Just wanted to add that maybe the last thing that we did for the environment and that really worked was for acid rain in 1991. At least where I live.

A few years before that there was the Montreal Protocol that banned CFCs and helped to heal the hole in the ozone layer. I think.

But yeah, I don’t remember anything of the sort recently,

Your optimism can only be admired. However the US has already stated multiple times that it doesn’t care about international law and that Americans cannot be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, or they will invade the Netherlands. The ICC cannot even detain an American. This was during W Bush and his “war on terror”.

And then Trump recently reiterated it with a new executive order, imposing penalties and visa restrictions on people even helping the ICC to investigate Americans.

I don’t know the exact word in English but, the person managing and maintaining the building. Not the landlord but their employee. I live in a high rise and my building has several of them.

And yeah, the law says they have to notify a tenant 24 hours before a landlord can emter an apartment, but there’s no enforcement of that. Tenants don’t have to acknowledge the notification. The landlord can just claim they sent an email or left a notice on my door and get in.

Some landlords are more respectful but my current one is a faceless billion dollar company that doesn’t give a fuck about tenants. If I’m not happy I can go and they will rent even higher to the next person.

So you decide not to answer because it’s probably someone trying to sell you something. But then a few seconds later you hear some keys jiggling, the door unlocks and opens with the concierge saying it’s inspection day for the insurance.

Based on a true story. In fact I work nights and sleep during the day, and this happened multiple times. Inspection for the insurances. Inspection for bugs and rodents. Inspection of the fire system. They are supposed to warn 24h in advance but sometimes I apparently dont get their emails and it’s a complete surprise.

I even installed a second lock to at least open the door myself instead of having people entering my apartment while I’m stoned on the couch.

This somehow makes me think of Animal Farm.

Suddenly this made me think of Animal Farm.

Indeed, electric cars may produce less brake dust particles than an ICE. However they are also heavier than ICE and the tires will shed more particles over time.

And electric cars are also somewhat less noisy but they cannot beat the laws of physics. You can still hear an electric car coming because of the noise tires make on the roads over certain speeds. The higher the speed, the noisier it is. Even if all the cars on a multi lane highway were all electric, it would still be noisy and difficult to have a conversation nearby. A six lane highway filled with electric cars will still need a sound wall.

There are also regulations to have electric cars make artificial noise to be “safe” at low speed, and some sound like they are constantly honking at low volume.

Like, yes, those two points are marginally better with electric cars, but it’s not much. And it doesn’t cancel all the other negative issues with cars.

And so all the kids are safe from being crushed by SUVs. No need for bike lanes. No need for traffic reduction. No need to ticket drivers not yielding to pedestrians or passing cyclists dangerously. No need to remove parking. No need to reduce the size or speed of cars. And turning right on red is a god given right.

Helmets are all that is needed to be safe in the streets! That and obeying the law.

I guess I get the intent. It’s better than nothing. But it’s also pretty depressing when you see beyond the attempt at fake security.

Benzin, gib mir Benziiiiin!

Do they have a model with AI?

Because they still have all the disadvantages of cars and they don’t really bring anything of value. A car is dangerous for the people around not in a car, inefficient at transporting people, takes valuable space, and pollutes the air with tire and brake dust particles. They are also noisy. Electric cars won’t change that.

In the case of Tesla, FSD is just a gadget for car owners that somehow don’t want to drive cars.

In the case of Waymo, they are not a solution to relieve transit in busy cities. There’s even more cars now, but without a driver and sometimes they get stuck and still need to call for help.

If you want me to get mildly excited for an autonomous vehicle, show me a train or a metro. Otherwise, if people want to get to places without driving, we already have solutions for that, but apparently it’s better to ask everyone to buy a private autonomous vehicle that requires a driving license and won’t work in the country side, rather than speak of the horrors of the T word.

EDIT: I know which community I’m in and didn’t want to get into this but I was asked. Self driving cars are also wasting energy because of the computing power needed to process all the stuff that a human brain was already processing “for free”. Now, instead of having billions of cars that require significantly more energy than transit to move around one or maybe two humans, we will have billions of cars that requires even more energy to plot courses and drive the individual cars around.

I guess I can understand if you live in a place without public transit, but if this is the case, it’s also remote enough so that “self driving cars” may not get there for some time. Waymo is using mapping tech and is not going out of a city any time soon.

And if your self driving vehicle is restricted to a single city or area, it becomes a matter of that city asking everyone to buy or use a self driving car because they can’t finance an adequate and efficient public transit system.

It’s just a gadget.

EDIT: I don’t have car and already don’t drive anywhere. Just like millions of other people in the world. But apparently, if you don’t want to drive, you need a car that drives for you. There is simply no other solution.

As much as I don’t like self-driving cars, I must admit that Waymo indeed seems better.

However it would be interesting to see how this self-driving tech could be implemented in personal vehicles.

Tesla’s “full self driving” is not a possibility for people without a driving license. AFAIK you already need to drive in order to have “full self driving”, while Waymo can just act as a regular taxi but without a full time driver. And they don’t just rely on cameras.

As someone without a driver’s license the difference between both is enormous, but for a car company like Ford looking for real self driving, you also want something proved to be actually working without the need to be actively monitored by a human.

This reminds me of the death penalty. Killing someone because that person killed is still killing someone.

However society choses to do it, it’s still killing someone. Because killing is bad so if you kill, someone will kill you. Oh no, it’s not a murder. It’s a state employee that works in the correction department. Killers are not okay. The executioner is only applying the lethal will of society towards killers by unaliving them. It’s not murder, it’s justice!

Do you not have ears?

I live in a high rise in a metropolis and wish they would be banned. The maintenance crew of the university the other side of the street is using those things in the spring and fall. Exactly the time of the year when I want to open my windows, they, with their ear protection are blasting their engines on and off and on and off and on and off and on and off, while I’m trying to watch a video or listen to some music. Whiiiiiiiiiiir, pap pap pap pap pap pap whiiiiiiiiiir whiiiiir whiiiiiiir whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir pap pap pap pap pap whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiir.

There’s a hundred windows in front of them, and another high rise just the other side of the street. How many people are just as annoyed as I am because those lazy fuckers can’t be bothered to use a rake?

Worse, the maintenance of my own high rise joins them a few times a month to blow the gravel off the fucking concrete around the building. So again, windows open, all you can hear for an hour is those fucking blowers on and off and on and off and on and off.

The other day I was eating on a terrasse and the handymen were replacing pieces of wood. Well, instead of sweeping the wood chips, he used a fucking blower among the people eating, to “clean up”.

Those things can go to hell for all I care.

But it was maybe a few months old at best. Maybe it had a defective battery from the start but I contacted Xiaomi and I’ve been told it was “normal” in “winter”. Then when I looked online for this issue with Xiaomi phones, the people on the forums said it was “normal”, and that I expected too much.

In the end it was probably a defective battery. I couldn’t believe that they were selling millions of these and that people always just kept them warm all the time. Like, they have a proper winter too in some parts of China, and I can’t imagine millions of people having their phone dying on them as soon as we get into sweater weather.

But obviously this left a bad taste in my mouth. This and having to ask permission to root my phone.

I decided not to buy another Xiaomi phone when the one I previously had would turn off when it was a bit mildly cool outside.

Like, I would take it out of my pocket to look at bus schedules but it would turn off after a few seconds of being exposed to 5°C, saying the battery was dead. Another time I had it attached to my bike handlebar and it kept turning off because apparently 13°C with the wind was also too chilly. Every time that fucking Xiaomi phone was feeling a bit chill, the battery would just die. And not even in freezing temps!

I looked online and everone of the fanboys on the forums kept saying that this is normal, battery performance degrades in winter, that iPhones do the same, and apparently all other phones do the same. In short, I had unreasonable expectations.

Yet, all my other phones’ batteries didn’t die within seconds of taking them out of my pocket, even in winter.

So, I don’t have to bother with their names anymore.

Ah yes, the conservative/republican way of thinking: I’d fraud and con you. I have no ethics and will exploit you. So surely everyone else will try to do the same.

There’s already milk in the ingredients so adding some must be acceptable.

But since we mention Doritos, it’s one of the things that I noticed how fast it got expensive. They nearly doubled in price since the pandemic.

Like, where I live a bag was around $3.49 a few years ago and now they charge $5.49, for a single bag! I was buying a bag once in a while but since it crossed the $5 mark, I leave them on the shelves.

Huh. I don’t know about the financial system but I’m guessing a good chunk of it is ran by some old mainframes.

It’s like the retail industry, still massively relying on IBM i/iSeries/AS400. I worked for a consulting company that was doing a little bit of admin and support work for companies still using this system and the list is still very long. At least it still receives updates, and it’s kind of fun/odd to work with if you like CLI, but it’s super expensive and absolutely proprietary.