For what it’s worth, many, maybe most (sorry, can’t be bothered to look up the stats right now) nuclear plants in the US are already owned by some publicly traded company beholden to its shareholders who expect it to turn an ever increasing profit for them.
Not that it gives me the warm-fuzzies that that’s the case, but it’s not quite as big of a departure from the current situation as you’re making it out to be.
If you’re fucking around with your radio equipment doing something you shouldn’t and end up causing interference on, for example, aircraft frequencies or emergency service radio systems, you could be a contributing factor to an airliner crashing or an ambulance not being dispatched in a timely manner and a patient dying because they didn’t get to the hospital in time.
You didn’t directly kill anyone, but you set up the circumstances that resulted in someone dying.
The price point is way off, but strangely enough I’ve personally been champing at the bit for something with pretty much exactly those specs,just at about half the price.
Currently, I daily drive an SUV and do get good use out of it. I have to commute in the snow (essential employee,) I have outdoorsy hobbies that require hauling people and camping gear around, I tow some small trailers, I use it pretty frequently to move furniture, pick up lumber and other bulky stuff from the hardware store, etc. and while I don’t go off-roading in the sense that I don’t purposely go looking for rocks to climb and mud to drive through for fun, I do sometimes drive onto a beach to fish or drive onto fields for various reasons, and find myself on some really shitty dirt roads where some ground clearance and 4wd are necessary. I’m doing those things usually a few times a month.
But most of my daily driving adds up to 20 miles a day or less, on paved roads, rarely going over 45mph. I also have a wonky schedule where I rarely have to work more than 3 days in a row, and it’s usually just me and occasionally my wife or my dog (rarely both at the same time)
I can’t quite afford 2 cars, but something like this at the right price point would probably tip the scales in my favor. I could daily drive the small cheap electric car and save my SUV (or maybe a small truck) for my days off when I’m doing stuff that it’s needed for while the small car charges.
I’d probably push it back to a little over 100 years to include WWI, the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and the British Mandate for Palestine, since that all set the stage for Israel being founded pretty directly, and there had already been a pretty substantial movement for Jews to immigrate to the region by about the '30s (known as the “Fifth Aliyah”) so a bit outside of your 80 year range.
But of course, none of these events happen in a vacuum, if you want to get really nitpicky, you can start talking about the events that led to world war 1, trace them way back, through the crusades, the birth of Muhammad, Christianity, the Roman empire, all the way back to the bronze age, and maybe even further if you were able to somehow find decent historical records going that far back.
Trying to point to one single event as the one that kicked off a certain conflict is tough, because there was always something that led up to that event too, and when you try to unravel it, before too long you might come to a very Douglass Adams-y conclusion that it all started when our first ape ancestors decided to come down from the trees, only for someone else to say that the trees had been a mistake in the first place and that we never should have left the oceans.
A few years back my area got hit with a pretty bad storm, beat the previous flood record here by about a foot, that previous record was set about 85 years prior. Bad flood, but statistically not totally unprecedented, you often hear talk about 100 year floodplains, and so that was almost a textbook perfect illustration of that, if you normally only get a flood that bad about once a century we were just about due.
Then the next year hurricane Ida hit, totally smashed that fresh new record by about 5 ft. It took them like a week to figure out exactly how bad the flooding actually was because it totally swamped all of the river gauges.
NOAA’s website has a list of 42 historic crests of that creek going back to at least 1933. 29 of those crests have been since 2000, and 7 have been in just the last 5 years.
Once upon a time in my area, ice was an industry, big blocks of ice would be cut out of nearby lakes in the winter, shipped out around the area, and stored to last through the year. There may even be a handful of older residents in our area who were alive when it was happening, and certainly a few who are old enough that their parents would have remembered it. We’re only about a century removed from that time.
My friends’ dad used to tell stories about being able to ice state down the local Creek in the winter and being able to skate all the way from our town to one about 6 miles downstream.
I have rarely seen any of the waterways in my area freeze over with even an inch of ice, certainly none of them freeze over thick enough that I’d be comfortable ice skating on them (I keep an eye on all of the ice conditions because I want to try ice fishing, been keeping an eye on it for a decade, haven’t had a chance yet. A lot of the local parks have posted regulations for ice fishing because it used to be a thing you could do around here) and absolutely not thick enough that you could cut a block of ice out of it.
We also set a record last year for the longest recorded stretch without an inch of snow. Snow totals have been overall trending downwards for a while, over the last couple decades a lot of the local school districts have cut down on the amount of snow days they build into their calendars because they just weren’t using them. A small local ski slope near me has had to invest in new snow making equipment because they absolutely couldn’t count on getting real snow anymore, or necessarily even the temperatures being cold enough for their old equipment to work reliably
Climate change should be pretty damn obvious to anyone in my area, and yet a whole lot of people around me refuse to see it.
I think you’re misreading the comment of the person you’re replying to here, it’s worded a little wonky and I don’t know if you picked up on a bit of a sarcastic tone there, I think you also may not be reading far enough into the history to really have a handle on the situation but frankly neither of you are doing a great job of explaining your positions so it’s a little hard to say what point either of you are trying to make
Tl;dr of modern Afghan history:
Around the 80s, Russia invaded Afghanistan and installed a socialist government
The US backs Islamic militants, essentially the Taliban or the groups that eventually morph into them, to oust the Russian backed government,
The Taliban also likes to style themselves as the Islamic emirate of Afghanistan
Some power struggles ensue, by the 90s sometime the Taliban is in charge of the country
9/11 happens, US invades, tries to set up their own government, pulls out, Taliban quickly takes back over
The impression I’ve always gotten (and I’m sure no political guru or social scientist or anything of the sort) isn’t so much that the country overall prefers the Taliban as much as most of them just don’t really give a rat’s ass about the country as a whole or who’s claiming to be in charge of it at any given time, they don’t have a strong sense of national identity, they care for more about their tribe or village than anything going on outside of it. American, Russian, Taliban, doesn’t really matter too much to them, when the guys with better guns roll into town, you pay them lip service until they go away then continue right on doing things more or less the same way you have for the last 2000 years.
It does happen that the Taliban probably aligns with their traditional values more closely than the other people who have tried ruling it as a unified country over the years, but day-to-day, they’re still probably mostly only going to the Taliban when they need something from them and deferring to village elders or local warlords or whoever for everything else.
There’s variation I’m sure, those in cities probably have a stronger sense of what a country is and what it has to offer in the modern world than those in rural areas, but it’s a largely rural country, almost 75% of them are living in rural areas and some of them are super rural where some of them have probably never even seen a city.
I understand that I come from a place of pretty significant privilege, but it is wild to me that when faced with these kinds of situations anyone is gambling on the kinds of medical care they might/might not be able to receive in these red states with restrictive abortion laws.
I know that if any of my friends, even if we’re not particularly close, came to me and said they needed me to drive them halfway across the country for an abortion because they may not be able to get life-saving medical care in our state if something goes wrong, we’re going, right then and there, no questions asked, I’m calling out sick from work, running up my credit cards on gas and hotel rooms and whatever else we may need and we’re hitting the road, and if needed I won’t ever breathe a word of it to anyone.
The fact that people are in a position where they feel like they can’t do that or don’t have people they think they can trust to do that for them is maddening.
I take part in a lot of outdoorsy activities, there’s kind of a split. Lots of conservation-minded folks like myself, and lots of assholes who don’t seem to realize or care that they won’t be able to go hunting, fishing, etc. if they develop over all the woodlands, poison the waterways, etc. and just want an excuse to shoot something or justify their much-larger-than-needed, lifted, coal-rolling truck.
Also a fair amount of people who don’t feel particularly strongly either way.
Sales of hunting/fishing licenses and such do end up funding a lot of conservation efforts, though arguably in a lot of cases the money doesn’t necessarily go where it’s most needed.
The more conservation-minded folks tend to be quieter about their interests and don’t make it their whole personality, they’re usually not the ones posing with a deer or fish in their profile pic.
6% weight increase doesn’t necessarily mean a 6% efficiency loss, it’s not a simple linear relationship like that. Depending on the power of the motor and a few other factors that 6% weight increase could mean a huge hit to efficiency.
A roof only needs to be a thin piece of sheet metal, weighing somewhere in the neighborhood of 1-2lbs per square foot
Most solar panels are going to weigh somewhere in the neighborhood of 2-4lbs per square foot. So is likely the panel would weigh 2-4 times as much as just a plain metal roof, plus possibly a metal roof under it and/or additional framing to attach the panels to, so power to weight does absolutely come into play.
This chucklefuck:
“babies born with any deformities or disabilities should be shot in the forehead.”
What trump was trying to scaremonger about and claimed democrats support in the debate:
He also says execution after birth, it’s execution, no longer abortion, because the baby is born, is okay
Seems he’s once again confused
Politicians lie and use all kinds of weasely doublespeak bullshit all the damn time, it’s pretty much their signature move, everyone knows it, it’s been the punchline of countless jokes, no one likes it, but anyone with half a brain understands that it’s part of how the game is played and how you get the morons that make up a lot of this country excited to show up and vote for you.
So why are Kamala and so many other democrats so bad at just doing that when it counts?
How many undecided idiots does she think have fracking as their big tentpole issue, who are saying “gee, you know, I kind of agree with everything else she’s saying, but I don’t know if she agrees with me that fracking is the greatest thing since sliced bread, so I guess I’ll stay home on election day or maybe vote for the guy who’s skin looks like it was stained orange by fracking chemicals”
Compared to how many people in her base who are strongly against fracking, and feel that by supporting it she is just plain not listening to them and who may choose to stay home on election day because they feel so alienated and hopeless about the state of politics in our country.
How hard is it to just say nothing about these kinds of issues? Or if it’s something you absolutely have to comment on, why not just dance around it and say some vague bullshit about making fracking safe?
Play the fucking game, and play it to win.
I know she’s in the pockets of megacorporations that support fracking, her record speaks for itself for anyone with half a brain who cares to look into it, most people aren’t going to look into it though.
I don’t support fracking, but I also know if Trump wins then it’s game over, and oil and gas companies might just start a fracking operation from my bedroom and dump their waste in my dog’s water bowl just because they can, and since we’ll be living in a fascist dictatorship hell scape, there’d be no clear path forward to do anything about it.
If Harris wins, fracking stays more or less as it is now, and there’s a path forward, even if it’s a narrow one, to get a better candidate next time around.
But like I said, a lot of people are idiots who refuse to see that bigger picture, they’ll see Harris doing shit like this and just lose interest and not show up on election day or throw their vote away to some third party because they think they’re making a stand.
I bought a case of hugs for a bbq I had over the summer for my friends who are now all into their 30s. Figured it would be a fun little hit of nostalgia.
They were more popular than I expected, and actually better than I remember them being.
My wife’s family used to have a vacation home on Ocracoke. One year her mom bought some romance novel for a beach read that was set on Ocracoke, it seemed appropriate.
It was pretty clear that the writer had never been to Ocracoke or even bothered looking at Google maps because they talked about the cliffs by the sea.
It’s a glorified sandbar, just about the biggest elevation changes you’ll find are some dunes and the curb stepping off a sidewalk onto the road, nothing even remotely resembling a cliff.
Probably yes, and I don’t necessarily blame them, everyone has to blow off steam
But the choice of language is worth considering
Maybe I’m more politically correct than I like to give myself credit for, but I curse like a sailor, and I still don’t tend to call anyone a bitch, male or female. I’ll call them a asshole, moron, idiot, motherfucker, piece of shit, lazy, a fascist loofah-faced shit-gibbon, worthless low-down good-for-nothing greedy bastard, waste of space/oxygen/carbon, dirtbag, sleazeball, whiney, shit-head, coward, dumbass, creep, weirdo, pervert, dumb, two-faced, spineless, and countless other insults, they’re all on the table, and I’ll wish all kinds of unpleasantness on them up to and including death.
But bitch (and also cunt) is kind of an inherently gendered insult. I don’t consider being a woman to be a bad thing, so I don’t use those words, even behind closed doors. Same way I don’t use slurs against LGBTQ people, different races and ethnicities, people with disabilities, etc. those don’t ring true to me as insults so I don’t use them as insults.
And I think the fact he does use that kind of insult shows a lot about how he thinks.
When I left my old job, a lowly shipping/receiving guy in a warehouse, my job panicked and offered me a pretty significant raise if I stayed.
After having been there about 5 years, I’d made myself somewhat indispensable, they kind of just kept piling responsibilities onto me, I absorbed a lot of a supervisors duties when he retired with no replacement hired for him, I had fairly minimal oversight and was mostly left to figure out how things worked on my own (which I didn’t really mind, it made the job more interesting and I was up to the task, but I definitely didn’t get paid nearly enough for the work I was doing) so I was pretty much the only one who knew how all of our shipping and receiving stuff worked.
Along the way I wrangled myself a couple OK raises, but not really enough to bring me to a proper living wage. I had asked a couple of times about at least getting a promotion in title if nothing else so that I would have something more impressive on my resume that “warehouse associate” which I’m pretty sure was my job title the entire time I was there despite effectively being a supervisor.
When they offered me more when I told them I was leaving, it pissed me off more than anything. If they’d just paid me that much from the get-go and kept on top of giving me decent raises to reflect the job I was doing there’s a good chance I’d still be working there now and never would have tried looking for another job. What they offered me wasn’t quite my starting salary at my new job but it was pretty close.
I could have left them really high and dry and just left, but I didn’t want to screw over whoever was replacing me too badly, so I wrote down instructions for everything I could think of that was my responsibility because honestly no one else had the whole picture, a handful of people there could do parts of my job but a lot of it, like I said, was stuff I had to figure out on my own. All of the business cards I’d acquired for different shipping companies, vendors, etc. and I gave 3 weeks notice and attempted to pass on as much knowledge as possible to my likely temporary replacement before I left. Last I heard, they went through several replacements within a few months of me leaving.
I don’t know anything about the full send podcast, if it’s meant to be a serious interview, I think that’s kind of a bad look on him that he’d choose to recount it with a mild profanity like hell. I curse like a sailor on my own time, but in any situation where I’m acting as a representative of my job or acting in any sort of official capacity for any organization I’m a part of, or just trying to make a good, professional impression, my speech is squeaky clean and fit to be aired on PBS kids.
Even if it’s meant to be a more light-hearted and humorous podcast, there’s a fine line to walk for people in the public eye and they need to be mindful of what sort of soundbites they’re making that could be taken out of context. That kind of shows a little lack of forethought about what he’s going to say and how it might be received by his audience, which isn’t exactly a desirable quality in a politician.
Honestly, even if it hit him 2-3 days later, it’d be kind of hard to pin it on the McDonald’s unless he ate all of his meals there that day or there was an outbreak of salmonella in the area and McDonalds was the common factor between the cases.
He could have just as easily gotten it from his breakfast or dinner, and that may even be more likely. I won’t pretend for a moment that McDonald’s employees can be 100% trusted to follow their proper food handling procedures and such to the letter, but I’m certain that a corporate outfit like McDonald’s probably has so many guidelines in place and has idiot-proofed as much of their equipment as possible that it should be next-to impossible for them to be at fault even if half their rules end up getting ignored.
There’s of course cases where things out of their control could happen, like they get a batch of lettuce that’s contaminated with salmonella from their supplier, but that’s the kind of thing that could happen at literally any restaurant, and there’s only so much you can do to mitigate that.
It varies of course, but most public nudity laws I’ve seen pretty much only specify that genitals and female breasts (and sometimes not even breasts) need to be covered.
There’s a picture in the article, she’s wearing some fairly conservative undies, I’ve seen people wear more revealing clothes just out shopping at Walmart or going for a jog, and she’s certainly showing less skin than you’d see at most beaches or swimming pools.
At worst you might get questioned by the cops about why you’re out walking around in your underwear, but unless you seem like you’re in the middle of a mental health crisis, or refusing to leave a business or otherwise causing a disturbance, it’s kind of a stretch to say you’d be arrested, at least in most halfway modern countries if the cops are enforcing the laws properly (which is of course not a given)