Not yet haha!

They're not yet at the level of the UK either. They are over 10 times that of France. The "not yet" is doing some very heavy lifting. I'm not going to cheer on Germany for being so far a bit less shit than they were.

Wikipedia is hopelessly biased and always will be: reality has a well known liberal bias and since Wikipedia aims to represent reality there is no hope it's ever "neutral".

No assembled or manufactured product on this planet is sourced from a single country in its entirety.

This is very true. And it sort of gets weirdly fractal because many of the individual parts are also manufactured with complex supply chains. Where does the copper, silicon and chemical supplies for the manufacturing of the many ancillary chips (which may or may not be made in USA) come from? And so on.

Only pretty simple things can be "made in X" for some X.

About the only consistent through line in conservatism is doing something shitty while yelling very loudly how the other guys are doing it.

The right always puts itself as the party of law and order. They never are, because they are the party of the rich. Law and order cost money and the right prefer tax breaks. Plus the best way to get rich is to cheat.

Your choice of how you define "speech" is new to me.

Words spoken or written. You know when you flap your meat and blow air through it and make meat sounds? And those have meaning to the other meat?

It seems very strange and unworkable.

That's kind of the point: free speech absolutism IS unworkable. The only way free speech absolutism works is for the absolutists to have a definition of speech which excludes many things.

The reductiveness of your framework

It's not me that's reductive, it's the notion of absolutism that's reductive.

all it can do is apply its one and only rule: "Speech must be free".

And that right there is the problem with free speech absolutism. So the solution of course is absolutism[*]

[*] Excluding things that cause certain kinds of harm.

And now you're picking over what harm is OK and what isn't and you're having the same discussion as a non absolutist, except the absolutist is usually convinced they are a stronger supporter of free speech even though they are talking about exactly the same caveats.

"If you believe in freedom of speech

If you believe in free speech absolutism. I am a strong proponent of free speech, not an absolutist and it's incredibly obvious those things are different.

I have known many radical "muh freeze peach" folks, but I have never met anyone who thinks all the above scenarios ought to be classified as - and evaluated for legal culpability as - merely acts of speech.

The muh freeze speech absolutists are fundamentally dishonest with themselves at best. They claim the moral high ground from exactly the same position as people they are yelling at,

It turns out that the people with true TDS are the supporters.

The funny thing is at a base instinctual level they kind of know it. That's why it's always "both sides! so I voted for Trump". They need to justify it to themselves, fundamentally. That's why people who didn't vote for the greater evil never se the same justification of the "other side" being somehow just as bad.

Perhaps consider a hybrid electric to get the best of both.

It depends on what you want, really. LEVC do make hybrid electric vans. They make the current london black cabs, which mostly run on electric but cabbies do need to be able to randomly go very far sometimes, so that makes sense.

There's more than one way to build a hybrid electric

The Chevy one with a motor generator and optional direct drive via a dog clutch seems to me to be the best, or a good one. It's arguably simpler than a pure ICE drivetrain, what with not needing nearly such a complex transmission, just a dog clutch which is synchronised automatically.

I realize that was a long read but I'm liking this idea for a hybrid, and I wanted to show how this has advantages over either a battery-electric or the ICEVs we know today.

For what it's worth Chevy cancelled theirs and it never appeared to gain popularity.

Two things in laws and regulations made trucks get so much bigger in the USA.

I did not know the reasons. Does that mean that a standard panel van with 1 row of seats at the front is taxed less than a crew cab truck?

Kidnapping someone is already illegal.

Yes? So they'll get prosecuted if they succeed. But as a free speech absolutist, you won't mind them trying again and again since anything before the kidnapping is just words, i.e. speech.

In the world of free speech absolutism, soliciting and commissioning a crime is fine because that act is just words, i.e. speech.

recklessly inducing someone into physical danger is already illegal.

That's because you don't live in a free speech absolutism society. With free speech absolutism, that wouldn't be illegal because it's speech.

It being truth doesn't make the subsequent kidnapping and abuse okay "because free speech"

And that's why free speech absolutism is stupid.

Problem is though, if you look at all the major economies, the ones with the lowest CO2 per capita have nuclear in the mix.

It's easy enough to look at Reddit's robots.txt file:

Really, what would those be?

Arguably they are in breach of the CFAA.. Reddit's robots.txt file:
# Welcome to Reddit's robots.txt
# Reddit believes in an open internet, but not the misuse of public content.
# See https://support.reddithelp.com... Reddit's Public Content Policy for access and use restrictions to Reddit content.
# See https://www.reddit.com/r/reddi... for details on how Reddit continues to support research and non-commercial use.
# policy: https://support.reddithelp.com...

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Defunding police is a about enabling anarchy.

No, you're full of shit.

On the right, definding the police is about tax breaks and kickbacks for the rich.

On the left, it's the sound fiscal argument that diverting money from the police to things that tackle the underlying causes of crime is much more effective.

The shit you're lapping up about anarchy is thought free culture war nonsense.

Basically most of the times an American would have a truck, Europeans have a van.

Also... doesn't it rain in America? We have drop side vans (i.e. small lorries, but they're built on van chasses) in Europe which are functionally equivalent to pickups, except with usually a bigger bed, better visibility and lower loading. The pickup covers people use are very low and they have very little storage compared to a van.

Maybe I should have said B roll.

Yeah maybe you should. You were basically accusing him of being lazy and imbalanced, rather than doing a lot of work himself, explaining his reasons and not wanting to buy a much more expensive camera so he can make precisely the videos you think he ought to make...

Either way, the image he presents in that video is not a balanced one.

So you claim, but I literally posted a video why he explains (a) why he mostly posts in sunny weather and (b) why it doesn't matter, and (c) footage from snowy and rainy weather.

And frankly your notion of balance is a bit off.

Being honest about the issues

What issues? So far you've brought high density only housing, which is NOT something he advocates for, and "the weather". The latter is clearly not actually an issue since people use alternatives to cars in all sorts of weather if good alternatives are available.

Nonetheless he's covered it repeatedly.

High density housing is a red flag for a lot of people.

So? He doesn't advocate for nothing but high density housing. Why do you keep bringing it up?

If your plan relies on it,

That "if" is doing an awful lot of heavy lifting.

Single family detached homes are not the solution for absolutely everyone. You keep bringing up Japan. It's not like there aren't flats in Japan. There's always going to denser and less dense areas. There's always people who will happily trade space for distance and vice versa. This applies almost universally. Not everyone wants an N bedroom house with a garden, for some perfect value of N.

We should be building new, walkable towns and cities,

Yes, we should, but not just. It's almost like the point Not Just Bikes makes--repeatedly--is the one you want. Maybe you should stop telling me what you think he's saying and listen to what he actually says.

Viable alternatives to driving.

That means walkability, which depends on mixed use neighbourhoods (not as you keep on saying high density housing). Mass transit routes which aren't delayed by cars, places where cyclists aren't treated as third class citizens while being repeatedly threatened with murder.

green belt wankers

Starmer eviscerating environmental regulation won't fix the problem, but it'll shred what remains of our already low biodiversity, while ensuring profits for developers and luxury (i.e. not affordable) homes with a complete lack of amenities, while pushing huge costs onto the council because nothing except houses is being provisioned.

We have 1.5 million planning applications approved which aren't being built right now. Trashing the environment so developers can make a few extra quid isn't the solution.

I wish I knew what the answer was.

The daily mail loves driving related culture wars and everyone's in hoc to the Daily Mail. It's almost like Starmer has a big majority and doesn't need to give in to every single piece of culture war nonsense painting anything that doesn't prioritise drivers as a "war on motorists".

But that fucker doesn't think I'm a "working person" because I don't drive to work. And he thinks maybe Khan should "reflect" in whether to follow the legal requirement to not allow a load of people to be killed and maimed by pollution because Starmer felt it might affect his majority. With idiots like him in charge there is no hope.

An end to right to buy so the government can take a more active role in housing would help. Planning where everything is focussed on the primacy of cars needs to happen. Planning mandating mixed use needs to happen. And planning around mass needs to happen.

Starmer is a lame duck

Oh FML, how did we end up with that clown. He doesn't appear to stand for everything except a kind of vague authoritarianism with him in charge. But not even for traditional reasons like massive self enrichment, or a desire to bend the world to his will. He has no apparent guiding principles at all which means he has no idea which way to go on any given issue, no reason for any decisions he does make and no overall coherent direction.

It's the dead rat on a stick effect. A dead rat on a stick could have won the leadership election over Corbyn after that massive failure, and a dead rat on a stick could have thrashed the Tories after their shit. And, well, pretty much a dead rat on a stick won. Unfortunately the dead rat is convinced that's because he's awfully clever and ought to be president rather than PM.