The company says in documents posted by government safety regulators Friday that a rear wiring bundle can come in contact with the rear axle housing. That can chafe the wiring and cause a short circuit, which can turn on the parking brake without action from the driver, increasing the risk of a crash.
So not to downplay Fords mess up or the big recall but its interesting to me how easy a fix this is as long as you know exactly what bundle of wires you’re looking for down there. Take it in for the free maintenance though, please do not DIY an auto recall.
Many decades ago I worked at the sierra natural history museum in california. It on a college campus and it has a Richter scale within the confines of the museum
Classes more or less released for lunch at the same time every day past a certain point due to teachers union agreements. The Richter scale would always register a seismic event just from students migrating from the classrooms to the various food venues and seating areas. We had to make a note on the printout (yes I'm that old)
Man that’s environmental scientists catch phrase lately, “No one wants to be right about this.” I really wish people(cough governments) would take them seriously.
Even if everyone agrees it’s bad, nobody wants to deal with the decrease in quality of life it’ll take to fix it; least of all those who won’t suffer as much, or will be dead long before the worst of it starts to hit.
Yeah, that is a major problem with how Western democracies are put together. It is going to cost a lot of money to do anything effectively, so governments would rather postpone any action until the next government takes over, then it will be their problem. And of course this line of thought continues with the next government.
Long term plans with any meaningful changes are just not suitable for our kind of political systems.
No. While that may seem like the effect, he’s been very keen to position himself as actually trying to keep runaway inflation from punishing the lower class. It devalues capital, but do you think the wealthy are affected by the cost of groceries?
The point of tempering wage growth is to temper costs of important consumables and purchases: food, housing, and transportation.
The prices of goods rises with the available cash of people that actually spend their paychecks. Investment is not how most people use their money–they buy food, pay rent, purchase gas, etc. If there is more money available from wage workers that spend most of their money on consumables and basic living expenses, the prices all of those things go up.
Grocery stores, gas stations, and most large corporations (which includes farms) are staged and staffed by people that “spend” the majority of their money. Which means when the cost of stuff goes up, you have to pay them more so they can continue to be able to get these basic consumables. And that means paying them more, so the cost of bringing food to your grocery store and fuel to your gas station goes up. So you need more money from your job to shoulder that burden… but, then, so do they. So you’re paid more, and they’re paid more, which costs more, and it doesn’t end without economic intervention. And that’s what inflation is. There are reasonable arguments for keeping wages AND COSTS LOW, but they involve wage workers voting at a rate higher that 25%, because they involve adjudication of our tax targets that aren’t completely in favor of the very wealthy.
Californians, we have legal weed in this state, and it’s cheaper than ever. It’s also not full of glass beads, lead, oregano, fentanyl, rat poops, Aspergillus mold, or glyphosate.
He added that he shares in the “frustration” that Russell was only charged with misdemeanors and said that he is calling on state legislators to add an “enhancement” to the law “when somebody falsely reports kidnapping or another violent crime.”
Bring on the downvotes, but I’ll bet if she were a pretty white girl he wouldn’t have said that.
And don’t get me wrong, I agree with him on this. I’m just a cynic as to why it’s being brought up.
The girl, whom Reuters is not identifying because of her age, faces a felony charge of making a false police report concerning the use of a firearm in a violent manner and a misdemeanor charge for misusing 911 services.
They also nailed Sheri Papini - 18 months in prison + 300K in fines.
The authorities truly do not like it when you fake a kidnapping.
This has effected 0.03% of the vehicles (so far). It’s good they’re getting after it early before their vehicles start actively killing their occupants.
The super-shitification** by sold-out governments and the H U G E fossil fuel industry against 50+ years of scientific climate change warnings hasn't forced any changes, it's unlikely watching it play out will do anything. In fact all we're seeing now is even more drilling operations beginning and even less care about the human cost.
At this point we can only hope for the best and prepare for the worst because we ain't seen nothing yet.
Gibson, an actor, said the harassment began about a year ago. He was sitting at the lake with a friend who is white, and nearby were two white men whom he didn’t know. One of the men approached Gibson and asked him to provide his address. When Gibson declined, the man called the police. Although he remained calm, Gibson said he “probably was the most upset I’ve ever been.”
“I’m telling the police, ‘Why are you bothering me?’” Gibson said. “I said, ‘I can’t believe that you’re bothering me this much and all I’m doing is fishing.’ I’m not smoking. I’m not drinking. I’m not partying. I’m not making loud noise. I’m not loitering. But you asked me all of these questions.”
Two other white men fishing nearby told Gibson that they had been fishing at the pond for seven years and had never been questioned, even though they didn’t live in the community. Since then, Gibson started capturing all incidents on camera.
I am really dreading the devastation I know this El Niño will bring. As the situation deteriorates, it makes me wonder how I can be most helpful at a time like this. Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?
“It’s as if the human race has received a terminal medical diagnosis and knows there is a cure, but has consciously decided not to save itself.“
—Prof Lesley Hughes
When a patient receives a likely terminal diagnoses with one obtainable cure, they typically do everything in their power to get to it unless that means leaving themselves or others permanently destitute. Their coming death is very close. So is the only way out.
The cause in both these statements is that global warming will NEVER be an immediate threat. Humans are wired for immediacy, and if the threat is not a right now thing, they switch to ignoring and adapting. Our psychology is wired to try to address the tiger and to adapt to what is unfortunately continual environmental collapse.
Those who understand we literally cannot do that and that a great many of us will die are not equipped to handle that information without simply sinking into increasingly immobile despair, because...what the fuck can I do about it?
I already eat little, don't even own a car, my worst offense is having internet but it's necessary for work. My other options are to become homeless again or Amish.
People in many countries are suffering greatly already from natural events that have been kicked up to 20. All I can do is watch. And I do. But more and more as someone who has a large stomach for suffering, even I'm beginning to evaluate what good it's doing me, as a civilian, to watch.
I can't help, or I would have. Whatever's going to happen to me in the future is unavoidable. My choices then are between Despair and Not Despair. This is why the masses won't pay attention. They don't have the bandwidth for the entire planet.
The politicians, however, have no excuse for this, and had we less tendency to shut our eyes and stomp our feet and more biological ability to plan in long term, they would be on pikes in the 00's.
Do I keep trying to pursue my research career or devote even more of my time to warning the public?
Unfortunately, at the risk of sounding defeatist, warning the public is pretty much a lost cause at this point. The ones that are receptive already know (and are seeing it first hand this summer), and the ones who aren’t have their heads so far up their own asses that they’re receiving AM radio. And realistically, there’s not much for the average person to do; it’s the industrial -scale operators that are the largest problem, and they’ll resort to murdering their opposition (both figuratively and literally) before giving up a cent of profit. We as a populace need to full on revolt and take back our health and planet, but we are so effectively convinced our enemies are our neighbors that I really am not sure what to do here.
You gotta get the Rs in on it. For a while right and left was more of a friendly rivalry, albeit intense at times. Barring nazis and zealots they’re not all bad. You can see them peaking out every now and then. Tradesmen unionizing, adoption of solar panels, the simple acknowledgment of systemic corruption, the libertarians trying really hard to figure out how to run a country without a government(lol). They’re not all bad extremists. Though they do seem easily controlled by state.
Not individually, no. Collectively, even if we don’t have everyone, we can go pretty far and we did not too long ago, many times. This is what we should be advocating for, I don’t think there are any other alternatives at this point.
The true dispair is knowing that the ones primarily responsible for the issues we are facing (private jets, mega yachts, hundred million dollar properties, etc.) are completely untouchable by us.
We just get to watch in horror as our world decays and the rich get richer.
I mean, they're quite literally not, though. All it takes is luck, firepower, and someone willing take out Taylor Swift.
I'm sure it will have to get one fuck of a lot worse before people in that tax bracket catch it from their own security, but if enough people are self-sacrificing for long enough, they may even have to outlaw guns or something. Which would at least give my wretched corpse a chuckle.
I don’t know where you take that from but the super rich are a tiny tiny fraction of the problem. They don’t buy containerships full of stuff, they don’t eat millions of animals per day, they don’t constitute the vast majority of travel.
Yes, on a per person basis they have an extremely large footprint, but it’s still a drop in the bucket compared to the industries that feed the consumption of the average citizens.
That’s in no way a rich people thing. Polluting less often means that stuff people are used to will cost more or will be less available.
The greens in Germany suggested that maybe meat is too cheap and people should eat it less and maybe also don’t drive your car so much. And a good chunk of the population lost their fucking mind at the audacity to suggest doing something in two sectors that massively contribute to climate change.
The reality is that effective action against climate change is hugely unpopular and politicians realize that it’s often political suicide because people hate change and there is no way to combat climate change without lifestyle changes for every single citizen.
The cold hard truth is our societies need to change from the ground up but it’s a death sentence for any politician to lobby for the changes required. Imagine if a politician came out and said “meat is now banned” and “petrol is now banned”? They would be laughed into obscurity.
We are fucked because we do not yet want off this ride. We want our cheap consumption. The fix is nuanced and multi-facetted and I don’t know if we will get there. Look for geo-engineering to science us out of this. We aren’t going to do the right thing. We’d rather seed the ozone with sulfer dioxide to lower the earth temp.
That politician would be laughed out by his own peers, not even the people of the US. Granted, I know a lot of people that would flip their absolute minds if things like that were banned, but at the end of the day they’ll move on.
The big problem is no one on the floors of the House or Senate would have the balls to vote it in. It’d be the lone politician and his friend. Every couple months they’ll introduce a bill and then have it dashed.
Lobbyists are shit in the US and they contribute to most of our backwards problems. Policies would be getting lobbied by oil and utility companies to stop these politicians. Smear campaigns the whole deal.
The only reason we haven’t made the major life changes we need to make is because it isn’t profitable.
We are not profitable, unless we consume. Unless our money continues to funnel to the top hands we will continue to perpetually destroy our planet. Simple as that.
As citizens, we can only access the changes we need to make based on the size of our income. I can’t afford to get an electric car, fresh ingredients are expensive, I can’t buy a house to then fit it with solar panels.
This change has to come from the people that have the means to change it for everyone, hence the top 400 people holding some 98% of the US currency hostage.
This is not a problem civilians can solve. We can try, but we will fail. The footprint is from the people that can stop it and the only major lifestyle changes would be difficult, but doable for us, it’d be near impossible for the billionaires to adjust to such a degree, and I’m not confident they ever will.
When a patient receives a likely terminal diagnoses with one obtainable cure, they typically do everything in their power to get to it unless that means leaving themselves or others permanently destitute. Their coming death is very close. So is the only way out.
I think our situation is more like that of a decades long cigarette smoker. They know their habit is deadly, and know exactly what the remedy is, but most of them will smoke until they die or until it’s too late because quitting feels impossible. There are smokers that do quit though, everyday.
I really hope Tony Seba is right on his forecasts. It’s the only thing that brings more hope. Electric cars, solar, batteries and precision fermentation. He’s been right a lot so I have faith.
Having said that we need a huge carbon tax (including on trade) like today.
Sorry to burst the Tony Seba bubble, but he was wrong about self-driving electric cars and he is also wrong about batteries.
(Solar he is probably right on).
We only have two really big, proven guns in the fight against climate change: carbon tax (or, the power of the market) and atomic energy (or, the power of E=MC^2).
Fission is by far the cheapest energy source we have ever discovered. There is no cheaper energy today than an existing nuclear plant.
We just over regulated it and lost the skills and knowledge, but it’s nothing we can’t regain. And we will. The plus side of having many different nations is that not all nations are scientifically braindead.
Battery tech improves very slowly and prices are either stable or have even risen die to scarcity. The industry will boom and be very important, but it won’t scale to the level needed to combat climate change.
The only form of energy storage that is more dense than hydrocarbons is atomic energy.
Research has been yielding some pretty promising results lately in the battery department, so there is hope there.
Fission requires an enormous upfront costs, but the yield ratio is better than anything we’re doing right now. The biggest problems with fission are the waste and public perception (the nookular crowd), the last being why no major projects have been brought forth recently. Hopefully we are able to figure out fusion soon; there’s been some great strides made in that too, but we are still quite a ways off from it being commercially viable.
Fission is only expensive because we're depending on the free market to develop and deploy it.
Basically, we cannot depend on capitalism to fix a problem that capitalism created.
I've seen fairly credible estimates that say when we finally max out the usable land for solar and wind, we'd be producing 30-40% of the world's electricity via those two methods.
Which is a lot of power, but it falls short of the final goal. As a note, we just barely crossed 10% in 2022.
We need fission. It can power the world for the next 1000 years at current demand, and that's including the power generated by solar and wind.
The problem is, regulatory sabotage has created a system where it's more cost-effective to build the biggest nuclear plant possible. Except by building bigger, you drive up the costs more. Every part must be custom-built, which is expensive, most parts need special machinery to install, which is expensive, and then the constant frivolous lawsuits from people who don't understand a damn thing about nuclear power, but have strong opinions are expensive.
Add in the fact that these lawsuits delay construction, which means that the regulations can then change mid-construction, which means you need to back-port everything to be compliant with the new regs, and now you have a massive project that's been delayed a dozen times and had the final cost skyrocket, all because the current regulatory structure is such that every plant costs the same to license. And the licensing fees are pretty hefty.
So people taking the risk, build bigger, because the biggest plants can produce more power, which can then be sold to a wider market, and that means more profit in the long run. But again, big plants are fucking expensive.
The answer of course is a factory built small modular reactor. They can be slotted in place, run for 10 years, then shipped back to the manufacturer for refueling and refitting. And because they're small, they literally cannot melt down. There's not enough fuel to do so. Being modular, they can stack next to each other until you have the power needed, and they need the land equivalent of a corner gas station. All to produce more power than most solar farms.
But to really get the economies of scale, and drive that price down, you need a bunch of them to be ordered. Which puts up back in the realm of capitalism not being able to fix a problem that capitalism created. See, those first few units are going to be super expensive as the factory is built and tooled up, and no one wants to pay for that when they can just buy 1000 acres of land and throw a solar farm down.
Also, that licensing issue is still there. You have to pay a lot of money to open a nuclear plant, and that's not even the insurance premiums.
Oh yeah, then there's the waste issue, which is only an issue because we're not actually allowed to burn the waste in a reactor. Because of regulatory sabotage again.
If we were allowed to reprocess and burn the waste, the remaining dangerous isotopes would last a couple hundred years, not the hundreds of thousands of unprocessed waste. We'd also shit ton more fuel power the world for a very long time.
Fission is only expensive because we’re depending on the free market to develop and deploy it.
Basically, we cannot depend on capitalism to fix a problem that capitalism created.
Well that’s just wrong. Capitalism makes things cheaper. Also fission has been built under communist countries so the point doesn’t make sense.
I’ve seen fairly credible estimates that say when we finally max out the usable land for solar and wind, we’d be producing 30-40% of the world’s electricity via those two methods.
That’s just bull crap. Even some back of the envelope calculations can prove that. Go look up some solar farms and wind farms. Calculate the power to area ratio then extrapolate.
You have a very wrong opinion of how capitalism work. Even way before Henry Ford economies of scale have been a thing. The fact is nuclear power large or small doesn’t make much money. Also profit maximisation is also cost minimisation, it’s two sides of the same coin. Again a country like China could mass produce small reactors even just for themselves, but do they? No they are mass producing solar and wind because it’s more economical. None of the arguments you have made in anyway stop China (who know how to build small reactors) wouldn’t do this.
The French also built a bunch of cheap reactors by building the same design. But that paradigm is not as common as it should be. Every Reactor in the US is a custom design.
Capitalism, goes with the cheapest option, even if it's not the best. Except that's not actually how it works, It actually goes with the option that makes the most money, regardless of who it hurts. That's the capitalism I know and hate.
Capitalism is why oil companies still exist.
China is building wind and solar farms, but they also rank third in the world for number of nuclear power capacity, and are building more plants. They have 22 plants under construction right now, and a further 70 are in development.
So yeah, a state controlled economy can do it quite easily, capitalism cannot.
The issue with the capitalist approach is called a bootstrapping paradox. You need to sell the thing to develop the thing, and you can't sell it without first developing it. Literally needing to reach down, grab your own boot straps, and lift yourself up.
Again, capitalism cannot fix the problems created by capitalism.
And you better believe that the factories that pump out solar cells and wind turbines were initially built with government money.
The federal government has been throwing money at solar and wind projects. And these days it pays off, but in the early days, it did not. Wind was particularly expensive for the power generated for about 5-10 years. And then more factories came online and the price rapidly fell.
The same crowd that told us to wait for wind to become viable, screams that nuclear is too expensive and should get no government money at all.
That same crowd often sues new nuclear power projects, driving up the cost further. All because they are fucking idiots who want fossil fuels to win.
See, that's the dirty little secret. Every wind and solar farm needs a backup power source for when they're offline. And that backup is always natural gas.
Those natural gas peaker plants are being built at a breakneck pace. All because solar and wind get priority on the grid. And then when they fall off, you need a near instant ramp up of power, which only natural gas can provide.
Batteries that can handle the load don't actually exist yet, and likely require more investment than it would take to get a small modular reactor factory going full steam.
Nuclear has huge investment since 1940’s and tonnes of money is still going into it. More money is not going to help anytime soon. It’s just throwing good money at bad. I’m not saying it won’t be cracked eventually. But with the limited time and money in the system wind and solar are obviously the answers.
Capitalism can easily solve the problem with externalities. Very few people that support capitalism wouldn’t also support government investment so the fact that capitalist governments have funded capital gains is not at all a failure of capitalism. That would be like saying governments funding schools to increase human capital to raise more taxes is a failure of capitalism. In fact it is the optimal solution for all even in a capitalist society.
There is always wind or solar. If you build enough of it they the low points aren’t that low anymore. There is still huge amounts of hydro on most continents. We are not even 10% of the way to where we need to be with renewables. The fact that they only offset gas some of the time doesn’t mean they won’t ever work, it just means we haven’t built enough yet.
It had a huge investment in the 40s, 50s and 60s. At least in the US.
Really, we should acknowledge again that the extreme price of nuclear is a US problem, and not as applicable to the rest of the world, although some of the regulatory sabotage was exported to other countries via treaty.
And again, capitalism cannot solve a problem that capitalism created, because oil is still too fucking profitable to solve it.
As to your example of governments running schools to make better workers for capitalism... Need I say more? Schools are not often run for profit, and the ones that are almost always perform worse than the ones that are run by the government at cost.
As to Hydo, most rivers that can support hydro are already tapped, and creating artificial lakes is worse for the environment than almost anything else you can do. The rotting plant matter at the bottom emits more methane than people realize. And that's not even mentioning the ecological damage to the river itself.
As to wind and solar, sure, there's somewhere on the planet you could probably build more, but getting the power from those places to where it's needed is going to cost more than just building an on site nuclear plant, even at the artificially elevated US prices.
This goes into why prices in the US are elevated. It's a fascinating read. It doesn't talk about some of the issues of scale, i.e. the fact that new nuclear plants are often so huge that they need special everything to even be built. Which is actually an outgrowth of the regulatory licensing structure, but it does cover some of the stupidity around the regulations.
This conflict hasn't gotten much attention in the press - thanks to OP for bringing it forward. Here's an Al Jazeera article from May that explains the conflict in more detail than the summations available from the western press.
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