While I agree with the sentiment "plant the right tree for the location", sometimes that isn't enough. Take the US Southwest drought, which is killing both natives and invasives, cultivated and wild. We lost 4 trees on our block last year, and while they're not local species, they are native to hot, dry areas that usually do fine with minimal maintenance.

And then there's the semi-regular maintenance to prevent them from growing up into the power lines. I wish they'd bury the lines, but it'll be 400 years before they get to my block according to the city master plan, so...

Idiotic government is a problem, but not the only problem.

I agree on the "it's complicated". What I mainly object to is that the Democratic party would be seen as right-wing, when in actuality it's far more complicated.

On gender identity, Europe is pushing back noticeably on affirmative care (the norm in the US), and it's not just the conservative religious countries doing so. On abortion, yes they're a fact, but in many (if not most) EU countries they're also more restrictive than what most states had under Roe, and what the Progressive caucus would like. On immigration, my personal experience is that Europe still has an integration and racism problem, to a greater degree than the US.

Incidentally, from an European perspective, the US Democrats are pretty strongly conservative and the Republican are right-wing extremists that mostly do not actually qualify as merely conservative anymore.

That gets said a lot here but is only partially true, and more so in an economic sense than a social one. There's a number of important social issues where the US Democratic party is to the left of the average European, for instance on gender identity attitudes, abortion rights, and immigration. Also depends greatly which European country you're talking about: Sweden is not Italy is not Hungary.

My uncle has a 400V 3-phase induction stove in his house, just because he likes to cook. Not wealthy - worked for the Belgian railways all his life and living in the house that his father had built. He just happens to already have 3-phase, so wanted the most powerful stove he could afford.

But, I don't agree with GP either. While I prefer gas, induction is very good.

Ouch, yeah, that's painful. Are you stuck out in the middle of nowhere?

I really don't care about 1 Gbps - my usage is light enough that 300 Mbps is fast enough. Going higher would marginally speed up a couple of things, but I doubt I'd notice. Improving my upload speed, in contrast, would have a huge impact on remote work, offsite backups, etc. However, I'm in a major city where Spectrum has a monopoly and the next-best option is 50 Mbps ADSL...

Only competing with fiber on the downlink. Spectrum upstream is still a measly 35 Mbps.

Agreed we don't want to get into a price spiral that ruins the city.

There's another solution, however: allow more development. One reason prices are spiraling is high demand caused by construction not keeping up with need. If cities would allow for more, denser construction (maybe more applicable to CA than NY, but still...), then this'd blunt demand and reduce the price inflation. Rent control makes it harder to pressure cities into this change because the existing residents tend towards NIMBYism and I Got Mine thinking.

Another article I read some time ago said that some delivery people are even running custom electric motors on bikes that they assemble from kits, with all of the bits about cheap batteries and cheaper chargers with bad or no auto-shut-off in play.

Just to defend kits, there's nothing inherently wrong with "kit" e-bikes, nor are they necessarily cheap. There's kits you can get that are safe and reliable. Buy a cheap kit off Amazon drop-shipped from China, on the other hand, and you might end up with a fire.

Think you hit the nail on the head that it's about people "cutting corners", regardless of the details.

Only an actual fascist would call a party that would be considered a moderate conservative party anywhere else in the world, marxist and progressive.

This gets said a lot on slashdot, but the truth is actually more nuanced. There's areas where the Democrats are quite conservative, but others where they're more progressive than most. Calling them Marxist is silly, calling them socially progressive is not.

Take, for instance, two hot-button Democratic issues in the US today: abortion and gender dysphoria. Roe vs Wade is a more pro-abortion ruling than the comparable laws of many European countries. Affirmative care for gender dysphoria in minors is also very progressive, and (off the top of my head) is not practiced in the UK and parts of Scandinavia, possibly elsewhere as well. I'm sure you could find other examples where the US Democratic position is more progressive, sometimes significantly so, than much of Western Europe.

My impression is that US political parties are predominantly divided on social issues while Western EU parties are more divided on economic issues. The US mean economic view falls to the right in the EU, while the EU mean social view is falls more in line with a moderate Democratic stance than a progressive one. This is why, for example, the "Liberal" party is generally a right-wing party in the EU: they're taking classic liberal economic stances, as opposed to the US where liberal refers to social policy.

Correction: *new world* urban living sucks, mainly because most of its urban environments are still built for cars and are too spread out for a non-automotive lifestyle, forcing you into congestion. For contrast, try living in a city that was built for pedestrians and only later converted to cars. Having lived in both, I'd trade my suburban house with space for a European-style rowhouse in an instant. Unfortunately, there's no easy path to get from where the US is to where I'd like it to be short of a domestic ground war or a 9.0+ quake.

I'm not aware of any such cities on the North American continent, but feel free to correct me if you know of any. The closest I can think of is NYC, which has its own issues.

NASA does more than just humans on Mars. That extra $6 billion would cover a lot of science - that's two new rovers of the Curiosity type all the way to Mars, for example, and is actual cost, not hand-waving. Even if you do focus on manned, $6 billion would cover an Artemis launch to the moon.

NASA's 2023 budget is ~ $25 billion, so while an extra 25% is not "decades" as GP wildly states, it is not just the Tang you dismiss it as being.

There is no way I'm scanning any QR code either, my 10 year old rick rolls people with a QR code all the time, but it could lead to anything.

QR codes can hold more than just URLs. I used to have a business card with a QR on the back that encoded all data on the front as a vCard. Even 10 years ago smartphones were able to recognize it and offer to create a new contact. It makes for a larger QR than is typical, but with phone camera resolutions these days that shouldn't be an issue.

Where does the energy come from to keep the battery at that temperature?

It's in the fucking summary.

What's more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery.

Keep working at writing comments, dude. Eventually you'll get it.

I mean, if all you have is an open air bicycle to shop, go to work, etc...you're SOL on bad weather days, no?

Or, just wear a winter coat/rain coat/light clothes?

I spent a decade in Belgium with no car of my own, commuting by bike almost every day. It's perfectly doable, especially considering that most of the time (this year being an exception) Western Europe generally has more moderate weather than the US. These days I e-bike straight through the SoCal summer - if it's midday and hot, I just rely on the motor more. It's not always fun given the weather, but nor is driving.

A healthy working human should be perfectly capable of handling typical weather at any time of year. If you can't then either you've got a disability of some sort or you're spoiled.

What you describe doesn't surprise me - one thing that any diver learns when they start experimenting with enriched gas (i.e. O2 > 21%) is that you have to be very careful to keep your tanks clean. Pumping pure oxygen into a tank who's intake has been contaminated by oil (say, from an unclean compressor) is a good way to blow up a fill station. The results are generally not pretty.

Once compressed, the tanks are much less of an explosion risk even if they contain pure oxygen. They could burst at the seams if corroded, but that's why an inspection is required yearly. Tanks that have been found to be made of bad materials (say, most aluminium tanks in the US in the 90s) are condemned and taken out of circulation at their regular inspections. There's a burst disk that should also relieve any overpressure, say due to lying in a scorching hot car. Tanks still do explode on occasion despite these precautions, but I believe that these days it's exceptionally rare.