This is what I always think about when lawmakers take punitive measures against homelessness and drug addiction, or higher theft/property crimes, as though it isn’t abundantly clear why all of those things have increased.
San Francisco wants to drug test people applying for welfare
Now do Dramamine
I feel like the second thing often has to do with the first thing
Lithium mining is not good for the environment.
I am so sick of seeing our deserts destroyed, as though it’s somehow “empty” land. There are a million square miles of parking lots and building roofs in this country that we could cover with these things, and yet we would rather destroy ecosystems that are already delicate and millions of years old, with species that don’t exist anywhere else in the world. And then call it “green” while we do it. All of this because the government can’t be bothered to deal with (read: compensate) private property owners to cover their parking lots and roofs with solar.
They can say they’ll stay away from “sensitive resources” all they want, but that’s proven to be false in the past, so why should we believe them now? They’re only putting them within ten miles of existing transmission lines - next time, it will be within ten miles of the ones they’re building now, and so on until there’s nothing left. The sad part is that this comment will be immediately taken as being against solar and renewables, when it’s actually against destroying more of our untouched land and history for profit.
There’s already tons of solar fields and wind fields in the desert. Now they’re starting to open up old gold mines and create new ones, in the Sierras as well as the desert. Look at Grass Valley and Nevada City, where not a single resident wants some giant mining company threatening their town and their rivers, but apparently they don’t get a say about their own homes. Joshua trees have been destroyed by fires caused by climate change, and none of us will see them grow back in our lifetimes. They’ve destroyed important historical sites like the petroglyphs at China Lake and display fake ones for tourists. They’ve built Las Vegas nearly up to the edge of Red Rocks and there’s ugly mansions popping up on the way to Mt Charleston. They’re building a train straight through some of the last open desert in California east of San Diego and through the agricultural region of San Joaquin valley. They’re “cleaning up” the Salton Sea, but of course you can’t just trust that they’re not going to fill the area with McMansions after that so they can expand the tourist dollars of Palm Springs. They’re turning the western terminus of the original transcontinental railroad into a fucking strip mall called The Railyards and putting a farmer’s market in the old Southern Pacific buildings. Some Silicon Valley douchebags are building a “utopia” in the middle of the wetlands east of SF, destroying the ecosystems and birds’ migratory pattens that the region has tried so hard to protect.
In the next fifty years, there will not be any open land left in the US unless it is a lucrative tourist attraction like Yosemite. There is already hardly anywhere on the SoCal coast that doesn’t cost $20 to get near it, and half of it is private property when private beaches are supposedly illegal in California. Ironically, the last piece of wild coastline in OC is owned by the military. It’s just a blatant “fuck you” to our country’s wilderness, ecosystems, and history, and especially, it seems, to the American Southwest.
There’s a station in Orange County they just shut down after it sat there unused for however many years. They already bury nuclear waste in the Arizona desert, they can’t act like that’s somehow off limits when they’re willing to destroy the rest of the desert with solar panels, wind farms, and lithium mines. It’s bullshit that the American desert is viewed as being empty and without value, unless it’s pretty enough to charge tourists and entry fee. There’s zero excuse for destroying what little we have left of our open land in the US. It will be completely gone before we even have time to realize it.
Why are these solar panels not going on top of buildings? On parking lots and parking garages? We never seem to have a problem finding more room for those? I know the answer is that it will cost more and they would need some kind of rights from the property owners. That’s still not an excuse to destroy the land, the ecosystems, and the species that live there. It’s fucking disgusting, soulless, and short sighted. Teddy Roosevelt is rolling in his grave.
Scientology seems to get away with it fairly often. And all those holy roller type christian churches bringing conservative politics into their services despite their tax exempt status. But this is where we draw the line - keeping people from dying of hypothermia.
I thought the church was in Wisconsin and didn’t get where Ohio came in. The church and pastor are in Ohio, but the author is making a connection to the recent hypothermia deaths in Milwaukee.
They already don’t have rights, but the laws are different from city to city. In some places they can’t be fed in public and people get arrested for giving them food. They can’t be on the sidewalk. They’re obviously not allowed to fall asleep as long as they’re unhoused. Plus parking restrictions created specifically to prevent car camping. Taking trash from dumpsters is considered theft. You can’t use a restroom without buying something and cities have taken out all or most public bathrooms, so it becomes a crime just to relieve themselves. Idk, the list is pretty endless.
The irony in this comment
That’s literally what addiction does to people. It makes them unrecognizable. That doesn’t excuse it, but it’s just the way addiction works. So many comments deriding this person’s intelligence when it has zero to do with that.
This is why addiction treatment and social services are so shitty in the US. People are so ready to insult others before trying to understand them, yet the solution to things like this require exactly that understanding. It’s like homelessness and NIMBYs. If they’re so concerned about the homeless encroaching on their property values, then they should take action to reduce its causes. But instead they’d rather blame, shame, and…expect them to disappear into thin air apparently.
Users inject with tap water all the time, it is super rare for the tap water to be the reason for infection and other medical complications
wonder how the hell this nurse got her license. You can’t be THAT stupid
Addiction changes people until they don’t even recognize themselves. It has nothing to do with smart vs stupid. They were obviously smart and competent enough to be given a license. It’s just that the person who did this doesn’t even resemble the person who got their nursing license anymore. If they’re able to get sober someday, they’ll be horrified at having to live with this the rest of their life.
There’s a reason addiction is considered a disease. The problem is when people mistake this explanation as an excuse for the things people do while in their addictions. It doesn’t excuse it. I just wish more people would make an effort to understand how addiction actually works because if we made any effort as a society instead of constantly playing the bootstrap/blame game, we could deal with it more effectively and prevent shit like this.
Also I don’t know anything about what’s in tap water, but when addicts use IV drugs that’s pretty much what they’re mixed with. Obviously there’s a lot of infections in that population, but also people who do it every day without tap water killing them.
If it’s at all profitable it will end up being companies making up a bunch of new personas eventually. That might be good in that it’s more jobs per “influencer,” but also maybe lower paying.
Although I’m pretty sure this already happened with fake Instagram models and I don’t think it ever really went anywhere. It was just a novel thing for awhile.
The new generation of “clean your plate, there’s starving children in Africa.”
Saying “don’t complain because someone else has it worse” is the worst form of bad faith, uneducated argument. You’re the problem.
You should consider going back to college. Or just going to college. Or just reading a single book.
Temecula is a shitshow, partly from all the recent construction. But it already has 5 lanes, and even more once you get to the 215 split. I never even see anyone on the toll roads (by comparison to the main freeway) south of Temecula, so if that’s what they’re putting in, maybe they should charge less if they actually expect people to use them.