Your link doesn’t address this point. It doesn’t anywhere mention tyre pollution due to increased weight.

Airless bicycle tyres? I don’t see the connection.

What do you mean?

His other videos are much more forward-thinking, it’s true. I have not seen the “strong towns” ones so I’ll have a look later.

The planning of cities is, among other things, tied to the willingness to accommodate huge, wasteful vehicles.

I look at this the other way. If cities were properly designed, people would no longer need SUVs. Right now they need them to feel safe, and it’s okay for people to want to feel safe. If cities were developed a bit more soundly, people would no longer feel this need.

You don’t need to push people out of SUVs by making cities more hostile to them. You just need to make cities less hostile to cycling and buses, and everyone who can will use them. Cities should accommodate everyone, including cyclists and SUV users, whereas right now the accommodate neither.

But I understand the other perspective too, that SUVs are more dangerous and therefore should be banned. But I don’t find the video convincing at all, unless you were already convinced about that before watching.

It’s a very American perspective. By focusing on car design, he is missing out on the important issues.

Nothing in the video matters. If all the SUVs were instantly replaced by Igos, society would still have all the same problems, maybe 10 or 20% smaller. It wouldn’t solve anything.

Focusing on the differences in car design is a distraction from the important changes, which are mostly about city planning. The need for cars (among other things) disappears once city planning is done properly.

Or tags!

Thanks. I have made many feature requests and you always consider them seriously (but usually reject them).

I should do one of those things.

Although there are many flaws, and we do complain, Lemmy is still the best (or least dysfunctional) forum in existence. So yous must be doing something right.

I’ve spent too much time explaining currency theory to purple who aren’t really interested. So if you have a specific question I can answer it. But not many questions and not a debate.

Bitcoin should have led to global currency reform, for a start. That failed. It could still lead to energy reform and other important societal progress. But regulation and other factors are killing it.

In general we are open for constructive feedback

My one big fear right now is that a mod could delete my words, and they would be lost forever.

Sometimes I write long essays here. They are ideas that I think are important and original. I write them so people will be able to read them many years into the future.

It’s important that anything deleted by a mod or an admin can be saved by the creator afterwards.

I’d argue it’s necessary that nothing can ever be fully deleted, if you want people to ever write anything important here.

That’s why historically most of the most important world-change essays were written to newspapers. Once a newspaper is published, it is available forever. It can never be expunged.

good bot

Google, Facebook or Microsoft can buy it if this is likely. If can’t buy it they can get it banned.

I’m not here to answer your question (though TBF most of the other commenters didn’t answer it either) but I’d like to ask you about burnout.

I find that in times where there is a lot going on, both at work and at home, I am multi-tasking all day, juggling many so many different urgent jobs that I can’t think about any of them, think about what I am doing now or doing next, or think at all.

When go to bed I have fought many fires, but have accomplished nothing, and still have just and many frustrating jobs waiting for the next day. After several days of this I am continuously anxious and irritable. My mind is a fog.

Is this burnout?

What helps? Writing down all the jobs in a list and going through them sequentially. Just refuse to do anything not urgent or that someone else can do. But any job that takes less than 5 minutes just do immediately without even writing it down.

Taking a 20 minute nap. Sometimes that doesn’t help, so sit alone in a dark room for as long as it takes for the mind to clear.

Prolonged intense exercise helps. So does spending time in a new place. Talking socially with other people. Maybe drugs, but for me neither beer nor spirits help at all.

But these solutions all consume time. So you need to get through all the jobs first. When you reach the end, you have enough free time to do those things. To heal your mind after the burnout.

Well the most common and effective way of destroying local cultures, is to force the people to speak the common language.

For example in France, the UK, and many other places, there used to be many local regions, with their own languages and strong local cultures and loyalties. The rulers wanted to kill the local cultures, so that the people would have no local identity. This stops disloyalty or independent thinking or independence movements.

They did this by forcing their subjects to speak a common language.

This policy was perfectly effective.

A province speaking its own language can easily maintain its own identity and push for independence. Without its own language this is more difficult, even if it keeps its own customs.

I think I’ve been too vague. So I can elaborate about these policies in the UK or France, if you like. For other territories (Spain, Italy, etc) I believe the same thing happened but I’m not the expert.

I’m not sure they’re really the same question. Be careful of making a false equivalence.

Your questions are very loaded. Most people would answer “there shouldn’t be ANY racism at all!”

In that case, if the questions are really equivalent, everyone’s answer to the original question should be “there shouldn’t be any censorship at all” or maybe “there should be complete censorship for everyone”.

But I don’t think that’s the right conclusion. Therefore the questions are not equivalent. This is too simplistic.

Because you’re taking a very technical rhetorical stance, I’ll try to answer the same way.

Racism is a damaging thing. There’s no good side to it.

Censorship is also a damaging thing. But it can sometimes be a necessary evil to prevent worse evils. There is a sweet spot where it prevents more damage than it causes.

Racism is a natural feature that arises in groups of people, but censorship is a political measure. So if there is a damaging amount of racism in lemmy, censorship can be used to reduce it. While there is no underlying racism problem, then censorship causes its harm while producing no benefit.

These things are hard to measure, so censorship is normally a matter of very careful consideration.

As someone once told me, “cycling is a warmup excercise”.

Oh got it.

In a lot of the world people are car-dependent. So we must force manufacturers to stop making tyres that wear excessively fast. Which is easy for governments but difficult anyone else.

And reducing car-dependency obviously would be the longer term solution.

A big problem in cities. Is already known to cause serious diseases in humans, and the research is only beginning now. We don’t know anything about the effects on wildlife.

Try it. Run an experiment.

The second one is zoomed in, to make it look worse. Being able to see that there is solid ground on the left is important.

The example I know is where you take a random healthy man. Then you find five people who are waiting for different organ donations. Is it right to kill that man and harvest his organs, to save the five.

I find it a much more insightful example.

Will there be a “debate vegans” type sub? I still have so many questions, but don’t know where to ask.

On the other hand, electrolysis could be a good use of electricity supply peaks. There aren’t many others:

• pumping water up dams and towers
• mining bitcoin
• charging batteries
• anything else?

Very good article though. I learnt a lot.

“That’s a nice shirt” is generally taken as a sincere and high complement. Anything else at all will get funny looks.

You fell badly and landed on your back? Horrible.

I advocate that people should learn falling/tumbling at a young age. IMO many minor accidents become serious ones, just because nobody knows how to fall properly. I recently fell off a bike at 0mph, and injured my shoulder, just from falling incompetently.

How did it happen?

He’s right about everything. But there is more to it than he explains.

Both kinds of business park and everything in between, exist in western Europe. It just depends how much money they wanted to spend building it. You can find this kind of place in developed countries like NL much more easily than impoverished ones like USA, just because the bad kind is so cheap to build.

Those modern business parks are still terrible. They are beautiful, but empty, dead places. A choice to commute by bike, car or metro is good - but you also need the choice to live near your work and not commute at all. So developments must include housing and amenities as well as offices. A liveable, vibrant place is always mixed use.

99 percent invisible has a good recent episode called missing the bus.

Do all QR code phone apps do that, or just the one? Maybe it’s a setting in the app that you can turn off. You’d think the app would be clever enough to recognise whether the message is a URL or not, and treat it appropriately.

QR codes can often be ticket numbers or lists of information. It’s literally just text, but in a machine-readable form, instead of human-readable.

If it doesn’t exist, then you can invent it.

QR codes are perfect for encoding text, even though most people just use them to send URLs. It should be a very good tool for flyers.

If you want rich text, colours and fonts and sizes, I’m sure that’s easy too. But you might need to invent a type of markup to compress the style information better. Or it might already exist.

I think an alias could do that. Another good one is cd then ls.

These bad laws happen with elected representatives too, but worse. At least with direct democracy, laws will not be made which are against the majority’s best interest, and laws have a legitimate mandate.

For example it’s hard to imagine a direct democracy starting a war of convenience, like representative democracies frequently do and are doing right now. All the most egregious crimes of government would stop.

But the quality of all the little laws is debatable. I would argue it’s higher under DD but I can see why some people disagree.

But it’s hard to discuss very specific examples, because they are always cherry-picked.

Finally, there are several forms of DD and the Californian style is probably the least beneficial.

Yes. And a steam mop.

Most of the worlds’s society is collapsing. Much of the world is becoming uninhabitable. But only a small corner of the earth needs to remain prosperous, for the rich to keep living rich lives.

Since we’re talking politics now, the solution is direct democracy, where the electorate can compel the government to make a certain law, or take certain measures. Major changes become possible which are impossible now.

Nothing which harms the powerful vested interests will ever happen without direct democracy. Today, governments can simply decline to do things which don’t suit them, even if the electorate demands them.

Anyone who believes in any issue at all, your first priority is direct democracy. It is your new goal. Without it your protests are ignored. With it, you can directly change the world without even having to protest.

efficiency calculations are done with assumptions based on current load, usage patterns, and supergrid as prerequisites.

Could be. At least for rural areas, small scale could be more efficent.

aluminum not steel

IIRC aluminium is never used for rotating parts because of the way it fatigues. After a certain number of strain cycles it will snap.

not to keep generating more and more energy

Yes but now this is a political issue. How are you going to stand between big business’s and its thirst for AI? The usage is growing exponentially and IMO will soon be dominant and the rest of the economy becomes more efficient.

Thanks. The reason for big turbines is because they are more efficient. You use less materials for more power. So you’ll never convince an engineer of all this.

I wonder if there is a maximum size of turbine that can be built with steel, given how heavy it is. Wind might become a lot more expensive.

Which would not be a bad thing because the world needs to start converting to sea-swell power asap.

Wind power can be done in an environmentally friendly way wrt the equipment

How so?

Could be.

About the other thing you said

Weirdly very little coverage about that right now.

It’s partly cynical geo-politics. And it’s partly racism. But IMO there’s another reason. The somalis don’t have good internet and ubiquitous smartphones. If they did, their story would be everywhere. News isn’t about journalists trekking into warzones anymore - it’s people posting their own footage and the internet picking up on it. Without the footage there is no news.

You can debate if it’s the most important factor but it’s definitely a part of it.

What’s your take on that?

My theory is that the USA pulled out when it did because it saw a famine was coming. The famine might have happened anyway, but it’s much worse because of the USA’s past and present actions.