Great -- just what we don't need: another enormous cruise ship.

I find this hard to believe.

I've seen a lot of videos of people catching on video a close-up lightning strike (like in their backyard) and there's always an enormous, deafening explosion sound when the lightning hits, and you also see it.

In this video there's just a flash in the sky and the two blokes seemingly just lay down with a bellyache.

You asked at least 3 questions and all fo them very much leading questions.

To the first 2, my response is that it's only the extremely fortunate few that have the kind of financial security and freedom to make those adjustments, so lucky for them.

Your last question is:
do those companies get to continue to abdicate their responsibility, pawning it off on their customers?

Your question demands as part of it's base assumption that fossil fuels are inherently immoral or something and customers are clearly the victims. I reject that.

The entirety of the modern western world stands atop the usage of fossil fuels. If we cut ALL fossil fuel usage out tomorrow, mass global starvation would follow within a year, very nasty wars would rapidly follow that.

The massive gains in agricultural production we've seen over the last 100 years is extremely dependent on fossil fuels. Most importantly for efficiency in equipment run on fossil fuels, but also importantly on fertilizers produced by fossil fuels. Alternatives to that over the last 100 years did not exist. If you think Stalin and Mao's mass starvations were ugly, just know that the disruptions they made to agriculture were less severe than the gain/loss represented by fossil fuels.

All that is to state that simply saying don't use them because the future consequences are bad is extremely naive. The amount of future harm you must prove is coming is enormous, and the scientific community as represented by the IPCC hasn't even painted a worst case scenario so catastrophic.

From NYT article https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/03/opinion/sunday/this-is-why-uma-thurman-is-angry.html?referer=https://t.co/3KI4YYryAt?amp=1

In the famous scene where she’s driving the blue convertible to kill Bill — the same one she put on Instagram on Thanksgiving — she was asked to do the driving herself.

But she had been led to believe by a teamster, she says, that the car, which had been reconfigured from a stick shift to an automatic, might not be working that well.

She says she insisted that she didn’t feel comfortable operating the car and would prefer a stunt person to do it. Producers say they do not recall her objecting.

“Quentin came in my trailer and didn’t like to hear no, like any director,” she says. “He was furious because I’d cost them a lot of time. But I was scared. He said: ‘I promise you the car is fine. It’s a straight piece of road.’” He persuaded her to do it, and instructed: “ ‘Hit 40 miles per hour or your hair won’t blow the right way and I’ll make you do it again.’ But that was a deathbox that I was in. The seat wasn’t screwed down properly. It was a sand road and it was not a straight road.” (Tarantino did not respond to requests for comment.)

Thurman then shows me the footage that she says has taken her 15 years to get. “Solving my own Nancy Drew mystery,” she says.

It’s from the point of view of a camera mounted to the back of the Karmann Ghia. It’s frightening to watch Thurman wrestle with the car, as it drifts off the road and smashes into a palm tree, her contorted torso heaving helplessly until crew members appear in the frame to pull her out of the wreckage. Tarantino leans in and Thurman flashes a relieved smile when she realizes that she can briefly stand.

Uma Thurman said she didn't want to drive this car. She said she had been warned that there were issues with it. She felt she had to do it anyway. It took her some 15 years to get footage of the crash. (Note: There is no audio.)
“The steering wheel was at my belly and my legs were jammed under me,” she says. “I felt this searing pain and thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m never going to walk again,’” she says. “When I came back from the hospital in a neck brace with my knees damaged and a large massive egg on my head and a concussion, I wanted to see the car and I was very upset. Quentin and I had an enormous fight, and I accused him of trying to kill me. And he was very angry at that, I guess understandably, because he didn’t feel he had tried to kill me.”

Even though their marriage was spiraling apart, Hawke immediately left the Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky to fly to his wife’s side.

“I approached Quentin in very serious terms and told him that he had let Uma down as a director and as a friend,” he told me. He said he told Tarantino, “Hey, man, she is a great actress, not a stunt driver, and you know that.” Hawke added that the director “was very upset with himself and asked for my forgiveness.”

Two weeks after the crash, after trying to see the car and footage of the incident, she had her lawyer send a letter to Miramax, summarizing the event and reserving the right to sue.

Miramax offered to show her the footage if she signed a document “releasing them of any consequences of my future pain and suffering,” she says. She didn’t.

When I was in Belgium a couple of years ago, I visited a farm where they're still pulling WW1 iron out of the ground on a daily basis. "The Iron Harvest" it's called. Finding WW1 shells is so common that farmers in the area just collect them and put them at the end of their roads for the disposal guys to pick up.

The truly scary part is that somewhere in Belgium, there's about 87,000 kilos of high explosives, which was supposed to be used to blow an enormous hole in the German trenches became lost when the Brits had to fall back. To this day, no one knows where the explosives are. In 1955, lightning hit a similar "lost mine" and pretty much leveled an otherwise dull field of vegetables.

Article about these lost mines here: https://simonjoneshistorian.com/2017/05/01/lost-mines-of-messines/

Well...I tried to like it, and watched the first 4 episodes this winter....one kid pushed off a building was the extent of the violence I recall. After Vikings, I was expecting more.
I told my wife to find me an episode with action, not just drama...she tried starting at season 7, which started well with a mass poisoning (quickly ruined for me with a Mission Impossible style mask removal...WHAT?!), but nothing else. Maybe she just chose poorly, but I still wasn't impressed. I want some blood eagles or better with a minimum of two protracted gruesome deaths or a medium to enormous bloody battle per episode to feel I've gotten satisfactory ultra violence, I wasn't overly impressed with the few sex scenes I've seen either.

I never watched House Of Cards, just wasn't interested in a political drama, I see far more of that than I ever wanted in real life now.
So yeah, I don't think it's for me....that's fine, most popular shows aren't. What I've seen so far was fantasy soap opera more than action. If basic cable can give me semi-historical brutal live organ removals, hundreds of bloody deaths, and three ways, I expect the same or better from premium cable.

It is a ludicrous resolution with pie in the sky hopes. It's the equivalent of passing a non-binding resolution to end all wars or to create a machine to pull water from the air without spending massive amounts of energy.

Not only does it suggest incredibly unrealistic goals on the environmental front, especially when one considers that China/Russia will cheat their fucking asses off to prevent meeting the goals due to the enormous economic hit, it also tries to tie in socialized medical care, high paying jobs for everyone, the death of large corporations, cheap housing, and (among other things) the economic security of ANYONE who is unable/unwilling to work.

While we are at it, we should start looking into breaking the concept into five year increments. I hear that did wonders for the USSR.

I grew up in Amish country in PA and I know for a fact that all of those pesticides that the Amish aren't using (they use them) ended up polluting the Chesapeake Bay in Maryland. General manure runoff is a problem as well.

Regardless, of organic or not - many problems crop up out here in the West in the form of water consumption. Obviously, we don't have much water to spare - but CA is always taking more and more water to grow crops that require enormous amounts of water, like avocados. One avocado takes about 18.5 gallons of water to grow - that said, an average american shower costs about as much a day if it's 8 minutes long (17.5); which I also see as a problem. Not to mention that CA also produces a shit ton of America's beef (#4). 80% of all of CA (which is like a country) water use is agricultural. I just think that CA (it might all burn to the ground anyway) needs to stop supporting the grocery needs of america (spread it out!) and stop wasting so much water that a lot of other states in the west need. It's a whole other Chinatown film that should be created to represent what is going on.

So, after months of issues including plastics both leaving the capture area through the entrance and just going directly under the "curtain", the device has broken catastrophically and was returned to port for repairs today, barely 3 months after deployment. Disappointing.

I'm glad they're trying something, but in reality even working perfectly this device could only clean the ocean surface like a single parking lot vacuum truck could clean and decontaminate the entire mid West. We would need hundreds of thousands of these working 24/7 to make a significant difference, and that would undoubtedly cause new insurmountable problems.

Besides, enormous amounts of plastics have degraded enough that they no longer float at the surface. These devices could never harvest that plastic, and that's the plastic entering the food web at the base, contaminating everything from phytoplankton up.

China has enormous volume and inertia. Even if rich chinese stop getting richer quickly, there will be masses of poor chinese trying to make it out of poverty into the middle classes driving the world economy for decades to come. Unless something unexpected breaks down badly.

A trade war will hurt the US worse and faster, it just has more to lose.

I hate this guy and his channel passionately. He's making tons of youtube bux torturing and killing various animals, primarily rodents. He's one of those "survivalist" wackjobs who has somehow found a enormous audience of people who seem to like watching videos of animals in pain.

And before anyone replies with something utterly moronic like, "dood relax their jus mice okey", I know what they are and I know that they struggle against losing their lives just as earnestly as humans do.

It isn't that enormously clever, this video. Mildly so.

However, I became fascinated at his acting ability.

It isn't easy, being that natural.

This is a great acting reel.

The issues with this....

The cost in energy to pump that water must be enormous. All for what? Does that really impress people? As said above, it would suck to be in any of those offices below, especially after the inevitable failure of the waterproofing.

Ian Malcolm: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should."

Fuuuuuck me...
That guy has enormous balls of steel.

I'm less familiar with American demographics, but I agree with the overall principal. Here in Canada we have IMO an even more severe segregation and unequal opportunity for Aboriginal peoples. It's severe enough up here though that not only are communities segregated by living on reserves with their own separate schools, but we have separate school divisions, and even their reporting and funding lines are different from all other schools.

That adds up to an enormous amount of differential treatment. Replacing that with equal opportunity though is much more desirable than 'waiting' till the school system has already failed kids and then 'lowering the bar' in one way or another to help them get into university.

In Canada I think our supreme court has done as at least 1 disservice greater than you guys though in making race a required consideration in sentencing. The appropriate section of sentencing:
"In sentencing an aboriginal offender, the judge must consider: (a) the unique systemic or background factors which may have played a part in bringing the particular aboriginal offender before the courts; and (b) the types of sentencing procedures and sanctions which may be appropriate in the circumstances for the offender because of his or her particular aboriginal heritage or connection."
The goal is to address the over-representation of aboriginal people in prisons. The effect however, is ultimately discriminatory as well. Before you dismiss the discrimination against whites as ok because it balances things out as is the 'goal', that's not the only affect. Another problem in Canada is the over-representation of Aboriginal peoples as the victims of crime, because most violent crime is between parties that are related. So on the whole crimes committed against Aboriginal people will on average be sentenced more leniently...

Failing to address the real underlying unequal opportunity can't corrected by more inequality later to balance the scales. In Canada, our attempt at it are too lesson the sentencing of people with unequal backgrounds, but the expense of victims that also faced those same unequal backgrounds...

And that 'corrective' inequality is also creating similar resentment amongst white people here too. People don't like their kids not getting into a school of choice potentially because of a race based distinction, but they like it even less to see a crime committed against them treated more leniently because of race.