FedPosterman5000

Umm if amerikkkans want to blow up dams effectively they should start practicing at home - maybe start with your local low-head dam and go from there? Who’s got the money to fix them if they were to be damaged irreparably? 🤷‍♂️

Private engineering firms are just there to eat the blame when making “tough decisions”, since they have neither ties to the community nor an obligation to its members. Federal engineering studies are obligated to consider a range of decisions and utilize standards, private studies just need to say what you want them to and then provide enough backing to justify it in permitting. Therefore our system of austerity and kickbacks greatly favors one over the other.

For sure. New Orleans is a privatized nightmare in terms of engineering and construction - cranking out dogshit studies with no correction since the CPRA is just as useless, and everything in the pockets of the local levee districts, glorified chambers of commerce but with the authority to define which communities get levees.

At the end of the day, it’s not about protecting any communities (otherwise you wouldn’t build them below sea level….) but rather about protecting oil infrastructure. Hence you see lots of studies that aren’t fiscally justified go forward with poorly defined benefit-cost analyses, and then hardly hold up to scrutiny, except that the local levee districts then rile up their local slop farmer (e g. Sen. Graves (R)-LA) who leans on the federal government to approve it.

I don’t think there have ever been any consequences to this sort of action? But if there are, we’ll all certainly learn from them…

That could also be due to the ocean and atmosphere being a concern for NOAA, and the navy and air force also having people who study ocean and atmosphere, and the us federal government programs which make it easier for former military to enter civil service.

But yes though, anything the US has done in terms of understanding natural processes is invariably linked to using that knowledge to spread violence globally. US develops research to understand littoral drift and beachhead dynamics? Better believe that’s to support beach invasions. US develops underwater drones capable of surveying bathymetry quickly and cheaply? Better believe that’s not going to be used for good.

But yeah NOAA has a commissioned officer section - which admittedly has really cool boats and planes (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_Commissioned_Officer_Corps), as does the US Public Health Service (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Public_Health_Service_Commissioned_Corps).

Frankly if you can grift money from the military to support climate research and public health you have my full support, but remember the piper gets paid in the end…

Thank you, kind robot.

Dent corn specifically - mmm yummy tasty corn genetically modified for optimized biofuel production

Type of guy to run out of the casino with his arms full of chips- I’m rich!!!!

So much mixed emotions around not being diagnosed with any mental health conditions in the 90s - sure I didn’t get treatment and developed coping mechanisms that have taken a decade to undo, but at least I only got bullied for being fat (until I learned the value of punching your way out certain situations)

Still from the new Mars Attacks! prequel looks great

Yeah definitely geared to purge whatever vestiges of “central planning” even occur in the US anymore- this is IMO an area they believe can be 1-to-1 replaced by AI - and with how “planning” currently occurs in the government (with enough guardrails to prevent too much introspection of root causes)- they’re not wrong, it will just be the death of any sort of novel thought (or whatever offends the bourgeoisie) applied to planning.

Imagining the blowback if trump put “the Vatican” on his tariff charts lol. Most Americans probably think “The Vatican” is a specific church, not a country, and would probably start crowing about “attacks on religion”.

Also it’s so fucking annoying that all of the people pearl clutching in fear of shudders drug users in urban areas! shudders - areas that they’ve often never been to.

My family were so surprised to hear how much I loved visiting Portland and San Francisco - and I didn’t even tell them about my favorite part of tourism, carrying around smokes and meeting scary drug users!, who it turns out, are the same as me - but where I had fortunate breaks (either through blind luck (I grew up poor) or privilege (I grew up whitey)), someone decided it was better for society to cast them aside (or treat them with such little compassion that it’s the preferred option). Idk it pisses me off so much.

The best conversation I’ve had in a long time (and this is about talking to a person with a mental disorder, not to imply that he also is a drug user by proxy) was with a guy I’ll call “Lonnie” who was also watching the sun rise over Lake Michigan - he told me all about having schizotypal disorders and how he comes to watch the sun rise every day to try and stay grounded and connected to his grandma - his only living relative who had recently passed - and how it helps with preventing substance abuse.

Anyway my point is, treating people with kindness goes much further than criminalization.

And people wonder why we are so disgusted by the bourgeoisie.