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

To be honest, I’m struggling to keep track of the points you are making because you brought in several tangential topics all at once without much context (shale gas vs. oil, oil exports, LCOE, Poland all in a thread about solar energy in Finland compared to fossil fuel energy in Texas). I’ll just point out that the US is #4 in oil exports, by either barrels or export value (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_exports) and the number one oil producer (source: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production), so I think it is pretty obvious that the investments into fossil fuel infrastructure in the US are well and above what is necessary for a “strategic reserve” use case

Right now a lot of “renewable energy” sources are subsidized in Europe for only political reasons.

I can assure you the same is true for fossil fuels in Texas right now, so I don’t see how this is a strike on renewable energy

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

Dutch=Netherlands Danish=Denmark

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!

Yes, I’m just speaking to the point the comment was making, that solar panels over parking lots that are at car factories particularly benefit from the hail defense aspect because the parking lot owner (the factory) has a vested interest in maintaining the condition of the parked cars. This isn’t an argument for any point of view, it’s an explanation of what was clearly ambiguous language by the original commenter, based on your misinterpretation. The sass is unnecessary

Once you buy them sure. But not while they are sitting on a lot outside the car factory waiting to get sold

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.

I’m gonna go ahead and say the scale is logarithmic, because the jumps from cat to dog to baby/horse to dragon are all depicted about the same and are definitely not

Easy. His, erm, broad stature makes him an easy whipping target when it comes time to drive the capitalist pigs and their market stands out of the temple

The fact that you mixed up the Dakotas in your comparison to cities really emphasizes your point

Hign speed rail is really more effective at cutting down short domestic flight and the number of cars driving on interstates than it is at enabling car-free lifestyles. Not to say it doesnt help with that, but the correct tool for that job is local transit and bikable/walkable communities, which both Houston and DFW are working on, even if they are under constant threat of regression by the irresponsible actions of TXDOT aka the highway widening mafia

If someone is being paid to work in those expensive areas, the pay should be sufficient to live in or near those expensive areas. It’s entitlement for the employer class that this isn’t the case. The implications of it not being the case (the existence of a class of people in these areas that struggle to afford basic necessities, the extension of psyche-degrading and environmentally destructive commutes, the tearing apart of our societal fabric that comes from isolated suburban commuting living) are all horrificly negative at scale. You may live and work in a situation that is independent of those negatives (you found a good enough paying job in a low cost of living area, or maybe even you work remote, or you don’t mind the isolation and destructive nature of the exurban commute) and that is good for you, but to imply that the whole nation needs to follow your example or stop complaining shows a sore lack of awareness about how scalable the solution you personally found is.

The monkeys paw curls, everyone now has to drive from the perspective of a back seat passenger looking over the driver’s shoulder

You can absolutely make that distinction, but speaking as another meat eater, it’s not really a given that factory farming is more like one than the other

Is the creation of a nuclear-armed North Korea in the Middle East with an effective ballistic missile program the change you wish to see in the world?