what’s the purpose of holding the most important job in the world, if you constantly have to worry about going to prison? Ridiculous.

Big yikes there. The purpose is to serve the American people.

The President is not the King of America, and its easy to not have to worry about going to prison - just don’t commit crimes. Before Trump, the question wasn’t even relevant.

The interesting thing to me regarding both power and blasphemy is that by the fact that it was on display in a major cathedral, those in charge have already given it their blessing. Anyone calling “blasphemy” only looks like a fool.

So you have these “traditionalists” wanting to drag the Church backwards. But due to the hierarchical structure of the Catholic Church that’s just not how it works. Church leadership has made significant progressive strides over the last decade, leaving people like this Tschugguel with only impotent rage and vandalism as their options. And as you state this only adds new context to the art, giving it more power and ensuring that their regressive goals are not taken seriously.

Meanwhile the Evangelicals have gone absolute nutters, I never thought I would see the day where the Catholics were the “progressive” church. But they play the long game, and have always changed along with society over the millenia.

The work had drawn criticism from some Catholics, who said it was blasphemous.

I won’t deny it’s kind of an odd idea for a sculpture and clearly designed to create controversy, but claiming that it’s blasphemous just confirms the fact that they don’t know the definition of the word. It just depicts a defining moment in Christian history, whether you like the aesthetics or not… The Catholic church has definitely celebrated weirder things.

Sure lasers don’t have recoil, but I see no reason a laser gun can’t have recoil.

Anything from flywheel energy storage, a lasing medium compressed by pistons, massive magnetic fields created by high currents, who knows what’s inside that thing.

A handheld laser gun has to generate a beam of such unrealistic intensity that I’d be surprised if the power stage didn’t buck in some manner.

Thanks for the American context as I’m a Canadian and our systems are different here. I didn’t realize the risks involved and the motivation behind it. I think this might be my least popular comment on Lemmy ever😅

The USA as a battleground between religion and atheism changes the context as I would shrug most of this off here in Canada as harmless. Like the 10 commandments? Most of them are good advice, basically just “don’t be a piece of shit” and i wouldn’t have a problem teaching them to kids… Unless the goal is to teach them actively as the word of God and marginalize non-believers as sinful, in which case this is absolutely criminal. That is church, not school.

We have a more robust separation of church and state to the point where when I read “teaching the Bible in school” I hear “robustly secular, historical and cultural study” which as I stated I believe would be a valuable learning experience. In Quebec there are even rules that public servants can’t display any religious symbols at all, even as small as a cross on a bracelet. The leader of our Conservative party recently made a statement that both abortion and gay rights were “a closed issue” and he would not stand for any attacks on them.

So personally my wife and I made the hard decision this year to send our daughter to a Catholic school next year due to the rapidly declining quality of public education. However the Catholic school district here is publicly funded and staffed, with strict regulations that any religious content is optional and that respect must be given equally to those who choose it or do not choose it.

Many of her friends have already made the switch (regular school is quickly emptying out of smart kids and turning into a zoo as parents pull their kids) and stated this is exactly how it works, most of them being non-religious as well but impressed with the discipline and learning outcomes. My wife teaches college and said the difference is night and day with some kids even making it out of public highschool unable to read. Meanwhile my daughter’s new school has won awards for the achievements of its graduates and their placement in top schools and in industry.

So you see I’m comfortable enough with our dedication to secularism here in Canada that I am willing to send my daughter to an actual Catholic school with no fear that she will be brainwashed… Obviously a bit of bible study doesn’t scare me but in the context of the USA culture war it’s clearly a much bigger deal.

Forcing it as a belief system is definitely wrong, but we were forced to study plenty of literature when I was in school, much of it far less relevant. I don’t see the difference with the Bible, especially if presented as a historical document and prototypical collection of stories?

I’m not religious and wasn’t raised in a religious family, but when I decided to pick up a Bible and read it as a teenager I couldn’t believe how much context it gave me on our culture and its origins.

Having to read and study the whole thing would also help rein in overzealous religion IMO. The #1 reason I’ve heard from evangelicals who left their church was “I decided to read the Bible for myself”

Not just American history, the Bible is the absolute cornerstone of our entire culture. As the one book that every household owned for much of recorded history, the amount of biblical references and reused stories is ridiculous.

I have absolutely no problem with the Bible being taught in schools as it’s an incredibly important document. I find it odd that it isn’t, because the separation of church and state shouldn’t prohibit the study of old books in any way.

I was talking about this with my wife who came from Taiwan at 16 and was sort of second hand exposed to Western culture. She said everything can’t be a bible story can it? I dug out a Bible off the shelf and flipped through, well you know David and Goliath, you know Samson, Jonah and the whale yeah these are classics right?

She says no, so I ask if she knows the story of Pinocchio or why her luggage was made by “Samsonite”. And the truck that we saw yesterday with the “G0L1ATH” license plate?

Yeah it’s everywhere

As a farmer, especially during something like seeding or harvest where focus and not making mistakes are critical.

Fortunately I got my doc to prescribe me XR dexadrine + IR to use as a top up/enhancer. I rarely take the IR or just add a half pill on long days, but always fill the prescription as if I take it every day, giving me a large supply to ride through shortages.

They want society to oppose immigration and work visas so that these people will have to work as illegals, for lower pay and worse working conditions.

Despite all the right wing wall talk, the wealthy actually benefit from a somewhat porous border for this reason.

Even as a rancher (native prairie, low input) I agree beef is way too cheap. Well, it was, now it’s starting to be more appropriately priced.

Considering everything from the labour involved in raising it ethically to the nutritional value, the consumer pays very little for beef for what they’re getting. Even if it means people eat less beef, the price should go up. It would also favour small farmers like me who would rather raise less cows sustainably on grass than overgraze chasing high volume sales.

To be fair proper integration of an aftermarket VoIP app requires almost every permission a phone has, especially if the app wants to mirror your caller ID, and supports SMS and attaching various media.

Actually a modern “sand battery” does have to be sand or at least a granular material. The difference between a sand battery and thermal mass is that you use a conveyor to superheat small fractions of the sand, allowing the isolation of high grade heat.

If you have a single kWh to store and 1 ton of sand to work with, you could heat 1kg of sand to hundreds of degrees (sand battery), or 1 ton of sand by one degree (thermal mass).

1 ton of slightly warm sand is useless, while you can extract the high grade heat from the 1kg and get your 1 kWh back.

I’ve been really curious about the possibility of a small DIY sand battery type system. I currently store my “negative value” midday solar power by dumping it into a water tank and using it to feed my hydronic heating system.

However as we know that results in a tank containing useless low-grade heat on a cloudy day, where a sand battery would result in a small amount of usable high-grade heat.

The cooling equivalent could actually be implemented fairly easily at home with common consumer ice machines (which are effectively heat pumps). Make ice when there’s surplus, dump it in an insulated hopper with a heat exchanger for night-time cooling, recycle the near-freezing melt water to make ice the next day. Water is a lot easier to handle because it can be pumped instead of conveyed, and you get the advantage of phase change storage.

And if the difference between $6 and $8 really is where they draw the line, they can always wait for a sale. I’ve bought many indie games on sale where I thought eh, that might be fun for $12 but not worth risking my $20

I own some enameled iron but find it’s only good for things like spaghetti sauce that attack exposed iron, and deglaze stuck material on their own.

Otherwise everything sticks to it terribly compared to regular seasoned iron.

Do you have a trick to avoid this? I’ve tried all manner of oils as well as lethecin spray, nothing seems to work for me.

Unfortunately not as the oil is impregnated into very small pores during manufacturing. This is the “sol-gel” part of the process, a way of creating a solid and liquid in very close contact.

The oil is effectively bonded to the surface creating a “permanent oil film” which is why it works so well. You can think of the long tails of the silicone molecules being trapped in the pores.

However once they escape there’s no putting them back. Seasoning cast iron is a totally different process involving polymerizing light oils into a solid coating.

The secret of these coatings, which is deeply buried and requires some research, is their “sol-gel” structure.

Basically they are like a sintered bronze “oilite” bushing, where oil is stored in the pores between the bronze to lubricate the surface.

In this case the oil is silicone oil, and while it performs amazingly and is totally inert and harmless it sets a lifespan for the pan. Once the oil is depleted, the pan is worthless.

I’ve gone back almost entirely to cast iron and stainless steel, though I do have one Greenpan that I save for scrambled eggs and similar.

My quest 2 exists to have VD on it

Sounds a lot like a girl I knew back in college. Do you also share it with all your friends and people you barely met?

Nah, it’s easy as this project would be like most mining startups - you just need a liar and a hole in the ground

Nah you just need to find some suckers idiots investors who want in on this innovative and brilliant idea.

Then honestly you don’t even have to build the pipe