Right, I just looked and saw there are some conflicting ideas about this.

The brine issues seem quite abd:

And even the desalination industry agrees concentrated salt is a problem. Because it is heavier than seawater, the brine tends to settle toward the bottom of the coastal areas where it is released—unless it is diluted. The excess salt decreases dissolved oxygen in the water, suffocating animals on the seafloor. Technologies exist to reduce brine waste prior to disposal or to mine pollutants out of the waste for commercial use—but this is generally cost-prohibitive. Instead, plants use other strategies to minimize damage.

One such alternative involves situating plants in areas where strong currents help disperse the brine. But this is not always possible. For example, the Arabian Gulf is shallow, lacks strong currents and has seen incoming freshwater slow to a trickle due to upstream dams and to people in the region diverting water for drinking and irrigation. The Gulf is also a receptacle for salty “produced water” from the oil and gas industry. As a result of these factors, the Gulf is now about 25 percent saltier than typical seawater, with hotspots double or triple its regular salinity. In addition to harming sea life, extreme salinity also makes desalinating the water more difficult and expensive. The Red and the Mediterranean seas are also growing more saline.

Some plants make efforts to better mix the brine into the ocean when discharged, either by using multiple waste outlets that spread it over a larger area or by pressurizing the waste flow to disperse it by force. A recent six-year study at the Sydney Desalination Plant in Australia found its pressure diffuser reduced excess salinity in coastal areas where waste brine was released. But the abnormally fast flow prevented species with slow-swimming larvae—such as tube worms, lace corals and sponges—from colonizing the impact zone. At the same time, species that thrive in high-flow conditions—such as barnacles and bivalves—increased in number, says study lead author Graeme Clark, a senior research associate at the University of New South Wales’s School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences. The study showed an attempt to reduce the harm of extreme salinity can change the composition of species living in the outfall area. “It’s a bit of the lesson for the industry,” he says, about considering the impact of hydrodynamic changes. Nevertheless, he adds, the impacts are “less sinister…than the toxic effect of high salinity.”

Scientific American

It’s quite a complex issue.

lol

India’s government-run NITI Aayog public policy centre forecasts a “steep fall of around 40 percent in freshwater availability by 2030”, in a July 2023 report.

It also warned of “increasing water shortages, depleting groundwater tables and deteriorating resource quality”.

Groundwater resources “are being depleted at unsustainable rates”, it added, noting they make up some 40 percent of total water supplies.

It is a story repeated across India, said Himanshu Thakkar, from the South Asia Network on Dams, Rivers and People, a Delhi-based water rights campaign group.

This is “typical of what keeps happening all over the country”, Thakkar said, adding it represents everything “wrong with the political economy of making dams in India”.

“While projects are planned and justified in the name of drought-prone regions and its people, most end up serving only the distant urban areas and industries,” he said.

Truly, India needs to rapidly supply water to these areas, perhaps with massive desalination projects like they do in the Gulf region, where areas like Riyadh have 7 million people dependent on water pumped in from the cost.

I met one man in my life who used Linux who was able to engage the topic of ‘what computers do ya’ll have’ without completing monopolizing the conversation and turning it into an unwanted presentation on Linux Master Race.

All true

Thank you

This is very sober analysis.

From a few other incidents I am aware of, it sounds pretty consistent.

Just curious… .do schools generally fully cooperate when files are charged over a fight like this?

You’re absolutely, completely right.

I think he might be an honest-to-God sociopath with zero empathy for other living things, perhaps due to a big hit to the head or just born without this capacity… When someone has this condition, their only hope is that they develop an intellectual respect for the principles of justice, or become devoutly religious and committed to those virtues. Even then, as you say, they are not someone you want to be around at all because the normal emotions that would make any of us stop from using extreme violence are missing in them…

What he did to that cat is absolutely insane. It overwhelms me…

And what mental health support is he really going to get…? Little to none. It’s going to be grandpa carrying the weight…

Honestly, it seems hopeless, but I pray there is someone who can help him turn the corner on his mental health issues… mostly for the sake of all the people who will ever have to interact with him.

It is a famous fact that serial killers often start out on animals. I certainly hope he’s not headed down that path.

He has been very principled over the years. He is a friend of free speech - unwaveringly so - and I respect that more than anything.

May he recover.

Of course, we all have to go someday, and 95 is a ripe, old age…

But even though we disagree on a lot of things, I’d miss him.

Just as a note: I think the crosspost feature is broken, at least in my browser, because when I entered the community I wanted to post it in in the seaerch box, everything would go blank except the body.

My apologies to the OP and anyone impacted negatively by this.

I actually think there’s an argument to be made that a lot of top tier athletes are never doing things like their taxes prior to a big match. It’s just really anticlimactic to say “My spouse/manager/dad does all my paperwork and handles my finances before a fight” than to say “I isolate myslf from my spouse and don’t have any orgasms before a fight.”

I also think that they would make the argument that they have plenty of impulse control and focus, it’s just a matter of the extent to which one has it.

It’s one thing to be a man who does not look at p0rn or masturb8 and only sleeps with his wife and another thing to be a monk.

Apologies - I did not even know there was one…

FARGO — A Fargo man has been sentenced to eight years in prison for abusing his ex-girlfriend and killing her kitten with a microwave.

Cass County Judge Cherie Clark sentenced 24-year-old Carlos Perez on Monday, June 10, to five years in prison for aggravated domestic assault and terrorizing. The prison terms for each of those charges will be served concurrently.

He received an additional three years in prison for animal cruelty for beating and killing a kitten.

“This was pure torture,” prosecutor Katie Nechiporenko said of Perez killing the cat.

Perez pleaded guilty to the three Class C felonies Monday.

The investigation into Perez started Sept. 3 when a woman reported Perez assaulted her the night before, according to court documents. Perez wanted the woman back early from work because he didn’t have a phone and wanted to use hers, a criminal complaint said.

The Forum does not identify victims of domestic violence.

When the woman showed up late, they got into a fight and he slapped her, which split her lip, the complaint said. The woman tried to call 911, but Perez grabbed the phone and broke it, the complaint said.

Charges related to that incident were dismissed Monday when Perez pleaded guilty to the aggravated assault, terrorizing and animal cruelty charges stemming from two other incidents in August.

The complaint said Perez cut the woman’s middle finger with a knife on Aug. 7. The woman needed stitches because of the injury, the complaint said.

Perez also abused and killed the woman’s kitten on Aug. 19 “as a result of her not coming home at a time that Carlos deemed appropriate” when the woman went to a P!nk concert that night, according to court documents. He sent pictures to her showing him holding that cat on a stove burner, the complaint said.

Perez also hit the kitten over the head with a speaker, causing it to have a seizure, the complaint said. He then choked the cat, burned the kitten’s feet with a lighter and put the kitten in a microwave to kill it, the complaint said.

He then put the dead kitten in a dumpster and told the woman “that would happen to her next,” the complaint said.

When asked about the incidents, Perez told police, “I was mad,” according to the complaint. He also claimed he was giving the kitten a bath when it scratched him, so he got mad and “blacked out,” according to the complaint.

The woman was not in the courtroom on Monday. A relative read a letter on her behalf, saying that fear overshadowed her life because of Perez.

Perez threatened to harm the woman’s family if she left him, she wrote in the letter. He also threatened to kill her with rocks, she said, adding he kept rocks in his closet.

“The defendant’s cruelty knew no bounds,” the woman wrote.

Killing the cat in the manner Perez did shows his “sadistic nature,” the woman wrote. In asking for the strictest sentence possible, she said Perez poses a threat to the public and possibly could kill his next victim.

Nechiporenko asked for a prison sentence totaling eight years — three years for the assault and terrorizing charges, plus five for animal cruelty. She said she received dozens of letters from across the country asking her to hold Perez accountable for the torture of the kitten.

Animal Victory, a North Carolina organization that raises animal cruelty awareness, sent a letter to Clark and asked for the maximum punishment, which would be five years in prison for each of the three felony charges.

More than 16,000 supporters signed a petition asking that Perez be held accountable for abusing the woman and killing her cat. The letter to Clark asked that Perez be prohibited from owning or residing with animals.

“What Perez did to this innocent kitten is unconscionable,” the letter said.

Perez’s attorney, Tanya Martinez, asked he be sentenced to two years in prison, noting the man’s mental health issues.

“He is horrified by his actions that night,” Martinez said.

His grandfather, Louis Perez, said the defendant had a rough childhood and lost both his parents when he was young.

Carlos Perez’s brother, 20-year-old Gabriel Perez, was killed in a drive-by shooting in 2018 at the now-demolished McDonald’s in downtown Fargo. The killer, Miguel Jay Cooley, was sentenced to 35 years in prison for the murder.

The grandfather said Carlos Perez has been on his own for most of his life. The 24-year-old needs help, not prison, Louis Perez said.

“That doesn’t help anybody, being in jail,” the grandfather said.

When asked if he wanted to make a statement in court, Carlos Perez said, “I don’t really have anything to say.”

Clark acknowledged Carlos Perez took responsibility by pleading guilty, but he didn’t appear to show remorse, she said.

A criminal history that included domestic violence, paired with this case, showed an escalation of violent behavior, the judge said. The victim in this case didn’t do anything to deserve the abuse, and Carlos Perez used an innocent kitten as a tool for manipulating her, Clark said.

“Domestic violence is all about power and control,” she said. [end of full article]

lol

That is amazing - really good stuff. I will add that to my anecdotes on this topic.

Yeah man I feel like this is more of a “call the lynch mob” situation than a “call the cops.”

I am a progressive living in PA and have followed his career since he was a progressive mayor out in what people near Philly consider the Wasteland. He’s always been a staunch and vocal supporter of Israel. I can’t say if that’s a sincerely held belief, or a political decision, but there’s no question about where he stands.

That’s very interesting to me - I would have actually guessed he was critical of Israel before on some level or maybe silent, but never a full on supporter.

As for border security, he came up during the tail end of the Obama administration and supported Bernie in 2016. During the Trump years, it was pretty easy for anyone left of Goebbels to oppose Trump’s crimes against humanity committed under the auspices of border control, but it still didn’t come up much in his 2018 campaign for Lt. Gov. His race against Oz for the Senate in 2022 was more about how horrible Oz would be, and marijuana.

So I understand why modern progressives are surprised to learn that Fetterman is backing Biden’s plan. But that doesn’t mean he’s changed his stance, it just means they weren’t aware of his stance to begin with.

Good analysis, thank you.

Yeah I believe there’s this weird story about how like… Onani/onanism entered the vocabulary through the Old Testament character and then the notoriously private Japanese adopted the foreign word “onani” to refer to masturb8tion and so it just sticks in my head a bit more and comes out when I feel the need to slightly self-censor in consideration of being on the work net (it’s not an English speaking IT team but, you know how it goes, don’t be the shortest hanging fruit).

I am just a social conservative in the Fediverse offering my two cents.

Sorry to coom on your circle jerk on jerking

Update:

#Sick moment woman smirks and giggles in court as she’s charged with butchering 3-year-old boy outside Ohio supermarket

This is the sickening moment a woman accused of butchering 3-year-old Julian Wood in an Ohio grocery store parking lot smirked, smiled and giggled her way through a court appearance as the horrifying charges were read against her.

Bionca Ellis, 32, displayed the disgusting behavior a week after she allegedly stabbed the child to death and also wounded his 38-year-old mother Margot Wood outside a Giant Eagle in North Olmsted — outside Cleveland.

Authorities have said the attack was a “random act of violence.”

… Woman is unhinged…

Ellis then giggled and replied “si” when Judge Nancy Russo asked her if she was going to plead not guilty to the charges against her, News 5 Cleveland reported. She eventually said “yes “when the furstrated judge pressed her.

… God rest his soul:

Julian was remembered as a “sweet little boy” who was obsessed with his new baby sister and always wanted to wrestle with his older brother.

NY Post