etoleb123
etoleb123 t1_ja82y2o wrote
Reply to comment by the_original_Retro in ELI5: why do grocery stores in the US keep such a large inventory? Aside from being prepared for episodic panic buying like toilet paper or bottled water, is there an economic reason to do this? How much of the food ends up going bad? by DrEverythingBAlright
And that’s just one of the “loss leaders”, where you lose $ on some products to get customers who will make you money elsewhere. Years ago (may not still be true) a buddy who was a VP at Walmart said they lose their shirts on bananas. They want theirs to be the greenest bananas out there so that people associate their food with freshness.
etoleb123 t1_j20p5cb wrote
Reply to comment by r3dl3g in ELI5 What is Thermodynamics? by SheeshKebabi
Enthalpy is well described above.
With Entropy, think of it as a measure of the “quality” of the energy—specifically, how useless has the energy become? High entropy = more useless. This is important because energy is not created or destroyed, but it does change and in those changes it becomes less useful.
For example, when you burn the gas in your car, you get ~35% efficiency—that is, only 35% turns into kinetic energy of the car. The other 65% isn’t lost…it is just dissipated in the atmosphere as heat and cannot easily be used any more. So its entropy has increased.
etoleb123 t1_ja8g5yq wrote
Reply to ELI5: why does/doesn’t probability increase when done multiple times? by Reason-Local
Ask yourself this—does the die remember what it previously landed on? If not, how could the odds go up? It’s a physical thing that falls and bounces by the laws of physics. What physics laws would change because it was previously on a 5 instead of a 3?