Sacrifices specifically performed by priests were not really the norm. They happened, they existed, but often those were for really big really important rituals where you need someone to ensure it's performed correctly. But even then the role of the priest was not much what the modern conception looks like. Ancient polytheistic religions weren't just "Christianity but with more sky daddies'. The priests role was to ensure orthopraxy, not orthodoxy.

The impetus for a sacrifice was far from always some rarefied churchy thing. If someone in your family was making a journey you might invoke some god to look on favor of whatever their goal was and see to their safe return, and propose to the god that if they do so you'd celebrate their return and success, and the god role in it by making a sacrifice to that god. And you might involve a priest in determining if the god agreed to those terms (determine portents was very much seen as a skill and if you ask the god for help and the portents say '"Don't do this" you'd want to put those plans off). But on their safe return you wouldn't just hand the animal off to a priest and wash your hands of the whole thing. The sacrifice would be part of your families celebration of their success and return. It's not the priests eating the food, it's you.

Even if you're not trying to ask for some specific thing, your local gods would be powerful members of your community. So as mentioned if you were celebrating something (Slaughtering an animal and the food that came from it would be cause enough to celebrate) you'd make sure any god who was relevant was included just on general principle. The animal grew well and strong, did not die to illness or wild animals, and now you and your household have a bounty of food. Clearly the gods looked in favor on that, and they'd deserve to be included in that celebration as much or more than any of the members of the household. Unless there was some specific agreement with the god to make a sacrifice, the sacrifice wouldn't be made out of obligation, but because not doing so would just be plain rude.

A lot of sacrifices wouldn't have been "Well we need to waste this animal as a sacrifice to keep a god happy, but a least the priests can eat it", but "We're slaughtering this animal for food to eat ourselves. So we're going to offer some relevant god an appropriate portion of that bounty as thanks." In a modern context, a community BBQ would be a wholly appropriate event to make some offerings, because it would not do to snub some of the most powerful and important figures of that community.

in a lot of places they were kinda. in many ancient religions the gods were viewed as powerful members of the community. You throw a party, you make sure they're included.

More deliberate and specific rituals also happened of course but if you were slaughtering a goat for food and are going to celebrate something? Might as well make a sacrifice to whoever the relevant deity was at the same time. If they like it, you might get a bit of divine favor, and you sure wouldn't want them to feel like they were snubbed.

Its not a coincidence that when animal offerings were burnt or etc, they were often parts we couldn't eat, or only a small part of the animals. Rituals where the whole animal was given up were less common and often reserved for really important things.

Headline conventions accept syntactic ambiguity in favor of information density, on the assumption the reader is both 1: willing to not be deliberately obtuse and 2: if interested can read the entire following article which will explain the issue/event/etc in greater detail.

This is not new, and has been a telegraphic style was the convention long long before anyone in this thread was born. It's been how headlines have worked your entire life. If you read this title and don't easily grasp what they're talking about, that's pretty much on you.

>New Navajo Nations Council speaker to be woman for first time

That's still ambiguous anyways: It reads as if the new Navajo Nations Council speaker has just now decided to be a woman for the first time.

It's also just headlinese, attempting to compress important information into a compact headline.

And it's perfectly fine and understandable. Headline conventions do present some syntactic ambiguity at some point, but this is entirely understandable if the reader applies even a fraction of common sense, let alone one that reads the article under the headline.

On an ambiguity scale of 1 to crash blossoms, this is a 3 at most.

Sure. Well kinda. Obviously things are complicated. Positive in that it ultimately means petro companies have given up on overtly fighting change and are now preparing to weather it.

It's more that the other poster seem to be under the impression that this just means more money for other banks and Danske Bank is doing this because they specifically aren't making much on it. This means there's 'less' money for oil going around period. Especially compared to a decade ago where you barely had to convince a bank you could actually break ground to get financing.

It's more likely to do with new projects just not being a good investment anymore.

Projects that have a short time to generate profit after the first major dollar spend also have high operating costs and are in general financially precarious. 2020 made a lot of banks concerned about the reliability of those projects as investments.

More stable projects on the other hand (eg offshore oil) are massive money sinks, and take a long time to start generating profit. They've historically been a reliable investment, but right now a multi billion dollar investment in fossil fuel generation that will take years to even start production and then even more years to generate profit is not looking good. You're not going to fun those projects unless you're really confident it'll pay out more than a decade in the future. Right now it's not clear they will. Even the big petro companies are no longer blue chips, smaller companies died like flies over the last 5 years.

Petro companies also aren't interested in taking on debt the same way they used to. For a long time it was assumed that any amount of supply could be met by rising demand, and in turn that any hole in the ground would pay for itself. It was seen as a very safe investment unless you mismanaged the project entirely. 2020 changed that view dramatically and lots of projects funded on credit had to be closed down because they were no longer profitable to run. Today those companies don't expect new holes in the ground to always pay for itself, and instead aim to fund expansion projects based on their current income and not bet so heavily on future income from new production.

The reality is that the era of "Drill baby Drill" is over, and that it was infact never really a good idea anyways (see again, 2020). There's far less demand for financing, and the details around what demand is left are more complex. Every bank has fewer petro companies looking to them for financing, and we're probbaly going to see more of this over time. The only banks that will still offer funding will be the ones who want to maintain increasingly specialized departments for handling fossil fuel investments instead of redirecting that effort and overhead to other fields.

Probably not even that. Venus will have lost most of it's hydrogen as it stopped having liquid water. Which is a chicken and egg problem sort of, because the presence of life protects against that, by providing a sink for CO2 and by generating an ozone layer. the former keeps the water liquid (allowing oceans to store more CO2) while the latter protect water in the atmosphere from photo-dissociation

A magnetic field also may not help that much either. Hydrogen is light enough that the Earth losses it anyways. As long as the hydrogen remains as water, its not going to be lost that much faster. Meanwhile a run away green house effect would still end with Earth striped of its hydrogen over time. It'd just take a bit longer.

major 'must pass' bills get all kinds of riders because they're a good chance for horse trading. reb bob wants something on their pet issue and if it gets included as a rider, he'll will support rep carols thing, who will support rep Alice' thing, which will make some allied rep of alice happy and stop blocking yet another thing.

you don't get that done across multiple bills easily, it takes one bill not passing to fuck up the quid pro quo. throw it all in one bill however and it all gets done at once.

its also good for getting Congress critters to buy into the important bill. if someone throws a last minute stink. they're not just delaying the important bill, but pissing off everyone who got their thing added as a rider. at that point it's not just "we need to pass this bill" but "I spent a bunch of effort negotiating riders that might not end up included in the next version of this doesn't pass". plus anyone who got something added as a rider is unlikely to create problems for the main bill.

sometimes it's also just a good chance to deal with small issues that aren't going to make it to a vote on their own. no one's going to object to it being passed, but there's not enough will power to actually get it done. getting it tacked onto a bill that's definitely being passed makes it more feasible.