Yes many people don’t vote because of deliberately fettered access to polling and/or a generally correct understanding that the electoral college nullifies or makes redundant their vote in their jurisdiction. Your vote for a third party is a signal but essentially a qualified abstention. Your high horse however is so misguided and absurd- to suggest that you held a moral high ground because the Biden administration supported the Gaza genocide is flatly wrong. If you want to place blame for that administration’s actions, blame Citizen’s United, blame AIPAC, blame the DNC, etc. And write letters, protest, get mad. But facilitating the ascent of what is objectively, obviously, candidly worse to make that statement is insulting to the intelligence of anyone to whom you make the argument. Perhaps your vote was in a jurisdiction where you could assume the electoral votes would go to the Dems anyway, but that just makes it flat out virtue signaling. The left will continue to cut off its nose to spite its face to the peril of US democracy and world peace. You nailed em tho.
Voted in PA. I suspect that regardless of who is president next, from either party, US policy will be changing towards Israel. The right, because they are anti-Semitic, and the liberals, because they lost an election over genocide. If the only thing the establishment wants from us is our votes, well they're going to have to earn them. They have no qualms about being transactional with other folks. They just get mad that we're transactional with them because we're supposed to behave.
IMO, speaking from the perspective of an ecology doctorate, while PhDs have much to contribute outside of academia, the training is laser focused on that route, to the detriment of students and funders (which is, generally speaking, society/taxpayers). The reality is more PhDs are minted than exist professorships, yet many advisors wish you to be their academic offspring, not just continuing in research but in their line of research. This dynamic was far more the cause of mental health issues than the work being “hard”, which checks out since there are innumerable other forms of hard and harder work.
I got my license because I'm an offshore sailor. It is useful as safety and communication equipment (radio nets to keep track of other boats, their weather and fishing conditions :), and let your would-be-rescuers know your position and status), but also for sending and receiving data. It is my primary interface for weather info at sea using traditional weatherfax, but also more modern GRIB extraction. I can even update my blog using my SSB on HAM frequencies at sea. It's fun. Never had a shoreside station though.
> Let your would-be-rescuers know your position and status
Stupid question, do search and rescue services even have equipment that can tune into HAM frequencies, are they even listening on those frequencies, and do they regularly train on communicating with the HAM community?
I'm sure there are more established ways of radioing for help in the maritime world(Aviation has the guard frequency)
Not a stupid question at all. But these aren't search and rescue services, they are just other sailors. I'm talking about locales that are far far outside of the realm of typical rescue services, and in no particular jurisdiction. Your best bet for rescue is your fellow sailors or commercial shipping traffic. Radio nets like the Pacific Seafarers Net allow you to make yourself known so that folks can keep tabs on you (and you them) in case something happens.
EPIRB and other emergency beacons still use HF radio frequencies (not HAM of course) and countries like the U.S., Australia, New Zealand and others I'm sure are monitoring those signals. But even then, they will first and foremost look to the seafaring community to actually render assistance, and that kind of call to action does often make its way through HAM radio nets, though I'm not sure exactly how, e.g., the U.S. Coast Guard makes that first outreach as the rescue coordinator.
In California it seems a lot of cities decided to try and add bike infrastructure but the design process yielded many compromises, since that infrastructure comes at the expense of car (and parking) infrastructure. As a result we got really bad bike lanes, but gave up few parking spots. The design process declared victory via compromise- best of both worlds. In reality, the bike lanes are worthless and cyclists like myself just use the primary vehicle lanes, since not dying is more important than protecting the convenience and respecting the supremacy of other road users. Drivers honk and yell and deliberately endanger you, but that was true before too.
The article talks about using design and engineering out of the problem. I do not believe that is what was done in the cities you cite, even if that was their headline intention.
Good points. It would be a productive use of all of the time those trucks spend idling too, going into and out of ports and in freeway traffic. Seems like there are times and circumstances when directing excess diesel energy to the trailer battery could be reasonable.
There is no such thing as excess diesel energy.
If today an idling diesel engine uses n units of fuel per minute, if you try to put any power into a battery for use later, it will use more n+x fuel per minute.
Now, if for some reason the engine was idling for no reason other than to keep a dome light on for an hour, then yes you could generate 100 watts as fast as possible and then turn the entire engine off, leaving the dome light lit for several hours off that 100watts you made. That is what a current hybrid does, again.
But if the engine has to idle for other reasons, even laziness, making power while it idles is simply using extra fuel to make that power.
It is sometimes surprising to learn which organisms are more or less like us. Annelid worms like the ones you likely find in the soils where you live do have brains, for example, albeit ones with different characteristics than those of crustaceans or mammals [1]. They don’t have lungs though sometimes gills. Are they more like crabs or humans? Tough to say but fun to ponder. Incidentally, of the marine invertebrates, the ones we are most closely related to are tunicates and salps, which are blobs that filter feed [2]. Who said cladistics wasn’t cool?
Imagine all the ways we can’t imagine how other organisms experience their existence. But as you learn more about their biology it’s incredible how much we share.
This is about water use, as opposed to land use. Land use matters, but let's try to stay focused for a second, esp. b/c some of the livestock are not local to the feed grows.
The Colorado River has barely touched the Gulf of California for years. There is inherent value as well as economic value in the ecosystem services that result from allowing natural systems to thrive... or even just function at all.
I hope we are not so cynical as to suggest that the over-extraction of the river and the destruction of the reliant ecosystems is an acceptable consequence of human success.
Even if you like hamburgers, is it worth the cost to continue to over-extract for their production from locations that cannot support it just because people have been doing it for a while and have a strong sense of private property rights? Why shouldn't we tell these farmers to pay up for the water or go somewhere to produce that food where it is more abundant?
Imperial Valley farmers are paying a trivial $20/acre-foot of water and are primarily growing hay to feed domestic and foreign livestock. Looks like 685K acre-feet per year to feed livestock out of a total water extraction of 1188K acre-feet (had to add up the totals from their graph to get that). So that means ~58% of the water is for cows.
Given how politically impossible it seems to be to increase rates or re-litigate water rights, I think I have to agree with the conclusion of the article: we got to stop eating the meat they're producing.
The health of the Colorado River Basin affects tons of people very directly in the U.S. and Mexico. We have been over-extracting it for ages. I am in favor of wise water usage in non-agricultural settings, but it's time we took action to mitigate the increasingly detrimental impacts of legacy water users from a legacy social and environmental climate.
The article states that 50% of hay grown in Southern California is exported to China, and another 10% is exported to Saudi Arabia. If American meat consumption decreases, the portion of hay that gets exported will likely just increase. I think water intensity should be taken into account when determining export policies. Every time I read an article about water usage in an industry, the biggest or one of the biggest users ends up being the export market. We're shipping one of our most precious resources away.
This is really cool. Can’t underestimate the power of this material to inspire future scientists. Hell I am a scientist and it inspires me too. I look forward to the launch (hehe)
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