Trump was elected. Twice. It was not a fluke, not a once in a lifetime event, he's a symptom of wider processes happening in the US. The world has changed and the old order is not coming back
Trump is one thing but the overall dynamic of similar politicians gaining footholds across the world is what worries me. If everyone is X nation first in the same way, you lose the ability to negotiate with compromises, people want to start expanding their borders and that just escalates into war.
We're already seeing that in a few cases but it just stands to get worse if this carries on.
When the choices are “unlikable person” and “straight up agent of chaos set on destroying the US in every way he can” and you choose the latter, that’s on you.
I think people like trump because the idea of burning it all to the ground and starting over sounds nice. It’s a very simple solution to a very complex problem, and dumb people really gravitate towards that.
Of course they never really considered what “burn it all down” meant. It meant all, nobody is safe. No business is safe.
Half the countries in Europe has their own Trump-equivalent politician heading one of the largest parties, and yet Europeans are imagining it's something happening "in the US" while they sleepwalk into disaster.
Yes, and: these are the same picture. They're all promoted by Russian-backed influencers on US-owned social media, or indigenous US racists. We've got Elon inciting race riots in Belfast now; several people left homeless after they were firebombed out.
I am European and I am all too aware that the trend exists here as well. I am just hoping that a majority will now be able to see what disasters that road can lead to.
Does it matter who is president? The US was spying on European leaders before Trump's first term:
"According to the investigation, which covered the period from 2012 to 2014, the NSA used Danish information cables to spy on senior officials in Sweden, Norway, France and Germany, including former German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and former German opposition leader Peer Steinbrück."
The obvious issue is that the US boycott is making a bad situation worse. You know that is the other person's point, but you are a disingenuous ideologue.
Well if we are going the MAID option then along the path of your idea I suggest all the other burdens go with them. Anyone on welfare, SNAP and similar programs, etc... Anyone part of the recent floods into the country that are also on welfare, especially groups that have brought violent tribal blood feuds. All violent felons that are just going to sit in prison and milk the taxes. All the rioters that cause damages to property. Anyone that has not assimilated to the countries culture. Actually I could make a really long list the more I think about it. This should be a blog write-up. Thank-you for inspiring the ideas.
So today you open a savings account, put money there every month of your life, and in 50 years someone takes it away and gives you a more "reasonable option"?
Would Eurofins be able to set up monitoring on Tesla's property?
What other sources would have similar pollutants to a Lithium factory? It seems pretty specific and if there was some other obvious source why wouldn't Tesla point that out?
Hexavalent chromium can come from many industrial sources, including welding stainless steel. If you go to Tesla's lithium refinery in google maps[1] and follow the drainage ditch along highway 77 (to the northeast) about a half mile, you'll see a company called Tex-Isle Processing. They supply steel pipes and coating services for oil drilling.[2] It could be that one of their manufacturing processes creates hexavalent chromium.
In my opinion there isn't enough information to blame anyone for the slightly-above-drinking-water levels of hexavalent chromium. The drainage ditch goes along a highway and a rail line, so pollution could come from all kinds of places.
The lab tested for chromium in two ways: one test (ICP) measures all chromium of any kind, and the other measures hexavalent chromium specifically. The ICP test returned a concentration that was an order of magnitude smaller than the hexavalent test (0.0003 vs 0.0104 mg/L). That is to say, the tests contradict each other (because the whole is smaller than the part).
But I agree, measuring at the end of the ditch was the wrong thing to do if they take issue with that specific factory (though it was the right thing to do to prove a harmful pollution exists in general)
So another measurement directly at the pipe would be in order.
The measured levels of arsenic, strontium, and vanadium are below the limits for drinking water, even in California. And 4% of drinking water sources in California have higher hexavalent chromium content than the water in that ditch.[1] Besides sodium from salt, the only metal that was particularly high was lithium, at 0.0714mg/L or 71 micrograms per liter. A significant fraction of drinking water in the US has higher concentrations than that.[2]
The level of salt shouldn't affect much. Adding up the chloride and sodium content gets you 684mg/L, which is on the low end of brackish water (500-30,000mg/L). The limit for agricultural irrigation is 2,000mg/L, and photos of the pipe show plenty of grass growing around and in the water.
The phosphorous could come from fertilizers, as there's plenty of farm land in the area. That would also explain the higher ammonium levels, as both anhydrous ammonia and ammonium phosphate are common fertilizers.
The article is really about how sensitive our scientific instruments are, not how dangerous the water is. It reminds me of articles like Vice's American Honey Is Radioactive from Decades of Nuclear Bomb Testing[3], where the most radioactive honey they could find was 10 times less radioactive than a banana.
They list 6 pollutants, but only two of them seem relevant to the legality of this.
One is an amount of arsenic that is a quarter of what's allowed in drinking water. So technically, someone dumping drinking water in the ditch could contaminate this measurement.
The other is hexavalent chromium, which is 4% higher than allowed. According to wikipedia that is "indeed one of the more widely used heavy metals in various sectors and industries (metallurgy, chemicals, textiles, etc.) with particular involvement in the metal coating sector" and used in the production of all kinds of dyes, paints, plastics, etc. It can also be formed by welding stainless steel, and is found in drinking water ... that doesn't sound very specific to me.
I don't know where that ditch is, but on google maps the Tesla lithum plant is right next to a place storing drilling equipment outdoors. Runoff from any kind of industry nearby could end up in that ditch. After all, collecting runoff is what ditches are there for
Sure. What ditches aren't for, and vary greatly wrt, is discharging all inputs out to sea or or a large body of water for "sufficient" dilution.
Ditches can be sealed (concrete lined, with a membrane underneath) or, say, just dirt.
Dirt ditches with a long run filter .. heavier particles drop out, weeds and other organics grab onto various compounds, etc. Those things that filter out and layer into a ditch and can then concentrate over time (subject to terms and conditions).
A reasonable question, that should be asked of any industrial area, is whether dirt ditches, leaky pipes, the whole deal, are accumulating toxins over a decade or more ... and what the impact and remediation plan is for that.
Worst case, ditch line concentrates leach down into a water table close enough to an extraction pump that goes to water food or be drunk by people. (Or later in time earthworks for housing kick up a dust layer that just happens to be mostly "20 years of bad ju-ju")
Not insurmountable, something to be wary of, these things have happened.
>Worst case, ditch line concentrates leach down into a water table close enough to an extraction pump that goes to water food or be drunk by people. (Or later in time earthworks for housing kick up a dust layer that just happens to be mostly "20 years of bad ju-ju")
Pretty much all water discharge rules are built around filtering stuff out. I thought we wanted it in the dirt so it would't be in the water?
The part that drives me up the wall is the two faced capricious nature of all this.
I have a grass parking lot and everyone screeches about tire rubber concentrating in the dirt.
I pave the lot and everyone screeches about the rubber in the runoff
I pay an engineering firm to say that my grass strip on the side of the paved parking lot is an engineered feature that per their calculation will catch yada yada yada blah blah blah and I get my permit.
Seems to me like you can't put anything anywhere. You just go in circles until you've the right rings for the right amount and then they say "this is fine".
Whether the ditch is dirt and grass (nature's filter) or lined with something, hexavalent chromium is just the big boy big dollar version of the same stupid parking lot problem.
Say they filter the chromium out. So then it winds up concentrated in something. Where does it go then? Seems like the only way to permanently deal with waste is to sell it into another jurisdiction where the buyer has kissed the right rings to let it be used as some input to some other process where it then goes from waste to something else.
Sewerage discharge pipes are ideally built to take post processed human waste residues far enough out to sea to not be trapped in small bays but to disperse and diffuse through a greater volume of water.
The ideal here might be (I haven't dug into site specific details here) to take any industrial runoff far out to a large volume of water so that it can disperse and not be concentrated in a manner that creates a time bomb for human food / water inputs.
If that is the intent, then unsealed ditches crossing watersheds is a bad idea compared to sealed pipes with deep water discharge.
Strict liability is only permitted for minor violations, like a citation or fine. If you make it up to misdemeanor speeding, it's no longer reasonable to claim you weren't aware you were speeding.
It's tempting to dismiss them like that, but that doesn't fix anything.
The reality is much more complicated. The Democratic party is far from perfect (they kinda suck, in fact), and if they aren't attracting voters, "the other side is just stupid" is a useless, arrogant way to go.
Attracting voters with things like repeatedly promising to drastically cut consumer prices on most everything ‘from day 1’, repeatedly promising no new wars/stopping being ‘the world police’, quickly ending the Russian invasion of Ukraine, etc?
Hey, I'm not saying Trump and the GOP are great. They disgust me. But they talk to people in a way they find engaging. Even when they lie, somehow. But regardless, I'm not sure how what you said has anything to do with what I wrote.
The Democratic party often sounds like a bunch of elitists, and that turns off many voters, even those who might consider themselves liberal or progressive. I'll likely vote for Democrats in every election until I die, but I don't think of myself as a Democrat, and haven't registered as one in decades (fortunately the Democratic party has open primaries in California, so I don't have to declare a party).
Oh I absolutely agree. I'm not trying to "both-sides" this. I'm just saying that calling conservatives stupid/idiots isn't productive and isn't going to solve anything.
The voters are the source of the problem and we need to focus on them instead of Trump because once he is gone they'll just elect another piece of shit.
A large portion of the population doesn't vote but if they understand the real danger of Trump supporters maybe that will motivate them
Plurality, not majority. (Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates).
Which is functionally a vote for the status quo. Someone who can't bother to vote isn't going to bother e.g. protesting or otherwise affirming their rights.
> Not that I’m excusing the dumb dumbs who decided not voting was a viable course of action when they decided that “both sides” were running bad candidates
Sounds like both candidates were terrible enough that quite a few didn't bother?
Many taxpayers are non-citizens or convicted felons and cannot vote. Turnout of citizens who were eligible to vote last election was 65%. Of those, 49.8% voted for Trump. Some portion of them likely did not vote with this specific policy in mind.
