I use extra borax in my laundry because the water here is ridiculously hard. It’s also good for other cleaning and killing bugs.
Nice! Like that.
Boric acid is cheaper than Borax and works better on pest control. Skips a whole step, in fact.
actually its called boron about 45 minutes away from me … and they still do mine tours there
I read that article about 26 years ago; absolutely fascinating. It was the first thing I thought of when someone mentioned gutta percha upthread.
As already pointed out by Stranger and blondebear and joked about by kenobi (twenty mules).
In Boron, CA one of the main roads is Borax Road. It is an exit off of highway CA-58 and takes you towards the Borax Visitor Center.
You can in fact still buy 20-Mule-Team Borax, same as 134 years ago:
However, as pointed out upthread increasing the amount produced that much would require building the industrial infrastructure to do so. Which would be expensive and more importantly take quite some time.
Yes. Once you realize thus, Borat’s pride in the high quality of “Kazakhstan’s” potassium is less funny/ridiculous!
Probably an oversight, but the lake is called (the) Great Salt Lake.
I’ll just point out here that Potash is no longer made from ashes. It’s refined from potassium rich ore. Check out the Veritasium look at Potash: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMDJA4UvXLA&t=347s
Thanks all for the Borax / Boron correction. D’oh. I’ve even been there. I blame my confusion on the Borax Road exits I drove past all those years while zooming down the dark desert highways with cool wind in my hair.
Returning to Potash …
Potash is NOT a non-technical term for Potassium. Potash is a non-technical / ancient term for Potassium Chloride. Which is an ingredient in fertilizers and in that application is commonly but wrongly referred to as just “Potassium” in the N - K - P trilogy. Which is really N - K and Cl - P quadrogy (is so a word! 
).
Are you sure this wasn’t from that period when you were styling your hair with Cool Whip?
Maybe doing a bit too much of the colitas.
Colitas, no. Coladas, yes.
Never mind. Inadvertent double-post.
Just the reverse: potassium is named for potash, once Davy isolated the element from potash, hence its name in English.
German chemists named it Kailium, from the Arabic « kali » meaning alkali. Hence the symbol for potassium is K, reflecting the German name.
I agree about the timing. “Potassium” the element is named in relation to, and sorta for, the older known substance potash.
My point is that the chemical substance potassium and the chemical substance potash are different. The words are not synonyms, and the substances are not the same, despite their each having a parent-child relationship to the other.
Of course it’s not the end of the world. It’s one thing that will add a little bit onto the price of groceries, but pennies per items. It’s one thing that will cost a few jobs, reduce some profitability on a few things, but it’s unlikely you personally will notice.
But it’s not just potash. It’s potash and oil and iron and aluminum and nickel and coffee and bananas and machine parts and a thousand other things.
They are not doing this to help the common person.
The Great Depression wasn’t the end of the world either. Hope you’re ready for another one.
Kalium is German, given by its discoverer, from the Arabic named alkali, from Arabic Al-Qayla which means “plant ashes”.