP-complete" is "in NP, and also NP-hard". The definition of "NP-hard" is that you can reduce any NP problem to it using a poly-time mapping reduction (also known as a Karp reduction). So yes, SAT being NP-complete does mean that you can reduce any NP problem to SAT, using a poly-time mapping reduction.

Breaking a hash (e.g. collision finding) is in NP, because you can easily check a proposed solution. Well, with an obvious quibble: P and NP are about asymptotic complexity, but most hash functions are fixed-size. Also if you're looking at complexity theory you might want to talk about targeted collision finding, or first or second preimage resistance, but same deal there. But anyway, supposing you choose a keyed hash that does scale so that you can talk about its asymptotic complexity at all, and has a poly-time cost to evaluate it, breaking that hash would be in NP. Therefore it can be reduced to SAT using a poly-time mapping reduction.

The reason why your statement is confusing to me is that if you generalize it beyond NP, it breaks down; for an arbitrarily hard complexity class M and an arbitrary M-hard problem, you don't need to be in M to be able to find a reduction to the M-hard problem.

Breaking a hash is a prototypical NP problem (ok maybe FNP). SAT is the prototypical NP-hard problem.

I was just trying to explain that using SAT to attack hashes is therefore unsurprising, and does not in any way imply that breaking hashes is NP-complete, the way that it would if the reduction went in the other direction.

Surely the same logic would make sense for another class M, if you had a problem "M-HASH" that's clearly in M, and an M-hard problem "M-SAT" to reduce it to? There might be other problems that you could also reduce to M-SAT, but mentioning that it solves all of M is what's relevant if M-HASH is in M.

I think I'm also wrong.

I thought about my original response some more and this is a more coherent version of what I was trying to say:

A problem being in NP is sufficient but not necessary to reduce it to an NP-complete problem.

But that's wrong. It's both sufficient and necessary to be in NP. It intuitively feels like you're tacking on more than you need to by introducing the "necessary" constraint, but it makes sense.

But hamburgers and dildos are good. It's not pleasure itself that has an ugly face; rather, it's seeking pleasure in spite of the cost to others.

You offer spiritualism as a cure. I think our higher end should be not spiritualism but the well-being of those we care about.

It's nice that spiritualism covers all bases: you should care about and help your friends and family; you should practice gratitude; etc. But we should state those things directly, lest fundamentalist screwball ideas like restriction of individual expression creep in under the guise of moral righteousness.

I say "unsubstantiated" because a cursory web search didn't turn anything up. Anecdotally, it seems true.

I'd say in general there is a very clear north/south divide in Europe when it comes to coffee. Northern Europe drinks more filter coffee and souther Europe drinks mostly espresso. Of course over the past couple of decades a lot of 'foreign' influences has greatly changed how Northern Europeans drink coffee (much like in the US)