State of the Discussion

Seems like water turbines do not need much lithium or cobalt.

Turbines need steel, zinc, iron, and copper for the main structure and wiring. Rare earth elements are also needed for the magnets in turbine generators.

The same thing that #MeToo had to do with it.

In theory, it wasn't sex-negative but abuse negative and fought *VERY* hard against abuses large and small up to and including those of Al Franken.

In practice, it resulted in Al Franken resigning and all sorts of weird cultural eddies. I mean, you've witnessed the last decade or so, right?

We've seem to come a long way from trying to get justice for Jackie Coakley.

It's certainly not an endorsement of Moira Donegan's playbook.

Was Al Franken considered a victory?

To be perfectly honest, I think that he represents a fairly important victory for #MeToo but I have argued against people who see it as an excess. Something to the effect of "We shouldn't be leaning on #MeToo if all it does is result in people like Al Franken, Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, Jeffrey Epstein, and Andrew Cuomo either going to jail or getting their charges dropped or having to resign or whatever weird thing happened with Bill Cosby that still isn't exactly clear."

Remember The Crappy Media Men's list? Moira Donegan paid out a six-figure settlement over that thing.

In any case, Hogg's statement strikes me as being, at least!, a pivot away from the #MeToo actual energy of 8 short years ago (while allowing that the theoretical energy that anybody would defend was a needed corrective for the time).

Slowly working my way through Shadow of the Tomb Raider, the last installment of the TR reboot -- I picked it up for five bucks a while back and finally had a bit of time to play it. It has its issues around story & lack of novelty and lack of action (at some point I stopped bothering with all the weapon upgrades, because there hasn't been enough fighting to need more than the basics), but the scenery is pretty and the challenge tombs are good.

They are. One of the frustrating things about the I/P conflict conversations is the tendency of Pro-Palestinian Westerners to just see the conflict in ethnic terms and ignore the religious angle. They can't get beyond the White vs. Color framing.

That used to be true, but the machine is sputtering pretty hard in the era of social media. Especially with Democratic Party approval numbers south of 40%, a promising Dem politician nowadays will probably have better personal success if they visibly buck the establishment and trumpet it on the socials rather than toeing the line.

In 2024, an additional 38 GWh of grid-scale battery storage was deployed in the US. Almost all of that was lithium-ion. The biggest battery manufacturers look ready to start switching to sodium-ion for grid applications: it's safer, cheaper, uses less scarce materials, operates well over a wider temperature range, and the modest weight penalty doesn't matter.

Alawites and Christians are being massacred in Syria by Islamists. This is why Israeli Jews aren't up for completely dismantling Israel and replacing it with a one state solution:

https://www.europarl.europa.eu/doceo/document/P-10-2025-001051_EN.html

" I have no idea what you’re even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely ‘a state of matter’ and thus is not inherently dangerous."

please tell me that you are not attempting to have a conversation about air-travel security without being aware of the basic facts regarding threats to air travel

a criticism of “you’re not strict enough to actually find all the things” is not an argument against attempting to find all the things.

'The methods you are using cannot possible product the outcomes that need to have happen if your purpose was real, but it is not' is, indeed, a pretty good argument against funding a part of the government that is incredibly invasive.

2) the things the TSA actually does effectively filter for – articles hidden in shoes, liquids in quantity – actually could substantially affect an aircraft in a term short enough to be relevant.

The TSA is not 'effectively filtering liquids in quantity' at all, mostly because of the incredibly obvious fact that multiple people can just carry liquids through and put them together on the other side. You don't even have to cheat!

Meanwhile, cheating is trivial. You can get much larger amounts of liquids (Which you can then combine to make even more) just by signing a doctor's note that they are medically required, which is trivial. I recommend insulin so they won't check it...

...granted, I have no idea what you're even trying to smuggle past security because liquid is merely 'a state of matter' and thus is not inherently dangerous.

As for shoes, firstly, we do not screen quite a lot of people's shoes to start with. Secondly, there are quite a few ways to alter things to hide 10 ounces of plastic explosives such that they would be undetected by x-ray machines. If we actually wish to stop that, we need to do better nitrate detection, including airborne.

That actually _would_ be something useful for airport security, but we don't do useful things, we do stupid things that assume that attackers are going to use literally, word-for-word, the same attack as last time.

Credit where it's due, I think he handled that quite well. Might be too little too late for him but no harm in a force for figuring this stuff out within the larger coalition.

Part of the challenge for Hogg personally might be that... well he's kind of a weener. He's also glued to one of those cultural issues that polls in ways that I think one has to conclude are kind of misleading and anyway aren't a priority.

However if he wants to start saying what has often been unsayable, maybe start making doing so contagious, I'm all for it.

Gotta agree with the duck here. Also, any time you're working with anything that involves the ocean you're talking about an undertaking that will have massive corrosion/wear/weather problems even under the best of circumstances. Salt water is extremely unkind to most materials.

The right has plenty of anti-Semitism of it’s own that it hides up.

It has small hate groups which identify as Right. What does it have at an institutional level?

The problem with left anti-Semitism for the Democratic Party and mainstream liberals is that most of it comes from forces outside the Democratic Party.

We are currently trying to remove anti-Semitism from college policies and administration. How did "outside forces" create that? My strong impression is the Left faction which views the world as "white oppressors vs black victims" has decided Jews are white and therefore should be thrown under the bus in the Palestinian conflict(s).

That’s your spin on their spin on an amendment that won’t pass.

NOW is one of the strongest supporters of the ERA, from the very beginning. And it doesn't matter if it has not chance of passing, we're not talking about what has a chance of passing, we're talking about 'what feminist organizations want'. NOW, extremely clearly, wants the ERA passed. That has been the position of NOW _always_.

And the ERA would not allow, or at least create a very _very_ high bar, to women's sport existing.

Basically, under the ERA, the government would have to prove there is a compelling government interest to having competitive sports at all, (Which is not clear to start with. Athletics, yes but that doesn't mean sports), _and_ also prove that the only way to fill that need would be gender segregated sports, as opposed to just having sports that do not need gender segregation.

And 'men do better' is not going to fly there, there'd have to be _actual safety concerns_...and there would have to be a reason that universities could not just switch to sports without those safety concerns to do whatever the government said they were trying to do with sports.

This, literally, what the ERA would do, it is what it is intended to do, to move 'laws based on sex' up the same level as 'laws based on race'. This is not actually confusing.

Hell, the entire reason the ERA didn't pass (At least, some people say it didn't.) is that the people opposing it pointed literally this out. Not about sports, but about _restrooms_. The Federal and state governments would literally not be allowed to have sex segregated restrooms under the law unless they could meet a pretty high bar...which, for the record, they maybe could meet with restrooms (by lying about safety), but with sports, they'd also have to prove the sport needed to exist _at all_, that there wasn't some other way off accomplishing whatever compelling government interest was there. (At least with restrooms, you can sorta start with the idea that government restrooms are needed.)

So I find your response incredibly silly. Yes, NOW, a major (Arguably, the leading-mainstream) feminist organization want to remove women's sports. Or, more accurately, remove the sex segregation of sports. Even if they are not particularly open about it.

I'm not entirely sure that you want to mix the whole "antisemitism" thing with the "antiapartheid" thing.

Like, that is not proverbial chocolate that you want to get in your proverbial peanut butter.

In this case I am referring to Elon but thanks for trolling.

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
― Jean-Paul Sartre

(might want to check your sources on that one)

(i know, i know, it's too juicy to wait, it's too moist flaky tasty-shortbread smooth-mouthfeel delicious to wait, it just feels so good to be First)