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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 6th, 2023

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  • Obligatory “fuck United”.

    They fucked up my vacation a number of years ago and I have since sworn them off. The most generous interpretation of the incident is that I missed an email updating a time change and arrived at the airport after the flight had left. Their next flight wasn’t until the next morning. My wife and I were looking and there was a flight from a different airline that would have cost them $400 each to book for us (they wouldn’t refund us so we could purchase that separately). The first agent at the counter completely understood our request but simply didn’t have the authority to make that decision. So she got a supervisor. The supervisor did that annoying ass thing where they listen to your request and then restate it in objectively different terms to sound unreasonable. In the end they covered a hotel for the night and gave us $550 each in travel vouchers and lost a customer for life. So they ended up paying way more and lost a customer than had they not fucked around from the start. Had they paid the $400 from the beginning, we’d have given them much higher preference on our future flights which have been many.


  • Ah. I see the angle you’re coming from. I had mentioned in another comment somewhere that essentially all salt without an impermeable barrier between it and the water on this planet would be dissolved (provided it doesn’t saturate the water which would be a horrifically enormous amount of salt). Salt is highly soluble in water and on any timescale that could be relevant would fully dissolve and achieve a general equilibrium. If the planet has water, then it has a star able to warm the planet. There’s no realistic scenario that wouldn’t result in the ocean fully mixing.



  • Overall composition of a planet is what would matter, not whether there is land. If there is salt on the planet, it would almost assuredly have salty oceans. Salt diffuses in water. If you put salt into a glass of water and leave it sit, eventually the salt would dissolve and mix completely. Salt water has a different density than water. The act of dissolving involves energy changes. These create small eddies and currents that would mix the water until it was in equilibrium. If there is salt in any form on your waterworld, the only way it wouldn’t be salty is if the salt was permanently separated from the water physically.


  • The reason water is concentrated in oceans isn’t specifically due to continents existing. Salt doesn’t evaporate so all rain is fresh water. That fresh water falls. When it falls over land it flows to the lowest point it can go. This leads to all flowing water flowing towards oceans and seas. Salt won’t travel upstream. Ergo salt simply stays in oceans and seas.

    Now consider a world with no land. This wouldn’t really differ from a single ocean on earth. Currents and waves will move in all directions at some point which should mix the salt all around. You could get some differences if there were ice caps or icebergs. Those could behave similarly to continents depending on size.