This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. Many were increasingly of the opinion that they’d all made a big mistake in coming down from the trees in the first place. And some said that even the trees had been a bad move, and that no one should ever have left the oceans.
Correct on every damn count. Even though I have my little digital watch.
Fantastic author with a fantastic set of books. The bit about how humans can fly will always make me laugh my ass off. Apparently we possess the capability of flight but we’re doing it wrong. The trick is to throw yourself at the ground and miss.
Agreed, Adams was a genius with an incredible sense of humour. When I was 12 years old I started reading the HHGTTG books and I loved them all. The Dirk Gently books were tremendous fun as well. But the real hidden gem was his book about animals going extinct (Last chance to see). A friend of mine taped a reading session of Adams at his university in Germany back in the day. He later converted it to mp3 files and many years later I still love listening to that gig every few months or so. Let me know if you’d like a copy of it.
I would LOVE a copy of it! That sounds truly fantastic. I’m on my 8th replay of Baldurs Gate 3 (not like I finished any of them yet) and most of the time I’m just watching Trek in the background. Love to shake it up with some classic Doug. If you don’t mind of course.
Tap water in the US costs on average about $0.01 per gallon or less. People typically drink a gallon or less per day, so about $0.30 per month. Your water bill is pretty much not affected by the tap water you drink, just the water you use for everything else.
Bottled water is easily hundreds of times the cost.
Yeah true, but chances are you’ll post on a smaller “”“dead”“” sublemmy and it’ll get upvotes and responses within hours. Do the same with an active reddit and you’ll be lucky if anyone responds
Open exactly one email. Don’t bother reading it; That would put you into overtime. But you can at least commit to opening the email and waiting for it to load before you clock out for the year.
The position is for a senior web engineer, so you either look at the company website and say “hmm” or you open a development app, write the HTML tag, maybe a head or css tag, then save the document.
I actually did the math on my current salary. So with converting it to USD and accounting for 2 weeks vacation and assuming I only work 40 hours a week. 5 pounds per hour is (approximately) one-tenth my hourly rate. So I would only be putting in 6 minutes of work for the entire length of the contract. Which, with my setup, amounts to sitting down, booting up, sipping coffee, and reading all of my slack notifications
Mind you I’m not a senior engineer and I’m also not paid in the top percentile
Oh shit, it’s almost like a lot of other vaccines, like the flu vaccine. You’ve uncovered a big government secret! The Immuminati will be by to give you a gold star tonight.
To layman’s terms, people used to make 5 children and 3 of them would die. Then this mortality has dropped. People still make 5 children. The country has too much children. The country is really young and very few per capita are susceptible to covid.
The opposite happens in Western countries. Old people don’t die. People don’t make children anymore. Population is really old, covid really affects a lot of people per capita.
That really is one of the most absurd things about the American Empire. They’ll come and destroy your people, taint and corrupt your land with bones and blood, bomb you back into the stone age, and then make a trillion dollar budget film about how it made them feel sad. The othering is so powerful that emotions only exist within the walls of capital
I’m entertained by the fact that everyone gets hung up on how EVs are still not totally green because the electricity comes from coal fired plants or that there’s still manufacturing emissions and stuff…
It’s like, yeah, but compared to an ICE car, which has all the same problems (environmental cost of manufacturing the vehicle, mining and refining the fuel, transporting it, etc) but EVs don’t actively pollute nearly as much during use, and they speak as if these are of equal environmental cost, and they’re not. Additionally, ICE vehicles need a lot more oil to operate that needs to be changed and disposed of every few thousand miles.
It’s like doing less harm isn’t valuable to the people arguing against it, but then again, those are probably the same people who drive their V8 truck to get groceries.
Environmental impact is still less than ICE, yes, but until we figure out a better way to process lithium and make batteries last longer hybrids still have a smaller environmental impact over the lifetime of the vehicle. Eventually we need to cut out petrol entirety of course, but until we get clean batteries the better short-term solution is hybrids when a vehicle is strictly necessary, and bikes or waking in all other cases. An electric motorcycle might be a good short-term solution too, but as of now battery manufacturing is unacceptably dirty. But as you said, it’s still better than ICE. I just think hybrid would be better as a transition while the technology is improved.
I agree that battery tech needs to be better. We also need to put in the work now to improve the grid so that when there’s wide scale adoption, the grid won’t collapse under the strain.
For the most part it’s a transit issue… we simply cannot move that many watts of power.
For the rest of it, and hybrids versus full electric vs bikes vs walking, that’s a much larger discussion, since not everyone will be able to adopt something more green than a highly efficient vehicle (whether hybrid or EV or otherwise)…
My main point is that they’ll argue dumb crap like manufacturing, that causes so much pollution, and say it in a way that almost seems like they think that ICE cars are better for that, somehow?
It’s like, we know it’s not “carbon neutral” or whatever… it’s just carbon massively reduced and that’s the point Carl.
Actually hybrid cars aren’t more green than electric cars. As much as electric cars aren’t perfect, they are by far the greenest option. Don’t trust oil lobbies :)
From a practical standpoint, hybrid cars make no sense. You inherit the problems of both electric and fossil and you gain pretty much nothing. I don’t understand why they are still being made.
I understand the electric bit is cheaper and more efficient in city traffic while the fossil bit is more supported over long distance travel.
It seems intended for the teething stage where the charging point infrastructure isn’t rolled out extensively enough for pure EV usage, and public transport doesn’t do the thing.
I see a risk in complacency where the final steps aren’t taken of rolling out charging points and buffing transit because hybrids are “good enough”. Probably not a massive risk though as fossil’s stigma grows and fuel prices rise.
Still, nuclear energy has a very good carbon footprint (unlike coal plants) and the public image of them being polluters was a joint disinformation project by Greenpeace and the oil companies in the early 2000s. Greenpeace backpedaled hard on their stance in the recent years.
Larger engines (such as those in power plants) are also generally more efficient. And RVs don’t use oil to drive the oil to where the car can get oil - we have the grid (a modern wonder of the world) to do that for us.
The magical Nirvana solution that will turn our society into Star Trek still isn’t here, so we need to obstruct less harmful solutions while failing to offer anything usable.
They will continue to astroturf any and all arguments no matter how stupid to see what sticks. We must continue to refute these idiotic claims and progress towards cleaner air
It’s like, yeah, but compared to an ICE car, which has all the same problems (environmental cost of manufacturing the vehicle, mining and refining the fuel, transporting it, etc) but EVs don’t actively pollute nearly as much during use, and they speak as if these are of equal environmental cost, and they’re not. Additionally, ICE vehicles need a lot more oil to operate that needs to be changed and disposed of every few thousand miles.
None of that is the real problem with electric cars.
The real problem with electric cars is that they’re still cars, which means they embody the same arrogance of space as regular cars. In other words, they take up too much space – both while driving and while parked – physically forcing trip origins and destinations further apart and ruining the city not only for pedestrians, cyclists and transit riders, but even also for the drivers themselves.
(That last link is from the perspective of a car enthusiast, by the way.)
I’m not going to argue with you on that point, I think cars are too big in the first place. With electric vehicles they can be reconfigured to ebikes or something much, much smaller. but I’m only mentioning the ICE vs EVs cost of manufacturing and how “green” they are. It’s a step in the right direction; it’s not the whole journey. Walkable cities and more compact designs of metro areas is still something that needs to be done, but it’s an entirely separate argument to the one I was making.
As someone who primarily drives because I live in a small suburb in the middle of a farm region, I’d be happy to park at the edge of a larger city and walk/bike/e-scooter/transit my way into the city. I think transit costs and the costs associated with most of the bike/e-bike/scooter services to be a bit high, given that I just drove to the city in the first place, but that’s a minor gripe among the plethora of other issues it could and would likely solve to have the city more pedestrian friendly.
Personally, given where I live, I’m more or less obligated to have a car, and if that car is a PHEV or full EV, would benefit the world overall; maybe not by a lot, but certainly more than using ICE vehicles to get around.
I just visited the US and I was dumbfounded how insane your city planning is. Like you literally can’t just make a short shopping trip on foot. You’d have to walk half an hour to even reach basic stores because the sprawl is so bad (City in CA with about 100k inhabitants) and then there are parking spaces everywhere. Like atleast half to 2/3 of the land space is used for parking. And ofc most parking is planned so they can accomodate everyone which means they’re always atleast half empty.
I think it’s just something people are sensitive about, and understandably so. Most obese people (by choice; i.e. self admittedly just have a bad diet and sedentary lifestyle) I know are never really offended by memes and consistently express a desire to do better. Fact is fixing the problem is genuinely difficult once you pass a certain point, as it requires a dramatic lifestyle change. Anyone who says that is easy is full of shit.
I avoid jokes like that mostly because it feels like punching down on people who are not happy with their health/weight and struggling to fix it. Especially when it’s the typical low hanging fruit, it’s just not fun when the joke makes me feel like kind of an ass.
Also it’s not like we’re unaware of being fat. Like, no, Kevin, I don’t need your terrible joke to tell me I’m overweight and should lose some weight. I own a mirror. The “let’s make fun of fat people!” crowd always seem to think they’re giving us some divine fucking insight.
Huh? Americans are like the most willing to admit their country is shit of like anywhere of the Lemmy audience… America fucking sucks, sign American. I had some dude from Pakistan super mad at me for saying women are second class citizens there the other day. Apparently they treat women super well, according to that angry guy anyway. I’m still pretty sure they don’t.
As always, these things can’t be generalised. Every country has people that talk about their own problems, and every country has “patriots” that will deny anything is happening. There are just a lot of Americans on the internet, so people notice those who relentlessly praise America more.
After all, few countries literally ingrain “[country] exceptionalism” into their population in their school system. Many Americans, while thinking they are pointing out problems, still say “but it’s still better than almost any other country at X”.
Romania doesn’t ingrain Romanian exceptionalism, but it does keep a lot of the REALLY horrible things Romanians have done out of the history classes.
Starting soon, the Romanian holocaust and communist period are going to be taught in high school history classes. AUR (basically our Republican party) is completely flipping their lid right now. They’re a small party, but very loud and aggressively ignorant.
While yes, there were some Sharia laws back in the 1980’s, many recent laws in the last 20 years have been giving more rights to women.
And that is the problem with many of you Americans, you read something online once about an other country or hear it on one of your news stations, and you instantly believe it without ever checking if it is factual or not.
The same type of people exist in other countries of course, but the blatant ignorance of Americans about other countries is staggering.
Yep. People definitely want to colonize the first one. The only thing keeping apartments off that location is strict governmental regulation of space like that. The desire is definitely there though.
I do the same, whenever he bites someone who tries to pet him i say “wow, he never does that, do all dogs hate you?” even though i know damn well he does it to everyone
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