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Cake day: June 14th, 2023

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  • BIDEN: Fentanyl and the byproducts of fentanyl went down for a while. And I wanted to make sure we use the machinery that can detect fentanyl, these big machines that roll over everything that comes across the border, and it costs a lot of money. That was part of this deal we put together, this bipartisan deal.

    More fentanyl machines, were able to detect drugs, more numbers of agents, more numbers of all the people at the border. And when we had that deal done, he went – he called his Republican colleagues said don’t do it. It’s going to hurt me politically.

    He never argued it’s not a good bill. It’s a really good bill. We need those machines. We need those machines. And we’re coming down very hard in every country in Asia in terms of precursors for fentanyl. And Mexico is working with us to make sure they don’t have the technology to be able to put it together. That’s what we have to do. We need those machines.





  • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.worldtomemes@lemmy.worldgoddamnit
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    24 hours ago

    Even if it wasn’t, you could just convert it to .jpg if you felt strongly about it. Not as though there’s a compatibility issue.

    The complaint people are having is with resizing/manipulation after download. They want these enormous uncompressed files floating around on every website, in the off chance they plan to download it and manipulate it. 99.9% of the web needs to be full of megabyte sized image files for the 0.1% y’all want to play with.



  • Pick less evil each time!

    Part of the problem is that people are sold on these guys as “Less Evil” every time. Clinton was the less-evil replacement for Bush. Bush Jr was the less-evil replacement for Clinton. Obama for Bush. Trump for Obama/Hillary. Biden for Trump. Maybe now Trump for Biden.

    Evil is necessarily subjective, and a great deal of what we see as “evil” varies starkly based on where we’re getting our news and our values. What do you tell to the people who are doggedly convinced a mob of hispanic/arabic/chinese fentanyl fueled rape gangs are charging across the border to steal American children and murder them for their adrenochrome? What do you say to the folks doggedly convinced that the wrong President will bring about a thermo-nuclear holocaust or a dozen new 9/11s? How do you reason with a person who believes Plan B is no different than strangling a baby to death with your own two hands?

    So much of the conversation about “Lesser Evil” is justifying a new and more brutal police state as a defensive measure against some horrifying phantom menace - be it J6 Groypers coming to lynch everyone to the left of Mitt Romney or Chinese TikTok dancers tricking American teenagers into perpetuating a Uyghur genocide.

    When you’ve got Israeli Genocide versus Palestinian Islamic Jihad as your baseline for debate, there’s an endless capacity for evil even in the “Lesser” branch.





  • I just dont see any reason to ever invest into it nowadays, when renewables and batteries have gotten so good.

    Renewables and batteries have their own problems.

    Producing and processing cobalt and lithium under current conditions will mean engaging in large-scale deforestation in some of the last unmolested corners of the planet, producing enormous amounts of toxic waste as part of the refinement process, and then getting these big bricks of lithium (not to mention cadmium, mercury, and lead) that we need to dispose of at the battery’s end of lifecycle.

    Renewables - particularly hydropower, one of the most dense and efficient forms of renewable energy - can deform natural waterways and collapse local ecologies. Solar plants have an enormous geographic footprint. These big wind turbines still need to be produced, maintained, and disposed of with different kinds of plastics, alloys, and battery components.

    Which isn’t even to say these are bad ideas. But everything we do requires an eye towards the long-term lifecycle of the generators and efficient recycling/disposal at their end.

    Nuclear power isn’t any different. If we don’t operate plants with the intention of producing fissile materials, they run a lot cleaner. We can even power grids off of thorium. Molten salt reactors do an excellent job of maximizing the return on release of energy, while minimizing the risk of a meltdown. Our fifth generation nuclear engines can use this technology and the only thing holding us back is ramping it up.

    Unlike modern batteries, nuclear power doesn’t require anywhere near the same amount of cobalt, lithium, nickel and manganese. Uranium is surprisingly cheap and abundant, with seawater yielding a pound of enrichable uranium at the cost of $100-$200 (which then yields electricity under $.10/kwh).

    We can definitely do renewables in a destructive and unsustainable way, recklessly mining and deforesting the plant to churn out single-use batteries. And we can do nuclear power in a responsible and efficient way, recycling fuel and containing the relatively low volume of highly toxic waste.

    But all of that is a consequence of economic policy. Its much less a consequence of choosing which fuel source to use.



  • I would rather see more investment on better renewable tech then relaying on biohazard.

    Modern nuclear energy produces significantly less waste and involves more fuel recycling than the historical predecessors. But these reactors are more expensive to build and run, which means smaller profit margins and longer profit tails.

    Solar and Wind are popular in large part because you can build them up and profit off them quickly in a high-priced electricity market (making Texas’s insanely expensive ERCOT system a popular location for new green development, paradoxically). But nuclear power provides a cheap and clean base load that we’re only able to get from coal and natural gas, atm. If you really want to get off fossil fuels entirely, nuclear is the next logical step.


  • One of the saddest bits of the show was when they kinda just gave up talking about socio-economic issues and made the whole show revolve around Homer being a big dumb-dumb.

    Some of the harshest criticism they had around nuclear power revolved around its privatization and profitization. A bunch of those early episodes amounted to people asking for reasonable and beneficial changes to how the plant was run, then having to fight tooth and nail with the company boss for even moderate reform.


  • Again, I agree, but my comment was about automobiles.

    Nearly 40% of Honda’s automobile production took place in China in the last financial year.

    Honda would continue to keep its supply chain in China for the domestic market in the world’s second-largest economy while building a separate one for markets outside of China, the Sankei said. It did not say where it got the information.

    That’s not “pulling out of China”. That’s a sign of Chinese domestic automobile consumption rising.

    Biden has expanded Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 to include more imports.

    I haven’t seen much to suggest he’s enforcing it. These laws are consistently toothless, in the same way more and more of our regulatory system is toothless.