As long as you don’t try and use it in a dusty/sandy/muddy environment. Which is to say, everywhere the UK military has been in the last thirty years.

Edit: The weapon platform got better in later revisions, but never shed the reputation, and that means the servicemen don’t trust it, which is awful from a morale viewpoint. The sooner it’s completely replaced the better for myriad reasons.

The idea was pretty cool. The execution, not so much. Unreliable at best, unfortunately, which is the last thing you want in a firearm, especially a personal defence variant.

If that were true, we wouldn’t be where we are today.

Like a red and white “Santa Claus”? Giving diamonds upon engagement for marriage? Chocolate eggs at Easter?

Mate, it’s universal.

Maybe if Obama had spent as much time on the links as Trump, you all wouldn’t be in this mess.

LMAO

Remember when all the coal rolling micropenises were whacking “I did that!” stickers stickers on everything?

Wonder what they’re all blaming now their man, Mango Mussolini and his team of cum-guzzling sycophants and fascist handlers are fully in charge?

Is it still somehow Biden’s fault? What’s their play here?

In what language, Russian? Because that’s not how it’s done in English.

I’m from the UK, but that’s irrelevant as I didn’t say democracy here was older than your country, did I?

My point stands.

Pumped Hydro or simple hot sand (I shit you not) are good ways of storing excess energy without resorting to direct electrical storage solutions (which are improving year on year at a swift pace too).

There are a lot of other ways being explored too. To name but a couple; pumped geothermal storage using everything from old mines to aquifers (a few degrees C in a lot of water is a lot of energy and deep mines will add it for free), and underwater pressure energy storage (I like this one for it’s simplicity and sustainability).

But you’re totally correct. The oil industry has almost infinite money and power, and thus an almost unassailable influence on politics and policy.

The hope lies in the almost. With a bit of luck, things will get bad enough that the populous at large start to question whether being so dependent on other countries for the ability to move shit around is such a cracking idea when the alternative is right there, today, not in a decade when any local oil begins to flow, if there is any to be had.

A smart politician would spin a wholehearted policy shift to renewables as “ensuring the sovereignty of our nation’s energy supply, the backbone of our economy, which should never be beholden to foreign governments or corporations”. Done right, it could be used to rally the “rabid far right” and the “loony left” of any country to the same greater good for all of humanity.

It could be argued though, that for the time and money taken to explore, map, develop, then extract that dinosaur juice, you could have built an entire country’s worth of renewable energy sources.

Especially when you factor in that all that oil will be sold at “global market price”, so none of it will result in cheaper energy for anyone.

Mate we have pubs here that are older than your entire country. The US isn’t the “oldest” anything, there’s nothing the US knows that it didn’t learn from someone else. From Warfare to Politics, Science to Religion, all shamelessly lifted wholesale from elsewhere, or plain stolen from someone else.

American exceptionalism is the greatest lie you’ve ever been sold.

I can predict the start of a fuel shortage in a few weeks when the last deliveries get to refineries and refineries crater their output to try and avoid running dry. (Shutting down a refinery safely is not exactly a simple process, nor is restarting one from cold.) Fuel prices skyrocket, shortages start, fuel rationing is introduced, it only gets worse from there.

All the knock on effects from oil (and it’s industrially very important byproducts) going stupid… Well, that may trigger a global recession that makes everything before it look like merely a warmup.

As someone who has spent the vast portion of their life clinically underweight, oddly, I know exactly what you’re describing when you say “food noise”.

See, I don’t really get hungry like “normal” people do, I usually only realise I’ve not eaten when I get to the stomach cramps stage. Never have done. I assume it’s an artefact of my autism or ADHD. (No, it’s not the stims I take as meds either, I wasn’t diagnosed till I was 33.)

However, the latest attempt with Mirtazapine to treat the chronic depression has given me an insight I would have lacked otherwise. One of it’s side effects is an increased appetite, which manifests exactly how you describe it. Once the dose hits my system, I become very aware of everything in the kitchen, and my brain won’t STFU about it.

It’s real, and you’re not imagining it. Which is all I can offer unfortunately. It’s not much, but the validation can be important sometimes. 💛

I have no idea who you are, aside from what you’ve stated in these comments, but you clearly have a great passion for the core concept of what stories are capable of.

Just wanted to make it known I respect that passion, and am uplifted by knowing it exists out there somewhere. Cheers for that. 💛

lol

lmao, even.

I’m not even going to explain myself, I think the majority understand already.

There are not “plenty”. I will concede that there are, in theory, a few.

Those that join the police force with such positive things in heart and mind either get ground down and quit, a burned out cynical husk of a person, or get corrupted.

Very few have the diplomatic skills as well as the temerity to be able to stick it out. Those very few that can and do are working within a system that is at best so obsessed with measurable statistics there is no leeway for officer discretion, and at worst actively designed to incarcerate as many as possible.

Which version of the system you get exposed to is mostly a matter of one’s skin colour and apparent wealth, which strongly suggests the number of “good ones” is so vanishingly small as to be statistically insignificant.

It could be argued that this is why progress is measured in lifetimes. The old must submit to entropy before the new can take their place.

If you’re genuinely trying to convince someone in particular, try asking “how?” That should starting breaking the ignorance into smaller chunks that you can repair with truthful knowledge. You might have to go a few layers of “how?” deep to start patching the holes in their understanding in order to build a solid foundation for the rest of what you and I take as obvious.

Edit: At the risk of “stating the obvious” I’ll point out that the term “woke” is intended as a derogatory reference to those who have “woken up”. Meaning, we learned something that suddenly made everything else make sense. Some missing piece of the puzzle was, at some point, unveiled to us, and we became aware of (at least part of) the bigger picture.

Go wake some people up. 💛

Then your learning is teaching you bullshit designed to isolate you and push you yet further into the toxic masculinity circlefuck.

It’s true that no-one likes a misogynistic, self-entitled prick though. If you were actually suggesting that you’re upset that that shit is largely seen for the pathetic attempt to hide one’s inadequacies and insecurities that it is, you won’t find as much sympathy for that as you hoped.

Firstly, congratulations on coming to that awful realisation. It’s a shit place to be, and I genuinely empathise.

Secondly though, now? None of the atrocities before this point made you stop and think “Maybe we’re the baddies?”. For the sake of clarity, go and have a dig around and re-examine every single conflict the US has been involved in since the second world war.

Even just the stuff accessible to every online numpty should make you wince, now your blinkers have fallen off. Consider though, how bad the shit you don’t know must be, if the stuff you do is as bad as it is.

Yeah, not conflating intelligent, creative problem solving with a glorified search engine that makes up the answers if it can’t lift them wholesale from another source. That would be a good start, right?