u/bi_smuth

Does anyone else experience this with conferences in their field, where you suddenly bond very closely with people who aren't in your usual social circle, but as soon as you go back to work it's like it never happened?

I'm having a hard time with this as a lonely phd whose friends were all masters students. I'll go to a conference and think I'm finally making new friends. We bond really closely, have pretty deep and emotional conversations, hug and call each other best friends by the end of the week, even make loose plans to do things together after the conference, and then as soon as I walk back into the office the next week they don't even speak to me.

It happens every conference but for some reason I still get hopeful every time that this time it will last. When I'm at the conference it feels like such a real bond, but when we get back it's like we're different people than we were there.

I know it would take a lot to switch our power grid over to wind/solar/nuclear but that would also create a lot of jobs. But the biggest benefit I can see is that our economy wouldn't be dependent on the middle east. We wouldnt have to go to war over there and worry so much about our gas and oil prices fluctuating as political control over resources shifts.

I feel like conservatives should be overall very supportive of an independent American run power grid that doesn't rely on the middle east? Most conservatives hate those countries anyway, so why would they want our economy to be dependent on them? And I thought they generally supported the idea of American led industries.

I feel like I must be missing a piece of the puzzle here but I don't see what conservatives are getting out of this. I understand that most of the politicians (on both sides) are being paid off by oil industries to keep our economy dependent on them, but I'm talking about the constituents. I feel like this should be a pretty bipartisan thing as it seems to benefit both liberal and conservative values. But I don't know if I am just being naive about something