TheVat

Yeah, all those liberal white folks think alike, and in simplistic terms! So many straw men here, my gardening needs are covered for the next 30 years.

Something a bit deceptive in that drawing. LOL. Yes, it is simple.

Those forums have been distracting (and tedious to follow, so I gave up), so am glad you posted again.

Just curious, bit of a digress, but wouldn't eliminating involuntary servitude (a broader category than chattel slavery) eliminate military conscription? I suppose they've got a clause in there somewhere...

Way off base there. I learned the old-faahioned way: listening to black people, and working as a social worker for a decade. In the US. Where understanding systemic racism and discrimination is rightly considered to be essential to having America live up to its Constitutional principles. The only way your hypothesized Self-Reliant Minority can get political traction to fix things in the US is to coalition with other groups who share their goals. 12‰ of the US population is not going to remedy 400 years of discrimination without another 39% (or at least, a strong plurality in some cases) lending some support. And given how the voting system deck is stacked, probably more than that. Progressives here are mostly committed to coming together to help Dr. King's dream along, and not shaming each other on personal experience credentials. I also have never been a woman seeking reproductive care, or gay. Are you suggesting I shouldn't bother to march with them, too, or donate money or publicly express support? I'm curious what sort of America we'll have if white guys like me sit meekly with our hands folded while all those discriminated minorities try their luck on tje streets and in the courts.

Strawman, as regards the US. That you think equal justice and equal opportunity is some sort of paternal problem solving, rather than a provision of the basic tools to thrive in society, indicates you have no clue what minority groups in the US want. Or what their obstacles are. As for fighting for your own grievances to be resolved, those are nice noble words, but here in the US, the problems are severe enough that no group minds all hands on deck helping out or at least voting progressively. When someone has a jackboot on their face, it is not condescension to step in and help the removal. Nothing says condescension quite like hagiography.

So when you sit one out, it's because neither candidate seems better. But when a black voter sits one out, they are just lazy. How weird you cannot imagine a demographic often ignored by politicians (e.g. both candidates may favor building a freeway and splitting your hood down the middle and saturating it with diesel soot) may have members who conclude voting is pointless. As @CharonY noted, your post seems to validate the OP article's view on ingrained racism.

Fair points. I'm not opposed to moving fast and breaking things in dire situations. I posted it to get some idea of how this looks, especially to folks in Europe, and ask if that crack demolition team might have found more effective Russian kneecaps to whack elsewhere. E.g. maybe blow up the rest of the Kerch Strait bridge, which is important to Russia's control of Crimea. Or take out Russian pipelines that carry oil/gas to China. Just saying, maybe keep the CIA in the loop and work with them on finding Achilles Heels. Or train more sharks like this one.... https://www.thedailybeast.com/tourists-watch-russian-man-get-devoured-by-shark-on-egypt-beach

This situation is not quite as you describe. The people who are "not bothering" are likely to be those who have low-end jobs where taking time off work is not an option, in places where polling stations in walking distance have been closed, where voter ID paperwork requirements fall especially hard on those with limited mobility, time, childcare, where some polling stations have standing outside Far Right election "monitors" carrying weapons, etc. Due to time crunch this morning, I am leaving out a number of other obstacles thrown in the path of minority access to voting, but all of this is well documented and witnessed, especially in swing states.

It's published because the Post got a scoop. With pretty solid information from European intelligence service. And the story, if you read it, concerns blowing up a pipeline that was part of the energy supply of several NATO nations....nations that have given billions and will give billions more to Ukraines defense. When Ukraine's operational plans include a kick in the butt to Russia that bounces off Russia and also kicks their allies, it's a good idea to coordinate with said allies. The US may look the other way, but nations like Germany already had a large faction that was questioning some appropriations to Ukraine. So maybe not the best plan. To review, from the article.... Details about the plan, which have not been previously reported, were collected by a European intelligence service and shared with the CIA in June 2022. They provide some of the most specific evidence to date linking the government of Ukraine to the eventual attack in the Baltic...

While I can't say if that's correct or not, it is weird that multiple people in my life who worked with electrical equipment, as well as an instructor in an electronics course way back in undergrad days, all told me quite the opposite of that. Also worth mentioning that the electric chair uses AC, because of its more effective lethality. Is there an EE here who can account for these seeming contradictory ideas about AC v DC? I did find this... https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/direct-current/chpt-3/physiological-effects-electricity/#:~:text=Low-frequency AC produces extended,away from the current's source.

You don't come across as neutral. You seem to be annoyed that black people, after several centuries of everyone constantly identifying them as black, now identify themselves as black and see that as a real ethnicity and culture. Which they want to see thrive. I want to write a book called The White People's Guide to How Black People Should Protest, Ask for Reparations, and Courteously Pretend That Race is Irrelevant and No One Has Reminded Them On a Daily Basis That They are Black. The chapters on how to protest and ask for reparations will consist of blank pages, except for the first one which has one word: NEVER.

A Washington Post writer challenges Mr Bean on his recent critique of EVs in The Guardian. Some good points, and facts clarified, on the overall carbon debt of an EV, the possible merits of hydrogen for personal vehicles, etc. https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/06/06/sorry-mr-bean-evs-are-better-choice/ For those facing a paywall, here is a screenshot of the article... https://archive.is/ihdUT For those who prefer soy biodiesel, of course, there may be Bean-friendly vehicles.

Not my position at all. Of course wealth and property cannot be absolutely equalized. Fixing the cycle of poverty is more about giving equal opportunity to those may want to build wealth. Hence my lean towards having reparations be focused on educational funding. In the US, taxation has a dismal track record so far in rectifying blockages on opportunity - corporate control over state and federal lawmakers keeps our taxation system more like "welfare for the rich." You are unfamiliar with US courts, then. Those most mired in the cycle of poverty are those least able to bring an action in a court here. Copious free time and money are required, though there might be some small percentage who were able to get assistance from some charitable legal funding organization. And waiting times for a docket would be measured in years - not much help to a sixteen year old who has to drop out of school because his single mom got sick and can't work and he has to work and look after the family. Finally, I'm not sure where others here stand on this, but I would include "means testing" as part of any sort of reparative payment., to ensure that funds went towards families still struggling to grab a rung of the ladder, not to those who have already climbed it. I would also skip the racial category and make eligible anyone from a group that was disenfranchised. This would include Hispanics and indigenous tribal people. (I live in an area with a lot of indigenous poverty, the Lakota tribe, and all the social ills that go with that, so am aware of what happens to multiple generations when you deprive them of land and liberty and stuff them on a "rez")

In the US the problem is past laws, or past differentials in enforcement, which do generational damage. Families are blocked from building wealth and educational status, which sets in motion a chain of effects such that later generations can't send kids to college, or muster seed money for a business or whatever. Others have hinted at the value of reading the whole thread. I join them.

Washington Post exclusive today.... https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/06/06/nord-stream-pipeline-explosion-ukraine-russia/ I was thinking Ukrainians were smarter than that. Maybe they thought Germany and other N. Euros would be okay, the winters there are so mild? Or that no one would ever figure out it was them? Usually, endangering a key ally is not seen as a good idea.

Waste electrical and electronic equipment (better known by its unfortunate acronym, Weee) is the fastest-growing waste stream in the world. Electronic waste amounted to 53.6m tonnes in 2019, a figure growing at about 2% a year. Consider: in 2021, tech companies sold an estimated 1.43bn smartphones, 341m computers, 210m TVs and 548m pairs of headphones. And that’s ignoring the millions of consoles, sex toys, electric scooters and other battery-powered devices we buy every year. Most are not disposed of but live on in perpetuity, tucked away, forgotten, like the old iPhones and headphones in my kitchen drawer, kept “just in case”. As the head of MusicMagpie, a UK secondhand retail and refurbishing service, tells me: “Our biggest competitor is apathy.” Globally, only 17.4% of electronic waste is recycled. Between 7% and 20% is exported, 8% thrown into landfills and incinerators in the global north, and the rest is unaccounted for. Yet Weee is, by weight, among the most precious waste there is. One piece of electronic equipment can contain 60 elements, from copper and aluminium to rarer metals such as cobalt and tantalum, used in everything from motherboards to gyroscopic sensors. A typical iPhone, for example, contains 0.018g of gold, 0.34g of silver, 0.015g of palladium and a tiny fraction of platinum. Multiply by the sheer quantity of devices and the impact is vast: a single recycler in China, GEM, produces more cobalt than the country’s mines each year. The materials in our e-waste – including up to 7% of the world’s gold reserves – are worth £50.9bn a year... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jun/03/i-spot-brand-new-tvs-here-to-be-shredded-the-truth-about-our-electronic-waste Will we, I wonder, someday be mining landfills? Seems to me that whatever does not get recycled and ends up in trash should at least be separated at the landfill into its own dump area, for possible future excavation.

Haven't seen the deets yet, but this reinforces my belief that seizure of Russian frozen overseas assets (somewhere around 300 billion) and allocating them to Ukrainian reconstruction would be justice. Russia is a thug nation.

How was this determined? Any methodology that claims to achieve such a precise figure deserves close examination. As @geordief has stumbled upon research that challenges orthodox beliefs about the Norwegian reindeer bladder, I feel we need a thread refereed by a cystiszoologist and a micturologist, experts who have monitored what I'm sure is a steady flow of papers. Pee-reviewed papers, of course.

The lower mass of brown dwarves means there's not enough heat from contraction and not enough density to ever reach the conditions needed to sustain hydrogen fusion. IIRC, terrestrial reactors fuse deuterium and tritium, on the basis of their availability and what conditions can be engineered. Lithium could be used, but it's easier to fission lithium and use the tritium product. (and sell the helium, or make a lot of party balloons?)

Questionable. Your payback time is longer, some municipal codes restrict how high you can mount them (they work best at 25 ft. or more, either on a roof peak or a pole), and you do need to live somewhere pretty breezy (like maybe Bonaire, or South Dakota). Where I live is, IIRC, one of the 5 windiest places in US, so I could probably break even on a unit that averaged 5 - 10 kwh/day (enough for our house) in ten to fifteen years. So, seems like wind power is more efficient and cheaper when scaled up and served on a grid. A municipality, for example, can pick an optimal location and put several large turbines there. So far I'm content to spend the money on energy-efficient appliances, windows, lights, etc. No roof climbing for me. 😀