If you want to know what it was like for coal miners to fight for their right to unionize, watch Harlan County, USA.
Thinking how we raised Americans up in the past vs. now makes me want to cry.
🎶🎵
Cotton on the roadside, cotton in the ditch
We all picked the cotton, but we never got rich
Daddy was a veteran, a Southern Democrat
They ought to get a rich man to vote like that
Sing it
Song, song of the south
Sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth
Gone, gone with the wind
There ain’t nobody lookin’ back again
Well, somebody told us Wall Street fell
But we were so poor that we couldn’t tell
Cotton was short and the weeds were tall
But Mr. Roosevelt’s a-gonna save us all
Well, Mama got sick and Daddy got down
The county got the farm and we moved to town
Papa got a job with the TVA
He bought a washin’ machine and then a Chevrolet
~ Alabama
And while we’re at it, country music used to be fucking awesome.
I can’t even imagine growing up in coal mines.
My asthma winces at the very idea. I saw a bumper sticker in the US some years ago that said “Coal keeps the lights on”, well, I guess, but so do other things that aren’t carcinogenic.
Unfortunately we have a dependency on products like steel and cement as well.
I live in West Virginia dude. The DMV sells black license plates that say “Friends of Coal”. There aren’t half as many as I saw in my youth though.
Hmm. Sun, oil, nuclear, um… maybe wind isn’t carcinogenic.
Wind is carcinogenic when it’s blowing all the exhaust from vehicles and production plants your way! Yum!
Wind turbines reduce the blowing by the amount of energy they create minus the heat created by friction. I guess that could create stagnation smog which would be bad.
Edit: eventually it could slow down the moon and kill everything. eventually. suns likely to explode first.
Isn’t wind caused by a combination of heat from the sun and the spinning of the planet? I think we’d have to cover a bonkers amount land with turbines before we saw an appreciable increase in stagnant air.
I was thinking all energy on earth (except nuclear?) comes from the sun. I suppose that there is some inertial energy from previous stars/big bang.
Yeah, elements heavier than iron, like uranium, only form in supernovas at the end of a star’s lifespan. So, arguably still solar energy, just not our solar energy.
Water, although it has other impacts.
Different flavors of water power as well. Tidal (not really a functioning thing yet, but still), river dams, and geothermal.
That would be a Kentucky plate. I prefer the other option, “unbridled spirit.”
Yes it was!
And everybody clapped.
And now everybody’s gonna clap for this comment! In addition to their staggering creativity, let’s all give them a round of applause for how much smarter this commenter is than all of us! Hands together people; this person alone knows that many if not most things on the internet are fake!
