They already assigned MTG to the Homeland Security Committee. If that isn't putting a fox in the henhouse...

User Requested removal

TSMC is building a huge chip plant here in Phoenix. My question is where the water for this plant is going to come from. 

Hoover Dam, most probably. Which is already getting depleted at an alarming rate without it...

What is the USA's stance on the use of desalination plants?

Many large-scale mining operations over here use desal plants to provide clean water for operations, which is actually energy intensive... But they are generally supported by renewable energy.

There are a lot of obstacles to desalinization in Arizona, the first being that the state doesn't border any oceans. The nearest source of seawater to Arizona is the Sea of Cortez, which is in a foreign country (Mexico), so that would largely be at the mercy of international relations with the Mexican government. 

There is a desalinization plant in Yuma, a city which sits on the Colorado River at the junction between Arizona, California, and Mexico. It was actually built not to desalinize water for Arizona, but to satisfy a water treaty with Mexico, which was receiving brackish water through the Colorado from Arizona agriculture. Furthermore, Mexico has declared the delta area of the Colorado that flows into the Sea of Cortez, the Cienega de Santa Clara, a protected area. In addition to the huge expense of restarting the Yuma plant, pumping brine into Mexico would likely upset the Mexican government. So due to geological, geopolitical, and financial issues, this plant has only been operated twice since its 1992 opening, and one of those times was for a demonstration. 

There is also a proposal to fund the building of a desalinization plant in Mexico at Puerto Penasco on the Sea of Cortez, in which case the treated water would be piped to Arizona at an estimated cost of $3000/acre foot, which is the average annual water use of a family of four, spearheaded by an Israeli engineering firm, IDE. 

User Requested removal

Why do people care about the most pointless things?

"Gas stoves might be contributing to childhood asthma"

How backwards do you have to be to care more about gas stoves than your child's health?

Someone was telling me that I would/should be outraged if someone didn't show me proper respect by standing up at the end of my wedding to shake my hand, because respect is important.

No I wouldn't. Your ideas of "what's respectful and what's not" aren't important to me. To me it would feel more disrespectful to not respect that other person's autonomy. 

If the act of complaining about something is having a worse effect on society than the thing that you're complaining about, you should probably stop complaining. 

Donald Trump being called a “pussy ass bitch” is now permanently in the US’s Congressional Record.

This is based on a Tweet made by Chrissy Teigen in 2019 that the Trump White House tried to get deleted.

I guess not all parts of the era of Idiocracy were negative :)

Mississippi GOP passes ‘apartheid’ bill to create unelected courts system in majority-Black capital of Jackson

"Mississippi’s Republican-controlled House voted on Tuesday to create a separate court system composed of unelected leaders and an expanded police force in the capital of Jackson.

The proposal, HB 1020, has been put forth by its GOP backers as a measure to increase public safety and reduce backlogs in the courts, but local leaders have argued the measure is a power grab from the state’s largely conservative, white legislature against the majority Black population of Jackson.

“Only in Mississippi would we have a bill like this … where we say solving the problem requires removing the vote from Black people,” Rep Ed Blackmon, a Democrat, said at the legislature on Tuesday.

He added that the measure, which would allow state officials to appoint judges and prosecutors instead of the usual local process of electing them, wouldn’t do anything to reduce crime."

Just break out the klan hoods, already.