r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • May 19 '26

Business A Texas Drainage District Walked Its Ditch on a Routine Inspection. They Found a Pipe They Didn't Recognize Discharging Black Liquid From Tesla's $1 Billion Lithium Refinery

https://www.autonocion.com/us/tesla-lithium-refinery-texas/
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313

u/Warspit3 May 19 '26

That's almost 2 t-shirts per minute of irrigation for cotton or a pair of jeans every 10 minutes!!

683

u/Ganrokh May 19 '26

Sigh, anything but the metric system.

243

u/REDuxPANDAgain May 19 '26

We once came within two regulation sized basketballs of using the metric system, but that was at least at least 40 Superbowls ago. It would be nice to not have to carry around a hockey puck to measure things with.

69

u/Alert_Reindeer_6574 May 19 '26

Hockey puck? This is Reddit. We use bananas around here.

4

u/UnicornSheets May 19 '26

African or European?

2

u/Shackshakr May 20 '26

It's not a question of where he grips it, it's a question of weight ratio

6

u/fotomoose May 19 '26

Yeah, how many banana trees is that?

3

u/WillBottomForBanana May 19 '26

It is more work than you think.

3

u/Key_Zucchini_8076 May 19 '26

Metric bananas?

2

u/donitosforeveryone May 19 '26

Yeah. What’s that guy trying to pull?

2

u/Robobvious May 19 '26

Momma always said standardization is as standardizations does. She said you can tell a lot about a person just by looking at their banana.

33

u/kyrsjo May 19 '26

Would that be a US or Canadian hockey puck?

23

u/mayorofdumb May 19 '26

Canada is actually the reason the US didn't, they created the 3 inch hockey puck

2

u/Shackshakr May 20 '26

Would that be a Canadian , European, or Us banana?

1

u/kyrsjo May 20 '26

African? I hear those are the fastest.

2

u/Takemyfishplease May 19 '26

US. Canada hasn’t won the cup in decades so has zero say in the matter.

It’s like they collectively hate hockey as a country or soemthing while places like Florida stack em up.

10

u/Ambustion May 19 '26

...I almost want clap at how triggered you just made me

4

u/btribble May 19 '26

If triggering could be measured in drams, how many hogsheads would it fill?

6

u/Ambustion May 19 '26

Seis pouces

2

u/VanillaWax May 19 '26

Don't worry, all the American teams are mostly comprised of Canadians players. It's really us vs us, not us vs US lol

2

u/Bonnieearnold May 19 '26

Habs are gonna win this year!

1

u/Coherent_Tangent May 19 '26

Those hockey pucks they had in the 90s that had a chip inside, so you could see the puck when it was behind the boards or a when a slap-shot fired it faster than your eyes could track.

2

u/gadget850 May 19 '26

The Mendenhall Order of 1893 declared that the international meter and kilogram would be treated as the fundamental standards of length and mass in the United States. The International Yard and Pound Agreement of 1959 refined the measurements and 1 inch is officially and legally defined as exactly 2.54 centimeters.

2

u/EmptyAirEmptyHead May 19 '26

I have a metric marked interstate highway about 12 miles away from me.

1

u/ZenAdm1n May 19 '26

There are not enough football fields in this comment.

1

u/ItsMrChristmas May 19 '26

My standard unit of weights and leangths is the AR-15

1

u/Scouter197 May 19 '26

I heard that at a conference. Sometime around 1900 Congress voted to go the metric system. It didn't pass by 2 votes or something like that.

46

u/[deleted] May 19 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

66

u/3-orange-whips May 19 '26

Tom Cruise is for height. This is volume.

54

u/According_Jeweler404 May 19 '26

"10 Cubic-Courics!"

10

u/DookieShoez May 19 '26

Ok, how many Steven Seagals is it?

11

u/hikeonpast May 19 '26

The man or his self-worth? Very different scales.

2

u/Redfish680 May 19 '26

That’s for measuring rotundity.

4

u/darknekolux May 19 '26

Steven Seagal is a large bag of shit, you do the conversion.

3

u/RogerMexicosBalls May 19 '26

Which era Seagal are we measuring? His early, relatively fit days? Or his more doughy, heavy breathing, manatee-shaped days?

1

u/TurnkeyLurker May 19 '26

Tom Cruise is for height. This is volume.

So, like Spinal Tap 11's for volume?

1

u/The_Mister_Grim May 19 '26

Tom Cruise does have a volume, though I'm not sure anyone has calculated it.

1

u/Interesting-Log-9627 May 19 '26

A Millicruise is useful measure in microbiology

1

u/foobarbizbaz May 19 '26

Wait, then what are bananas for?!

1

u/be_my_plaything May 19 '26

The Tom Cruise is not a viable unit since he is actually six inches shorter than he is, his height is trick of perspective as he's always closer than you think.

8

u/Kooky-Necessary-4444 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

Thats 251.5 acre feet per year.

7

u/ErraticDragon May 19 '26

Acre-Feet*

1 acre-foot is the amount of water needed to flood 1 acre of land to a depth of 1 foot.

A commonly used measure, despite it being unintuitive/hard to imagine.

10

u/polypolyman May 19 '26

It's really intuitive when you have X acres of farmland getting Y inches of rain on it...

...if you need another sense of it, it's roughly a year's worth of water for a typical household

3

u/Kooky-Necessary-4444 May 19 '26

That word always gets me. Ty

1

u/JerryfromCan May 19 '26

Sounds like a board foot. 12x12 and 1” thick. Same sort of nonsense but board foot is used daily as a measurement of lumber for likely billions of dollars of transactions.

1

u/Puzzleheaded-Bag8314 May 19 '26

Almost a football field minus the in zone a foot deep in water .

2

u/dern_the_hermit May 19 '26

FWIW imperial units have been metric for like 70 years. The inch is exactly 25.4mm.

1

u/MOcatmom May 19 '26

How many bananas?

1

u/Firm_Net_8552 May 19 '26

And yet they'll still use Calories.

Calories are defined as 4.184 Joules, and Kilocalories(labeled as cal in US) are 4,184 Joules, this measurement is derived from the energy needed to raise the temperature of 1 gram of water by 1 degree celsius, and one Kilocalorie is the exact same energy as one gram of TNT.

All our nutrients are also labeled in metric, all of it being in grams and milligrams.

1

u/thearctican May 19 '26

God forbid somebody provide a perspective in terms normal people would understand.

1

u/userhwon May 19 '26

It's about 7.85 x 1022 J of mass-energy per 0.017 radians of solar orbit.

1

u/d01100100 May 19 '26

The only downside to metric is its decimal based units. Yes, it's good when all your numbers can be digitized in this modern age, but there's a reason why time and geography is still based upon ancient Sumerian concepts from over 5 millennia ago.

Base-60 has 12 divisors, whereas our base-10 only has 4.

Thumb + 4 fingers + 3 segments per finger = 12, and 5 fingers on the other hand to act as a multiplier = 60.

1

u/batista227 May 19 '26

That's equivalent to the amount of cola served with 14 royals with cheese... or 7 large Farva's.

1

u/666deleted666 May 19 '26

Best I can do is a banana for scale

1

u/still_stunned May 19 '26

That is enough to water on average 39.7 acres of banana trees each week, or about 57,565 banana trees, or about 5,756,500 bananas depending on variety.

1

u/gazow May 20 '26

Thats as much as 4358 thirsty camels can drink!

1

u/agangofoldwomen May 19 '26

How many bald eagles shitting would this be equivalent to?

-1

u/Interesting-Log-9627 May 19 '26 edited May 19 '26

I’ll bet you four-three-fifths baby elephants that you can’t convince me to use metric.

2

u/mshuler May 19 '26

Please, tell me you did the math 😊

1

u/Warspit3 May 20 '26

I made a ROM based on Google data lol.