Prayer can be a powerful self meditation tool. It’s effectively a way to organize your thoughts by talking to yourself. What is not helpful is sending “thoughts and prayers” every time something bad happens without actually attempting to do anything to address the problem at hand.
One massive point that most people are completely blind to is that with energy considerations we are aggressively pursuing two very different goals that in many regards are directly at odds with one another.
The first goal is electrification, which can largely be accomplished by increasing renewables, investing in battery technology, etc. But in the US, we have also been accommodating the desire for electrification by massively increasing natural gas capacity.
The second goal is decarbonization. This requires us to also nix natural gas from the equation at some point. In addition to the problems others have already mentioned (like the fact that renewables aside from hydro are not viable base load power options right now), there is a significant chunk of our energy infrastructure that simply cannot be satisfied in any regard purely with renewables. Like the huge number of industrial processes that need process heat to achieve their end product.
So the best solution is energy portfolio diversity. We can steadily continue to phase out heavy polluters for electrification, but if we want to truly decarbonize, industry demands a solution that can still produce high heat without emissions. Nuclear is a woefully under-exploited technology in that regard, but it is potentially a great solution.
Tabletop games, writing, doing little engineering problems at home, and recently I got into bookbinding to restore old crumbling paperbacks!
Sure. Except “letting them evacuate” in this case is better characterized as “continuing to expel them from their homes under threat of violence.” I’m not arguing the 24 hour time period is the atrocity, I’m arguing the act of creating a humanitarian crisis under the auspices of a military campaign effort is abhorrent.
It’s not like we don’t have any good reporting on the matter either. The BBC for example has already been attacked because they refused to declare Hamas as terrorists (a label I agree with, for the record). [This article](BBC News - Khan Younis: A Gaza city on its knees, now with a million mouths to feed
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-67116403) provides some insight into the absolute horror regular Palestinians are going through right now.
The Hamas attacks were barbaric and horrific. Israel giving 1 million+ people 24 hours to leave or risk being destroyed in a bombing campaign while cutting off access to food, water, and fuel is barbaric and horrific. There is such thing as nuance, but it doesn’t take very much critical thinking to recognize that both Israel and Hamas are commiting atrocities.
Planning and running my homebrew ttrpg campaign. I’ve sunk nearly three years into fleshing out my setting from plate tectonics to modern geopolitics!
This Old Tony, Abom, Tested (mostly just One Day Builds by Adam Savage), Wirtual, Isaac Arthur, CityNerd, Intelligence Squared debates, FloridaMan Diplomacy, Abom79
Yep a theater company in my town recently put on a play dramatizing the closing of the city’s pools. Instead of integrating they filled the pools frequented by white patrons with concrete and the one frequented by black patrons with garbage. It also touched on the fact that the lack of availability for safe public swimming locations has led to needless deaths of hundreds and hundreds of black people who opted to swim in fast moving creeks and waters connected to industrial facilities. All because racists were unwilling to share a body of water with someone with a different color of skin.
For the first few years of my career after college which has a pretty generous 401k company matching scheme I put the maximum amount possible into my retirement accounts and lived well within my means to build up a nest egg. Now that I am married I have dialed back my investments so we can afford to live a little bit nicer with the knowledge that we have a really great start in our retirement accounts.
My wife and I moved in together two years before getting married. This made living substantially cheaper for both of us and made us positive that we wanted to live together and could tolerate each other prior to tying the knot :).
I got a vasectomy mid-last year. My wife and I both agreed long before marriage that we only want to adopt. Adoption is obviously very expensive, but now we have the peace of mind of knowing we have full control over when we start to invest in that process to expand our family. No “accidents” can happen which is very liberating.