It will probably happen eventually for gas stations in very rural areas, but keep in mind that you only really need one gas station in a given county staying open to keep gas vehicles viable, and you don’t really need all that much traffic to keep a pump open, especially if there arn’t any other options and as such you can increase margin drastically.

I know what you meant and what they should do, I was just repeating what they actually did so far.

It’s PG&E, so they said that he’s still on the hook for this months billing cycle. Starting next month though, he’ll be billed correctly, hopefully.

Ok, i’ll bite.

While I get the instance name is lost on some visitors, it’s fascinating to see Republican campaign material posted here in complete seriousness. So much about how dare the government possibly have impeded people heavily involved in far right campaigns in making money off distracting the working class with made up culture war. How dare other private businesses want to throw the out and proud Nazi’s off their platform.

A few offhand points, it is absolutely within the State Department’s remit to identify foreign infuance campaigns, even if they don’t always get it right.

The fact that the Twitter Files also showed that companies can and did push back on numerous recommendations after their own investigation disagreed without repercussions would seem to be pretty damming evidence that they really were recommendations about potential misinformation accounts and not government censorship.

Similarly, the comments on identifying misinformation is based on the ludicrous idea that there is just no possible way for an investigation to tell the difference between a truth and an outright lie, and thusly anyone attempting to do so or tell others about the serial liar much be censoring them.

The best evidence that the government isn’t actually trying to censor these group is government doesn’t use this sort of lukewarm, you might want to take a look at these accounts methods on pleople who it actually wants to censor like leftists, they just declare them a potential terror theat and send the FBI or police in to rough up the environmental group or activists.

But hey, they called the New York Post sensationalist and massive transphobe campaigning to get trans people banned from public restrooms prone to misinformation, so I guess the deep state really is censoring poor Donald Trump and his friends and we should be outraged not at the blatant campaign to mislead the poor into voting against their interests, but of the most lukewarm, liberal, halfhearted response possible to it.

In short, get back to me when they’ve done something more than politely ask the mods to look into a questionable user, like have even approached the sort of things they do people trying to block pipelines on a weekly basis.

Personally I tend to think that the Bengal famine is better compared to the Holodomor, as it is closer in time, area, and effect. If there is a lesson to these things though, I think it’s that it doesn’t matter what economic system you use of the people in charge are fans of eugenics, and that’s why it’s so important that there be strong independent checks on the government and politicians, minority representation, multi-party rule, etc…

I know BC at least solved this problem a few years ago by just legally requiring landlords to provide L2 chargers when asked and suddenly EVs were very popular with apartment owners.

While L2 chargers are definitely the ideal for household charging, it’s worth noting for places with street parking and such that you absolutely can charge an EV overnight with an household outlet and an extension cord, At least you can if you’re not averageing more than 60 miles(100km) per day, and if you’re dependent on street parking you’re probably closer into town than that.

Ideally the government would institute a similar must provide L2 if asked for employees at places with electric service, as that would ensure that they could not only get 170miles (290km) during a 9-5 shift, but allow for bidirectional charging to actually help with bulk grid storage, or at least incentivize charging at times when solar is plentiful instead of at night where you’re going to be drawing from a grid scale battery or hydro resivor.

On the grid front, while electrification will require expansion of capacity, it is worth remembering that this is not a unprecedented surge in growth so much as a return to the normal rate of grid expansion after decades of austerity. Even in north america, with our sprawling suburbs built on long freeway car commutes, our average EV consumes less power than our average air conditioner does over the entire year.

Admittedly optimizing for grid distribution means charging overnight though, when all the infrastructure that feed those hungry air conditioners during the day is siting around with unused capacity, so the optimal mix will depend on whether upgrading distribution infrastructure is more expensive than upgrading grid storage infrastructure and nighttime generating capacity.

Precisely, their a gas company. Helping the planet means just turning everything off and never turning it on again, so you know the only green promise they want to keep is the green in their share price.

No shit, in a fossilized economy everything emits carbon, and low co2 new steel production is still in its infancy. Nevertheless it emits far, far less carbon than running a natural gas plant for the same power, and as the article points out, can and is continually reused forever with no new carbon emissions beyond that of the enegy used to transport the material and power the arc furnace.

The startup cost in carbon just means there is a delay in between when a turbine is built, and when it is produceing zero carbon energy. Studies show that even the most steel intensive offshore turbines repay this debt in under a year, and again, this is why we need to be getting as much wind energy online as soon as possible.

If going to a smaller turbine design means that you save four months worth of startup carbon, but means a wind farm only captures two thirds as much wind energy over its three hundred month design lifespan then going with the smaller design will have effectively cost nearly a hundred months worth of output to save four. While that two thirds number is going to very by project constraints, the reduction doesn’t need to be very large to work out to a net carbon savings, even if you couldn’t recycle steel at all.

As things like available project land, projected ongoing maintenance budget, and most often capital availabllity ultimately constrain a given projects size and net generating capacity, it makes sense to go for the larger turbines that more efficiently make use of these limited resources, instead of the practically unlimited in this context supply of steel.

In short, optimizing for steel use is effectively producing kilotons of ongoing co2 emissions to save tons of co2 once.

Of course, and busses (or at least trolley buses) are and for all of the foreseeable future will continue to be the best form of mass transport for rural, near rural, towns, and suburbs. I’m just jaded by politicians who seem to think that a big bus completely equivalent to a tram or light rail, and despise thouse who take half decent tram proposals and downgrade them once more into f-ing BRT, which is at best a slightly cheaper to build worse tram, and which rarely live up to even that goal.

I mean they’re using an effectively off the shelf reactor which if outputted as promised would fatally irradiate anyone in the area, so i’m not sure the’re really set up to do much beyond separation of fools and money.

I mean they did go green. An average of ten percent growth in earnings per year over the last five years, seems like things were pretty green over there to me. I mean it’s a gas company, what other kind of green could they have been talking about?

Precisely, good stable wind blowing when we need power is not something we have an unlimited amount of, like times we can recycle steel. The steel in todays wind turbine is the steel in a thousand years from now’s turbine, where as the co2 that got pumped into the atmosphere because that turbine wasn’t enough is also the co2 killing people in a thousand years. The higher you get a turbine above the ground, the less turbulence it will see, and the more constantly it will be in the right range to generate power.

The more you can count on it, the less battery and hydro you need to cover when the winds not blowing, and thusly the less space and turbines you need.

As for labor efficiency, i’ve always though of the goal of solarpunk to be a world where we’ve settled out into a way of life that can be maintained long term and where people are free to do what they want and help out where they can instead of worrying about if they’ll earn enough from the megacorp to have heat and food next month.

While you still need someone to do dangerous and unpleasant things like climbing turbines, ideally you’re only asking as few people as possible to do so as you need.

And given that even in that future people will still be paying the price in lives for the GHGs we emit today, we owe it to them and possibly us if we live long enough to shrink the river of co2 we’re putting out as fast as we can, as every fossil plant that is replaced by clean energy today is decades of that’s plants cost gone.

They use steel more effectively, but use other resources like wind, land, labor, and electronics less effectively, and all of which are harder to recycle. It also didn’t mention household or village scale as much as was still comparing very large grid scale systems, which is important as once you get much smaller than that energy efficiency falls off a cliff.

Finally, while a detailed look into a specific resource can be very interesting, it’s important to take a holistic look at how energy sources compare and not just evaluate on one figure.

Ultimately, as our ability to manufacture steel is not currently a major constraint to decarbonization, more important limitations like installation and maintenance costs are going to be dominant at least for the next few decades. Similarly as the low hanging fruit like electricity generation make up less and less of our collective GHG emissions, we’ll have more resources like plentiful wind energy to throw at problems like decarbonizing steel, as its still a problem will have to solve sooner or later.

Though as per tradition, as you and the ten foot radius around you are engulfed in flame the DM would like to remind you that Fireball is often the poor spell to cast for hostage rescue, especially in tight spaces.

The bendy busses will continue to be built until morale improves.

The problem is that people are conditioned to blame the president for the current cost of gas, and that gas should always cost the same. If not, then inflation is too high, never mind that keeping the cost the same means the real cost is falling. Or that right now gas costs two cents lower than it did in 2013 pre inflation.

Amaricans would absolutely blame the current government for gas going from $3.52 a gallon to the sill subsidized to an extent EU average $7.31 a gallon. Throw in the more realistic costs of actually cleaning up said co2 with direct air carbon capture at a $100 a ton and you get $8.20 a gallon, which is actually nowhere remotely near as bad as I expected it to be, though that would require someone to actually do carbon capture at scale. Electricity of course beats the pants off of all of the above at an US average cost of about $1.90 per gallon equivalent.

You also have the inflationary effects of the US being very dependent on trucks for most goods transport, due in no small part to rail companies entering a state of ‘managed decline’ and looting said infrastructure for scrap at a time where everyone from China and India to Ethiopia and North Korea were electrifying, and thusly being stuck with trains that cost nearly twice as much to run as electric lines run by an industry of managers who think that their customers are going to replace a single train with gravel with several thousand trucks any day now so might as well sell the tracks off.

That being said, a high vehicle registration tax on gas and diesel vehicles combined with an effectively free one on new energy vehicles seems to have demonstrated more of an effect, though admittedly places that have tried that have also tended to have a far less subsidized cost of fuel in the first place so it may only have an potent effect in combination.

Functionally the US also needs an equivalent to or allow import of the French Ami and similar such cheap city cars as well as Canadian style legislation demanding that landlords must install L2 chargers if asked if it wants for cars to still be an option for poor rural people, which unfortunately given the need to cut carbon now and the demonstrated ability of US cities to take a decade and millions of dollars to put in a bus lane it probably does. City dewellers will of course just use bikes if they can get their city to stop wasting money on far more expensive to maintain per person-mile car lanes.

All in all this problem needs a lot of complex legislation to solve, but I sopose the benefit of WAITING THIRTY FUCKING YEARS AFTER IT DECIDED THAT CONTINUED EMMISIONS WERE A CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER TO THE VERY EXSISTANCE OF THE NATION is that most of the possibilities have already been tried before so you can pick what works and skip what doesn’t.

In game however, you have the advantage of being able to know the future of tech unlocks and plan ahead a bit, so you can leave rights of way open for highways, metros, etc, later. You also have the vehicle cap, so practically if you properly understand the roadway mechanics you can trivially satisfy all possible demand, though I think planing metros and streetcars is more of the fun.

Or you could also do what I do and just play with unlock all and build it all at once, staring with the outlying towns and growing out words towards higher density block by block, but while less frustrating to do higher detail in said way it does also remove of the character of growing individual areas.

That image also makes me so sad.

Note, since the 80s the vast, vast majority of piston driven aircraft engines have been able to operate on unleaded fuel. We know this because for decades GA pilots have been filling out the paperwork for an experimental fuel variance and then running these engines unmodified on the cheaper unleaded they got from the gas station down the street without any apparent issue or rise in engine maintenance/failures among pilots that do this. The main hurdles being the necessary and not insignificant paperwork as well as concern over insurance rates.

From my understanding there was a problem with one series of engine in the seventies that was suspected to be due to unleaded fuel among the more modern product line of a major manufacturer, and while the engine was modified to fix it neither Lycoming nor Continental, the two primary piston engine manufacturers who make up the vast majority of the market, saw significant pressure to drop the official recommendation for unleaded until relatively recently.

Since the US finally started to get serious about phasing out leaded avgas in the 2010s, and the aditude of its been fine so far so why risk any change has run up against said pressure, both have to my knowledge dropped the requirement retroactively with no modification necessary for the majority of their historical and current product line.

You might need to re-engine or more likely just get an exemption for flying history aircraft, but the benefit to the hundreds of thousands that live near GA airports in terms of reduced damage to children’s nervous systems far outweighs the nebulous cost of switching the default form of avgas.

What does that have to do with the drivetrain of the car? That would be due to things like better hood and road design, better enforcement of speed limits, and since you cited a stat that includes drivers as well pedestrians over forty years the move to requing roll over protection, expansion of airbag systems, more available crash modeling, and of course the near worldwide mandate that cars include seatbelts.

Most of this is either structural and thusly uneffected by a drive train conversion, or governmental.

The biggest dangers involved with a drivetrain conversion are going to be the same as any major home automotive work, namely something heavy fall or slips during work, followed by getting fingers/hair/clothing caught in moving parts, etc…

None of this is going to endanger the public, at least not to the extent that it can compete with the chance of getting distracted driving and plowing through a pedestrian or right hooking a cyclist.

Honestly the unsafe part is that they are a ton or so of metal going at speed only decimeters from civilians with only the concentration and control of your average idiot there to prevent manslaughter.

Compared to that, there is very little you can actually do to a car that will move the needle on safety, especially for anyone but its occupants.

The biggest concern in this place is the effect on collapsing the aquifer like has happened across the border in Pakistan. Overuse of water rights is difficult to enforce, but at least farmers had to trade one valuable liquid for another. By contrast with solar your only cost is upfront, and as such farmers are effectively penalized for turning off the pumps and not taking all they can to an even greater extent.

Now obviously it’s better to not be burning diesel and this was still a problem before electrifying, but it’s still seems bittersweet in this case.

Really? Doesn’t seem that wild to me that a place where cartels have openly claimed responsibility for assassinating politicians that threaten the status quo might see a large pushback against a change to the status quo.

You know what you must do. Down with all landlords./s

More seriously, I will note that multigenerational households are only looked down upon when the poors do it, if the rich do it than it’s just a family manor.

Honestly, I doubt needs are diverging so much as marketing has diverged between markets as various companies try to create and maintain places and growing markups for themselves.

Companies in the US focus on competing to sell the largest and thusly highest margin vehicles they can, companies in the Germany focus on upselling customers on speed because they have smaller parking and stricter emissions, and in the price competitive market of China, the focus is on infotainment systems that add something to market and upsell without actually costing much to add.

That being said, while marking can shape demand there is only so much that marketing can do to change the actual needs of car buyers. People still need and buy pickup trucks in europe and asia, rich Americans and Chinese still love their absurdity fast cars, and I doubt that the US or Europe are going to see an end to increasing electronics to increase markup anytime soon, China is just ahead of the curve on that one.

I mean a lot of Amarican infrastructure was built by the new deal with a hundred year lifespan, so it’s not exactly a surprise that now a hundred years after the new deal there is a lot of Amarican infrastructure that needs to be replaced.

Important to note that their stuff is not only things like remaining photos of dead parents and relatives, but also medications and the documents required to get a job, both of which have to be replaced at taxpayer expense. But hey, we offered them a place in the five and a half year long wait list they were already on, so the government really is doing all it can.

To be fair given some of the places and things YubiKeys protect, especially local government, finance, hospitals, and the like, this is one of the cases where a physical attack isn’t beyond the realm of possibility. I’m not cloning a Yubikey with specialized kit to break into a small business, but if it plus a password lets me log in as an accountant at an bank or investment firm on the target’s day off, well then it might be worth it for an attacker.

Thing is, the research into direct cash transfusions and other straight basic income has shown that poor people generally have a very good idea of what they specifically need to do to get out of poverty, be that a gym membership to shower, good clothes, a bike or car, an apartment, someplace to keep documents and medications where they won’t be thrown out by cops, getting a GED after their parents threw them out for being gay, a preschool because their minimum wage job won’t let them keep a baby around the building, or other prerequisite to getting a job / a job that pays well enough for an apartment, they just don’t have the money to actually do any of it.

A person have a good community kitchen they can go to and get free food, and as such food stamps are worthless to them, but they can’t spend that same pittance on something that would actually help them get out of poverty like clothes and a gym membership or saving up for a small car where they can store their stuff and get to jobs, all because a government commite of people and lobbyists who have never lived outside of a gated community have decided what each poor persons budget should look like and coincidentally they all look the same.

People know how to learn to catch fish, they just can’t do it without the right tools, or because they have to be back standing in line at the shelter by 3PM each day.

And gobal warming means the rivers will soon be hot enough that about half of all salmon species stroke out in them. Replaceing clean energy with fossil fuels, which is the definitional result of removing clean energy from the grid while any fossil plants remain connected, not only hurts salmon numbers today, but ensures that for hundreds upon hundreds of years into the future there can be no salmon.

There is a reason why despite the no change to the number of dams and thouse same dams getting easier and easier for salmon to cross salmon runs have still tended to decline, and keeping methane plants that would otherwise be shut down today operating for decades to come does not help with that.

Neglecting all the stronger hurricanes, monsoons, floods, elimination of coral reefs, forests, and habitat, we can fertilize trees and reintroduce salmon, we cannot refrigerate the rivers.

Of course they will and have responded. The response naturally being, how could Hamas be so violent as to force the poor IDF snipers to do this?

I’m more skeptical than most that self driving will be properly solved anytime in the next few decades, but I really doubt the article’s claims that it will be able to claim much modeshare from bikes and transit.

Firstly, we already have and have had autonomous vehicles for nearly as long as we have had vehicles, their called taxis and carpools. Making these potentially cheaper, though in practice I doubt it since a taxi’s costs are spread over all its users while a car has to be paid by just you, does not change the fact that they are less convienent than being able to show up and hop on like a bus, or the immunity to traffic delays of rail. Indeed the proposed system of distant out of city parking lots would take more planning than just parking your own vehicle today in most places, as you have to call or order ahead with AVs to have them ready for instead of waking to your car and jumping in. Similarly, getting stuck in traffic does not get much more fun simply because someone else is driving, especially if you can’t even talk to them.

The arguement for them replacing bikes is even worse, because one of the few things proper self driving vehicles are already pretty good at thanks to 360 ultrasonic and lidar sensors at is not blindly running down bikes, and a future with widespread adoption would also imply that most other vehicles have similar driver assistance tech, and as such more people will feel safe biking even in places with shit bike infrastructure. Meanwhile most people who were going to use a bike for a trip will not choose driving over bikeing just because they can get someone else to come pick them up.

I could see it having an effect on modeshare in places with really shit and infrequent transit, but the whole point of rapid transit is that it is more rapid than taking a car. If your transit system is slower and worse than waiting ten minutes in the rain for an Uber, fix your terrible transit system, because that really should be a low bar to clear.

Someone else this time. The company is called Confident Health and seems to do primarily drug and alcohol addiction counseling in a limited number of states. It also seems to be security negligence instead of a major revenue stream.

Seemed like appropriate enough music for me, although on second thought I can’t imagine the Empire ever having to halfass a port because their nominal ally stopped them from using their infrastructure.

Politically, major outside military forces like aircraft carriers tend to be viewed at a stabilizing force in the local region, but more to the point Redrum and I were talking about Isreal’s primarily being useful politically rather than militarily to destabilize and break up leftist and Soviet groups in the region.

Except OPEC still had significant power and influence in the US well after the Yom Kippur war ended in 1973, and said war didn’t even involve the majority of the OPEC member countries.

I think the US becoming the largest oil producer in the world might have had more to do with the decline in OPEC’s influence on the US but what do I know?

Yes, but it’s presence in the region being a destabilizing force is a very different thing to being primarily an unsinkable aircraft carrier as the commenter I responded to described it.

I mean Saudi Arabia also does all those things, most of them far better than Israel ever could due to geography, and at a far lower cost. If Isreal snapped out of existence tomorrow, between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Greece European and North American power projection in the Middle East and North Africa remains almost entirely unchanged.

Honestly the military benefits of supporting Isreal while real are definitely not as important as the domestic political benefits to the US, which is to say that the conservatives like Isreal because it provides a nice place to deport all the Jews to while also maintaining precedent for an enthnostate with race based citizenship, and the Democrats like it because they get a lot of gifts, friends, and in their minds potential voters, all for doing exactly what the conservatives want them to do.

37 times and counting. Part of the joke is that they just change a few words to localize each shooting, as no one has done anything at all to address the issue since they first published the original article in 2014.

Average percentage of the building process, pg 3 so about 20% in the US, maybe more if you accept the interior finish. That being said I am highly skeptical this changes the needle, especially in the third world, because almost always if you have the land to build a shack, the cost of the shack isn’t going to keep you on the street.

Fundamentally, developers intuitively understand that building will be just about as profitable in ten years as now, but if you build to much now you will have an ‘oversupply crisis’ and the price as well as the associated profit margin will go down. Similarly, if you build a new building and are selling units very quickly, that means you’re below market price and should raise the price until they just barely sell, because that price jump will more than cover the cost of that apartment being empty for a few months or even years.

This all applies wether you’re in a shanty town in Brazil or in downtown Vancouver, and since even if you snapped your fingers and the cost to build in that shantytown halved it wouldn’t really change, I am really skeptical that even a highly transformative technology could change things, much less an expensive replacement for a few pallets of cinder blocks, a few friends, some drinks, and a weekend.

What you need is something like plentiful public housing providing a minimum quality of house at cost that the market must do better than, but groups like the IMF tend to despise countries doing things like that, because it’s a highly profitable investment when private foreigners do it but a reckless waste of money if the government tries to do the same thing.