The point is that it’s part of standard process and procedure, and she made an off-duty judge come in on her day off to do it instead.
It’s an asshole move. She should not be a public servant if she intends to hold up proceedings based on her beliefs. Especially one with authority like a judges.
Yes, because in order for the marriage to happen, you need an officiant to ask some questions of both parties and confirm that they know what they signed and that it was all above board. That is not a performance, that is standard court procedure and the minimum requirement to get married.
I don’t care what bad-faith conservatives are saying, yes they’re full of it. Here are the facts:
From where I’m standing, we should be encouraging the private sector and investing some percentage of our portfolio in restarting and building nukes with all of that context.
This is the same logic behind building an investment portfolio. You could go all in on Bitcoin, or you could spread out your portfolio in the market. 80% into the solid, tried and true stocks, 15% into up and comers, 5% into moonshots like crypto or gamestop or whatever. Same deal here.
My understanding is that this is not the case for providing baseload to entire cities, and it’s unlikely to be the case as we increase energy usage (which has been spiking again, thanks to crypto and AI among other things). With current battery tech it would require massive amounts of lithium that would have far greater environmental impact, and still not really cover all needs. And other mechanisms, like stored energy (pumping water, spinning disks)are more theoretical.
I think I would be much more open to the argument once we have a full modern city converted at least partially to 80-90% renewables, with emergency services and other core infrastructure running off of storage instead of existing power plants. If we get there, then I’d probably stop saying we should invest in nuclear in parallel.
And to be clear, we should get there, if possible. We should push forward full throttle, because all of that innovation would be incredible, and I don’t want us to rely solely on one power source at all, be that renewables, nuclear, or whatever else. A smart strategy is have backups, which is why I think we should do both.
We don’t have a set amount of money and resources, fundamentally.
We have an abundance of food, water, and shelter.
We have a lot of smart people who are currently spending their lives making money on made up markets and apps.
We have plenty of steel, concrete, and any other resources that would be in contention.
When it comes to money, if we raised taxes just a little, we’d be fine. I’m kind of an MMT person, but point is, we could get money, print it, tax it, etc. as it’s an abstraction on top of the other things above.
The mindset of “it’s gotta be one or the other” is a false choice presented by the fossil fuel industry and conservative politicians. They say we can’t raise taxes and we can’t increase deficit spending so they can get us to fight. And I guarantee you, if we all agreed to do nuclear, they would flip the script and start investing in renewables, because what they want is to kill momentum. After all, who do you think was behind all the scare mongering after three mile island?
I don’t want to kill momentum for renewables, but I want to start building it for nuclear at the same time.
We can do both.
Sure, both can be true though. What I don’t see very often from the pro-nuke crowd, right or left, is that we should defund renewables. Pro-nuke types tend to be pretty technical and very in the weeds so they see the benefits of both. They just get bent out of shape by their pet project being defunded.
On the pro-renewable side, there’s more partisanship because it’s a wider base, it appeals to the crunchy side of the left, AND nuclear has been character assassinated with fear around meltdowns. Most people with concerns around timelines and technical constraints on nuclear, like yourself, are flexible too.
It’s the crunchy folks and the moderates we need to convince. If they log onto a post here on Lemmy and see a bunch of pro-nuke people and pro-renewable people arguing and not agreeing that both forms are awesome and we should do both, those people are much more likely to fall for one of the forms of propaganda from the fossil fuel lobbyists. After all, we can’t even agree!
Japan for one, whose coal and natural gas consumption has gone up significantly: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_Japan
Germany has stayed fairly steady, fair enough. Imagine if they had just focused on replacing fossil fuels instead of nuclear, they would be nearly carbon free by now.
I have no problem with the majority of funding going to renewables and making progress right now, but I also don’t see why we can’t break ground on new 4th generation nukes and continue investment in nuclear research at the same time. We can hedge our bets, make progress on both. If the 100% renewables + storage plan pans out, cool, we stop the nukes. If they don’t, then cool, we have our carbon free baseload production and we aren’t a decade behind on it when we need it.
I don’t think we have the time to wait on and expect breakthroughs anymore. A decade ago, sure, but if we end up having major issues with storage and don’t make those breakthroughs 10 years from now, and we start building nuclear plants then, we’re in for an even worse timeline.
Re: government support, sure. If this is a zero sum game and we have to choose one or the other, I’ll probably go renewable. From what I’ve seen, the zero sum mentality itself is the conservative trap. They keep us fighting against each other when we could just say “do both”.
When the IRA passed in the states, there was some amount of funding for nukes. Not a ton, but some. Yet there was skepticism of that, there were calls on the left to defund that among circles I frequented. Why? The support for nukes was much less than renewables and storage, and like an order of magnitude less. It was a hedge - keep investing in alternatives to renewables in case they don’t work out, because we don’t have a crystal ball. So why be divided on this?
The trap isn’t nuclear. It’s division and scarcity thinking. It’s zero-sum politics.
I updated it a lil bit
Yeah, I agree re: Reagan. I think the overall point is more that there may need to be compromise to create a new coalition, because right now the Dems keep choosing economics that hurt the average person, and lean harder into socio-political progressivism to still appear left leaning.
Why are we debating this at all, shouldn’t it be the decision of the parents? You don’t agree, that’s fine, you can tell your kids no. If someone else looks at the evidence and believes it’s true, and believes this is hugely beneficial to their kid, why should the government have a say in their kid’s medical treatment?
Look, we’re talking past each other.
I don’t believe that any judge or person in general should be forced to perform a ceremony of a different religion or belief system. I agree with you on that point, because full ceremonies are indeed performances with a lot of layered, cultural meanings.
The issue here is you are then taking that and asserting that any proceeding that is more involved than signing a piece of paper is, in fact, a ceremony. This is where we differ, and I’ll tell you why: by that definition, signing the paper is ceremonial.
Yes, it does record a real world event. But that is a ceremony that we have culturally come to accept after a long history of doing it. We could have come up with many other types of ceremonies to confirm a contract - it could have been a wax seal, or using a broke stick like stocks originally were. Anything can fit the definition of ceremony if you squint hard enough.
So, what’s a reasonable place for us to draw the line? I would argue that the current status quo is not particularly religious or meaningful outside of the contract.
The officiant confirms that both parties understand what is happening, that this is a contract that will legally bind them together. It’s very serious. Be very sure.
Then, they announce that the couple is officially wed, and they sign the document.
Last, they usually say “you may kiss” or something to that effect.
The most objectionable thing here is the final statement, but even that is hardly objectionable. It is a statement of fact and does not imply any level of endorsement beyond confirming that the deed is done.
This is a very, very small formality. There are courtroom procedures that are more lengthy and involved than this regularly. But you are pushing to say this counts as a ceremony, because if it does, then the judge doesn’t have to do this and she’s in the right.
I just don’t buy it. The only part of that which can be called remotely ceremonial is the statement about kissing, and honestly if the judge refused to say that in the end I would not care. But every other part is a reasonable procedure to make sure both parties understand the stakes, are not being coerced, etc.