From what I understand, some degree of nuclear power is always going to be necessary. This is because while we tend to think of excess power in the energy grid as being stored away, this in fact is not the case and we only use power as it's actively available. Excess power is wasted. The major downside of renewables is that they're circumstancial. Solar energy is only available during clear days, wind power is only available on windy days, etc. Until we massively improve our energy storage capabilities we're going to need some kind of constant supply of power backing the other ones when they aren't available. Without adequate nuclear energy available, that's going to be fossil fuels. And when compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear energy is unbelievably better for the environment. The only byproduct is the spent fuel which is dangerous, but we have control over where it ends up which is more than can be said for fossil fuels.
Yeah, bullet dodged on that guy. It's pretty shitty when the choices are a racist or someone with Alzheimer's. Especially considering how large California is, I'm pretty sure they could have come up with better options.
I don't even think this is necessarily an age issue. You can get Alzheimer's at 50 too. To me the issue is a shameful unwillingness from Democrats to acknowledge Feinstein's inability to fulfill her duties. Pelosi straight up called people sexist for suggesting Feinstein should step down. It's despicable. If I was in California, I'd be pretty fucking mad right now that my senator was being used as a tool to advance other people's interests by preying on her dementia.
Unfortunately, steeply here doesn't really capture the size disparity between Lemmy and Reddit. Lemmy has 60k active monthly users. Reddit has 450 million active monthly users. We have a looong way to go before we can really compete. But we just have to keep pushing. Now that we exist and have a sustainable userbase, the next time Reddit does something idiotic we'll be here to attract disgruntled users. Something good that we can be doing is showing up to the threads on Reddit about the terrible things Reddit does and advertising Lemmy to people.
I kind of like that idea, except I think it's less likely to create a non-partisan court and more likely to create a randomly partisan court. Like, odds are that five of the justices would still have a partisan lean. Is that fair to the American people? Also, when Republicans block a president from having their judicial nominations confirmed, then it becomes even more likely for conservative justices to make it to the SCOTUS. Same for if Dems blocked. It would incentize obstruction.
I've felt that we should simply have the SCOTUS be elected like we do in many states. Why shouldn't the people have a direct say in who makes the greatest decisions about our constitution? It was one thing when the court was ostensibly non-partisan, but at this point if it's going to be partisan either way, we should just make it elected.
Alternatively, we could bake the partisanship into the court. Make the court have an even number, then reward an equal number of justices to the major parties (parties receiving more than x% of the vote in presidential elections or something like that). If libertarians or greens ever get more popular, we can have the court autoadjust to split between more parties. That's my hairbrained idea that would probably be too messy to be worth it.
I was reading about Vivek Ramaswamy on his Wikipedia page last night and I saw that he's seriously pushing raising the voting age to 25! What a bunch of absolute fascist shitheads. Trying to steal the right to vote from voters that disagree with them. Literally doing the thing they accuse Democrats of doing. It's the same old bullshit hypocrisy with those fuckfaces. I wish it still surprised me. How anybody could possibly support them at this point is beyond me. They've become a joke and nothing more at this point. I wish there was a serious opposition to the Democratic Party. It's not good to have only one sane party in a country. You want your party's ideas to be forged in the fire of scrutiny that comes with serious political conversations. But what Republicans have become is useless. At this point I can't wait for them to just fucking die as a party. Wipe them out so badly that a new party has to rise in their stead. And God I hope it looks nothing like the modern conservative bullshit ideology.
I did some digging and the two words have different etymologies. So it's a coincidence. English has many words that share the same spelling but have different meanings/etymologies as well. "Fan" for example. For "tour", the "tower" usage comes from the Latin "turrem" which also means "tower", and the "tour" usage comes from the Latin "tournāre" which means "to turn".
You think it's weird in Iowa? Try Wisconsin! Literally every state it touches now has legal weed except for the tiny bit of Iowa we touch in the corner. Illinois, Minnesota, Michigan. All now have legal weed. But I still see the news reports in Wisconsin about "criminals" being caught with weed. It's insane.
This is complete speculation, but I wonder if the less common inverted title (eg Lake Michigan, River Thames, etc) comes from English's French influence. In French they usually invert the title in this way. For example, what we call the Eiffel Tower, they call the Tour Eiffel.
Yeah, I get annoyed at the people acting like this place is perfectly fine as it is. It isn't. It lacks content. It has repetitive posts. And as far as I'm concerned, growth will iron out those problems over time. It doesn't need to be all at once, but I am looking forward to it. 60k active monthly users is nothing. Reddit has 450 million active users. It's hard to overstate how much larger Reddit is. Even if you're a hipster opposed to Lemmy growing to a Reddit size, it isn't even remotely close to being that large yet. And as far as I'm concerned it still hasn't reached the mass it needs to turn it into a super engaging community just yet. I'm rooting for it to become more engaging and I'm doing everything I can to increase that engagement, but we really don't need the smug in denial "it's perfect right now" attitude.
I don't think this is all that dissimilar from how Reddit was though if you were subscribed to two world news subreddits and two technology subreddits. I think the key is picking out the more popular communities and only subscribing to those. Eventually the goal would be for the less popular communities to fizzle out in favor of bigger communities.
All it's going to take is one scandal for these bullshit bills to cause overwhelming outrage that'll lead to lost elections. These old fucks are so out of touch with modern tech. It's a joke that they're in charge of regulating things like encryption. I can't wait until a generation of people that grew up with the internet ages into these legislative positions.
I think that's true for Reddit because Huffman hasn't done anything dramatic enough to lose the base yet unfortunately. But I think Twitter's base has been melting away. Hard to say because only Musk has the numbers. But with Threads out there now with millions of users and Mastodon having over a million users, the disillusionment with Twitter is much more clearly shown.
It's funny you say that because that's exactly where my mind went too. A system with elections, but a class of officials that exist outside of that system and that can overrule it and can't be touched by it.
I think the best part is that an "X" in the top corner of a website is a well known sign to close a page. Like, I need to fight the urge to click it to exit out. Beyond that, how the fuck are you even supposed to search anything about it? X is such an ambiguous name. I don't know why the fuck Musk spent billions on Twitter just to completely rebrand the IP into something so utterly idiotic. Considering his destruction of the platform and firing of most of the staff that maintained it, I would have thought the one thing of value he still had left was name recognition and major cultural ownership of words like "tweet". I can hardly believe that a decade ago I thought Musk was a genius and I dreamed of working for SpaceX (a dream that faded as soon as I saw employee reviews thank God). Now it's clear that the man has no idea how to run a small business let alone something as big as Twitter.
I most recently encountered this fact from the game, Stray! You know, the recent game with the cat and all the robots. Apparently their city design was heavily inspired by the Kowloon Walled City.
This is genuinely quite a scary belief coming from a SCOTUS justice. In effect he is saying that the SCOTUS is the only institution in the US that is completely untouchable by legislation. That elevates the SCOTUS to a level beyond any other government position. Effectively our benevolent overlords. Given how low of approval ratings that the SCOTUS has, their recent series of ideological activist decisions, and the fact that they aren't even elected positions, I find myself increasingly in support of a fundamental redefinition of the SCOTUS as we know it. I don't see why we shouldn't stack the SCOTUS when they've fundamentally abandoned their duty to any level of fairness or responsibility for the citizens of the US.
That's a common glitch on Lemmy right now. Subscribing to communities oftentimes gives you that message, but as far as I'm aware they'll still show up in your feed like normal. I've heard if you click subscribe and then let it sit for a while it can resolve itself to show you as fully subscribed, but I haven't had much luck with that.
Well, for context, Mastodon has around 1.5 million monthly active users. Twitter/Reddit are around 450 million monthly active users. You can enjoy Lemmy's small size but also see that at 60k monthly active users it hasn't even reached a size comparable to many other famous small sized forums. I don't know what N is. I personally think the Fediverse should be the replacement for corporate social media and that social media can be essential in how information spreads through society. It can decide elections. It can shift society's views on issues. I think it does us a disservice to go the hipster route and cling to our small niche thing and resist growth. The beauty of Lemmy is that there will always be small communities regardless. Anyone who wants a small community need only defederate from the big servers and stick to a small, niche server.
Gray @ Gray @lemmy.ca Posts 2Comments 112Joined 2 yr. ago
From what I understand, some degree of nuclear power is always going to be necessary. This is because while we tend to think of excess power in the energy grid as being stored away, this in fact is not the case and we only use power as it's actively available. Excess power is wasted. The major downside of renewables is that they're circumstancial. Solar energy is only available during clear days, wind power is only available on windy days, etc. Until we massively improve our energy storage capabilities we're going to need some kind of constant supply of power backing the other ones when they aren't available. Without adequate nuclear energy available, that's going to be fossil fuels. And when compared to coal, oil, and natural gas, nuclear energy is unbelievably better for the environment. The only byproduct is the spent fuel which is dangerous, but we have control over where it ends up which is more than can be said for fossil fuels.