Scientists Discover a Game-Changing Way To Remove Salt From Water 176
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNET: [T]he ability to quickly and easily desalinate water has long been a goal of scientists around the world. And now, a group of researchers from Columbia University believe they've found a way to do it. The process is called Temperature Swing Solvent Extraction (TSSE) and it's designed to purify hypersaline brines (water that contains a high concentration of salts, making it up to seven times as salty as seawater). This kind of waste water is produced by industrial processes and during oil and gas production and it poses a major pollution risk to groundwater.
The research team, led by Columbia Engineering's assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering Ngai Yin Yip, mixed a solvent (dyed red) in with a sample of hypersaline brine (dyed blue). The liquids appear to stay separated in the jar, but after heating them, and then decanting the red solvent into another jar to be heated separately, the team was left with a layer of clear water. While the science is complicated, the above video shows the process in a pretty simple way (no chemistry PhD required). What's most exciting about the process is its implications. The team was able to remove up to 98.4% of the salt, which is comparable to the current "gold standard" process, reverse osmosis. But unlike reverse osmosis or other methods of desalination, this process doesn't require high temperatures or high pressures -- just a low-grade heat of less than 70C (158F). The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
The research team, led by Columbia Engineering's assistant professor of earth and environmental engineering Ngai Yin Yip, mixed a solvent (dyed red) in with a sample of hypersaline brine (dyed blue). The liquids appear to stay separated in the jar, but after heating them, and then decanting the red solvent into another jar to be heated separately, the team was left with a layer of clear water. While the science is complicated, the above video shows the process in a pretty simple way (no chemistry PhD required). What's most exciting about the process is its implications. The team was able to remove up to 98.4% of the salt, which is comparable to the current "gold standard" process, reverse osmosis. But unlike reverse osmosis or other methods of desalination, this process doesn't require high temperatures or high pressures -- just a low-grade heat of less than 70C (158F). The study has been published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology Letters.
I guess it's too late to announce my discovery now (Score:3)
I found a way to remove water from salt.
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Watching the video, this appears to be what they're actually doing.
The solvent strips the water from the brine, and then you recover the pure water from the solvent. So the salt is left behind and the water is removed.
Consider the possibilities! (Score:2)
Solvents (Score:5, Informative)
This study demonstrates TSSE desalination of high-salinity brines simulated by NaCl solutions with three amine solvents: diisopropylamine (DIPA), N-ethylcyclohexylamine (ECHA), and N,N-dimethylcyclohexylamine (DMCHA). We show that TSSE can desalinate brines with salinities as high as 234000 ppm total dissolved solids (i.e., 4.0 M NaCl) and achieve salt removals up to 98.4%.
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And for those of us without a chemistry degree, how bad/toxic/rare/expensive are those solvents?
Re: Solvents (Score:4, Informative)
Amines smell like rotting fish. Those particular solvents are fairly expensive. $4.50/oz and up.
Anything treated this way is going to need secondary treatment with Fenton's reagent (H2O2 and iron (III) sulfate) to destroy the residual amines or you'll have one hell of a pissed off customer base. Fortunately, this is standard wastewater treatment stuff.
Re: Solvents (Score:5, Interesting)
Right, unless you used that desalinated water for agriculture, in which case it would be fresh water with trace amounts of fertilizer.
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If that can cost-effectively reduce California's dependence on the Colorado River then it may well be worth it. The Salton Sink at the southern end of inland California is below sea level and isn't all that far from the Mexican Gulf of California. A system that can desalinate seawater en-masse and then deliver it into the Imperial and Coachella valleys, predominately gravity-fed to keep costs down, could supplement California's, Baja California's, Sonora's, and Arizona's agricultural needs for water where
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DMCHA is £27 per 100ml in "synthetic grade" purity
ECHA is £16 per 25ml at 98% purity
DIPA is £31 per 250ml at 99% purity
All are considered corrosive and poisonous in high concentrations, but none are classed as environment hazards, so that's good! They're pretty common reagents, not least of which because you can buy them from a catalogue.
At industrial scale, you would use less pure and cheaper by volume amounts of the stuff, or manufacture it yourself from cheaper reagents on the fly. That
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Now the question is: how do we remove the salt from the solvents so that they can both be re-used? Otherwise we have just another waste stream to deal with.
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This study demonstrates TSSE desalination of high-salinity brines simulated by NaCl solutions with three amine solvents...
Unfortunately seawater isn't a pure NaCl brine. After sodium, other ions include magnesium, sulfur, calcium, potassium, and bromine. There's darn little bromine in it, but the magnesium might be a problem. The chlorine is ~2% by mass, the sodium is ~1% by mass, and the magnesium is ~0.1% by mass.
The important bit of the article: How (Score:1)
TSSE utilizes a low-polarity solvent with temperature-dependent water solubility for the selective extraction of water over salt from saline feeds. Because it is membrane-less and not based on evaporation of water, it can sidestep the technical constraints that limit the more traditional methods. Importantly, TSSE is powered by low-grade heat (50%) for the hypersaline brines, also comparable to current seawater desalination operations. But, unlike TSSE, reverse osmosis cannot handle hypersaline brines.
Kind of like how water in a gasoline tank sinks to the bottom. This solvent absorbs some water at around room temperature, and holds less water at a higher temperature... it "floats higher" on the water (there's less water in it). Vid might be a bit confusing since the solvent is initially added as red. At the end of the video [youtu.be] the clear stuff is the solvent, the red stuff is the water. I guess the dye is an impurity not purified by the solvent.
would it then be more effective in a centrifuge? (Score:1)
But ... (Score:2)
It might be fine for desalinization. Where the brine can be dumped back into the sea and diluted. But if the point is to process high salinity industrial waste, you still have the same quantity of salt to dispose of. And how efficient is the solvent recovery?
Re:But ... (Score:4, Informative)
No, it can't, at least not without consequences. It severely upsets the salinity [sciencenews.org] around the point you pump the brine into the sea and is wreaking havoc [pacinst.org] on the marine ecosystems around larger desalination plants. Desalination sounds great on paper, but unless we can extract the solvents and salt from the resulting brine reusing the solvents and using the salt in bulk for things like energy storage, it's not quite the panacea it's cracked up to be.
We're going to keep running the plants for the fresh water regardless of the ecological consequences, of course.
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your table salt for example usually come from sea water evaporation
From TFS:
This kind of waste water is produced by industrial processes and during oil and gas production
I think I'm going to pass on that fracking brand table salt. Desalinization of sea water is one thing. Sell the salt or dump the brine in that nearby salty body of water. Taking careful steps to dilute it properly. It's the stuff that, as the summary states "poses a major pollution risk to groundwater". That sounds like stuff that you just can't dump nearby. Or at all.
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I would think of it more as a brine concentration tool. The standard zero liquid discharge approach is to go for evaporation ponds, and crystalize the salt. You essentially keep the brine at saturation concentrations, so you can reduce the liquid needed to be evaporated by 30-50%.
How do you desalinate the solvent (Score:3)
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they work with the temp differential of 50 degrees (20-70), the salinity of the solvent doesnt matter, at 20 degrees it holds only so much water+salt, at 70degrees it hold less water and more salt, so it's recovering the water from the temp change, if you let it cool down without removing the water at the end, i would assume the water would be reabsorbed into the solvent
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The sense I get of the chemistry is that the solvent works like a sponge. It suck up lots of water and only a little salt when it is cold, then it dumps the water when it is warmer, but holds onto the salt even more. Heating it "squeezes" the sponge.
So the process would dump the solvent into the brine, mix it, then let it settle while it is cooled. That would happen is an sealed tank. At the opposite end, the saturated solvent is pulled over to a tank where it is heated. The "fresh" water is pulled out
Well ... Maybe ... (Score:2)
I found the video to be hard to follow. But if I understand what I saw (I may not), I have a couple of questions:
1. It looks to me like the amount of purified water produced was rather small.
2. Where did the salt go? They haven't shoved it through a wormhole into another dimension or anything. My guess is that it is dissolved in the amine solution. That's fine, but what do you do with a large amount of fluid that looks to be even more saline than the hypersaline solution you started with, and also co
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Hmm (Score:3, Interesting)
Something seems fishy here.
First thing I noticed was that the camera pans up as the person pours the blue-colored water into the red-colored solvent, obscuring the bottom of the jar. it then pans back down to show a very clean separation between the two colors. That's a very unusual - and suspicious - camera movement to make. They could easily be hiding a video edit there.
The second thing I thought about is, if the two fluids are dyed, how did they prevent the dyes themselves from mixing? Not only would the water and solvent need to be immiscible, the dyes would have to be as well while also being compatible with the liquids they're coloring.
Neither of these prove anything of course, but I think they are valid questions at least.
=Smidge=
chemical pump (Score:1)
so in effect they created a chemical pump, to pump out the water, with the pumping step being (scoop) collect water at room temp 20, then heat it up to (dump) 70 degrees to dump the water back out, then cool the solvent and do it all over again, neat.!
At the stage "lab experiment", it is not (Score:2)
"Game changing", that is. Is they have a prototype running that can do this for a long time with limited maintenance, we can start to call it that, but not before. What is it with the stupid reporting?
Calling bullshit. (Score:2)
The camera just happens to pan up when the actual "reaction" happens, missing the whole thing.
Its like movies that cut after every punch in a fight scene to hide sloppy choreography.
whale sperm (Score:1)
Indianapolis Salt Waer (Score:1)
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Re:Wouldn't boiling & distillation do it alone (Score:5, Informative)
They're simple solvents. DIPA, for example, is made by the reaction of ammonia with acetone over a catalyst. And it's closed-cycle; the solvent doesn't go anywhere.
I really like this. The big issue with desalination is that, fundamentally, saltwater is in a low-energy state, and it takes a ton of energy to remove said salt. There's no working around this fact. So fundamentally, since you have to use lots of energy, the goal is to use lower-grade (cheaper) energy sources. There was for example a proposal several years back to use ion-selective membranes and hypersaline brine to drive desalination. The hypersaline brine would donate a cation to one tank of seawater and an anion to another (membranes limiting what can flow in each direction), and the two tanks would have to pull a cation and an anion respectively from a third tank of seawater (also membrane-limited) to maintain the cation and anion balance - in effect, desalinating the third tank. The hypersaline brine was to be made by using just about the lowest-grade energy source possible - solar evaporation ponds. But the problem was affordably producing the ion-selective membranes en masse and coming up with a system that would be reliable large-scale.
The energy source for this process, however, is nearly as good. All thermal power plants - fossil, nuclear, solar thermal, etc generate low-grade waste heat (water that's hot, but not hot enough to economically extract power from). It's cheap, free, or sometimes they'll even pay you to take it (where they're limited on the cooling water supply; dry air-cooled systems are expensive). Also, low-grade geothermal heat is vastly more abundant, and usually far cheaper / from shallower depths, than the sort of high-grade geothermal heat needed to generate electricity (the latter of which then gives you low-grade geothermal heat as a waste product). If you can use low-grade heat to drive desalination, that's going to be immensely useful.
There's no complexity to this process, either. It's just A) have a cheap organic solvent with virtually no solubility for salt, but a highly temperature-dependent solubility for water; B) heat it until it absorbs water from the brine; C) separate off the solvent/water layer; D) cool it until it discharges almost all of its water; E) separate off the freshwater layer; F) post-treat and sell the water, while returning the solvent to mix with more brine. Processes like this are used in industry all the time - just not, historically, for desalination.
This should be able to scale. Quickly.
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Yes. Although the best approach in that regard would be to use the waste heat of a solar thermal plant. Whenever you have "high-grade" heat, you want to be generating electricity from that. You get low-grade heat as a waste product.
That said, perhaps you can make a solar concentrator system that's much cheaper than conventional systems for electricity generation, but can't produce high-grade heat. If that happens to be the case, then sure, such a system would be appropriate here.
Re:Wouldn't boiling & distillation do it alone (Score:4, Insightful)
So: how much energy to make the solvent? Turns out a lot.
What you missed is that the solvent is not consumed by the desalination process. This makes the cost of manufacture a lot less important.
Re: Wouldn't boiling & distillation do it alon (Score:3)
More importantly, is it toxic? Some amount of solvent will stay in the salt free fraction. If it's low enough and nontoxic and degrades quickly the product water should be fine for irrigation.
Also, is some heat resistant bacteria going to decide "yummy" and turn the solvent into biological glop within a few days? I've run a couple of tests with waste water recovery by RO where the biofouling was unmanageable.
Re:Wouldn't boiling & distillation do it alone (Score:5, Interesting)
This is silly. The Haber process, for example, uses 10-12 kWh per kg of ammonia. A traditional desalination plant consumes about the same amount of power to make 4000 litres of water. I guarantee you, over the life of the solvent / plant, that kilogram of ammonia, converted to DIPA, will be processing many orders of magnitude more water than 4000 litres. It'll be cycling hundreds or thousands of times per day, every day, for somewhere between months and decades on end (depending on how effective they are at preventing unintended loss of the solvent).
You're talking about a consumable (power) vs. a non-consumable (solvent). That's simply not not comparable.
OMG, two of the world's most common industrial chemicals... clearly nobody knows how to handle them!
To reiterate, you do realize that we're talking about a non-consumable item, don't you? Perhaps a couple dozen tonnes per plant. The world produces 175 million tonnes of ammonia-equivalent (various forms) per year. The overwhelming majority put towards agriculture. Acetone is a "mere" 6,7 million tonnes.
****Facepalm****
Please learn what a chemical reaction is. To repeat: "DIPA, for example, is made by the reaction of ammonia with acetone over a catalyst."
Why are you here? Don't you have a Tesla thread to troll?
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Re: Wouldn't boiling & distillation do it alon (Score:2)
Once again, until you actually read it:
Please learn what a chemical reaction is. To repeat: "DIPA, for example, is made by the reaction of ammonia with acetone over a catalyst."
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Jesus H. Christ, you can't even quote Wikipedia correctly. "It may be prepared by the reductive amination of acetone with ammonia using a modified copper oxide"
Are you still not getting understanding? There is neither ammonia nor acetone involved in the actual purification process. They're only used to make the DIPA. The operators of a plant never have to concern themselves with either ammonia nor acetone. And the manufacture of DIPA for water purification is simply a nothing thing, in terms of volume
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Key sentence from the paper:
"Other solvents with different chemical structures and properties can yield better performances to further expand the prospects of TSSE for energy-efficient and cost-effective desalination of high-salinity brines."
So, read this as a proof-of-concept, not as an optimized industrial process. Clearly some significant chemical / industrial engineering would be required to scale this to any significant level cost-effectively.
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Well, no. It contains the same energy, but the efficiency of recovery is expected to be quite poor. Unless you've got some new process that could be used.
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Do you call 50% efficiency good? I don't. And I believe that it's often a lot less that that. I'm sure there are situations where there's a better result, but I really doubt that those are typical of non-pressurized systems.
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But if you do it at a low enough pressure, the energy for the latent heat of vaporization can come from ambient conditions. Of course, creating that vacuum will consume a lot of energy, too.
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The enthalpy of vaporization does not depend on surface area and only by a few percent on temperature (or pressure) within the temperature range of interest (300-373 K), and does so in the wrong direction for your argument.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
That said, in an industrial process you can recover most of the energy of an evaporation/condensation cycle. It's a tradeoff between energy efficiency and the size and cost of heat exchangers and compressors for the throughput that you need.
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Re:Wouldn't boiling & distillation do it alone (Score:5, Informative)
Boiling water away requires almost as much energy as heating it from freezing to boiling. In other words, you spend double the energy to boil it off, as opposed to just heating it all the way. Dissolved salt will make it cost even more energy. So while boiling works, it's not going to be efficient.
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Actually, boiling water away requires 540 calories per gram, so 5.4x the energy of heating it from freezing to boiling, but you can do it for free if you join forces with a coal/gas/nuclear plant, where they're boiling water anyway.
This cost (of reducing entropy) is unavoidable for any method, including the new game-changing way.
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boiling water away requires 540 calories per gram
Using numbers from Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], efficient distillation-based processes require 40-90 calories of heat per gram. So you clearly can get considerable saving by recovery of the latent heat.
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One thing I don't fully get, is this is a problem with industrial salt, so this is highly concentrated salt. So this process just makes more concentrated salt. Granted it will take less space to store, but you now have more toxic material to store.
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And what process doesn't result in waste products that require storage?
At least there are numerous applications for salt, and since salt is mined we wouldn't necessarily have to mine it anymore depending on the geography of desalinization plants.
This process might even have applications that you're not thinking of, like reducing the salinity content of the Salton Sea, which could result in it becoming a resort destination again, which would help the local economy.
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Think about that a little bit. This is waste from an industrial process so the "salt" is unlikely to be pure sodium chloride. The benefit here would be that the resultant liquid waste wouldn't be an environmental toxin. (The summary did not indicate it would be drinkable.) The solid waste would take much less space to store, and might actually be worth reprocessing for, perhaps, precious minerals.
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That works but isn't practical on a large scale. Ie, it would be very expensive to supply the water needs for a city this way.
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Welll....there's a perhaps hiding in there. This was done at laboratory scale. Scaling it up could add unforeseen costs.
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Why are you obsessed with Trump? Your daily life has not changed one bit since he was elected.
Actually in a proper federal system, the average person is not supposed to care very much about what the president does, at least in times of peace (no war declared by Congress in our case). The vast majority of government is supposed to come from local and state levels.
Of course we abandoned proper federalism a very long time ago.
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The Civil War changed that. Then the growth of mass media such as Radio and TV. Which made the Federal officials far more visible then your local government.
Because of the cost of broadcasting, it made more sense to cover a federal official to talk to the country, then a governor or a mayor, who just needs to talk to a subset of a broadcast area.
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Because he needs treatment for TDS. Still a common problem 3 years in to Trumps very successful presidency. I can't wait to see the heads exploding in November 2020 when Trump is elected to his 2nd term.
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Could happen.
And you will see heads explode if he does win.
Of course if you see him lose... heads will explode as well.
A Polemic President by all standards, just as Obama was.
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Of course if you see him lose... heads will explode as well.
Ether way I believe the 2020 election night will be very entertaining. Speaking of exploding heads, I believe if Trump does lose there will probably be a smoking hole right where foxnews used to be.
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A Polemic President by all standards, just as Obama was.
I wouldn't say that. In 2012 there were some vocal conservatives on social media but there weren't mass protests in the streets, rioting, looting, etc. Mainly because Obama's reelection was expected by anyone outside the Fox News bubble, no one seriously believed Romney had a shot.
I suspect if Trump is reelected, mass protests, rioting, and looting. Antifa will prove me right. This will come as a complete shock and surprise to the left, despite the overwhelming odds that he will be re-elected anyway - t
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"I wouldn't say that."
Obama was a polemic president in my view and I think Trump is as well.
You don't see Trump as polemic or do you not see Obama as polemic? I am confused about what you are trying to say by your examples of rioting.
It seems to me that Trump is polemic simply because everything he says or does causes some sort of firestorm of reaction either positive or negative.
Obama elicited extremely strong reactions amongst a large percentage of the population as well to the point of Mitch McConnell sa
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"I suspect if Trump is reelected, mass protests, rioting, and looting. Antifa will prove me right. This will come as a complete shock and surprise to the left, despite the overwhelming odds that he will be re-elected anyway - there have been only three Presidents who lost their second term elections since WWII/modern news media."
I am not so certain about Antifa spontaneously of their own accord rioting and looting, but I could see a big Antifa rising in response to large white supremacists celebrations. Tho
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Antifa's whole MO is excessive anarchy. Portland, OR isn't exactly a hotbed of white supremacist activity, and neither was the 2017 inauguration in DC, yet they still come out in disproportionate force whenever three people right of Lenin gather under a banner.
Re: your other comment: I didn't see Obama as polemic, beyond Obamacare. Conversely, if Trump were to cure cancer, CNN would run a story the next day on how he's put thousands of oncologists out of work.
Re: BIG SALT (Score:2)
Antifa seems to come out when white supremacists come out to March under their various banners. Not sure whether that is right left or center but it is a point of view that seems to bring Antifa out.
I donâ(TM)t think they like white supremacy or neonazis much.
Re: BIG SALT (Score:2)
âoeI didnâ(TM)t see Obama as polemicâ
And yet I believe most would agree that he was.
It isnâ(TM)t about if he did one thing or other which people disagreed with.
I had many people including my father tell me that Obama was destroying the fabric of America and that he was put in place to rip up the constitution and destroy the US.
My dad was far from the only person who felt this to be true.
Add to that the hundreds and hundreds of unflattering appellations pinned to Obama and the dozens of c
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When have the red states ever subsidized the blue states? On average, more federal dollars get spent in red states than they send back in taxes, and on average blue states receive fewer federal dollars than the tax dollars they send to DC.
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Why is federal dollars spent per capita by state a useful metric? We all know that every state has a large portion of the population that pays little or not tax, and a small portion of the population that pays a lot of tax.
The reason some states are "donor" states is that they have more rich people. Not because of anything the state as a whole does.
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My tax return was double what I usually get back last year, and double again this year. I'm not sure what you are doing to your taxes but its clear to me they haven't been filed them right. Instead of blaming an imaginary boggy man like President Trump, I would suggest you get a new accountant.
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Too much withholding perhaps?
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Probably. Taxes are still complex enough that you need to hire someone to do them. Getting as much as I did back really surprised me. Normally, I owe a little every year. This is by design.
Most people don't understand how the tax system work and what a return actually is. They think it's free money that you get from the government, when it's actually money that you over paid the government. What your tax return actually turns out to be is a free loan that you give to the government and collect no
Re: BIG SALT (Score:2)
Great summary of how things work.
I too owe every year but that is because U work as an independent contractor and not W-2
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The only way your tax return was actually gutted is if you make quite a bit of money in states with extremely high taxes. So really, you're finally feeling the effects of those taxes instead of being shielded by the federal government absorbing some of the burden. Otherwise your tax return was less because the government didn't take the money out of your checks in the first place. So you had more money the rest of the year. It's not the government's fault that you apparently can't budget to save your life.
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You'd fucking support "hands-on" Joe Biden and throw away all leftist "believe all women" tripe. And you fucking know it.
This sums up the hypocrisy of the "progressives" so absolutely dead-on perfectly. It's THE reason I can't take anything they say seriously.
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You'd fucking support "hands-on" Joe Biden and throw away all leftist "believe all women" tripe. And you fucking know it.
This sums up the hypocrisy of the "progressives" so absolutely dead-on perfectly. It's THE reason I can't take anything they say seriously.
How do you know these are actually, literally the same people? Often times, people with different, conflicting views are lumped into one giant, ill-defined category. Then, pundits point to these different positions and decry the hypocrisy. This happens all across the political spectrum.
Also, morons exist, and they live all across the political spectrum.
Also, FWIW, I consider myself progressive, but I don't believe ALL women (lying happens, much to the detriment of real victims). Also, I think cre
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Yippie... a sensible comment rather than a troll food fight with personal insults being the entree.
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"You're a brainless CHILD"
Are personal insults the new way to have discourse on slashdot?
Sad
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I ended up with about 12 bucks a month more this year than last year. Not much but it could get me in to some movie each month.
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You're pulling down over 270/year as a couple? You should realize that you're well within the top 10% of incomes, and I'm sure you live in a bubble of the same. Probably live in California, too. Talk to YOUR state leaders about all the crap they're taxing you for. The rest of us got tired of subsidizing your boondoggles.
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You're pulling down over 270/year as a couple?
How does 120+15=270?
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You should stop talking and go buy your lottery tickets. You have to be a big player with that sort of math skills.
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"200-300k /yr in San Fran doesn't exactly make you rich"
Yes it does. $200-300k/year makes you rich ANYWHERE!
For $300k you would take home ~$225k just using the standard deduction. That is over $18k/month. Sure, you won't have a personal helicoptor, but you will be in the 98% of U.S. earners according to - https://dqydj.com/income-perce... [dqydj.com]
If that doesn't count as rich, then the American dream is dead.
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I paid somewhere around 12 bucks/month less in tax this year vs. last year.
Not sure the big tax break was all that big for most people I talk with.
But we definitely have spent our way to a hot economy. One tends to do that with debt.
I could by a lot if suddenly I got a couple of credit cards and loaded them up.
What happens after the spending spree though?
Something to ponder.
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Um.... lots of businesses pay taxes.
That is why they always talk about lowering the corporate tax rate and did.
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Yeah. The Democrats screeching and taking to the streets in protests, because Hillary the Hag didn't win this time like they wanted, and then they spent 2 years calling him a traitor didn't have ANYTHING to do with the division.
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It can be reused, but some is left behind in the brine, which isn't wasted per se... as heating it will release / precipitate more of the brine below the solvent layer, allowing extraction of more of the solvent.
The important thing here is that this can be made a continuous process with higher concentration brine left behind (to be refilled and concentrated desalinated again), and more solvent added to absorb the water then decant (via a spillway at the top of a container), and warmed then purified water re
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A way for people to explode their population even more. Bring on the plastic!
Fortunately, today’s other tech breakthrough is a plastic that can be easily recycled:
https://www.foxnews.com/scienc... [foxnews.com]
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Thing is, desalinization is expensive. You only do it if you need to.