His mom was (she was from Scotland where the national church is Presbyterian) and she took him to a PCUSA church in Queens while he was growing up. Whereas his dad having German background was a Lutheran. In a 2020 interview he said he had swapped to be non-denominational Christian now though.
Aw thanks, that’s kind of you to say. =) I am still relatively new to Lemmy and didn’t even know it was possible to make custom tags for users so I’d also like to say thanks for broadcasting out neat info!
That’s not PCUSA doing that? They’re not even in the same organization with each other. PCUSA is a part of the World Communion of Reformed Fellowships while that Uganda church you linked is with churches more like PCA in the competing far more conservative World Reformed Fellowship.
edit: for the other links, the Lord’s Resistance Army seems to be some religious mishmash that doesn’t even seem to be affiliated with any established denomination, like they’re not even claiming to be any kind of Presbyterian conservative or otherwise? And on the anti-Homosexuality Act that is opposed by PCUSA on their own website.
https://pcusa.org/sites/default/files/TheGlobalCrisisforPeopleWhoAreLGBTandTheirFamilies.pdf
https://pcusa.org/news-storytelling/news/2021/6/17/refugee-and-lgbtqia-lives-intersect-every-day
Will consider for the future but in all honesty probably forget
Can you point out or link for us what specifically PCUSA (and not some other conservative denomination) is doing that is bad in Uganda?
As an example is what I intended, as there are other right-leaning Presbyterian alternatives than PCA such as Orthodox Presbyterian Church and Bible Presbyterian Church and so on so forth so I didn’t want to spell out PCA as the only one.
PCUSA and other mainline Protestant churches (ex. United Methodists, Evangelical Lutherans, Episcopalians, United Church of Christ etc.) are fairly resistlib coded and have protested or rebuked Trump and his policies many many times through his presidencies. It comes at a cost because they’ve been hemorrhaging conservative leaning people offended by their positions on immigration abortion social justice etc. to conservative alternatives (ex. PCA rather than PCUSA) or to new and growing churches in the “Evangelical” movement, and don’t get replaced because people more on the left are more likely leave the faith entirely than to go to a left-leaning church. But they still do protests and whatnot anyway, you just don’t hear much of them because their share of the population is much lower and less loud than the very vocal Evangelical section.
From the article this seems less like opening a full-on front in conception and more like a teehee wow our drone seems to have gotten turned around and flew into a substation sort of provocation. An unambiguous invasion will activate more or less everyone but relatively piddly incursions don’t typically excite as much of the population because many away from the area tend to see the cost of war as worse than the cost of tolerating those incursions. So ironically a well-calibrated attack in this gray zone kind of way that falls just short of the line can actually divide people in the victim country rather than unite them, and if a particular sort of incursion is tolerated once then it’s not a far step for Russia to keep spamming that out and take advantage of the additional flexibility. I think that the former is more of the goal because there is a burgeoning division in Polish society on aiding Ukraine or not that Russia is trying to make as wide as possible, things get much more dire for Ukraine if Polish help is cut.
Every once in a while Russia does screw up with where the line is (ex. when Turkey blew up a jet they were flying over Turkish territory) but even in that case where they did get a vigorous response they kind of won anyway because it drove a big wedge between Turkey and the rest of NATO. Then isolated and threatened-feeling Turkey sought to improve relations with Moscow and among other things actually started officially allowing Russian jets to fly over their territory to Syria, up until the invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Funnily you very rarely see the Sacagawea dollar coins in circulation the US (albeit more than the $2 billion) but we ship a massive number of those dollar coins overseas to Ecuador which officially uses USD. Incredibly common since many expenses there are in the couple dollars sort of range and you barely see $1 bills at all since many people refuse to accept worn-out bills.
Probably install robust and efficient A/C in public spaces capable of handling many people so they have somewhere safe to go if they can’t afford it on their own, better post the dangers of unsupervised waters, and so on. It’s also easy to grow complacent later in the year as it gets cooler and think this was just a freak accident but probably something at least as bad as this will be back soon so don’t let up and when less people are interested in the colder months is a good time to keep installing but more cost-effectively and with less delays.
The US sanctions and airstrikes ISIS in West Africa
Definitely the top priority in a country being eaten up by ISIS
I dunno for tomatoes specifically because I don’t grow them but there are other considerations at play than growing zone. Plants have wildly different needs for light, moisture, how well the soil drains, soil pH and more. For example blueberries need acidic leaning soil and will die if their soil is too basic since they can’t get nutrients or their soil gets too waterlogged they are attacked by fungus because they’re adapted to well-draining acidic soils. Some plants need fertilization to continue thriving but carnivorous pitcher plants will get burned by the excess nitrogen and will also fare terribly in non-moist soil. I’d assume that, since NM has very hot and dry weather and basic soils, at least one or more of those trips up tomatoes.
That’s likely true for the rescue operations not being established in time but I think the “even worse” in the title is referring to this part:
The government deployed the military to the disaster areas not to help but to diffuse any expression of public discontent. “Here there are more rifles than shovels,” a volunteer reportedly shouted in despair. Civil-society groups pleaded for the government to unblock access to social media and censored news outlets, even if only temporarily, so that people could get information. Instead, Rodríguez announced that local and international journalists would be subjected to further restrictions.
This is so tiresome
No one changes minds on the internet but I like to yap so w/e though I did almost drop when my draft got wiped.
In my opinion, this is the waving away bit I referred to earlier. Europe doesn’t have a “middle of nowhere.” There is no such thing as a “secure location.” There is at best one with slightly reduced risks. There are people spread out everywhere, you’re going to end up in somebody’s backyard who doesn’t want it there. You need to be very careful that this stuff doesn’t escape its container and seep into groundwater. And this needs not to happen for a minimum of a century. You’re not breathing in the fumes constantly, sure. That’s why it’s better than a coal plant. You’re risking radiation leakages over a very long time for future generations, should we survive this as a species. It’s human hubris to say we can engineer around this threat on a scale of centuries.
Lower populations are fine and plenty of undesirable villages are depopulating as young folks move to the cities and pensioners shuffle off this coil. Find one with an agreeable populace (not as hard as you think, many communities actually try to be selected for waste disposal projects and try to promote their site over others), no seismic activity of importance for a geologically sustained period of time, and impermeable clay soil far below any important aquifer. Place it there with compacted bentonite clay or similar as a liner. Insanely low hydraulic conductivity (~10^-13 m/s) through the torturous paths in the clay which also simultaneously has a strongly adsorbent effect where the solute gets scrubbed out by the clay while the water is on its long journey out means even if the cans fail and a substantial amount of material gets out it won’t be going far… not enough moving aggressively enough to impact hundreds of feet above. As it happens there was already a trial run done by Mother Nature billions of years ago in the natural nuclear reactors of Oklo, Gabon and it turned out that the fission products didn’t get very far at all even with less than ideal materials.
A significant number of inland plants are built close to rivers for the perceived ease of getting the water. We just need one of them to fail unexpectedly to have a big problem. I’m not sure using groundwater for cooling is a great idea for much the same reasons as it isn’t for data centers. We need to manage our water resources, especially drinking water, as Europe heats up. We need to plan for a time when there is no “surplus water.” And damming up rivers is expensive and the benefits of that to the environment are limited. If we go to these lengths to preserve a nuclear fission plant we might as well built a solar farm and a wind farm.
It’s a rare river that suddenly deletes itself with no forewarning of reduction in flow but anyway the amount of water needed for sustained cooling of fuel pools is substantially lower than that needed to support active operation at full power so if the river reroutes itself entirely or whatever you have in mind then you can scram to shut the plant down. Then your remaining needs can be handled by onsite water storage which is mandated by the regulator along with alternate flexible means of getting the water into the pools such as using firehoses. I’ve seen a site that pumped groundwater to cool the reactor and there was no concern of depletion because it was near a water source that left it constantly charged, even excessively so to the point that flooding would regularly render some of the pump stations inaccessible except by boat in the wetter seasons of the year. I was not getting at building a dam to save a nuke plant but rather pointing out that there are many different designs that can handle different environmental conditions so having hot and low flow rivers does not entirely cancel the prospects for nuclear power entirely even if some specific sites are rendered uneconomical and IF it is worth it perhaps alternatives may exist for a particular site like extending storage ponds and tanks to ride out irregularities in weather and river flow. It’s a good idea to have a mixed power grid that’s not overly reliant on one or two elements subject to shocks.
I understand that emissions-wise nuclear fission is a great way to avoid those and it thus beats burning fossils. It’s still more of a “the plague or cholera?” kind of choice between them. If everything around nuclear power plants is that great and nothing to worry about, why Three Mile, Chernobyl, and Fukushima? It’s the hubris of we’ve got forces much more powerful than us under control. Until we don’t. We’ve thought of everything! Until we find out we didn’t. You put all of this together and that’s why I think fission is a stop gap technology we should phase out completely - drastically, at the very least.
The halt on nuclear but continuing energy demand resulted in continued massive rollout of fossil fuels with all their attending health consequences and the cøimate crisis. Nuclear is right at the bottom of deaths per MW produced between solar and wind. Hydro and the natural gas are two orders of magnitude higher and coal is yet another. If people think that for their area nuclear is prudent and can convince and live up to the standards of the regulator then I see no reason to stand in their way and tell them no such that they build some way deadlier energy source. A lot of expansion is happening for nuclear, much more for solar, and I see both of those developments as really really good if they are preventing something worse like gas from coming online. For what it’s worth ithe worst of the three accidents you mentioned is not physically possible in western reactors which have a negative void coefficient of reactivity whereas Chernobyl had a positive one. In the Chernobyl reactor graphite was the moderator (slows down neutrons to a speed where they will actually interact with the fuel) and water was the coolant whereas in western reactors water is both the coolant and moderator. So at Chernobyl the water wasn’t as good at moderating as the graphite and actually acted as a neutron absorber that ate up neutrons without contributing to fission reactions. So when they heated up, the water expanded and became less good at absorbing which meant less neutrons got consumed so more flew on into the graphite to get moderated and could cause fissions which made more power which boiled more water to repeat the cycle and that’s how you got a runaway reaction at a plant that also didn’t even have a containment. In western reactors since the water is the moderator if it expands from heating then it also becomes worse at slowing down the neutrons because more are sailing through and not slowing down to interact with the fuel. So this limits how high you can get the power much more sharply, plus we have containments to keep the material there even if the vessel loses its integrity. This is part of why the deaths and radioactive releases are insanely less for the other two combined vs. Chernobyl. Those events changed how nuclear does business and inaugurated WANO and comprehensive sharing of operating experience and strategies on safely operating plants, including on beyond design basis accidents in the wake of the unprecedented earthquake and tsunami combo that took out Fukushima. Honestly for mostly safe but occasionally punctuated with insanely deadly and/or displacing tragedies hydro should be considered as scarier than nuclear, meanwhile fossil fuels are just slowly killing people everywhere to general shrugs.
Yeah ancestral plants that became many crops look almost nothing like their descendants in many cases
The funniest I think are secondary crops like oats and rye. Our forebears weren’t even trying to grow a better version of those, those started off as just weeds that people were trying to get rid of in their wheatfields. In the course of purging them they accidentally selected for more wheat-like plants that people would be less likely to rip out until they became actual decent crops on their own, while also maintaining hardiness in areas that wheat couldn’t handle such that they spun off and became popular on their own rights.
Sounds like they should deliver reciprocal gifts to more refineries
It creates highly toxic waste products that nobody wants to keep stored for centuries in their backyard, just not a lot of CO2. That gets waved away a lot like it isn’t an issue. It’s better than burning gas, oil, or coal. It’s not better than renewables in my opinion. And nuclear needs a reliable cooling chain for its survival and all the people unfortunate enough to live close by. That’s normally done with water that happens to flow by the plant. If the increasing heat dries out these rivers, you’ll get a slightly more stretched out version of Fukushima.
It’s a very small amount that can be contained in secure casks and concentrated in a particular secure location in the middle of nowhere as opposed to other industrial wastes that are blasted out into the environment and our lungs.
You do need cooling water to keep a plant operational at full power by ensuring your condenser can handle all the steam coming in. If it can’t due to declining river volume then the operators must reduce power (thus making less steam which needs less condensing), if they for whatever reason were not paying attention to the alarms going off then their plant would automatically shut down for loss of condenser vacuum and restore that margin by itself. You don’t have to use rivers as the source of cooling for every nuclear reactor either though some existing ones are designed that way. You can source water from oceans, lakes, groundwater, heck you can make artificial bodies of water that are filled with surplus water and can be used in times of diminished water from whatever is used to feed them, etc.
A ton of Instagram content is designed to amp up your insecurities and then sell you some course or whatever… lots of goofy activities going on like influencers banding together to rent massive houses and nice cars as the backdrop for some video about how they’re gajillionaires at 20 and you can be too if you just buy their course 🙄. And as you said for the real people on there who aren’t influencers there is a bias towards generally wanting to post the things that put themselves in the best light.
I only use Instagram these days when an old pal sends me a reel, the influencer to friend ratio is too high nowadays for my taste