sh00g

Seltzer water 99% of the time. Ski otherwise!

No thanks. One party already does everything it can to disenfranchise voters across the country. I think I’ll stick with the pro-Democracy side of the equation.

To add on to this explanation, the food industry in the US is chock full of fake marketing terms that are designed to get more eco-conscious consumers to fall into their trap. This is a problem across large swathes of the food industry, but one of the most egregious is chicken.

• “No antibiotics” is supposed to mean the chicken was never given antibiotics (shocker, I know). There is no regular methodology for verifying this label is accurate outside of random sampling of poultry at slaughter.
• “No hormones” is a completely useless label you’ll see used all the time. Hormones are not allowed in the production of chickens for slaughter in the US.
• “Cage free” is another tricky one. Chickens are almost never kept in cages when raised for slaughter. Hens are frequently kept in cages for egg-laying purposes. If you see this on chicken breast packaging it probably doesn’t mean anything.
• “Free-range” means the chicken had some kind of access to “outside.” There are no standards for how much “outside” space is required or what that “outside” space has to look like.

So unfortunately a bit more legwork is required to make sure product labeling statements are actually worth something. That’s a problem in the US, but the opposite side of the coin is problematic too (like how many people now attribute “GMO” as meaning “toxic”).

Prayer can be a powerful self meditation tool. It’s effectively a way to organize your thoughts by talking to yourself. What is not helpful is sending “thoughts and prayers” every time something bad happens without actually attempting to do anything to address the problem at hand.

“Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt.” ― William Shakespeare, Measure for Measure

“It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.” ― Captain Jean-Luc Picard

“How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it.” — Marcus Aurelius

One massive point that most people are completely blind to is that with energy considerations we are aggressively pursuing two very different goals that in many regards are directly at odds with one another.

The first goal is electrification, which can largely be accomplished by increasing renewables, investing in battery technology, etc. But in the US, we have also been accommodating the desire for electrification by massively increasing natural gas capacity.

The second goal is decarbonization. This requires us to also nix natural gas from the equation at some point. In addition to the problems others have already mentioned (like the fact that renewables aside from hydro are not viable base load power options right now), there is a significant chunk of our energy infrastructure that simply cannot be satisfied in any regard purely with renewables. Like the huge number of industrial processes that need process heat to achieve their end product.

So the best solution is energy portfolio diversity. We can steadily continue to phase out heavy polluters for electrification, but if we want to truly decarbonize, industry demands a solution that can still produce high heat without emissions. Nuclear is a woefully under-exploited technology in that regard, but it is potentially a great solution.