too dumb to read

checks out

Most sensible comment in the thread, thread shoulda probably ended here.

Most greens are very wierd. They claim to be against malnutrition and vitamin deficiency, but when it comes to solutions, they are against them(see golden rice). They are also mostly vegans, but when it comes to insulin, they would rather kill lots of pigs instead of scary-scary GMO yeast. Or when it comes to energy production, they rather would choose one with guaranteed dangers(coal has very nasty byproducts of burning) instead of potential.

I think this is probably because they represent a more dangerous and legitimate opposition to the powers that be, and, as a result, tend to be one of the most astroturfed groups on the planet. Couple that with a kind of extremism, where they will oppose golden rice or GMO yeast on the basis of evergreening IP laws (a fair complaint, imo), and then you can kind of see why they keep opposing things that are presented as solutions and keep getting hit with the terminally annoying “well, why don’t you have any solutions, then?” style of criticism.

then you’re just a bot.

I mean to be fair you do make it pretty easy to discredit your entire argument, when you’re just gonna say that anyone calling you out on this very obviously stupid idea is a bot. Like that’s the same thing again.

Maybe I’m a victim of Poe’s law, but I’ve seen “launch nuclear waste into space” get way more repute than it deserves as an idea from people who have no clue about the actual issues with, even just normal aspects to do with energy generation. It’s a shorthand signal that lets me know that someone’s had all their thinking on it done for them by shitty pop science and shitty science journalism. It’s like if someone believes in antivax, or something. I’m probably not going to really think they’re a credible source, after that. This is also bad if the shit they’re saying is itself lacking in external sources which I can rely on outside of them.

I’m also flexing my brain right now because none of the shit you said at all really backs up the idea the nuclear energy is the future. Like, if you think it’s inevitable that more plants collapse and it’s inevitable that nuclear power plants get destroyed by missiles in times of war (also a great idea, on par with disposing of it in space, let me irradiate the exact area I’m trying to capture for miles and miles around), then you wouldn’t want nuclear power. If you believe in that and then you also believe in the overblown problem of nuclear waste, then there’s not really a point, there’s no point at which the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

The reason people aren’t going to accept nuclear if they believe it has cons is because like half of those cons are, albeit overblown, catastrophic for life on the planet, and the other half are failures to conceptualize based on economic boogeymen, just the same as with solar power. Political will problems, rather than problems with physical reality or core technologies. But still, problems that conflict with the existence of the idea itself.

You’re not going to convince people to go in on nuclear power, your stated idea, if you only point out it’s flaws, and then also post ridiculous shit.

This, this should be common sense, and I don’t understand why it’s not.

Okay, so, say I need some energy that’s pretty dense in terms of the space that it takes up, say I need a large amount of constant energy draw, and say that I need a form of energy that’s going to be pretty stable and not prone to variation in weather events. I.e. I seek to power a city. This isn’t even really a far-fetched hypothetical, this is a pretty common situation. What energy source seems like the best for that? Basically, we’re looking at hydropower, which generally has long term environmental problems itself, and is contextually dependant, or nuclear.

Solar also makes sense, wind energy also makes sense, for certain use cases. Say I have a very spread out population or I have a place where space is really not at a premium, as is the case with much of america, and america’s startling lack of population density, that might be the case. But then, I kind of worry that said lack of population density in general is kind of it’s own ongoing environmental crisis, and makes things much, much harder than they’d otherwise need to be.

I think the best metaphor for nuclear that I have is the shinkansen. I dunno what solar would be, in this metaphor, maybe bicycles or something. So, the shinkansen, when it was constructed, costed almost double it’s expected cost and took longer then anyone thought it would and everybody fucking hated it, on paper. In practice, everybody loves that shit now, it goes super fast, and even though it should be incredibly dangerous because the trains are super light and have super powerful motors and no crash safety to speak of, they’re pretty well-protected because the safety standards are well in place. It’s something that’s gone from being a kind of, theoretical idiot solution, to being something that actually worked out very well in practice.

If you were to propose a high speed rail corridor in the US, you would probably get the same problems brought up, as you might if you were to plan a nuclear site. Oh, NIMBYs are never gonna let you, it’s too expensive, we lack the generational knowledge to build it, and we can patch everything up with this smaller solution in e-bikes and micromobility anyways. Then people don’t pay attention to that singular, big encompassing solution, and the micromobility gets privatized to shit and ends up as a bunch of shitty electric rental scooters dumped in rivers and a bunch of rideshare apps that destroy taxi business. These issues which we bring up strike me as purely being political issues, rather than real problems. So, we lack generational knowledge, why not import some chinese guys to build some reactors, since they can do it so fast? Or, if we’re not willing to deal with them, south korean?

I’m not saying we can’t also do solar and renewables as well, sure, those also have political issues that we would need to deal with, and I am perfectly willing to deal with them as they come up and as it makes sense. If you actually want a sober analysis, though, we’re going to need to look at all the different use cases and then come up with whichever one actually makes sense, instead of making some blanket statement and then kind of, poo-pooing on everything else as though we can just come up with some kind of one size fits all solution, which is what I view as really being the thing which got us into this mess. Oooh, oil is so energy dense, oooh, plastic is so highly performing and so cheap and we don’t even have to set up any recycling or buyback schemes, oooh, let’s become the richest nation on the planet by controlling the purchasing of oil. We got lulled into a one size fits all solution that looked good at the time and was in hindsight was a large part in perhaps a civilization ending and ecologically costly mistake.

And I say just launch the waste into space

This immediately discards like, everything you’ve said up until now, though. It matters if it explodes on the way up challenger style and irradiates half of the continent with a massive dirty bomb of nuclear waste. It’s way more cost effective, efficient, and safer to just put it somewhere behind a big concrete block and then pay some guy to watch it 24/7, and make sure the big concrete block doesn’t crack open or suffer from water infiltration or whatever.

So an interesting thing I’ve noticed people doing is basically claiming that whatever other side is being astroturfed by the “real evil”, right. “Fossil fuel is funding renewable FUD of nuclear reactors!” or “Fossil fuels is funding nuclear FUD of renewables!”. You can also see this with liberals claiming that anyone who disagrees with the DNC is a Russian bot, and with people who disagree with libs claiming that libs fund radical right-wing candidates as an election strategy and that this is one of the reasons why they are basically just as bad as those right-wingers.

The core thing you need to understand about this, as a claim, is that they can both be true. They can both be backed opposition, controlled opposition, astroturfing. Because it’s not so much that they’re funding one racehorse that they want to be their opposition, so much as they are going to fund both sides, plant bad faith actors among both sides, bad faith discourse and division, thought terminating cliches, logical fallacies, whatever, and then by fueling the division, they’ve successfully destroyed their opposition. The biggest help to the fossil fuels lobby isn’t the fact that conversations about nuclear or renewables are happening when “we should be pushing, we should be in emergency mode, everyone should agree with me or get busted” right, as part of this “emergency mode” is us having these conversations. No, the biggest help to fossil fuels lobbies is the nature of the discourse, rather than the subjects of the discourse.

Also I find it stupid that people are arguing for all in on one of the other. That’s dumb. Really, very incredibly dumb. Mostly as I see this discourse happening in a disconnected top-down vacuum separate from any real world concerns because everyone just wants to be “correct” in the largest sense of the word and then have that be it. Realistically, renewables and nuclear are contextually dependant. Renewables can be better supplemented by energy storage solutions to solve their not matching precisely the power usage curves and trends, but a lot of those proposed storage solutions require large amounts of concrete, careful consideration of environmental effects, and large amounts engineering, i.e. the same shit as nuclear. It can both be true that baseload doesn’t matter so much as things like solar can more closely match the power usage curves naturally for desert climates where large amounts of sunlight and heat will create larger needs for A/C, and it can also be true that baseload is a reality in other cases where you can’t as easily transition power needs or try to offset them without larger amounts of infrastructural investment or power losses. Can’t exactly preheat homes in the day so they stay warm at night, in a cold climate, if the r-values for your homes are ass because everyone has a disconnected suburban shithovel that they’re not recouping maintenance costs of when they pay taxes.

These calculations of cost offsets and efficiencies have to be made in context, they have to be based in reality, otherwise we’re just arguing about fucking nothing at all. Maybe I will also hold water in the debates for money not being a great indicator of what’s possible, probable, or what’s the best long term solution for humanity, too, just to put that out there. But God damn this debate infuriates me to no end because people want to have their like, universal one size fits all top down kingly decree take of, well is this good or bad, instead of just understanding a greater, more nuanced take on the subject.

If you wanna have a top-down take on what’s the best, you probably want global, big solar satellites, that beam energy down with microwave lasers.

I mean the government pretty much already has a death note, of a kind. If you’re not Gary Webb, then they could always just slip some shit in your water main or whatever, or otherwise just kinda kill you however they want. So it’s not all that useful for them to have, other than being cheaper and maybe making some political assassinations much easier.

You know I do kinda wonder what effect that would have culturally, especially if that became a kind of trend or mainstay. Like, obviously a big investigation would take place as to the cause of death. Doubt they would come up with anything, but obviously, huge scandal. After that, do the successors keep getting killed since they’d probably be the same or worse, or what happens? What would happen in response to that? Would they rename the party, launch further investigations, would they attempt to dissolve the party? Would they attempt to believe in different ideals out of a kind of fear or natural selection, or what? Would they all just devolve into extremely conspiratorial thought as they desperately tried to ward it off?

I mean, if they figured it out, then they might even just start putting them out under aliases or fake names or something.

Well, yes, but generally not for the reasons people think they were

Google maps won’t give you a route at all in public transit if you include multiple stops. I think generally, for public transit, you either have to use google maps to extensively look up and plan your own route, or you have to use a different app. There’s one just called “transit”, which I think people generally use, has good integration, and sometimes local agencies have their own app or will use a different one, there’s a handful of generalized ones.

But yeah, in any case. Probably, Google should be better about that.

“Dicks fuck pussies, and Dicks also fuck assholes”. Greatest speech ever

Yeah, that’s what I was referring to. The movie came out in 2004, you know, the year after we invaded Iraq, as was the context of the movie. If you pay attention to that speech, it’s basically just saying that US hegemony is good and US exceptionalism is real, and that our actions are a net positive for the international community. That the international community needs us. That we need to “fuck this asshole”. In combination with the movie making fun of celebrities that had non-interventionist views, and calling them a homosexual slur that will probably get flagged on lemmy, saying that they suck up to dictators. It being satire doesn’t suddenly make the movie mean the opposite of what it meant, that’s just classic irony-poisoning.

I mean Team America was a pretty lowkey pro military intervention and pro america movie, to be honest. He’d probably have the opinion he would have if he had watched that movie and especially if he’d listened to the classic longwinded matt and trey speech that they throw in at the end to kind of spell out the message, it’s just that nobody really watches or remembers anything other than the like, first 20 minutes of that movie, where the protagonists get hit with kind of a low point and “america” kind of looks bad, because those first twenty minutes make the most memorable use of the gag.

This is the case for basically every issue, yeah, this is generally why telling people to start with politics at the local level isn’t really a great suggestion for most people.

You can’t fund inter-city trains at the local level, really, that has to be done at the state level at the very least, usually in a state like california, only, and usually it has to be done with federal funding. If you don’t have inter-city trains or public transit, then it’s hard to make a walkable city. Basically what I’m saying is that it’s not atomizable, it has to be integrated with the rest of the network, which is why even the best US cities are pretty car-centric.

This is true for a litany of other political issues besides just public transit.

Fuck that shit, all the gas lawn tools should be backwards converted to run on hydrolysis-produced rocket fuel, feasibility and efficiency and safety be damned.

I dunno, maybe with a 12 gauge slug, or maybe buckshot, but, with anything lesser than that, I’d be pretty skeptical that it’s a my preferred choice of death.

Because gun manufacturers are fucking morons that think ease of use for anyone and everyone is an appealing priority over safety protocols on the weapon that can, as we have seen, very easily kill you. If you can’t train to take the safety off when you need it, if you can’t spare the tenth of a second it takes to turn it off, you probably shouldn’t be using a gun.

I second most of these other recommendations, but since I haven’t seen them said yet, The Magnetic Fields. Somehow manages to be funny while also being very geniune and touching, which I think is kind of what I look for in a band.

I just write in the same way that I talk, and I’m a west coast valley girl, sue me

it’s the memetic filter, only gay people are allowed to read what I post

I’m gonna go with like an alternative viewpoint here and say that, rather than it being kind of like, a inevitability of human behavior once you reach a certain point of like, not giving a shit about consequences, or like, having enough power, you just lose touch with reality and become a pedo like, automatically (which is kind of a weird self-report). I’m gonna say that instead, it’s probably because of that kind of mentality. Because it’s seen as a sort of inevitable thing, once you reach a high enough status. Because of the mentality of like, women at younger and younger ages being seen as more desirable sexually, because of like this weird collective cultural fetish around female innocence and beauty, and even naivety, to some degree. You ever notice that weird like, “born yesterday” movie trope, where some chick has like, amnesia, or is a robot, or whatever, and so is a kid, but is also supposed to be like, smokin’? Like the fifth element. That movie’s still pretty good, but that shit’s weird af as a trope, probably evidence of cultural baggage, it’s like the western version of the thousand year old loli.

Probably all wrapped up in like some old timey patriarchy shit I need to read up on. Maybe due to the prevalence of child brides in sort of like, societies in which inheritance is a thing? Like, patrilineal societies, maybe, where marriage asap at the capacity of childbirth is seen as a thing which sort of, preserves patrilineal inheritance. Then something to do with like, the western nuclear family’s imposition on history, to sort of, retroactively frame history along the lines that it provides, while also unconsciously adopting, nonsensically, some of the same historical, cultural narratives that were propagated around patrilineal inheritance in order to attempt to justify it.

There’s some through-line there, probably. Something along those lines.

I think it’s pretty inarguable that sexual attraction in some way is affected by the standards of the society in which you’re raised on a pretty fundamental level, so, probably it’s due to like an extremely depressing and fucked up societal standard, I would think, more than just like. Ahh, they’re rich, so, the pedo switch flipped in their head. Like, once they realized they could, they just did, kinda thing, and then it all ends there and nobody asks any questions as to why that switch was there in the first place.