Bullshit cyclists are a menace.

Cars are a menace. How many people die on the roads due to cars in London. How make sure to bikes? Heck, how many people die on the pavements due to bikes?

Bikes are treated badly but the idea that cyclists are ax menace is the result of 50 years of right wing propaganda. Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth, to the point where even left wing places like the guardian will not question it. But it's not true. The statistics show that cars are far far far more dangerous, when in boroughs like Southwark where 65% don't have regular access to a car.

Cyclists are only a menace in people's minds. Cars are a menace in actual fact.

Legal E bikes have no need for more insurance than push bikes. 15.5mph is their maximum speed and it's frankly slower than I go most of the time anyway. The limits are quite reasonable for parity with push bikes. Though I'd probably put tyre width limits on ebikes too...

The guardian article isn't anti e bike, but also you linked the wrong article.

I agree that there is a problem with illegal ebikes: loads are being sold which aren't remotely road legal and have dangerously unsafe batteries. There's also a problem with companies like deliveroo which are relying on loopholes to avoid even minimum wage, so the people desperate enough to work there can only afford the illegal bikes from Amazon. The point of contractor rules wasn't so companies could avoid safety, insurance, legal vehicles, basic employee protection and so on. These are not professional contractors. And the solution to that isn't to make the regulations even laxer.

The article and me aren't against legal ebikes, which is to say assistance limited to 15.5, mph and 250W of power, and with pedal assist only (no twist throttle).

There are a lot of unregistered, illegal motorbikes. Amazon can apparently freely sell these because they are "just" a market place. The solution to a lack of dedicated bine infrastructure is to build dedicated car infrastructure, not to have unmaintained, dangerous motorbikes.

Wait what, dedicated car infrastructure?

Yeah. You only need segregation when there are too many cars. On neighborhood roads that don't have through traffic, cars and bikes can mix safely. You only need infrastructure to stop drivers killing cyclists when the driving becomes a problem. So really it's infrastructure for cars because you only need it when there are too many cars, driving too badly.

That's the thing about university, their job it to teach reality and that means they are discussing liberals teaching ideology because reality has a well liberal bias.

Much better to teach about Jeebus and the America Fuck Yeah version of history where America died everything perfectly.

A large percentage of the people buying EVs have too much income to be eligible for the credit anyway. The median income for EV buyers is $140k, and for single people, the cutoff was just $150k. The purpose of the tax credit was to try to get EVs into the hands of people with more moderate income, but I suspect its main effect was cause people to lease the cars instead of buying them, where you could weirdly still get the credit.

IMO, Tesla needs a new CEO. The board of directors keeps trying to pump more money in his direction hoping that it will keep his attention and make him focus on Tesla, but IMO, the damage is done and won't magically go away just by convincing him to shut up and stop acting like a cartoon supervillain. Just two words (Mr. Trump's favorite two words), and the company's problems mostly go away.

Yeah, I stopped doing that non-sense back around 2015. Me, the wife, and 3 kids, over $200. Insane. Unbelievable amount of ads before movie, no intermission for bathroom break, and uncomfortable seats. I'm content sitting in front of my 55" living room monitor where my family controls the narrative.

I believe we may be witnessing the beginning of the end for Intel unfortunately. How the mighty has fallen.

Yes and no. Yes, Sega and Nintendo should talk to each other to figure out how to deal with it. No, that doesn't change the fact that as a non-owner, Sega giving it to a merchant is not adequate for that merchant to gain the right to dispose of it and grant title to it

Again, the merchant's right to grant title exists only if that transfer is done by the legitimate owner of the item or that owner's authorized agent. If Nintendo had done so, then the OP would be correct. If Nintendo had authorized it, then the OP would be correct. But even in the best case, it's legally grey if Nintendo was not involved and can show clear documentation that Sega was not the legal owner, because that would be approximately exactly the same situation as if someone took stolen jewelry to a jeweler and the jeweler sold it.

And just in case someone misreads that, the case linked above hinged on two key facts: first, that the person who gave it to the jeweler was not a dealer, similar to how Sega is not a dealer in Nintendo dev kits, and second, that the company that gave it to that person had an agreement that denied him the right to transfer title in it. So in terms of the material facts, other than the nature of the products themselves and possibly the timing of the events, that case is very, very similar to this one.

Yes quite, but you're presenting it as an absolute.

Reality is that there's a continuum between complete anarchy and Stalanistic style central control.

In general, law enforcement would expect the owner to be the one reporting a theft. By disposing of Nintendo's property without their permission, Sega likely effectively committed theft. It would be weird for the thief to turn themselves in and expect the police to undo what they did.

And I would argue that if Nintendo doesn't care enough to go to the police to demand the return of their property, then Sega probably doesn't have a right to do so as a non-owner.

No, he's talking about Sega entrusting the goods to the scrap seller. Sega is not a retail merchant of electronics; it's a manufacturer. Entrusting that hardware to Sega almost certainly doesn't give Sega any particular right to transfer the title to someone else.

Nope. That only applies if the owner transfers those goods. What you're missing is that Sega didn't own this stuff in the first place, and therefore had no legal right to transfer it.

If someone sells stolen goods to a pawn shop and someone else buys those stolen goods, they still have to give them back if the rightful owner manages to track them down. This is legally no different, IMO.

Actually, he sold Nintendo property that was being held in Sega's custody, which makes it a very different matter legally. Now whether Sega has any legal right to repossess it is another question. Nintendo likely does, but Sega's only right is probably the right to tell Nintendo what they did and let Nintendo go to court to try to get it back.

Assuming that is based on real-world chargers and not some theoretical lower-speed charging, half at once is probably enough to allow everyone to switch without any non-software changes.

Most people drive under 40 miles per day. Assuming 30A charging at 240V, which is typical for home charging, that's only about two hours of charging. Most people's cars are likely to be plugged in almost continuously from 8 P.M. to 8 A.M., statistically speaking, so even if there's only enough capacity to charge a sixth of all cars concurrently, there would still probably be enough capacity to charge all of the cars.

So basically, as long as the car knows when you're likely to need to leave in the morning and communicates with servers at the power company to spread cars' charging out over the hours that it expects to be inactive, this seems likely to be a solved problem.

Of course, without a link to that MIT study, I can't say for sure what their assumptions were, so I could be way off base.

Already not paying it.

$9.99 with ads is way overpriced. Does this clown honestly think I'll pay them to shove ads at me? I'd maybe consider $9.99 with no ads. I'd certainly be okay with zero with ads, though I probably won't watch it any more than I watch my free-with-Walmart-Plus Paramount+ subscription with ads, which is to say approximately never.

If your service shows ads, I'm the product, and I'm not going to pay you to be the product.

I'm not aware of anything significantly better. Most of the carbon-neutral fuels produce a fraction of the energy that goes into making them. Technically speaking, so does ethanol, but we pretend it doesn't, because we ignore all the sunlight used as energy input. Carbon-neutral fuels are still in that "theoretically possible, but completely impractical" stage, where the cost to produce them and the energy loss involved makes them utterly infeasible as a real-world replacement for motor vehicle fuel.

We absolutely should be doing that research, and various companies are. But until there's some reason to believe that they will be successful, we can't count on that as a solution to the problem. More to the point, as long as actual gasoline is legal to sell, the only way those synthetic fuels will ever be viable is if they are cheaper than gasoline, and there's almost no chance of that happening, in practice. Even ethanol is more expensive. E85 has 71.1% of the power of gasoline, but costs 80% as much. The only reason anyone uses this stuff is because of government mandates to do so.

Gaseous energy sources are likely infeasible, because if you want to actually power a car with it, you're going to need it to have high energy per unit volume in the car's gas tank, which means compressing the gas, which wastes huge amounts of energy. We tried this with hydrogen, and the losses from compressing the gas alone made it impractical as an energy source even before all the other systemic losses from fuel cell efficiency, electrolysis, etc.

I'd be curious to hear it. My first inclination is to believe that you'd either have to inject the fuel at detonation time (which seems likely to damage the injectors) or massively reduce the compression, which would give you less power. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'm having a hard time believing it should be done or that consumers would want it.

They modify diesel engines. For the same reason the market has rejected diesel cars, they will reject those. I'm pretty sure it's not a solution for replacing gasoline, unless by replacing gasoline, you mean after replacing the engine and the entire fuel system.

I'm not saying it's not an issue. I'm saying that it's pretty much the only remaining issue.

Except that none of those alternatives are economically feasible. The synthetic fuels currently being made are about an order of magnitude more expensive than gasoline. If people can't afford an extra $5k on the cost of their vehicles, they sure as h*** aren't going to be able to afford to spend $30+ per gallon for synthetic fuel. A person with average driving habits would break even on the EV in less than half a year of driving.

No, I really don't. Your wild guess is just that: a wild guess. See my comments elsewhere about most of the raw material for batteries being iron, and requiring far less iron than you lose by getting rid of the engine.

From what I've read, subject matter experts mostly say we can do it, though. It's mostly the auto industry pundits that are saying we can't, and it's because they don't want to, not because we can't.

Because 2050 is the EU's target for being net zero carbon. And you're right that we won't hit that. But if all new cars are EVs by 2035, *most* cars will be BEVs by 2050. And by then we might actually be able to produce enough carbon-neutral fuel for the few percent that remain.

*shrugs* It might happen at some point, but after decades of research, it still hasn't gotten much cheaper, which makes me believe that it is unlikely to be commercially viable unless you ban the much cheaper gasoline alternative. And you can't do that unless they can get their production up by many orders of magnitude, and they won't ramp up production to those levels until it is commercially viable, so there's a chicken-and-egg problem. You're talking about what can be done. I'm talking about what will actually work in the market.

And by doing so, you prevent using that energy in more efficient ways. We already capture waste heat to produce electricity, and to the extent that we don't, we could. It will almost certainly never be more efficient to use waste heat to produce hydrogen or synthetic fuels than it is to turn that waste heat into electricity and power an EV. Even if your fuel production produces as much energy in the output as it takes in energy input (which seems unrealistic, given the current state of the industry), the energy efficiency for converting the synthetic fuel to locomotion from a gasoline engine would still destroy efficiency so badly that various thermoelectric energy capture strategies going into BEVs would be more efficient. And it gets worse when you factor in real-world efficiency for synthetic fuel production.

So because we can't solve the whole problem, we shouldn't solve any of the problem?

Carbon neutrality, not zero fossil fuels.

What are you talking about? We do know how to do it. Car companies have a strong disincentive to do it. Dealers don't want to deal with EVs because they make most of their money on service, not on sales. EVs have much lower service needs. Dealers are therefore strongly incentivized to tell people that they don't want an EV, and to not carry them on their lots, so much so that many folks who want to buy an EV have had a really hard time doing so. This is well documented.

The auto industry didn't even start taking EVs seriously until a few years ago. EVs were mostly compliance cars. And at least in the U.S., nobody but Tesla was building HVDC charging in the quantities needed to get the job done, so eventually the entire industry basically threw up their hands and gave up and switched to Tesla's charging system.

This is not evidence that the problem is hard. This is evidence that the manufacturers dragged their feet as hard as they could to avoid doing it.

*shrugs* You still need a source of raw materials to feed into that, and this is where a big chunk of the energy gets spent.

One last time, you're going to have to give me some actual citations, because what I'm saying is consistent with what I've read on the subject.