• 1 Post
  • 56 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 9th, 2023

help-circle
  • Hopefully, but I worry no small part of it at the moment is just that we’re too small to be worth the bother. If the fediverse grows big enough to matter, well I worry about what dedicated teams of people working a full time job could do. One or two people can easily run a few dozen active accounts, which in turn could easily dominate conversation on an instance.






  • It’s also worth nothing that in the US, 200km is more than sufficient to navigate the entire interstate highway system from end to end and coast to coast. Moreover, when going on long trips charging speed is more important than range, so long as your range is over that 200km barrier.

    Now the system is not perfect, especially out west where the state highway system is more important and I can personally attest to a few 600km gaps, but the solution to that problem is to put in a few dozen infill fast chargers in the small forgotten backroads towns, and in the mean time just eating the fifteen percent longer detour to use the interstate highway network.


  • While I agree with most of the articles points, even if they and the title are nearly all phrased in very hyperbolic language and the extent of the “slowdown” has been rather overstated given that sales are still increasing, I take issue with it citing Norway’s 89% EV sales as insufficient becuse only 20% of vehicles on the road are EVs yet.

    Namely, the average lifespan of a ICE car is 12 years. While it’s definitely better for the environment to replace a functional ICE with an EV after two to four years, buying a new car when you don’t need to is a big financial cost and so it shouldn’t be surprising that many people are waiting until their cars get old to replace them.

    While I also agree that simply replacing every ICE with an EV isn’t enough on its own and that trollybuses and other electric mass transit need to be part of the solution, it’s not a question of one or the other. If we are to have any hope of staying below 2C, we need to be doing both and a whole lot more beside, especially when it comes to cleaning up industry.

    We simply don’t have the time left anymore for any one solution to be expanded to the point it can solve the problem on its own, if that was ever possible to begin with. We need solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear to generate clean power in the first place. We need heat pumps and geothermal to turn that into the heating and cooling necessary to keep people safe in a world with increasing dangerous temperatures.

    We need trollybuses, metros, and high speed intercity rail to electrify the transport of people. We need denser housing in our cities and EVs in our rural areas and service and delivery vehicles. We need overhead cantanarys to electrify our railroads. We need green hydrogen to decarbonize farming, steel marking and a thousand other processes. We need net zero bio and synthetic fuels for ships and aircraft. We even need carbon capture and sequestration to deal with the industrial processes that can’t otherwise be decarbonated.

    Any framing that expects a single one of these to solve the problem on its own ignores the things it can’t cover. Our current actions are insufficient to tackle the scale of the problem, that is not a sign we should roll back one in favor of another, it is a sign that we need to be pushing increasing the scale of all of the above.






  • It frustrates me to no end that the automakers who are known for their boring but practical cars and who’s customer base is the most likely to want an EV are instead still messing around with hydrogen becuse the Japanese government sunk a lot of money into a nuclear hydrogen plant and can’t stand the idea of just using it for industrial applications.

    Like even if it works, produces masses of cheap hydrogen and makes it cost competitive, you would still need to license and build dozens of new plants in each market you wanted to export to, which means maybe the cars become viable for export by 2030, by which time your not competing with gas vehicles but electric ones.

    Once people get used to the convenience filling up for cheap at home, I suspect it will be really hard to get them to go back to going out and spending five to fifteen minutes every single week driving to the gas station.


  • You could also just set your DNS to one of the many free DNSSEC providers. That’s even more secure because there are fewer middle men who can track you. After all, while your ISP may not be able to see that DNS traffic, if you arn’t using DNSSEC anyway then your VPN and their upstream provider can.

    Besides, nearly all tracking nowadays uses third party browser fingerprinting, which a VPN does nothing about. Practically, a VPN is far more security theater than actual security.

    Also, isn’t it funny that sending all your data though a second nation where it no longer legally counts as Amarican internet traffic became really well advertised right after a major scandal came out where the NSA was illegally monitoring American traffic, and more protections were put in place to keep them from doing it again?

    You don’t even need the VPN company to be in on it, a group like the NSA can pretty easily compromise a “no logs” VPN’s technical infrastructure or that of their upstream provider, and they’re even got people who feel like they have something to hide to self select for it to cut down on the amount of boring traffic in the first place.


  • Except these things do require action for a lot of people. Their is a good reason why Tesla was required to send out mail to all effected customers.

    This may come as a shock to you, but not all people have their cars connected to the internet. While it varies by network, about 30% of the US by area does not even have cell service, and the parts that do can be unreliable, especially if there is a big garage door between you and the tower. And this is the US, Canada is even more rural.

    Some people might have also purposely disconnected their vehicles from the cell network, maybe because of evidence that Tesla employees were making highlight reels of customers from the in car camera footage.

    In either of these or more cases, an update requires active work and steps to resolve. Indeed there is a reason Tesla has to provide technicians who can come out to their customers address to apply it free of charge. The same language and laws apply to every other auto manufacturer on our shared roads.



  • So by that logic, if I were to hack your computer, copy the data, and put sell it to some group for them to use, would that be theft. You still have your data, you haven’t lost anything directly, and while the group I sold it to may use a saved credit card or password to harm you I didn’t, so would what I did be considered theft?

    Similarly, if I just sold the information gained by it to advertisers, marketers, your friendly neighborhood stalker, etc… Would that have been theft? You weren’t harmed, the demonstrably valuable information was just taken without your consent and given to a third party that wanted it.



  • You know, it would be really nice if some of them actually knew what that book was talking about sometimes. From my understanding the Bible describes and condemns witchcraft as making deals with evil for power, and basically uses it as condemnation of thinking that the ends can ever justify the means by taking things to the logical extreme.

    In most modern settings at least, magic is either an inerhant trait, lots of carful study, or a bargain with a benign spirit of some variety.

    There’s is admittedly a long history of people missing the point of this, most of which stated by an utter loon trying to get back at is ex. The people at the time utterly ignored medieval Karen, but this drove him to rant a lot in writings which then got used as a source by latter assholes to justify gojng after the people they wanted to get back at.

    All of which ignores the obvious of course, which is to say the Bible doesn’t say you can’t experience story’s about sin in the first place.