People also don’t realize that too much power is just as bad as too little, worse in fact. There’s always useful power sinks: pumped hydro, batteries, thermal storage, but these are not infinite.

Cranberries don’t grow on the water, the fields are just flooded at harvest time because the berries float, which makes it an easy method to gather them.

Lion batteries have flames without explosions because of design considerations with the batteries: vent holes that allow pressure and heat to escape a failing battery. It’s possible that if those safeguards were compromised, you could trigger an actual explosion.

He has. He and his twin brother were actually part of a study into the effects of long term space habitation (his trips were shorter). They’re the only two siblings to ever both go to space.

The problem is the obscenity exception is also used for things like preventing someone from walking around a public park with a giant sign covered in gore porn. Something like that I think is obviously pretty okay to ban, but clearly it gets misused for a lot of homophobic/transphobic type stuff.

This is only even close to true if you think ‘worldly’ is western Europe plus like 3 other countries. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks counts as left and right wing. Biden is a left wing American Democrat, this is such a stupid argument.

Fully agree. Honestly there’s a few subjects where this kinda logic comes up and I get annoyed. Like it’s fine to not be perfect, but don’t pretend that you aren’t perfect, or that your choices are somehow ‘good’ when they aren’t, just because you don’t like the realization.

Yeah the difference is hot fusion works, see: the sun. Cold fusion would require a fundamental change in how we understand physics works. It’s junk science.

Good ol Sure Wish I’d Finished Training.

I mean that’s kinda the point the guy you originally replied to was making. From the limited info I’ve seen about this guy I know nothing about him, which isn’t enough for me to dismiss him as a shitty person with just “Nazi bad”. Certainly a good starting point tho lol

I mean there is slightly more to it than just that. Oskar Schindler was a Nazi, is he bad?

Yeah but this also results in the site receiving less money from ads, also hurting them in the long run. Really the solution is to pay for the services you enjoy, and acknowledge the age-old “if the service is free, you are the product”.

It’s also really confusing because even if you don’t have any particular affinity for Ukraine, even a Republican must acknowledge that functionally Russia and China are only things that are even remotely close to peer adversaries, and any military hardware we send Ukraine is going to get dumped directly into damaging that adversary. It’s basically one of the most efficient military investments you could get right now. If you’re even a bit pro military, you should be pro Ukraine.

Sure, but I wouldn’t really find the process of starting the conversation to find that out “small talk”. Even if there’s not a lot new most of the time, to me small talk has to be the kind of banal and meaningless conversations that basically never lead into those ‘real’ ones. How’s the weather, what about that local sports team, did you see someone bought that house/building/store down the road, etc.

I think the complicated thing is there are people you don’t really know, acquaintances, where the generic “how’s the wife and kids” is small talk, because they don’t actually really care, it’s just a generic greeting thing. But a friend asking that is different, imo.

I dunno that seems pretty prejudicial. It’s literally the job of politicians to listen to their constituents and advocate for them. Obviously there’s a problem of unequal access and representation, but I’m not sure anything he did here is particularly outside that mold, certainly not criminal. Can you actually point to something concrete that he did that you think is criminal?

I think what it comes down to for me personally about McCain is that even though I disagreed with a lot of his politics, I do genuinely believe he cared about the country and the people in it, and generally speaking he did what he honestly thought was best for them.

We can criticize the relative purity of every politician until we’re blue in the face, but honestly the one overriding characteristic I think it’s fair to demand of every elected official is that they’re honestly working in good faith for the betterment of the country. As long as that’s true I have no deep-seated issue with them.

Senators Glenn and McCain were cleared of having acted improperly but were criticized for having exercised “poor judgment”.

Keating and DeConcini were asking McCain to travel to San Francisco to meet with regulators regarding Lincoln Savings; McCain refused.[7][11] DeConcini told Keating that McCain was nervous about interfering.[7] Keating called McCain a “wimp” behind his back, and on March 24, Keating and McCain had a heated, contentious meeting.[11]

The regulators then revealed that Lincoln was under criminal investigation on a variety of serious charges, at which point McCain severed all relations with Keating.[7]

I’m all for shitting on McCain for some of the questionable takes he’s had in his life, but I don’t think this is the obvious “he’s corrupt” politician mic drop you think it is.

Talking to a friend you haven’t seen in a while about what’s new in your life is basically the opposite of "small talk’. I can empathize with those kind of social interactions being hard for some people, but it’s a social skill that’s worth either practicing or finding alternative paths to accomplish if you want to make and keep friends.

I mean this is assuming that children are rationally considering the amount of power an abuser has over their lives, which is clearly not the case. To a kid, simply being an adult makes them seem powerful.