On the fulfilling community aspect, I found that at my Unitarian Universalist (UU) church. UU's don't believe in a shared religious text, instead they have a core set of shared values. My church has people who identify as atheist, Christian, several types of pagan, Buddhist, Jewish, Muslim, etc. We celebrate religious holidays from all of them as well as secular holidays like Trans Day of Visibility and Earth day. The focus is on being together and trying to make the world a better place. I also really like the music program. There's a handy website to find a congregation near you, many stream services on Zoom so you can test them out before going in person.
The Expanse does a good job delving into somewhat realistic internal solar system travel/physics in the not too distant future and politics of Earth vs Mars vs asteroid "Belters" factions
Agreed. There's plenty of suffering that happens in life just because. Purposeful suffering doesn't seem like a good thing in most cases.
But there's also the issue of the definition of suffering. Minor suffering like tolerating a colder thermostat setting in the winter, it saves money and energy, seems rather subjective on where the line could be drawn on bad vs good.
Did not ask ChatGPT. I spend a good amount of my free time volunteering on environmental projects, including rain water management. Rain gardens are great!
Not sure about the specifics in this particular case, but here are common things that contribute to poor river water quality:
Impermeable surfaces in human-built environments, which cause water to flow more quickly and therefore erode river banks (dams and retaining ponds help slow down water flows)
Residential and agricultural fertilizer/manure runoff, increases nutrients in water that cause microbes to grow faster
Tiling agricultural fields, which releases more of the above
Untreated human sewage
Improper dumping of industrial chemicals, or breach of containment due to upstream flooding
It currently is the same schedule as heroin (schedule 1)... "Rescheduling" is the name of the regulatory process that was ongoing, but could not conclude in time. These things take time to do properly and hold up in court and make them stick, it wasn't from lack of desire.
The Biden administration was in the process of federally legalizing cannabis through the proper regulatory channels, but couldn't finish in time before his term ended.
There's two subreddits I really miss: AskScience and AskHistorians. I was a regular and flaired contributor to AskScience, but its super helpful to generate a response when there's a good question. It would feel weird opining on a random science topic that I come up with. And I loved the well sourced AskHistorians posts. When I do see a c/AskHistorian post on Lemmy the responses are very low effort
For those who need it 1-800-QUIT-NOW has free resources to support quitting smoking, it's the #1 thing you can do to improve your health. The American Lung Association has a great website as well.
Tl:Dr: Phthalates are endocrine disrupters