And natural gas was supposed to be an transition energy source to get America off coal so that we could transition to renewable energy. History has not been kind to the “if we can just implement this greenwashed fossil fuel process, it’ll really allow us to unlock green energy potential down the road” promise

He’s not running for reelection, the Rs are getting that Senate seat this year

Sure, but 23% of LGBTQ voters aren’t voting for Harris, which is significantly less than a third (33%). Still higher than it should be, granted, but I am pretty sure that is what the original reply comment was pointing out.

From memory and a couple quick Google searches

• January 6th, including both the violence at the national Capitol and related, often violent protests outside verious state capitols
• Death threats to election count and poll workers
• Republican legislator invites armed men into the Oregon State Capitol during a protest
• Armed protestors rally around the tallying center in Detroit while the count was ongoing
• Brawl with counterprotestors at the “million Maga march”
• Violent “Stop the steal” protests in Sacramento

I wouldn’t say there was just a little violence after the 2020 loss

The city already settled to pay about $3 per resident for the cops’ bad behavior and to put cops in a training on political violence. If some of the cops in question live outside of the city (not uncommon), they probably won’t pay a dime and the only impact they will feel is sitting through a training session that they will probably not take seriously

That’s not right wing. Do not allow right wingers to hide in the shadow of your reasonable political views by assuming their identity. Call yourself a market capitalist, a liberal, or even a Reagan-era Republican if you believe that is what your views align to and are speaking in an American context, but don’t let yourselves be used to rehabilitate the image of the right wing. They will only take that as a permission structure to hold more and more heinous views while pointing at you and others like you and saying "see, we are reasonable people with serious political positions that deserve a voice at the table. They don’t represent you, so why give them leverage to claim that they do?

Are you assuming that AI in this case is some form of generative AI? I would not ask chatgpt if a mushroom is poisonous. But I would consider using a convolutional neural net based plant identification software. At that point you are depending on the quality of the training data set for the CNN and the rigor put into validating the trained model, which is at least somewhat comparable to depending on a plant identification book to be sufficiently accurate/thorough, vs depending on the accuracy of a story that genAI makes up based on reddit threads, which is a much less advisable venture

Spending energy to convince conservatives to vote D is not a winning strategy. The idea is to convince those who are convincable, not to create some epiphany moment when all the Republicans stand up and say they were wrong and switch parties. This is naming and shaming as an electoral strategy, not as a punishment

It’s easier to read if you read it as a line spoken by the Silicon Valley TV character Jian Yang

It’s definitely not that. They are just pointing out that the right to free speech prevents the government from impeding someone’s ability to say something, it doesn’t (despite implications made by a lot of people who cry out that their right to free speech is being impeded) force others to listen to or agree with that thing being said. If anything, the people that abuse the name of free speech by implying that it means people need to agree with them, or need to amplify their message, are attacking free speech by mudding the water around what it means and making it harder for good faith entities to invoke that right

And yet the demise of the coal industry accelerated in his administration, with no apparent pause despite Trump rolling back the safety regulations that were protecting the coal miners. He’s pro coal baron, not pro coal miner

Vivian was victimized by her father’s heartless disregard and rejection of her identity. Elon is now going around stating a narrative that her coming out to him is at least a significant contributing reason he is a fascist (“I lost my son to the woke mind virus”), a narrative that this headline plays directly into. You can take the same sequence of facts and headline it as “Musk is going public with the same bigotry that he wielded against his transgender daughter. A lot of trans people have family members like him” that doesn’t make it sound like Elon Musk would have been politely building his rockets and evs in a corner if only his daughter hadn’t come out as trans, and doesn’t make it sound like Vivian indirectly donated 10s of millions of dollars to Trump’s 2024 campaign by coming out as someone that that exact campaign wants to suppress. The headline as written is almost a threat to closeted trans people. “Yeah, your parents may be Schrodinger’s bigots right now, but come out and they will go full scorched earth to dehumanize you and you will be responsible for their shift”.

I’m pretty sure you are agreeing that that isn’t the case, and it wouldn’t surprise me if the text of the article is also aligned against that message, but the headline (probably written by an editor hungry for rage clicks) is solidly aligned to it, and should be called out for that

Mike Johnson moves one heartbeat closer to the Whitehouse in this hypothetical. And the remaining heartbeat would be on tour campaigning, which we’ve seen can expose someone to high velocity lead poisoning. Plus, Kamala would have to oversee an unplanned administration turnover, taking time and energy away from her campaigning efforts. It’s all painfully obvious why they want this and none of it has to do with the good of the country

Am one of those “assholes”. Kamala was far from my favorite candidate in 2020, but I just donated a hefty (for me) chunk of change and will be volunteering. I didn’t need perfection, just a feasible path to victory in November and now we have it. I’m so pumped right now, project 2025 no longer looks like an inevitability. LFG!

The monkeys paw curls. Texas has implemented more laws to stop minorities from voting

Was 68 the last time an incumbent was switched out? Because as conflicted as I am about wanting Biden to give way for a candidate who is physically capable of campaigning vs being concerned about the ability to find someone with a better probability of victory than him, I don’t find the conventional political wisdom of 1968 a very convincing argument in today’s media and political landscape

He didn’t go far enough. World population doubling time is down to 50ish years. Thanos probably took 50 years to formulate, prep, and execute his plan, during which time the population had doubled and he was just returning to status quo. It’s like what is happening to the $15 minimum wage movement with inflation

Porque no los dos?

Rabbit hole incoming: If you have to pick one, I suppose it depends on what metric you are trying to maximize. One doublestacked intermodal train car takes two long haul trucks off the road. One Siemens Venture passenger train car takes 74 people, or about 50 cars at 1.5 people per car, off the road. You can generally run longer freight trains than passenger trains, but 25x to normalize for VMT (which could be used as an approximate measure of direct health impacts from driving: crash risk, elevated blood pressure, obesity. It could also be used to approximate societal impacts of car culture: real estate dedicated to surface parking, voting bloc size that supports car-centric planning and development regulations) is probably excessive. On the other hand, if we normalize for emissions (hard to find data here, but as far as I can tell trucks are on the order of 10x as emissive), that gets us down to 5x train length, which is about on par (northeast corridor trains are typically in the 1/6 of a mile range, and median freight train length is somewhere in the 1-1.5 mile range from what I could find), and if we use infrastructure damage/maintenance cost (trucks are about two orders of magnitude worse than even today’s SUV saturated passenger car market, I’m assuming without reason or evidence that damage to steel rail infrastructure between a freight and a passenger car scales significantly less harshly for the sake of simplicity), things look downright strongly in favor of freight traffic. At the end of the day, it probably just depends on which use case has more unmet demand on a case by case basis. Of course, both pale when compared to the opportunity that high speed rail gives to take short haul flights out of the sky, but that is another set of analysis and does partially correlate to the elevated infrastructure cost of high speed rail vs conventional rail.

This makes one of the “solutions” from the article: “A law was introduced at the end of 2023 that will eliminate the need for permits and environmental impact assessments for bridges that are being widened to add lanes as part of renovations.” look particularly shortsighted. Infrastructure is a maintenance debt that we are reckoning with, so we will make it easier to build specifically bigger infrastructure so that in 25 years we will have an even bigger problem to solve? Not to mention the concept of induced demand meaning that those lanes are going to increase the amount of vehicles using the bridge, which would be exactly the kind of thing that should get an environmental assessment, versus repurposing some lanes for sustainable transit or building a separate bridge for those modes

Radiation does not by definition make things it impacts radioactive, and most of the lingering effects that we associate with radiation have to do with radioactive particles that are left behind by the atmosphere. Since there is no particulate matter traveling between the sun and Mars (photons not withstanding), the surface of Mars would not be expected to acquire radioactive properties from an acute solar radiation event like this one. However, an entity on the surface of Mars would be exposed to radiation from the Sun, much more so than an entity on/near earth and it’s magnetosphere (Mars’ thin atmosphere and distance from the sun probably helps reduce that disparity relative to something in say low earth orbit, but I don’t think it fully equalizes or shifts the scales). I am not an astrophysicist, so there’s at least a 20% chance I got part of that wrong.