• 0 Posts
  • 9 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
cake
Cake day: August 1st, 2023

help-circle
  • Saying “maybe people are the problem” is reductive and unhelpful. But I agree with you broadly, religion is just a system or a tool, it can be used for good or evil.

    To judge if religion is a good system or a bad one, we can use a cost benefit analysis. This is what we have been attempting to do in this thread.

    But when it comes to sensitive subjects like religion, many people have a tendency to avoid, overlook, and deny the associated costs.


  • Anti-science, misogyny, etc may be bad independently of religion, but they aren’t independent of religion. Religion is a source of these problems.

    You can imagine a hypothetical religion that is simply a “social club” or whatever, but here in the real world religion comes with baggage.

    Religion is why my cousin’s children have never seen a doctor in their life. Religion is why my gay friend in high school tried to kill himself. Religious indoctrination has led to lifelong shame and trauma in many of my friends.

    And this was just from a “moderate” sect of Christianity- the millions living under fundamentalist religion have it even worse.




  • If we “all agree” and do a moonshot construction plan we could have electricity in 8 years. This is a fantasy, tho.

    Best case scenario in the real world is operational in 12 years.

    In the capitalist hellscape here in the US, a reasonable expectation would be 18-20 years.

    20 years also happens to be the lifespan of our wind turbines. In 20 years, all of the currently running wind turbine blades will be in a landfill and new ones will need to be manufactured to replace them.

    No reasonable person is suggesting nuclear as a short-term option. It’s a long term investment.


  • Are solar and wind really “clean” energy? Everyone in this thread seems to ignore the costs of these methods.

    Every modern wind turbine requires 60 gallons of highly synthetic oil to function, and it needs to be changed every 6 months. That’s a lot of fossil fuel use.

    Lithium mining for batteries is extremely destructive to the environment.

    Production of solar panels burns lots of fuel and produces many heavy metals. Just like with nuclear waste, improper disposal of these toxic elements can be devastating to the environment.

    Of course, solar and wind are a big improvement over coal and natural gas. I dont want the perfect to be the enemy of the good, I just want to be realistic about the downfalls of these methods.

    I believe, with our current technology, that nuclear is our cleanest and greenest option.




  • A huge round of layoffs as he pushes for a $56 billion dollar pay package is no surprise.

    Theres this conflict of interest when a person only gets paid in giant stock options. His job isn’t to make cars or manage a profitable business, his job is stock market manipulation.

    And the pro-business, deregulatory financial hellscape we all inhabit makes his job very easy.